CHAPTER XXV
O day, pass gently that art here again,Turn memory’s spear, and may thy vespers closeUpon a twilight odorous of the rose,Drooping her petals in the falling rain.There is no virtue in remembered pain,The past is sleeping. Watching its reposeI shudder, lest those weary lids unclose,And I be folded in its coils again.
O day, pass gently that art here again,Turn memory’s spear, and may thy vespers closeUpon a twilight odorous of the rose,Drooping her petals in the falling rain.There is no virtue in remembered pain,The past is sleeping. Watching its reposeI shudder, lest those weary lids unclose,And I be folded in its coils again.
O day, pass gently that art here again,Turn memory’s spear, and may thy vespers closeUpon a twilight odorous of the rose,Drooping her petals in the falling rain.
O day, pass gently that art here again,
Turn memory’s spear, and may thy vespers close
Upon a twilight odorous of the rose,
Drooping her petals in the falling rain.
There is no virtue in remembered pain,The past is sleeping. Watching its reposeI shudder, lest those weary lids unclose,And I be folded in its coils again.
There is no virtue in remembered pain,
The past is sleeping. Watching its repose
I shudder, lest those weary lids unclose,
And I be folded in its coils again.
N
ONE evening the children were gathered in the drawing-room, and Miss Ross sat among them working at her tambour frame. She wore a slender gold thimble set with corals, and in a slanting, almost obliterated handwriting, the posie, “Use me, nor lose me,” was writ around its base. This thimble had been her mother’s, and when her work was done for the evening, she would shut it away in a narrow case that held her scissors, and needlecase, and bodkin; and this case was lined withvelvet that had faded to the colour of silver weed when the wind reverses it.
“We should feel indebted to Mrs. Inchbald,” she was saying, “for telling us so spirited a tale. I found my share of entertainment in watching your faces the while. Bimbo, I take it, will do well in life to set himself a fine example, for his sympathies are sufficiently fluid to shape themselves according to their groove. Let him see that they flow in a fine mould. While Mrs. Inchbald spoke of Ratface, his chin receded, his eyes narrowed, and I momentarily expected his ears to change their position on his head. Later, when she sketched for us the brave Thurot, his very shoulders broadened, his eye lightened, and his jaw set square. None of you, I noticed, found it in your heart to compliment her on the picture of Miss Augusta Noble’s cousin, the spoilt child.”
“I wish I’d asked her, though,” said Christopher, “what they did to smugglers when they were caught.”
“I can tell you,” said Miss Ross. “They were forced for five years into the service, as either soldiers or sailors; but as they nearly always deserted, this was changed, and smugglers were sentto prison instead. As for the smuggling vessels, when these were taken, they were sawn through in three places.”
Bimbo groaned aloud.
“Nothing nice happens nowadays,” he said. “No smuggling, no highwaymen, no pirates;nothing. People go about in top hats.”
“There are burglars still,” said Clare.
“I was much afraid of robbers when I was a child,” said Miss Ross. “When the nurses withdrew, and I was left alone to go to sleep, I became immediately so convinced of the presence of a robber close to me, that I invented a way of softening his heart. I took to saying my prayers aloud. ‘O bless my mother and father,’ I would say, ‘and teach me to live dutifully towards them in word and deed; bless my brothers and sisters, my playmates and friends;’ and then, slightly raising my voice, I would say, ‘and O, bless the thief now in the room.’ I used to think he could not possibly harm me if he heard himself prayed for, and I did not stop here. I would explain to God that I felt he only stole because he hadn’t thought much about it, and that if God blessed him and made him happy, he would give it up. And so my thoughts being distracted by inventing excusesfor the robber, my fear would gradually decline, and I would fall asleep.
RaeburnMISS ROSS
RaeburnMISS ROSS
MISS ROSS
“But I have never found among grown people,” she continued, “a just appreciation of this torture children may undergo in their fear of being alone in the dark. It is better in your days, my dears, I have noticed this. You may have night lights, and your doors are left wide; but in my generation these qualms were all brushed aside.”
“Do go on telling us about when you were little,” said Clare. “There’s hardly any story I like better than when grown-up people will do that.”
“I was not an amusing child,” answered Miss Ross, “and nothing very much happened to me. But I suppose children are the same in all ages, as to what they like and what they think about, and in the manner to them in which life appears. Have you ever looked back at the house you live in from a distance, and caught yourself saying, ‘I must just run back, and find the house without me.’ The instant recognition of its being an impossibility is less real than the impulse itself.
“I used to think, too, if I only could see when my eyes were shut everything would appear different. So I would lie pretending to be asleep, and thensuddenly jerk my eyes open, thinking I should catch everything strangely changed. But there invariably was the cupboard and the dressing-table, and all the familiar objects just as they had been. I endowed them with a sense of mockery at my efforts, and of being immeasurably subtler than I. So I would lie quite still, and stealthily lift a lid. But no, they were always the same. This did not convince me they did not move. On the contrary, I would say to myself with a sense of vexed despair, ‘I shall never, never know what things look like when I’m not seeing them.’”
Clare said, “Mummie believes, you know, that if you think about a thing a great deal—something, I mean, that isn’t really alive, as we are—that you endow it with a sort of image of life, and that strange things can happen in this way. Gems that have been thought magical, and idols that have been worshipped for centuries, have their being. That is why she would never like to have a Buddha in her house; she would think it would feel neglected. It would suffer and be cold, and its suffering would stream from it, and affect others. Besides, the wrongfulness it would be, to treat something that a great many people think sacred, merely as an ornament, or a curiosity.”
“I had a brooch once,” said Miss Ross, “that had a life of its own. It had many other things to do beside being my brooch, that was quite certain. I first found out it was a person by its evidently hearing what I said. It was a gold brooch, fashioned like an instep, or a curved willow leaf, and the pin worked on a principle evolved ages ago by some primitive race. ‘Never,’ said I one morning, in a moment of impatience—‘never will I again use such a clumsy pin as this. It tears lace, and once inserted in any material it is almost impossible to dislodge.’ I was pricked to the bone.
“This brooch would go away for days to attend to its own business; and when I’d given up looking for it, there I would find it on my pincushion, looking me in the eye. Even my maid, a most unimaginative woman, appeared to be conscious of its ways.
“‘I see your brooch has come back, Miss,’ she would say. Finally it chose a worthier home.
“I was travelling with my parents in Italy, driving through Tuscany in our private coach. We stayed for some weeks in Florence, and during that time I used to attend Mass in one of the great churches there. I became acquainted with the old priestwho officiated. One day as I was leaving the church, he said to me, ‘Signora, have you seen the gift that has been made? The blue robe that has been presented to the Madonna?’
“I re-entered the church with him, and he led me to the Lady Chapel, and my eyes rested on the carved figure representing the Virgin Mary. To celebrate the Easter festival, some one had presented new robes. I looked from the kindly face of the old priest, filled as it was with fond devotion, to the pensive face of the carved figure with the outstretched hands.
“And there, where the folds of the blue mantle were gathered full upon the breast, I saw my brooch.
“I stepped forward. ‘Ah, you notice that,’ said the Father. ‘Yes, for three weeks now we await the owner to appear. We have had notices written, and placards put about, but no one has claimed it. And so, till the festival is over, I have placed it where you see it. It is a gold brooch, therefore worthy to clasp the new robe.’
“I kept silence. I would not have cared to take it from where it now was.
“I turned to go. A ray from one of the lighted candles glinted on the surface of the gold. Clearly,thought I, a signal of recognition. I knew its ways.
“I let the old priest move a few paces in front of me, and quickly stepping back I touched it twice with my hand in token of farewell. I was filled with fear lest the priest should turn and see me, for however crazy one may be in these matters, one doesn’t like others to think one so.”
“No,” said Clare. “I know that. If somebody comes in when I’ve been talking to myself, or saying lines out loud when I’m alone, I always quickly turn it into a cough of some description. It never sounds in the least like one, though.”
“Have you always named things that belong to you?” asked Miss Ross. “Nothing can really live to you unless it has got a name.”
“Yes,” said the children, “Mummie has names for things. She used to think when she was little that her feet were boys, and that they were called Owen and Barber. And she had an umbrella called Harvey, for years.”
“It’s right to have fancies about things,” said Miss Ross. “I will tell you one that I read once long ago.
“The writer said, ‘When I have risen to walk abroad in the fresh new air of summer, in thehour of dawn when mankind is still at rest, the face of Nature has taken to me a new aspect, the unity of all things in creation appears revealed. It has seemed to me that I have surprised a great secret.
“‘I have seen Nature at such times depicted in the vast form of some great goddess, a woman of Titanic form. The races of mankind are her children, and according to the features of the land they live in, so are they placed upon her mother form. Those who live upon the plains dwell on the great palms of her hands; those whose dwellings are placed among the embosoming hills have her breast for their shelter. The lakes are her eyes and the great forests her hair, the rivers are her veins and the rain her tears, and she sighs in the sound of the Sea.
“‘The rainbows are her thoughts, and the mists rising from the quiet meadows are her meditations and her prayers. Her laughter is in the sound of brooks, and she breathes in the warmth that exhales from the earth, after it is dusk in Summer. The lightning is her anger, and in the thunder she finds utterance, and the darkness of the night is her great mantle over the land.’” Miss Ross ceased speaking, and there was silence for a time. Then Christopher said:
“And what are the earthquakes?”
“Perhaps when she yawns,” said Bim. Children often save people trouble by giving themselves a reply.
Miss Ross had a large white book on her lap, she was turning the pages.
“I like this book of your Mother’s,” she said; “these phrases are from the writings of an old herbalist, and he speaks of the lime-leaf that ‘in Autumn becomes wan, and spotted as the doe.’
“‘The wyche-elme whose gold is let loose on the wind after night frostes, and cold dawnes.
“‘The delicate jargonell that keeps the sweets of France in old, warm, English gardens.’
“And further on he writes of ‘the sloe whose excellent purple blood makes so fine a comfort.’
“He speaks of the ‘green smockt filberte,’ and finally talks in this pleasant manner of the nature of mushrooms.
“‘Many do fear the goodly musherooms as poysonous damp weeds. But this doth in no ways abate the exceeding excellence of God’s Providence, that out of the grass and dew where nothing was, and where only the little worm turned in his sporte, come, as at the shaking of bells, these delicate meates.’
“The older you grow, children,” Miss Ross said, looking up from the book, “the more pleasure youwill find in comfortable words. In well-adjusted phrase, and in lines that have beauty in their sound as in their imagery. I have found nourishment for the soul in the positive satisfaction to be derived from words.
‘With how slow steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies,How silently, and with how wan a face,’
‘With how slow steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies,How silently, and with how wan a face,’
‘With how slow steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies,How silently, and with how wan a face,’
‘With how slow steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies,
How silently, and with how wan a face,’
and—
‘A world of leafage, murmurous and a-twinkleThe green, delicious, plentitude of June.’
‘A world of leafage, murmurous and a-twinkleThe green, delicious, plentitude of June.’
‘A world of leafage, murmurous and a-twinkleThe green, delicious, plentitude of June.’
‘A world of leafage, murmurous and a-twinkle
The green, delicious, plentitude of June.’
And these lines seem to me full of music.
‘O, Philomela fair, O, take some gladness,That here is juster cause for plaintful sadness.Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth.Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.”
‘O, Philomela fair, O, take some gladness,That here is juster cause for plaintful sadness.Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth.Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.”
‘O, Philomela fair, O, take some gladness,That here is juster cause for plaintful sadness.Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth.Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.”
‘O, Philomela fair, O, take some gladness,
That here is juster cause for plaintful sadness.
Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth.
Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.”
“These are only a few of the many fragments I have in my memory.”
“But poetry is nearly always so sad,” said Bimbo. “I like things with jokes in them.”
“I know you do,” said Miss Ross, and her face was lovely when she smiled. “I know exactly what you feel like. When you get up in the morning you feel the whole day is not long enough forall you mean to do in it, the whole world is your playground. And when you glow after the cold bath there is nothing you don’t feel ready for, from wittling a stick, to building an empire. And you’re downstairs and out early, and ‘away to the meadows, the meadows again,’ with your rod and your line, and your bait at your belt, and your family see no more of you till dinner-time.”
The children gave a deep breath, for this made them think of water-meadows and minnow-fishing, marsh-marigolds in golden clumps, and deep, clear runlets.
“This is the fun of being young,” said Miss Ross, “prize it.”
“And what is the fun of being old?” asked Bimbo.
“Many people have asked that before you, but all those who see the right aspects of youth may be trusted, I think, to grow old properly. Good taste is the highest degree of sensibility. And nowhere so clearly as in growing old, is good taste more subtly evidenced.
“The great thing is to feel. Let every bit of you be alive, even though you may suffer. The only sin is indifference.”
“Is it people’s fault when they are indifferent, or can’t they help it?” asked Clare.
“Oh, there are folk who will close their eyes and sit in the very market-place of the universe, with their fingers in their ears.”
“Then a bullock runs into them, I suppose,” said Bim; “and they pick themselves up from the dust, saying, ‘What have I done to deserve it?’”
“Yes,” added Clare, “or they will say, ‘See, we were promised music to dance to, and where are the sweet strains?’”
All the older children would have shrunk from an allusion to the great grief of which the beautiful face before them bore so deep an impress, but one of the younger ones said:
“I’m so surprised that you, who are so sad to look at, should have such nice laughing eyes all the same when you speak, and seem so ready to be amused.”
Miss Ross did not answer immediately, her lips framed some words. Only Clare who was nearest to her heard them, for she was speaking to herself:
“And even yet I dare not let it languish,Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain,Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,How could I seek the empty world again?”
“And even yet I dare not let it languish,Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain,Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,How could I seek the empty world again?”
“And even yet I dare not let it languish,Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain,Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,How could I seek the empty world again?”
“And even yet I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain,
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?”
But aloud, she said to the little child who hadspoken: “Sorrow and gladness are close together, the more you have it in your nature to suffer, the more thoroughly you can enjoy. And these two things, suffering and gladness, mean a full comprehension of life. The psalmist says, ‘Grant me understanding, and I shall live’ and understanding means the spirit that makes us accept our joys, our duties, and our sorrows; deliberately adjusting ourselves to them, giving them their place.
“It is a good prayer, ‘Help me better to bear my sorrows, and to more fully understand my joys.’ For only when we understand our joys do we find contentment.”
“There’s a poem Mummie read to us once,” said Bimbo, “in which a man tells how he had everything in life to make him happy. He had riches, he had houses, he had talents, he had friends, and lots of fun of every description, but he hadn’t contentment, and wanting that, he wanted all. And so he set out to seek her, and he travelled far and wide, till at last he went home, because he was tired. And there, when he got home, he found her by his own doorstep, sitting spinning!”
“Yes,” said Miss Ross; “I like that story. We have got to find her. And those who have grudgesagainst Fate, and grievances, are the people who expect her to find them.
“I assure you, my dear children, I’ve more sympathy with murderers than with grumblers; they at least have some compelling motive, are strongly exercised by hatred or revenge. (I rather like people who can hate, very few people can do it.) But grumblers—I place them in the same class as those who talk about being resigned. Let there be fortitude; indeed if we are to face life at all, we must have it. But resignation, I despise.”
Miss Ross rose from her chair, and a piece of paper fell on the ground beside her. Clare picked it up to return it, but she had already passed down the room. And as Clare’s glance fell on the paper she saw that it was poetry written there.
“No coward soul is mine,No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere.I see Heaven’s glories shine,And Faith shines equal, arming me from fear.Vain are the thousand creedsThat move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,Worthless as withered weeds,Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.To waken doubt in oneHolding so fast by Thine infinity.So surely anchored onThe steadfast rock of immortality.There is no room for Death,No atom that his might could render void.Thou, Thou art Being and Breath,And what Thou art may never be destroyed.”
“No coward soul is mine,No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere.I see Heaven’s glories shine,And Faith shines equal, arming me from fear.Vain are the thousand creedsThat move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,Worthless as withered weeds,Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.To waken doubt in oneHolding so fast by Thine infinity.So surely anchored onThe steadfast rock of immortality.There is no room for Death,No atom that his might could render void.Thou, Thou art Being and Breath,And what Thou art may never be destroyed.”
“No coward soul is mine,No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere.I see Heaven’s glories shine,And Faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
“No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere.
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
Vain are the thousand creedsThat move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,Worthless as withered weeds,Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
To waken doubt in oneHolding so fast by Thine infinity.So surely anchored onThe steadfast rock of immortality.
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thine infinity.
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
There is no room for Death,No atom that his might could render void.Thou, Thou art Being and Breath,And what Thou art may never be destroyed.”
There is no room for Death,
No atom that his might could render void.
Thou, Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.”