“A very pleasant incident!”
“Yes indeed. The poet was fortunate, was he not? But if you are fond of pictures, I should have liked to show you my Vandykes. We had the famous Clitheroe Beauty, an earl’s daughter, maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria. She chose plain Hugh Clitheroe before all the noblemen of the court;—we Clitheroes have always been fortunate in that way. I said plain Hugh, but he was as handsome a cavalier as ever wore rapier. He might have been an earl himself, but he took the part of liberty, and was killed on the Parliament side at Edgemoor. I had his portrait too, a Vandyke, and one of the best pictures he ever painted, as I believe is agreed by connoisseurs. You should have seen the white horse, sir, in that picture,—full of gentleness and spirit, and worthy the handsome cavalier just ready to mount him.”
As the old gentleman talked of his heroic ancestor, a name not unknown to history, he revived a little, and I saw an evanescent look of his daughter’s vigor in his eye. It faded instantly; he sighed, and went on.
“I should almost have liked to live in those days. It is easier to die for a holy cause than to find one’s way along through life. I have found it pretty hard, sir,—pretty hard,—and I hope my day of peace is nearly come.”
How could I shatter his delusion, and thunder in his ear that this hope was a lie?
“I had a happy time of it,” he continued, “till after my Ellen’s birth, and I ought to be thankful for that. I had my dear wife and hosts of friends,—so I thought them. To be sure I spent too much money, and sometimes had rather too gay an evening over the claret at my old oak dining-table. But that was harmless pleasure, sir. I was always a kind landlord. I never could turn out a tenant nor arrest a poacher. I suppose I was too kind. I might better have saved some of the money I gave to my people in beef and beer on holidays. But it made them happy. I like to see everybody happy. That was my chief pleasure. The people were very poor in England then, sir,—not that they are not poor now,—and I used to be very glad when a good old English holiday or a birthday, gave me a chance to give them a little festival.”
I could imagine him the gentle, genial host. Fate should have left him there in the old hall, dispensing frank hospitality all his sunny days and bland seasons through, lunching young poets, and showing his Vandykes with proper pride to strangers. His story carried truth on its face. In fact, the man was all the while an illustration of his own tale. Every tone and phrase convicted him of his own character.
“It sometimes makes me a little melancholy,” he continued, “to speak of those happy days. Not that I regret the result I have at last attained! Ah, no! But the process was a hard one. I have suffered, sir, suffered greatly on my way to the peace and confidence I have attained.”
“You have attained these?” I said.
“Yes; thank God and this Latter-Day revelation of his truth! I used to think rather carelessly of religion in those times. I suppose it is only the contact with sin and sorrow that teaches a man to look from the transitory to the eternal. Shade makes light precious, as an artist would say. I was brought up, you know, sir, in the Church of England; but when I began to think, its formalism wearied me. I could not understand what seemed to me then the complex machinery of its theology. I thought, sir, as no doubt many people of the poetic temperament and little experience think, that God deals with men without go-betweens; that he acts directly on the character by the facts of nature and the thoughts in every soul. It was not until I grew old and sad that I began to feel the need of something distinct and tangible to rest my faith upon, and even then, sir, I was sceptical of the need of revelations and Messiahs and miracles, until I learnt through the testimony of living witnesses—yes, of living witnesses—that such things have come in the Latter Day. Yes, sir, the facts of what you call Mormonism, its miracles, its revelations, which do not cease, and its new Messiah, have proved to me the necessity of other like supernatural systems in the past, and given me faith in their evidences, which before seemed scanty.”