Pixy-led by our senses we spend our strength like our substance in pleasure and flood our brains with drink that we may live in a fool’s paradise half our time and a real hades for the next half. Pixy-led by our ignorance we accept the appearance of things for their substance and knock our heads against the walls by which we are surrounded, determined not to learn their real properties. Thus we seek to exorcise the murderous diseases of men, moral as well as physical, by muttered charms and potent talismans, rather than by tracing the cause in its course—baring the roots—and thus learning how best to extirpate them. But we content ourselves with sighing at the hard necessities of Fate; and, wrapping ourselves up in a false cloak of religion, we say that the Father of Men and the God of Love has laid on us these terrible scourges that we may learn patience under suffering; while shutting our eyes to the fact that with every poison is an antidote and that every evil has its remedy. Pixy-led by our fears we create the sorrows that we dread, and live in a world of misery fashioned by our self-tormenting hands. How many time-honoured beliefs and cherished ideas are only fancies and superstitions without base or substance!—how many beloved things are utterly without value, and beautiful creatures mere pixy cheats if only we could open our eyes and see! Oh! if ever the reign of truth, clear, bright, unmistakable truth, comes on this sad earth of ours, what a heap of dead bones which now seem to have life would fall together—what enchantment of the pixies would be at an end! The gold that now we cherish would be turned to rubbish to which we would not give harbourage; and the things which we now believe to be rubbish would prove themselves of purest gold throughout. Among our most earnest prayers may be inserted that of deliverance from the charms and magic spells of the pixies—in other words, deliverance from vain imaginings and false beliefs; from baseless hope and causeless fear; the restless doubt of an unproved suspicion, and the blind faith which accepts because it wishes, and believes because it desires.
HELENA, LADY HARROGATE.
CHAPTER XXXIII.—IN WOOLMER FOREST.
‘Beaten, decidedly beaten, bad luck to them! The only chance Sir David has left is to slip off in the night, grope for a ford higher up the stream, and pass his artillery over as best he may. I could lay a wager that he tries it.’
‘Not he,’ returned a gruffer voice. ‘Moffat’s too wary to be caught napping. The sly old fox was almost too many for us though, when he made that forced march, and all but captured the bridge by a swoop of his cavalry.’
‘Ah!’ chimed in a third officer of the group now eating a hurried supper around a bivouac fire, the glow of which was doubly welcome from the fact that the uniforms of all present had been drenched and soaked with the heavy rain that had fallen that day—‘Ah! tell it not in Gath; but it was the quickness of those militia fellows—the Devon Light Infantry, or whatever they call themselves—that saved us. The enemy’s cavalry were just clattering over the bridge, when that militia regiment threw out its skirmishers, in very smart style too, and saved the chief from a checkmate.’
‘That was Harrogate’s doing,’ observed the first speaker; ‘he’s their acting-major just now, and I saw him on horseback at the bridge-foot. A first-rate fellow he is, and could teach a lesson to some of our pompous bigwigs in cocked-hat and feather. All the same, I’d not work as he does, if I were a lord.’
‘You had better leave off chattering, you youngsters, and get forty winks,’ said the good-natured senior with the gruff voice. ‘It’s ten to one Moffat has us under arms and on the march a good hour before daybreak. I learned his ways in India, when we were following Tantia Topee and the Nana up hill and down dale. As for me, I’ve the rounds to-night, and—— Well, sergeant; what is it?’ he added, as he tightened his belt.
‘A civilian, sir, that wants to be passed to the quarters of an officer of the Devon militia, on important business, he says. He has come in a gig from Downton, and the picket stopped him on the Whiteparish road.’