Down the hill and down!—to the shores of the salt sea, where the flowing life is dammed into a stagnant lake, a dead sea, growing more and more bitter with separation and lack of outlet. Mrs. Franks had come to feel the comforting of her husband a hopeless thing, and had all but ceased to attempt it. He grew more hopeless for the lack of what she thought moved him no more, and when she ceased to comfort him, the fountain of her own hope began to fail; in comforting him she had comforted herself. The boys, whose merriment even was always of a sombre kind, got more gloomy, but had not begun to quarrel; for that evil, as interfering with their profession, the father had so sternly crushed that they had less than the usual tendency to it.
They had reached at last the point of being unable to pay for their lodging. They were indeed a fort-night's rent behind. Their landlady was not willing to be hard upon them, but what could a poor woman do, she said. The day was come when they must go forth like Abraham without a home, but not like Abraham with a tent and the world before them to set it up in, not like Abraham with camels and asses to help them along. The weakly wife had to carry the sickly baby, who, with many ups and downs, had been slowly pining away. The father went laden with the larger portion of the goods yet remaining to them, and led the Serpent of the Prairies, with the drum hanging from his neck, by the hand. The other boys followed, bearing the small stock of implements belonging to their art.
They had delayed their departure till it was more than dusk, for Franks could not help a vague feeling of blame for the condition of his family, and shrank from being seen of men's eyes; every one they met must know they had not a place to lay their heads! The world was like a sea before them—a prospect of ceaseless motion through the night, with the hope of an occasional rest on a doorstep or the edge of the curb-stone when the policeman's back was turned. They set out to go nowhither—to tramp on and on. Is it any wonder—does it imply wickedness beyond that lack of trust in God which is at the root of all wickedness, if the thought of ending their troubles by death crossed his mind, and from very tenderness kept returning? At the last gasp, as it seemed, in the close and ever closer siege of misfortune, he was almost ready, like the Jews of Masada, to conquer by self-destruction. But ever and again the sad eyes of his wife turned him from the thought, and he would plod on, thinking, as near as possible, about nothing.
At length as they wandered they came to a part where seemed to be only small houses and mews. Presently they found themselves in a little lane with no thoroughfare, at the back of some stables, and had to return along the rough-paved, neglected way. Such was the quiet and apparent seclusion of the spot, that it struck Franks they had better find its most sheltered corner, in which to sit down and rest awhile, possibly sleep. Scarcely would policeman, he thought, enter such a forsaken place! The same moment they heard the measured tread of the enemy on the other side of the stables. Instinctively, hurriedly, they looked around for some place of concealment, and spied, at the end of a blank wall, belonging apparently to some kind of warehouse, a narrow path between that and the wall of the next property. Careless to what it led, anxious only to escape the annoyance of the policeman, they turned quickly into it. Scarcely had they done so when the Serpent, whose hand his father had let go, disappeared with a little cry, and a whimper ascended through the darkness.
"Hold your n'ise, you rascal!" said his father sharply, but under his breath; "the bobby will hear you, and have us all to the lock-up!"
Not a sound more was heard. Neither did the boy reappear.
"Good heavens, John!" cried the mother in an agonized whisper, "the child has fallen down a sewer! Oh, my God! he is gone for ever!"
"Hold your n'ise," said Franks again, "an' let's all go down a'ter him! It's better down anywheres than up where there ain't nothing to eat an' nowheres to lie down in."
"'Tain't a bad place," cried a little voice in a whisper broken with repressed sobs. "'Tain't a bad place, I don't think, only I broken one o' my two legs; it won't move to fetch of me up again."
"Thank God in heaven, the child's alive!" cried the mother. "—You ain't much hurt, are you, Moxy?"
"Rather, mother!"
By this time the steps of the policeman, to which the father had been listening with more anxiety than to the words of wife or child, were almost beyond hearing. Franks turned, and going down a few steps found his child, where he half lay, half sat upon them. But when he lifted him, he gave a low cry of pain. It was impossible to see where or how much he was hurt. The father sat down and took him on his knees.
"You'd better come an' sit here, wife," he said in a low dull voice. "There ain't no one a sittin' up for us. The b'y's a bit hurt, an' here you'll be out o' the wind at least."
They all got as far down the stair as its room would permit—the elder boys with their heads hardly below the level of the wind. But by and by one of them crept down past his mother, feebly soothing the whimpering baby, and began to feel what sort of a place they were in.
"Here's a door, father!" he said.
"Well, what o' that?" returned his father. "'Taint no door open to us or the likes on us. There ain't no open door for the likes of us but the door o' the grave."
"Perhaps this is it, father," said Moxy.
"If it be," answered his father with bitterness, "we'll find it open, I'll be bound."
The boy's hand had come upon a latch; he lifted it, and pushed.
"Father," he cried with a gasp, "it is open!"
"Get in then," said his father roughly, giving him a push with his foot.
"I daren't. It's so dark!" he answered.
"Here, you come an' take the Sarpint," returned the father, with faintly reviving hope, "an' I'll see what sort of a place it is. If it's any place at all, it's better than bein' i' the air all night at this freezin' time!"
So saying he gave Moxy to his bigger brother and went to learn what kind of a place they had got to. Ready as he had been a moment before for the grave, he was careful in stepping into the unknown dark. Feeling with foot and hand, he went in. He trod upon an earthen floor, and the place had a musty smell: it might be a church vault, he thought. In and in he went, with sliding foot on the soundless floor, and sliding hand along the cold wall—on and on, round two corners, past a closed door, and back to that by which he had entered, where, as at the grave's mouth, sat his family in sad silence, waiting his return.
"Wife," he said, "we can't do better than to take the only thing that's offered. The floor's firm, an' it's out o' the air. It's some sort of a cellar—p'r'aps at the bottom of a church. It do look as if it wur left open jest for us!—Youusedto talk abouthimabove, wife!"
He took her by the hand and led the way into the darkness, the boys following, one of them with a hold of his mother, and his arm round the other, who was carrying Moxy. Franks closed the door behind them, and they had gained a refuge. Feeling about, one of the boys came upon a large packing-case; having laid it down against the inner wall, Franks sat, and made his wife lie upon it, with her head on his knees, and took Moxy again in his arms, wrapt in one of their three thin blankets. The boys stretched themselves on the ground, and were soon fast asleep. The baby moaned by fits all the night long.
In about an hour Franks, who for long did not sleep, heard the door open softly and stealthily, and seemed aware of a presence besides themselves in the place. He concluded some other poor creature had discovered the same shelter; or, if they had got into a church-vault, it might be some wandering ghost; he was too weary for further speculation, or any uneasiness. When the slow light crept through the chinks of the door, he found they were quite alone.
It was a large dry cellar, empty save for the old packing-case. They must use great caution, and do their best to keep their hold of this last retreat! Misfortune had driven them into the earth; it would be fortune to stay there.
When his wife woke, he told her what he had been thinking. He and the boys would creep out before it was light, and return after dark. She must not put even a finger out of the cellar-door all day. He laid Moxy down beside her, woke the two elder boys, and went out with them.
They were so careful that for many days they continued undiscovered. Franks and the boys went and returned, and gained bread enough to keep them alive, but it may well seem a wonder they did not perish with cold. It is amazing what even the delicate sometimes go through without more than a little hastening on the road the healthiest are going as well.
About noon the next day, lord Gartley called. Whether he had got over his fright, or thought the danger now less imminent, or was vexed that he hadappearedto be afraid, I do not know. Hester was very glad to see him again.
"I think I am a safe companion to-day," she said. "I have not been out of the house yet. But till the bad time is over among my people, we had better be content not to meet, I think."
Lord Gartley mentally gasped. He stood for a moment speechless, gathering his thoughts, which almost refused to be gathered.
"Do I understand you, Hester?" he said. "It would trouble me more than I can tell to find I do."
"I fear I understand you, Gartley!" said Hester. "Is it possible you would have me abandon my friends to the small-pox, as a hireling his sheep to the wolf?"
"There are those whose business it is to look after them."
"I am one of those," returned Hester.
"Well," answered his lordship, "for the sake of argument we will allow ithasbeen your business; but how can you imagine it your business any longer?"
Indignation, a fire always ready "laid" in Hester's bosom, but seldom yet lighted by lord Gartley, burst into flame, and she spoke as he had never heard her speak before.
"I am aware, my lord," she said, "that I must by and by have new duties to perform, but I have yet to learn that they must annihilate the old. The claims of love cannot surely obliterate those of friendship! The new should make the old better, not sweep it away."
"But, my dear girl, the thing is preposterous!" exclaimed his lordship. "Don't you see you will enter on a new life! In the most ordinary cases even, the duties of a wife are distinct from those of an unmarried woman."
"But the duties of neither can supersede those of a human being. If the position of a wife is higher than that of an unmarried woman, it must enable her to do yet better the things that were her duty as a human being before."
"But if it be impossible she should do the same things?"
"Whatever is impossible settles its own question. I trust I shall never desire to attempt the impossible."
"You have begun to attempt it now."
"I do not understand you."
"It is impossible you should perform the duties of the station you are about to occupy, and continue to do as you are doing now. The attempt wuld be absurd."
"I have not tried it yet."
"But I know what your duties will be, and I assure you, my dear Hester, you will find the thing cannot be done."
"You set me thinking of more things than I can manage all at once," she replied in a troubled way. "I must think."
"The more you think, the better satisfied you will be of what I say. All I want of you is to think; for I am certain if you do, your good sense will convince you I am right."
He paused a moment. Hester did not speak. He resumed:
"Just think," he said, "what it would be to have you coming home to go out again straight from one of these kennels of the small-pox! The idea is horrible! Wherever you were suspected of being present, the house would be shunned like the gates of death."
"In such circumstances I should not go out."
"The suspicion of it would be enough. And in your absence, as certainly as in your presence, though not so fatally, you would be neglecting your duty to society."
"Then," said Hester, "the portion of society that is healthy, wealthy, and—merry, has stronger claims than the portion that is poor and sick and in prison!"
Lord Gartley was for a moment bewildered—not from any feeling of the force of what she said, but from inability to take it in. He had to turn himself about two or three times mentally before he could bring himself to believe she actually meant that those to whom she alluded were to be regarded as a portion of the same society that ruled his life. He thought another moment, then said:
"There are the sick in every class: you would have those of your own to visit. Why not leave others to visit those of theirs?"
"Then of course you would have no objection to my visiting a duchess in the small-pox?"
Lord Gartley was on the point of saying that duchesses never took the smallpox, but he did not, afraid Hester might know to the contrary.
"There could be no occasion for that," he said. "She would have everything she could want."
"And the others are in lack of everything! To desert them would be to desert the Lord. He will count it so."
"Well, certainly," said his lordship, returning on the track, "there would be less objection in the case of the duchess, in as much as every possible precaution would in her house be taken against the spread of the disease. It would be horribly selfish to think only of the person affected!"
"You show the more need that the poor should not be deserted of the rich in their bitter necessity! Who among them is able to take the right precautions against the spread of the disease? And if it spread among them, there is no security against its reaching those at last who take every possible care of themselves and none of their neighbours. You do not imagine, because I trust in God, and do not fear what the small-pox can do to me, I would therefore neglect any necessary preventive! That would be to tempt God: means as well as results are his. They are a way of giving us a share in his work."
"If I should have imagined such neglect possible, would not yesterday go far to justify me?" said lord Gartley.
"You are ungenerous," returned Hester. "You know I was then taken unprepared! The smallpox had but just appeared—at least I had not heard of it before."
"Then you mean to give up society for the sake of nursing the poor?"
"Only upon occasion, when there should be a necessity—such as an outbreak of infectious disease."
"And how, pray, should I account for your absence—not to mention the impossibility of doing my part without you? I should have to be continually telling stories; for if people came to know the fact, they would avoid me too as if I were the pest itself!"
It was to Hester as if a wall rose suddenly across the path hitherto stretching before her in long perspective. It became all but clear to her that he and she had been going on without any real understanding of each other's views in life. Her expectations tumbled about her like a house of cards. If he wanted to marry her, full of designs and aims in which she did not share, and she was going to marry him, expecting sympathies and helps which he had not the slightest inclination to give her, where was the hope for either of anything worth calling success? She sat silent. She wanted to be alone that she might think. It would be easier to write than talk further! But she must have more certainty as to what was in his mind.
"Do you mean then, Gartley," she said, "that when I am your wife, if ever I am, I shall have to give up all the friendships to which I have hitherto devoted so much of my life?"
Her tone was dominated by the desire to be calm, and get at his real feeling. Gartley mistook it, and supposed her at length betraying the weakness hitherto so successfully concealed. He concluded he had only to be firm now to render future discussion of the matter unnecessary.
"I would not for a moment act the tyrant, or say you must never go into such houses again. Your own good sense, the innumerable engagements you will have, the endless calls upon your time and accomplishments, will guide you—and I am certain guide you right, as to what attention you can spare to the claims of benevolence. But just please allow me one remark: in the circle to which you will in future belong, nothing is considered more out of place than any affectation of enthusiasm. I do not care to determine whether your way or theirs is the right one; all I want to say is, that as the one thing to be avoided is peculiarity, you would do better not to speak of these persons, whatever regard you may have for their spiritual welfare, asyour friends. One cannot have so many friends—not to mention that a unity of taste and feeling is necessary to that much-abused wordfriendship. You know well enough such persons cannot be your friends."
This was more than Hester could bear. She broke out with a vehemence for which she was afterwards sorry, though nowise ashamed of it.
"Theyaremy friends. There are twenty of them would do more for me than you would."
Lord Gartley rose. He was hurt. "Hester," he said, "you think so little of me or my anxiety about your best interests, that I cannot but suppose it will be a relief to you if I go."
She answered not a word—did not even look up, and his lordship walked gently but unhesitatingly from the room.
"It will bring her to her senses!" he said to himself. "—How grand she looked!"
Long after he was gone, Hester sat motionless, thinking, thinking. What she had vaguely foreboded—she knew now she had foreboded it all the time—at least she thought she knew it—was come! They were not, never had been, never could be at one about anything! He was a mere man of this world, without relation to the world of truth! To be tied to him for life would be to be tied indeed! And yet she loved him—would gladly die for him—not to give him his own way—for that she would not even marry him; but to save him from it—to save him from himself, and give him God instead—that would be worth dying for, even if it were the annihilation unbelievers took it for! To marry him, swell his worldly triumphs, help gild the chains of his slavery was not to be thought of! It was one thing to die that a fellow-creature might have all things good! another to live a living death that he might persist in the pride of life! She could not throw God's life to the service of the stupid Satan! It was a sad breakdown to the hopes that had clustered about Gartley!
But did she not deserve it?
Therewith began a self-searching which did not cease until it had prostrated her in sorrow and shame before him whose charity is the only pledge of ours.
Was it then all over between them? Might he not bethink himself, and come again, and say he was sorry he had so left her? He might indeed; but would that make any difference to her? Had he not beyond a doubt disclosed his real way of thinking and feeling? If he could speak thus now, after they had talked so much, what spark of hope was there in marriage?
To forget her friends that she might go intosocietya countess! The thought was as contemptible as poverty-stricken. She would leave such ambition to women that devoured novels and studied the peerage! One loving look from human eyes was more to her than the admiration of the world! She would go back to her mother as soon as she had found her poor Corney, and seen her people through the smallpox! If only the house was her own, that she might turn it into a hospital! She would make it a home to which any one sick or sad, any cast out of the world, any betrayed by seeming friends, might flee for shelter! She would be more than ever the sister and helper of her own—cling faster than ever to the skirts of the Lord's garment, that the virtue going out of him might flow through her to them! She would be like Christ, a gulf into which wrong should flow and vanish—a sun radiating an uncompromising love!
How easy is the thought, in certain moods, of the loveliest, most unselfish devotion! How hard is the doing of the thought in the face of a thousand unlovely difficulties! Hester knew this, but, God helping, was determined not to withdraw hand or foot or heart. She rose, and having prepared herself, set out to visit her people. First of all she would go to the bookbinder's, and see how his wife was attended to.
The doctor not being there, she was readily admitted. The poor husband, unable to help, sat a picture of misery by the scanty fire. A neighbor, not yet quite recovered from the disease herself, had taken on her the duties of nurse. Having given her what instructions she thought it least improbable she might carry out, and told her to send for anything she wanted, she rose to take her leave.
"Won't you sing to her a bit, miss, before you go?" said the husband beseechingly. "It'll do her more good than all the doctor's stuff."
"I don't think she's well enough," said Hester.
"Not to get all the good on it, I daresay, miss," rejoined the man; "but she'll hear it like in a dream, an' she'll think it's the angels a singin'; an' that'll do her good, for she do like all them creaturs!"
Hester yielded and sang, thinking all the time how the ways of the open-eyed God look to us like things in a dream, because we are only in the night of his great day, asleep before the brightness of his great waking thoughts. The woman had been tossing and moaning in an undefined discomfort, but as she sang she grew still, and when she ceased lay as if asleep.
"Thank you, miss," said the man. "You can do more than the doctor, as I told you! When he comes, he always wakes her up; you make her sleep true!"
In the meantime yet worse trouble had come upon the poor Frankses. About a week after they had taken possession of the cellar, little Moxy, the Serpent of the Prairies, who had been weakly ever since his fall down the steps, by which he had hurt his head and been sadly shaken, became seriously ill, and grew worse and worse. For some days they were not much alarmed, for the child had often been ailing—oftener of late since they had not been faring so well; and even when they were they dared not get a doctor to him for fear of being turned out, and having to go to the workhouse.
By this time they had contrived to make the cellar a little more comfortable. They managed to get some straw, and with two or three old sacks made a bed for the mother and the baby and Moxy on the packing-case. They got also some pieces of matting, and contrived to put up a screen betwixt it and the rickety door. By the exercise of their art they had gained enough to keep them in food, but never enough to pay for the poorest lodging. They counted themselves, however, better off by much than if they had been crowded with all sorts in such lodging as a little more might have enabled them to procure.
The parents loved Moxy more tenderly than either of his brothers, and it was with sore hearts they saw him getting worse. The sickness was a mild smallpox—so mild that they did not recognize it, yet more than Moxy could bear, and he was gradually sinking. When this became clear to the mother, then indeed she felt the hand of God heavy upon her.
Religiously brought up, she had through the ordinary troubles of a married life sought help from the God in whom her mother had believed:—we do not worship our fathers and mothers like the Chinese—though I do not envy the man who can scorn them for it—but they are, if at all decent parents, our first mediators with the great father, whom we can worse spare than any baby his mother;—but with every fresh attack of misery, every step further down on the stair of life, she thought she had lost her last remnant of hope, and knew that up to that time she had hoped, while past seasons of failure looked like times of blessed prosperity. No man, however little he may recognize the hope in him, knows what it would be to be altogether hopeless. Now Moxy was about to be taken from them, and no deeper misery seemed, to their imagination, possible! Nothing seemed left them—not even the desire of deliverance. How little hope there is in the commoner phases of religion! The message grounded on the uprising of the crucified man, has as yet yielded but little victory over the sorrows of the grave, but small anticipation of the world to come; not a little hope of deliverance from a hell, but scarce a foretaste of a blessed time at hand when the heart shall exult and the flesh be glad. In general there is at best but a sad looking forward to a region scarcely less shadowy and far more dreary than the elysium of the pagan poets. When Christ cometh, shall he find faith in the earth—even among those who think they believe that he is risen indeed? Margaret Franks, in the cellar of her poverty, the grave yawning below it for her Moxy, felt as if there was no heaven at all, only a sky.
But a strange necessity was at hand to compel the mother to rouse afresh all the latent hope and faith and prayer that were in her.
By an inexplicable insight the child seemed to know that he was dying. For, one morning, after having tossed about all the night long, he suddenly cried out in tone most pitiful,
"Mother, don't put me in a hole."
As far as any of them knew, he had never seen a funeral—at least to know what it was—had never heard anything about death or burial: his father had a horror of the subject!
The words went like a knife to the heart of the mother. She sat silent, neither able to speak, not knowing what to answer.
Again came the pitiful cry,
"Mother, don't put me in a hole."
Most mothers would have sought to soothe the child, their own hearts breaking the while, with the assurance that no one should put him into any hole, or anywhere he did not want to go. But this mother could not lie in the face of death, nor had it ever occurred to her that nopersonis ever put into a hole, though many a body.
Before she could answer, a third time came the cry, this time in despairing though suppressed agony,—
"Mother, don't let them put me in a hole."
The mother gave a cry like the child's, and her heart within her became like water.
"Oh, God!" she gasped, and could say no more.
But with the prayer—for what is a prayer but a calling on the name of the Lord?—came to her a little calm, and she was able to speak. She bent over him and kissed his forehead.
"My darling Moxy, mother loves you," she said.
What that had to do with it she did not ask herself. The child looked up in her face with dim eyes.
"Pray to the heavenly father, Moxy," she went on—and there stopped, thinking what she should tell him to ask for. "Tell him," she resumed, "that you don't want to be put in a hole, and tell him that mother does not want you to be put in a hole, for she loves you with all her heart."
"Don't put me in the hole," said Moxy, now using the definite article.
"Jesus Christ was put in the hole," said the voice of the next elder boy from behind his mother. He had come in softly, and she had neither seen nor heard him. It was Sunday, and he had strolled into a church or meeting-house—does it matter which?—and had heard the wonderful story of hope. It was remarkable though that he had taken it up as he did, for he went on to add, "but he didn't mind it much, and soon got out again."
"Ah, yes, Moxy!" said the poor mother, "Jesus died for our sins, and you must ask him to take you up to heaven."
But Moxy did not know anything about sins, and just as little about heaven. What he wanted was an assurance that he would not be put in the hole. And the mother, now a little calmer, thought she saw what she ought to say.
"It ain't your soul, it's only your body, Moxy, they put in the hole," she said.
"I don't want to be put in the hole," Moxy almost screamed. "I don't want my head cut off!"
The poor mother was at her wits' end.
But here the child fell into a troubled sleep, and for some hours a silence as of the grave filled the dreary cellar.
The moment he woke the same cry came from his fevered lips, "Don't put me in the hole," and at intervals, growing longer as he grew weaker, the cry came all the day.
Hester had been to church, and had then visited some of her people, carrying them words of comfort and hope. They received them in a way at her hand, but none of them, had they gone, would have found them at church. How seldom is the man in the pulpit able to make people feel that the things he is talking about are things at all! Neither when the heavens are black with clouds and rain, nor when the sun rises glorious in a blue perfection, do many care to sit down and be taught astronomy! But Hester was a live gospel to them—and most when she sang. Even the name of the Saviour uttered in her singing tone and with the expression she then gave it, came nearer to them than when she spoke it. The very brooding of the voice on a word, seems to hatch something of what is in it. She often felt, however, as if some new, other kind of messengers than she or such as she, must one day be sent them; for there seemed a gulf between their thoughts and hers, such as neither they nor she could pass.
In fact theycould notthink the things she thought, and had no vocabulary or phrases or imagery whereby to express their own thinkings. God does not hurry such: have we enough of hope for them, or patience with them? I suspect their teachers must arise among themselves. They too must have an elect of their own kind, of like passions with themselves, to lift them up, and perhaps shame those that cannot reach them. Our teaching to them is no teaching at all; it does not reach their ignorance; perhaps they require a teaching that to our ignorance would seem no teaching at all, or even bad teaching. How many things are there in the world in which the wisest of us can ill descry the hand of God! Who not knowing could read the lily in its bulb, the great oak in the pebble-like acorn? God's beginnings do notlooklike his endings, but theyarelike; the oakisin the acorn, though we cannot see it. The ranting preacher, uttering huge untruths, may yet wake vital verities in chaotic minds—convey to a heart some saving fact, rudely wrapped in husks of lies even against God himself.
Mr. Christopher, thrown at one time into daily relations with a good sort of man, had tried all he could to rouse him to a sense of his higher duties and spiritual privileges, but entirely without success. A preacher came round, whose gospel was largely composed of hell-fire and malediction, with frequent allusion to the love of a most unlovely God, as represented by him. This preacher woke up the man. "And then," said Christopher, "I was able to be of service to him, and get him on. He speedily outgrew the lies his prophet had taught him, and became a devout Christian; while the man who had been the means of rousing him was tried for bigamy, convicted and punished."
This Sunday Hester, in her dejection and sadness about Gartley, over whom—not her loss of him—she mourned deeply, felt more than ever, if not that she could not reach her people, yet how little she was able to touch them, and there came upon her a hopelessness that was heavy, sinking into the very roots of her life, and making existence itself appear a dull and undesirable thing. Hitherto life had seemed a good thing, worth holding up as a heave-offering to him who made it; now she had to learn to take life itself from the hand of God as his will, in faith that he would prove it a good gift. She had to learn that inalldrearinesses, of the flesh or spirit, even in those that seem to come of having nothing to do, or from being unable to do what we think we have to do, the refuge is the same—he who is the root and crown of life. Who would receive comfort from anything but love? Who would build on anything but the eternal? Who would lean on that which has in itself no persistence? Even the closest human loves have their only endurance, only hope of perfection, in the eternal perfect love of which they are the rainbow-refractions. I cannot love son or daughter as I would, save loving them as the children of the eternal God, in whom his spirit dwells and works, making them altogether lovely, and me more and more love-capable. That they are mine is not enough ground for enough love—will not serve as operative reason to the height of the love my own soul demands from itself for them. But they are mine because they are his, and he is the demander and enabler of love.
The day was a close, foggy, cold, dreary day. The service at church had not seemed interesting. She laid the blame on herself, and neither on prayers nor lessons nor psalms nor preacher, though in truth some of these might have been better; the heart seemed to have gone out of the world—as if not Baal but God had gone to sleep, and his children had waked before him and found the dismal gray of the world's morning full of discomfortable ghosts. She tried her New Testament; but Jesus too seemed far away—nothing left but the story about him—as if he had forgotten his promise, and was no longer in the world. She tried some of her favourite poems: each and all were infected with the same disease—with common-place nothingness. They seemed all made up—words! words! words! Nothing was left her in the valley but the shadow, and the last weapon, All-prayer. She fell upon her knees and cried to God for life. "My heart is dead within me," she said, and poured out her lack into the hearing of him from whom she had come that she might have himself, and so be. She did not dwell upon her sorrows; even they had sunk and all but vanished in the gray mass of lost interest.
The modern representatives of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar would comfort us with the assurance that all such depression has physical causes: right or wrong, what does their comfort profit! Consolation in being told that we are slaves! What noble nature would be content to be cured of sadness by a dose of medicine? There is in the heart a conviction that the soul ought to be supreme over the body and its laws; that there must be a faith which conquers the body with all its tyrants; and that no soul is right until it has that faith—until it is in closest, most immediate understanding with its own unchangeable root, God himself. Such faith may not at once remove the physical cause, if such there be, but it will be more potent still; in the presence of both the cause and the effect, its very atmosphere will be a peace tremulous with unborn gladness. This gained, the medicine, the regimen, or the change of air may be resorted to without sense of degradation, with cheerful hope and some indifference. Such is perhaps the final victory of faith. Faith, in such circumstances, must be of the purest, and may be of the strongest. In few other circumstances can it have such an opportunity—can it rise to equal height. It may be its final lesson, and deepest. God is in it just in his seeming to be not in it—that we may choose him in the darkness of the feeling, stretch out the hand to him when we cannot see him, verify him in the vagueness of the dream, call to him in the absence of impulse, obey him in the weakness of the will.
Even in her prayers Hester could not get near him. It seemed as if his ear were turned away from her cry. She sank into a kind of lethargic stupor. I think, in order to convey to us the spiritual help we need, it is sometimes necessary—just as, according to the psalmist, "he giveth to his beloved in their sleep"—to cast us into a sort of mental quiescence, that the noise of the winds and waters of the questioning intellect and roused feelings may not interfere with the impression the master would make upon our beings. But Hester's lethargy lasted long, and was not so removed. She rose from her knees in a kind of despair, almost ready to think that either there was no God, or he would not hear her. An inaccessible God was worse than no God at all! In either case she would rather cease!
It had been dark for hours, but she had lighted no candle, and sat in bodily as in spiritual darkness. She was in her bedroom, which was on the second floor, at the back of the house, looking out on the top of the gallery that led to the great room. She had no fire. One was burning away unheeded in the drawing-room below. She was too miserable to care whether she was cold or warm. When she had got some light in her body, then she would go and get warm!
What time it was she did not know. She had been summoned to the last meal of the day, but had forgotten the summons. It must have been about ten o'clock. The streets were silent, the square deserted—as usual. The evening was raw and cold, one to drive everybody in-doors that had doors to go in at.
Through the cold and darkness came a shriek that chilled her with horror. Yet it seemed as if she had been expecting it—as if the cloud of misery that had all day been gathering deeper and deeper above and around her, had at length reached its fullness, and burst in the lightning of that shriek. It was followed by another and yet another. Whence did they come? Not from the street, for all beside was still; even the roar of London was hushed! And there was a certain something in the sound of them that assured her that they rose in the house. Was Sarah being murdered? She was half-way down the stairs before the thought that sent her was plain to herself.
The house seemed unnaturally still. At the top of the kitchen stairs she called aloud to Sarah—as loud, that is, as a certain tremor in her throat would permit. There came no reply. Down she went to face the worst: she was a woman of true courage—that is, a woman whom no amount of apprehension could deter when she knew she ought to seek the danger.
In the kitchen stood Sarah, motionless, frozen with fear. A candle was in her hand, just lighted. Hester's voice seemed to break her trance.
She started, stared, and fell a trembling. She made her drink some water, and then she came to herself.
"It's in the coal-cellar, miss!" she gasped. "I was that minute going to fetch a scuttleful! There's something buried in them coals as sure as my name's Sarah!"
"Nonsense!" returned Hester. "Who could scream like that from under the coals? Come; we'll go and see what it is."
"Laws, miss! don't you go near it now. It's too late to do anything. Either it's the woman's sperrit as they say was murdered there, or it's a new one."
"And you would let her be killed without interfering?"
"Oh, miss, all's over by this time!" persisted Sarah, with white lips trembling.
"Then you are ready to go to bed with a murderer in the house?" said Hester.
"He's done his business now, an' 'll go away."
"Give me the candle. I will go alone."
"You'll be murdered, miss—as sure's you're alive!"
Hester took the light from her, and went towards the coal-cellar. The old woman sank on a chair.
I have already alluded to the subterranean portion of the house, which extended under the great room. A long vault, corresponding to the gallery above, led to these cellars. It was rather a frightful place to go into in search of the source of a shriek. Its darkness was scarcely affected by the candle she carried; it seemed only to blind herself. She tried holding it above her head, and then she could see a little. The black tunnel stretched on and on, like a tunnel in a feverish dream, a long way before the cellars began to open from it. She advanced, I cannot say fearless, but therefore only the more brave. She felt as if leaving life and safety behind, but her imagination was not much awake, and her mental condition made her almost inclined to welcome death. She reached at last the coal-cellar, the first that opened from the passage, and looked in. The coal-heap was low, and the place looked large and very black. She sent her keenest gaze through the darkness, but could see nothing; went in and moved about until she had thrown light into every corner: no one was there. She was on the point of returning when she bethought herself there were other cellars—one the wine-cellar, which was locked: she would go and see if Sarah knew anything about the key of it. But just as she left the coal-cellar, she heard a moan, followed by a succession of low sobs. Her heart began to beat violently, but she stopped to listen. The light of her candle fell upon another door, a pace or two from where she stood. She went to it, laid her ear against it, and listened. The sobs continued a while, ceased, and left all silent. Then clear and sweet, but strange and wild, as if from some region unearthly, came the voice of a child: she could hear distinctly what it said.
"Mother," it rang out, "youmayput me in the hole."
And the silence fell deep as before.
Hester stood for a moment horrified. Her excited imagination suggested some deed of superstitious cruelty in the garden of the house adjoining. Nor were the sobs and cries altogether against such supposition. She recovered herself instantly, and ran back to the kitchen.
"You have the keys of the cellars—have you not, Sarah?" she said.
"Yes, miss, I fancy so."
"Where does the door beyond the coal-cellar lead out to?"
"Not out to nowhere, miss. That's a large cellar as we never use. I ain't been into it since the first day, when they put some of the packing-cases there."
"Give me the key," said Hester. "Something is going on there we ought to know about."
"Then pray send for the police, miss!" answered Sarah, trembling. "It ain't for you to go into such places—on no account!"
"What! not in our own house?"
"It's the police's business, miss!"
"Then the police are their brothers' keepers, and not you and me, Sarah?"
"It's the wicked as is in it, I fear, miss."
"It's those that weep anyhow, and they're our business, if it's only to weep with them. Quick! show me which is the key."
Sarah sought the key in the bunch, and noting the coolness with which her young mistress took it, gathered courage from hers to follow, a little way behind.
When Hester reached the door, she carefully examined it, that she might do what she had to do as quickly as possible. There were bolts and bars upon it, but not one of them was fastened; it was secured only by the bolt of the lock. She set the candle on the floor, and put in the key as quietly as she could. It turned without much difficulty, and the door fell partly open with a groan of the rusted hinge. She caught up her light, and went in.
It was a large, dark, empty place. For a few moments she could see nothing. But presently she spied, somewhere in the dark, a group of faces, looking white through the circumfluent blackness, the eyes of them fixed in amaze, if not in terror, upon herself. She advanced towards them, and almost immediately recognized one of them—then another; but what with the dimness, the ghostliness, and the strangeness of it all, felt as if surrounded by the veiling shadows of a dream. But whose was that pallid little face whose eyes were not upon her with the rest? It stared straight on into the dark, as if it had no more to do with the light! She drew nearer to it. The eyes of the other faces followed her.
When the eyes of the mother saw the face of her Moxy who died in the dark, she threw herself in a passion of tears and cries upon her dead. But the man knelt upon his knees, and when Hester turned in pain from the agony of the mother, she saw him with lifted hands of supplication at her feet. A torrent of divine love and passionate pity filled her heart, breaking from its deepest God-haunted caves. She stooped and kissed the man upon his upturned forehead.
Many are called but few chosen. Hester was the disciple of him who could have cured the leper with a word, but for reasons of his own, not far to seek by such souls as Hester's, laid his hands upon him, sorely defiling himself in the eyes of the self-respecting bystanders. The leper himself would never have dreamed of his touching him.
Franks burst out crying like the veriest child. All at once in the depths of hell the wings of a great angel were spread out over him and his! No more starvation and cold for his poor wife and the baby! The boys would have plenty now! If only Moxy—but he was gone where the angels came from—and theirs was a hard life! Surely the God his wife talked about must have sent her to them! Did he think they had borne enough now? Only he had borne it so ill! Thus thought Franks, in dislocated fashion, and remained kneeling.
Hester was now kneeling also, with her arms round her whose arms were about the body of her child. She did not speak to her, did not attempt a word of comfort, but wept with her: she too had loved little Moxy! she too had heard his dying words—glowing with reproof to her faithlessness who cried out like a baby when her father left her for a moment in the dark! In the midst of her loneliness and seeming desertion, God had these people already in the house for her help! The back-door of every tomb opens on a hill-top.
With awe-struck faces the boys looked on. They too could now see Moxy's face. They had loved Moxy—loved him more than they knew yet.
The woman at length raised her head, and looked at Hester.
"Oh, miss, it's Moxy!" she said, and burst into a fresh passion of grief.
"The dear child!" said Hester.
"Oh, miss! who's to look after him now?"
"There will be plenty to look after him. You don't think he who provided a woman like you for his mother before he sent him here, would send him there without having somebody ready to look after him?"
"Well, miss, it wouldn't be like him—I don't think!"
"It wouldnotbe like him," responded Hester, with self-accusation.
Then she asked them a few questions about their history since last she saw them, and how it was they had sunk so low, receiving answers more satisfactory than her knowledge had allowed her to hope.
"But oh miss!" exclaimed Mrs. Franks, bethinking herself, "you ought not to ha' been here so long: the little angel there died o' the small-pox, as I know too well, an' it's no end o' catching!"
"Never mind me," replied Hester; "I'm not afraid. But," she added, rising, "we must get you out of this immediately."
"Oh, miss! where would you send us?" said Mrs. Franks in alarm. "There's nobody as 'll take us in! An' it would break both our two hearts—Franks's an' mine—to be parted at such a moment, when us two's the father an' mother o' Moxy. An' they'd take Moxy from us, an' put him in the hole he was so afeared of!"
"You don't think I would leave my own flesh and blood in the cellar!" answered Hester. "I will go and make arrangement for you above and be back presently."
"Oh thank you, miss!" said the woman, as Hester sat down the candle beside them. "I do want to look on the face of my blessed boy as long as I can! He will be taken from me altogether soon!"
"Mrs. Franks," rejoined Hester, "you musn't talk like a heathen."
"I didn't know as I was saying anything wrong, miss!"
"Don't you know," said Hester, smiling through tears, "that Jesus died and rose again that we might be delivered from death? Don't you know it's he and not Death has got your Moxy? He will take care of him for you till you are ready to have him again. If you love Moxy more than Jesus loves him, then you are more like God than Jesus was!"
"Oh, miss, don't talk to me like that! The child was born of my own body?"
"And both you and he were born of God's own soul: if you know how to love he loves ten times better."
"You know how to love anyhow, miss! the Lord love you! An angel o' mercy you been to me an' mine."
"Good-bye then for a few minutes," said Hester. "I am only going to prepare a place for you."
Only as she said the words did she remember who had said them before her. And as she went through the dark tunnel she sang with a voice that seemed to beat at the gates of heaven, "Thou didst not leave his soul in hell."
Mrs. Franks threw herself again beside her child, but her tears were not so bitter now; she and hers were no longer forsaken! She also read her New Testament, and the last words of Hester had struck her as well as the speaker of them:
"And she'll come again and receive us to herself!" she said. "—An' Christ'll receive my poor Moxy to himself! If he wasn't, as they say, a Christian, it was only as he hadn't time—so young, an' all the hard work he had to do—with his precious face a grinnin' like an angel between the feet of him, a helpin' of his father to make a livin' for us all! That would be no reason why he as did the will o'hisfather shouldn't take to him. If ever there was a child o' God's makin' it was that child! I feel as if God must ha' made him right off, like!"
Thoughts like these kept flowing through the mind of the bereaved mother as she lay with her arm over the body of her child—ever lovely to her, now more lovely than ever. The small-pox had not been severe—only severe enough to take a feeble life from the midst of privation, and the expression of his face was lovely. He lay like the sacrifice that sealed a new covenant between his mother and her father in heaven. We have yet learned but little of the blessed power of death. We call it an evil! It is a holy, friendly thing. We are not left shivering all the world's night in a stately portico with no house behind it; death is the door to the temple-house, whose God is not seated aloft in motionless state, but walks about among his children, receiving his pilgrim sons in his arms, and washing the sore feet of the weary ones. Either God is altogether such as Christ, or the Christian religion is a lie.
Not a word passed between husband and wife. Their hearts were too full for speech, but their hands found and held each the other. It was the strangest concurrence of sorrow and relief! The two boys sat on the ground with their arms about each other. So they waited.