“You cannot think it was that I meant,” cried John. “How you mistake me, mother! It is because your work has been so perfect, so unwearied—because it ought to have wrought miracles——”
“Oh, no, no, not that,” she said, recovering her tranquillity, and smiling on her boy. “It has been very humble, my dear; but still, if you had seen the parish when we came—the alehouse was more frequented than the church a great deal—the children were not baptised—there were things going on I could not speak of even to you. That very Robert Little that we were speaking of—his father was the most inveterate poacher in the whole country, always in prison or in trouble; the eldest brother went for a soldier, and one of the girls—— Oh, John, Fanshawe Regis is not Paradise, but things are better now.”
“My dear little mother! but they are not as good as they ought to be after the work of all your life.”
“Don’t speak of me, my dear boy, as if I were everything,” said Mrs Mitford; “think of your papa—and oh, John, think of what is far beyond any of us. Think whose life it was that was given, not for the righteous, but to save sinners; think who it was that said there was joy in heaven over one that repented; and should we grudge a whole lifetime if we could but be sure that one was saved? I hope that is what I shall never, never, do.”
John drew his mother’s hand through his arm as she looked up in his face, with her soft features all quivering with emotion. What more could he say? She was not clever, nor very able to take a philosophical view of the matter. She never stopped to ask herself, as he did, whether this faulty, shifty, mean, unprofitable world was worth the expenditure of that divine life eighteen hundred years ago, and of the many lives since which have been half divine. All that;—and nothing better come of it than the vice, and the hypocrisy, and mercenary pretences at goodness, and brutal indifference to everything pure and true, which were to be found in this very village, in the depth of the rural country, in England that has been called Christian for all these hundreds of years. So much—and so little to result from it. Such were the thoughts that passed through John’s mind, mingled with many another gloomy fancy. Adding up long lines of figures was scarcely more unprofitable—could scarcely be of less use to the world. When he thought of his father’s precise little sermons, his feelings were different; for Dr Mitford spoke as a member of the Archæological Society might be supposed to speak, being compelled to do so, to a handful of bumpkins who could not, as he was well aware, understand a word he said—and was content with having thus performed the “duty” incumbent on him. That might be mended so far as it went; but who could mend the self-devotion, the unconscious gospel of a life which his mother set before the eyes of the village? They knew that her charity never failed, nor her interest in them, nor the tender service which she was ready to give to the poorest, or even to the wickedest. Twenty-five years this woman, who was as pure as the angels, had been their servant, at their call night and day. Heaven and earth could not produce a more perfect ministration, her son said to himself, as he watched her coming and going; and yet what did it all come to? Had Mrs Mitford seen the thoughts that were going on in his mind, she would have shrunk from him with a certain horror. They were hard thoughts both of God and man. What was the good of it? Nobody, it appeared to John, was the better. If Fanshawe Regis, for one place, had been left to itself, would it have made any difference? Such thoughts are hard to bear, when a man has been trained into the habit of thinking that much, almost everything, can be done for his neighbours if he will but sufficiently exert himself. Here was a tender good woman who had exerted herself all her life—and what was the end of it? Meanwhile Mrs Mitford walked on cheerfully, holding her son’s arm, with a little glow of devotion about her heart, thinking, what did it matter how much labour was spent on the work if but the one stray lamb was brought back to the fold? and pondering in the same breath a new argument by which Robert Little, in the Doctor’s greatcoat, and his wife in one of her own bonnets, could be got to come to church, and induced to send their children to school.
Sometimes, however, John’s strange holiday, which nobody could quite understand, was disturbed by immediate questions still more difficult. Mrs Mitford did not say much, having discovered in her son’s eye at the moment of his return that all was not well with him; but she looked wistfully at him from time to time, and surprised him in the midst of his frequent reveries with sudden glances of anxious inquiry which spoke more distinctly than words. She did not mention Kate, which was more significant than if she had spoken volumes; and when the letters came in, in the morning, she would turn her head away not to see whether her son expected anything, or if he was disappointed. A mixture of love and pride was in her self-restraint. He should not be forced to confide in her, she had resolved; she would exercise the last and hardest of all maternal duties towards him, and leave him to himself. But Dr Mitford had no such idea. He was busy at the moment with something for the 'Gentleman’s Magazine,' which kept him in his study for the first few days after John’s arrival; but as soon as his article was off his mind, he began to talk to his son of his prospects, as was natural. This happened in the library, where John was sitting, exactly as he had been sitting that first morning when Kate peeped in at the door and all the world was changed; though I cannot tell whether the young man at first remembered that. Dr Mitford was seated at the other end of the room, as he had been that day. A ray of October sunshine shone in through one light of the great Elizabethan window and fell in a long line upon the polished oak floor, on the library carpet, on Dr Mitford’s white head, and as far as the wall on the other side of him—a great broad arrow of light, with some colour in it from the shield in the centre of the glass. Behind this was the glimmer of a fire, and John, lifting his weary eyes from his book, or his eyes from his weary book, he could scarcely have told which, became suddenly aware of the absolute identity of the outside circumstances, and held his breath and asked himself, had he dreamed it, or had that interruption ever been? Was the door going to open and Kate to peep in breathless, shy, daring, full of fun and temerity? or had she done it, and turned all the world upside down? When he was asking himself this question Dr Mitford laid down his pen; then he coughed his little habitual cough, which was the well-understood sign between him and his domestic world that he might be spoken to; then he was fretted by the sunshine, and got up and drew the blind down; and then, having quite finished his article, and feeling himself in a mood for a little talk, he took a walk towards his son between the pillars that narrowed the library in the middle, and looked like a great doorway. He did not go straight to John, but paused on the way to remark upon some empty corners, and to set right some books which had dropped out of their exact places.
“I wish the doctor would return my Early English books,” he said, approaching his son; “one ought to make a resolution against lending. You might give me a day, John, just to look up what books are missing, and who has them. I think you know them better than I do. But, by the by, you have not told us how long you can stay.”
“I don’t think it matters much,” said John.
“You don’t think it matters much! but that looks as if you were not taking any great trouble to make yourself missed. I don’t like that,” said Dr Mitford, shaking his head: “depend upon it, my boy, you will never secure proper appreciation until you show the people you are among that another cannot fill your place.”
“But the fact is that a dozen others could fill my place, sir,” said John, “quite as well as—very probably much better than I.”