Mr. Wingfold went as he had come, thoughtful even to trouble. What was to be done for the woman? What was his part, as parson of the parish, with regard to her behaviour in church? Was it or was it not his part to take public notice of what she intended, if not as a defiance to God, at least as an open expression of her bitter resentment of his dealing with her? The creator's discipline did not suit his creature's taste, and she would let him know it: whether it suited her necessities, she did not ask or care; she knew nothing of her necessities—only of her desires. Had she had a suspicion that she was an eternal creature, poor as well as miserable, blind and naked as well as bereaved and angry, she might have allowed some room for God to show himself right. But she was ignorant of herself as any savage. Was Wingfold to take her insolence in church as a thing done to himself, which he must endure with patience? or, putting himself out of the question, and regarding her conduct only as a protest against the ways of God with her, must he leave reproof as well as vengeance to the Lord? Was it his business, or was it not, to rebuke her, and make his rebuke as open as her offence? It troubled him almost beyond bearing to think that some of his flock might imagine that the great lady of the parish was allowed to behave herself unseemly, where another would be exposed to shame. But how abhorrent to him was a public contention in the church, and on the Lord's day! Mrs. Wylder was just the woman to challenge forcible expulsion, and make the circumstances of it as flagrant as possible! She might even use both pistol and whip! What better opportunity could she find for giving point to her appeal against God! A man might, in the rage of disappointment, cry out that there could be no God where baffle met the holiest instinct—that blundering chance must rule; he might, illogical with grief, declare that as God could treat him so, he would believe in him no longer; or he might assert that an evil being, not a good, was at the heart of life—a devil and not a God, for he was one who created and forgot, or who remembered and did not care—who quickened exposure but gave no shield! called from the void a being filled with doorless avenues to pain, and abandoned him to incarnate cruelty, that he might make him sport with the wildness of his dismay! but here was a woman who did not say that God was not, or that he was not good, but with passionate self-party-spirit cried out, “He is against me! he sides with my husband! He is not my friend, but his: I will let him know how I resent his unfairness!” Whether God was good or bad she did not care—that was not a point she was concerned in; all she heeded was how he behaved to her—whether he took part with her husband or herself. He had torn from her the desire of her heart and left her desolate: she would worship him no longer! She had been brought up to believe there was a God, and had never doubted his existence: with her whole will and passion she opposed that which she called God. She had never learned to yield when wrong, and now she was sure she was right. Though hopeless she resisted. She cried out against God, but believed him by his own act helpless to deliver her, for what could he do against the grave? Powerless for her as unfriendly toward her, why should she worship him? Why should she pay court to one who neither would nor could give her what she wanted? What was he God for? Wassheto go to his house, and carry herself courteously, as if he were her friend! She would not! And that there might be no mistake as to how she regarded him, she would sit in her pew and read her novel, while the friends of God said their prayers to him! If she annoyed them, so much the better, for the surer she might hope thathewas annoyed!
It may seem to some incredibly terrible that one should believe in God and defy him! But do none of us, who say also we believe in God, and who are far from defying him, ever behave like Mrs. Wylder? It is one thing to believe in a God; it is quite another to believe in God! Every time we grumble at our fate, every time we are displeased, hurt, resentful at this or that which comes to us, every time we do not receive the suffering sent us, “with both hands,” as William Law says, we are of the same spirit with this half-crazy woman. In some fashion, and that a real one, she must have believed in the God against whom she urged her complaint; and it is rather to her praise that, like Job, she did it openly, and not with mere base grumblings in her heart at her fireside. It is mean to believe half-way, to believe in words, and in action deny. One of four gates stands open to us: to deny the existence of God, and say we can do without him; to acknowledge his existence, but say he is not good, and act as true men resisting a tyrant; to say, “I would there were a God,” and be miserable because there is none; or to say there must be a God, and he must be perfect in goodness or he could not be, and give ourselves up to him heart and soul and hands and history.
But what was parson Wingfold to do in the matter? Was he to allow the simple sheep of his flock to think him afraid of the squire's lady? or was he to venture an uproar in the church on a Sunday morning? His wife and he had often talked the thing over, but had arrived at no conclusion. He went to her now, and told her all that had passed.
“Isn't it time to do something?” she said.
“Indeed I think so—but what?” he answered. “I wish you would show me what I ought to do! Let me see it, and I will do it.” She was silent for a moment.
“Couldn't you preach at her?” she said, with a laugh in which was an odd mingling of doubt and merriment.
“I have always thought that a mean thing, and have never done it—except by dwelling on broadest principles. That an evil principle has an advocate present, is no reason for sparing it: what am I there for? But to preach that the many may turn on the one—that I never could do!”
“This case is different from any other. The wrong is done continuously, in the very eyes of the congregation, and for the sake of its being seen,” Mrs. Wingfold answered. “Neither would you be the assailant; you would but accept, not give the challenge. For I don't know how many Sundays, she has been pitting her position in the pew against yours in the pulpit! Believing it out of your power to do anything, she flaunts her French novel in your face; and those that can't see her, see her yellow novel in your eyes, and think about her and you, instead of the things you are saying to them! For the sake of the work given you, for the sake of your influence with the people, you must do something!”
“It is God she defies, not me.”
“I think she defies you to say an honest word on his behalf. Your silence must seem to her an acknowledgment that she is right.”
“That cannot be, after what I have said to her more than once in her own house.”
“Then at least she must think that either you have no authority to drive from the little temple one of the cows of Bashan, or are afraid of her horns.”
“Quite right, Nelly!” cried the rector; “you are quite right. Only you don't give me a hint what to do!”
“Am I not saying as plain as I can that you must preach at her?”
“H'm! I didn't expect that of you!”
“No; for if you could have expected it of me, you would have thought of it yourself! But just think! A public scandal requires public treatment. You will not be dragging her before the people; she has put herself there! She is brazen, and must be treated as brazen—set in the full glare of opinion. And I think, if I were a clergyman, I should know how to do it!”
Wingfold was silent. She must be right! Something glimmered before him—something possible—he could not see plainly what.
“It is all very well to make such a clamour about her boy,” continued his wife, “but every one knows that she quarrelled with him dreadfully—that for days at a time they would be cat and dog with each other. Her animal instinct lasted it out, and she did not come to hate him; but I can't help thinking it must have been in a great measure because her husband favoured the other that she took up this one with such passion. I have been told she would abuse him in language not fit to repeat, the little wretch answering her back, and choking with rage that he could not tear her.”
“Who told you?” asked the parson.
“I would rather not say.”
“Are you sure it is not mere gossip?”
“Quite sure. To be gossip, a thing must go through two mouths at least, and I had it first-mouth. I tell it you because I think it worth your knowing.”
The next Sunday morning, there lay the lady as usual, only her novel was a red one. When the parson went into the pulpit, he cast one glance on the gallery to his right, then spoke thus:—
“My friends, I will follow the example of our Lord, and speak to you to-day in a parable. The Lord said there are things better spoken in parables, because of the eyes that will not see, and the ears that will not hear.
“There was once a mother left alone with her little boy—the only creature in the world or out of it that she cared for. She was a good mother to him, as good a mother as you can think, never overbearing or unkind. She never thought of herself, but always of the desire of her heart, the apple of her eye, her son born of her own body. It was not because of any return he could make her that she loved him. It was not to make him feel how good she was, that she did everything for him. It was not to give him reasons for lovingher, but because she lovedhim, and because he needed her. He was a delicate child, requiring every care she could lavish upon him, and she did lavish it. Oh, how she loved him! She would sit with the child on her lap from morning till night, gazing on him; she always went to sleep with him in her bosom—as close to her as ever he could lie. When she woke in the dark night, her first movement was to strain him closer, her next to listen if he was breathing—for he might have died and been lost! When he looked up at her with eyes of satisfaction, she felt all her care repaid.
“The years went on, and the child grew, and the mother loved him more and more. But he did not love her as she loved him. He soon began to care for the things she gave him, but he did not learn to love the mother who gave them. Now the whole good of things is to be the messengers of love—to carry love from the one heart to the other heart; and when these messengers are fetched instead of sent, grasped at, that is, by a greedy, ungiving hand, they never reach the heart, but block up the path of love, and divide heart from heart; so that the greedy heart forgets the love of the giving heart more and more, and all by the things it gives. That is the way generosity fares with the ungenerous. The boy would be very pleasant to his mother so long as he thought to get something from her; but when he had got what he wanted, he would forget her until he wanted something more.
“There came at last a day when she said to him, 'Dear boy, I want you to go and fetch me some medicine, for I feel very poorly, and am afraid I am going to be ill!' He mounted his pony, and rode away to get the medicine. Now his mother had told him to be very careful, because the medicine was dangerous, and he must not open the bottle that held it. But when he had it, he said to himself, 'I dare say it is something very nice, and mother does not want me to have any of it!' So he opened the bottle and tasted what was in it, and it burned him terribly. Then he was furious with his mother, and said she had told him not to open the bottle just to make him do it, and vowed he would not go back to her! He threw the bottle from him, and turned, and rode another way, until he found himself alone in a wild forest, where was nothing to eat, and nothing to shelter him from the cold night, and the wind that blew through the trees, and made strange noises. He dismounted, afraid to ride in the dark, and before he knew, his pony was gone. Then he began to be miserably frightened, and to wish he had not run away. But still he blamed his mother, who might have known, he said, that he would open the bottle.
“The mother got very uneasy about her boy, and went out to look for him. The neighbours too, though he was not a nice boy, and none but his mother liked him, went out also, for they would gladly find him and take him home to her; and they came at last to the wood, with their torches and lanterns.
“The boy was lying under a tree, and saw the lights, and heard the voices, and knew it was his mother come. Then the old wickedness rose up fresh in his heart, and he said to himself: 'She shall have trouble yet before she finds me! Am I to come and go as she pleases!' He lay very still; and when he saw them coming near, crept farther, and again lay still. Thus he went on doing, and so avoided his saviours. He heard one say there were wolves in the wood, for that was the sound of them; but he was just the kind of boy that will not believe, but thinks every one has a purpose of his own in saying this or that. So he slipped and slipped away until at length all despaired of finding him, and left the wood.
“Suddenly he knew that he was again alone. He gave a great shriek, but no one heard it. He stood quaking and listening. Presently his pony came rushing past him, with two or three wolves behind him. He started to his feet and began to run, wild to get out of the wood. But he could not find the way, and ran about this way and that until utter despair came down upon him, and all he could do was to lie still as a mouse lest the wolves should hear him.
“And as he lay he began at last to think that he was a wicked child; that his mother had done everything to make him good, and he would not be good; and now he was lost, and the wolves alone would find him! He sank at last into a stupor, and lay motionless, with death and the wolves after him.
“He came to himself in the arms of a strange woman, who had taken him up, and was carrying him home.
“The name of the woman was Sorrow—a wandering woman, a kind of gypsy, always going about the world, and picking up lost things. Nobody likes her, hardly anybody is civil to her; but when she has set anybody down and is gone, there is often a look of affection and wonder and gratitude sent after her. For all that, however, very few are glad to be found by her again.
“Sorrow carried him weeping home to his mother. His mother came out, and took him in her arms. Sorrow made her courtesy, and went away. The boy clung to his mother's neck, and said he was sorry. In the midst of her joy his mother wept bitterly, for he had nearly broken her heart. She could not get the wolves out of her mind.
“But, alas! the boy forgot all, and was worse than ever. He grew more and more cruel to his mother, and mocked at every word she said to him; so that—”
There came a cry from the gallery. The congregation started in sudden terror to their feet. The rector stopped, and turning to the right, stood gazing. In the front of the squire's pew stood Mrs. Wylder, white, and speechless with rage. For a moment she stood shaking her fist at the preacher. Then, in a hoarse broken voice, came the words—
“It's a lie. My boy was never cruel to me. It's a wicked lie.”
She could say no more, but stood and glared, hate in her fierce eyes, and torture in her colourless face.
“Madam, you have betrayed yourself,” said the rector solemnly. “If your son behaved well to you, it makes it the worse in you to behave ill to your Father. From Sunday to Sunday you insult him with rude behaviour. I tell you so in the face of this congregation, which knows it as well as I. Hitherto I have held my tongue—from no fear of the rich, from no desire to spare them deserved disgrace in the eyes of the poor, but because I shrank from making the house of God a place of contention. Madam, you have behaved shamefully, and I do my duty in rebuking you.”
The whole congregation were on their feet, staring at her. A moment she stood, and would have brazened out the stare. But she felt the eyes of the motionless hundreds blazing upon her, and the culprit soul grew naked in the presence of judging souls. Her nerve gave way; she turned her back, left the pew, and fled from the church by the squire's door, into the grounds of Wylder Hall.
Happily Barbara was not in the church that morning.
The next Sunday the squire's pew was empty. The red volume lay open on its face upon the floor of it.
Wingfold's dear plot had palled. He had rough-hewed his end, but the divinity had shaped it. When the squire came to know what had taken place, he made his first call on the rector. He said nothing about his wife, but plainly wished it understood that he bore him no ill will for what he had done.
The rector had often wished his wife could in some natural way get hold of Miss Wylder; he suspected something exceptionally fine in her: how else could she, with such a father and such a mother, have such a countenance? There must be a third factor in the affair, and one worth knowing—namely herself! That she seemed to avoid being reckoned among church-goers might be a point in her favour! What reports reached him of her wild ways, mingled with exaggerated stories of her lawlessness, did not shock him: what was true in them might spring from mere exuberance of life, whose joy was her only law—and yet a real law to her!
He had had no opportunity of learning either how peculiar the girl was, or how capable. She was not yet up to his teaching; she had to have other water to drink first, and was now approaching a source that might have caused him anxiety for her, had he ever so little believed in chance. But a shepherd is none the less a true shepherd that he leaves plenty of liberty to the lamb to pick its own food. That its best instincts may not be to the taste either of its natural guardians or the public, is nothing against those instincts. Without appearing to their guardians both strange and headstrong, some sheep would never get near the food necessary to keep them alive. Confined to the provender even their shepherds would have them contented withal, many would die. Sometimes, to escape from the arid wastes of “society,” haunted with the cries of its spiritual greengrocers, and find the pasture on which their souls can live, they have to die, and climb the grassy slopes of the heavenly hills.
Barbara had as yet had no experience of pain—or of more at least than came from sympathy with suffering—a sympathy which, though ready, could hardly be deep in one who had never had a headache herself. To all dumb suffering things, she was very gentle and pitiful; but her pity was like that of a child over her doll.
She was always glad to get away from home. While her father was paying his long-delayed visit to the rector, she was flying over hedge and ditch and rail, in a line for that gate of Mortgrange which Simon Armour and his grandson found open when first the former took the latter to see the place: Barbara had a key to it.
She went with swift gliding step, like that of a red Indian, into the library. Richard was piecing the broken cords of a great old folio—the more easily that they were double—in order to re-attach the loosened sheets and the hanging board, and so get the book ready for a new cover. She carried in her hand something yet more sorely in need of mending—a pigeon with a broken wing, which she had seen lying in the park, and had dismounted to take. It kept opening and shutting its eyes, and she knew that nothing could be done for it; but the mute appeal of the dying thing had gone to her heart, and she wanted sympathy, whether for it or for herself she could hardly have distinguished. How she came to wake a little more just then, I cannot tell, but the fact is a joint in her history. The jar to the pigeon's life affected her as a catastrophe. She felt that there a crisis had come: a living conscious thing could do nothing for its own life, and lay helpless. Say rather—seemed so to lie. Oh, surely it is in reason that not a sparrow should fall to the ground without the Father! To whom but the father of the children that bemoan its fate, should the children carry his sparrow? But Barbara was carrying her pigeon where was no help for the heart of either.
“Ah, poor thing,” said Richard, “I fear we can do nothing for it! But it will be at rest soon! It is fast going.”
“Ah! but where?” said Barbara, to whom that moment came the question for the first time.
“Nowhere,” answered Richard.
“How can that be? If I were going, I should be going somewhere! I couldn't go nowhere if I tried ever so. I don't like you to say it is going nowhere! Poor little thing! I won't let you go nowhere!”
“Well!” returned Richard, a little bewildered, “what would you have me say? You know what I mean! It is going not to be, that is all.”
“That is all! How wouldyoulike to be told you were going nowhere—going not to be—that was all?”
Richard saw that to declare abruptly his belief that he was himself as much going nowhere as any pigeon that ever died, would probably be to close the door between them. At the same time, if he left her to imagine that he expected life for himself, but not for the animals, she must think him selfish! Unwilling therefore to answer, he took refuge in his genuine sympathy with suffering.
“Is it not strange,” he said, and would have taken from her hands the wounded bird, but she would not part with it, “that men should take pleasure in killing—especially a creature like that, so full of innocent content? It seems to me the greatest pity to stop such a life!”
As he spoke there came upon him the dim sense of a foaming reef of argument ahead—such as this: “Then there ought to be no death! And what ought not to be, cannot be! But there is death: what then is death? If it be a stopping of life, then that is which cannot be. But it may be only a change in the form of life that looks like a stopping, and is not! If Death be stronger than Life, so that he stops life, how then was Life able so to flout him, that he, the thing that was not, arose from the antenatal sepulchre on which Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it? Life alone is: nothingness is not; Death cannot destroy; he is not the antagonist, not the opposite of life.” Some such argument Richard, I say, saw vaguely through the gloom ahead, and began to beat to windward.
“Did you ever notice,” he said, “inThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the point at which the dead bird falls from the neck of the man?”
It was a point, however, at which neither he nor Barbara was capable of seeing the depth of the poem. Richard thought it was the new-born love of beauty that freed the mariner; he did not see that it was the love of life, the new-born sympathy with life.
“I don't even know what you are talking of,” answered Barbara. “Do tell me. It sounds like something wonderful! Is it a story?”
“Yes—a wonderful story.”
Richard had not attempted to understand Coleridge's philosophy, taking it for quite obsolete; and it was but doubtfully that he had made trial of his poems. Happily choosingChristabel, however, for a tasting-piece, he was immediately enchanted and absorbed; and never again had he been so keenly aware of disappointment as when he came to the end, and found, as an Irishman might say, that it was not there: a lump gathered in his throat; he flung the book from him, and it was a week before he could open it again.
The next poem he tried wasThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which he read with almost equal delight, bewitched with many an individual phrase, with the melody unique of many a stanza, with the strangeness of its speech, with the loveliness of its real, and the wildness of its invented pictures. But he had not yet discovered, or even begun to foresee the marvel of its whole. A man must know something of repentance before he can understandThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The volume containing it had come into his hands as one of a set his father had to bind. It belonged to a worshipper of Coleridge, who had possessed himself of every edition of every book he had written, or had had a share in writing. There he read first the final form ofThe Rimeas it appeared in theSibylline Leavesof 1817: when he came to look at that in theLyrical Ballads, published in 1798, he found differences many and great between the two. He found also in the set an edition with a form of the poem differing considerably from the last as well as the first. He had brought together and compared all these forms of the poem, noting every minutest variation—a mode of study which, in the case of a masterpiece, richly repays the student. It was no wonder, therefore, that Richard had almost every word of it on the very tip of his tongue.
He began to repeat the ballad, and went on, never for a moment intermitting his work. Without the least attempt at what is called recitation, of which happily he knew nothing, he made both sense and music tell, saying it as if he were for the hundredth time reading it aloud for his own delight. If his pronunciation was cockneyish, it was but a little so.
The very first stanza took hold of Barbara. She sat down by Richard's table, softly laid the dying bird in her lap, and listened with round eyes and parted lips, her rapt soul sitting in her ears.
But Richard had not gone far before he hesitated, his memory perplexed between the differing editions.
“Have you forgotten it? I amsosorry!” said Barbara. “Itiswonderful—not like anything I ever heard, or saw, or tasted before. It smells like a New Zealand flower called—” Here she said a word Richard had never heard, and could never remember. “I don't wonder at your liking books, if you find things in them of that sort!”
“I've not exactly forgotten it,” answered Richard; “but I've copied out different editions for comparison, and they've got a little mixed in my head.”
“But surely the printers, with all their blunders and changes, can't keep you from seeing what the author wrote!”
“The editions I mean are those of the author himself. He kept making changes, some of them very great changes. Not many people know the poem as Coleridge first published it.”
“Coleridge! Who was he?”
“The man that wrote the poem.”
“Oh! He altered it afterwards?”
“Yes, very much.”
“Did he make it better?”
“Much better.”
“Then why should you care any more for the first way of it?”
“Just because it is different. A thing not so good may have a different goodness. A man may not be so good as another man, and yet have some good things in him the other has not. That implies that not every change he made was for the better. And where he has put a better phrase, or passage, the former may yet be good. So you see a new form may be much better, and yet the old form remain much too good to be parted with. In any case it is intensely interesting to see how and why he changed a thing or its shape, and to ponder wherein it is for the better or the worse. That is to take it like a study in natural history. In that we learn how an animal grows different to meet a difference in the supply of its needs; in the varying editions of a poem we see how it alters to meet a new requirement of the poet's mind. I don't mean the cases are parallel, but they correspond somehow. If I were a schoolmaster, I should make my pupils compare different forms of the same poem, and find out why the poet made the changes. That would do far more for them, I think, than comparing poets with each other. The better poets are—that is, the more original they are—the less there is in them to compare.”
“But I want to hear the rest of the story. Never mind the differences in the telling of it.”
“I'm afraid I can't get into the current of it now.”
“You can look at the book! It must be somewhere among all these!”
“No doubt. But I haven't time to look for it now.”
“It won't take you a minute to find it.”
“I must not leave my work.”
“It wouldn't cost you more than one tiny minute!” pleaded Barbara like a child.
“Let me explain to you, miss:—I find the only way to besureI don't cheat, is to know I haven't stopped an instant to do anything for myself. Sometimes I have stopped for a while; and then when I wanted to make up the time, I couldn't be quite sure how much I owed, and that made me give more than I needed—which I didn't like when I would gladly have been doing something else. When the time is my own, it is of far more value to me for the insides than to my employer for the outsides of the books. So you see, for my own sake as well as his, I cannot stop till my time is up.”
“Thatisbeing honest!”
“Who can consent to be dishonest! It is the meanest thing to undertake work and then imagine you show spirit by shirking what you can of it. There's a lot of fellows like that! I would as soon pick a pocket as undertake and not do!”
Barbara begged no more.
“But I can talk while I work, miss,” Richard went on; “and I will try again to remember.”
“Please, please do.”
Richard thought a little, and presently resuming the poem, went on to the end of the first part. As he finished the last stanza—
God save thee, ancient Mariner,From the fiends that plague thee thus!—Why look'st thou so?—With my cross-bowI shot theAlbatross!'”—
“Ah!” cried Barbara, “I see now what made you think of the poem!”—and she looked down at the throbbing bird in her lap.
It opened its dark eyes once more—with a reeling, pitiful look at her, Barbara thought—quivered a little, and lay still. She burst into tears.
Richard dropped his work, and made a step toward her.
“Never mind,” she said. “One has got to crysomuch, and I may as well cry for the bird! I'm all right now, thank you! Please go on. The bird is dead, and I'm glad. I will let it lie a little, and then bury it. If it be anywhere, perhaps it will one day know me, and then it will love me. Please go on with the poem. It will make me forget. I'm not bound to remember, am I—where I'm not to blame, I mean, and cannot help?”
“Certainly not!” acquiesced Richard, and began the second part.
“I see! I see!” cried Barbara, wiping her eyes. “They were cross with him for killing the bird, not because they loved the beautiful creature, but because it was unlucky to kill him! And then when nothing but good came, they said it was quite right to kill him, and told lies of him, and said he was a bad bird, and brought the fog and mist!—I wonder what's coming to them!—That's not the end, is it? It can't be!”
“No; it's not nearly done yet. It's only beginning.”
“I'm so glad! Do go on.”
She was eager as any child. Coleridge could not have desired a better listener.
“I know!Iknow!” she said presently. “Wewere caught in a calm as we came home! My father is fond of the sea, and brought us round the Cape in a sailing-vessel. It was horrid. It lasted only three days, but I felt as if I should die. It wasn't long enough, I suppose, to draw out the creeping things.”
“Perhaps it wasn't near enough to the equator for them,” answered Richard, and went on:—
“Ah! well a-day! what evil looksHad I from old and young;Instead of the cross, the AlbatrossAbout my neck was hung.”
“Poor man! And in such weather!” exclaimed Barbara. “And such a huge creature! I see! They thought now the killing of the bird had brought the calm, and they would have their revenge! A bad set, those sailors! People that deserve punishment always want to punish. Do go on.”
When the skeleton-ship came, her eyes grew with listening like those of one in a trance.
“What a horrid, live dead woman!” she said. “Her whiteness is worse than any blackness. But I wish he had told us what Death was like!”
“In the first edition,” returned Richard, much delighted that she missed what constructive symmetry required, “thereisa description of Death. I doubt if you would like it, though. You don't like horrid things?”
“I do—if they should be horrid, and are horrid enough.”
“Coleridge thought afterwards it was better to leave it out!”
“Tell it me, anyhow.”
“His bones were black with many a crack,All black and bare, I ween;Jet-black and bare, save where with rust,Of mouldy damps and charnel crust,They were patched with purple and green.
“—There! What do you think of that?”
“Heis nothing like so horrid as the woman!”
“She is more horrid in the first edition.”
“How?”
“Herlips are red,herlooks are free,Herlocks are yellow as gold;Her skin is as white as leprosy,And she is far liker Death than he;Her flesh makes the still air cold.”
“I do think that is worse. Tell me again how the other goes.”
“The Night-MareLife-in-deathwas she,Who thicks man's blood with cold.”
“Yes, the other is worse! I can hardly tell why, except it be that you get at the sense of it easier. What does the Nightmare Life-in-Death mean?”
“I don't know. I can't quite get at it.”
How should he? Richard was too close to the awful phantom to know that this was her portrait.
“There's another dreadful stanza in the first edition,” he went on. “It is repeated in the second, but left out in the last. I fancy the poet let himself be overpersuaded to omit it. The poem was not actually printed without it until after his death: he had only put it in theerrata, to be omitted.—When the woman whistles with joy at having won the ancient Mariner,
“'A gust of wind sterte up behind,'
“—as if, like the sailors, she had whistled for it:—
“'A gust of wind sterte up behind,And whistled through his bones;Through the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth,Half whistles and half groans;'
“and the spectre-bark is blown along by this breath coming out of the bosom of the skeleton.”
“I think it was a great mistake to leave that verse out!” said Barbara. “There is no nasty horror in it! Thereisa little in the description of Death!”
“I think with you,” returned Richard, more and more astonished at the insight of a girl who had read next to nothing. “Our lecturer at King's,” he went on, “pointed out to us, in this part, what some call a blunder.”
“What is it?”
“I will give you the verses again; and you see if you can pick it out.”
“Do, please.”
“—Till clombe above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip.”
“I never saw a star there! But I see nothing wrong.”
“Which is the nearest to us of the heavenly bodies?”
“The moon, I suppose.”
“Certainly:—how, then, could a star come between us and it? For if the star were within the tip of the moon, it must be between us and the dark part of the moon!”
“I see! How stupid of me! But let me think!—If the star were just on the edge of the moon, between the horns, it would almost look as if it were within the tips—might it not?”
“That's the best that can be said for it anyhow,—except indeed that the poor ignorant sailor might, in the midst of such horrors, well make the blunder.—By the way, in the first edition it stood as you have just said: the line was,
“'Almost within the tips.'”
“What did he change it to?”
“He made it—
“'Within the nether tip.'”
“Why did he change it?”
“You would see that at the first glance, if you were used to riming.”
“Are you a poet, then, as well as a blacksmith and a bookbinder?”
“Too much of a poet, I hope, to imagine myself more than a whittler of reeds!” answered Richard.
He was not sorry, however, to let Barbara know him for a poor relation of the high family of poets. In truth, what best enabled him to understand their work, was the humble work of the same sort he did himself.
She did not understand what he meant by awhittler of reeds, but she rightly took what he said for a humble affirmative.
“I begin to be frightened at you!” she rejoined, half meaning it. “Who knows what else you may not be!”
“I am little enough of anything,” answered Richard, “but nothing that I do not wish to be more of.”
A short silence followed.
“You have not told me yet why he changed that line!” resumed Barbara.
“Better wait until I can show it you in the book: then you will see at once.”
“Please, go on then. I don't know anything about the poem yet! I don't know why it was written!”
“You like some dreams, though they have no reason in them, don't you?”
“Yes; but then I suppose there is reason in the poem!”
“There is, indeed!” said Richard, and went on.
But presently she stopped him.
“One thing I should like to know before we go further,” she said; “—why they all fell down except the ancient Mariner.”
“You remember that Death and the woman were casting dice?”
“Yes.”
“It is not very clear, but this is how I understand the thing:—They diced for the crew, one by one; Death won every one till they came to the last, the ancient Mariner himself, and the woman, a sort of live Death, wins him. That is why she cries, 'I've won, I've won!' and whistles thrice—though she has won only one out of two hundred. I should think she was used to Death having more than she, else she wouldn't have been so pleased. Perhaps she seldom got one!”
“Yes, I see all that. But things oughtn't to go by the casting of dice. Money may, for that does not signify, but not the souls and bodies of men. It should not be the way in a poem any more than in the open world.—Let me think!—I have it!—They were not good men, those sailors! They first blamed, and then justified, and then again blamed and cruelly punished the poor mariner, who had done wrong certainly, but was doubtless even then sorry for it. He was cruel to a bird he did not know, and they were cruel to a man they did know! So they are taken, and he is left—to come well out of it at last, I hope.—Yes, it's all right! Now you can go on.”
She said nothing as he showed her the deck strewn so thick with the dead bodies, whose cursing eyes all looked one way; but when the heavenly contrast came:—