Hester spoke brokenly with awe and reverence of her book, as of some mighty presence, some constraining power outside herself. She saw it complete, beautiful—an entrancing vision, inaccessible, as a sunset.
"I cannot reach up to it. I cannot get near it," she said. "When I try to write it, it is like drawing an angel with spread wings with a bit of charcoal. I understate everything. Yet I labor day by day travestying it, caricaturing the beautiful thoughts that come into my mind. I make everything commonplace and vulgar by putting it into words. I go alone into the woods and sit for hours quite still with the trees. And gradually I understand and know. And I listen, and Nature speaks, really speaks—not a façon de parler, as some people think who explain to you that you mean this or that by your words which you don't mean—and her spirit becomes one with my spirit. And I feel I can never again misunderstand her, never again fail to interpret her, never again wander so far away from her that every white anemone and every seedling fern disowns me, and waits in silence till the alien has gone from among them. And I come home, Rachel, and I try, sometimes I try for half the night, to find words to translate it into. But there are no words, or, if there are, I cannot find them, and at last I fall back on some coarse simile, and in my despair I write it down. And, oh! Rachel, the worst is that presently, when I have forgotten what it ought to have been, when the vision fades, I know I shall admire what I have written. It is that that breaks my heart."
The old, old lament of those who worship art, that sternest mistress in the world, fell into the silence of the little drawing-room. Rachel understood it in part only, for she had always vaguely felt that Hester idealized Nature, as she idealized her fellow-creatures, as she idealized everything, and she did not comprehend why Hester was in despair because she could not speak adequately of Life or Nature as she saw them. Rachel thought, with bewilderment, that that was just what she could do.
At this moment a carriage drew up at the door, and after a long interval, during which the wrathful voice of the cook could be distinctly heard through the kitchen window recalling "Hemma" to a sense of duty from the back yard, "Hemma" breathlessly ushered in the Bishop of Southminster.
CHAPTER XIII
Originality irritates the religious classes, who will not be taken out of their indolent ways of thinking; who have a standing grievance against it, and "heresy" and "heterodoxy" are bad words ready for it.—W.W. PEYTON.
The Bishop was an undersized, spare man, with a rugged, weather-beaten face and sinewy frame. If you had seen him working a crane in a stone-mason's yard, or leading a cut-and-thrust forlorn-hope, or sailing paper boats with a child, you would have felt he was the right man in the right place. That he was also in his right place as a bishop had never been doubted by any one. Mr. Gresley was the only person who had occasionally had misgivings as to the Bishop's vocation as a true priest, but he had put them aside as disloyal.
Jowett is believed to have said, "A bishop without a sense of humor is lost." Perhaps that may have been one of the reasons why, by Jowett's advice, the See of Southminster was offered to its present occupant. The Bishop's mouth, though it spoke of an indomitable will, had a certain twist of the lip, his deep-set, benevolent eyes had a certain twinkle which made persons like Lord Newhaven and Hester hail him at once as an ally, but which ought to have been a danger-signal to some of his clerical brethren—to Mr. Gresley in particular.
The Bishop respected and upheld Mr. Gresley as a clergyman, but as a conversationalist the young vicar wearied him. If the truth were known (which it never was), he had arranged to visit Hester when he knew Mr. Gresley would be engaging the reluctant attention of a ruridecanal meeting.