There & Back

by George MacDonald

DR. DODDRIDGE'S DOG.

“What! you Dr. Doddridge's dog, and not know who made you!”

My little dog, who blessed you
With such white toothy-pegs?
And who was it that dressed you
In such a lot of legs!
I'm sure he never told you
Not to speak when spoken to!
But it's not for me to scold you:—
Dogs bark, and pussies mew!
I'll tell you, little brother,
In case you do not know:—
One only, not another,
Could make us two just so.
You love me?—Quiet!—I'm proving!—
It must be God above
That, filled those eyes with loving!—
He was the first to love!
One day he'll stop all sadness—
Hark to the nightingale!
Oh blessed God of gladness!—
Come, doggie, wag your tail!
That's “Thank you, God!”—He gave you
Of life this little taste;
And with more life he'll save you,
Not let you go to waste!
So we'll live on together,
And share our bite and sup;
Until he says, “Come hither,”—
And lifts us both high up!

Barbara was so much pleased with the verses that she thought them a great deal better than they were.

Wingfold walked home thinking how, in his dull parish, where so few seemed to care whether they were going back to be monkeys or on to be men, he had yet found two such interesting young people as Richard and Barbara.

He had come upon Richard again at his grandfather's, had had a little more talk with him, and had found him not so far from the kingdom of heaven but that he cared to deny a false god; and he had just discovered in Barbara, who so seldom went to church and who came of such strange parents, one in whom the love of God was not merely innate, but keenly alive. The heart of the one recoiled from a God that was not; the heart of the other was drawn to a God of whom she knew little: were not the two upon converging tracks? What to most clergymen would have seemed the depth of a winter of unbelief, seemed to Wingfold a springtime full of the sounds of the rising sap.

“What man,” he said to himself, “knowing the care that some men have of their fellow-men, even to the spending of themselves for them, can doubt that, loving the children, they must one day love the father! Who more welcome to the heart of the eternal father, than the man who loves his brother, whom also the unchanging father loves!”

Personally, I find the whole matter of religious teaching and observance in general a very dull business—as dull as most secular teaching. If salvation is anything like what are commonly considered its means, it is to me a consummation devoutly to be deprecated. But no one ever found Wingfold dull. For one thing he scarcely thought about the church, and never mistook it for the kingdom of God. Its worldly affairs gave him no concern, and party-spirit was loathsome to him as the very antichrist. He was a servant of the church universal, of all that believed or ever would believe in the Lord Christ, therefore of all men, of the whole universe—and first, of every man, woman, and child in his own parish. But though he was the servant of the boundless church, no church was his master. He had no master but the one lord of life. Therefore the so-called prosperity of the church did not interest him. He knew that the Master works from within outward, and believed no danger possible to the church, except from such of its nominal pastors as know nothing of the life that works leavening from within. The will of God was all Wingfold cared about, and if the church was not content with that, the church was nothing to him, and might do to him as it would. He did not spend his life for the people because he was a parson, but he was a parson because the church of England gave him facilities for spending his life for the people. He gave himself altogether to the Lord, and therefore to his people. He believed in Jesus Christ as the everyday life of the world, whose presence is just us needful in bank, or shop, or house of lords, as at what so many of the clergy call the altar. When the Lord is known as the heart of every joy, as well as the refuge from every sorrow, then the altar will be known for what it is—an ecclesiastical antique. The Father permitted but never ordained sacrifice; in tenderness to his children he ordered the ways of their unbelieving belief. So at least thought and said Wingfold, and if he did not say so in the pulpit, it was not lest his fellows should regard him as a traitor, but because so few of his people would understand. He would spend no strength in trying to shore up the church; he sent his life-blood through its veins, and his appeal to the Living One, for whose judgment he waited.

The world would not perish if what is called the church did go to pieces; a truer church, for there might well be a truer, would arise out of her ruins. But let no one seek to destroy; let him that builds only take heed that he build with gold and silver and precious stones, not with wood and hay and stubble! If the church were so built, who could harm it! if it were not in part so built, it would be as little worth pulling down as letting stand. There is in it a far deeper and better vitality than its blatant supporters will be able to ruin by their advocacy, or the enviers of its valueless social position by their assaults upon that position.

Wingfold never thought of associating the anxiety of the heiress with the unbelief of the bookbinder. He laughed a laugh of delight when afterward he learned their relation to each other.

The next Sunday, Barbara was at church, and never afterward willingly missed going. She sought the friendship of Mrs. Wingfold, and found at last a woman to whom she could heartily look up. She found in her also a clergyman's wife who understood her husband—not because he was small-minded, but because she was large-hearted—and fell in thoroughly with his modes of teaching his people, as well as his objects in regard to them. She never sought to make one in the parish a churchman, but tried to make every one she had to do with a scholar of Christ, a child to his father in heaven.

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CHAPTER XXXII. THE SHOEING OF MISS BROWN.

Two days after, on a lovely autumn evening, Barbara rode Miss Brown across the fields, avoiding the hard road even more carefully than usual. For Miss Brown, as I have said, was in want of shoes, and Barbara herself was to have a hand in putting them on.

The red-faced, white-whiskered, jolly old Simon stood at the smithy door to receive her: he had been watching for her, and had heard the gentle trot over the few yards of road that brought her in sight. With a merry greeting he helped her down from the great mare. It was but the sense that his blackness was not ingrain, that kept him from taking her in his arms like a child, and lifting her down—so small was she, and so friendly and childlike. She would have shaken hands with him, but he would not with her; it would make her glove, he said, as black as his apron. Barbara pulled off her glove, and gave him her dainty little hand, which the blacksmith took at once, being too much of a gentleman not to know where respect becomes rudeness. He clasped the lovely loan with the sturdy reverence of his true old heart, saying her hand should pay her footing in the trade.

“Lord, miss, ain't I proud to make a smith of you!” he said. “Only you must do nothing but shoe! I can't let you spoil your hands! You can keep Miss Brown shod without doing that!—Here comes Dick for his part! He might have left it to who taught him! Did he think the old man would be rough with missie?—I dare say, now, he's been teaching you that woman's work of his this long time!”

“Stop, stop, Mr. Armour!” cried Barbara. “When you see me shoe Miss Brown, perhaps you won't care to talk about woman's work again!”

Richard came up, took Miss Brown in, and put her in her place. The smith knew exactly what sort and size of shoes she wanted, and had them already so far finished that but a touch or so was necessary to make them an absolute fit. Barbara tucked up her skirt, and secured it with her belt. But this would not satisfy Simon. He had a little leather apron ready for her, and nothing would serve but she must put it on to protect her habit. Till this was done he would not allow her touch hammer or nail.

“Come, come, missie,” he said, “I'm king in my own shop, and you must do as I tell you!”

Thereupon Barbara, who had stood out only for the fun of the thing, put on the leather apron with its large bib, and set about her work.

Richard did not offer to put on the first shoe: he believed she had so often watched the operation, that she must know perfectly what to do. Nor was he disappointed. She proceeded like an adept. Happily Miss Brown was very good. She was neither hungry nor thirsty; she had had just enough exercise to make her willing to breathe a little; nothing had gone wrong on the way to upset her delicate nerves—for, gentle and loving as she always was, she was apt to be both apprehensive and touchy; her digestion was all right, for she had had neither too much corn nor too much grass; therefore she stood quite still, and if not exactly full of faith, was yet troubled by no doubt as to the ability of her mistress to put on her shoes for her—iron though they were, and to be fastened with long sharp nails.

Richard was nowise astonished at Barbara's coolness, or her courage, or the business-like way in which she tucked the great hoof under her arm, or even at the accurate aim which brought the right sort of blow down on the head of nail after nail in true line with its length; but he was astonished at the strength of her little hand, the hardness of her muscles, covered with just fat enough to make form and movement alike beautiful, and the knowing skill with which she twisted off the ends of the nails: the quick turn necessary, she seemed to have by nature. In her keen watching, she had so identified herself with the operator, that perfect insight had supplied the place of active experience, and seemed almost to have waked some ancient instinct that operated independent of consciousness. The mare was shod, and well shod, without any accident; and Richard felt no anxiety as he lifted the little lady to her back, and saw her canter away as if she had been presented with fresh feathery wings instead of only fresh iron shoes.

He experienced, however, not a little disappointment: he had hoped to walk a part of her way alongside of Miss Brown. Barbara had in truth expected he would, but a sudden shyness came upon her, and made her start at speed the moment she was in the saddle. Simon and Richard stood looking after her.

With a sharp scramble she turned. Richard darted forward. But nothing was wrong with the mare. She came at a quick trot, and they were side by side in a moment. Barbara had bethought herself that it was a pity to get no more pleasure or profit out of the afternoon than just a horse-shoeing!

“She's all right!” she cried.

Richard imagined she had but started to put her handiwork to the test. They walked back to the old man, and once more she thanked him—in such pretty fashion as made him feel a lord of the world. Then Richard and she moved away together in the direction of Mortgrange, and left Simon praying God to give them to each other before he died.

They had not gone far when it became Richard's turn to stop.

“Oh, miss,” he said, “I must go back! Neither of us has been to see Alice, and I haven't for more than a week! Think of her lying there, expecting and expecting, and no one coming! It's just the history of the world! I must go back!”

He would not have said so much but that Barbara sat regarding him without response of word or look, appearing not to heed him. He began to wonder.

“Alice can't be dead!” he thought with himself, “She was pretty well when I saw her last!”

“She is gone,” said Barbara quietly, and the thought just discarded returned on Richard with a sickening clearness.

He stood and stared. Barbara saw him turn white, and understood his mistake—so terrible to one who had no hope of ever again seeing a departed friend.

“She went home to her mother yesterday,” she said.

Richard gave a great sigh of relief.

“I thought she was dead!” he answered, “—and I had not been so good to her as I might have been!”

“Richard,” said Barbara—it was the first time she called him by his name—“did anybody in the world ever do all he might to make his best friends happy?”

“No, miss, I don't think it. There must always be something more he might have done.”

“Then the better people become, the more lamentations, mourning, and woe”—the words had taken hold of her at church the Sunday before—“there must always be, because of those they shall never look upon again, those to whom they shall never say, I am sorry! How comes it that men are born into a world where there is nothing of what they most need—consolation for the one inevitable thing, sorrow and self-reproach?”

“There is consolation—that it will soon be over, that we go to them!”

“Go to them!” cried Barbara. “—We do not even go to look for them! We shall not even know that we would find them if we could! We shall not have even the consolation of suffering, of loving on in vain! The whole thing is the most wrongful scorn, the most insulting mockery!—the laughter of a devil at all that is noble and tender!—only there is not even a devil to be angry with and defy!”

Barbara spoke with an indignation that made her eloquent. Richard gave her no answer: there was no logic in what Barbara said—nothing to reply to! Why should life not be misery? Why should there be any one who cared? There was no ground for thinking there might be one! The proof was all the other way! The idea was too good to be true! Richard had said so to himself a thousand times. But was the world indeed on such a grand scale that to believe in anything better or other than it seemed, was to believe too much—was to believe more than, without proof which was not to be had, Richard would care to believe? The nature of the case grew clearer to him. As a man does not fear death while yet it seems far away, so a man may not shrink from annihilation while yet he does not realize what it means. To cease may well seem nothing to a man who neither loves much, nor feels the bitterness of regret for wrong done, the gnawing of that remorse whose mother is tenderness! He was beginning to understand this.

The silence grew oppressive. It was as if each was dreaming of the other dead. To break the pain of presence without communion, Richard spoke.

“Can you tell me, miss,” he said, “why Alice went away without letting me know? She might have done that!”

“She had a good reason,” answered Barbara.

“I can't think what it could be!” he returned. “I never was so long without seeing her before, but surely she could not be so much offended at that! You see, miss, I knew you went every day! and I knew I should like that better than having any one else to come and see me! so I gave myself no trouble. I never thought of her going for a long time yet! Did her mother send her money?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Perhaps my grandfather lent her some! She couldn't have any herself! I wonder why she dislikes me so much!”

He was doubting whether she would have taken money from him, if he had been in time to offer it. He did not like to ask Barbara if she had helped her.—And then what was she to do when she got home?

Barbara had let him talk, delighted to look in at the windows his words went on opening. In particular it pleased and attracted her, that he was so unconscious of the goodness he had shown Alice. Barbara and he made a rare conjunction of likeness. So many will do a kindness who are not yet capable of forgetting it!

Barbara could not tell him that Alice was afraid to bid him good-bye lest in her weakness she should render an explanation necessary. She did not in the least doubt Richard was her brother, and her heart was full of him. How often, as she lay alone, building her innocent and not very wonderful castles, had she not imagined herself throwing her arms about him, and kissing him at her will!—what if she should actually do so when he came to bid her good-bye! Then she would have to tell him he was her brother, and so perhaps might ruin everything! She must go without a word!

“She is far from disliking you,” said Barbara.

“Why then did she not tell me, that I might have given her money for her journey?”

“There was no need of that,” returned Barbara. “She is my sister now, and a sovereign or two is nothing between us.”

“Oh, thank you! thank you, miss! Then she will have a little over when she gets home! But I am afraid it will be long before she is able to work again! It would be of no use to tell my mother, for somehow she seems to have taken a great dislike to poor Alice. I am positive she does not deserve it. My mother is the best woman I know, but she is very stiff when she takes a dislike. Have you got her address, miss? Arthur would take money from me, I think, but I don't know where he is. I was always meaning to ask her, and always forgot.”

“I will see she has everything she wants,” answered Barbara.

“Bless your lovely heart, miss!” exclaimed Richard. “But I fear nothing much will reach them so long as their mother is alive. She eats and drinks the flesh and blood of her children. Nobody could help seeing it. There's Arthur, cold, and thin, and miserable, without a greatcoat in the bitterest weather! and Alice with hardly flesh enough for setting to her great eyes! and Mrs. Manson well dressed, and eating the best butter, and drinking the best bottled stout that money can buy! If only their mother was like mine! If one of her family had to starve, she would claim it as her right. Such women as Mrs. Manson have no business to be mothers! Why were they made—if people are made?”

“Perhaps they will be made something of yet!” suggested Barbara.

“If you're right, miss, and there be a God, either he's not so good as you would be if you were God, or else somebody interferes, and won't let him do his best.”

“Shall I tell you what our clergyman said to me the other day?” returned Barbara.

“Yes, if you please, miss. I don't mind what you say, because the God you would have me believe in, is like yourself; and if he be, and be like you, he will set everything tight as soon as ever he can.”

“What Mr. Wingfold said was this—that it was not fair, when a man had made something for a purpose, to say it was not good before we knew what his purpose with it was. 'I don't like,' he said, 'even my wife to look at my verses before they're finished! God can't hide away his work till it is finished, as I do my verses, and we ought to take care what we say about it. God wants to do something better with people than people think.'”

“Is he a poet?” said Richard. “But when I think how he looked at the sunrise—of course he is! That man don't talk a bit like a clergyman, miss; he talks just like any other man—only better than I ever heard man talk before. I couldn't help liking him from the first, and wishing I might meet him again! But I think I could put him a question or two yet that would puzzle him!”

“I don't know,” answered Barbara; “but one thing I am sure of, that, if you did puzzle him, he would say he was puzzled, and must have time to think it over!”

“That is to behave like a man!—and after all, clergymen are men, and there must be good men among them!—But do you think, miss, you could get Arthur's address from Alice? The office is not where it used to be.”

“I dare say I could.”

“You see, miss, I shall have to go back to London.”

There was a tone and tremble in his words, to which, not to the words themselves, Barbara made reply.

“Will anyone dare to say,” she rejoined, “that we shall not meet again?”

“The sort of God you believe in, miss, would not say it,” he answered; “but the sort of God my mother believes in would.”

“I know nothing about other people's Gods,” rejoined Barbara. “Indeed,” she added, “I know very little about my own; but I mean to know more: Mr. Wingfold will teach me!”

“Take care he don't overpersuade you, miss. You have been very good to me, and I couldn't bear you to be made a fool of. Only he can't be just like the rest!”

“He will persuade me of nothing that doesn't seem to me true—be certain of that, Richard. And if it please God to part us, I will pray and keep on praying to him to let us meet again. If I have been good to you, you have been much better to me!”

Richard was not elated. He only thought, “How kind of her!”

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CHAPTER XXXIII. RICHARD AND VIXEN.

Barbara turned her mare across the road, and sent her at the hedge. Miss Brown cleared it like a stag, and took a bee-line along the grass for Wylder Hall. Richard stood astonished. A moment before she was close beside him, and now she was nearly out of his sight! The angel that ascended from the presence of Manoah could scarcely have more amazed the Danite. Though Richard could shoe a horse, he could no more have stuck to Miss Brown over that hedge than he could have ascended with the angel. He watched till she vanished, and then watched for her reappearance at a point of hope beyond. Only when he knew that distance and intervention rendered it impossible he should see her more, did he turn and take his way to Mortgrange.

He was as much in love with Barbara as a man could be who indulged no hope whatever of marrying her—who was not even tempted to build the humblest castle for her in the air of possibility. But so far was his love from causing in him any kind of selfish absorption, that his heart was much troubled at Alice's leaving him without a farewell. Her behaviour woke in him his first sense of the inexplicable: he little thought of its being but the first visible vapour of a mystery that involved both his past and his future. All he knew was, that the sister of his friend had, in a stormy night in London, fled from him as from a wild beast; and that now, on a quiet morning in the country, she was gone from his grandfather's house without a word of farewell to him who had called him to her aid.

“There must be a reason for everything,” he said to himself, “but some reasons are hard to find!”

The next day in the forenoon, Richard was busy as usual in the library. Doors and windows were shut against draughts, for he was working with gold-leaf on the tooling of an ancient binding. A door opened, and in came the goblin of the house. Perceiving what Richard was about, she came bounding, lithe as a cat, and making a willful wind with her pinafore, blew away the leaf he was dividing on the cushion, and knocked a book of gold-leaf to the floor. The book-mender felt very angry, but put an extra guard on himself, caught her in a firm grasp, and proceeded to expel her. She threw herself on the floor, and began to scream. Richard took her up, laid her down in the hall, and closed and locked the door by which she had entered. Vixen lay where he laid her, and went on screaming. By and by her screaming ceased, and a few moments after, the handle of the door was tried. Richard took no notice. Then came a peremptory knock. Richard called out, “Who's there?” but no answer came except a repetition of the knock, to which he paid no heed. The knock was twice repeated, but Richard went on with his work, and gave no sign. Suddenly another door, which he had not thought of securing, burst open, and in sailed Miss Malliver, the governess, tall and slight, with the dignity she put on for her inferiors, to whom she was as insolent as to those above her she was cringing. True superiority she was incapable of perceiving; real inferiority would have been hard to find.

“Man!” she exclaimed, the moment her wrath would allow her to speak, “what do you mean by your insolence?”

“If you allude to my putting the child out of the room,” answered Richard, “I mean that she is rude, and that I will not be annoyed with her!”

“You shall be turned out of the house!”

“In the meantime,” rejoined Richard, who had a not unnatural repugnance to Miss Malliver, and was now thoroughly angry, “I will turn you too out of the room, and for the same reason.”

Richard felt, with every true gentleman, that the workman has a claim to politeness as real as that of any gentleman. The man who cannot see it is a cad.

“I dare you!” cried Miss Malliver, giving the rein to her innate coarseness.

Before he blames Richard, my reader must think how he might himself have behaved, had he been brought up among the people. I would have him reflect also that the woman who presumes on her sex, undermines its claim. Richard laid the tool he was using quietly aside, and approached her deliberately. Trusting, like king Claudius, in the divinity that hedged her, and not believing he would presume to touch her, the woman kept her ground defiantly until his hands were on the point of seizing her. Then she uttered a shriek, and fled. Richard closed the door behind her, made it also fast, and returned to his work.

But he was not to be left in peace. Another hand came to the door, and a voice demanding entrance followed the foiled attempt to open it. He recognized the voice as lady Ann's, and made haste to admit her. But her ladyship stood motionless on the door-mat, erect and cool. Anger itself could not warm her, for that she was angry was plain only from the steely sparkle in her grey eyes.

“You forget yourself! You must leave the house!” she said.

“I have done nothing, my lady,” answered Richard, “but what it was necessary to do. I did not hurt the child in the least.”

“That is not the point. You must leave the house.”

“I should at once obey you, my lady,” rejoined Richard, “but I am not at liberty to do so. Sir Wilton has the command of my time till the month of May. I am bound to be at his orders, whether I choose or not, except he tell me to go.”

Lady Ann stood speechless, and stared at him with her icicle-eyes. Richard turned away to his work. Lady Ann entered, and shut the door behind her. Richard would have had to search long to discover the cause of her peculiar behaviour. It was this: in his anger, he had flashed on her a look which she knew but could not identify, and which somehow frightened her. She must shape and identify the reminiscence! Familiar enough with the expression of her husband's face when he was out of temper, she had yet failed to identify with it that look on the face of his son. Had she known Richard's mother, she would probably have recognized him at once; for there was more of her as well as of his father in his expression when he was angry: there must have been a good many wrathful passages between the two! In the face of their child the expression of the mother so modified that of the father, that lady Ann could not isolate and verify it. She must therefore go on talking to him, keeping to the point, but not pushing it so as to bring the interview to an end too speedily for her purpose!

“Mr.——,—I don't know your name,” she resumed, “—no respectable house could harbour such behaviour. I grant sir Wilton is partly to blame, for he ought not to have allowed the library to be turned into a workshop. That however makes no difference. This kind of thing cannot continue!”

Richard went on with his work, and made no reply. Lady Ann looked in vain for a revival of the expression that had struck her. For a moment she thought of summoning Miss Malliver to do what she would not condescend to do herself, namely, enrage him, that she might have another chance with the suggested likeness; but something warned her not to risk—she did not know what. At the same time the resemblance might be to no person at all, but to some animal, or even perhaps, some piece of furniture or china!

“You must not imagine yourself of importance in the house,” she resumed, “because a friend of the family happens to be interested in the kind of thing you do—very neatly, I allow, but—”

She stopped short. At this allusion to Barbara, Richard's rage boiled up with the swelling heave in a full caldron on a great furnace. Lady Ann turned pale, pale even for her, murmured something inaudible, put her hand to her forehead, and left the room.

Richard's wrath fell. He thought with himself, “I have frightened her! Perhaps they will leave me alone now!” He closed the door she had left open behind her, unlocked the other, and fell once more to his work.

For the time the disturbance was over. When Miss Malliver and Vixen, lingering near, saw lady Ann walk past, holding her hand to her forehead, they also turned pale with fear: what a terrible man he must be who had silenced my lady in her own house, and had his own way with her! Vixen dared not go near him again for a long time.

But lady Ann's perturbation did not last. She said to herself that she was a fool to imagine such an absurdity. She remembered to have heard, though at the time it had no interest for her, that the bookbinder had relatives in the neighbourhood. Such a likeness might meet her at any turn: the kind of thing was of constant occurrence about estates! It improved the breed of the lower orders, and was no business of hers! A child had certainly been lost, with a claim to the succession; but was she therefore to be appalled at every resemblance to her husband that happened to turn up! As to that particular child, she would not believe that he was alive! He could not be! That, after so many years, she, an earl's daughter, would have to give way to a woman lower than a peasant, was preposterous!

It must be remembered that she knew nothing of the relation of the nurse to the child she had stolen, knew of no source whence light could fall upon their disappearance. Old Simon himself knew nothing of the affair till years after the feeble search for the child had ceased. Lady Ann had a strong hope that his birth had not been registered: she had searched for it—with what object I will not speculate, but had not found it. She was capable of a good deal in some directions, for she came of as low a breed as her husband, with more cunning, and less open defiance in it; there was not much she would have blenched at, with society on her side, and a good chance of foiling in safety the low-born woman who had “popped” her child “in between the” heritage “and” her “hopes.” It might be wrong, but it would be for the sake of right! Ought not imposture to be frustrated, however legalized? Would it not be both intrusion and imposture for a man of low origin to possess the ancient lands of Mortgrange, ousting a child of her family, born of her person, and bred in the brightest beams of the sun social?

I can well imagine her coming to reason thus. For the present, unnecessary as she was determined to think it, she yet resolved to do all that was left her to do: she would watch; and while she watched, would take care that the young man was subjected to no annoyance, lest in his wrath his countenance should suggest to another, as to herself, the question of his origin!

Thus it came that Richard heard nothing more of his threatened expulsion from Mortgrange.

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CHAPTER XXXIV. BARBARA'S DUTY.

The same afternoon appeared Barbara—as none knew when she might not appear—before the front windows of the house, perched upon her huge yet gracious Miss Brown. Arthur was in general upon the outlook for her, but to-day he was not, being more vexed with her than usual for withholding the encouragement he desired, and indeed imagined he deserved—not exactly from vanity, yet no less from an overweening sense of his own worth.

It is an odd delusion to which young men are subject, that, because they admire, perhaps even love a woman, they have a claim on her love. Arthur was confident that he loved Barbara as never man had loved, as never woman had desired to be loved, and counted it not merely unjust but cruel of her to show him no kindness that savoured of like attraction. He did not know or suspect that a fortnight of the London season would go far to make him forget her. He was not a bad sort of fellow, had no vice, was neither snob nor cad; his worst fault was pride in himself because of his family—pride in everything he had been born to, and in a good deal he fancied he had been born to, in which his having was small enough. He was not jealous of Barbara's pleasure in Richard's company. The slightest probe of such a feeling toward a man so infinitely beneath him, he would have felt degrading. To think of the two together would have been to insult both Barbara and himself; to think of himself and the bookbinder for one briefest moment of comparison, would have been to insult all the Lestranges that ever lived. Tuke had no raison d'être but work for the library that would one day be Arthur's, and by its excellence add to the honour of Mortgrange! He forgot that Richard had opened his eyes to its merit, and imagined himself the discoverer of its value: did he not pay the man for his work? and is not what a man pays for his own? Does not the purchaser of a patent purchase also the credit of the invention? That the workman in the library knew as much more than he about the insides as about the outsides of the books, gave him no dignity in his eyes: none but a university-man at least must gain honour by knowledge! The fact, however, did make him more friendly; and after he got used to Richard he seldom stiffened his jelly to remind him that their intercourse was by the sufferance of a humane spirit. Barbara's behaviour to him had done nothing to humble him; for humiliation is at best but a poisoned and poisonous humility.

Little Vixen ran out to Barbara, and made herself less unpleasant than usual: the monkey was preparing her, by what blandishment she was mistress of, to receive a complaint against the man in the library which would injure him in her favour. Might Vixen but see motion and commotion, turmoil and passion around her, she did not care how it arose, or which of the persons involved got the worse in it. She accompanied Barbara to the stable, and as they walked back together, gave her such an account of what had taken place, that Barbara, distrusting the child, yet felt anxious. She knew the spirit of Richard, knew that he would never show her ladyship the false respect a tradesman too often shows, and feared lest he should have to leave the house. She must give lady Ann the opportunity of saying what she might please on the matter!

It must be remembered that Barbara was under no pledge of secrecy to Alice or any one; she was free to do what might seem for the best—that is, for the good of Richard. It was the part of every neighbour to take care of a blind man, particularly when there was special ground for caution unknown to him.

“I am sorry to find you so poorly, dear lady Ann,” she said, with her quick sympathy for suffering.

Vixen had told her that the horrid man had made her mamma quite ill; and Barbara found her with her boudoir darkened, and a cup of green tea on a Japanese table by the side of the couch on which she lay.

“It is only one of my headaches, child!” returned lady Ann. “Do not let it disturb you.”

“I am afraid, from what Victoria tells me, that something must have occurred to annoy you seriously!”

“Nothing at all worth mentioning. He is an odd person, that workman of yours!”

“He is peculiar,” granted Barbara, doubtful of her own honesty because of the different sense in which she used the word from that in which it would be taken; “but I am certain he would not willingly vex any one.”

“Children will be troublesome!” drawled her ladyship.

“Particularly Victoria,” returned Barbara. “Mr. Tuke cannot bear to have his work put in jeopardy!”

“Very excusable in him.”

Barbara was surprised at her consideration, and thought she must somehow be pleased with Richard.

“It would astonish you to hear him talk sometimes,” she said. “There is something remarkable about the young man. He must have a history somewhere!”

She had been thinking whether it was fair to sir Wilton and his family to conceal the momentous fact she alone of their friends knew: were they not those, next to Richard himself, most concerned in it? Should lady Ann be allowed to go on regarding the property as the inheritance of her son, when at any instant it might be swept from his hold? Had they not a right to some preparation for the change? If there was another son, and he the heir, ought she not at least to know that there was such a person? She had resolved, that very morning, to give lady Ann a hint of the danger to which she was exposed.

But there was another reflection, more potent yet, that urged Barbara to speak. Since learning Alice's secret, she had found herself more swiftly drawn toward Richard, nor could she escape the thought that he might one day ask her to be his wife: it would be painful then to know that she had made progress in his regard by being imagined his superior, when she knew she was not! Incapable of laying a snare, was she not submitting to the advantage of an ignorance? The misconception she was thus risking in the future, had already often prevented her from going to Mortgrange. Richard, she was certain, knew her better than ever to misjudge her, but she shrank from the suspicion of any one that she had hidden what she knew for the sake of securing Richard's preference before their relations were altered—when, on a level with the choice of society, he might well think differently of her.

Barbara was one of those to whom concealment is a positive pain. She had a natural hatred, most healthy and Christian, to all secrets as such; and to take any advantage of one would have seemed to her a loathsome thing. She constantly wanted to say all that was in her, and when she must not, she suffered.

“He may have good blood in him on one side,” suggested lady Ann. “He was rude to me, but I dare say it was the child's fault. He seems intelligent!”

“He is more than intelligent. I suspect him of being a genius.”

“I should have thought him a tradesman all over!”

“But wouldn't genius by and by make a gentleman of him?”

“Not in the least. It might make him grow to look like one.”

“Isn't that the same? Isn't it all in the look?”

“By no means. A man must be a gentleman or he is nothing! A gentleman would rather not have been born than not be a gentleman!” said lady Ann.

She spoke to an ignorant person from the colonies, where they could not be supposed to understand such things, and never suspected the danger she and her false importance were in with the little colonial girl.

“But if his parents were gentlefolk?” suggested Barbara.

“Birth predetermines style, both in body and mind, I grant,” said lady Ann; “education and society must do their parts to make any man a gentleman; and where all has been done, I must confess to having seen remarkable failures. Bad blood must of course have got in somehow.”

“I wish I knew what makes a gentleman!” sighed Barbara. “I have all my life been trying to understand the thing.—Tell me, lady Ann—to be a gentleman, must a man be a good man?”

“I am sorry to say,” she answered, “it is not in the least necessary.”

“Then a gentleman may do bad things, and be a gentleman still?”

“Yes—that is, some bad things.”

“Do you mean—not many bad things?”

“No; I mean certain kinds of bad things.”

“Such as cheating at cards?”

“No. If he were found doing that, he would be expelled from any club in London.”

“May he tell lies, then?”

“Certainly not! It is a very ungentlemanly thing to tell lies.”

“Then, if a man tells a lie, he is not a gentleman?”

“I do not say that; I say that to tell lies is ungentlemanly?”

“Does that mean that he may tell some lies, and yet be a gentleman?”

Lady Ann was afraid to go on. She saw that to go on answering the girl from the colonies, with her troublesome freedom of thought and question, might land her in a bog of contradictions.

“How many lies may a gentleman tell in a day?” pursued the straight-going Barbara.

“Not any,” answered lady Ann.

“Does the same rule hold for ladies?”

“Y—e—s——I should say so,” replied her ladyship—with hesitation, for she suspected being slowly driven into some snare. She knew she was not careful enough to speak the truth—so much she confessed to herself, the fact being that, to serve any purpose she thought worth gaining, she would lie without a scruple—taking care, however, to keep the lie as like the truth as consisted with success, in order that, if she were found out, it might seem she had mistaken.

Barbara noted the uncertainty of the sound her ladyship's trumpet gave, and began to be assured that the laws of society were no firm stepping-stones, and that society itself was a morass, where one must spend her life in jumping from hump to hump, or be swallowed up.

She had been wondering how far, if Richard proved heir to a baronetcy, his education and manners would decree him no gentleman; but it was useless to seek light from lady Ann. As they talked, however, the feeling came and grew upon her, that she was not herself acting like a lady, in going so much to her house, and being received by her as a friend, when all the time she knew something she did not know, something it was important for her to know, something she had a right and a claim to know. She would herself hate to live on what was not her own, as lady Ann would be left to do when sir Wilton died, if the truth about Richard remained undisclosed! It was very unfair to leave them unwarned for this reason besides, that so the fact might at last find them, for lack of preparation, without resource!

“I want to talk to you about something, lady Ann,” she said. “You can't but know that a son of sir Wilton's was stolen when he was a baby, and never found!”

It was the first time for many years that lady Ann had heard the thing alluded to except once or twice by her husband. Her heart seemed to make a somersault, but not a visible muscle moved. What could the girl be hinting at? Were there reports about? She must let her talk!—the more freely the better!

“Every one knows that!” she answered. “It is but too true. It happened after my marriage. I was in the house at the time.—What of it, child? There can be little hope of his turning up now—after twenty years!”

“I believe he has turned up. I believe I know him.”

Lady Ann jumped to the most natural, most mistaken conclusion.

“It's the bookbinder!” she said to herself. “He has been telling her a pack of lies! His being in the house is part of the plot. It must be nipped in the bud! If it be no lie, if he be the very man, it must be nipped all the same! Good heavens! if Arthur should not marry her—or someone—before it is known!”

“It may be so,” she answered quietly, “but it hardly interests me. I don't like talking of such things to a girl, but innocence cannot always be spared in this wicked world. The child you speak of was born in this house, and stolen out of it; but his mother was a low woman; she was not the wife of sir Wilton.”

“Everybody believed her his wife!” faltered Barbara.

“Very possibly! Very likely! She may even have thought so herself! Such people are so ignorant!” said lady Ann with the utmost coolness. “He may even have married her after the child was born for anything I know.”

“Sir Wilton must have made her believe she was his wife!” cried Barbara, her blood rising at the thought of such a wrong done to Richard's mother.

“Possibly,” admitted lady Ann with a smile.

“Then a baronet may tell lies, though a gentleman may not!” said Barbara, as if speaking to herself.

Lady Ann was not indignant. She had hesitated to say a lady might lie, but did not hesitate to lie the moment the temptation came, nor for that would doubt herself a lady! She knew perfectly that the woman was the wife of her husband as much as she herself was, and that she died giving birth to the heir. She had no hope that any lie she could tell would keep that child out of the property if he were alive and her husband wished him to have it; but a lie well told to Barbara might help to keep her for Arthur.

“Gentlemen think they may tell lies to women!” she returned with calmness, and just a tinge of regret.

“How are they gentlemen then?” cried Barbara; “or where is the good of being a gentleman? Is it that he knows better how to lie to a woman? A knight used to be every woman's castle of refuge; a gentleman now, it seems, is a pitfall in the bush!”

“It is a matter they settle among themselves,” answered lady Ann, confused between her desire to appear moral, and to gain her lie credit.

“I think I shall not call myself a lady!” said Barbara, after a moment's silence. “I prefer being a woman! I wonder whether in heaven they say a woman or a lady!”

“I suppose they are all sorts there as well as here,” answered lady Ann.

“How will the ladies do without gentlemen?” suggested Barbara.

“Why without gentlemen? There will be as many surely of the one sex as of the other!”

“No,” said Barbara, “that cannot be! Gentlemen tell lies, and I am sure no lie is told in heaven!”

“All gentlemen do not tell lies!” returned lady Ann, herself at the moment full of lying.

“But all gentlemen may lie!” persisted Barbara, “so there can be no gentlemen in heaven.”

“I am sorry I had to mention the thing,” returned lady Ann, “but I was afraid your sweet romantic nature might cherish an interest where was nothing on which to ground it. Of course I know whence the report you allude to comes! Any man, bookbinder or blacksmith, may put in a claim. He will find plenty to back him. They will very likely get up a bubble-company, for speculation on his chance! His own class will be sure to take his part! Now that those that ought to know better have taught them to combine, the lower orders stick at nothing to annoy their superiors! But, thank heaven, the estate is not entailed!”

“If you imagine Mr. Tuke told me he was heir to Mortgrange, lady Ann, you are mistaken. He does not know himself that he is even supposed to be.”

“Are you sure of that? Who then told you? Is it likely his friends have got him into the house, under the eye of his pretended father, and he himself know nothing of the manoeuvre?”

“How do you know it was he I meant, lady Ann?”

“You told me so yourself.”

“No; that I did not! I know I didn't, lady Ann! What made you fix on him?”

Lady Ann saw she had committed herself.

“If you did not tell me,” she rejoined, “your peculiar behaviour to the man must have led me to the conclusion!”

“I have never concealed my interest in Mr. Tuke, but—”

“You certainly have not!” interrupted her ladyship, who both suffered in temper and lost in prudence from annoyance at her own blunder.

“Pray, hear me out, lady Ann. What I want to say is, that my friendship for Mr. Tuke had begun long before I learned the fact concerning which I thought I ought to warn you.”

“Friendship!—ah, well!—scarcely decorous!—but as to what you call fact, I would counsel a little caution. I repeat that, if the man be the son of that woman, which may be difficult to prove, it is of no consequence to any one; sir Wilton was never married to his mother—properly married, I mean. I am sorry he should have been born out of wedlock—it is anything but proper; at the same time I cannot be sorry that he will never come between my Arthur and the succession.”

Here lady Ann saw a sudden radiance light up the face of Barbara, and change its expression, from that of a lady rightfully angry and a little scornful, to that of a child-angel. Entirely concerned hitherto with Richard's loss and pain, if what lady Ann said should be true, it now first occurred to her what she herself would gain if indeed he was not the heir: no one could think she had been his friend because he was going to be a rich man! If he was the wronged man her ladyship represented him—and her ladyship ought to know—she might behave to him as she pleased without suspicion of low motive! Little she knew what motives such persons as lady Ann were capable of attributing—as little how incapable they were of understanding any generous motive!

Barbara had an insuperable, a divine love of justice. She would have scorned the thought of forsaking a friend because the very mode of his earthly being was an ante-natal wrong to him. The righteousness that makes a man visit the sins of a father upon his children, is the righteousness of a devil, not the righteousness of God. When God visits the sins of a father on his children, it is to deliver the child from his own sins through yielding to inherited temptation. Barbara rejoiced that she was free to approach Richard, and make some amends to him for the ass-judgment of the world. I do not know that she said to herself, “Now I may love him as I please!” but her thought went in that direction.

It did not take lady Ann long to interpret the glow on Barbara's face to her own satisfaction. The report she had heard and believed, had kept Barbara back from encouraging Arthur, and made her pursue her unpleasant intimacy with the bookbinder! the sudden change on her countenance indicated the relief of finding that Arthur, and not this man, was indeed the heir! How could she but prefer her Arthur to a man smelling of leather and glue, a man without the manners or education of a gentleman! He might know a few things that gentlemen did not care to know, but even those he got only out of books! He could not do one of the many things her Arthur did! He could neither ride, nor shoot, nor dress, nor dance! He was tall, but he was clumsy! No doubt he was a sort of vulgar-handsome, but when out of temper, was ugly enough!

That lady Ann condescended to such comparison, was enough to show that she believed the story at least half. The girl remaining silent.

“You will oblige me, dear Barbara,” she said, “by not alluding to this report! It might raise doubt where it could not do serious harm!”

“There are others who not only know but believe it,” answered Barbara.

“Who are they?”

“I do not feel at liberty to tell their names. I thought you had a right to know what was said, but I have no right to mention where I heard it.”

Lady Ann grew thoughtful again, and as she thought grew convinced that Barbara had not spoken the truth, and that it was Richard who had told her: it is so easy for those who lie to believe that another is lying! It is impossible indeed for such to imagine that another, with what they would count strong reason for lying, would not lie. Gain is the crucial question for vile souls of any rank. She believed also, for they that lie doom themselves to believe lies as well as disbelieve truths, that Richard had got into the house in order to learn things that might serve in the establishing of his claim.

“It will be much better you should keep silent concerning the report,” she said. “I do not want the question stirred. If the young man, any young man, I mean, should claim the heirship, we must meet the thing as it ought to be met; till then, promise me you will be silent.”

She would fain have time to think, for she feared in some way compromising herself. And in any case, the longer the crisis could be postponed, the better for her prospects in the issue!

“I will not promise anything,” answered Barbara. “I dread promising.”

“Why?” asked lady Ann, raising her eyebrows.

“Because promises have to be kept, and that is sometimes very difficult; and because sometimes you find you ought not to have made them, and yet you must keep them. It is a horrid thing to have to keep a promise you don't like keeping, especially if it hurts anybody.”

“But if you ought to make the promise?” suggested lady Ann.

“Then you must make it. But where there is no ought, I think it wrong to bind yourself. What right have you, when you don't know what may be wanted of you, to tie your own hands and feet? There may come an earthquake or a fire!”

“Does friendship demand nothing? You are our guest!”

It was not in lying only that lady Ann was not a lady.

“One's friends may have conflicting interests!” said Barbara.

Lady Ann was convinced that Richard was at the root of the affair, and she hated him. What if he were the heir, and it could be proved! The thought was sickening. It was with the utmost strain that she kept up her apparent indifference before the mocking imp honest Barbara seemed to her. For heaven is the devil's hell, and the true are the devils of it. How was she to assure herself concerning the fellow? how discover what he was, what he knew, and how much he could prove? She could not even think, with that little savage sitting there, staring out of her wide eyes!

“My sweet Barbara,” she said, “I am so much obliged to you for letting me know! I will not ask any promise from you. Only you must not heedlessly bring trouble upon us. If the thing were talked about, some unprincipled lawyer would be sure to take it up, and there would be another claimant-case, with the people in a hubbub, and thousands of ignorant honest folk duped of their money to enrich the rascality. I heard a distinguished judge once say, that, even if the claimant were the real sir Roger, he had no right to the property, having so long neglected the duties of it as to make it impossible to be certain of his identity. Such people put the country to enormous expense, and are never of any service to it. It is a wrong to all classes when a man without education succeeds to property. For one thing he will always side with the tenants against the land. And what service can any such man render his country in parliament? Without a suitable training there can be no genuine right.”

She was on the point of adding—“And then are the hopes and services and just expectations of a lifetime to go for nothing?” but checked herself and was silent.

To all this Barbara had been paying little heed. She was revolving whether she ought to tell Richard what she had just heard. Neither then nor as she rode home, however, could she come to a conclusion. If Richard was not the heir, why should she trouble him? But he might be the heir, and what then? She must seek counsel! But of whom? Not of her mother! As certainly not of her father! She had no ground for trusting the judgment of either.

Having got rid of Miss Brown, she walked to the parsonage.

But she did not find there such a readiness to give advice as she had expected.

“The thing is not my business,” said Wingfold.

“Not!” returned the impetuous Barbara. “I thought you were so much interested in the young man! He told me the other day that he had seen you again, and had a long talk with you, and that you thought the popular idea of the inspiration of the scriptures the greatest nonsense!”

“Did he tell you that I said it was much nearer the truth after all than the fancy that the Bible had no claim beyond any other book?”

“Yes, he did.”

“That's all right!—Tell me then, Miss Wylder: are you interested in the young man because he is possibly heir to a baronetcy?”

“Certainly not!” answered Barbara with indignation.

“Then why should I be?” pursued the parson. “What is it to me? I am not a county-magistrate even!”

“I cannot understand you, Mr. Wingfold!” protested Barbara, “You say you are there not for yourself but for the people, yet you will not move to see right done!”

“I would move a long way to see that Mr. Tuke cared to do right: that is my business. It is not much to me, and nothing to my business, whether Mr. Tuke be rich or poor, a baronet or a bookbinder; it is everything to me whether Mr. Tuke will be an honest fellow or not.”

“But if he should prove to have a right to the property?”

“Then he ought to have the property. But it is not my business to discover or to enforce the right. My business is to help the young man to make little of the matter, whether he find himself the lawful heir, or a much injured man through his deceived mother.—Tell me whose servant I am.”

“You are the servant of Jesus Christ.”

“—Who said the servant must be as his master.—Do you remember how he did when a man came asking him to see justice done between him and his brother?—He said, 'Man, who made me a judge and a divider over you? Take heed and beware of covetousness.'—It may be your business to see about it; I don't know; I scarcely think it is. My advice would be to keep quiet yet a while, and see what will come. There appears no occasion for hurry. The universe does not hang on the question of Richard's rights. Will it be much whether your friend go into the other world as late heir, or even late owner of Mortgrange, or as the son of Tuke, the bookbinder? Will the dead be moved from beneath to meet the young baronet at his coming? Will the bookbinder go out into dry places, seeking rest and finding none?”

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XXXV. THE PARSON'S COUNSEL.

It was a happy thing for both Richard and Barbara, that Barbara was now under another influence besides Richard's. The more she saw of Mr. and Mrs. Wingfold, the more she felt that she had come into a region of reality and life. Both of them understood what a rare creature she was, and spoke as freely before her as if she had been a sister of their own age and standing. Barbara on her side knew no restraint with them, but spoke in like freedom, both of her past life, and the present state of things at home—which was indeed no secret, being manifest to the servants, and therefore known to all the county, in forms more or less correct, as it had been to all the colony before they left it. She talked almost as freely of Richard, and of the great desire she had to get him to believe in God.

“It was a dangerous relation between two such young people!” some of my readers will remark.—Yes, I answer—dangerous, as every true thing is dangerous to him or her who is not true; as every good thing is dangerous to him or her who is not good. Nothing is so dangerous as religious sentiment without truth in the inward parts. Certain attempts at what is called conversion, are but writhings of the passion of self-recommendation; gapings of the greed of power over others; swellings of the ambition to propagate one's own creed, and proselytize victoriously; hungerings to see self reflected in another convinced. In such efforts lie dangers as vulgar as the minds that make them, and love the excitement of them. But genuine love is far beyond such grovelling delights; and the peril of such a relation is in inverse proportion to the reality of those concerned.

Barbara was one who, so far as human eyes could see, had never required conversion. She had but to go on, recognize, and do. She turned to the light by a holy will as well as holy instinct. She needed much instruction, and might yet have fierce battles to fight, but to convert such as Barbara must be to turn them the wrong way; for the whole energy of her being was in the direction of what is right—that is, righteousness. She needed but to be told a good thing—I do not say told that a thing was good—and at once she received it—that is, obeyed it, the only way of receiving a truth. She did the thing immediately demanded upon every reception of light, every expansion of true knowledge. She was essentially of the truth; and therefore, when she came into relation with a soul such as Wingfold, a soul so much more developed than herself, so much farther advanced in the knowledge of realities as having come through difficulties unknown and indeed at present unknowable to Barbara, she met one of her own house, and her life was fed from his, and began to grow faster. For he taught her to know the eternal man who bore witness to his father in the face of his perverse children, to know that his heart was the heart of a child in truth and love, and the heart of a God in courage and patience; and Barbara became his slave for very love, his blessed child, the inheritor of his universe. Happily her life had not been loaded to the ground with the degrading doctrines of those that cower before a God whose justice may well be satisfied with the blood of the innocent, seeing it consists but in the punishing of the guilty. She had indeed heard nothing of that brood of lies until the unbelieving Richard—ah, not far from believing he who but rejected such a God!—gave her to know that such things were believed. From the whole swarm she was protected—shame that it should have to be said!—by pure lack of what is generally regarded as a religious education, such being the mother of more tears and madness in humble souls, and more presumption in the proud and selfish, than perhaps any other influence out of whose darkness God brings light. Neither ascetic nor mystic nor doctrinist of any sort, caring nothing for church or chapel, of observance of any kind as observance, she believed in God, and was now ready to die for Jesus Christ, in the eternal gladness that there was such a person as God and such a person as Jesus Christ. Their being was to her the full and only pledge of every bliss, every childlike delight. She believed in the God of the whole earth, not in a puritanical God. She never imagined it could be wrong to dance: merry almost in her very nature, she now held it a duty to be glad. Fond of sweets, she would have thought it wrong to refuse what God meant her to like; but she had far more pleasure in giving than in receiving them. She got into a little habit of thanking God for Miss Brown every time she felt herself on her back. She saw, the moment she heard it, that whatever was not of faith was sin: “The idea,” she said, “of taking a thing from God without thinking love back to him for it!” She shuddered at the thought of unnecessarily hurting, yet would punish sharply. She would whip her dog when he deserved it, but sat up all night with him once when he was ill. She understood something of the ways of God with men.

Wingfold never sought to moderate her ardour for the good of her workman-friend; he only sought to strengthen her in the truth.

One day, when they were all three sitting together in the twilight before the lamp was lit—for Helen Wingfold was one of those happy women able to let their hands lie in their laps—he said to his pupil,

“Now, pray, Miss Wylder, don't try by argument to convince the young man of anything. That were no good, even if you succeeded. Opinion is all that can result from argument, and his opinion concerning God, even if you got it set right, would not be knowledge of God, and would be worth nothing; while, if a man knows God, his opinion is either right, or on the nearest way to be right. The notion in Richard's brain of the God he denies, is but another form of the Moloch of the Ammonites. There never was, and never could be such a God. He in whom I believe is the God that says, 'This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.' It is as if he said—'Look at that man: I am just such! No other likeness of me is a true likeness. Heed my son: heed nobody else. Know him and you know me, and then we are one for ever.' Talk to Richard of the God you love, the beautiful, the strong, the true, the patient, the forgiving, the loving; the one childlike, eternal power and Godhead, who would die himself and kill you rather than have you false and mean and selfish. Let him feel God through your enthusiasm for him. You can't prove to him that there is any God. A God that could be proved, would not be worth proving. Make his thoughts dwell on such a God as he must feel would be worth having. Wake the notion of a God such as will draw him to wish there were such a God. There are many religious people who will tell you there is no such God as I mean; but God will love you for believing that he is as good and true as you can think. Throw the notions of any who tell you otherwise to the winds of hell, 'God is just!' said a carping theologian to me the other day. 'Yes,' I answered, 'and he cannot be pleased that you should call that justice which is injustice, and attribute it to him!' There are many who must die in ignorance of their Father in heaven, because they will not of their own selves judge what is right. Such never get beyond the weak and beggarly elements. Set in Richard's eye a God worth believing in, a God like the son of God, and he will go and look if haply such a God may be found; he will call upon him, and the God who is will hear and answer him. What good would it be, what could it bring but the more condemnation, that a man should be sure there was a God, if he did not cry to him? But although a man may never doubt and never cry, I cannot imagine any man sure there is a God without his first having cried to him. God is God to us not that we may say he is, but that we may know him; and when we know him, then we are with him, at home, at the heart of the universe, the heirs of all things. All this is foolishness, I know, to the dull soul that cares only for the things that admit of being proved. The unprovable mystery out of which come the things provable, has for them no interest, they say, because it is unprovable: they take for granted that therefore it is unknowable. Would they be content it should be unknowable if things were all as they should be within them? When the eyes of those who have made themselves at home in the world of the senses and care for no other are opened, I imagine them saying—'Yes, He was after all; but none the less were you fools to believe in him, for you had no proof!' Then I seem to hear the children laugh and say, 'We had himself, and did not want it.' That the unprovable is necessarily the unknowable, a thousand beliefs deny. 'You cannot prove to me that you have a father!' says the blind sage, reasoning with the little child. 'Why should I prove it?' answers the child. 'I am sitting on his knee! If I could prove it, that would not make you see him; that would not make you happy like me! You do not care about my father, or you would not stand there disputing; you would feel about until you found him!' If a thing be true in itself, it is not capable of proof; and that man is in the higher condition who is able to believe it. In proportion as a man is a fool he is unable to believe what in itself is true. If intellect be the highest power, then the men of proof are the wisest; if there be something deeper than intellect, causing and including it, if there be a creative power of which our intellect is but a faint reflex, then the child of that power, the one who acknowledges and loves and obeys that power, will be the one to understand it. If a man say, 'I cannot believe; I was not made to believe what I could not prove;' I reply, Do you really say, 'It is not true,' because you have no proof? Ask yourself whether you do not turn from the idea because you prefer it should not be true. You accept a thousand things without proof, and a thousand things may be perfectly true, and have no proof. But if you cannot be sure, why therefore do you turn away? Is the thing assuredly false? Then you ought of course to turn away. Can you prove it false? You cannot. Again, why do you turn away? That a thing is not assuredly true, cannot be reason for turning from it, else farewell to all theory and all scientific research! Is the thing less good, less desirable, less worth believing, in itself, that you cannot thus satisfy yourself concerning it? The very chance that such a thing may be true, the very fact that it cannot be disproved, is large reason for an honest, and continuous, and unending search. Do you hold any door in your nature open for the possibility of a God having a claim on you? The truth is, as I hinted before, that you are not drawn to the idea, do not like it; and it is therefore you turn away, and not because you have no proof.—If the man then shifted his ground and said, 'He seemed to me not a good being, and I said therefore, he cannot exist;' I should reply, There you were right. But a thing that cannot be, cannot render impossible a thing that can be—a thing against whose existence there are no such arguments as have rightly shown that the other cannot be. In right logical balance you must admit that a creative being who is good may exist. But the final question is always this: Have you acted, or rather, are you acting according to the conscience which is the one guide to truth, to all that is!”

“But,” said Barbara, “perhaps the man would say that we see such suffering in the world, that the being who made it, if there be one, cannot possibly be both strong and good, otherwise he would not allow it.”

“Say then, that he might be both strong and good, and have some reason for allowing, or even causing it, which those who suffer will themselves one day justify, ready for the sake of it to go through all the suffering again. Less than that would not satisfy me. If he say, 'What reason could justify the infliction of such suffering?' then tell him what I am now going to tell you.

“A year ago,” continued Wingfold, “my little boy displeased me horribly. I will not tell you what he did: when the boy grows up, he will find it as impossible to understand how he could have done the thing, as I find it now. People say, 'Children will be children!' but I see little consolation in that. Children must be children, and ought to be good children. They are made to be good children, just as much as men are made to be good men. All I will say is, that he did a mean thing. You see his mother can hardly keep from crying now at the thought of it. Thank God, she was of one mind with me. I took him, and, bent on making him feel, if not how horrid the thing was in itself—for what imperfect being can ever know the full horror of evil!—at least how horrid I thought it, broke out in strong language. I told him I must whip him; that I could not bear doing it, but rather than he should be a damned, mean, contemptible little rascal, I would kill him and be hanged for it. I dare say it sounds very improper, but—”

“Not in the least!” cried Barbara. “I like a man to curse what is bad, and go down on his knees to what is good.”

“Well, what do you think the little fellow said?—'Don't kill me, papa,' he cried. 'I will be good. Don't, please, be hanged for my naughtiness! Whip me, and that will make me good.'”

“And then you couldn't do it?” asked Barbara anxiously.

“I cried,” said Wingfold, and almost cried again as he said it. “I'm not much in the habit of crying—I don't look like it, do I?—but I couldn't help it. The child took out his little pocket-handkerchief and dried my eyes, and then prepared himself for the whipping. And I whipped him as I never did before, and I hope in God shall never have to do again. The moment it was over, while my heart was like to burst, he flung his arms round my neck and began kissing me. 'I will never make you cry again, papa!' he said.—He has kept his word, and since then I have never wondered at the suffering in the world. I have puzzled my metaphysical brains to the last gasp about the origin of evil—I don't do that now, for I seem to understand it—but, since then, I have never troubled myself about the origin of suffering. I don't like pain a whit better than another, and I don't bear it nearly so well as Helen, but I vex neither my brain nor my heart as to God's sending it. I knew after whipping my boy, that the tears the Lord wept over Jerusalem were not wept by him only, but by the Father as well. Whoever says God cannot suffer, I say he does not understand. God can weep, and weeps more painful tears than ours; for he is God, and we are his little ones. That boy's trouble was over with the punishment, but my heart is sore yet.

“It comes to this, that the suffering you see around you, hurts God more than it hurts you, or the man upon whom it falls; but he hates things that most men think little of, and will send any suffering upon them rather than have them continue indifferent to them. Men may say, 'We don't want suffering! we don't want to be good!' but God says, 'I know my own obligations! and you shall not be contemptible wretches, if there be any resource in the Godhead.' I know well that almost all the mothers in my congregation would, hearing what I have just told you, call me a cruel father. They would rather have me a weak one, loving my child less. They would rather their child should be foul in the soul than be made clean through suffering! I know they would! But I know also that they do not see how ugly is evil. And that again is because they are not clean enough themselves to value rightness above rubies! Tell the tale your own way to your workman-friend, and may God help him to understand it! The God who strikes, is the God whose son wept over Jerusalem.”

“I am so glad you whipt the darling!” said Barbara, scarcely able to speak. “I shall love him more than ever.”

“You should see how he loves his father!” said Helen. “His father is all his talk when we are alone together. He sees more of me than of him now, but by and by his father will take him about with him.”

“And then,” said Barbara, “all his talk will be of you!”

“Yes; it is the way of the child!”

“And of the whole family in heaven and earth,” rejoined the parson.

Barbara rose.

“You'll be on the watch,” said Wingfold, “for any chance for me of serving your mother?”

“I will,” replied Barbara.

The next morning she got on Miss Brown, and rode to the forge, where Simon made her always welcome. It was sunshine to his heart to see her, he said. She knew that Richard was to be there. They left Miss Brown in the smithy, and went for a walk together, during which Barbara was careful to follow the parson's advice. Their talk was mostly about her life in New Zealand. Now that she knew God more, and believed more in him, she was more able to set forth her history. Feelings long vague had begun to put on shapes definite and communicable. She understood herself better, and was better able to make Richard understand her. And in Richard, by degrees, through the sympathy of affection, was growing the notion of a God in whom it would not be hard to believe. He ought not to believe, and he had not believed in the supposed being hitherto presented to him as God; now he saw the shape of a God in whom, if he existed, he ought to believe. But he had not yet come to long that he should exist, to desire him, or to cry out in the hope that he would hear him. His hour was not yet come. But when the day of darkness arrived, when he knew himself helpless, there would be in his mind a picture of the God to whom he must cry in his trouble—a God whose existence would then be his only need, the one desire of his soul. To wake the sense of this eternal need, present though unrecognized under every joy, was the final cause of every sorrow and pain against which Richard rebelled—most naturally rebelled, knowing neither the plague of a heart that would but could not be lord over itself, nor of a nature hatefully imperfect and spotted, yea capable of what itself could not but detest.

Naturally, his manners were growing more refined from his intercourse with the gracious, brave, sympathetic, unconventional creature, so strong yet so gentle, so capable of indignation, so full of love. He was gradually developing the pure humanity that lay beneath the rough artisan. He was, in a word, becoming what in the kingdom of heaven every man must be—a gentleman, because more than a gentleman.

All this time Barbara was pulled two ways: for Richard's sake she would have him heir to the baronetcy; for her own she would be rid of the shadow of having sought the baronet in the bookbinder. But more and more the asseveration of lady Ann gained force with her—that Richard was not the heir. She had greatly doubted her, but now she said to herself: “She could hardly be mistaken, and she cannot have lied.” The consequence was that she grew yet more free, more at home with Richard. She listened to all he had to tell her, learning of him with an abandon of willingness that put him upon his honour to learn of her again. And he did learn, as I have said, a good deal—went farther than he knew in the way of true learning.

They strolled together in the field behind the smithy, within sight of the cottage, for an hour or so; then hearing from the smithy the impatient stamping of Miss Brown, and fearing she might give the old man trouble, hastened back. Richard brought out the mare. Barbara sprang on a big stone by the door, and mounted without his help. She went straight for Wylder Hall.

As they were walking up and down the field, Arthur Lestrange passed on foot, saw them, and went home indignant.

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CHAPTER XXXVI. LADY ANN MEDITATES.

It would have been difficult for Arthur himself to say whether in his heart rage or contempt was the stronger, when he saw the lady he loved walking in a field, turning and returning, in close talk with the bookbinder-fellow. Never had she so walked and talked with him! She preferred the bookbinder's society to his—and made it no secret that she did, for, although evidently desirous of having their interview uninterrupted, they walked in full view of the high road!

What did Barbara mean by it? He could not treat her as a child and lay the matter before Richard! If a lady showed favour to a man, the less worthy he was, the less could he be expected to see the unfitness of the thing. Besides, to acknowledge thus any human relation between Richard and either of them, would be degrading. It was scorn alone that kept Arthur from hating Richard. For Barbara, he attributed her disregard of propriety, and the very possibility of her being interested in such a person, to the modes of life in the half savage country where she had been born and reared—educated, he remarked to himself, he could not say. But what did she mean by it? The worst of his torment was that the thought, unreasonable as it was, would yet come—that Richard was a good-looking fellow, and admiration, which in any English girl would have been rendered impossible by his vulgarity, might have a share in her enjoyment of his shop-talk about books. The idea was simply disgusting!

What was he to do? What could any one do? The girl was absolutely uncontrolled: was it likely she would prove controllable? Would she mind him, when she cared no more for his stately mother than for the dairy-woman! How could such a bewitching creature so lack refinement! The more he thought, the more inexplicable and self-contradictory her conduct appeared. Such a jewelled-humming-bird to make friends with a grubbing rook! The smell of the leather, not to mention the paste and glue, would be enough for any properly sensitive girl! Universally fascinating, why did she not correspond all through? Brought out in London, she would be the belle of the season! If he did not secure her, some poor duke would pounce on her!

But again what was he to do? Must he bring scorn on himself by appearing jealous of a tradesman, or must he let the fellow go on casting his greasy shadow about the place? As to her being in love with him, that was preposterous! The notion was an insult! Yet half the attention she gave the bookbinder would be paradise to him! He must put a stop to it! he must send the man away! It would be a pity for the library! It was beginning to look beautiful, and would soon have been the most distinguished in the county: lord Chough's was nothing to it! But there were other book-binders as good as he! And what did the library matter! What did anything matter in such a difficulty!

She might take offence! She would be sure to suspect why the fellow was sent packing! She would know she had the blame of ruining the library, and the bookbinder as well, and would never enter the house again! He must leave the thing alone—for the present! But he would be on his guard! Against what, he did not plainly tell himself.

While the son was thus desiring a good riddance of the man he had brought into the house, and to whom Barbara was so much indebted, the mother was pondering the same thing. Should the man remain in the house or leave it? was the question with her also;—and if leave it, on what pretext? She was growing more and more uncomfortable at the possibilities. The possession of the estate by one born of another woman, and she of low origin; the subjection in which they would all be placed to him as the head of the family—a man used to the low ways of a trade, a man dirty and greasy, hardly in his right place at work in the library, the grandson of a blacksmith with brawny arms and smutty face—the ideas might well be painful to her!

Then first the thought struck her, that it must be his grandfather's doing that he was in the house! and there he was, at their very door, eager to bear testimony to the bookbinder as his grandson and heir to Mortgrange! Alas, the thing must be a fact, a horrible fact! All was over!—But she would do battle for her rights! She would not allow that the child was found! The thing was a conspiracy to supplant the true heir! How ruinous were the low tastes of gentlemen! If sir Wilton had but kept to his own rank, and made a suitable match, nothing of all this misery would have befallen them! If her predecessor had been a lady, her son would have been a gentleman, and there would have been nothing to complain of! To lady Ann, her feeling had the force of a conviction, that the son of Robina Armour could not, in the nature of things divinely ordained, have the same rights as her son. Lady Ann's God was the head of the English aristocracy. There was nothing selfish that lady Ann was not capable of wishing; there was nothing selfish she might not by degrees become capable of doing. She could not at that moment commit murder; neither could lady Macbeth have done so when she was a girl. The absurd falsity of her notions as to her rights, came from lack of love to her neighbour, and consequent insensibility to his claims. At the same time she had not keen, she had only absorbing feelings of her rights; there was nothing keen in lady Ann; neither sense nor desire, neither hope nor fear, neither joy nor sorrow, neither love nor hate. Beyond her own order, beyond indeed her own circle in that order, the universe hardly existed. An age-long process of degeneration had been going on in her race, and she was the result: she was well born and well bred for feeling nothing. There is something fearful in the thought that through the generations the body may go on perfecting, while the heart goes on degenerating; that, while the animal beauty is growing complete in the magic of proportion, the indescribable marvel that can even give charm to ugliness, is as steadily vanishing. Such a woman, like Branca d'Oria in the Inferno, is already damned, and only seems to live. Lady Ann was indeed born capable of less than most; but had she attempted to do the little she could, one would not have been where she was; she would have beep toiling up the hill of truth, with a success to be measured, like the widow's mite, by what she had not.

All her thoughts were now occupied with the rights of her son, and through him of the family. Sir Wilton had been for some time ailing, and when he went, they would be at the mercy of any other heir than Arthur, just as miserably whether he were the true heir or an impostor; the one was as bad as the other from her point of view! For the right, lady Ann cared nothing, except to have it or to avoid it. The law of the land was to be respected no doubt, but your own family—most of all when land was concerned—was worthier still!

It were better to rid the place of the bookbinder—but how? As to whether he was the legal heir or not, she would rather remain ignorant, only that, assured on the point, she would better understand how to deal with his pretension! But she could not consult sir Wilton, because she suspected him of a lingering regard for the dead wife which would naturally influence his feeling for the live son—if live he were: no doubt he had enjoyed the company of the low-born woman more than hers, for she, a woman of society, knew what was right! She had reason therefore to fear him prejudiced for any pretender! Arthur and he got on quite as well as could be expected of father and son—their differences never came to much; but on the other hand sir Wilton had a demoniacal pleasure in frustrating! To make a man he disliked furious, was honey and nuts to sir Wilton; and she knew a woman whose disappointment would be dearer to him than that of all his enemies together! It was better therefore that he should have no hint, and especially from her, of what was in the air!

Lady Ann thought herself a good woman because she never felt interest enough to be spiteful like sir Wilton; yet, very strangely, not knowing in herself what repentance meant, she judged him capable of doing her the wrong of atoning to his first wife for his neglect of her, by being good to her child! Thinking over her talk with Barbara, she could not, after all, feel certain that Richard knew, or that he had incited Barbara to take his part. But in any case it was better to get rid of him! It was dangerous to have him in the house! He might be spending his nights in trumping up evidence! At any moment he might appeal to sir Wilton as his father! But at the worst, he would be unable to prove the thing right off, and if her husband would but act like a man, they might impede the attempt beyond the possibility of its success!

One comfort was, that, she was all but confident, the child was not already baptized when stolen from Mortgrange; neither were such as would steal children likely to have them baptized; therefore the God who would not allow the unbaptized to lie in his part of the cemetery, would never favour his succession to the title and estate of Mortgrange! The fact must have its weight with Providence!—whom lady Ann always regarded us a good churchman: he would never take the part of one that had not been baptized! Besides, the fellow was sure to turn out a socialist, or anarchist, or positivist, or radical, or something worse! She would dispute his identity to the last, and assert his imposture beyond it! Her duty to society demanded that she should not give in!

Suddenly she remembered the description her husband had given her of the ugliness of the infant: this man was decidedly handsome! Then she remembered that sir Wilton had told her of a membrane between certain of his fingers—horrible creature: she must examine the impostor!

Arthur was very moody at dinner: his mother feared some echo of the same report as caused her own anxiety had reached him, and took the first opportunity of questioning him. But neither of lady Ann's sons had learned such faith in their mother as to tell her their troubles. Arthur would confess to none. She in her turn was far too prudent to disclose what was in her mind: the folly of his youth might take the turn of an unthinking generosity! the notion of an elder brother might even be welcome to him!

In another generation no questions would be asked! Many estates were in illegal possession! There was a claim superior to the legal! Theirs was a moral claim!

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CHAPTER XXXVII. LADY ANN AND RICHARD.

The same afternoon, Richard was mending the torn title of a black-letter copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs. Vixen had forgotten her former fright, and her evil courage had returned. Opening the door of the library so softly that Richard heard nothing, she stole up behind him, and gave his elbow a great push just as, with the sharpest of penknives, he was paring the edge of a piece of old paper, to patch the title. The pen-knife slid along the bit of glass he was paring upon, and cut his other hand. The blood spouted, and some of it fell upon the title, which made Richard angry: it was an irremediable catastrophe, for the paper was too weak to bear any washing. He laid hold of the child, meaning once more to carry her from the room, and secure the door. Then first Vixen saw what she had done, and was seized with horror—not because she had hurt “the bear,” but because of the blood, the sight of which she could not endure. It was a hereditary weakness on sir Wilton's side. One of the strongest men of his family used to faint at the least glimpse of blood. There was a tradition to account for it, not old or thin enough to cast no shadow, therefore seldom alluded to. It was not, therefore, an ordinary childish dismay, but a deep-seated congenital terror, that made Vixen give one wavering scream, and drop on the floor. Richard thought she was pretending a faint in mockery of what she had done, but when he took her up, he saw that she was insensible. He laid her on a couch, rang the bell, and asked the man to take the child to her governess. The man saw blood on the child's dress, and when he reached the schoolroom with her, informed the governess that she had had an accident in the library. Miss Malliver, with one of her accomplished shrieks, dispatched him to tell lady Ann. Coming to herself in a few minutes, Vixen told a confused story of how the bear had frightened her. Lady Ann, learning that the blood was not that of her child, came to the conclusion that Richard had played upon her peculiarity to get rid of her, for Vixen, incapable of truth, did not tell that she was herself the cause of the wound whence the blood had made its appearance. Miss Malliver, who would hardly have been sorry had Vixen's throat been cut, rose in wrath, and would have swooped down the stair upon Richard.

“Leave him to me, Malliver,” said lady Ann, and rising, went down the stair. But the moment she entered the library, and saw Richard's hand tied up in his handkerchief, she bethought herself of the happy chance of satisfaction as to whether or not he was web-fingered: the absence of the peculiarity would indeed prove nothing, but the presence of it would be a warning of the worst danger: he might have had it removed, but could not have contrived to put it there!

“What have you done to yourself, Mr. Tuke?” she said, making a motion to take the wounded hand, from which at the same time she shrank with inward disgust.

“Nothing of any consequence, my lady,” answered Richard, who had risen, and stood before her. “I was using a very sharp knife, and it went into my hand. I hope Miss Victoria is better?”

“There is nothing much the matter with her,” answered her ladyship. “The sight of blood always makes her faint.”

“It is a horrid sight, my lady!” rejoined Richard, wondering at her ladyship's affability, and ready to meet any kindness. “When I was at school, I was terribly affected by it. One boy used to provoke me to fight him, and contrive that I should make his nose bleed—after which he could do what he liked with me. But I set myself to overcome the weakness, and succeeded.”

Lady Ann listened in silence, too intent on his hands to remark at the moment how the fact he mentioned bore on the question that absorbed her.

“Would you mind showing me the wound?” she said. “I am something of a surgeon.”

To her disappointment, he persisted that it was nothing. Because of the peculiarity she would gladly have missed in them, he did not like showing his hands. His mother had begged him not to meddle with the oddity until she gave her consent, promising a good reason for the request when the right time should arrive; but he was sensitive about it—probably from having been teased because of it. His comfort was, that a few slits of a sharp knife would make him like other people.

Lady Ann was foiled, therefore the more eager: why should the man be so unwilling to show his hands?

“Your work must be very interesting!” she said.

“I am fond of it, my lady,” he answered. “If I had a fortune left me, I should find it hard to drop it. There is nothing like work—and books—for enjoying life!”

“I daresay you are right.—But go on with your work. I have heard so much about it from Miss Wylder that I should like to see you at it.”

“I am sorry, my lady, but I shall be fit for next to nothing for a day or two because of this hand. I dare not attempt going on with what I am now doing.”

“Is it so very painful? You ought to have it seen to. I will send for Mr. Hurst.”

As she spoke, she turned to go to the bell. Richard had tried to interrupt her, but she would not listen. He now assured her that it was his work not his hand that he was thinking of; and said that, if Mr. Lestrange had no objection, he would take a short holiday.

“Then you would like to go home!” said her ladyship, thinking it would be so easy then to write and tell him not to come back—if only Arthur could be got to do it.

“I should like to go to my grandfather's for a few days,” answered Richard.

This was by no means what lady Ann desired, but she did not see how to oppose it.

“Well, perhaps you had better go,” she said.

“If you please, my lady,” rejoined Richard, “I must see Mr. Lestrange first. I cannot go without his permission.”

“I will speak to my son about it,” answered lady Ann, and went away, feeling that Richard would be a dangerous enemy. She did not hate him: she only regarded him as what might possibly prove an adverse force to be encountered and frustrated because of her family, and because of the right way of things—that those, namely, who had nothing should be kept from getting anything. In the meantime the only thing clear was, that he had better be got out of the neighbourhood! It was well sir Wilton had hardly seen the young man: if there was anything about him capable of rousing old memories, it were well it should not have the chance! Sir Wilton was not fond of books, and it could be no great pleasure to him to have the library set to rights; he was annoyed at being kept out of it, for he liked to smoke his cigar there, and shuddered at the presence of a working man except in the open air: she was certain he would feel nowise aggrieved if the design were abandoned midway! The only person she feared would oppose Tuke's departure, was Arthur.

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CHAPTER XXXVIII. RICHARD AND ARTHUR.

She went to find him, told him what had happened to the young man, and, feeling her way, proposed that he should go to his grandfather's for a few days. Arthur started. Send him where he and Barbara would be constantly meeting! Must he for ever imagine them walking up and down that field, among the dandelions and daisies! He had discovered, he believed, all that was between them, but was not therewith satisfied: she had found out, he said to himself, that the fellow was an infidel, did not believe in God, or a resurrection—was so low that he did not care to live for ever, and she was trying to convert him. Arthur would rather he remained unconverted than that she should be the means of converting him. Nor indeed would he be much injured by having the growth of such a faith as Arthur's prevented in him: Arthur prided himself in showing due respect to the Deity by allowing that he existed. But the fellow was too clever by half, he said, and would be much too much for her. Any theory wild enough would be attractive to her, who never cared a pin-head what the rest of the world believed! She had indeed a strong tendency to pantheism, for she expected the animals to rise again—a most unpleasant notion! Doubtless it was she that sought his company; a fellow like that could not presume to seek hers! He was only laughing at her all the time! What could an animal like him care about the animals: he had not even a dog to love! He would not have him go to his grandfather's! he would a thousand times rather give up the library! There should be no more bookbinding at Mortgrange! He would send the books to London to him! It would be degrading to allow personal feeling to affect his behaviour to such a fellow; he should have the work all the same, but not at Mortgrange!

So he answered his mother that he was rather tired of him, and thought they had had enough of him; the work seemed likely to be spun out ad infinitum, and this was a good opportunity for getting rid of him. He was sorry, for it was the best way for the books, but he could send them to him in London, and have them done there! The man, he understood, had been making himself disagreeable too, and he did not want to quarrel with him! He was a radical, and thought himself as good as anybody: it was much best to let him go. He had at first liked him, and had perhaps shown it more than was good for the fellow, so that he had come to presume upon it, setting it down to some merit in himself. Happily he had retained the right of putting an end to the engagement when he pleased!

This was far better than lady Ann had expected. Arthur went at once to Richard, and speaking, as he thought, unconcernedly, told him they found it inconvenient to have the library used as a workshop any longer, and must make a change.

Richard was glad to hear it, thinking he meant to give him another room, and said he could work just as well anywhere else: he wanted only a dry room with a fire-place! Arthur told him he had arranged for what would be more agreeable to both parties, namely, that he should do the work at home. It would cost more, but he was prepared for that. He might go as soon as he pleased, and they would arrange by letter how the books should be sent—so many at a time!

Richard spied something more under his dismissal than the affair with Miss Vixen; but he was too proud to ask for an explanation: Mr. Lestrange was in the right of their compact. He felt aggrieved notwithstanding, and was sorry to go away from the library. He would never again have the chance of restoring such a library! He did not once think of it from the point of gain: he could always make his living! It was to him a genuine pleasure to cause any worthy volume look as it ought to look; and to make a whole straggling library of books wasted and worn, put on the complexion, uniform, and discipline of a well-conditioned company of the host of heaven, was at least an honourable task! For what are books, I venture to say, but an army-corps of the lord of hosts, at whose command are troops of all natures, after the various regions of his indwelling! Even the letter is something, for the dry bones of books are every hour coming alive to the reader in whose spirit is blowing the better spirit. Richard himself was one of such, though he did not yet know there was a better spirit. Then again, there were not a few of the books with which individually he was sorry to part. He had also had fine opportunity for study, of which he was making good use, and the loss of it troubled him. He had read some books he would hardly otherwise have been able to read, and had largely extended his acquaintance with titles.

He was sorry too not to see more of Mr. Wingfold. He was a clergyman, it was true, but not the least like any other clergyman he had seen! Richard had indeed known nothing of any other clergyman out of the pulpit; and I fear most clergymen are less human, therefore less divine, in the pulpit than out of it! Many who out of the pulpit appear men, are in it little better than hawkers of old garments, the worse for their new patches. Of the forces in action for the renovation of the world, the sale of such old clothes is one of the least potent. They do, however, serve a little, I think, even as the rags of a Neapolitan for the olives of Italy, as a sort of manure for the young olives of the garden of God.

But his far worst sorrow was leaving Miss Wylder. That was a pain, a keen pain in his heart. For, that a woman is miles above him, as a star is above a marsh-light, is no reason why a man should not love her. Nay, is it not the best of reasons for loving her? The higher in soul, and the lowlier in position he is, the more imperative and unavoidable is it that he should love her; and the absence of any thought in the direction of marriage leaves but the wider room for the love infinite. In a man capable of loving in such fashion, there are no bounds to the possibilities, no limit to the growth of love. Richard thought his soul was full, but a live soul can never be full; it is always growing larger, and is always being filled.

“Like one that hath been stunned,” he went about his preparations for departure.

“You will go by the first train in the morning,” said Arthur, happening to meet him in the stable-yard, whither Richard had gone to look if Miss Brown was in her usual stall. “I have told Robert to take you and your tools to the station in the spring-cart.”

“Thank you, sir,” returned Richard; “I shall not require the cart. I leave the house to-night, and shall send for my things to-morrow morning. I have them almost ready now.”

“You cannot go to London to-night!”

“I am aware of that, sir.”

“Then where are you going? I wish to know.”

“That is my business, sir.”

“You have no cause to show temper,” said Arthur coldly.

“I should not have shown it, sir, had you not presumed to give me orders after dismissing me,” answered Richard.

“I have not dismissed you; I mean to employ you still, only in London instead of here,” said Arthur.

“That is a matter for fresh arrangement with my father,” rejoined Richard, and left him.

Arthur felt a shadow cross him—almost like fear: he had but driven Richard to his grandfather's, and had made an enemy of him! Nor could he feel satisfied with himself; he could not get rid of the thought that what he had done was not quite the thing for a gentleman to do. His trouble was not that he had wronged Richard, but that he had wronged himself, had not acted like his ideal of himself. He did not think of what was right, but of what befitted a gentleman. Such a man is in danger of doing many things unbefitting a gentleman. For the measure of a gentleman is not a man's ideal of himself.

His uneasiness grew as day after day went by, and Barbara did not appear at Mortgrange. He was not aware that Richard saw no more of her than himself. He knew that he was at his grandfather's; he had himself seen him at work at the anvil; but he did not know that the hope in which he lingered there was vain.

Richard waited a week, but no Barbara came to the smithy. He could not endure the thought of going away without seeing her once more. He must once thank her for what she had done for him! He must let her know why he had left Mortgrange.

He would go and say good-bye to the clergyman: from him he might hear something of her!

Wingfold caught sight of him approaching the house, and himself opened the door to him. Taking him to his study, he made him sit down, and offered him a pipe.

“Thank you, sir; I don't smoke,” said Richard.

“Then don't learn. You are better without it,” answered Wingfold, and put down his own pipe.

“I came,” said Richard, “to thank you for your kindness to me, and to ask about Miss Wylder. Not having seen her for a long time, I was afraid she might be ill. I am going away.”

There was a tremor in Richard's voice, of which he was not himself aware. Wingfold noted it, pitied the youth because of the fuel he had stored for suffering, and admired him for his straightforwardness.

“I am sorry to say you are not likely to see Miss Wylder,” he answered. “Her mother is ill.”

“I hardly thought to see her, sir. Is her mother very ill?”

“Yes, very ill,” answered Wingfold.

“With anything infectious?”

“No. Her complaint is as little infectious as complaint could be; it is just exhaustion—absolute prostration, mental and nervous. She is too weak to think, and can't even feed herself. I fear her daughter will be worn out waiting on her. She devotes herself to her mother with a spirit and energy I never but once knew equalled. She never seems tired, never out of spirits. I heard a lady say she couldn't have much feeling to look cheerful when her mother was in such a state; but the lady was stupid. She would wait on her own mother almost as devotedly as Miss Wylder, but with such a lugubrious countenance that her patient might well seek refuge from it in the grave. But it is no wonder she should be in good spirits: it is the first time in her life, she says, that she has been allowed to be of any use to her mother! Then she is not suffering pain, and that makes a great difference. But more than all, her mother has grown so tender to her, and so grateful, following her constantly about the room with her eyes, that the girl says she feels in a paradise of which her mother is the tutelar divinity, raying out bliss as she lies in bed! Also her father is kinder to her mother. Little signs of tenderness pass between them—a thing she has never known before! How could she be other than happy!—But what is this you tell me about going away? The library cannot be finished!”

Wingfold had dilated on the worth of Miss Wylder, and let Richard know of her happiness, out of genuine sympathy. He knew that, next to the worship of God, the true worship of a fellow-creature, in the old meaning of the word, is the most potent thing for deliverance.

“No, sir,” answered Richard; “the library is left in mid ocean of decay. I don't know why they have dismissed me. The only thing clear is, that they want to be rid of me. What I have done I can't think. There is a little girl of the family—”

Here he told how Vixen had from the first behaved to him, and what things had happened in consequence, the last more particularly.

“But,” he concluded, “I do not think it can be that. I should like to know what it is.”

“Then wait,” said Wingfold. “If we only wait long enough, every reason will come out. You know I believe we are not going to stop, but are meant to go on and on for ever; and I believe the business of eternity is to bring grand hidden things out into the light; and with them will come of necessity many other things as well, even some, I daresay, that we count trifles.—But I am sorry you're going.”

“I don't see why you should be, sir!” answered Richard, his look taking from the words their seeming rudeness.

“Because I like you, and feel sure we should understand each other if only we had time,” replied the parson. “It's a grand thing to come upon one who knows what you mean. It's so much of heaven before you get there.—If you think I'm talking shop, I can't help it—and I don't care, so long as you believe I mean it. I would not have you think it the Reverend Thomas and not Thomas himself that was saying it.”

“I should never say you talked shop, sir; and I don't think you would say I was talking shop if I expatiated on the beauties of a Grolier binding! You would see I was not talking from love of gain, but love of beauty!”

“Thank you. You are a fair man, and that is even more than an honest man! I don't speak from love of religion; I don't know that I do love religion.”

“I don't understand you now, sir.”

“Look here: I am very fond of a well-bound book; I should like all my new books bound in levant morocco; but I don't care about it; I could do well enough without any binding at all.”

“Of course you could, sir! and so could I, or any man that cared for the books themselves.”

“Very well! I don't care about religion much, but I could not live without my Father in heaven. I don't believe anybody can live without him.”

“I see,” said Richard.

He thought he saw, but he did not see, and could not help smiling in his heart as he said to himself, “I have lived a good many years without him!”

Wingfold saw the shadow of the smile, and blamed himself for having spoken too soon.

“When do you go?” he asked.

“I think I shall go to-morrow. I am at my grandfather's.”

“If I can be of use to you, let me know.”

“I will, sir; and I thank you heartily. There's nothing a man is so grateful for as friendliness.”

“The obligation is mutual,” said Wingfold.

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CHAPTER XXXIX. MR., MRS., AND MISS WYLDER.

A new experience had come to Mrs. Wylder. Her passion over the death of her son; her constant and prolonged contention with her husband; her protest against him whom she called the Almighty; the public consequence of the same; these, and the reaction from all these, had resulted in a sudden sinking of the vital forces, so that she who had been like a burning fiery furnace, was now like a heap of cooling ashes on a hearth, with the daylight coming in. She had not only never known what illness was, she did not even know what it was to feel unfit. Her consciousness of health was so clear, so unmixed, so unencountered, that she had never had a conception, a thought, a notion of what even that health was. Power and strength had so constantly seemed part of her known self, that she never thought of them: they were never far enough from her to be seen by her; she did not suspect them as other than herself, or dream that they could be disjoined from her. She could think only in the person of a strong woman; she was aware only of the being of a strong woman. Even after she had been some time helpless in bed, as often as she thought of anything she would like to do, it was the act of trying to get up and do it that made her aware afresh that she was no more the woman corresponding to her consciousness of herself. For her consciousness had never yet presented her as she really was, but always through the conditional and non-essential, so that by accidents only was she characterized to herself. Now she was too feeble even to care for the loss of her strength; her weakness went too deep to be felt as an oppression, for it met with no antagonism. Her inability to move was now no prison, and her attendant was no slave with tardy feet, but an angel of God.

For her Bab was now the mother's one delight. Her love for her lost twin had been in great part favouritism, partisanship, defence, opposition; her love for Barbara was all tenderness and no pride. In her self-lack she clung to her—as lordly dame, who had taken her castle for part of herself, and impregnable, but, its walls crumbling under the shot of the enemy, found herself defenceless before her captors, might turn and clasp her little maid, suppliant for protection. Good is it that we are not what we seem to ourselves “in our hours of ease,” for then we should never seek the Father! The loss of all that the world counts first things is a thousandfold repaid in the mere waking to higher need. It proves the presence of the divine in the lower good, that its loss is so potent. A man may send his gaze over the clear heaven, and suspect no God; when the stifling cloud comes down, folds itself about him, shuts from him the expanse of the universe, he begins to long for a hand, a sign, some shadow of presence. Mrs. Wylder had not got so far as this yet, but she had sought refuge in love; and what is the love of child, or mother, or dog, but the love of God, shining through another being—which is a being just because he shines through it. This was the one important result of her illness, that, finding refuge in the love of her daughter, she loved her daughter. The next point in her eternal growth would be to love the God who made the child she loved, and whose love shone upon her through the child. By nature she was a strong woman whom passion made weak. It sucked at her will till first it hardened it to a more selfish determination, then pulped it to a helpless obstinacy. The persistence that goes with inclination has its force only from the weakness of pride and the mean worship of self; it is the opposite of that free will which is the reflex of the divine will, and the ministering servant-power to all freedom, which resists and subdues the self of inclination, and is obedient only to the self of duty. Where the temple of God has no windows, earthquake must rend the roof, that the sunlight may enter. Barbara's mother lay broken on her couch that the spirit of the daughter might enter the soul of her mother—and with it the spirit of him who, in the heart of her daughter, made her that which she was.

Her illness had lasted a month, when one day her husband, at Barbara's prayer coming to see her, she feebly put out her hand asking for his, and for a moment the divine child in the man opened its heavenly eyes. He took the offered hand kindly, faltered a gentle-sounding commonplace or two, and left her happier, with a strange little bird fluttering in his own bosom. There are eggs of all the heavenly birds in our bosoms, and the history of man is the incubation and hatching of these eggs.

She began to recover, but the recovery was a long one. As soon as she thought her well enough, Barbara told her that Mr. Wingfold had been to inquire after her almost every day, and asked whether she would not like to see him. Mrs. Wylder was in a quiescent condition, non-combatant, involving no real betterment, occasioned only by the absence of impulse. But such a condition gives opportunity for the good, the gentle, the loving, to be felt, and so recognized. The sufferer resembles a child that has not been tempted, whose trial is yet to come. With recovery, fresh claim will be put in by the powers of good. This claim will be resisted by old habit, resuming its force in the return of physical and psychical health,—and then comes the tug of war. For no one can be saved, as he who knows his master would be saved, without the will being supreme in the matter, without the choosing to fulfill all righteousness, to resist the wrong, to do the right. Wingfold never built much on bed-repentance. The aphorism of the devil sick and the devil well, is only too true. But he welcomed the fresh opportunity for a beginning. He knew that pain and sickness do rub some dirt from the windows toward the infinite, and that things of the old unknown world whence we came, do sometimes look in at them, a moment now, and a moment then, waking new old things that lie in every child born into the world. I seem to see the great marshes where the souls go wandering about after the bog-fires; a kiss blown from the walls of the city comes wavering down among them; it flits hither and thither with the dead-lights; it finds a soul with a spot on which it can alight; it settles there; and kisses it alive. God is the God of patience, and waits and waits for the child who keeps him waiting and will not open the door.

Wingfold went to see her, but took good care to press nothing upon her. He let her give him the lead. She spoke of her weakness, and the parson drew out her moan. She praised her Barbara, and the parson praised her again in words that opened the mother's eyes to new beauties in her daughter. She mentioned her weariness, and the parson spoke of the fields and the soft wind and the yellow shine of the butter-cups in the grass. Her heart was gently drawn to the man whose eyes were so keen, whose voice was so mellow and strong, and whose words were so lovely sweet, saying the things that were in her own heart, but would not come out.

One day he proposed to read something, and she consented. I will not say what he read, for I would avoid waking controversy as to fitness. He thought he knew what he was about. The good in a true book, he would say, is the best protection against what may not be so good in it; its wrong as well as its right may wake the conscience: the thoughts of a book accuse and excuse one another. In saying so, he took the true reader for granted; to an untrue reader the truth itself is untrue. The general sense of honour, he would say, has been stimulated not a little by the story of the treachery of Jael. Nor was it any wonder he should succeed in interesting Mrs. Wylder, for she had a strong brain as well as a big heart. More than half her faults came of an indignant sense of wrong. She had passionately loved her husband once, but he had soon ceased even the show of returning her affection,

And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.

After a fierce struggle against the lessons life would have her taught, a struggle continued to her fortieth year, she was now at length a pupil in another school, where the schoolroom was her bed, the book of Quiet her first study, her two attendants a clergyman and her own daughter, and her one teacher, God himself. In that schoolroom, the world began to open to her a little. Among men who could, without seeming to aim at it, make another think, I have not met the equal of Wingfold. His mode was that of the open-hearted apostle, who took men by guile. He called out the thoughts lurking in their souls, and set them dealing with those thoughts, not with him: they were slow to discover that he was a divine musician, playing upon the holy strings of their hearts; they thought the tunes came alive in their own air—as indeed they did, only another hand woke them. To work thus, he had to lay bare not a little of his own feeling, but where it was brotherly to show feeling, he counted it unchristian to hide it. Feeling by itself, however, that came and went without correspondent action, he counted not only weak and mawkish, but tending to the devilish.

Barbara was happy all day long. Life seemed about to blossom into a great flower of scarlet and gold. She had learned from the parson that the bookbinder was gone, but was at the time too busy and too anxious to question him as to the cause of his going. Till her mother was well, it was enough to know that Richard had wanted to see her, doubtless to tell her all about it. She often thought of him, what he had done for her, and what she had tried to do for him, and was certain he would one day believe in God. She did not suspect any quarrel with the people at Mortgrange. She thought perhaps the secret concerning him had come out, and he did not choose to remain in a house the head of which, if lady Ann's tale was true, had so bitterly wronged his mother. As soon as she was able she would go and hear of him from his grandfather! There was no hurry! She would certainly see him again before long! And he would be sure to write! It did not occur to her that a man in his position would hardly venture to approach her again, without some renewed approach on her part; and for a long time she was nowise uneasy.

The hope alive in Wingfold made him a true consoler; and the very sight of him was a strength to Barbara. She regarded him with profound reverence, and his wife as most enviable of women: could she not learn from his mouth the rights of a thing, the instant she opened hers to ask them? Barbara did not know how much the sympathy, directness, and dear common sense of Helen, had helped to keep awake, support, and nourish the insight of her husband. She did not know, good and powerful as Wingfold must have been had he never married, how much wiser, more useful, and more aspiring he had grown because Helen was Helen, and his wife, sent as certainly as ever angel in the old time. The one fault she had in the eyes of her husband was, that she was so indignant with affectation or humbug of any sort, as hardly to give the better thing that might coexist with it, the needful chance.

So long as evil comes to the front, it appears an interminable, unconquerable thing. But all the time there may be a change, positive as inexplicable, at the very door. How is it that a child begins to be good? Upon what fulcrum rests the knife-edge of alteration? As undistinguishable is the moment in which the turn takes place; equally perplexing to keenest investigation the part of the being in which the renovation commences. Who shall analyze repentance, as a force, or as a phenomenon! You cannot see it coming! Before you know, there it is, and the man is no more what he was; his life is upon other lines! The wind hath blown. We saw not whence it came, or whither it went, but the new birth is there. It began in the spiritual infinitesimal, where all beginnings are. The change was begun in Mrs. Wylder. But the tug of her war was to come.

Lady Ann had not once been to see her since first calling when she arrived. Naturally she did not take to her. In the eyes of lady Ann, Mrs. Wylder was insufferable—a vulgar, arrogant, fierce woman, purse-proud and ignorant. But a keen moral eye would have perceived lady Ann vastly inferior to Mrs. Wylder in everything right-womanly. Lady Ann was the superior by the changeless dignity of her carriage, but her self-assured pre-eminence was offensive, and her drawling deliberation far more objectionable than Mrs. Wylder's abrupt movements, or the rough and ready speech that accompanied her eager dart at the gist of a matter. Even the look that would kill a man if it could, never roused such hate as sprang to meet the icy stare of her passionless ladyship. Many a man with no admiration of the florid, would have sought refuge in Mrs. Wylder's plump face, vivid with an irritable humanity, from the moveless pallor of lady Ann's delicately formed cheek, and the pinched thinness of her fine, poverty-stricken nose. Oh those pinched nostrils, the very outcry of inward meanness! will they ever open to the full tide of a surging breath? What vital interweaving of gladness and grief will at length make strong and brave and unselfish the heart that sent out those nostrils? Less than a divine shame will never make it the heart of a fearless, bountiful, redeeming woman.

Mrs. Wylder was nowise annoyed that lady Ann did not call a second time. She did not care enough to mind, and preferred not seeing her. They had in common as near nothing as humanity permitted. “Stuck-up kangaroo!” she cried her.

“I'll lay you my best sapphire,” she said to her daughter, in the hearing of Wingfold, whose presence she had forgotten, “that for the last three hundred years not a woman of her family has suckled her own young!”

Neither mother nor daughter had shown the least deference to lady Ann's exalted position. The first movement of her dislike to Mrs. Wylder was caused by her laughing and talking as unrestrainedly in her presence as in that of the doctor's wife, who happened to be in the room when lady Ann entered. But now that danger, not to say ruin, appeared in the distance, she must, for the sake of her son, wronged by his father's having married another woman before his mother, neglect no chance! Arthur had been to Wylder Hall repeatedly, but Barbara had not seen him! She must go herself, and pay some court to the young heiress! She was anxious also to learn whether any chagrin was concerned in her continuous absence from Mortgrange.

Barbara received her heartily, and they talked a little, lady Ann imagining herself very pleasing: she rarely condescended to make herself agreeable, and measured her success by her exertion. She found Barbara in such good spirits that she pronounced her heartless—not to her son, or to any but herself, who would not have come near her but for the money to be got with her. She begged her, notwithstanding, for the sake of her complexion, to leave her mother an hour or two now and then, and ride over to Mortgrange. Incessant watching would injure her health, and health was essential to beauty! Barbara protested that nothing ever hurt her; that she was the only person she knew fit to be a nurse, because she was never ill. When her ladyship, for once oblivious of her manners, grew importunate, Barbara flatly refused.

“You must pardon me, lady Ann,” she said; “I cannot, and I will not leave my mother.”

Then lady Ann thought it might be wise to make a little more of the mother to whom she seemed so devoted. She had imagined the daughter of the coarse woman must feel toward her as she did, and suspected a coarser grain in the daughter than she had supposed, because she was not disgusted with her mother. She did not know that eyes of love see the true being where other eyes see only its shadow; and shadows differ a good deal from their bodies.

But meeting Mr. Wylder in the avenue as she returned, and stopping her carriage to speak to him, lady Ann changed her mind, and resolved to curry favour with the husband instead of the wife. For hitherto she had scarcely seen Mr. Wylder, and knew about him only by unfavourable hearsay; but she was charmed with him now, and drew from him a promise to go and dine at Mortgrange.

Bab went singing back to her mother, who was never so ill that she did not like to hear her voice. She could not always bear it in the room, but outside she was never tired of it. So Bab went about the house singing like a mavis. But she never passed a servant, male or female, without ceasing her song to say a kind word; and her mother, who, now that she had got on a little, lay listening with her keenest of ears, knew by the checks and changes of Bab's song, something of what was going on in the house. If one asked Bab what made her so happy, she would answer that she had nothing to make her unhappy; and there was more philosophy in the answer than may at first appear. For certainly the normal condition of humanity is happiness, and the thing that should be enough to make us happy, is simply the absence of anything to make us unhappy.

“Everything,” she would answer another time, “is making me happy.”

“I think I am happiness,” she said once.

How could she naturally be other than happy, seeing she came of happiness! “Il lieto fattore,” says Dante; “whose happy-making sight,” says Milton.

Mr. Wylder went and dined with sir Wilton and lady Ann. The latter did her poor best to please him, and was successful. It had always been an annoyance to Mr. Wylder that his wife was not a lady. In the bush he did not feel it; but now he saw, as well as knew, wherein she was inferior, and did not see wherein she excelled. It was the more consolation to him that lady Ann praised his daughter, her beauty, her manners, her wit—praised her for everything, in short, that she thought hers, and for some things she thought were not hers. But she hinted that it would be of the greatest benefit to Barbara to have the next season in London. The girl had met nobody, and might, in her ignorance and innocence, being such an eager, impetuous, warm-hearted creature, with her powers of discrimination of course but little cultivated, make unsuitable friendships that would lead to entanglement; while, well chaperoned, she might become one of the first ladies in the county. She took care to let her father know at the same time, or think he knew, that, although her son would be only a baronet, he would be rich, for the estates were in excellent condition and free of encumbrance; and hinted that there was now a fine chance of enlarging the property, neighbouring land being in the market at a low price.

Mr. Wylder had indeed hoped for a higher match, but lady Ann, being an earl's daughter, had influence with him. The remaining twin was so delicate that it was very doubtful if he would succeed: if he did not, and land could be had between to connect the two properties of Mortgrange and Wylder, the estate would be far the finest in the county; when, as lady Ann hinted, means might be used to draw down the favour of Providence in the form of a patent of nobility.

To lady Ann, London was the centre of love-making, and Arthur, she said to herself, would show to better advantage there than in the country. The place where she had herself been nearest to falling in love, was a ball-room: the heat apparently had half thawed her.

Mr. Wylder thought lady Ann was right, and the best thing for Barbara would be to go to London: lady Ann would present her at court, and she would doubtless be the belle of the season. Her chance would be none the worse of making a better match than with Arthur Lestrange.

It may seem odd that a like reflection did not occur to lady Ann: far more eligible men than her son might well be drawn to such a bit of sunshine as Barbara; but just what in Barbara was most attractive, lady Ann was least capable of appreciating.

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CHAPTER XL. IN LONDON

It was into the first of the London fogs of the season that Richard, after a slow parliamentary journey, got out of his third-class carriage, at the great dim station. He took his portmanteau in one hand, and his bag of tools in the other, and went to look for an omnibus. How terribly dull the streets were! and how terribly dull and commonplace all inside him! Into the far dark, the splendour of life, Barbara, had vanished! Various memories of her, now this look, now that, now this attire, now that—a certain button half torn from her riding habit—the feeling of her foot in his hand as he lifted her to Miss Brown's back—would enter his heart like the proclamation of a queen on a progress through her dominions. The way she drove the nails into her mare's hoof; the way she would put her hand on his shoulder as she slid from the saddle; the commanding love with which she spoke to the great animal, and the way Miss Brown received it; the sweet coaxing respect she showed his blacksmith-grandfather; the tone of her voice when she said God;—a thousand attendant shadows glided in her queen-procession, one after the other in single file, through his brain, and his heart, and his every power. He forgot the omnibus, and went tramping through the dreary streets with his portmanteau and a small bag of tools—he had sent home his heavier things before—thinking ever of Barbara, and not scorning himself for thinking of her, for he thought of her as true lady herself would never scorn to be thought of by honest man. No genuine unselfish feeling is to be despised either by its subject or its object. That Barbara was lovely, was no reason why Richard should not love her! that she was rich, was no reason why he should forget her! She came into his life as a star ascends above the horizon of the world: the world cannot say to it, “Go down, star.” Yea, Richard's star raised him as she rose. In her presence he was at once rebuked and uplifted. She was a power within him. He could not believe in God, but neither could he think belief in such a God as she believed in, degrading. He said to himself that everything depended on the kind of God believed in; and that the kind of God depended on the kind of woman. He wondered how many ideas of God there might be, for every one who believed in him must have a different idea. “Some of them must be nearer right than others!” he said to himself—nor perceived that he was beginning to entertain the notion of a real God. For he saw that the notions of the best men and women must be convergent, and was not far from thinking that such lines must point to some object, rather than an empty centre: the idea of the best men and women must be a believable idea, might be a true idea, might therefore be a real existence. He had not yet come to consider the fact, that the best of men said he knew God; that God was like himself, only greater; that whoever would do what he told him should know that God, and know that he spoke the truth concerning him; that he had come from him to witness of him that he was truth and love. Richard had indeed started on a path pointing thitherward, but as yet all concerning the one necessary entity was vaguest speculation with him. He did feel, however, that to give in to Barbara altogether, would not make him a believer such as Barbara. On the other hand, he was yet far from perceiving that no man is a believer, let him give his body to be burned, except he give his will, his life to the Master. No man is a believer with whom he and his father are not first; no man, in a word, who does not obey him, that is, who does not do what he said, and says. It seems preposterous that such definition should be necessary; but thousands talk about him for one that believes in him; thousands will do what the priests and scribes say he commands, for one who will search to find what he says that he may do it—who will take his orders from the Lord himself, and not from other men claiming either knowledge or authority. A man must come up to the Master, hearken to his word, and do as he says. Then he will come to know God, and to know that he knows him.

When he stopped thinking of Barbara, all was dreary about Richard. But he did not once say to himself, “She does not love me!” did not once ask, “Does she love me?” He said, “She cares for me; she is good to me! I wish I believed as she does, that I might hope to meet her again in the house of the one Father!”

It was Saturday night, and he had to go through a weekly market, a hurrying, pushing, loitering, jostling crowd, gathered thick about the butchers' and fishmongers' shops, the greengrocers' barrows, and the trays upon wheels with things laid out for sale. Suddenly a face flashed upon him, and disappeared. He was not sure that it was Alice's, but it suggested Alice so strongly that he turned and tried to overtake it. Impeded by his luggage, however, which caught upon hundreds of legs, he soon saw the attempt hopeless. Then with pain he remembered that he had not her address, and did not know how to communicate with her. He longed to learn why she had left him without a word, what her repeated avoidance of him meant; far more he desired to know where she was that he might help her, and how she fared. But Barbara was her friend! Barbara knew her address! He would ask her to send it him! He hardly thought she would, for she was in the secret of Alice's behaviour, but, joy to think, it would be a reason for writing to her! His heart gave a bound in his bosom. Who could tell but she might please to send him the fan-wind of a letter now and then, keeping the door, just a chink of it, open between them, that the voice of her slave might reach her on the throne of her loveliness! He walked the rest of the way with a gladder heart; he was no longer without a future; there was something to do, and something to wait for! Days are dreary unto death which wrap no hope in their misty folds.

His uncle and aunt received him with more warmth than he had ever known them show. They were in good spirits about him, for they had all the time been receiving news of him and Barbara, with not a word of Alice, from old Simon. Jane's heart swelled with the ambition that her boy should as a working-man gain the love of a well born girl, and reward her by making her my lady.

I do not think Mrs. Tuke could have loved a son of her own body more than this son of her sister; but she was constantly haunted with a vague uneasiness about the possible consequences to herself and her husband of what she had done, and the obstacles that might rise to prevent his restoration; and this uneasiness had its share both in repressing the show of her love, and in making her go to church so regularly. Her pleasure in going was not great, but she was not the less troubled that Richard did not care about going. She was still in the land of bullocks and goats; she went to church with the idea that she was doing something for God in going. It is always the way. Until a man knows God, he seeks to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about; while the things for the sake of which he sent his son, the man regards as of little or no consequence. What the son says about them, he takes as a matter of course for him to say, and for himself to neglect.

Mrs. Tuke noted, the next day, that, as often almost as he was still, a shadow settled on Richard's face, and he looked lost and sad: but it only occurred to her that of course he must miss Barbara, never that he cherished no hope such as she would have counted hope. She took it almost as an omen of final success when in the evening he asked her if she would not like him to go to church with her. He felt as if in church he would be nearer Barbara, for he knew that now she went often. But alas, while there he sat, he felt himself drifting farther and farther from her! The foolish utterances of the parson made him deeply regret that he had gone. While he believed, or at least was willing to believe, that they misrepresented Christianity, they awoke all his old feelings of instinctive repulsion, and overclouded his discrimination. Almost as little could he endure the unnature as the untruth of what he heard. It had no ring of reality, no spark of divine fire, no appealing radiance of common sense, little of any verity at all. There was in it, as nearly as possible, nothing at all to mediate between mind and mind, between truth and belief, between God and his children. The clergyman was not a hypocrite—far from it! He was in some measure even a devout man. But in his whole presentation of God and our relation to him, there was neither thought nor phrase germane to sunrise or sunset, to the firmament or the wind or the grass or the trees; nothing that came to the human soul as having a reality true as that of the world but higher; as holding with the life lived in it, with the hopes and necessities of the heart and mind. If “the hope of the glory of God” must be fashioned in like sort, then were the whole affair of creation and redemption both dull and desperate. There was no glow, no enthusiasm in the man—neither could there be, with the notions he held. His God suggested a police magistrate—and not a just one.

Richard would gladly have left the place, and wandered up and down in the drizzle until, the service over, his mother should appear; but for her sake he sat out the misery.

“The man,” he said to himself, “does not give us one peg on which to hang the love of God that he tells us we ought to feel! Love a God like that! If he were as good as my mother, I would love him! But we have all to look out to protect ourselves from him! Mr. Parson, there's no such being as you jabber about! It puzzles me to think what my mother gets from you.”

He had written his letter to Barbara, and when they came out he posted it. A long, long time of waiting followed; but no waiting brought any answer. Lady Ann had dropped a hint, and Mr. Wylder had picked it up, a hint delicate, but forcible enough to make him do what he had never done before—keep an outlook on the letters that came for his daughter. When Richard's arrived, it did not look to him that of a gentleman. The writing was good, but precise; it was sealed with red wax, but the impression was sunk: a proper seal had not been used! Especially where his own family was concerned, Mr. Wylder was not the most delicate of men! he opened the letter, and in it found what he called a rigmarole of poetry and theology! “Confound the fellow!” he said to himself. Lady Ann did well to warn him! There should be no more of this! The scatter-brain took after her mother! He would give it her hot!

But he neither gave it her hot, nor gave her the letter; he did not say a word. He feared the little girl he pretended to protect, and knew that if he entered the lists with her, she would be too much for him. But he did not understand that the mean in him dared not confront the noble in his child. So Richard's letter only had it hot; it went into the fire, and Bab never read the petition of her poor friend.

The next morning Richard went to the shop, and fell to the first job that came to his hand. He acquainted his father with Lestrange's proposal in regard to the library: Mr. Tuke would have him accept it.

“You shall have all it brings,” he said.

“I don't want the money!” returned Richard.

“But I want the honour of the thing,” replied his uncle. “You answered the young gentleman sharply: you had better let me write!”

Richard made no objection. He would gladly keep the door open to any place where the shadow of Barbara might fall, and was willing therefore to pocket the offence of his causeless dismissal. But no notice was taken of Tuke's letter, and a gulf of negation seemed to yawn between the houses.

Thus was initiated a dreary time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, and it did not seem so unnatural to be without her now. Had it been summer, all the forms of earth and air would have brought to him the face and voice and motion of Barbara; and yet the soul would have been gone from them. The world would have been worse dead then than now in the winter. Barbara had been the soul of it—more than a sun to it.

He could not, however, dead as the world seemed, remain a moment indoors after his work was done. Whatever sort the weather, out he must go, often on the Thames, heedless of cold or wind or rain. His mother grew anxious about him, attributed his unrest to despair, and feared she might have to tell him her secret. She recoiled from setting free what she had kept in prison for so many years. In her own mind she had settled his coming of age as the term of his humiliation, and she would gladly keep to it. She shrunk from losing him, from breaking up the happiness that lay in seeing him about the house. But that her husband had insisted on accustoming themselves to live without him, she would hardly have consented to his late absence. She shrunk also from the measures necessary to reinstate him, and from the commotion those measures must occasion. It was so much easier to go on as they were doing! and delay could not prejudice his right! In fact, most of the things that made her take the baby, were present still, making her desire to keep the youth. A day would come when she must part with him, but that day was not yet! She dreaded uncaging her secret, because of the change it must work, whether immediate action were taken or not. She never suspected that anyone knew or surmised it but herself, or that she had to beware of any tongue but her own.

Her husband left the matter entirely to her. It was her business, he said, from the first, and he would let it be hers to the last.

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CHAPTER XLI. NATURE AND SUPERNATURE.

But Richard soon began to recover both from the separation and from his disappointment in regard to his letter. He was satisfied that whatever might be the cause of her silence, it came from no fault in Barbara. Nothing ever shook his faith in her.

And soon he found that he looked now upon the world with eyes from which a veil had been withdrawn. Barbara gone, mother Earth came nigh to comfort her child. He had always delighted in the beauty of the world—in what shows of earth and air were to be seen in London. The sunset that filled as with a glowing curtain the end of some street where he walked, would go on glowing in his heart when it left the street. Even in winter he would now and then go out to see the sunrise, and see it; and from the street might now and then, at rare times, he beheld a dappling and streaking, a mottling and massing of clouds on the blue. The fog of the London valley, and the smoke of the London chimneys, did not always, any more than the cares and sorrows and sins of its souls, blot out its heaven as if it had never looked on the earth. But he had learned much since he went to the country; he had gone nearer to Nature, and seen that in her lap she carried many more things than he knew of; and now that Barbara was gone, the memories of Nature came nearer to him: he remembered her and was glad. Soon he began to find that, both as regards Nature and those whom we love, absence is, for very nearness, often better than presence itself. He had been used to think and talk of Nature either as an abstraction, or as the personification of a force that knew nothing, and cared for nothing, was nobody, was nothing; now it gradually came to him, and gained upon him ere he knew, first that the things about him wore meanings, and held them up to him, then that something was thinking, something was meaning the things themselves, and so moving thoughts in him, that came and went unforeseen, unbidden. Thoughts clothed in things were everywhere about him, over his head, under his feet, and in his heart; and as often as anything brought him pleasure, either through memory or in present vision, it brought Barbara too; and she seemed their maker, when she was but one of the fair company, the lady of the land. Everything beautiful turned his face to the more beautiful, more precious, diviner Barbara. With each new sense of loveliness, she floated up from where she lay, ever ready to rise, in the ocean of his heart. She was the dweller of his everywhere!

He knew that Barbara did not make these things; it only seemed as if she made them because she was the better joy of them: did not the fact show how the fiction of a God might have sprung up in the minds that had no Barbara to look like the maker of the loveliness? But Barbara was there already, known and loved. The mind did not invent Barbara. And again, why should the mind want anyone to look like a maker, an indweller, an ingeniuer—to use a word of Shakespeare's invention? Yet again, why should the thought of Barbara suggest a soul, that is, a causing, informing presence, to these things? Was there a meaning in them? How did they come to have that meaning? Could it be that, having come out of nothing—the mind of man, and all the things, out of the same nothing, they responded enough to each other for the man to find his own reflex wherever he pleased to look for it? Only, if man and Nature came both out of nothing, why should they not be nothing to each other? why should not man be nothing to himself? As it was, one nothing, having no thought, meant the same the other nothing meant, having thought!—and hence came all the beauty of the world! And once again, if these things meant nothing but what the mind put into them—its own thought, namely, of them—they did not really mean anything, they were only imagined to mean it; and why should he, if but for a moment, imagine Barbara at the root of nothing? And why should he not, seeing she was herself nothing? Or was he to consent to be fooled, and act as if there was something where he knew there was nothing?

The truth of Richard's love appeared in this that he was more able now to see the other side of a thing, to start objection to his own idea from the side of one who thought differently.

“If I feel,” he would say to himself, “as if these things meant something, and conclude that they only mean me, being the body to me, who am the soul of them; and still more if I conclude that the sum of them is the blind cause of me; then, when I grow sick of myself, finding no comfort, no stay in myself for myself, and know that I need another, say another self, then the seeming sympathy that Nature offers me, is the merest mockery! It is only my own self—myself gone behind and peeping round a corner, grinning back sympathy at me from its sickening death-mask! Why should man need another if he came from nothing? But he came from a father and mother: man needed the woman: will not that explain the thing? No; for even the relation itself needs to be comforted and sustained and defended!”

Why was there so much, and most of all in himself, for which, as Richard was beginning to understand, even a Barbara could not suffice? Why also did her sufficiency depend so much on her faith in an all-sufficient? And why was there so often such a gulf betwixt the two that seemed made for each other? Ah! they were made for each other only in the general! For the individual, Nature did not care; she had no time! Then how was it that he cared for Nature? If Nature meant anything, was an intelligence, a sort of God, why should he, the individual, who loved as an individual, was a blessing or curse to himself as an individual—why should he care anything for one who loved only in the general? Could a man love in general? Yes; he himself loved his kind and sought to deliver them from superstition. But that was because he could think of them as a multitude of individuals. If he had never loved father, mother, or friend, would he have loved in the general? Would crowds of men and women have awaked love in him? If so, then the bigger crowd must always move the greater love! No; it is from the individual we go to the many. Love that was only in the general, that cared for the nation, the race, and let the individual perish, could not be love. He would be no God who cared only for a world or a race. The live conscious individual man could not love or worship him! And if no individual worshipped, where would be the worship of the crowd? Still less could a vague creator of masses, that knew nothing of individuals, being himself not individual, be worthy to be called God! Demon be might be—never God! But if God were a person, an individual, and so loved the individual!—ah, then indeed!—Barbara believed that such a God lived all about and in us! Mr. Wingfold said he was too great to prove, too near to see, but the greater and the nearer, the more fit to be loved! There were things against it! Nature herself seemed against it, for, lovely us she was, she did awful things! Could Nature have come from one source, and God be another source from which came man? He was too near Nature, too much at home with her, to believe it. Could it be one Nature that made all the lovely things, and another Nature that decreed their fate? That also he could not believe: they and their fate must be from one hand, or heart, or will! He could but hope there might be some way of reconciling the terrible dissonance between Nature and Barbara's God! If there was such a way, if their contradiction was only in seeming, then the very depth of their unity might be the cause of their seeming discord!

Something in this way the mind of Richard felt and thought and saw and doubted and speculated. Then he would turn to the ancient story—still because “Barbara said.”

The God Barbara believed in was like Jesus Christ!—not at all like the God his mother believed in! Jesus was one that could be loved: he could not have come to reveal such a God as his mother's, for he was no revelation of that kind of a God! He was gentle, and cared for the individual! And he said he loved the Father! But he was his son, and a good son might love a bad father. Yes, but could a bad God have a good son? No; the son of God must be the revelation of his father; such as the Son is, just such and no other must the Father be; there cannot but be harmony between the beings of the two!

In very truth there must appear schism in Nature, yea schism in God himself, until we see that the ruling Father and the suffering Son are of one mind, one love, one purpose; that in the Father the Son rules, in the Son the Father suffers; that with the Son the other children must suffer and rise to rule. To Richard's eyes there was schism everywhere; no harmony, no right, no concord, no peace! And yet all science pointed to harmony, all imagination thirsted for it, all conscience commanded it! all music asserted and prophesied it! all progress was built on the notion of it! all love, the only thing yielding worth to existence, was a partial realization of it! So that the schism came even to this, that harmony itself was divided against itself, asserting that the thing that was not, and could not be, yet ought to be! Nothing but harmony has a real, a true, an essential being; yet here were thousands of undeniable things which seemed to exist in very virtue of their lack of harmony! There were shocks and recoils in every part of every thinking soul, in every part of the object-world! And yet in certain blissful pauses, unlooked for, uncaused by man, certain sudden silences of the world, an eternal harmony would for one moment manifest itself behind the seething conflicting discords that fill the atmosphere of the soul—straightway to vanish again, it is true, but into the heart of Hope that saves men. If harmony was not at one with itself in its harmony, neither was discord at one with itself in its discordancy! Now and then all nature seemed on the point of breaking into a smile, and saying, “Ah, children! if you but knew what I know!” Why did she not say what she knew? Why should she hide the thing that would make her children blessed?

The thought, half way to an answer, did not come to Richard then: What if we are not yet able to understand her secret—therefore not able to see it although it lies open before us? What if the difficulty lies in us! What if Nature is doing her best to reveal! What if God is working to make us know—if we would but let him—as fast as ever he can! There is one thing that will not be pictured, cannot be made notionally present to the mind by any effort of the imagination—one thing that requires the purest faith: a man's own ignorance and incapacity. It is impossible to think of the object of our ignorance, how then realize the ignorance whose very centre is a blank, a negation! When a man knows, then first he gets a glimpse of his ignorance as it vanishes. Ignorance, I say, cannot be the object of knowledge. We must believe ourselves ignorant. And for that we must be humble of heart. When our world seems clear to the horizon, when the constellations beyond look plainest, when we seem to be understanding all within our scope, then have we yet to believe that, unseen, formally unsuspected, beyond, lies that which may wither up many forms of our belief, and must modify every true form in which we hold the truth. For God is infinite, and we are his little ones, and his truth is eternally better than the best shape in which we see it. Jesus is perfect, but is our idea of him perfect? One thing only is changeless truth in us, and that is—obedient faith in him and his father. Even that has to grow—but with a growth which is not change. That there is a greater life than that we feel—yea, a life that causes us, and is absolutely and primarily essential to us—of this truth we have a glimpse; but no man will arrive at the peace of it by struggling with the roots of his nature to understand them, for those roots go down and out, out and down infinitely into the infinite. It is by acting upon what he sees and knows, hearkening to every whisper, obeying every hint of the good, following whatever seems light, that the man will at length arrive. Thus obedient, instead of burying himself in the darkness about its roots, he climbs to the tree-top of his being; and looking out thence on the eternal world in which its roots vanish and from which it draws its nourishment, he will behold and understand at least enough to give him rest—and how much more, let his Hope of the glory of God stand at its window and tell him. For in his climbing, the man will, somewhere in his progress upward, the progress of obedience, of accordance to the law of things, awake to know that the same spirit is in him that is in the things he beholds; and that his will, his individuality, his consciousness, as it infolds, so it must find the spirit, that root of himself, which is infinitely more than himself, that “one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” When He is known, then all is well. Then is being, and in it the growth of being, laid open to him. God is the world, the atmosphere, the element, the substance, the essence of his life. In him he lives and moves and has his being. Now he lives indeed; for his Origin is his, and this rounds his being to eternity. God himself is his, as nothing else could be his. The serpent of doubt is gagged with his own tail, and becomes the symbol of the eternal.

Dissatisfaction is but the reverse of the medal of life. So long as a man is satisfied, he seeks nothing; when a fresh gulf is opened in his being, he must rise and find wherewithal to fill it. Our history is the opening of such gulfs, and the search for what will fill them.

But Richard was far yet from having his head above the cloudy region of moods and in the blue air of the unchangeable. As the days went by and brought him no word from Barbara, the darkness again began to gather around him. There are as many changes in a lover's weather as in that of England. The sad consolations of nature by degrees forsook him; they grew all sadness and no consolation. The winter of his soul wept steadily upon him, laden with frost and death. He went back to his stern denial of a God. He thought he had no need of any God, because he had no hope in any.

Strangely, but in accordance with his nature, while he denied God, he denied him resentfully. “If there were a God,” he said, “why should I pray to him? He has taken from me the one good his world held for me!” Not an hour would he postpone judgment of him; not one century would he give the God of patience to justify himself to his impatient child! He lost his love of reading. A book was to him like a grinning death's-head. He ministered to it no longer with his mind, but only with his hands. He hated the very look of poetry. The straggling lines of it were loathsome to his eyes. Where, in such a world as he now lived in, could live a God worth being? Where indeed? Richard made his own weather, and it was bad enough. Happily, there is no law compelling a man to keep up the weather or the world he has made. Never will any man devise or develop mood or world fit to dwell in. He must inhabit a world that inhabits him, a world that envelops and informs every thought and imagination of his heart.

In Richard's world, the one true, the one divine thing was its misery, for its misery was its need of God.

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CHAPTER XLII. YET A LOWER DEEP.

But while thus Richard suffered, scarce knew, and cared nothing, how the days went and came, he did his best to conceal his suffering from his father and mother, and succeeded wonderfully. As if in reward for this unselfishness, it flashed into his mind what a selfish fellow he was: his trouble had made him forget Alice and Arthur! he must find them!

He knew the street where the firm employing Arthur used to have its offices; but it had removed to other quarters. He went to the old address, and learned the new one. The next day he told his father he would like to have a holiday. His father making no objection, he walked into the city. There he found the place, but not Arthur. He had not been there for a week, they said. No one seemed to know where he lived; but Richard, regardless of rebuffs, went on inquiring, until at length he found a carman who lived in the same street. He set out for it at once.

After a long walk he came to it, a wretched street enough, in Pentonville, with its numbers here obliterated, there repeated, and altogether so confused, that for some time he could not discover the house. Coming at length to one of the dingiest, whose number was illegible, but whose door stood open, he walked in, and up to the second floor, where he knocked at the first door on the landing. The feeble sound of what was hardly a voice answered. He went in. There sat Arthur, muffled in an old rug, before a wretched fire, in the dirtiest, rustiest grate he had ever seen. He held out a pallid hand, and greeted him with a sunless smile, but did not speak.

“My poor, dear fellow!” said Richard; “what is the matter with you? Why didn't you let me know?”

The tears came in Arthur's eyes, and he struggled to answer him, but his voice was gone. To Richard he seemed horribly ill—probably dying. He took a piece of paper from his pocket, and a pencil-conversation followed.

“What is the matter with you?”

“Only a bad cold.”

“Where is Alice?”

“At the shop. She will be back at eight o'clock.”

“Where is your mother?”

“I do not know; she is out.”

“Tell me anything I can do for you.”

“What does it matter! I do not know anything. It will soon be over.”

“And this,” reflected Richard, “is the fate of one who believes in a God!” But the thought followed close, “I wish I were going too!” And then came the suggestion, “What if some one cares for him, and is taking him away because he cares for him! What if there be a good time waiting him! What if death be the way to something better! What if God be going to surprise us with something splendid! What if there come a glorious evening after the sad morning and fog-sodden night! What if Arthur's dying be in reality a waking up to a better sunshine than ours! We see only one side of the thing: he may see the other! What if God could not manage to ripen our life without suffering! If only there were a God that tried to do his best for us, finding great difficulties, but encountering them for the sake of his children!”—“How dearly I should love such a God!” thought Richard. He would hold by him to the last! He would do his best to help him! He would fight for him! He would die for him!

His hour was not yet come to know that there is indeed such a God, doing his best for us in great difficulties, with enemies almost too much for him—the falsehood, namely, the unfilialness of his children, so many of whom will not be true, priding themselves on the good he has created in them, while they refuse to make it their own by obeying it when they are disinclined.

If even he might but hope that with his last sigh Arthur would awake to a consciousness justifying his existence, let him be the creation of a living power or the helpless product of a senseless, formless Ens-non-ens, he would be content! For then they might one day meet again—somewhere—somewhen, somehow; together encounter afresh the troubles and dissatisfactions of life, and perhaps work out for themselves a world more endurable!

But with that came the thought of Barbara.

“No!” he said to himself, “let us all die—die utterly! Why should we grumble at our poor life when it means nothing, is so short, and gives such a sure and certain hope of nothing more! Who would prolong it in such a world, with which every soul confesses itself disappointed, of which every heart cries that it cannot have been made for us! When they grow old, men always say they have found life a delusion, and would not live it again. From the first, things have been moving toward the worse; life has been growing more dreary; men are more miserable now than when they were savage: how can we tell that the world was not started at its best, to go down hill for ever and ever, with a God to urge its evil pace, for surely there is none to stop it! What if the world be the hate-contrivance of a being whose delight it is to watch its shuddering descent into the gulf of extinction, its agonized slide into the red foam of the lake of fire!”

But he must do something for the friend by whose side he had sat speechless for minutes!

“I will come and see you again soon, Arthur,” he said; “I must go now. Would you mind the loan of a few shillings? It is all I happen to have about me!”

Arthur shook his head, and wrote,

“Money is of no use—not the least.”

“Don't you fancy anything that might do you good?”

“I can't get out to get anything.”

“Your mother would get it for you!”

He shook his head.

“But there's Alice!”

Arthur gave a great sigh, and said nothing. Richard laid the shillings on the chimneypiece, and proceeded to make up the fire before he went. He could see no sort of coal-scuttle, no fuel of any kind. With a heavy heart he left him, and went down into the street, wondering what he could do.

As he drew near the public-house that chiefly poisoned the neighbourhood, it opened its hell-jaws, and cast out a woman in frowzy black, wiping her mouth under her veil with a dirty pocket-handkerchief. She had a swollen red face, betokening the presence of much drink, walked erect, and went perfectly straight, but looked as if, were she to relax the least of her state, she would stagger. As she passed Richard, he recognized her. It was Mrs. Manson. Without a thought he stopped to speak to her. The same moment he saw that, although not dead drunk, she could by no tropical contortion be said to be sober.

She started, and gave a snort of indignation.

“You here!” she cried. “What the big devil do you want—coming here to insult your betters! You the son of the bookbinder! You're no more John Tuke's son than I am. You're the son of that precious rascal, my husband! Go to sir Wilton; don't come to me! You're a base-born wretch,—Oh yes, run to your mother! Tell her what I say! Tell her she was lucky to get hold of her tradesman.”

She had told her son and daughter that Richard was the missing heir; and in what she now said she may have meant only to reflect on the humble birth of his mother and abuse his aunt, but it does not matter much what a drunkard means. At the same time the poison of asps may come from the lips of a drunkard as from those of a sober liar. As the woman staggered away, Richard gave a stagger too, and seemed to himself to go reeling along the street. He sat down on a doorstep to recover himself, but for a long way after resuming his walk went like one half stunned. His brain, nevertheless, seemed to go on working of itself. The wretched woman's statement glowed in him with a lurid light. It seemed to explain so much! He had often felt that his father, though always just, did not greatly care for him. Then there was his mother's strangeness—the hardness of her religion, the gloom that at times took possession of her whole being, her bursts of tenderness, and her occasional irritability! His mother! That his mother should—should have made him an outcast! The thought was sickening! It was horrible! Perhaps the woman lied! But no; something questionable in the background of his life had been unrecognizably showing from the first of his memory! All was clear now! His mother's cruel breach with Alice, and her determination that there should be no intercourse between the families, was explained: had Alice and he fallen in love with each other, she would have had to tell the truth to part them! He must know the truth! He would ask his mother straight out, the moment he got home! But how could he ask her! How could any son go to his mother with such a question! Whatever the answer to it, he dared not! There was but one alternative left him—either to kill himself, or to smother his suffering, and let the miserable world go on! Why should he add to its misery by making his own mother more miserable? Such a question from her son would go through her heart like the claws of a lynx! How could she answer it! How could he look upon her shame! Had she not had trouble enough already, poor mother! It would be hard if her God assailed her on all sides—beset her behind and before! Poor mother indeed, if her son was no better than her God! He must be a better son to her than he had been! The child of her hurt must heal her! Must he as well as his father be cruel to her! But alas, what help was in him! What comfort could a heart of pain yield! what soothing stream flow from a well of sorrow! Truly his mother needed a new God!

But even this horror held its germ of comfort: he had his brother Arthur, his sister Alice, to care and provide for! They should not die! He had now the right to compel them to accept his aid!

He thought and thought, and saw that, in order to help them, to do his duty by them, he must make a change in his business relations with Mr. Tuke: he must have the command of his earnings! He could do nothing for his brother and sister as things were! To ask for money would wake inquiry, and he dared not let his mother know that he went to see them! If he did, she would be compelled to speak out, and that was a torture he would rather see her die than suffer. He must have money concerning which no questions would be asked!

Poor, poor creatures! Oh, that terrible mother! It was good to know that his mother was not like her!

The first thing then was, to ask his father to take him as a journeyman, and give him journeyman's wages. His work, he knew, was worth much more, but that would be enough; his father was welcome to the rest. Out of his wages he would pay his share of the housekeeping, and do as he pleased with what was left. Buying no more books, he would have a nice little weekly sum free for Alice and Arthur. To see his brother and sister half starved was unendurable! he would himself starve first! But how was his money to reach them in the shape of food? That greedy, drunken mother of them swallowed everything! Like old Saturn she devoured her children; she ate and drank them to death! Sport of a low consuming passion, thought Richard, what matter whether she came of God or devil or nothing at all! Redemption, salvation from an evil self, had as yet no greater part in Richard's theories than in Mrs. Manson's thoughts. The sole good, the sole satisfaction in life the woman knew, was to eat and drink, if not what she pleased, at least what she liked. If there were an eternity in front, thought Richard, and she had her way in it, she would go on for ever eating and drinking, craving and filling, to all the ages unsatisfied: he would not have his hard-earned money go to fill her insatiable maw! It was not his part in life to make her drunk and comfortable! Wherever he came from, he could not be in the world for that! So what was he to do?

He seemed now to understand why Barbara had not written. She had known him as the son of honest tradespeople, and had no pride to make her despise him; but learning from Alice that he was base-born, she might well wish to drop him! It might not be altogether fair of Barbara—for how was he to blame? Almost as little was she to blame, brought up to count such as he disgraced from their birth! Doubtless her religion should have raised her above the cruel and false prejudice, for she said it taught her to be fair, insisted that she should be just! But with all the world against him, how could one girl stand up for him! True he needed fair play just so much the more; but that was the way things went in this best of possible worlds! No two things in it, meant to go together, fitted! He fought hard for Barbara, strained his strength with himself to be content beforehand with whatever she might do, or think, or say. One thing only he could not bear—to think less of Barbara! That would kill him, paralyze his very soul!—of a man make him a machine, a beast outright at best! In all the world, Barbara was likest the God she believed in: if she—the idea of her, that was, were taken from him, he must despair! He could stand losing herself, he said, but not the thought of her! Let him keep that! Let him keep that! He would revel in that, and defy all the evil gods in the great universe!

With his heart like a stone in his bosom, he reached the house, a home to him no more! and by effort supreme—in which, to be honest, for Richard was not yet a hero, he was aided by the consciousness of doing a thing of praise—managed to demean himself rather better than of late. The surges of the sea of troubles rose to overwhelm him; his courage rose to brave them: let them do their worst! he would be a man still! True, his courage had a cry at the heart of it; but there was not a little of the stoic in Richard, and if it was not the stoicism of Epictetus or of Marcus Aurelius, there was yet some timely, transient help in it. He was doing the best he could without God; and sure the Father was pleased to see the effort of his child! To suffer in patience was a step toward himself. No doubt self was potent in the patience, and not the best self, for that forgets itself—yet the better self, the self that chooses what good it knows.

The same night he laid his request for fixed wages before his father, who agreed to it at once. He believed it no small matter in education that a youth should have money at his disposal; and his wife agreed, with a pang, to what he counted a reasonable sum for Richard's board. But she would not hear of his paying for his lodging; that was more than the mother heart could bear: it would be like yielding that he was not her very own child!

The trouble remained, that a long week must elapse before he could touch any wages, and he dared not borrow for fear of questions: there was no help!

At night, the moment his head was on the pillow, the strain of his stoicism gave way. Then first he felt alone, utterly alone; and the loneliness went into his soul, and settled there, a fearful entity. The strong stoic, the righteous unbeliever burst into a passion of tears. Sure they were the gift of the God he did not know!—say rather, of the God he knew a little, without knowing that he knew him—and they somewhat cooled his burning heart. But the fog of a fresh despair streamed up from the rain, and its clouds closed down upon him. What was left him to live for! what to keep his heart beating! what to make life a living thing! Sunned and showered too much, it was faded and colourless! Why must he live on, as in a poor dream, without even the interest of danger!—for where life is worth nothing, danger is gone, and danger is the last interest of life! All was gray! Nothing was, but the damp and chill of the grave! No cloak of insanest belief, of dullest mistake, would henceforth hide any more the dreary nakedness of the skeleton, life! The world lay in clearest, barest, coldest light, its hopeless deceit and its misery all revealed! It was well that a grumous fog pervaded the air, each atom a spike in a vesicle of darkness! it was well that no summer noon was blazing about the world! At least there was no mockery now! the world was not pretending to be happy! was not helping the demon of laughter to jeer at the misery of men! Oh, the hellish thing, life! Oh this devilish thing, existence!—a mask with no face behind it! a look with no soul that looked!—a bubble blown out of lies with the breath of a liar! Words! words! words! Lies! lies! lies!

All of a sudden he was crying, as if with a loud voice from the bottom of his heart, though never a sound rose through his throat, “Oh thou who didst make me, if thou art anywhere, if there be such a one as I cry to, unmake me again; undo that which thou hast done; tear asunder and scatter that which thou hast put together! Be merciful for once, and kill me. Let me cease to exist—rather, let me cease to die. Will not plenty of my kind remain to satisfy thy soul with torment!”

Up towered a surge of shame at his poltroonery; he prayed for his own solitary release, and abandoned his fellows to the maker of their misery!

“No!” he cried aloud, “I will not! I will not pray for that! I will not fare better than my fellows!—Oh God, pity—if thou hast any pity, or if pity can be born of any prayer—pity thy creatures! If thou art anywhere, speak to me, and let me hear thee. If thou art God, if thou livest, and carest that I suffer, and wouldst help me if thou couldst, then I will live, and bear, and wait; only let me know that thou art, and art good, and not cruel. If I had but a friend that would stand by me, and talk to me a little, and help me! I have no one, no one, God, to speak to! and if thou wilt not hear, then there is nothing! Oh, be! be! God, I pray thee, exist! Thou knowest my desolation—for surely thou art desolate, with no honest heart to love thee!”

He thought of Barbara, and ceased: she loved God!

A silence came down upon his soul. Ere it passed he was asleep, and knew no more till the morning waked him—to sorrow indeed, but from a dream of hope.

On a few-keyed finger-board, yet with multitudinous change, life struck every interval betwixt keen sorrow, lethargic gloom, and grayest hope, and the days passed and passed.

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CHAPTER XLIII. TO BE REDEEMED, ONE MUST REDEEM.

The moment he received his wages from his father at the end of the week, Richard set out for Everilda street, Clerkenwell, a little anxious at the thought of encountering the dreadful mother, but hoping she would be out of the way.

When he reached the place, he found no one at home. He could not go back with his mission unaccomplished, and hung about, keeping a sharp watch on each end of the street, and on the approaches to it that he passed in walking to and fro.

He had not waited long before Arthur appeared, stooping like an aged man, and moving slowly He was in the same shabby muffler as of old. His face brightened when he saw his friend, but a fit of coughing prevented him for some time from returning his salutation.

“When did you have your dinner?” asked Richard.

“I had something to eat in the middle of the day,” he answered feebly; “and when Alice comes, she will perhaps bring something with her; but we don't care much about eating.—We've got out of the way of it somehow!” he added with an unreal laugh.

“It's no wonder you can't get rid of your cold!” returned Richard. “Come along, and have something to eat.”

“I can't have Ally come home and not find me!” objected Arthur.

“You shall put something in your pocket for her!” suggested Richard.

He seemed to yield; but his every motion was full of indecision. Richard took his arm.

“Do you know any place near,” he asked, “where we could get some supper?”

“No, I'm afraid I don't,” answered Arthur.

“Then you go in and rest, while I go and see,” returned Richard.

He searched for some time, but came upon no place where a man could even sit down. At last he found a coffee-shop, and went to fetch Arthur.

He found him stretched on his bed, but he rose at once to accompany him—with the more difficulty that he had yielded to his weariness and lain down. They managed however to reach their goal, and the sight of food waking a little hunger, the poor fellow did pretty well for one who looked so ill. As he ate he revived, and by and by began to talk a little: he had never been much of a talker—had never had food enough for talking.

“It's very good of you, Richard!” he said. “I suppose you know all about it!”

“I don't. What is it? Anything new?”

“No, nothing! It's all so miserable!”

“It's not all miserable,” answered Richard, “so long as we are brothers!”

The tears came in Arthur's eyes. Their mother had repented telling them the truth about Richard, and pretended to have discovered that, while sir Wilton was indeed Richard's father, Mrs. Tuke was after all his mother.

“Yes, that is good,” he said, “though it be only in misfortune! But I am a wretched creature, and no good to anybody; you are a strong man, Richard; I shall never be worth calling your brother!”

“You can do one great thing for me.”

“What is that?”

“Live and grow well.”

“I wish I could; but that is just what I can't do. I'm on my way home.”

“I would gladly go with you!”

“Why?”

Richard made no answer, and silence followed. Arthur got up.

“Ally will be home,” he said, “and thinking me too ill to get along!”

“Let's go then!” said Richard.

When they entered Everilda street, they saw Alice on the door-step, looking anxiously up and down. The moment she caught sight of them, she ran away along the street. Richard would have followed her, but Arthur held him, and said,

“Never mind her to-night, Richard! She don't know that you know. I will tell her; and when you come again, you will find her different. Go now, and come as soon as you can—at least, I mean, as soon as you like.”

“I will come to-morrow,” answered Richard. “Do you want me to go now?”

“It would be better for Alice. I will go to the end of the street, and she will see me from where she is hiding, and come. She always does.”

“Is she in the way of hiding then?”

“Yes, when my mother is—”

“Well, good-bye!” said Richard. “But where shall I find you to-morrow!”

They arranged their meeting, and parted.

The next day, they found a better place for their meal. Richard thought it better not to go quite home with Arthur, but, having learned from him where Alice worked, and at what hour she left, went the following night to wait for her not far from the shop.

At last she came along, looking very thin and pale, but she shone up when she saw him, and joined him without the least hesitation.

“How do you think Arthur is?” he asked.

“I've not seen him so well for ever so long,” she answered. “But that is not saying much!” she added with a sigh.

They walked along together. With a taste of happiness, say once a week, Alice would have been a merry girl. She was so content to be with Richard that she never heeded where he was taking her. But when she found him going into a shop with a ham in the window, she drew back.

“No, Richard,” she said; “I can't let you feed me and Arthur too! Indeed I can't! It would be downright robbery!”

“Nonsense!” returned Richard; “I want some supper, and you must keep me company!”

“You must excuse me!” she insisted. “It's all right for Arthur: he's ill; but for me, I couldn't look myself in the face in the glass if I let you feed me—a strong girl, fit for anything!”

“Now look here!” said Richard; “I must come to the point, and you must be reasonable! Ain't you my sister?—and don't I know you haven't enough to eat?”

“Who told you that?”

“No one. Any fool could see it with half an eye!”

“Artie has been telling tales!”

“Not one! Just listen to me. I earn so much a week now, and after paying for everything, have something over to spend as I please. If you refuse me for a brother, say so, and I will leave you alone: why should a man tear his heart out looking on where he can't help!”

She stood motionless, and made him no answer.

“Look here!” he said; “there is the money for our supper: if you will not go with me and eat it, I will throw it in the street.”

With her ingrained feeling of the preciousness of money Alice did not believe him.

“Oh, no, Richard! you would never do that!” she said.

The same instant the coins rang faintly from the middle of the street, and a cab passed over them. Alice gave a cry as of bodily pain, and started to pick them up. Richard held her fast.

“It's your supper, Richard!” she almost shrieked, and struggled to get away after the money.

“Yes,” he answered; “and yours goes after it, except you come in and share it with me!”

As he spoke he showed her his hand with shillings in it.

She turned and entered the shop. Richard ordered a good meal.

Alice stopped in the middle of her supper, laid down her knife and fork, and burst out crying.

“What is the matter?” said Richard, alarmed.

“I can't bear to think of that money! I must go and look for it!” sobbed Alice.

Richard laughed, the first time for days.

“Alice,” he said, “the money was well spent: I got my own way with it!”

As she ate and drank, a little colour rose in her face, and on Richard fell a shadow of the joy of his creator, beholding his work, and seeing it good.

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CHAPTER XLIV. A DOOR OPENED IN HEAVEN.

Some men hunt their fellows to prey upon them, and fill their own greedy maws; Richard hunted and caught his brother and sister that he might feed them with the labour of his hands. I fear there was therefore a little more for the mother to guzzle, but it is of small consequence whether those that go down the hill arrive at the foot a week sooner or later. To Arthur and Alice, their new-found brother, strong and loving, was as an angel from high heaven. It was no fault in Richard that he did not find a correspondent comfort in them. It did in truth comfort him to see them improve in looks and in strength; but they had not many thoughts to share with him—had little coin for spiritual commerce. Even their religion, like that of most who claim any, had little shape or colour. What there was of it was genuine, which made it infinitely precious, but it was much too weak to pass over to the help of another. Divine aid, however, of a different sort, was waiting for him.

Hitherto he had heard little or no music. The little was from the church-organ, and his not unjustifiable prejudice against its surroundings, had disinclined him to listen when it spoke. The intellect of the youth had come to the front, and the higher powers to which art is ministrant, had remained much undeveloped, shut in darkened palace-rooms, where a ray of genial impulse not often entered. For the highest of those powers, the imagination, without which no discovery of any grandeur is made even in the realms of science, dwells in the halls of aspiration, outlook, desire, and hope, and round the windows and filling the air of these, hung the dry dust-cloud of Richard's negation. But when Love, with her attendant Sorrow, came, they opened wide all the doors and windows of them to what might enter. Hitherto all his poetry, even what he produced, had come to Richard at second-hand, that is, from the inspiration of books; its flowers were of the moon, not of the sun; they sprang under the pale reflex light of other souls: for genuine life of any and every sort, the immediate inspiration of the Almighty is the one essential, and for that, Sorrow and Love now made a way.

First of all, the lower winds and sidelong rays of art, all from the father of lights, crept in, able now to work for his perfect will. For when a man has once begun to live, then have the thoughts and feelings of other men, and every art in which those thoughts or feelings are embodied by them, a sevenfold power for the strengthening and rousing of the divine nature in him. And as the divine nature is roused, the diviner nature, the immediate God, enters to possess it.

A gentleman who employed Richard, happened one day, in conversation with him as he pursued his work, to start the subject of music, and made a remark which, notwithstanding Richard's ignorance, found sufficient way into his mind to make him think over what little experience he had had of sweet sounds, ere he made his reply. When made, it revealed in truth his ignorance, but his modesty as well, and his capacity for understanding—with the result that the gentleman, who was not only a lover of music but a believer in it, said to him in return things which roused in him such a desire to put them to the test for verification or disapproval, that he went the next Monday night to the popular concert at St. James's Hall. In the crowd that waited more than an hour at the door of the orchestra to secure a shilling-place, there was not one that knew so little of music as he; but there never had been in it one whose ignorance was more worthy of destruction. The first throbbing flash of the violins cleft his soul as lightning cleaves a dark cloud, and set his body shivering as with its thunder—and lo, a door was opened in heaven! and, like the writhings of a cloud in the grasp of a heavenly wind, all the discords of spirit-pain were breaking up, changing, and solving themselves into the song of the violins! After that, he went every Monday night to the same concert-room. It was his church, the mount of his ascension, the place whence he soared—no, but was lifted up to what was as yet his highest consciousness of being. All that was best and simplest in him came wide awake as he sat and listened. What fact did the music prove? None whatever. Yet would not the logic of all science have persuaded Richard that the sea of mood and mystic response, tossing his soul hither and thither on its radiant waters, as, deep unto deep, it answered the marching array of live waves, fashioned one by one out of the still air, marshalled and ranked and driven on in symmetric relation and order by those strange creative powers with their curious symbols, throned at their godlike labour—that the answer of his soul, I say, was but an illusion, the babble of a sleeping child in reply to a question never put. If it was an illusion, how came it that such illusion was possible? If an illusion, whence its peculiar bliss—a bliss aroused by law imperative that ruled its factors, yet bore scant resemblance to the bliss? What he felt, he knew that he felt, and knew that he had never caused it, never commanded its presence, never foreseen its arrival, never known of its possible existence. The feeling was in him, but had been waked by some power beyond him, for he was not himself even present at its origin! The voice of that power was a voice all sweetness and persuading, yet a voice of creation, calling up a world of splendour and delight, the beams of whose chambers were indeed laid upon the waters, but had there a foundation the less lively earth could not afford. For the very essence of the creative voice, working wildest delirium of content, was law that could not be broken, the very law of the thought of God himself. Law is life, for God is law, and God is life. Law is the root and the stalk of life, beauty is the flower of life, and joy is its odour; but life itself is love. The flower and its odour are given unto men; the root and stalk they may search into if they will; the giver of life they must know, or they cannot live with his life, they cannot share in the life eternal.

One night, after many another such, he sat entranced, listening to the song of a violin, alone and perfect, soaring and sailing the empyrean unconvoyed,—and Barbara in his heart was listening with him. He had given up hope of seeing her again in this world, but not all hope of seeing her again somewhere; and her image had not grown less dear, I should rather say less precious to him. The song, like a heavenly lark, folded its wings while yet high in the air, and ceased: its nest was somewhere up in the blue. Should I say rather that one after one the singing birds flitted from the strings, those telegraph wires betwixt the seen and the unseen, and now the last lingerer was gone? All was over, and the world was still. But the face of Barbara kept shining from the depths of Richard's soul, as if she stood behind him, and her face looked up reflected from its ethereal ocean.

All at once he was aware that his bodily eyes were resting on the bodily face of Barbara. It was as if his strong imagining of her had made her be. His heart gave a great bound—and stood still, as if for eternity. But the blood surged back to his brain, and he knew that together they had been listening to the same enchanting spell, had been aloft together in the same aether of delight: heaven is high and deep, and its lower air is music; in the upper regions the music may pass, who knows, merging unlost, into something endlessly better! He had felt, without knowing it, the power of her presence; it had been ruling his thoughts! He gazed and gazed, never taking his eyes from her but for the joy of seeing her afresh, for the comfort of their return to their home. She was so far off that he could gaze at will, and thus was distance a blessing. Not seldom does removal bring the parted nearer. It is not death alone that makes “far-distant images draw nigh,” but distance itself is an angel of God, mediating the propinquity of souls. As he gazed he became aware that she saw him, and that she knew that he saw her. How he knew it he could not have told. There was no change on her face, no sign of recognition, but he knew that she saw and knew. In his modesty he neither perceived nor imagined more. His heart received no thrill from the pleasure that throbbed in the heart of the lovely lady at sight of the poor sorrowful workman; neither did she in her modesty perceive on what a throne of gems she sat in his heart. She saw that his cheek was pale and thin, and that his eyes were larger and brighter; she little thought how the fierce sun of agony had ripened his soul since they parted.

For the rest of the concert, the music had sunk to a soft delight, and took the second place; the delight of seeing dulled his delight in hearing. All the rainbow claspings and weavings of strange accords, all the wing-wafts of out-dreaming melody, seemed to him to come flickering and floating from one creative centre—the face, and specially the eyes of Barbara; yet the music and Barbara seemed one. The form of it that entered by his eyes met that which entered by his ears, and they were one ere he noted a difference. Barbara was the music, and the music was Barbara. He saw her with his ears; he heard her with his eyes. But as the last sonata sank to its death, suddenly the face and the tones parted company, and he knew that his eyes and her face must part next, and the same moment her face was already far away. She had left him; she was looking for her fan, and preparing to go.

He was not far from the door. He hurried softly out, plunged into the open air as into a great cool river, went round the house, and took his stand at one of the doors, where he waited like one watching the flow of a river of gravel for the shine of a diamond. But the flow sank to threads and drops, and the diamond never shone.

He walked home, nevertheless, as if he had seen an end of sorrow: how much had been given him that night, for ever to have and to hold! Such an hour went far to redeem the hateful thing, life! A much worse world would be more than endurable, with its black and gray once or twice in a century crossed by such a band of gold! Who would not plunge through ages of vapour for one flash of such a star! Who would not dig to the centre for one glimpse of a gem of such exhaustless fire! “But, alas, how many for whom no golden threads are woven into the web of life!” he said to himself as he thought of Alice and Arthur—but straightway answered himself, saying, “Who dares assert it? The secret of a man's life is with himself; who can speak for another!” He had himself been miserable, and was now content—oh, how much more than content—that he had been miserable! He was even strong to be miserable again! What might not fall to the lot of the rest, every one of them, ere God, if there were a God, had done with them! Who invented music? Some one must have made the delight of it possible! With his own share in its joy he had had nothing to do! Was Chance its grand inventor, its great ingenieur? Why or how should Chance love loveliness that was not, and make it be, that others might love it? Could it be a deaf God, or a being that did not care and would not listen, that invented music? No; music did not come of itself, neither could the source of it be devoid of music!

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CHAPTER XLV. THE CARRIAGE.

Before the next Monday, he had learned the outlets of the hall, and the relations of its divisions to its doors. But he fared no better, for whether again he mistook the door or not, he did not see Barbara come out. He had been with her, however, through all the concert; there was reason to hope she would be often present, and every time there would be a chance of his getting near her! The following Monday, nevertheless, she was not in the house: had she been, he said to himself, his eyes would of themselves have found her.

A fortnight passed, and Richard had not again seen Barbara. He began to think she must have gone home. A gentleman was with her the first night, whom he took for her father; the second, Arthur Lestrange was by her side: neither of them had he seen since.

Then the thought suggested itself that she might have come to London to prepare for her marriage with Mr. Lestrange. She must of course be married some day! He had always taken that for granted, but now, for the first time somehow, the thought came near enough to burn. He did not attempt to analyze his feelings; he was too miserable to care for his feelings. The thought was as terrible as if it had been quite new. It was not a live thought before; now it was alive and until now he had not known misery. That Barbara should die, seemed nothing beside it! Death was no evil! Whether there was a world beyond it or not, it was the one friend of the race! In death at last, outworn, tortured humanity would find repose!—or if not, what followed could not, at worst, be worse than what went before! It must be better, for the one misery of miseries would be to live in the same world with Barbara married: She was out of sight of him, far as princess or queen—or angel, if there were such a being; but the thought that she should marry a common, outside man, who knew no more what things were precious than the lowest fellow in the slums, was a pain he could neither stifle nor endure. Could a woman like Barbara for an instant entertain the notion? If she loved a man worthy of her, then—he thought, as so many have for a moment thought—he could bear the torture of it! But for such patience in prospect men are generally indebted to the fact that the man is not likely to appear, or, at least, has not yet come in sight. In vain he persuaded himself that Barbara would no more listen to such a suitor, than a man could ever show himself on the level of her love. That Barbara would marry Lestrange grew more and more likely as he regarded the idea. Mortgrange and Wylder Hall were conveniently near, and he had heard his grandfather suppose that Barbara must one day inherit the latter! The thought was a growing torment. His heart sank into a draw-well of misery, out of which the rope of thinking could draw up nothing but suicide. But as often as the bucket rose thus laden, Richard cast its content from him. It was cowardly to hide one's head in the sand of death. So long as he was able to stand, why should he lie down? If a morrow was on the way, why not see what the morrow would bring? why not look the apparition in the face, though for him it brought no dawn!

Once more the loud complaint against life awoke and raged. What an evil, what a wrong was life! Who had dared force the thing upon him? What being, potent in ill, had presumed to call him from the blessed regions of negation, the solemn quiet of being and knowing nothing, and compel him to live without, nay against his will, in misery such as only an imagination keen to look upon suffering, could have embodied or even invented? Alas, there was no help! If he lifted his hand against the life he hated, he might but rush into a region of torture more exquisite! For might not the life-compelling tyrant, offended that he should desire to cease, fix him in eternal beholding of his love and his hate folded in one—to sicken, yet never faint, in aeonian pain, such as life essential only could feel! He rebelled against the highest as if the highest were the lowest—as if the power that could create a heart for bliss, might gloat on its sufferings.

Again and again he would take the side of God against himself: but always there was the undeniable, the inexplicable misery! Whence came it? It could not come from himself, for he hated it? and if God did not cause, yet he could prevent it! Then he remembered how blessed he had been but a few days before; how ready to justify God; how willing to believe he had reason in all he did: alas for his nature, for his humanity! clothed in his own joy, he was generous to trust God with the bliss of others; the cold blast of the world once again swept over him, and he stood complaining against him more bitterly than ever.

It is a notable argument, surely, against the existence of God, that they who believe in him, believe in him so wretchedly! So many carry themselves to him like peevish children! Richard half believed in God, only to complain of him altogether! Were it not better to deny him altogether, saying that such things being, he cannot be, than to murmur and rebel as against one high and hard?

But I bethink me: is it not better to complain if one but complain to God himself? Does he not then draw nigh to God with what truth is in him? And will he not then fare as Job, to whom God drew nigh in return, and set his heart at rest?

For him who complains and comes not near, who shall plead?—The Son of the Father, saying, “They know not what they do.”

He began to wonder whether even an all-mighty and all-good God would be able to contrive such a world as no somebody in it would ever complain of. What if he had plans too large for the vision of men to take in, and they were uncomfortable to their own blame, because, not seeing them, they would trust him for nothing? He knew unworthy men full of complaint against an economy that would not let them live like demons, and be blessed as seraphs! Why should not a man at least wait and see what the possible being was about to do with him, perhaps for him, before he accused or denied him? At worst he would be no worse for the waiting!

His thinking was stopped by a sudden flood of self-contempt. Was Barbara to live alone that he might think of her in peace! He was a selfish, disgraceful, degraded animal, deserving all he suffered, and ten times more! What did it matter whether he was happy or not, if it was well with her! Was he a man, and could he not endure! Here was a possible nobility! here a whole world wherein to be divine! A man was free to sacrifice his happiness: for him, he had nothing but his crowned sorrow; he would sacrifice that! Had anyone ever sacrificed his sorrow to his love? Would it not be a new and strange sacrifice? To know that he suffered would make her a little unhappy: for her sake he would not be unhappy! He would at least for her sake fight with his grief; he would live to love her still, if never more to look on her face. In after eternal years, if ever once more they met, he would tell her how for her sake he had lived in peace, and neither died nor gone mad! Yea, for her sake, he would still seek her God, if haply he might find him! Was there not a possible hope that he would justify to him, even in his heart, his ways with men, and his ways with himself among his fellows? What if there was a way so much higher than ours, as to include all the seeming right and seeming wrong in one radiance of righteousness! The idea was scarce conceivable; it was not one he could illustrate to himself; but, as a thought transcending flesh and blood, better and truer than what we are able to think of as truth, he would try to hold by it! Things that we are right in thinking bad, must be bad to God as well as to us; but may there not be things so far above us, that we cannot take them in, and they seem bad because they are so far above us in goodness that we see them partially and untruly? There must be room in his wisdom for us to mistake! He would try to trust! He would say, “If thou art my father, be my father, and comfort thy child. Perhaps thou hast some way! Perhaps things are not as thou wouldst have them, and thou art doing what can be done to set them right! If thou art indeed true to thy own, it were hard not to be believed—hard that one of thine own should not trust thee, should not give thee time to make things clear, should behave to thee as if thou wouldst not explain, when it is that we are unable to understand!”

He was thinking with himself thus, as he walked home, late one Monday night, from the concert, to which had come none of the singing birds of his own forests to meet and make merry with the song-birds of the violins. Like a chaos of music without form and void, the sweet sounds had stormed and billowed against him, and he had left the door of his late paradise hardly in better mood than if it had been the church of the Rev. Theodore Gosport, who for the traditions of men made the word of God of small effect!

He was walking westward, with his eyes on the ground, along the broad pavement on the house-side of Piccadilly, lost half in misery, half in thought, when he was stopped by a little crowd about an awning that stretched across the footway. The same instant rose a murmur of admiration, and down the steps from the door came tripping, the very Allegra of motion, the same Barbara to whose mould his being seemed to have shaped itself. He stood silent as death, but something made her cast a look on him, and she saw the large eyes of his suffering fixed on her. She gave a short musical cry, and turning darted through the crowd, leaving her escort at the foot of the steps.

“Richard!” she cried, and catching hold of his hand, laid her other hand on his shoulder—then suddenly became aware of the gazing faces, not all pleasant to look upon, that came crowding closer about them.

She pulled him toward a brougham that stood at the curbstone.

“Jump in,” she whispered. Then turning to the gentleman, who in a bewildered way fancied she had caught a prodigal brother in the crowd, “Good-night, Mr. Cleveland,” she said: “thank you!”

One moment Richard hesitated; but he saw that neither place nor time allowed anything but obedience, and when she turned again, he was already seated.

“Home!” she said to the coachman as she got in, for she had no attendant.

“I must talk fast,” she began, “and so must you; we have not far to go together.—Why did you not write to me?”

“I did write.”

“Did you!” exclaimed Barbara.

“I did indeed.”

“Then what could you think of me?”

“I thought nothing you would not like me to think. I was sure there was an explanation!”

“That of course! You knew that!—But how ill you look!”

“It is from not seeing you any more at the concerts,” answered Richard.

“Tell me your address, and I will write to you. But do not write to me. When shall you be at the hall again?”

“Next Monday. I am there every Monday.”

“I shall be there, and will take your answer from your hand in the crush as I come out by the Regent-street door.”

She pulled the coachman's string.

“Now you must go,” she said. “Thank God I have seen you! Tell me when you write if you know anything of Alice.”

She gave him her hand. He got out, closed the door, took off his hat, and stood for minutes uncovered in the cold clear night, hardly sure whether he had indeed been side by side with Barbara, or in a heavenly trance.

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CHAPTER XLVI. RICHARD'S DILEMMA.

He turned and walked home—but with a heart how different! The world was folded in winter and night, but in his heart the sun was shining, and it made a wonder and a warmth at the heart of every crystal of the frost that spangled and feathered and jewel-crusted rail and tree! The misty moon was dreaming of spring, and almond blossoms, and nightingales.—But did Barbara know about him? Had Alice told the terrible secret! If she knew, and did not withdraw her friendship, he could bear anything—almost anything! But he would be happy now, would keep happy as long as he could, and try to be happy when he could not! She was with him all the way home. Every step was a delight. Foot lingered behind foot as he came; now each was eager to pass the other.

He slept a happy sleep, and in the morning was better than for many a day—so much better that his mother, who had been watching him with uneasiness, and wondering whether she ought not to bring matters to a crisis, began to feel at rest about him. She had not a suspicion of what now troubled him the most! A little knowledge is not, but the largest half-knowledge is a dangerous thing! He knew who was his father, but he did not know who was not his mother; and from this half-knowledge rose the thickest of the cloud that yet overshadowed him. He had been proud that he came of such good people as his father and mother, but it was not the notion of shame to himself that greatly troubled him; it was the new feeling about his mother. He did not think of her as one to be blamed, but as one too trusting, and so deceived; he never felt unready to stand up for her. What troubled him was that she must always know that unspoken-of something between her and her son, that his mother must feel shame before him. He could not bear to think of it. If only she would say something to him, that he might tell her she was his own precious mother, whatever had befallen her! that for her sake he could spurn the father that begot him! Already had come this good of Mrs. Manson's lie, that Richard felt far more the goodness of his mother to him, and loved her the better that he believed himself her shame. It is true that his love increased upon a false idea, but the growth gained by his character could not be lost, and so his love would not grow less—for no love, that is loved, gave God's, can clothe warm enough the being around whom it gathers. And when he learned the facts of the story, he would not find that he had given his aunt more love than she deserved at his heart.

As soon as the next day's work was over, Richard sat down to write to Barbara. But he had no sooner taken the pen in his fingers, than he became doubtful: what was he to say? He could not open his heart about any of the things that troubled him most! Putting aside the recurrent dread of her own marriage, how could he mention his mother's wrong and his own shame to a girl so young? She must be aware that such things were, but how was he, a huge common fellow, to draw near her loveliness with such a tale in his mouth! It would be a wrong to his own class, to his own education! for would it not show the tradesman, or the artisan, whichever they called him, as coarse, and unlit for the company of his social superiors? It would go to prove that in no sense could one of his nurture be regarded as a gentleman! And were there no such reason against it, how could he, even to Barbara, speak of his mother's hidden pain, of his mother's humiliation! It would be treachery! He would be as a spy that had hid himself in a holy place! The thing she could not tell him, how could he tell anyone! On the other hand, if he did not let her know the sad fact, would he not be receiving and cherishing Barbara's friendship on false pretences? He was not what he now seemed to her—and to be other to Barbara than he seemed, was too terrible! Still and again, he was bound to do her the justice of believing that she would not regard him differently because of what he could not help, and would justify his silence for his mother's sake. She would, in her great righteousness, be the first to cry out upon the social rule that visited the sins of the fathers on the mothers and children, and not on the fathers themselves! If then disclosure would make no difference to Barbara, he might, he concluded, let the thing rest—for the time at least—assured of her sisterly sympathy. And with that he bethought him that she had asked news of Alice, and it seemed to him strange. For Alice had not told him that, unable to keep the money she sent from falling into the hands of her mother and going in drink, unwilling to expose her mother, and incapable of letting Barbara spend her money so, she had contrived to have her remittances returned, as if they had changed their dwelling, and their new address was unknown.

He wrote therefore what he thought would set her at ease about them; and then, after thinking and thinking, yielded to the dread lest his heart should make him say things he ought not, and ended with a little poem that had come to him a night or two before.

This was the poem:

If there lie a still, pure sorrow
At the heart of everything,
If never shall dawn a morrow
With healing upon its wing,
Then down I kneel to my sorrow,
And say, Thou art my king!
From old pale joy I borrow
A withered song to sing!
And with heart entire and thorough,
To a calm despair I cling,
And, freedman of old king Sorrow,
Away Hope's fetters fling!

That was all—and not much, either as poetry, or as consolation to one that loved him; but sometimes, like that ghastly shroud of Icelandic fable, the poem will rise and wrap itself around the poet.

As Richard closed his envelope, he remembered, with a pang of self-reproach, that the hour of his usual meeting with Alice was past, and that Arthur too was in danger of going to bed hungry, for his custom was to put her brother's supper in Alice's handbag. He set out at once for Clerkenwell—on foot notwithstanding his haste, for he was hoarding every penny to get new clothes for Arthur, who was not only much in want of them for warmth, but in risk of losing his situation because of his shabby appearance.

His anxiety to reach the house before the mother came in, spurred him to his best speed. He halted two minutes on the way to buy some slices of ham and some rolls, and ran on again. It was a frosty night, but by the time he reached Everilda-street, he was far from cold. He was rewarded by finding his brother and sister at home, alone, and not too hungry.

He had just time to empty his pockets, and receive a kiss from Alice in return, when they heard the uncertain step of their mother coming up the stair, stopping now and then, and again resuming the ascent. Alice went to watch which door she would turn to when she reached the top, that Richard might go out by the other, for the two rooms communicated. But just as she was entering Arthur's room, Mrs. Manson changed her mind, and turned to the other door, so that Richard was caught in the very act of making his exit. She flew at him, seized him by the hair, and began to pull and cuff him, abusing him as the true son of his father, who did everything on the sly, and never looked an honest woman in the face. Richard said never a word, but let her tug and revile till there was no more strength in her, when she let him go, and dropped into a chair.

The three went half-way down the stair together.

“Don't mind her,” said Alice with a great sob. “I hope she didn't hurt you much, Richard!”

“Not a bit,” answered Richard.

“Poor mother!” sighed Arthur; “she's not in her right mind! We're in constant terror lest she drop down dead!”

“She's not a very good mother to you!” said Richard.

“No, but that has nothing to do with loving her,” answered Alice; “and to think of her dying like that, and going straight to the bad place! Oh, Richard, what shall I do! It turns me crazy to think of it!”

The door above them opened, and the fierce voice of the mother fell upon them; but it was broken by a fit of hiccupping, and she went in again, slamming the door behind her.

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CHAPTER XLVII. THE DOORS OF HARMONY AND DEATH.