Hester had not yet gone to see Miss Dasomma because of the small-pox.
Second causes are God's as much as first, and Christ made use of them as his father's way. It were a sad world indeed if God's presence were only interference, that is, miracle. The roundabout common ways of things are just as much his as the straight, miraculous ones—I incline to think more his, in the sense that they are plainly the ways he prefers. In all things that are, he is—present even in the evil we bring into the world, to foil it and bring good out of it. We are always disbelieving in him because things do not go as we intend and desire them to go. We forget that God has larger ends, even for us, than we can see, so his plans do not fit ours. If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour, but the ministering genius of our destruction.
But now Hester thought she might visit her friend. She had much to say to her and ask of her. First she told her of herself and lord Gartley. Miss Dasomma threw her arms about her, and broke into a flood of congratulation. Hester looked a little surprised, and was indeed a little annoyed at the vehemence of her pleasure. Miss Dasomma hastened to excuse herself.
"My dear," she said, "the more I saw of that man, the more I thought and the more I heard about him, his ways, and his surroundings, the more I marvelled you should ever have taken him for other than the most wordly, shallow, stunted creature. It was the very impossibility of your understanding the mode of being of such a man that made it possible for him to gain on you. Believe me, if you had married him, you would have been sick of him—forgive the vulgar phrase—yes, and hopeless of him, in six weeks."
"There was more and better in him than you imagine," returned Hester, hurt that her friend should think so badly of the man she loved, but by no means sure that she was wrong.
"That may be," answered her friend; "but I am certain also that if you had married him, you would have done him no good."
Then Hester went on with her tale of trouble. Her brother Cornelius had been behaving very badly, she said, and had married a young woman without letting them know. Her father and mother were unaware of the fact as yet, and she dreaded having to communicate it to them. He had been very ill with the small-pox, and she must take him home; but what to do with his wife until she had broken the matter to them, she did not know. She knew her father would be very angry, and until he should have got over it a little she dared not have her home: in a word she was at her wits' end.
"One question, excuse me if I ask," said Miss Dasomma: "arethey married?"
"I am not sure; but I am sure she believes they are."
Then she told her what she knew of Amy. Miss Dasomma fell a thinking.
"Could I see her?" she said at length.
"Surely; any time," replied Hester, "now that Corney is so much better."
Miss Dasomma called, and was so charmed with Amy that she proposed to Hester she should stay with her.
This was just what Hester wished but had not dared to propose.
Now came the painful necessity not only of breaking to the young wife that she must be parted from her husband for a while, but—which was much worse—of therein revealing that he had deceived her.
Had Cornelius not been ill and helpless, and characterless, he would probably have refused to go home; but he did not venture a word of opposition to Hester's determination. He knew she had not told Amy anything, but saw that, if he refused, she might judge it necessary to tell her all. And notwithstanding his idiotic pretence of superiority, he had a kind of thorough confidence in Hester. In his sickness something of the old childish feeling about her as a refuge from evil had returned upon him, and he was now nearly ready to do and allow whatever she pleased, trusting to her to get him out of the scrape he was in: she could do more than any one else, he was sure!
"But now tell me, on your word of honour," she said to him that same night, happening to find herself alone with him, "are you really and truly married to Amy?"
She was delighted to see him blaze up in anger.
"Hester, you insult us both!" he said.
"No, Cornelius," returned Hester, "I have a right to distrust you—but I distrust only you. Whatever may be amiss in the affair, I am certain you alone are to blame—not Amy."
Thereupon Cornelius swore a solemn oath that Amy was as much his lawful wife as he knew how to make her.
"Then what is to be done with her when you go home? You cannot expect she will be welcomed. I have not dared tell them of your marriage—only of your illness. The other must be by word of mouth."
"I don't know what's to be done with her. How shouldIknow!" answered Cornelius with a return of his old manner. "I thought you would manage it all for me! This cursed illness—"
"Cornelius," said Hester, "this illness is the greatest kindness God could show you."
"Well, we won't argue about that!—Sis, you must get me out of the scrape!"
Hester's heart swelled with delight at the sound of the old loving nursery-word. She turned to him and kissed him.
"I will do what I honestly can, Cornelius," she said.
"All right!" replied Corney. "What do you mean to do?"
"Not to take Amy down with us. She must wait till I have told."
"Then my wife is to be received only on sufferance!" he cried.
"You can hardly expect to be otherwise received yourself. You have put your wife at no end of disadvantage by making her your wife without the knowledge of your family. For yourself, when a man has taken money not his own; when he has torn the hearts of father and mother with anguish such as neither ever knew before—ah, Corney! if you had seen them as I saw them, you would not now wonder that I tremble at the thought of your meeting. If you have any love for poor Amy, you will not dream of exposing her to the first outbreak of a shocked judgment. I cannot be sure what my mother might think, but my father would take her for your evil genius! It is possible he may refuse to see yourself!"
"Then I'm not going. Better stay here and starve!"
"If so, I must at once tell Amy what you have done. I will not have the parents on whom you have brought disgrace and misery supposed guilty of cruelty. Amy must know all about it some day, but it ought to come from yourself—not from me. You will never be fit for honest company till for very misery you have told your wife."
Hester thought she must not let him fancy things were going back into the old grooves—that his crime would become a thing of no consequence, and pass out of existence, ignored and forgotten. Evil cannot be destroyed without repentance.
He was silent as one who had nothing to answer.
"So now," said Hester, "will you, or must I, tell Amy that she cannot go home?"
He thought for a moment.
"I will," he said.
Hester left him and sent Amy to him. In a few minutes she returned. She had wept, but was now, though looking very sad, quite self-possessed.
"Please, miss," she said—but Hester interrupted her.
"You must not call memiss, Amy," she said. "You must call meHester. Am I not your sister?"
A gleam of joy shot from the girl's eyes, like the sun through red clouds.
"Then you have forgiven me!" she cried, and burst into tears.
"No, Amy, not that! I should have had to know something to forgive first. You may have been foolish; everybody can't always be wise, though everybody must try to do right. But now we must have time to set things straighter, without doing more mischief, and you mustn't mind staying a little while with Miss Dasomma."
"Does she know all about it, miss—-Hester?" asked Amy; and as she called her new sister by her name, the blood rushed over her face.
"She knows enough not to think unfairly of you, Amy."
"And you won't be hard upon him when he hasn't me to comfort him—will you, Hester?"
"I will think of my new sister who loves him," replied Hester. "But you must not think I do not love him too. And oh, Amy! you must be very careful over him. No one can do with him what you can. You must help him to be good, for that is the chief duty of every one towards a neighbour, and particularly of a wife towards a husband."
Amy was crying afresh, and made no answer; but there was not the most shadowy token of resentment in her weeping.
In the meantime things had been going very gloomily at Yrndale. Mrs. Raymount was better in health but hardly more cheerful. How could she be? how get over the sadness that her boy was such? But the thing that most oppressed her was to see the heart of his father so turned from the youth. What would become of them if essential discord invaded their home! Cornelius had not been pleasant, even she was to herself compelled to admit, since first he began to come within sight of manhood; but she had always looked to the time when growing sense would make him cast aside young-mannish ways; and this was the outcome of her cares and hopes and prayers for him! Her husband went about listless and sullen. He wrote no more. How could one thus disgraced in his family presume to teach the world anything! How could he ever hold up his head as one that had served his generation, when this was the kind of man he was to leave behind him for the life of the next! Cornelius's very being cast doubt on all he had ever said or done!
He had been proud of his children: they were like those of any common stock! and the shame recoiled upon himself. Bitterly he recalled the stain upon his family in generations gone by. He had never forged or stolen himself, yet the possibility had remained latent in him, else how could he have transmitted it? Perhaps there were things in which he might have been more honest, and so have killed the latent germ and his child not have had it to develop! Far into the distance he saw a continuous succession of dishonest Raymounts, nor succession only but multiplication, till streets and prisons were swarming with them. For hours he would sit with his hands in his pockets, scarcely daring to think, for the misery of the thoughts that came crowding out the moment the smallest chink was opened in their cage. He had become short, I do not say rough in his speech to his wife. He would break into sudden angry complaints against Hester for not coming home, but stop dead in the middle, as if nothing was worth being angry about now, and turn away with a sigh that was almost a groan. The sight of the children was a pain to him. Saffy was not one to understand much of grief beyond her own passing troubles; it was a thing for which she seemed to have little reception; and her occasionally unsympathetic ways were, considering her age, more of a grief to her mother than was quite reasonable; she feared she saw in her careless glee the same root which in her brother flowered in sullen disregard. Mark was very different. The father would order Saffy away, but the boy might come and go as he pleased, nor give him any annoyance, although he never or scarcely ever took any notice of him. He had been told nothing of the cause of his parents' evident misery. When the news came of Corney's illness, his mother told him of that; but he had sympathy and penetration enough to perceive that there must be something amiss more than that: if this were all, they would have told him of it when first they began to be changed! And when the news came that he was getting better, his father did not seem the least happier! He would sometimes stand and gaze at his father, but the solemn, far-off, starry look of the boy's eyes never seemed to disturb him. He loved his father as few boys love, and yet had a certain dread of him and discomfort in his presence, which he could not have accounted for, and which would vanish at once when he spoke to him. He had never recovered the effects of being so nearly drowned, and in the readier apprehension caused by accumulated troubles his mother began to doubt if ever he would be well again. He had got a good deal thinner; his food did not seem to nourish him; and his being seemed slipping away from the hold of the world. He was full of dreams and fancies, all of the higher order of things where love is the law. He did not read much that was new, for he soon got tired with the effort to understand; but he would spend happy hours alone, seeming to the ordinary eye to be doing nothing, because his doing was with the unseen. So-called religious children are often peculiarly disagreeable, mainly from false notions of the simple thing religion in their parents and teachers; but in truth nowhere may religion be more at home than in a child. A strong conscience and a loving regard to the desires of others were Mark's chief characteristics. When such children as he die, we may well imagine them wanted for special work in the world to which they go. If the very hairs of our head are all numbered, and he said so who knew and is true, our children do not drop hap-hazard into the near world, neither are they kept out of it by any care or any power of medicine: all goes by heavenliest will and loveliest ordinance. Some of us will have to be ashamed of our outcry after our dead. Beloved, even for your dear faces we can wait awhile, seeing it is His father, your father and our father to whom you have gone, leaving us with him still. Our day will come, and your joy and ours, and all shall be well.
The attachment of Mark to the major continued growing.
"When Majie comes," he said one of those days, "he must not go again."
"Why, Markie?" asked his mother, almost without a meaning, for her thought was with her eldest-born, her disgrace.
"Because, if he does," he answered, "I shall not see much of him."
The mother looked at the child, but said nothing. Sorrow was now the element of her soul. Cornelius had destroyed the family heart; the family must soon be broken up, and vanish in devouring vacancy! Do you ask where was her faith? I answer, Just where yours and mine is when we give thanks trusting in the things for which we give thanks; when we rest in what we have, in what we can do, in what people think of us, in the thought of the friends we have at our back, or in anything whatever but the living, outgoing power of the self-alive—the one causing potency in the heart of our souls, and in every clothing of those souls, from nerve, muscle, and skin to atmosphere and farthest space. The living life is the one power, the only that can, and he who puts his trust or hope in anything else whatever is a worshipper of idols. He who does not believe in God must be a truster in that which is lower than himself.
Mark seldom talked about his brother. Before he went away the last time he had begun to shrink from him a little, as if with some instinct of an inward separation. He would stand a little way off and look at him as if he were a stranger in whom he was interested, and as if he himself were trying to determine what mental attitude he must assume towards him. When he heard that he was ill, the tears came in his eyes, but he did not speak.
"Are you not sorry for Corney?" said his mother.
"I'm sorry," he answered, "because it must make him unhappy. He does not like being ill."
"Youdon't like being ill, I'm sure Mark!" returned his mother, apprehending affectation.
"I don't mind it much," answered the boy, looking far away—as it seemed to his mother, towards a region to which she herself had begun to look with longing. The way her husband took their grief made them no more a family, but a mere household. He brooded alone and said nothing. They did not share sorrow as they had shared joy.
At last came a letter from Hester saying that in two days she hoped to start with Corney to bring him home. The mother read the letter, and with a faded gleam of joy on her countenance, passed it to her husband. He took it, glanced at it, threw it from him, rose, and left the room. For an hour his wife heard him pacing up and down his study; then he took his hat and stick and went out. What he might have resolved upon had Corney been returning in tolerable health, I do not know—possibly to kick him out of the house for his impudence in daring to show his face there; but even this wrathful father, who thought he did well to be angry, could not turn from his sickly child, let him be the greatest scoundrel under the all-seeing sun? But not therefore would he receive or acknowledge him! Swine were the natural companions of the prodigal, and the sooner he was with them the better! There was truth in the remark, but hell in the spirit of it: for the heart of the father was turned from his son. The Messiah came to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children. Strange it should ever have wanted doing! But it wants doing still. There is scarce a discernible segment of the round of unity between many fathers and their children.
Gerald Raymount went walking through the pine-woods on his hills. Little satisfaction lay in land to which such a son was to succeed! No! the land was his own! not an acre, not as much as would bury him, should the rascal have! Alas! he had taken honesty as a matter of course inhisfamily. Were they nothischildren? He had not thought of God as the bond of life between him and them, nor sought to nourish the life in them. He was their father and was content with them. He had pondered much the laws by which society proceeds and prospers, but had not endeavoured in his own case to carry towards perfection the relation that first goes to the making of society: the relation between himself and his children had been left to shift for itself. He had never known anything of what was going on in the mind of his son. He had never asked himself if the boy loved the truth—if he cared that things should stand in him on the footing of eternal reason, or if his consciousness was anything better than the wallowing of a happy-go-lucky satisfaction in being. And now he was astonished to findhisboy no better than the common sort of human animal! My reader may say he was worse, for there is the stealing; but that is just the point in which I see him likest the common run of men, while in his home relations he was worse. It is my conviction that such an act of open disgrace as he had been guilty of, may be the outcome of evil more easy to cast off than that indicated by home-habits embodying a selfishness regarded embodied in families, and which perhaps are as a mere matter of course. There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable. Few seem to understand that the true end is not to keep their children from doing what is wrong, though that is on the way to it, but to render them incapable of doing wrong. While one is capable of doing wrong, he is no nearer right than if that wrong were done—not so near as if the wrong were done and repented of. Some minds are never roused to the true nature of their selfishness until having clone some patent wrong, the eyes of the collective human conscience are fixed with the essence of human disapprobation and general repudiation upon them. Doubtless in the disapproving crowd are many just as capable of the wrong as they, but the deeper nature in them, God's and not yet theirs utters its disapproval, and the culprit feels it. Happy he if then at last he begin to turn from the evil itself, so repenting! This Cornelius had not begun to do yet, but his illness, while perhaps it delayed the time when the thought of turning should present itself, made it more likely the thought would be entertained when it did present itself.
The father came back from his lonely walk, in which his communion with nature had been of the smallest, as determined as before that his son, having unsonned himself, should no more be treated as a son. He could not refuse him shelter in his house for a time, but he should be in it on sufferance—in no right of sonship, and should be made to understand it was so!
But the heart of the mother was longing after her boy, like a human hen whose chicken had run from under her wing and come to grief. He had sinned, he had suffered, and was in disgrace—good reasons why the mother's heart should cling to the youth, why her arms should long to fold him to her bosom! The things which made his father feel he could not speak to him again, worked in the deeper nature of the mother in opposite fashion. In her they reached a stratum of the Divine. Was he unlovely?—she must love him the more! Was he selfish and repellent?—she must get the nearer to him! Everything was reason to her for love and more love. If he were but with her! She would clasp him so close that evil should not touch him! Satan himself could not get at him with her whole mother-being folded round him! She had been feeling of late as if she could not get near him: now that sickness had reduced his strength, and shame his proud spirit, love would have room to enter and minister! The good of all evil is to make a way for love, which is essential good. Therefore evil exists, and will exist until love destroy and cast it out. Corney could not keep his mother out of his heart now! She thought there were ten things she could do for him now to one she could have done for him before! When, oh when would he appear, that her heart might go out to meet him!
The day came. It was fine in London. The invalid was carefully wrapt up for the journey. Hester, the major and Miss Dasomma followed the young couple to the station. There the latter received the poor little wife, and when the train was out of sight, took her home with her. The major who got into the next carriage, at every stop ran to see if anything was wanted; and when they reached the station got on the box of the carriage the mother had sent to meet them. Thus Hester bore her lost sheep home—in little triumph and much anxiety. When they stopped at the door no one was on the outlook for them. The hall was not lighted and the door was locked. The major rang the bell. Ere the door was opened Hester had got down and stood waiting. The major took the youth in his arms and carried him into the dining-room, so weary that he could scarcely open his eyes. There seemed no light in the house, except the candle the man brought when he came to open the door. Corney begged to be put to bed. "I wish Amy was here!" he murmured. Hester and the major were talking together.
She hurried from the room and returned in a moment.
"I was sure of it," she whispered to the major. "There is a glorious fire in his room, and everything ready for him. The house is my father, but the room is my mother, and my mother is God."
The major took him again, and carried him up the stair—so thin and light was he. The moment they were past the door of her room, out came the mother behind them in her dressing gown, and glided pale and noiseless as the disembodied after them. Hester looked round and saw her, but she laid her finger on her lips, and followed without a word. When they were in the room, she came to the door, looked in, and watched them, but did not enter. Cornelius did not open his eyes. The major laid him down on the sofa near the fire. A gleam of it fell on his face. The mother drew a sharp quick breath and pressed her hands against her heart: there was his sin upon his face, branding him that men might know him. But therewith came a fresh rush from the inexhaustible fountain of mother-love. She would have taken him into her anew, with all his sin and pain and sorrow, to clear away in herself brand and pollution, and bear him anew—even as God bears our griefs, and carries our sorrows, destroys our wrongs, taking their consequences on himself, and gives us the new birth from above. Her whole wounded heart seemed to go out to him in one trembling sigh, as she turned to go back to the room where her husband sat with hopeless gaze fixed on the fire. She had but strength to reach the side of the bed, and fell senseless upon it. He started up with a sting of self-accusation: he had killed her, exacting from her a promise that by no word would she welcome the wanderer that night. For she would not have her husband imagine in his bitterness that she loved the erring son more than the father whose heart he had all but broken, and had promised. She was, in truth, nearly as anxious about the one as the other, for was not the unforgivingness of the one as bad—was it not even worse than the theft of the other.
He lifted her, laid her on the bed, and proceeded to administer the restoratives he now knew better than any other how to employ. In a little while he was relieved, her eyelids began to tremble. "My baby!" she murmured, and the tears began to flow.
"Thank God!" he said, and got her to bed.
But strange to say, for all his stern fulfilment of duty, he did not feel fit to lie down by his wife. He would watch: she might have another bad turn!
From the exhaustion that followed excess of feeling, she slept. He sat watchful by the fire. She was his only friend, he said, and now she and he were no more of one mind! Never until now had they had difference!
Hester and the major got Corney to bed, and instantly he was fast asleep. The major arranged himself to pass the night by the fire, and Hester went to see what she could do for her mother. Knocking softly at the door and receiving no answer, she peeped in: there sat her father and there slept her mother: she would not disturb them, but, taking her share in the punishment of him she had brought home, retire without welcome or good-night. She too was presently fast asleep. There was no gnawing worm of duty undone or wrong unpardoned in her bosom to keep her awake. Sorrow is sleepy, pride and remorse are wakeful.
The night began differently with the two watchers. The major was troubled in his mind at what seemed the hard-heartedness of the mother, for he loved her with a true brotherly affection. He had not seen her looking in at the door; he did not know the cause of her appearing so withdrawn and unmotherly: he forgot his shilling novel and his sherry and water, and brooded over the thing. He could not endure the low-minded cub, he said to himself; he would gladly, if only the wretch were well enough, give him a sound horse-whipping; but to see him so treated by father and mother was more than he could bear: he began to pity a lad born of parents so hard-hearted. What would have become of himself, he thought, if his mother had treated him so? He had never, to be sure, committed any crime against society worse than shocking certain ridiculously proper people; but if she had made much of his foibles and faults, he might have grown to be capable of doing how could he tell what? who would turn out a mangy dog that was his own dog! If the fellow were his he would know what to do with him! He did not reflect that just because he was not his, he did not feel the wounds that disabled from action. It was easy for him unhurt to think what he would do if he were hurt. Some things seem the harder to forgive the greater the love. It is but a false seeming, thank God, and comes only of selfishness, which makes both the love and the hurt seem greater than they are.
And as the major sat thinking and thinking, the story came back to him which his mother had so often told him and his brothers, all now gone but himself, as they stood or sat or lay gathered round her on the Sunday evenings in the nursery—about the boy that was tired of being at home, and asked his father for money to go away; and how his father gave it him, thinking it better he should go than grumble at the best he could give him; and how he grew very naughty, and spent his money in buying things that were not worth having, and in eating and drinking with greedy, coarse, ill behaved people, till at last he had nothing left to buy food with, and had to feed swine to earn something; and how he fell a thinking, and would go home. It all came back to his mind just as his mother used to tell it—how the poor prodigal, ragged and dirty and hungry, set out for home, and how his father spied him coming a great way off, and knew him at once, and set out running to meet him, and fell on his neck and kissed him. This father would not even look at the son that had but just escaped the jaws of death! True, the prodigal came home repentant; but the father did not wait to know that, but ran to meet him and fell on his neck and kissed him!
As the major thus reflected, he kept coming nearer and nearer to the individual I lurking at the keyhole of every story. Only he had to go home, else how was his father to receive him.
"I wonder now," he said, "if when a man die that is counted for going home! I hardly think it; that is a thing the man can't help at all; he has no hand in the doing of it. Who would come out to meet a fellow because he was flung down dead at his door. I fear I should find myself in no better box than this young rascal when he comes home because he can't help it!"
The end of it was that the major, there in the middle of the night, went down on his knees, and, as he had not now done since the eve of his last battle, tried to say the prayers his mother had taught him. Presently he found himself saying things she had not taught him—speaking from his heart as if one was listening, one who in the dead of the night did not sleep, but kept wide awake lest one of his children should cry.
"It is time," said the major to himself the next day, "that I began to think about going home. I will try again to-night!"
In his wife's room Gerald Raymount sat on into the dead waste and middle of the night. At last, as his wife continued quietly asleep, he thought he would go down to his study, and find something to turn his thoughts from his misery. None such had come to him as to his friend. He had been much more of a religious man than the major—had his theories concerning both the first and the second table of the law; nor had he been merely a talker, though his talk, as with all talkers, was constantly ahead of his deed: well is it for those whose talk is not ahead of their endeavor! but it was theideaof religion, and the thousand ideas it broods, more than religion itself, that was his delight. He philosophized and philosophized well of the relations between man and his maker, of the necessity to human nature of belief in a God, of the disastrous consequences of having none, and such like things; but having such an interest is a very different thing from being in such relations with the father that the thought of him is an immediate and ever returning joy and strength. He did not rejoice in the thought of the inheritance of the saints in light, as the inheriting of the nature of God, the being made partaker of the father's essential blessedness: he was far yet from that. He was so busy understanding with his intellect, that he missed the better understanding of heart and imagination. He was always so pleased with the thought of a thing, that he missed the thing itself—whosepossession, and not its thought is essential. Thus when the trial came, it found him no true parent. The youth of course could not be received either as clean-handed or as repentant; but love is at the heart of every right way, and essential forgiveness at the-heart of every true treatment of the sinner, even in the very refusal of external forgiveness. That the father should not have longed above all things for his son's repentance; that he should not have met even a seeming return; that he should have nourished resentment because the youth had sinned againsthisfamily in which beauty as his he had gloried; that he should care to devise no measures for generating a sense of the evil he had done, and aiding repentance as makes forgiveness a necessary consequence; that he should, instead, ruminate how to make him feel most poignantly his absolute scorn of him, his loathing of his all but convict son—this made the man a kind of paternal Satan who sat watching by the repose of the most Christian, because most loving, most forgiving, most self-forgetting mother, stirring up in himself fresh whirlwinds of indignation at the incredible thing which had become the fact of facts, lying heaviest, stinging deepest, seeming unchangeable. That it might prove a blessing, he would have spurned as a suggestion equally degrading and absurd. "What is done is done," he would have said, in the mingled despair of pride and pride of despair; "and all the power of God cannot make the thing otherwise. We can hold up our heads no more for ever. My own son has not only disgraced but fooled me, giving men good cause to say, 'Physician, heal thyself.'"
He rose, and treading softly lest he should wake the only being hefeltlove for now, and whom he was loving less than before, for self-love and pride are antagonistic to all loves, left the room and went to his study. The fire was not yet out; he stirred it and made it blaze, lighted his candles, took a book from a shelf, sat down, and tried to read. But it was no use; his thoughts were such that they could hold no company with other thoughts: the world of his kind was shut out; he was a man alone, because a man unforgiving and unforgiven. His soul slid into the old groove of miserable self-reiteration whose only result was more friction-heat; and so the night slid away.
The nominal morning, if not the dawn was near, when, behold, a wonder of the night! The door between the study and the old library opened so softly that he heard nothing, and ere he was aware a child in long white gown stood by his side. He started violently. It was Mark—but asleep! He had seen his mother and father even more than usually troubled all day, and their trouble had haunted him in his sleep; it had roused him without waking him from his dreams, and the spirit of love had directed his feet to the presence of his father. He stood a little way from him, his face white as his dress, not a word issuing from his mouth, silent, haunted by a smile of intense quiet, as of one who, being comforted, would comfort. There was also in the look a slight something like idiocy, for his soul was not precisely with his body; his thoughts, though concerning his father, were elsewhere; the circumstances of his soul and of his body were not the same; and so, being twinned, that is, divided,twained, he was as one beside himself. His eyes, although open, evidently saw nothing; and thus he stood for a little time.
There had never been tender relations between Mark and his father like those between the boy and his mother and sister. His father was always kind to him, but betwixt him and his boys he had let grow a sort of hard skin. He had not come so near to them as to the feminine portion of his family—shrank indeed from close relations with their spirits, thoughts or intents. It arose, I imagine, from an excess of the masculine element in his nature. Even when as merest children they came to be kissed before going to bed, he did not like the contact of their faces with his. No woman, and perhaps not many men will understand this; but it was always a relief to Mr. Raymount to have the nightly ceremony over. He thought there was nothing he would not do for their good; and I think his heart must in the main have been right towards them: he could hardly love and honour his wife as he did, and not love the children she had given him. But the clothes of his affections somehow did not sit easy on him, and there was a good deal in his behaviour to Cornelius that had operated unfavourably on the mind of the youth. Even Mark, although, as I have said, he loved him as few boys love a father, was yet a little afraid of him—never went to him with confidence—never snuggled close to him—never sat down by his side to read his book in a heaven of twilight peace, as he would by his mother's. He would never have gone to his father's room for refuge from sleeplessness.
Not recognizing his condition his father was surprised and indeed annoyed as well as startled to see him: he was in no mood for such a visit. He felt also strangely afraid of the child, he could not have told why. Wretched about one son, he was dismayed at the nocturnal visit of the other. The cause was of course his wrong condition of mind; lack of truth and its harmony in ourselves alone can make us miserable; there is a cure for everything when that is cured. No ill in our neighbours, if we be right in ourselves, will ever seem hopeless to us; but while we stand wrapped in our own selfishness, our neighbour may well seem incurable; for not only is there nothing in us to help their redemption, but there is that in ourselves, and cherished in us, which cannot be forgiven, but must be utterly destroyed.
There was an unnatural look, at the same time pitiful and lovely, about the boy, and the father sat and stared in gathering dread. He had nearly imagined him an angel of some doom.
Suddenly the child stretched out his hands to him, and with upcast, beseeching face, and eyes that seemed to be seeing far off, came close to his knee. Then the father remembered how once before, when a tiny child, he had walked in his sleep, and how, suddenly wakened from it, he had gone into a kind of fit, and had for a long time ailed from the shock. Instantly anxious that nothing of the kind should occur again, he took the child softly in his arms, lifted him to his knees, and held him gently to his bosom. An expression of supreme delight came over the boy's face—a look of absolute contentment mingled with hope. He put his thin hands together, palm to palm, as if saying his prayers, but lifted his countenance to that of his father. His gaze, however, though not its direction, was still to the infinite. And now his lips began to move, and a murmur came from them, which grew into words audible. He was indeed praying to his father, but a father closer to him than the one upon whose knees he sat.
"Dear God," said the child—and before I blame the familiarity, I must know that God is displeased with such address from the mouth of a child: for this was not a taught prayer he neither meant nor felt—
"Dear God!" said the child, "I don't know what to do, for papa and Corney, I am afraid, are both naughty. I would not say so to anybody but you, God, for papa is your little boy as I am his little boy, and you know all about it. I don't know what it is, and I think Corney must be more to blame than my dear papa, but when he came home to-night he did not go to papa, and papa did not go to him. They never said How do you do, or Good-night—and Corney very ill too! and I am always wanting to come to you, God, to see you. O God, you are our big papa! please put it all right. I don't know how, or I would tell you; but it doesn't matter—you would only smile at my way, and take a much better one of your own. But please, dear God, make papa and Corney good, and never mind their naughtiness, only make it just nothing at all. You know they must love one another. I will not pray a word more, for I know you will do just what I want. Good-by, God; I'm going to bed now—down there. I'll come again soon."
With that he slipped from his father's knee, who did not dare to detain him, and walked from the room with slow stately step.
By this time the heart of the strong hard man was swelling with the love which, in it all along, was now awake. He could not weep, but sobbed dry, torturing sobs, that seemed as if they would kill him. But he must see that the boy was safe in bed, and rising he left the room.
In the corridor he breathed more freely. Through an old window, the bright moon, shining in peace with nobody to see, threw partly on the wall and partly on the floor, a shadow-cross, the only thing to catch the eye in the thin light. Severe protestant as Gerald Raymount was, he found himself on his knees in the passage before the shadow—not praying, not doing anything he knew, but under some spiritual influence known only to God.
When the something had reached its height, and the passion for the time was over—when the rush of the huge tidal wave of eternity had subsided, and his soul was clearing of the storm that had swept through it, he rose from his knees and went up to Mark's room, two stories higher. The moonlight was there too, for the boy had drawn back the window-curtains that from his pillow he might see the stars, and the father saw his child's white bed glimmering like a tomb. He drew near, but through the gray darkness it was some seconds before he could rightly see the face of his boy, and for a moment—I wonder how brief a moment is enough for a death-pang to feel eternal!—for an awful moment he felt as if he had lost him: when he left the study he had been lifted straight to the bosom of the Father to whom he had prayed! Slow through the dusk dawned his face. He had not then been taken bodily!—not the less was he gone!—that was a dead face! But as he gazed in a fascination of fear, his eyes grew abler to distinguish, and he saw that he breathed. He was astonished to find how weak was the revulsion: we know more about our feelings than about anything else, yet scarcely understand them at all; they play what seem to us the strangest pranks—moving all the time by laws divine.
The boy seemed in his usual health, and was sleeping peacefully—dreaming pleasantly, for the ghost of a smile glinted about his just parted lips. Then upon the father—who was not, with all his hardness, devoid of imagination—came the wonder of watching a dreamer: what might not be going on within that brain, inaccessible as the most distant star?—yea far more inaccessible, for what were gravity and distance compared with difficulties unnamed and unnamable! No spirit-shallop has yet been found to float us across the gulf, say rather the invisible line, that separates soul from soul. Splendrous visions might be gliding through the soul of the sleeper—his child, born of his body and his soul—and not one of them was open to him! not one of the thoughts whose lambent smile-flame flitted about his child's lips would pass from him to him! Could they be more divided if the child were dead, than now when he lay, in his sight indeed, yet remote in regions of separate existence?
But how much nearer to him in reality was the child when awake and about the house? How much more did he know then of the thoughts, the loves, the imaginations, the desires, the aspirations that moved in the heart and brain of the child? For all that his contact with him came to, he might as well be dead! A phantom of him moving silent about the house fill the part as well! The boy was sickly: he might be taken from him ere he had made any true acquaintance with him! he was just the child to die young! He would see him again, it was to be hoped, in the other world, but the boy would have so few memories of him, so few associations with him that it would be hard to knot the new to the old!
He turned away, and went back to his room. There, with a sense of loneliness deeper than he had ever before felt, he went down on his knees to beg the company of the great being whose existence he had so often defended as if it were in danger from his creatures, but whom he had so little regarded as actually existent that he had not yet sought refuge with him. All the house was asleep—the major had long ended his prayers and was slumbering by the fire—when Raymount knelt before the living love, the source of his life, and of all the love that makes life a good thing, and rose from his knees a humbler man.