I should have now laid claim to my property, but for Mary. To turn Sir Geoffrey with his mother and sister out of it, would have caused me little compunction, for they would still be rich enough; I confess indeed it would have given me satisfaction. Nor could I say what real hurt of any kind it would occasion to Mary; and if I were writing for the public, instead of my one reader, I know how foolishly incredible it must appear that for her sake I should forego such claims. She would, however, I trust, have been able to believe it without the proofs which I intend to give her. The fact was simply this: I could not, even for my own sake, bear the thought of taking, in any manner or degree, a position if but apparently antagonistic to her. My enemy was her husband: he should reap the advantage of being her husband; for her sake he should for the present retain what was mine. So long as there should be no reason to fear his adopting a different policy from his father’s in respect of his tenants, I felt myself at liberty to leave things as they were; for Sir Giles had been a good landlord, and I knew the son was regarded with favour in the county. Were he to turn out unjust or oppressive, however, then duty on my part would come in. But I must also remind my reader that I had no love for affairs; that I had an income perfectly sufficient for my wants; that, both from my habits of thought and from my sufferings, my regard was upon life itself—was indeed so far from being confined to this chrysalid beginning thereof, that I had lost all interest in this world save as the porch to the house of life. And, should I ever meet her again, in any possible future of being, how much rather would I not stand before her as one who had been even Quixotic for her sake—as one who for a hair’s-breadth of her interest had felt the sacrifice of a fortune a merely natural movement of his life! She would then know not merely that I was true to her, but that I had been true in what I professed to believe when I sought her favour. And if it had been a pleasure to me—call it a weakness, and I will not oppose the impeachment;—call it self-pity, and I will confess to that as having a share in it;—but, if it had been a shadowy pleasure to me to fancy I suffered for her sake, my present resolution, while it did not add the weight of a feather to my suffering, did yet give me a similar vague satisfaction.
I must also confess to a certain satisfaction in feeling that I had power over my enemy—power of making him feel my power—power of vindicating my character against him as well, seeing one who could thus abstain from asserting his own rights could hardly have been one to invade the rights of another; but the enjoyment of this consciousness appeared to depend on my silence. If I broke that, the strength would depart from me; but while I held my peace, I held my foe in an invisible mesh. I half deluded myself into fancying that, while I kept my power over him unexercised, I retained a sort of pledge for his conduct to Mary, of which I was more than doubtful; for a man with such antecedents as his, a man who had been capable of behaving as he had behaved to Charley, was less than likely to be true to his wife: he was less than likely to treat the sister as a lady, who to the brother had been a traitorous seducer.
I have now to confess a fault as well as an imprudence—punished, I believe, in the results.
The behaviour of Mr. Coningham still rankled a little in my bosom. From Geoffrey I had never looked for anything but evil; of Mr Coningham I had expected differently, and I began to meditate the revenge of holding him up to himself: I would punish him in a manner which, with his confidence in his business faculty, he must feel: I would simply show him how the precipitation of selfish disappointment had led him astray, and frustrated his designs. For if he had given even a decent attention to the matter, he would have found in the forgery itself hints sufficient to suggest the desirableness of further investigation.
I had not, however, concluded upon anything, when one day I accidentally met him, and we had a little talk about business, for he continued to look after the rent of my field. He informed me that Sir Geoffrey Brotherton had been doing all he could to get even temporary possession of the park, as we called it; and, although I said nothing of it to Mr Coningham, my suspicion is that, had he succeeded, he would, at the risk of a law-suit, in which he would certainly have been cast, have ploughed it up. He told me, also, that Clara was in poor health; she who had looked as if no blight could ever touch her had broken down utterly. The shadow of her sorrow was plain enough on the face of her father, and his confident manner had a little yielded, although he was the old man still. His father had died a little before Sir Giles. The new baronet had not offered him the succession.
I asked him to go with me yet once more to Umberden Church—for I wanted to show him something he had over-looked in the register—not, I said, that it would be of the slightest furtherance to his former hopes. He agreed at once, already a little ashamed, perhaps, of the way in which he had abandoned me. Before we parted we made an appointment to meet at the church.
We went at once to the vestry. I took down the volume, and laid it before him. He opened it, with a curious look at me first. But the moment he lifted the cover, its condition at once attracted and as instantly riveted his attention. He gave me one glance more, in which questions and remarks and exclamations numberless lay in embryo; then turning to the book, was presently absorbed, first in reading the genuine entry, next in comparing it with the forged one.
‘Right, after all!’ he exclaimed at length.
‘In what?’ I asked.’ In dropping me without a word, as if I had been an impostor? In forgetting that you yourself had raised in me the hopes whose discomfiture you took as a personal injury?’
‘My dear sir!’ he stammered in an expostulatory tone, ‘you must make allowance. It was a tremendous disappointment to me.’
‘I cannot say I felt it quite so much myself, but at least you owed me an apology for having misled me.’
‘I hadnotmisled you,’ he retorted angrily, pointing to the register.—‘There!’
‘You leftmeto find that out, though.Youtook no further pains in the matter.’
‘Howdidyou find it out?’ he asked, clutching at a change in the tone of the conversation.
I said nothing of my dream, but I told him everything else concerning the discovery. When I had finished—
‘It’s all plain sailing now,’ he cried. ‘There is not an obstacle in the way. I will set the thing in motion the instant I get home.—It will be a victory worth achieving,’ he added, rubbing his hands.
‘Mr Coningham, I have not the slightest intention of moving in the matter,’ I said.
His face fell.
‘You do not mean—when you hold them in your very hands—to throw away every advantage of birth and fortune, and be a nobody in the world?’
‘Infinite advantages of the kind you mean, Mr Coningham, could make me not one whit more than I am; theymightmake me less.’
‘Come, come,’ he expostulated; ‘you must not allow disappointment to upset your judgment of things.’
‘My judgment of things lies deeper than any disappointment I have yet had,’ I replied. ‘My uncle’s teaching has at last begun to bear fruit in me.’
‘Your uncle was a fool!’ he exclaimed.
‘But for my uncle’s sake, I would knock you down for daring to couple such a word withhim.’
He turned on me with a sneer. His eyes had receded in his head, and in his rage he grinned. The old ape-face, which had lurked in my memory ever since the time I first saw him, came out so plainly that I started: the child had read his face aright! the following judgment of the man had been wrong! the child’s fear had not imprinted a false eidolon upon the growing brain.
‘What right had, you,’ he said, ‘to bring me all this way for such tomfoolery?’
‘I told you it would not further your wishes.—But who brought me here for nothing first?’ I added, most foolishly.
‘I was myself deceived. I did not intend to deceive you.’
‘I know that. God forbid I should be unjust to you! But you have proved to me that your friendship was all a pretence; that your private ends were all your object. When you discovered that I could not serve those, you dropped me like a bit of glass you had taken for a diamond. Have you any right to grumble if I give you the discipline of a passing shame?’
‘Mr Cumbermede,’ he said, through his teeth, ‘you will repent this.’
I gave him no answer, and he left the church in haste. Having replaced the register, I was following at my leisure, when I heard sounds that made me hurry to the door. Lilith was plunging and rearing and pulling at the bridle which I had thrown over one of the spiked bars of the gate. Another moment and she must have broken loose, or dragged the gate upon her—more likely the latter, for the bridle was a new one with broad reins—when some frightful injury would in all probability have been the consequence to herself. But a word from me quieted her, and she stood till I came up. Every inch of her was trembling. I suspected at once, and in a moment discovered plainly that Mr Coningham had struck her with his whip: there was a big weal on the fine skin of her hip and across, her croup. She shrunk like a hurt child when my hand approached the injured part, but moved neither hoof nor head.
Having patted and petted and consoled her a little, I mounted and rode after Mr Coningham. Nor was it difficult to overtake him, for he was going a foot-pace. He was stooping in his saddle, and when I drew near, I saw that he was looking very pale. I did not, however, suspect that he was in pain.
‘It was a cowardly thing to strike the poor dumb animal,’ I cried.
‘You would have struck her yourself,’ he answered with a curse,’ if she had broken your leg.’
I rode nearer. I knew well enough that she would not have kicked him if he had not struck her first; and I could see that his leg was not broken; but evidently he was in great suffering.
‘I am very sorry,’ I said. Can I help you?’
‘Go to the devil!’ he groaned.
I am ashamed to say the answer made me so angry that I spoke the truth.
‘Don’t suppose you deceive me,’ I said. ‘I know well enough my mare did not kick you before you struck her. Then she lashed out, of course.’
I waited for no reply, but turned and rode back to the church, the door of which, in my haste, I had left open. I locked it, replaced the key, and then rode quietly home.
But as I went, I began to feel that I had done wrong. No doubt, Mr Coningham deserved it, but the law was not in my hands. No man has a right topunishanother. Vengeance belongs to a higher region, and the vengeance of God is a very different thing from the vengeance of man. However it may be softened with the name of retribution, revenge runs into all our notions of justice; and until we love purely, so it must ever be.
All I had gained was self-rebuke, and another enemy. Having reached home, I read the Manual of Epictetus right through before I laid it down, and, if it did not teach me to love my enemies, it taught me at least to be ashamed of myself. Then I wrote to Mr Coningham, saying I was sorry I had spoken to him as I did, and begging him to let by-gones be by-gones; assuring him that, if ever I moved in the matter of our difference, he should be the first to whom I applied for assistance.
He returned me no answer.
And now came a dreary time of re-action. There seemed nothing left for me to do, and I felt listless and weary. Something kept urging me to get away and hide myself, and I soon made up my mind to yield to the impulse and go abroad. My intention was to avoid cities, and, wandering from village to village, lay my soul bare to the healing influences of nature. As to any healing in the power of Time, I despised the old bald-pate as a quack who performed his seeming cures at the expense of the whole body. The better cures attributed to him are not his at all, but produced by the operative causes whose servant he is. A thousand holy balms require his services for their full action, but they, and not he, are the saving powers. Along with Time I ranked, and with absolute hatred shrunk from—all those means which offered to cure me by making me forget. From a child I had a horror of forgetting; it always seemed to me like a loss of being, like a hollow scooped out of my very existence—almost like the loss of identity. At times I even shrunk from going to sleep, so much did it seem like yielding to an absolute death—a death so deep that the visible death is but a picture or type of it. If I could have been sure of dreaming, it would have been different, but in the uncertainty it seemed like consenting to nothingness. That one who thus felt should ever have been tempted to suicide, will reveal how painful if not valueless his thoughts and feelings—his conscious life—must have grown to him; and that the only thing which withheld him from it should be the fear that no death, but a more intense life might be the result, will reveal it yet more clearly. That in that sleep I might at least dream—there was the rub.
All such relief, in a word, as might come of a lowering of my life, either physically, morally, or spiritually, I hated, detested, despised. The man who finds solace for a wounded heart in self-indulgence may indeed becapableof angelic virtues, but in the mean time his conduct is that of the devils who went into the swine rather than be bodiless. The man who can thus be consoled for the loss of a woman could never have been worthy of her, possibly would not have remained true to her beyond the first delights of possession. The relief to which I could open my door must be such alone as would operate through the enlarging and elevating of what I recognized asmyself. Whatever would make me greater, so that my torture, intensified, it might well be, should yet have room to dash itself hither and thither without injuring the walls of my being, would be welcome. If I might become so great that, my grief yet stinging me to agony, the infiniteIof me should remain pure and calm, God-loving and man-cherishing, then I should be saved. God might be able to do more for me—I could not tell: I looked for no more. I would myself be such as to inclose my pain in a mighty sphere of out-spacing life, in relation to which even such sorrow as mine should be but a little thing. Such deliverance alone, I say, could I consent with myself to accept, and such alone, I believed, would God offer me—for such alone seemed worthy of him, and such alone seemed not unworthy of me.
The help that Nature could give me, I judged to be of this ennobling kind. For either nature was nature in virtue of having been born (nata) of God, or she was but a phantasm of my own brain—against which supposition the nature in me protested with the agony of a tortured man. To nature, then, I would go. Like the hurt child who folds himself in the skirt of his mother’s velvet garment, I would fold myself in the robe of Deity.
But to give honour and gratitude where both are due, I must here confess obligation with a willing and thankful heart. TheExcursionof Wordsworth was published ere I was born, but only since I left college had I made acquaintance with it: so long does it take for the light of a new star to reach a distant world! To this book I owe so much that to me it would alone justify the conviction that Wordsworth will never be forgotten. That he is no longer the fashion, militates nothing against his reputation. We, the old ones, hold fast by him for no sentimental reminiscence of the fashion of our youth, but simply because his humanity has come into contact with ours. The men of the new generation have their new loves and worships: it remains to be seen to whom the worthy amongst them will turn long ere the frosts of age begin to gather and the winds of the human autumn to blow. Wordsworth will recede through the gliding ages until, with the greater Chaucer, and the greater Shakspere, and the greater Milton, he is yet a star in the constellated crown of England.
Before I was able to leave home, however, a new event occurred.
I received an anonymous letter, in a hand-writing I did not recognize. Its contents were as follows:—
‘SIR,—Treachery is intended you. If you have anything worth watching,watchit.’
For one moment—so few were the places in which through my possessions I was vulnerable—I fancied the warning might point to Lilith, but I soon dismissed the idea. I could make no inquiries, for it had been left an hour before my return from a stroll by an unknown messenger. I could think of nothing besides but the register, and if this was what my correspondent aimed at, I had less reason to be anxious concerning it, because of the attested copy, than my informant probably knew. Still its safety was far from being a matter of indifference to me. I resolved to ride over to Umberden Church, and see if it was as I had left it.
The twilight was fast thickening into darkness when I entered the gloomy building. There was light enough, however, to guide my hand to the right volume, and by carrying it to the door, I was able to satisfy myself that it was as I had left it.
Thinking over the matter once more as I stood, I could not help wishing that the book were out of danger just for the present; but there was hardly a place in the bare church where it was possible to conceal it. At last I thought of one—half groped my way to the pulpit, ascended its creaking stair, lifted the cushion of the seat, and laid the book, which was thin, open in the middle, and flat on its face, under it. I then locked the door, mounted, and rode off.
It was now more than dusk. Lilith was frolicsome, and, rejoicing in the grass under her feet, broke into a quick canter along the noiseless, winding lane. Suddenly there was a great shock, and I lay senseless.
I came to myself under the stinging blows of a whip, only afterwards recognized as such, however. I sprung staggering to my feet, and rushed at the dim form of an assailant, with such a sudden and, I suppose, unexpected assault, that he fell under me. Had he not fallen I should have had little chance with him, for, as I now learned by his voice, it was Sir Geoffrey Brotherton.
‘Thief! Swindler! Sneak!’ he cried, making a last harmless blow at me as he fell.
All the wild beast in my nature was roused. I had no weapon—not even a whip, for Lilith never needed one. It was well, for what I might have done in the first rush of blood to my reviving brain, I dare hardly imagine. I seized him by the throat with such fury that, though far the stronger, he had no chance as he lay. I kneeled on his chest. He struggled furiously, but could not force my gripe from his throat. I soon perceived that I was strangling him, and tightened my grasp.
His efforts were already growing feebler, when I became aware of a soft touch apparently trying to take hold of my hair. Glancing up without relaxing my hold, I saw the white head of Lilith close to mine. Was it the whiteness—was it the calmness of the creature—I cannot pretend to account for the fact, but the same instant before my mind’s eye rose the vision of one standing speechless before his accusers, bearing on his form the marks of ruthless blows. I did not then remember that just before I came out I had been gazing, as I often gazed, upon an Ecce Homo of Albert Dürer’s that hung in my room. Immediately my heart awoke within me. My whole being still trembling with passionate struggle and gratified hate, a rush of human pity swept across it. I took my hand from my enemy’s throat, rose, withdrew some paces, and burst into tears. I could have embraced him, but I dared not even minister to him for the insult at would appear. He did not at once rise, and when he did, he stood for a few moments, half-unconscious, I think, staring at me. Coming to himself, he felt for and found his whip—I thought with the intention of attacking me again, but he moved towards his horse, which was quietly eating the grass, now wet with dew. Gathering its bridle from around its leg, he mounted, and rode back the way he had come.
I lingered for a while utterly exhausted. I was trembling in every limb. The moon rose and began to shed her low yellow light over the hazel copse, filling the lane with brightness and shadow. Lilith, seeming-in her whiteness to gather a tenfold share of the light upon herself, was now feeding as gently as if she had known nothing of the strife, and I congratulated myself that the fall had not injured her. But as she took a step forward in her feeding, I discovered to my dismay that she was quite lame. For my own part I was now feeling the ache of numerous and severe bruises. When I took Lilith by the bridle to lead her away, I found that neither of us could manage more than two miles an hour. I was very uneasy about her. There was nothing for it, however, but make the best of our way to Gastford. It was no little satisfaction to think, as we hobbled along, that the accident had happened through no carelessness of mine, beyond that of cantering in the dark, for I was on my own side of the road. Had Geoffrey been on his, narrow as the lane was, we might have passed without injury.
It was so late when we reached Gastford, that we had to rouse the ostler before I could get Lilith attended to. I bathed the injured leg, of which the shoulder seemed wrenched; and having fed her, but less plentifully than usual, I left her to her repose. In the morning she was considerably better, but I resolved to leave her where she was, and, sending a messenger for Styles to come and attend to her, I hired a gig, and went to call on my new friend the rector of Umberden.
I told him all that had happened, and where I had left the volume. He said he would have a chest made in which to secure the whole register, and, meanwhile, would himself go to the church and bring that volume home with him. It is safe enough now, as any one may find who wishes to see it—though the old man has long passed away.
Lilith remained at Gastford a week before I judged it safe for her to come home. The injury, however, turned out to be a not very serious one.
Why should I write of my poor mare—but that she was once hers all for whose hoped perusal I am writing this? No, there is even a better reason: I shall never, to all my eternity, forget, even if I should never see her again, which I do not for a moment believe, what she did for me that evening. Surely she deserves to appear in her own place in my story!
Of course I was exercised in my mind as to who had sent me the warning. There could be no more doubt that I had hit what it intended, and had possibly preserved the register from being once more tampered with. I could think only of one. I have never had an opportunity of inquiring, and for her sake I should never have asked the question, but I have little doubt it was Clara. Who else could have had a chance of making the discovery, and at the same time would have cared to let me know it? Also she would have cogent reason for keeping such a part in the affair a secret. Probably she had heard her father informing Geoffrey; but he might have done so with no worse intention than had informed his previous policy.
I am drawing my story to a close. Almost all that followed bears so exclusively upon my internal history, that I will write but one incident more of it. I have roamed the world, and reaped many harvests. In the deepest agony I have never refused the consolations of Nature or of Truth. I have never knowingly accepted any founded in falsehood, in forgetfulness, or in distraction. Let such as have no hope in God drink of what Lethe they can find; to me it is a river of Hell and altogether abominable. I could not be content even to forget my sins. There can be but one deliverance from them, namely, that God and they should come together in my soul. In his presence I shall serenely face them. Without him I dare not think of them. With God a man can confront anything; without God, he is but the withered straw which the sickle of the reaper has left standing on a wintry field. But to forget them would be to cease and begin anew, which to one aware of his immortality is a horror.
If comfort profound as the ocean has not yet overtaken and infolded me, I see how such may come—perhaps will come. It must be by the enlarging of my whole being in truth, in God, so as to give room for the storm to rage, yet not destroy; for the sorrow to brood, yet not kill; for the sunshine of love to return after the east wind and black frost of bitterest disappointment; for the heart to feel the uttermost tenderness while the arms go not forth to embrace; for a mighty heaven of the unknown, crowded with the stars of endless possibilities, to dawn when the sun of love has vanished, and the moon of its memory is too ghastly to give any light: it is comfort such and thence that I think will one day possess me. Already has not its aurora brightened the tops of my snow-covered mountains? And if yet my valleys lie gloomy and forlorn, is not light on the loneliest peak a sure promise of the coming day?
Only once again have I looked in Mary’s face. I will record the occasion, and then drop my pen.
About five years after I left home, I happened in my wanderings to be in one of my favourite Swiss valleys—high and yet sheltered. I rejoiced to be far up in the mountains, yet behold the inaccessible peaks above me—mine, though not to be trodden by foot of mine—my heart’s own, though never to yield me a moment’s outlook from their lofty brows; for I was never strong enough to reach one mighty summit. It was enough for me that they sent me down the glad streams from the cold bosoms of their glaciers—the offspring of the sun and the snow; that I too beheld the stars to which they were nearer than I.
One lovely morning I had wandered a good way from the village—a place little frequented by visitors, where I had a lodging in the house of the syndic—when I was overtaken by one of the sudden fogs which so frequently render those upper regions dangerous. There was no path to guide me back to my temporary home, but, a hundred yards or so beneath where I had been sitting, lay that which led down to one of the best known villages of the canton, where I could easily find shelter. I made haste to descend.
After a couple of hours’ walking, during which the fog kept following me, as if hunting me from its lair, I at length arrived at the level of the valley, and was soon in one of those large hotels which in Summer are crowded as bee-hives, and in Winter forsaken as a ruin. The season for travellers was drawing to a close, and the house was full of homeward-bound guests.
For the mountains will endure but a season of intrusion. If travellers linger too long within their hospitable gates, their humour changes, and, with fierce winds and snow and bitter sleet, they will drive them forth, preserving their Winter privacy for the bosom friends of their mistress, Nature. Many is the Winter since those of my boyhood which I have spent amongst the Alps; and in such solitude I have ever found the negation of all solitude, the one absolute Presence. David communed with his own heart on his bed and was still—there finding God: communing with my own heart in the Winter-valleys of Switzerland I found at least what made me cry out: ‘Surely this is the house of God; this is the gate of heaven!’ I would not be supposed to fancy that God is in mountains, and not in plains—that God is in the solitude, and not in the city: in any region harmonious with its condition and necessities, it is easier, for the heart to be still, and in its stillness to hear the still small voice.
Dinner was going on at thetable-d’hôte. It was full, but a place was found for me in a bay-window. Turning to the one side, I belonged to the great world, represented by the Germans, Americans, and English, with a Frenchman and Italian here and there, filling the long table; turning to the other, I knew myself in a temple of the Most High, so huge that it seemed empty of men. The great altar of a mighty mountain rose, massy as a world, and ethereal as a thought, into the upturned gulf of the twilight air—its snowy peak, ever as I turned to look, mounting up and up to its repose. I had been playing with my own soul, spinning it between the sun and the moon, as it were, and watching now the golden and now the silvery side, as I glanced from the mountain to the table, and again from the table to the mountain, when all at once I discovered that I was searching the mountain for something—I did not know what. Whether any tones had reached me, I cannot tell;—a man’s mind may, even through his senses, be marvellously moved without knowing whence the influence comes;—but there I was searching the face of the mountain for something, with a want which had not begun to explain itself. From base to peak my eyes went flitting and resting and wandering again upwards. At last they reached the snowy crown, from which they fell into the infinite blue beyond. Then, suddenly, the unknown something I wanted was clear. The same moment I turned to the table. Almost opposite was a face—pallid, with parted lips and fixed eyes—gazing at me. Then I knew those eyes had been gazing at me all the time I had been searching the face of the mountain. For one moment they met mine and rested; for one moment, I felt as if I must throw myself at her feet, and clasp them to my heart; but she turned her eyes away, and I rose and left the house.
The mist was gone, and the moon was rising. I walked up the mountain path towards my village. But long ere I reached it the sun was rising. With his first arrow of slenderest light, the tossing waves of my spirit began to lose their white tops, and sink again towards a distant calm; and ere I saw the village from the first point of vision, I had made the following verses. They are the last I will set down.
I know that I cannot move theeTo an echo of my pain,Or a thrill of the storming troubleThat racks my soul and brain;That our hearts through all the agesShall never sound in tune;That they meet no more in their cyclesThan the parted sun and moon.But if ever a spirit flashesItself on another soul,One day, in thy stillness, a vapourShall round about thee roll;And the lifting of the vapourShall reveal a world of pain,Of frosted suns, and moons that wanderThrough misty mountains of rain.Thou shalt know me for one live instant—Thou halt know me—and yet not love:I would not have thee troubled,My cold, white-feathered dove!I would only once come near thee—Myself,and not my form;Then away in the distance wander,A slow-dissolving storm.The vision should pass in vapour,That melts in aether again;Only a something linger-Notpain, but the shadow of pain.And I should know that thy spiritOn mine one look had sent;And glide away from thy knowledge,And try to be half-content.
The ebbing tide that leaves bare the shore swells the heaps of the central sea. The tide of life ebbs from this body of mine, soon to lie on the shore of life like a stranded wreck; but the murmur of the waters that break upon no strand is in my ears; to join the waters of the infinite life, mine is ebbing away.
Whatever has been his will is well—grandly well—well even for that in me which feared, and in those very respects in which it feared that it might not be well. The whole being of me past and present shall say: It is infinitely well, and I would not have it otherwise. Rather than it should not be as it is, I would go back to the world and this body of which I grew weary, and encounter yet again all that met me on my journey. Yes—final submission of my will to the All-will—I would meet itknowing what was coming. Lord of me, Father of Jesus Christ, will this suffice? Is my faith enough yet? I say it, not having beheld what thou hast in store—not knowing what I shall be—not even absolutely certain that thou art—confident only that, if thou be, such thou must be.
The last struggle is before me. But I have passed already through so many valleys of death itself, where the darkness was not only palpable, but choking and stinging, that I cannot greatly fear that which holds but the shadow of death. For what men call death, is but its shadow. Death never comes near us; it lies behind the back of God; he is between it and us. If he were to turn his back upon us, the death which no imagination can shadow forth, would lap itself around us, and we should be—we should not know what.
At night I lie wondering how it will feel; and, but that God will be with me, I would rather be slain suddenly, than lie still and await the change. The growing weakness, ushered in, it may be, by long agony; the alienation from things about me, while I am yet amidst them; the slow rending of the bonds which make this body a home, so that it turns half alien, while yet some bonds unsevered hold the live thing fluttering in its worm-eaten cage—but God knows me and my house, and I need not speculate or forebode. When it comes, death will prove as natural as birth. Bethink thee, Lord—nay, thou never forgettest. It is because thou thinkest and feelest that I think and feel; it is on thy deeper consciousness that mine ever floats; thou knowest my frame, and rememberest that I am dust: do with me as thou wilt. Let me take centuries to die if so thou willest, for thou wilt be with me. Only if an hour should come when thou must seem to forsake me, watch me all the time, lest self-pity should awake, and I should cry that thou wast dealing hardly with me. For when thou hidest thy face, the world is a corpse, and I am a live soul fainting within it.
Thus far had I written, and was about to close with certain words of Job, which are to me like the trumpet of the resurrection, when the news reached me that Sir Geoffrey Brotherton was dead. He leaves no children, and the property is expected to pass to a distant branch of the family. Mary will have to leave Moldwarp Hall.
I have been up to London to my friend Marston—for it is years since Mr Coningham died. I have laid everything before him, and left the affair in his hands. He is so confident in my cause, that he offers, in case my means should fail me, to find what is necessary himself; but he is almost as confident of a speedy settlement.
And now, for the first time in my life, I am about—shall I say, to court society? At least I am going to London, about to give and receive invitations, and cultivate the acquaintance of those whose appearance and conversation attract me.
I have not a single relative, to my knowledge, in the world, and I am free, beyond question, to leave whatever property I have, or may have, to whomsoever I please.
My design is this: if I succeed in my suit, I will offer Moldwarp to Mary for her lifetime. She is greatly beloved in the county, and has done much for the labourers, nor upon her own lands only. If she had the full power she would do yet better. But of course it is very doubtful whether she will accept it. Should she decline it, I shall try to manage it myself—leaving it to her, with reversion to the man, whoever he may be, whom I shall choose to succeed her.
What sort of man I shall endeavour to find, I think my reader will understand. I will not describe him, beyond saying that he must above all things be just, generous, and free from the petty prejudices of the country gentleman. He must understand that property involves service to every human soul that lives or labours upon it—the service of the elder brother to his less burdened yet more enduring and more helpless brothers and sisters; that for the lives of all such he has in his degree to render account. For surely God never meant to uplift any manat the expenseof his fellows; but to uplift him that he might be strong to minister, as a wise friend and ruler, to their highest and best needs—first of all by giving them the justice which will be recognized as such by him before whom a manishis brother’s keeper, and becomes a Cain in denying it.
Lest Lady Brotherton, however, should like to have something to give away, I leave my former will as it was. It is in Marston’s hands.
Would I marry her now, if I might? I cannot tell. The thought rouses no passionate flood within me. Mighty spaces of endless possibility and endless result open before me. Death is knocking at my door.—
No—no; I will be honest, and lay it to no half reasons, however wise.—I would rather meet her then first, when she is clothed in that new garment called by St Paul the spiritual body. That, Geoffrey has never touched; over that he has no claim.
But if the loveliness of her character should have purified his, and drawn and bound his soul to hers?
Father, fold me in thyself. The storm, so long still, awakes; once more it flutters its fierce pinions. Let it not swing itself aloft in the air of my spirit. I dare not think, not merely lest thought should kindle into agony, but lest I should fail to rejoice over the lost and found. But my heart is in thy hand. Need I school myself to bow to an imagined decree of thine? Is it not enough that, when I shall know a thing for thy will, I shall then be able to say: Thy will be done? It is not enough; I need more. School thou my heart so to love thy will that in all calmness I leave to think what may or may not be its choice, and rest in its holy self.
She has sent for me. I go to her. I will not think beforehand what I shall say.
Something within tells me that a word from her would explain all that sometimes even now seems so inexplicable as hers. Will she speak that word? Shall I pray her for that word? I know nothing. The pure Will be done!