"But why wasn't he as gentle with good women?" said Leopold.
"Wasn't he?" said the curate in some surprise.
"He said What have I to do with thee to his own mother?"
"A Greek scholar should go to the Greek," said the curate. "Our English is not perfect. You see she wanted to make him show off, and he thought how little she knew what he came to the world for. Her thoughts were so unlike his that he said, What have we in common! It was a moan of the God-head over the distance of its creature. Perhaps he thought: How then will you stand the shock when at length it comes? But he looked at her as her own son ought to look at every blessed mother, and she read in his eyes no rebuke, for instantly, sure of her desire, she told them to do whatever he said."
"I hope that's the right way of it," said Leopold, "for I want to trust him out and out. But what do you make of the story of the poor woman that came about her daughter? Wasn't he rough to her? It always seemed to me such a cruel thing to talk of throwing the meat of the children to the dogs!"
"We cannot judge of the word until we know the spirit that gave birth to it. Let me ask you a question: What would you take for the greatest proof of downright friendship a man could show you?"
"That is too hard a question to answer all at once."
"Well, I may be wrong, but the deepest outcome of friendship seems to me, on the part of the superior at least, the permission, or better still, the call, to share in his sufferings. And in saying that hard word to the poor Gentile, our Lord honoured her thus mightily. He assumed for the moment the part of the Jew towards the Gentile, that he might, for the sake of all the world of Gentiles and Jews, lay bare to his Jewish followers the manner of spirit they were of, and let them see what a lovely humanity they despised in their pride of election. He took her to suffer with him for the salvation of the world. The cloud overshadowed them both, but what words immediately thereafter made a glory in her heart! He spoke to her as if her very faith had reached an arm into the heavens, and brought therefrom the thing she sought.—But I confess," the curate went on, "those two passages have both troubled me. So I presume will everything that is God's, until it becomes a strength and a light by revealing its true nature to the heart that has grown capable of understanding it. The first sign of the coming capacity and the coming joy, is the anxiety and the question.—There is another passage, which, although it does not trouble me so much, I cannot yet get a right perception of. When Mary Magdalene took the Master of Death for the gardener—the gardener of the garden of the tombs! no great mistake, was it?—it is a lovely thing, that mistaking of Jesus for the gardener!—how the holy and the lowly, yea the holy and the common meet on all sides! Just listen to their morning talk—the morning of the eternal open world to Jesus, while the shadows of this narrow life still clustered around Mary:—I can give it you exactly, for I was reading it this very day.
"'Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?'
"'Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.'
"'Mary.'
"'Master!'
"'Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father; and to my God and your God.'
"Why did he say, DO NOT TOUCH ME? It could not be that there was any defilement to one in the new body of the resurrection, from contact with one still in the old garments of humanity. But could it be that there was danger to her in the contact? Was there something in the new house from Heaven hurtful to the old tabernacle? I can hardly believe it. Perhaps it might be. But we must look at the reason the Master gives—only of all words hard to understand, the little conjunctions are sometimes the hardest. What can that FOR mean? 'Touch me not, FOR I am not yet ascended to my Father.' Does it mean, 'I must first present myself to my Father; I must first have His hand laid on this body new-risen from the grave; I must go home first?' The child must kiss his mother first, then his sisters and brothers: was it so with Jesus? Was he so glad in his father, that he must carry even the human body he had rescued eternal from the grave, home to show him first? There are many difficulties about the interpretation, and even if true, it would still shock every heart whose devotion was less than absolutely child-like. Was not God WITH him, as close to him as even God could come to his eternal son—in him—ONE with him, all the time? How could he get nearer to him by going to Heaven? What head-quarters, what court of place and circumstance should the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible hold? And yet if from him flow time and space, although he cannot be subject to them; if his son could incarnate himself—cast the living, responsive, elastic, flowing, evanishing circumstance of a human garment around him; if, as Novalis says, God can become whatever he can create, then may there not be some central home of God, holding relation even to time and space and sense? But I am bewildered about it.—Jesus stood then in the meeting point of both worlds, or rather in the skirts of the great world that infolds the less. I am talking like a baby, for my words cannot compass or even represent my thoughts. This world looks to us the natural and simple one, and so it is—absolutely fitted to our need and education. But there is that in us which is not at home in this world, which I believe holds secret relations with every star, or perhaps rather, with that in the heart of God whence issued every star, diverse in kind and character as in colour and place and motion and light. To that in us, this world is so far strange and unnatural and unfitting, and we need a yet homelier home. Yea, no home at last will do, but the home of God's heart. Jesus, I say, was now looking, on one side, into the region of a deeper life, where his people, those that knew their own when they saw him, would one day find themselves tenfold at home; while, on the other hand, he was looking into the region of their present life, which custom and faithlessness make them afraid to leave. But we need not fear what the new conditions of life will bring, either for body or heart, for they will be nearer and sweeter to our deeper being, as Jesus is nearer and dearer than any man because he is more human than any. He is all that we can love or look for, and at the root of that very loving and looking.—'In my Father's house are many mansions,' he said. Matter, time, space, are all God's, and whatever may become of our philosophies, whatever he does with or in respect of time, place, and what we call matter, his doing must be true in philosophy as well as fact. But I am wandering."
The curate was wandering, but the liberty of wandering was essential to his talking with the kind of freedom and truth he wanted to mediate betwixt his pupil and the lovely things he saw.
"I wonder where the penitent thief was all the time," said Leopold.
"Yes, that also is a difficulty. There again come in the bothering time and space, bothering in their relation to heavenly things, I mean. On the Friday, the penitent thief, as you call him, was to be with Jesus in Paradise; and now it was Sunday, and Jesus said he had not yet been up to see his Father. Some would say, I am too literal, too curious; what can Friday and Sunday have to do with Paradise? But words MEAN in both worlds, for they are not two but one—surely at least when Jesus thinks and speaks of them; and there can be no wrong in feeling ever so blindly and dully after WHAT they mean. Such humble questioning can do no harm, even if, in face of the facts, the questions be as far off and SILLY—in the old sweet meaning of the word—as those of any infant concerning a world he has not proved.—But about Mary Magdalene: He must have said the word TOUCH ME NOT. That could not have crept in. It is too hard for an interpolation, I think; and if no interpolation, it must mean some deep-good thing we don't understand. One thing we can make sure of: it was nothing that should hurt her; for see what follows. But for that, when he said TOUCH ME NOT, FOR I AM NOT YET ASCENDED TO MY FATHER, she might have thought—'Ah! thou hast thy Father to go to, and thou wilt leave us for him.'—BUT, he went on, GO TO MY BRETHREN AND SAY UNTO THEM: I ASCEND UNTO MY FATHER, AND YOUR FATHER; AND MY GOD AND YOUR GOD. What more could she want? Think: the Father of Jesus, with whom, in all his knowledge and all his suffering, the grand heart was perfectly, exultingly satisfied,—that Father he calls our Father too. He shares with his brethren—of his best, his deepest, his heartiest, most secret delight, and makes it their and his most open joy: he shares his eternal Father with us, his perfect God with his brethren. And whatever his not having yet ascended to him may mean, we see, with marvel and joy, that what delayed him—even though, for some reason perfect in tenderness as in truth, he would not be touched—was love to Mary Magdalene and his mother and his brethren. He could not go to the Father without comforting them first. And certainly whatever she took the TOUCH ME NOT to mean or point at, it was nothing that hurt her.—It just strikes me—is it possible he said it in order to turn the overwhelming passion of her joy, which after such a restoration would have clung more than ever to the visible presence, and would be ready to suffer the pains of death yet again when he parted from her—might it be to turn that torrent into the wider and ever widening channel of joy in his everlasting presence to the innermost being, his communion, heart to heart, with every child of his Father? In our poor weakness and narrowness and self-love, even of Jesus the bodily may block out the spiritual nearness, which, however in most moods we may be unable to realise the fact, is and remains a thing unutterably lovelier and better and dearer—enhancing tenfold what vision of a bodily presence may at some time be granted us. But how any woman can help casting herself heart and soul at the feet of such a lowly grandeur, such a tender majesty, such a self-dissolving perfection—I cannot imagine. The truth must be that those who kneel not have not seen. You do not once read of a woman being against him—except indeed it was his own mother, when she thought he was going all astray and forgetting his high mission. The divine love in him towards his Father in heaven and his brethren of men, was ever melting down his conscious individuality in sweetest showers upon individual hearts; he came down like rain upon the mown grass, like showers that water the earth. No woman, no man surely ever saw him as he was and did not worship!"
Helen turned and glided back into the house, and neither knew she had been there.
All that could be done for Leopold by tenderest sisterly care under the supervision of Mr. Faber, who believed in medicine less than in good nursing, was well supplemented by the brotherly ministrations of Wingfold, who gave all the time he could honestly spare from his ordinary work to soothe and enlighten the suffering youth. But it became clearer every week that nothing would avail to entice the torn roots of his being to clasp again the soil of the world: he was withering away out of it. Ere long symptoms appeared which no one could well mistake, and Lingard himself knew that he was dying. Wingfold had dreaded that his discovery of the fact might reveal that he had imagined some atonement in the public confession he desired to make, and that, when he found it denied him, he would fall into despair. But he was with him at the moment, and his bearing left no ground for anxiety. A gleam of gladness from below the horizon of his spirit, shot up, like the aurora of a heavenly morning, over the sky of his countenance. He glanced at his friend, smiled, and said,
"It has killed me too, and that is a comfort."
The curate only looked his reply.
"They say," resumed Leopold, after a while, "that God takes the will for the deed:—do you think so?"
"Certainly, if it be a true, genuine will."
"I am sure I meant to give myself up," said Leopold. "I had not the slightest idea they were fooling me. I know it now, but what can I do? I am so weak, I should only die on the way."
He tried to rise, but fell back in the chair.
"Oh!" he sighed, "isn't it good of God to let me die! Who knows what he may do for me on the other side! Who can tell what the bounty of a God like Jesus may be!"
A vision arose before the mind's eye of the curate:—Emmeline kneeling for Leopold's forgiveness; but he wisely held his peace. The comforter of the sinner must come from the forgiveness of God, not from the favourable judgment of man mitigating the harshness of his judgment of himself. Wingfold's business was to start him well in the world whither he was going. He must fill his scrip with the only wealth that would not dissolve in the waters of the river—that was, the knowledge of Jesus.
It shot a terrible pang to the heart of Helen, herself, for all her suffering, so full of life, when she learned that her darling must die. Yet was there no small consolation mingled with the shock. Fear vanished, and love returned with grief in twofold strength. She flew to him, and she who had been so self-contained, so composed, so unsubmissive to any sway of feeling, broke into such a storm of passionate affection that the vexilla mortis answered from his bosom, flaunting themselves in crimson before her eyes. In vain, for Leopold's sake, the curate had sought to quiet her: she had resented his interference; but this result of her impetuosity speedily brought her to her senses, and set her to subdue herself.
The same evening Leopold insisted on dictating to the curate his confession, which done, he signed it, making him and Helen attest the signature. This document Wingfold took charge of, promising to make the right use of it, whatever he should on reflection conclude that to be; after which Leopold's mind seemed at ease.
His sufferings from cough and weakness and fever now augmented with greater rapidity, but it was plain from the kind of light in his eye, and the far look which was not yet retrospective, that hope and expectation were high in him. He had his times of gloom, when the dragon of the past crept out of its cave, and tore him afresh; but the prospect of coming deliverance strengthened him.
"Do you really think," he said once to the curate, "that I shall ever see Emmeline again?"
"Truly I hope so," answered his friend, "and could argue upon the point. But I think the best way, when doubt comes as to anything you would like to be true, is just to hide yourself in God, as the child would hide from the dark in the folds of his mother's mantle."
"But aunt would say, if she knew, that, dying as she did, Emmeline could not be saved."
"Some people may have to be a good deal astonished as to what can and cannot be," returned the curate. "But never mind what people say: make your appeal to the saviour of men about whatever troubles you. Cry to the faithful creator, his Father. To be a faithful creator needs a might of truth and loving-kindness of which our narrow hearts can ill conceive. Ask much of God, my boy, and be very humble and very hoping."
After all such utterances, Leopold would look his thanks, and hold his peace.
"I wish it was over," he said once.
"So do I," returned the curate. "But be of good courage, I think nothing will be given you to bear that you will not be able to bear."
"I can bear a great deal more than I have had yet. I don't think I shall ever complain. That would be to take myself out of his hands, and I have no hope anywhere else.—Are you any surer about him, sir, than you used to be?"
"At least I hope in him far more," answered Wingfold.
"Is that enough?"
"No. I want more."
"I wish I could come back and tell you that I am alive and all is true."
"I would rather have the natural way of it, and get the good of not knowing first."
"But if I could tell you I had found God, then that would make you sure."
Wingfold could not help a smile:—as if any assurance from such a simple soul could reach the questions that tossed his troubled spirit!
"I think I shall find all I want in Jesus Christ," he said.
"But you can't see him, you know."
"Perhaps I can do better. And at all events I can wait," said the curate. "Even if he would let me, I would not see him one moment before he thought it best. I would not be out of a doubt or difficulty an hour sooner than he would take me."
Leopold gazed at him and said no more.
As the disease advanced, his desire for fresh air and freedom grew to a great longing. One hot day, whose ardours, too strong for the leaves whose springs had begun to dry up, were burning them "yellow and black and pale and hectic red," the fancy seized him to get out of the garden with its clipt box-trees and cypresses, into the meadow beyond. There a red cow was switching her tail as she gathered her milk from the world, and looking as if all were well. He liked the look of the cow, and the open meadow, and wanted to share it with her, he said. Helen, with the anxiety of a careful nurse, feared it might hurt him.
"What DOES it matter?" he returned. "Is life so sweet that every moment more of it is a precious boon? After I'm gone a few days, you won't know a week from an hour of me. What a weight it will be off you! I envy you all the relief of it. It will be to you just what it would be to me to get into that meadow."
Helen made haste to let him have his will. They prepared a sort of litter, and the curate and the coachman carried him. Hearing what they were about, Mrs. Ramshorn hurried into the garden to protest, but protested in vain, and joined the little procession, walking with Helen, like a second mourner, after the bier. They crossed the lawn, and through a double row of small cypresses went winding down to the underground passage, as if to the tomb itself. They had not thought of opening the door first, and the place was dark and sepulchral. Helen hastened to set it wide.
"Lay me down for a moment," said Leopold. "—Here I lie in my tomb! How soft and brown the light is! I should not mind lying here, half-asleep, half-awake, for centuries, if only I had the hope of a right good waking at last."
A flood of fair light flashed in sweet torrent into the place—and there, framed in the doorway, but far across the green field, stood the red cow, switching her tail.
"And here comes my resurrection!" cried Leopold. "I have not had long to wait for it—have I?"
He smiled a pained content as he spoke, and they bore him out into the sun and air. They set him down in the middle of the field in a low chair—not far from a small clump of trees, through which the footpath led to the stile whereon the curate was seated when he first saw the Polwarths. Mrs. Ramshorn found the fancy of the sick man pleasant for the hale, and sent for her knitting. Helen sat down empty-handed on the wool at her brother's feet, and Wingfold, taking a book from his pocket, withdrew to the trees.
He had not read long, sitting within sight and call of the group, when Helen came to him.
"He seems inclined to go to sleep," she said. "Perhaps if you would read something, it would send him off."
"I will with pleasure," he said, and returning with her, sat down on the grass.
"May I read you a few verses I came upon the other day, Leopold?" he asked.
"Please do," answered the invalid, rather sleepily.
I will not pledge myself that the verses belonged to the book Wingfold held before him, but here they are. He read them slowly, and as evenly and softly and rhythmically as he could.
They come to thee, the halt, the maimed, the blind,The devil-torn, the sick, the sore;Thy heart their well of life they find,Thine ear their open door.
Ah! who can tell the joy in Palestine—What smiles and tears of rescued throngs!Their lees of life were turned to wine,Their prayers to shouts and songs!
The story dear our wise men fable call,Give paltry facts the mighty range;To me it seems just what should fall,And nothing very strange.
But were I deaf and lame and blind and sore,I scarce would care for cure to ask;Another prayer should haunt thy door—Set thee a harder task.
If thou art Christ, see here this heart of mine,Torn, empty, moaning, and unblest!Had ever heart more need of thine,If thine indeed hath rest?
Thy word, thy hand right soon did scare the baneThat in their bodies death did breed:If thou canst cure my deeper pain,Then thou art Lord indeed.
Leopold smiled sleepily as Wingfold read, and ere the reading was over, slept.
"What can the little object want here?" said Mrs. Ramshorn.
Wingfold looked up, and seeing who it was approaching them, said,
"Oh! that is Mr. Polwarth, who keeps the park gate."
"Nobody can well mistake him," returned Mrs. Ramshorn. "Everybody knows the creature."
"Few people know him really," said Wingfold.
"I HAVE heard that he is an oddity in mind as well as in body," saidMrs. Ramshorn.
"He is a friend of mine," rejoined the curate. "I will go and meet him. He wants to know how Leopold is."
"Pray keep your seat, Mr. Wingfold. I don't in the least mind him," said Mrs. Ramshorn. "Any FRIEND of yours, as you are kind enough to call him, will be welcome. Clergymen come to know—indeed it is their duty to be acquainted with all sorts of people. The late dean of Halystone would stop and speak to a pauper."
The curate did however go and meet Polwarth, and returning with him presented him to Mrs. Ramshorn, who received him with perfect condescension, and a most gracious bow. Helen bent her head also, very differently, but it would be hard to say how. The little man turned from them, and for a moment stood looking on the face of the sleeping youth: he had not seen him since Helen ordered him to leave the house. Even now she looked angry at his presumption in staring at her brother. But Polwarth did not see her look. A great tenderness came over his face, and his lips moved softly. "The Lord of thy life keep it for thee, my son!" he murmured, gazed a moment longer, then rejoined Wingfold.
They walked aside a few paces.
"Pray be seated," said Mrs. Ramshorn, without looking up from her knitting—the seat she offered being the wide meadow.
But they had already done so, and presently were deep in a gentle talk, of which at length certain words that had been foolhardy enough to wander within her range, attracted the notice of Mrs. Ramshorn, and she began to listen. But she could not hear distinctly.
"There should be one bishop at least," the little man was saying, "or I don't know but he ought to be the arch-arch-bishop,—a poor man, if possible,—one like the country parson Chaucer sets up in contrast with the regular clergy,—whose main business should be to travel about from university to university, from college to college, from school to school, warning off all young men who did not know within themselves that it was neither for position, nor income, nor study, nor influence, that they sought to minister in the temple, from entering the church. As from holy ground, he would warn them off."
Mrs. Ramshorn fancied, from certain obscure associations in her own mind, that he was speaking of dissenting ministers and persons of low origin, who might wish to enter the church for the sake of BETTERING THEMSELVES, and holding as she did, that no church preferment should be obtained except by persons of good family and position, qualified to keep up the dignity of the profession, she was not a little gratified to hear, as she supposed, the same sentiments from the mouth of such an illiterate person as, taking no note of his somewhat remarkable utterance, she imagined Polwarth to be. Therefore she proceeded to patronize him yet a little farther.
"I quite agree with you," she said graciously. "None but such as you describe should presume to set foot within the sacred precincts of the profession."
Polwarth did not much relish Mrs. Ramshorn's style, and was considerably surprised at receiving such a hearty approval of a proposed reformation in clerical things, reaching even to the archiepiscopal, which he had put half-humorously, and yet in thorough earnest, for the ear of Wingfold only. He was little enough desirous of pursuing the conversation with Mrs. Ramshorn: Charity herself does not require of a man to cast his precious things at the feet of my lady Disdain; but he must reply.
"Yes," he said, "the great evil in the church has always been the presence in it of persons unsuited for the work there required of them. One very simple sifting rule would be, that no one should be admitted to holy orders who had not first proved himself capable of making a better living in some other calling."
"I cannot go with you so far as that—so few careers are opened to gentlemen," rejoined Mrs. Ramshorn. "Besides—take the bar, for instance: the forensic style a man must there acquire would hardly become the pulpit. But it would not be a bad rule that everyone, for admission to holy orders, should be possessed of property sufficient at least to live upon. With that for a foundation, his living would begin at once to tell, and he would immediately occupy the superior position every clergyman ought to have."
"What I was thinking of," said Polwarth, "was mainly the experience in life he would gather by having to make his own living; that, behind the counter or the plough, or in the workshop, he would come to know men and their struggles and their thoughts—"
"Good heavens!" exclaimed Mrs. Ramshorn. "But I must be under some misapprehension! It is not possible you can be speaking of the CHURCH—of the clerical PROFESSION. The moment that is brought within the reach of such people as you describe, that moment the church sinks to the level of the catholic priesthood."
"Say rather, to the level of Jeremy Taylor," returned Polwarth, "who was the son of a barber; or of Tillotson, who was the son of a clothier, or something of the sort, and certainly a fierce dissenter. His enemies said the archbishop himself was never baptized. By-the-way, he was not ordained till he was thirty—and that bears on what I was just saying to Mr. Wingfold, that I would have no one ordained till after forty, by which time he would know whether he had any real call or only a temptation to the church, from the base hope of an easy living."
By this time Mrs. Ramshorn had had more than enough of it. The man was a leveller, a chartist, a positivist—a despiser of dignities!
"Mr.—, Mr.—, I don't know your name—you will oblige me by uttering no more such vile slanders in my company. You are talking about what you don't in the least understand. The man who does not respect the religion of his native country is capable of—of—of ANYTHING.—I am astonished, Mr. Wingfold, at your allowing a member of your congregation to speak with so little regard for the feelings of the clergy.—You forget, sir, when you attribute what you call base motives to the cloth—you forget who said the labourer was worthy of his hire."
"I hope not, madam. I only venture to suggest that, though the labourer is worthy of his hire, not every man is worthy of the labour."
Wingfold was highly amused at the turn things had taken. Polwarth looked annoyed at having allowed himself to be beguiled into such an utterly useless beating of the air.
"My friend HAS some rather peculiar notions, Mrs. Ramshorn," said the curate;" but you must admit it was your approval that encouraged him to go on."
"It is quite as well to know what people think," answered Mrs. Ramshorn, pretending she had drawn him out from suspicion. "My husband used to say that very few of the clergy had any notion of the envy and opposition of the lower orders, both to them personally, and to the doctrines they taught. To low human nature the truth has always been unpalatable."
What precisely she meant by THE TRUTH it would be hard to say, but if the visual embodiment of it was not a departed dean, it was at least always associated in her mind with a cathedral choir, and a portly person in silk stockings.
Here happily Leopold woke, and his eyes fell upon the gate-keeper.
"Ah, Mr. Polwarth! I am so glad to see you!" he said." I am getting on, you see. It will be over soon."
"I see," replied Polwarth, going up to him, and taking his offered hand in both his. "I could almost envy you for having got so near the end of your troubles."
"Are you sure it will be the end of them, sir?"
"Of some of them at least, I hope, and those the worst. I cannot be sure of anything but that all things work together for good to them that love God."
"I don't know yet whether I do love God."
"Not the father of Jesus Christ?"
"If God is really just like him, I don't see how any man could help loving him. But, do you know? I am terrified sometimes at the thought of seeing MY father. He was such a severe man! I am afraid he will scorn me."
"Never—if he has got into heavenly ways. And you have your mother there too, have you not?"
"Oh! yes; I didn't think of that. I don't remember much of her."
"Anyhow, you have God there, and you must rest in him. He will not forget you, for that would be ceasing to be God. If God were to forget for one moment, the universe would grow black—vanish—rush out again from the realm of law and order into chaos and night."
"But I have been wicked."
"The more need you have, if possible, of your Father in heaven."
Here Mrs. Ramshorn beckoned the attendance of the curate where she sat a few yards off on the other side of Leopold. She was a little ashamed of having condescended to lose her temper, and when the curate went up to her, said, with an attempt at gaiety:
"Is your odd little friend, as you call him, all—?"
And she tapped her lace-cap carefully with her finger.
"Rather more so than most people," answered Wingfold. "He is a very remarkable man."
"He speaks as if he had seen better days—though where he can have gathered such detestable revolutionary notions, I can't think."
"He is a man of education, as you see," said the curate.
"You don't mean he has been to Oxford or Cambridge?"
"No. His education has been of a much higher sort than is generally found there. He knows ten times as much as most university men."
"Ah! yes; but that goes for nothing: he hasn't the standing. And if he had been to Oxford, he never could have imbibed such notions. Besides—his manners! To speak of the clergy as he did in the hearing of one whose whole history is bound up with the church!"
She meant herself, not Wingfold.
"But of course," she went on, "there must be something VERY wrong with him to know so much as you say, and occupy such a menial position! Nothing but a gate-keeper, and talk like that about bishops and what not! People that are crooked in body are always crooked in mind too. I dare say now he has quite a coterie of friends and followers amongst the lower orders in Glaston. He's just the sort of man to lead the working classes astray. No doubt he is a very interesting study for a young man like you, but you must take care; you may be misunderstood. A young clergyman CAN'T be too cautious—if he has any hope of rising in his profession.—A gate-keeper, indeed!"
"Wasn't it something like that David wanted to be?" said the curate.
"Mr. Wingfold, I never allow any such foolish jests in my hearing. It was a DOOR-keeper the Psalmist said—and to the house of God, not a nobleman's park."
"A verger, I suppose," thought Wingfold.—"Seriously, Mrs. Ramshorn, that poor little atom of a creature is the wisest man I know," he said.
"Likely enough, in YOUR judgment, Mr. Wingfold," said the dean's widow, and drew herself up.
The curate accepted his dismissal, and joined the little man byLeopold's chair.
"I wish you two could be with me when I am dying," said Leopold.
"If you will let your sister know your wish, you may easily have it," said the curate.
"It will be just like saying good-bye at the pier-head, and pushing off alone—you can't get more than one into the boat—out, out, alone, into the infinite ocean of—nobody knows what or where," said Leopold.
"Except those that are there already, and they will be waiting to receive you," said Polwarth. "You may well hope, if you have friends to see you off, you will have friends to welcome you too. But I think it's not so much like setting off from the pier-head, as getting down the side of the ocean-ship, to laud at the pier-head, where your friends are all standing looking out for you."
"Well! I don't know," said Leopold, with a sigh of weariness. "I'm thankful sometimes that I've grown stupid. I suppose it's with dying. I didn't use to feel so. Sometimes I seem not to know or care anything about anything. I only want to stop coughing and aching and go to sleep."
"Jesus was glad to give up his spirit into his Father's hands. He was very tired before he got away."
"Thank you. Thank you. I have him. He is somewhere. You can't mention his name but it brings me something to live and hope for. If he is there, all will be well. And if I do get too tired to care for anything, he won't mind; he will only let me go to sleep, and wake me up again by-and-by when I am rested."
He closed his eyes.
"I want to go to bed," he said.
They carried him into the house.
Every day after this, so long as the weather continued warm, it was Leopold's desire to be carried out to the meadow. Once at his earnest petition, instead of setting him down in the usual place, they went on with him into the park, but he soon wished to be taken back to the meadow. He did not like the trees to come between him and his bed: they made him feel like a rabbit that was too far from its hole, he said; and he was never tempted to try it again.
Regularly too every day, about one o'clock, the gnome-like form of the gate-keeper would issue from the little door in the park-fence, and come marching across the grass towards Leopold's chair, which was set near the small clump of trees already mentioned. The curate was almost always there, not talking much to the invalid, but letting him know every now and then by some little attention or word, or merely by showing himself, that he was near. Sometimes he would take refuge from the heat, which the Indian never felt too great, amongst the trees, and there would generally be thinking out what he wanted to say to his people the next Sunday.
One thing he found strange, and could not satisfy himself concerning, namely, that although his mind was so much occupied with Helen that he often seemed unable to think consecutively upon any subject, he could always foresee his sermon best when, seated behind one of the trees, he could by moving his head see her at work beside Leopold's chair. But the thing that did carry him through became plain enough to him afterwards: his faith in God was all the time growing—and that through what seemed at the time only a succession of interruptions. Nothing is so ruinous to progress in which effort is needful, as satisfaction with apparent achievement; that ever sounds a halt; but Wingfold's experience was that no sooner did he set his foot on the lowest hillock of self-congratulation than some fresh difficulty came that threw him prostrate; and he rose again only in the strength of the necessity for deepening and broadening his foundations that he might build yet higher, trust yet farther: that was the only way not to lose everything. He was gradually learning that his faith must be an absolute one, claiming from God everything the love of a perfect Father could give, or the needs he had created in his child could desire; that he must not look to himself first for help, or imagine that the divine was only the supplement to the weakness and failure of the human; that the highest effort of the human was to lay hold of the divine. He learned that he could keep no simplest law in its loveliness until he was possessed of the same spirit whence that law sprung; that he could not love Helen aright, simply, perfectly, unselfishly, except through the presence of the originating Love; that the one thing wherein he might imitate the free creative will of God was to will the presence and power of that will which gave birth to his. It was the vital growth of this faith, even when he was too much troubled to recognize the fact, that made him strong in the midst of weakness; when the son of man in him cried out, Let this cup pass, the son of God in him could yet cry, Let thy will be done. He could "inhabit trembling," and yet be brave.
Mrs. Ramshorn generally came to the meadow to see how the invalid was after he was settled, but she seldom staid: she was not fond of nursing, neither was there any need of her assistance; and as Helen never dreamed now of opposing the smallest wish of her brother, there was no longer any obstruction to the visits of Polwarth, which were eagerly looked for by Leopold.
One day the little man did not appear, but soon after his usual time the still more gnome-like form of his little niece came scrambling rather than walking over the meadow. Gently and modestly, almost shyly, she came up to Helen, made her a courtesy like a village school-girl, and said, while she glanced at Leopold now and then with an ocean of tenderness in her large, clear woman-eyes:
"My uncle is sorry, Miss Lingard, that he cannot come to see your brother to-day, but he is laid up with an attack of asthma. He wished Mr. Lingard to know that he was thinking of him:—shall I tell you just what he said?"
Helen bent her neck: she did not feel much interest in the matter.But Leopold said,
"Every word of such a good man is precious: tell me, please."
Rachel turned to him with the flush of a white rose on her face.
"I asked him, sir—'Shall I tell him you are praying for him?' and he said, 'No. I am not exactly praying for him, but I am thinking of God and him together.'"
The tears rose in Leopold's eyes. Rachel lifted her baby-hand, and stroked the dusky, long-fingured one that lay upon the arm of the chair.
"Dear Mr. Lingard," she said,—Helen stopped in the middle of an embroidery stitch, and gave her a look as if she were about to ask for her testimonials—"I could well wish, if it pleased God, that I were as near home as you."
Leopold took her hand in his.
"Do you suffer then?" he said.
"Just look at me," she answered with a smile that was very pitiful, though she did not mean it for such, "—shut up all my life in this epitome of deformity! But I ain't grumbling: that would be a fine thing! My house is not so small but God can get into it. Only you can't think how tired I often am of it."
"Mr. Wingfold was telling me yesterday that some people fancy St. Paul was little and misshapen, and that that was his thorn in the flesh."
"I don't think that can be true, or he would never have compared his body to a tabernacle, for, oh dear! it won't stretch an inch to give a body room. I don't think either, if that had been the case, he would have said he didn't want it taken off, but another put over it. I do want mine taken off me, and a downright good new one put on instead—something not quite so far off your sister's there, Mr. Lingard. But I'm ashamed of talking like this. It came of wanting to tell you I can't be sorry you are going when I should so dearly like to go myself."
"And I would gladly stay a while, and that in a house no bigger than yours, if I had a conscience of the same sort in my back-parlour," said Leopold smiling. "But when I am gone the world will be the cleaner for it.—Do you know about God the same way your uncle does, Miss Polwarth?"
"I hope I do—a little. I doubt if anybody knows as much as he does," she returned, very seriously. "But God knows about us all the same, and he don't limit his goodness to us by our knowledge of him. It's so wonderful that he can be all to everybody! That is his Godness, you know. We can't be all to any one person. Do what we will, we can't let anybody see into us even. We are all in bits and spots. But I fancy it's a sign that we come of God that we don't like it. How gladly I would help you, Mr. Lingard, and I can do nothing for you.—I'm afraid your beautiful sister thinks me very forward. But she don't know what it is to lie awake all night sometimes, think-thinking about my beautiful brothers and sisters that I can't get near to do anything for."
"What an odd creature!" thought Helen, to whom her talk conveyed next to nothing. "—But I daresay they are both out of their minds. Poor things! they must have a hard time of it with one thing and another!"
"I beg your pardon again for talking so much," concluded Rachel, and, with a courtesy first to the one then to the other, walked away. Her gait was no square march like her uncle's, but a sort of sidelong propulsion, rendered more laborious by the thick grass of the meadow.