All her thoughts were now occupied with the rights of her son, and through him of the family. Sir Wilton had been for some time ailing, and when he went, they would be at the mercy of any other heir than Arthur, just as miserably whether he were the true heir or an impostor; the one was as bad as the other from her point of view! For the right, lady Ann cared nothing, except to have it or to avoid it. The law of the land was to be respected no doubt, but your own family—most of all when land was concerned—was worthier still!

It were better to rid the place of the bookbinder—but how? As to whether he was the legal heir or not, she would rather remain ignorant, only that, assured on the point, she would better understand how to deal with his pretension! But she could not consult sir Wilton, because she suspected him of a lingering regard for the dead wife which would naturally influence his feeling for the live son—if live he were: no doubt he had enjoyed the company of the low-born woman more than hers, for she, a woman of society, knew what was right! She had reason therefore to fear him prejudiced for any pretender! Arthur and he got on quite as well as could be expected of father and son—their differences never came to much; but on the other hand sir Wilton had a demoniacal pleasure in frustrating! To make a man he disliked furious, was honey and nuts to sir Wilton; and she knew a woman whose disappointment would be dearer to him than that of all his enemies together! It was better therefore that he should have no hint, and especially from her, of what was in the air!

Lady Ann thought herself a good woman because she never felt interest enough to be spiteful like sir Wilton; yet, very strangely, not knowing in herself what repentance meant, she judged him capable of doing her the wrong of atoning to his first wife for his neglect of her, by being good to her child! Thinking over her talk with Barbara, she could not, after all, feel certain that Richard knew, or that he had incited Barbara to take his part. But in any case it was better to get rid of him! It was dangerous to have him in the house! He might be spending his nights in trumping up evidence! At any moment he might appeal to sir Wilton as his father! But at the worst, he would be unable to prove the thing right off, and if her husband would but act like a man, they might impede the attempt beyond the possibility of its success!

One comfort was, that, she was all but confident, the child was not already baptized when stolen from Mortgrange; neither were such as would steal children likely to have them baptized; therefore the God who would not allow the unbaptized to lie in his part of the cemetery, would never favour his succession to the title and estate of Mortgrange! The fact must have its weight with Providence!—whom lady Ann always regarded us a good churchman: he would never take the part of one that had not been baptized! Besides, the fellow was sure to turn out a socialist, or anarchist, or positivist, or radical, or something worse! She would dispute his identity to the last, and assert his imposture beyond it! Her duty to society demanded that she should not give in!

Suddenly she remembered the description her husband had given her of the ugliness of the infant: this man was decidedly handsome! Then she remembered that sir Wilton had told her of a membrane between certain of his fingers—horrible creature: she must examine the impostor!

Arthur was very moody at dinner: his mother feared some echo of the same report as caused her own anxiety had reached him, and took the first opportunity of questioning him. But neither of lady Ann's sons had learned such faith in their mother as to tell her their troubles. Arthur would confess to none. She in her turn was far too prudent to disclose what was in her mind: the folly of his youth might take the turn of an unthinking generosity! the notion of an elder brother might even be welcome to him!

In another generation no questions would be asked! Many estates were in illegal possession! There was a claim superior to the legal! Theirs was a moral claim!



CHAPTER XXXVII.

LADY ANN AND RICHARD.

The same afternoon, Richard was mending the torn title of a black-letter copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs. Vixen had forgotten her former fright, and her evil courage had returned. Opening the door of the library so softly that Richard heard nothing, she stole up behind him, and gave his elbow a great push just as, with the sharpest of penknives, he was paring the edge of a piece of old paper, to patch the title. The pen-knife slid along the bit of glass he was paring upon, and cut his other hand. The blood spouted, and some of it fell upon the title, which made Richard angry: it was an irremediable catastrophe, for the paper was too weak to bear any washing. He laid hold of the child, meaning once more to carry her from the room, and secure the door. Then first Vixen saw what she had done, and was seized with horror—not because she had hurt "the bear," but because of the blood, the sight of which she could not endure. It was a hereditary weakness on sir Wilton's side. One of the strongest men of his family used to faint at the least glimpse of blood. There was a tradition to account for it, not old or thin enough to cast no shadow, therefore seldom alluded to. It was not, therefore, an ordinary childish dismay, but a deep-seated congenital terror, that made Vixen give one wavering scream, and drop on the floor. Richard thought she was pretending a faint in mockery of what she had done, but when he took her up, he saw that she was insensible. He laid her on a couch, rang the bell, and asked the man to take the child to her governess. The man saw blood on the child's dress, and when he reached the schoolroom with her, informed the governess that she had had an accident in the library. Miss Malliver, with one of her accomplished shrieks, dispatched him to tell lady Ann. Coming to herself in a few minutes, Vixen told a confused story of how the bear had frightened her. Lady Ann, learning that the blood was not that of her child, came to the conclusion that Richard had played upon her peculiarity to get rid of her, for Vixen, incapable of truth, did not tell that she was herself the cause of the wound whence the blood had made its appearance. Miss Malliver, who would hardly have been sorry had Vixen's throat been cut, rose in wrath, and would have swooped down the stair upon Richard.

"Leave him to me, Malliver," said lady Ann, and rising, went down the stair. But the moment she entered the library, and saw Richard's hand tied up in his handkerchief, she bethought herself of the happy chance of satisfaction as to whether or not he was web-fingered: the absence of the peculiarity would indeed prove nothing, but the presence of it would be a warning of the worst danger: he might have had it removed, but could not have contrived to put it there!

"What have you done to yourself, Mr. Tuke?" she said, making a motion to take the wounded hand, from which at the same time she shrank with inward disgust.

"Nothing of any consequence, my lady," answered Richard, who had risen, and stood before her. "I was using a very sharp knife, and it went into my hand. I hope Miss Victoria is better?"

"There is nothing much the matter with her," answered her ladyship. "The sight of blood always makes her faint."

"It is a horrid sight, my lady!" rejoined Richard, wondering at her ladyship's affability, and ready to meet any kindness. "When I was at school, I was terribly affected by it. One boy used to provoke me to fight him, and contrive that I should make his nose bleed—after which he could do what he liked with me. But I set myself to overcome the weakness, and succeeded."

Lady Ann listened in silence, too intent on his hands to remark at the moment how the fact he mentioned bore on the question that absorbed her.

"Would you mind showing me the wound?" she said. "I am something of a surgeon."

To her disappointment, he persisted that it was nothing. Because of the peculiarity she would gladly have missed in them, he did not like showing his hands. His mother had begged him not to meddle with the oddity until she gave her consent, promising a good reason for the request when the right time should arrive; but he was sensitive about it—probably from having been teased because of it. His comfort was, that a few slits of a sharp knife would make him like other people.

Lady Ann was foiled, therefore the more eager: why should the man be so unwilling to show his hands?

"Your work must be very interesting!" she said.

"I am fond of it, my lady," he answered. "If I had a fortune left me, I should find it hard to drop it. There is nothing like work—and books—for enjoying life!"

"I daresay you are right.—But go on with your work. I have heard so much about it from Miss Wylder that I should like to see you at it."

"I am sorry, my lady, but I shall be fit for next to nothing for a day or two because of this hand. I dare not attempt going on with what I am now doing."

"Is it so very painful? You ought to have it seen to. I will send for Mr. Hurst."

As she spoke, she turned to go to the bell. Richard had tried to interrupt her, but she would not listen. He now assured her that it was his work not his hand that he was thinking of; and said that, if Mr. Lestrange had no objection, he would take a short holiday.

"Then you would like to go home!" said her ladyship, thinking it would be so easy then to write and tell him not to come back—if only Arthur could be got to do it.

"I should like to go to my grandfather's for a few days," answered Richard.

This was by no means what lady Ann desired, but she did not see how to oppose it.

"Well, perhaps you had better go," she said.

"If you please, my lady," rejoined Richard, "I must see Mr. Lestrange first. I cannot go without his permission."

"I will speak to my son about it," answered lady Ann, and went away, feeling that Richard would be a dangerous enemy. She did not hate him: she only regarded him as what might possibly prove an adverse force to be encountered and frustrated because of her family, and because of the right way of things—that those, namely, who had nothing should be kept from getting anything. In the meantime the only thing clear was, that he had better be got out of the neighbourhood! It was well sir Wilton had hardly seen the young man: if there was anything about him capable of rousing old memories, it were well it should not have the chance! Sir Wilton was not fond of books, and it could be no great pleasure to him to have the library set to rights; he was annoyed at being kept out of it, for he liked to smoke his cigar there, and shuddered at the presence of a working man except in the open air: she was certain he would feel nowise aggrieved if the design were abandoned midway! The only person she feared would oppose Tuke's departure, was Arthur.



CHAPTER XXXVIII.

RICHARD AND ARTHUR.

She went to find him, told him what had happened to the young man, and, feeling her way, proposed that he should go to his grandfather's for a few days. Arthur started. Send him where he and Barbara would be constantly meeting! Must he for ever imagine them walking up and down that field, among the dandelions and daisies! He had discovered, he believed, all that was between them, but was not therewith satisfied: she had found out, he said to himself, that the fellow was an infidel, did not believe in God, or a resurrection—was so low that he did not care to live for ever, and she was trying to convert him. Arthur would rather he remained unconverted than that she should be the means of converting him. Nor indeed would he be much injured by having the growth of such a faith as Arthur's prevented in him: Arthur prided himself in showing due respect to the Deity by allowing that he existed. But the fellow was too clever by half, he said, and would be much too much for her. Any theory wild enough would be attractive to her, who never cared a pin-head what the rest of the world believed! She had indeed a strong tendency to pantheism, for she expected the animals to rise again—a most unpleasant notion! Doubtless it was she that sought his company; a fellow like that could not presume to seek hers! He was only laughing at her all the time! What could an animal like him care about the animals: he had not even a dog to love! He would not have him go to his grandfather's! he would a thousand times rather give up the library! There should be no more bookbinding at Mortgrange! He would send the books to London to him! It would be degrading to allow personal feeling to affect his behaviour to such a fellow; he should have the work all the same, but not at Mortgrange!

So he answered his mother that he was rather tired of him, and thought they had had enough of him; the work seemed likely to be spun out ad infinitum, and this was a good opportunity for getting rid of him. He was sorry, for it was the best way for the books, but he could send them to him in London, and have them done there! The man, he understood, had been making himself disagreeable too, and he did not want to quarrel with him! He was a radical, and thought himself as good as anybody: it was much best to let him go. He had at first liked him, and had perhaps shown it more than was good for the fellow, so that he had come to presume upon it, setting it down to some merit in himself. Happily he had retained the right of putting an end to the engagement when he pleased!

This was far better than lady Ann had expected. Arthur went at once to Richard, and speaking, as he thought, unconcernedly, told him they found it inconvenient to have the library used as a workshop any longer, and must make a change.

Richard was glad to hear it, thinking he meant to give him another room, and said he could work just as well anywhere else: he wanted only a dry room with a fire-place! Arthur told him he had arranged for what would be more agreeable to both parties, namely, that he should do the work at home. It would cost more, but he was prepared for that. He might go as soon as he pleased, and they would arrange by letter how the books should be sent—so many at a time!

Richard spied something more under his dismissal than the affair with Miss Vixen; but he was too proud to ask for an explanation: Mr. Lestrange was in the right of their compact. He felt aggrieved notwithstanding, and was sorry to go away from the library. He would never again have the chance of restoring such a library! He did not once think of it from the point of gain: he could always make his living! It was to him a genuine pleasure to cause any worthy volume look as it ought to look; and to make a whole straggling library of books wasted and worn, put on the complexion, uniform, and discipline of a well-conditioned company of the host of heaven, was at least an honourable task! For what are books, I venture to say, but an army-corps of the lord of hosts, at whose command are troops of all natures, after the various regions of his indwelling! Even the letter is something, for the dry bones of books are every hour coming alive to the reader in whose spirit is blowing the better spirit. Richard himself was one of such, though he did not yet know there was a better spirit. Then again, there were not a few of the books with which individually he was sorry to part. He had also had fine opportunity for study, of which he was making good use, and the loss of it troubled him. He had read some books he would hardly otherwise have been able to read, and had largely extended his acquaintance with titles.

He was sorry too not to see more of Mr. Wingfold. He was a clergyman, it was true, but not the least like any other clergyman he had seen! Richard had indeed known nothing of any other clergyman out of the pulpit; and I fear most clergymen are less human, therefore less divine, in the pulpit than out of it! Many who out of the pulpit appear men, are in it little better than hawkers of old garments, the worse for their new patches. Of the forces in action for the renovation of the world, the sale of such old clothes is one of the least potent. They do, however, serve a little, I think, even as the rags of a Neapolitan for the olives of Italy, as a sort of manure for the young olives of the garden of God.

But his far worst sorrow was leaving Miss Wylder. That was a pain, a keen pain in his heart. For, that a woman is miles above him, as a star is above a marsh-light, is no reason why a man should not love her. Nay, is it not the best of reasons for loving her? The higher in soul, and the lowlier in position he is, the more imperative and unavoidable is it that he should love her; and the absence of any thought in the direction of marriage leaves but the wider room for the love infinite. In a man capable of loving in such fashion, there are no bounds to the possibilities, no limit to the growth of love. Richard thought his soul was full, but a live soul can never be full; it is always growing larger, and is always being filled.

"Like one that hath been stunned," he went about his preparations for departure.

"You will go by the first train in the morning," said Arthur, happening to meet him in the stable-yard, whither Richard had gone to look if Miss Brown was in her usual stall. "I have told Robert to take you and your tools to the station in the spring-cart."

"Thank you, sir," returned Richard; "I shall not require the cart. I leave the house to-night, and shall send for my things to-morrow morning. I have them almost ready now."

"You cannot go to London to-night!"

"I am aware of that, sir."

"Then where are you going? I wish to know."

"That is my business, sir."

"You have no cause to show temper," said Arthur coldly.

"I should not have shown it, sir, had you not presumed to give me orders after dismissing me," answered Richard.

"I have not dismissed you; I mean to employ you still, only in London instead of here," said Arthur.

"That is a matter for fresh arrangement with my father," rejoined Richard, and left him.

Arthur felt a shadow cross him—almost like fear: he had but driven Richard to his grandfather's, and had made an enemy of him! Nor could he feel satisfied with himself; he could not get rid of the thought that what he had done was not quite the thing for a gentleman to do. His trouble was not that he had wronged Richard, but that he had wronged himself, had not acted like his ideal of himself. He did not think of what was right, but of what befitted a gentleman. Such a man is in danger of doing many things unbefitting a gentleman. For the measure of a gentleman is not a man's ideal of himself.

His uneasiness grew as day after day went by, and Barbara did not appear at Mortgrange. He was not aware that Richard saw no more of her than himself. He knew that he was at his grandfather's; he had himself seen him at work at the anvil; but he did not know that the hope in which he lingered there was vain.

Richard waited a week, but no Barbara came to the smithy. He could not endure the thought of going away without seeing her once more. He must once thank her for what she had done for him! He must let her know why he had left Mortgrange.

He would go and say good-bye to the clergyman: from him he might hear something of her!

Wingfold caught sight of him approaching the house, and himself opened the door to him. Taking him to his study, he made him sit down, and offered him a pipe.

"Thank you, sir; I don't smoke," said Richard.

"Then don't learn. You are better without it," answered Wingfold, and put down his own pipe.

"I came," said Richard, "to thank you for your kindness to me, and to ask about Miss Wylder. Not having seen her for a long time, I was afraid she might be ill. I am going away."

There was a tremor in Richard's voice, of which he was not himself aware. Wingfold noted it, pitied the youth because of the fuel he had stored for suffering, and admired him for his straightforwardness.

"I am sorry to say you are not likely to see Miss Wylder," he answered. "Her mother is ill."

"I hardly thought to see her, sir. Is her mother very ill?"

"Yes, very ill," answered Wingfold.

"With anything infectious?"

"No. Her complaint is as little infectious as complaint could be; it is just exhaustion—absolute prostration, mental and nervous. She is too weak to think, and can't even feed herself. I fear her daughter will be worn out waiting on her. She devotes herself to her mother with a spirit and energy I never but once knew equalled. She never seems tired, never out of spirits. I heard a lady say she couldn't have much feeling to look cheerful when her mother was in such a state; but the lady was stupid. She would wait on her own mother almost as devotedly as Miss Wylder, but with such a lugubrious countenance that her patient might well seek refuge from it in the grave. But it is no wonder she should be in good spirits: it is the first time in her life, she says, that she has been allowed to be of any use to her mother! Then she is not suffering pain, and that makes a great difference. But more than all, her mother has grown so tender to her, and so grateful, following her constantly about the room with her eyes, that the girl says she feels in a paradise of which her mother is the tutelar divinity, raying out bliss as she lies in bed! Also her father is kinder to her mother. Little signs of tenderness pass between them—a thing she has never known before! How could she be other than happy!—But what is this you tell me about going away? The library cannot be finished!"

Wingfold had dilated on the worth of Miss Wylder, and let Richard know of her happiness, out of genuine sympathy. He knew that, next to the worship of God, the true worship of a fellow-creature, in the old meaning of the word, is the most potent thing for deliverance.

"No, sir," answered Richard; "the library is left in mid ocean of decay. I don't know why they have dismissed me. The only thing clear is, that they want to be rid of me. What I have done I can't think. There is a little girl of the family—"

Here he told how Vixen had from the first behaved to him, and what things had happened in consequence, the last more particularly.

"But," he concluded, "I do not think it can be that. I should like to know what it is."

"Then wait," said Wingfold. "If we only wait long enough, every reason will come out. You know I believe we are not going to stop, but are meant to go on and on for ever; and I believe the business of eternity is to bring grand hidden things out into the light; and with them will come of necessity many other things as well, even some, I daresay, that we count trifles.—But I am sorry you're going."

"I don't see why you should be, sir!" answered Richard, his look taking from the words their seeming rudeness.

"Because I like you, and feel sure we should understand each other if only we had time," replied the parson. "It's a grand thing to come upon one who knows what you mean. It's so much of heaven before you get there.—If you think I'm talking shop, I can't help it—and I don't care, so long as you believe I mean it. I would not have you think it the Reverend Thomas and not Thomas himself that was saying it."

"I should never say you talked shop, sir; and I don't think you would say I was talking shop if I expatiated on the beauties of a Grolier binding! You would see I was not talking from love of gain, but love of beauty!"

"Thank you. You are a fair man, and that is even more than an honest man! I don't speak from love of religion; I don't know that I do love religion."

"I don't understand you now, sir."

"Look here: I am very fond of a well-bound book; I should like all my new books bound in levant morocco; but I don't care about it; I could do well enough without any binding at all."

"Of course you could, sir! and so could I, or any man that cared for the books themselves."

"Very well! I don't care about religion much, but I could not live without my Father in heaven. I don't believe anybody can live without him."

"I see," said Richard.

He thought he saw, but he did not see, and could not help smiling in his heart as he said to himself, "I have lived a good many years without him!"

Wingfold saw the shadow of the smile, and blamed himself for having spoken too soon.

"When do you go?" he asked.

"I think I shall go to-morrow. I am at my grandfather's."

"If I can be of use to you, let me know."

"I will, sir; and I thank you heartily. There's nothing a man is so grateful for as friendliness."

"The obligation is mutual," said Wingfold.



CHAPTER XXXIX.

MR., MRS., AND MISS WYLDER.

A new experience had come to Mrs. Wylder. Her passion over the death of her son; her constant and prolonged contention with her husband; her protest against him whom she called the Almighty; the public consequence of the same; these, and the reaction from all these, had resulted in a sudden sinking of the vital forces, so that she who had been like a burning fiery furnace, was now like a heap of cooling ashes on a hearth, with the daylight coming in. She had not only never known what illness was, she did not even know what it was to feel unfit. Her consciousness of health was so clear, so unmixed, so unencountered, that she had never had a conception, a thought, a notion of what even that health was. Power and strength had so constantly seemed part of her known self, that she never thought of them: they were never far enough from her to be seen by her; she did not suspect them as other than herself, or dream that they could be disjoined from her. She could think only in the person of a strong woman; she was aware only of the being of a strong woman. Even after she had been some time helpless in bed, as often as she thought of anything she would like to do, it was the act of trying to get up and do it that made her aware afresh that she was no more the woman corresponding to her consciousness of herself. For her consciousness had never yet presented her as she really was, but always through the conditional and non-essential, so that by accidents only was she characterized to herself. Now she was too feeble even to care for the loss of her strength; her weakness went too deep to be felt as an oppression, for it met with no antagonism. Her inability to move was now no prison, and her attendant was no slave with tardy feet, but an angel of God.

For her Bab was now the mother's one delight. Her love for her lost twin had been in great part favouritism, partisanship, defence, opposition; her love for Barbara was all tenderness and no pride. In her self-lack she clung to her—as lordly dame, who had taken her castle for part of herself, and impregnable, but, its walls crumbling under the shot of the enemy, found herself defenceless before her captors, might turn and clasp her little maid, suppliant for protection. Good is it that we are not what we seem to ourselves "in our hours of ease," for then we should never seek the Father! The loss of all that the world counts first things is a thousandfold repaid in the mere waking to higher need. It proves the presence of the divine in the lower good, that its loss is so potent. A man may send his gaze over the clear heaven, and suspect no God; when the stifling cloud comes down, folds itself about him, shuts from him the expanse of the universe, he begins to long for a hand, a sign, some shadow of presence. Mrs. Wylder had not got so far as this yet, but she had sought refuge in love; and what is the love of child, or mother, or dog, but the love of God, shining through another being—which is a being just because he shines through it. This was the one important result of her illness, that, finding refuge in the love of her daughter, she loved her daughter. The next point in her eternal growth would be to love the God who made the child she loved, and whose love shone upon her through the child. By nature she was a strong woman whom passion made weak. It sucked at her will till first it hardened it to a more selfish determination, then pulped it to a helpless obstinacy. The persistence that goes with inclination has its force only from the weakness of pride and the mean worship of self; it is the opposite of that free will which is the reflex of the divine will, and the ministering servant-power to all freedom, which resists and subdues the self of inclination, and is obedient only to the self of duty. Where the temple of God has no windows, earthquake must rend the roof, that the sunlight may enter. Barbara's mother lay broken on her couch that the spirit of the daughter might enter the soul of her mother—and with it the spirit of him who, in the heart of her daughter, made her that which she was.

Her illness had lasted a month, when one day her husband, at Barbara's prayer coming to see her, she feebly put out her hand asking for his, and for a moment the divine child in the man opened its heavenly eyes. He took the offered hand kindly, faltered a gentle-sounding commonplace or two, and left her happier, with a strange little bird fluttering in his own bosom. There are eggs of all the heavenly birds in our bosoms, and the history of man is the incubation and hatching of these eggs.

She began to recover, but the recovery was a long one. As soon as she thought her well enough, Barbara told her that Mr. Wingfold had been to inquire after her almost every day, and asked whether she would not like to see him. Mrs. Wylder was in a quiescent condition, non-combatant, involving no real betterment, occasioned only by the absence of impulse. But such a condition gives opportunity for the good, the gentle, the loving, to be felt, and so recognized. The sufferer resembles a child that has not been tempted, whose trial is yet to come. With recovery, fresh claim will be put in by the powers of good. This claim will be resisted by old habit, resuming its force in the return of physical and psychical health,—and then comes the tug of war. For no one can be saved, as he who knows his master would be saved, without the will being supreme in the matter, without the choosing to fulfill all righteousness, to resist the wrong, to do the right. Wingfold never built much on bed-repentance. The aphorism of the devil sick and the devil well, is only too true. But he welcomed the fresh opportunity for a beginning. He knew that pain and sickness do rub some dirt from the windows toward the infinite, and that things of the old unknown world whence we came, do sometimes look in at them, a moment now, and a moment then, waking new old things that lie in every child born into the world. I seem to see the great marshes where the souls go wandering about after the bog-fires; a kiss blown from the walls of the city comes wavering down among them; it flits hither and thither with the dead-lights; it finds a soul with a spot on which it can alight; it settles there; and kisses it alive. God is the God of patience, and waits and waits for the child who keeps him waiting and will not open the door.

Wingfold went to see her, but took good care to press nothing upon her. He let her give him the lead. She spoke of her weakness, and the parson drew out her moan. She praised her Barbara, and the parson praised her again in words that opened the mother's eyes to new beauties in her daughter. She mentioned her weariness, and the parson spoke of the fields and the soft wind and the yellow shine of the butter-cups in the grass. Her heart was gently drawn to the man whose eyes were so keen, whose voice was so mellow and strong, and whose words were so lovely sweet, saying the things that were in her own heart, but would not come out.

One day he proposed to read something, and she consented. I will not say what he read, for I would avoid waking controversy as to fitness. He thought he knew what he was about. The good in a true book, he would say, is the best protection against what may not be so good in it; its wrong as well as its right may wake the conscience: the thoughts of a book accuse and excuse one another. In saying so, he took the true reader for granted; to an untrue reader the truth itself is untrue. The general sense of honour, he would say, has been stimulated not a little by the story of the treachery of Jael. Nor was it any wonder he should succeed in interesting Mrs. Wylder, for she had a strong brain as well as a big heart. More than half her faults came of an indignant sense of wrong. She had passionately loved her husband once, but he had soon ceased even the show of returning her affection,

And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain.

After a fierce struggle against the lessons life would have her taught, a struggle continued to her fortieth year, she was now at length a pupil in another school, where the schoolroom was her bed, the book of Quiet her first study, her two attendants a clergyman and her own daughter, and her one teacher, God himself. In that schoolroom, the world began to open to her a little. Among men who could, without seeming to aim at it, make another think, I have not met the equal of Wingfold. His mode was that of the open-hearted apostle, who took men by guile. He called out the thoughts lurking in their souls, and set them dealing with those thoughts, not with him: they were slow to discover that he was a divine musician, playing upon the holy strings of their hearts; they thought the tunes came alive in their own air—as indeed they did, only another hand woke them. To work thus, he had to lay bare not a little of his own feeling, but where it was brotherly to show feeling, he counted it unchristian to hide it. Feeling by itself, however, that came and went without correspondent action, he counted not only weak and mawkish, but tending to the devilish.

Barbara was happy all day long. Life seemed about to blossom into a great flower of scarlet and gold. She had learned from the parson that the bookbinder was gone, but was at the time too busy and too anxious to question him as to the cause of his going. Till her mother was well, it was enough to know that Richard had wanted to see her, doubtless to tell her all about it. She often thought of him, what he had done for her, and what she had tried to do for him, and was certain he would one day believe in God. She did not suspect any quarrel with the people at Mortgrange. She thought perhaps the secret concerning him had come out, and he did not choose to remain in a house the head of which, if lady Ann's tale was true, had so bitterly wronged his mother. As soon as she was able she would go and hear of him from his grandfather! There was no hurry! She would certainly see him again before long! And he would be sure to write! It did not occur to her that a man in his position would hardly venture to approach her again, without some renewed approach on her part; and for a long time she was nowise uneasy.

The hope alive in Wingfold made him a true consoler; and the very sight of him was a strength to Barbara. She regarded him with profound reverence, and his wife as most enviable of women: could she not learn from his mouth the rights of a thing, the instant she opened hers to ask them? Barbara did not know how much the sympathy, directness, and dear common sense of Helen, had helped to keep awake, support, and nourish the insight of her husband. She did not know, good and powerful as Wingfold must have been had he never married, how much wiser, more useful, and more aspiring he had grown because Helen was Helen, and his wife, sent as certainly as ever angel in the old time. The one fault she had in the eyes of her husband was, that she was so indignant with affectation or humbug of any sort, as hardly to give the better thing that might coexist with it, the needful chance.

So long as evil comes to the front, it appears an interminable, unconquerable thing. But all the time there may be a change, positive as inexplicable, at the very door. How is it that a child begins to be good? Upon what fulcrum rests the knife-edge of alteration? As undistinguishable is the moment in which the turn takes place; equally perplexing to keenest investigation the part of the being in which the renovation commences. Who shall analyze repentance, as a force, or as a phenomenon! You cannot see it coming! Before you know, there it is, and the man is no more what he was; his life is upon other lines! The wind hath blown. We saw not whence it came, or whither it went, but the new birth is there. It began in the spiritual infinitesimal, where all beginnings are. The change was begun in Mrs. Wylder. But the tug of her war was to come.

Lady Ann had not once been to see her since first calling when she arrived. Naturally she did not take to her. In the eyes of lady Ann, Mrs. Wylder was insufferable—a vulgar, arrogant, fierce woman, purse-proud and ignorant. But a keen moral eye would have perceived lady Ann vastly inferior to Mrs. Wylder in everything right-womanly. Lady Ann was the superior by the changeless dignity of her carriage, but her self-assured pre-eminence was offensive, and her drawling deliberation far more objectionable than Mrs. Wylder's abrupt movements, or the rough and ready speech that accompanied her eager dart at the gist of a matter. Even the look that would kill a man if it could, never roused such hate as sprang to meet the icy stare of her passionless ladyship. Many a man with no admiration of the florid, would have sought refuge in Mrs. Wylder's plump face, vivid with an irritable humanity, from the moveless pallor of lady Ann's delicately formed cheek, and the pinched thinness of her fine, poverty-stricken nose. Oh those pinched nostrils, the very outcry of inward meanness! will they ever open to the full tide of a surging breath? What vital interweaving of gladness and grief will at length make strong and brave and unselfish the heart that sent out those nostrils? Less than a divine shame will never make it the heart of a fearless, bountiful, redeeming woman.

Mrs. Wylder was nowise annoyed that lady Ann did not call a second time. She did not care enough to mind, and preferred not seeing her. They had in common as near nothing as humanity permitted. "Stuck-up kangaroo!" she cried her.

"I'll lay you my best sapphire," she said to her daughter, in the hearing of Wingfold, whose presence she had forgotten, "that for the last three hundred years not a woman of her family has suckled her own young!"

Neither mother nor daughter had shown the least deference to lady Ann's exalted position. The first movement of her dislike to Mrs. Wylder was caused by her laughing and talking as unrestrainedly in her presence as in that of the doctor's wife, who happened to be in the room when lady Ann entered. But now that danger, not to say ruin, appeared in the distance, she must, for the sake of her son, wronged by his father's having married another woman before his mother, neglect no chance! Arthur had been to Wylder Hall repeatedly, but Barbara had not seen him! She must go herself, and pay some court to the young heiress! She was anxious also to learn whether any chagrin was concerned in her continuous absence from Mortgrange.

Barbara received her heartily, and they talked a little, lady Ann imagining herself very pleasing: she rarely condescended to make herself agreeable, and measured her success by her exertion. She found Barbara in such good spirits that she pronounced her heartless—not to her son, or to any but herself, who would not have come near her but for the money to be got with her. She begged her, notwithstanding, for the sake of her complexion, to leave her mother an hour or two now and then, and ride over to Mortgrange. Incessant watching would injure her health, and health was essential to beauty! Barbara protested that nothing ever hurt her; that she was the only person she knew fit to be a nurse, because she was never ill. When her ladyship, for once oblivious of her manners, grew importunate, Barbara flatly refused.

"You must pardon me, lady Ann," she said; "I cannot, and I will not leave my mother."

Then lady Ann thought it might be wise to make a little more of the mother to whom she seemed so devoted. She had imagined the daughter of the coarse woman must feel toward her as she did, and suspected a coarser grain in the daughter than she had supposed, because she was not disgusted with her mother. She did not know that eyes of love see the true being where other eyes see only its shadow; and shadows differ a good deal from their bodies.

But meeting Mr. Wylder in the avenue as she returned, and stopping her carriage to speak to him, lady Ann changed her mind, and resolved to curry favour with the husband instead of the wife. For hitherto she had scarcely seen Mr. Wylder, and knew about him only by unfavourable hearsay; but she was charmed with him now, and drew from him a promise to go and dine at Mortgrange.

Bab went singing back to her mother, who was never so ill that she did not like to hear her voice. She could not always bear it in the room, but outside she was never tired of it. So Bab went about the house singing like a mavis. But she never passed a servant, male or female, without ceasing her song to say a kind word; and her mother, who, now that she had got on a little, lay listening with her keenest of ears, knew by the checks and changes of Bab's song, something of what was going on in the house. If one asked Bab what made her so happy, she would answer that she had nothing to make her unhappy; and there was more philosophy in the answer than may at first appear. For certainly the normal condition of humanity is happiness, and the thing that should be enough to make us happy, is simply the absence of anything to make us unhappy.

"Everything," she would answer another time, "is making me happy."

"I think I am happiness," she said once.

How could she naturally be other than happy, seeing she came of happiness! "Il lieto fattore," says Dante; "whose happy-making sight," says Milton.

Mr. Wylder went and dined with sir Wilton and lady Ann. The latter did her poor best to please him, and was successful. It had always been an annoyance to Mr. Wylder that his wife was not a lady. In the bush he did not feel it; but now he saw, as well as knew, wherein she was inferior, and did not see wherein she excelled. It was the more consolation to him that lady Ann praised his daughter, her beauty, her manners, her wit—praised her for everything, in short, that she thought hers, and for some things she thought were not hers. But she hinted that it would be of the greatest benefit to Barbara to have the next season in London. The girl had met nobody, and might, in her ignorance and innocence, being such an eager, impetuous, warm-hearted creature, with her powers of discrimination of course but little cultivated, make unsuitable friendships that would lead to entanglement; while, well chaperoned, she might become one of the first ladies in the county. She took care to let her father know at the same time, or think he knew, that, although her son would be only a baronet, he would be rich, for the estates were in excellent condition and free of encumbrance; and hinted that there was now a fine chance of enlarging the property, neighbouring land being in the market at a low price.

Mr. Wylder had indeed hoped for a higher match, but lady Ann, being an earl's daughter, had influence with him. The remaining twin was so delicate that it was very doubtful if he would succeed: if he did not, and land could be had between to connect the two properties of Mortgrange and Wylder, the estate would be far the finest in the county; when, as lady Ann hinted, means might be used to draw down the favour of Providence in the form of a patent of nobility.

To lady Ann, London was the centre of love-making, and Arthur, she said to herself, would show to better advantage there than in the country. The place where she had herself been nearest to falling in love, was a ball-room: the heat apparently had half thawed her.

Mr. Wylder thought lady Ann was right, and the best thing for Barbara would be to go to London: lady Ann would present her at court, and she would doubtless be the belle of the season. Her chance would be none the worse of making a better match than with Arthur Lestrange.

It may seem odd that a like reflection did not occur to lady Ann: far more eligible men than her son might well be drawn to such a bit of sunshine as Barbara; but just what in Barbara was most attractive, lady Ann was least capable of appreciating.



CHAPTER XL.

IN LONDON.

It was into the first of the London fogs of the season that Richard, after a slow parliamentary journey, got out of his third-class carriage, at the great dim station. He took his portmanteau in one hand, and his bag of tools in the other, and went to look for an omnibus. How terribly dull the streets were! and how terribly dull and commonplace all inside him! Into the far dark, the splendour of life, Barbara, had vanished! Various memories of her, now this look, now that, now this attire, now that—a certain button half torn from her riding habit—the feeling of her foot in his hand as he lifted her to Miss Brown's back—would enter his heart like the proclamation of a queen on a progress through her dominions. The way she drove the nails into her mare's hoof; the way she would put her hand on his shoulder as she slid from the saddle; the commanding love with which she spoke to the great animal, and the way Miss Brown received it; the sweet coaxing respect she showed his blacksmith-grandfather; the tone of her voice when she said God;—a thousand attendant shadows glided in her queen-procession, one after the other in single file, through his brain, and his heart, and his every power. He forgot the omnibus, and went tramping through the dreary streets with his portmanteau and a small bag of tools—he had sent home his heavier things before—thinking ever of Barbara, and not scorning himself for thinking of her, for he thought of her as true lady herself would never scorn to be thought of by honest man. No genuine unselfish feeling is to be despised either by its subject or its object. That Barbara was lovely, was no reason why Richard should not love her! that she was rich, was no reason why he should forget her! She came into his life as a star ascends above the horizon of the world: the world cannot say to it, "Go down, star." Yea, Richard's star raised him as she rose. In her presence he was at once rebuked and uplifted. She was a power within him. He could not believe in God, but neither could he think belief in such a God as she believed in, degrading. He said to himself that everything depended on the kind of God believed in; and that the kind of God depended on the kind of woman. He wondered how many ideas of God there might be, for every one who believed in him must have a different idea. "Some of them must be nearer right than others!" he said to himself—nor perceived that he was beginning to entertain the notion of a real God. For he saw that the notions of the best men and women must be convergent, and was not far from thinking that such lines must point to some object, rather than an empty centre: the idea of the best men and women must be a believable idea, might be a true idea, might therefore be a real existence. He had not yet come to consider the fact, that the best of men said he knew God; that God was like himself, only greater; that whoever would do what he told him should know that God, and know that he spoke the truth concerning him; that he had come from him to witness of him that he was truth and love. Richard had indeed started on a path pointing thitherward, but as yet all concerning the one necessary entity was vaguest speculation with him. He did feel, however, that to give in to Barbara altogether, would not make him a believer such as Barbara. On the other hand, he was yet far from perceiving that no man is a believer, let him give his body to be burned, except he give his will, his life to the Master. No man is a believer with whom he and his father are not first; no man, in a word, who does not obey him, that is, who does not do what he said, and says. It seems preposterous that such definition should be necessary; but thousands talk about him for one that believes in him; thousands will do what the priests and scribes say he commands, for one who will search to find what he says that he may do it—who will take his orders from the Lord himself, and not from other men claiming either knowledge or authority. A man must come up to the Master, hearken to his word, and do as he says. Then he will come to know God, and to know that he knows him.

When he stopped thinking of Barbara, all was dreary about Richard. But he did not once say to himself, "She does not love me!" did not once ask, "Does she love me?" He said, "She cares for me; she is good to me! I wish I believed as she does, that I might hope to meet her again in the house of the one Father!"

It was Saturday night, and he had to go through a weekly market, a hurrying, pushing, loitering, jostling crowd, gathered thick about the butchers' and fishmongers' shops, the greengrocers' barrows, and the trays upon wheels with things laid out for sale. Suddenly a face flashed upon him, and disappeared. He was not sure that it was Alice's, but it suggested Alice so strongly that he turned and tried to overtake it. Impeded by his luggage, however, which caught upon hundreds of legs, he soon saw the attempt hopeless. Then with pain he remembered that he had not her address, and did not know how to communicate with her. He longed to learn why she had left him without a word, what her repeated avoidance of him meant; far more he desired to know where she was that he might help her, and how she fared. But Barbara was her friend! Barbara knew her address! He would ask her to send it him! He hardly thought she would, for she was in the secret of Alice's behaviour, but, joy to think, it would be a reason for writing to her! His heart gave a bound in his bosom. Who could tell but she might please to send him the fan-wind of a letter now and then, keeping the door, just a chink of it, open between them, that the voice of her slave might reach her on the throne of her loveliness! He walked the rest of the way with a gladder heart; he was no longer without a future; there was something to do, and something to wait for! Days are dreary unto death which wrap no hope in their misty folds.

His uncle and aunt received him with more warmth than he had ever known them show. They were in good spirits about him, for they had all the time been receiving news of him and Barbara, with not a word of Alice, from old Simon. Jane's heart swelled with the ambition that her boy should as a working-man gain the love of a well born girl, and reward her by making her my lady.

I do not think Mrs. Tuke could have loved a son of her own body more than this son of her sister; but she was constantly haunted with a vague uneasiness about the possible consequences to herself and her husband of what she had done, and the obstacles that might rise to prevent his restoration; and this uneasiness had its share both in repressing the show of her love, and in making her go to church so regularly. Her pleasure in going was not great, but she was not the less troubled that Richard did not care about going. She was still in the land of bullocks and goats; she went to church with the idea that she was doing something for God in going. It is always the way. Until a man knows God, he seeks to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about; while the things for the sake of which he sent his son, the man regards as of little or no consequence. What the son says about them, he takes as a matter of course for him to say, and for himself to neglect.

Mrs. Tuke noted, the next day, that, as often almost as he was still, a shadow settled on Richard's face, and he looked lost and sad: but it only occurred to her that of course he must miss Barbara, never that he cherished no hope such as she would have counted hope. She took it almost as an omen of final success when in the evening he asked her if she would not like him to go to church with her. He felt as if in church he would be nearer Barbara, for he knew that now she went often. But alas, while there he sat, he felt himself drifting farther and farther from her! The foolish utterances of the parson made him deeply regret that he had gone. While he believed, or at least was willing to believe, that they misrepresented Christianity, they awoke all his old feelings of instinctive repulsion, and overclouded his discrimination. Almost as little could he endure the unnature as the untruth of what he heard. It had no ring of reality, no spark of divine fire, no appealing radiance of common sense, little of any verity at all. There was in it, as nearly as possible, nothing at all to mediate between mind and mind, between truth and belief, between God and his children. The clergyman was not a hypocrite—far from it! He was in some measure even a devout man. But in his whole presentation of God and our relation to him, there was neither thought nor phrase germane to sunrise or sunset, to the firmament or the wind or the grass or the trees; nothing that came to the human soul as having a reality true as that of the world but higher; as holding with the life lived in it, with the hopes and necessities of the heart and mind. If "the hope of the glory of God" must be fashioned in like sort, then were the whole affair of creation and redemption both dull and desperate. There was no glow, no enthusiasm in the man—neither could there be, with the notions he held. His God suggested a police magistrate—and not a just one.

Richard would gladly have left the place, and wandered up and down in the drizzle until, the service over, his mother should appear; but for her sake he sat out the misery.

"The man," he said to himself, "does not give us one peg on which to hang the love of God that he tells us we ought to feel! Love a God like that! If he were as good as my mother, I would love him! But we have all to look out to protect ourselves from him! Mr. Parson, there's no such being as you jabber about! It puzzles me to think what my mother gets from you."

He had written his letter to Barbara, and when they came out he posted it. A long, long time of waiting followed; but no waiting brought any answer. Lady Ann had dropped a hint, and Mr. Wylder had picked it up, a hint delicate, but forcible enough to make him do what he had never done before—keep an outlook on the letters that came for his daughter. When Richard's arrived, it did not look to him that of a gentleman. The writing was good, but precise; it was sealed with red wax, but the impression was sunk: a proper seal had not been used! Especially where his own family was concerned, Mr. Wylder was not the most delicate of men! he opened the letter, and in it found what he called a rigmarole of poetry and theology! "Confound the fellow!" he said to himself. Lady Ann did well to warn him! There should be no more of this! The scatter-brain took after her mother! He would give it her hot!

But he neither gave it her hot, nor gave her the letter; he did not say a word. He feared the little girl he pretended to protect, and knew that if he entered the lists with her, she would be too much for him. But he did not understand that the mean in him dared not confront the noble in his child. So Richard's letter only had it hot; it went into the fire, and Bab never read the petition of her poor friend.

The next morning Richard went to the shop, and fell to the first job that came to his hand. He acquainted his father with Lestrange's proposal in regard to the library: Mr. Tuke would have him accept it.

"You shall have all it brings," he said.

"I don't want the money!" returned Richard.

"But I want the honour of the thing," replied his uncle. "You answered the young gentleman sharply: you had better let me write!"

Richard made no objection. He would gladly keep the door open to any place where the shadow of Barbara might fall, and was willing therefore to pocket the offence of his causeless dismissal. But no notice was taken of Tuke's letter, and a gulf of negation seemed to yawn between the houses.

Thus was initiated a dreary time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, and it did not seem so unnatural to be without her now. Had it been summer, all the forms of earth and air would have brought to him the face and voice and motion of Barbara; and yet the soul would have been gone from them. The world would have been worse dead then than now in the winter. Barbara had been the soul of it—more than a sun to it.

He could not, however, dead as the world seemed, remain a moment indoors after his work was done. Whatever sort the weather, out he must go, often on the Thames, heedless of cold or wind or rain. His mother grew anxious about him, attributed his unrest to despair, and feared she might have to tell him her secret. She recoiled from setting free what she had kept in prison for so many years. In her own mind she had settled his coming of age as the term of his humiliation, and she would gladly keep to it. She shrunk from losing him, from breaking up the happiness that lay in seeing him about the house. But that her husband had insisted on accustoming themselves to live without him, she would hardly have consented to his late absence. She shrunk also from the measures necessary to reinstate him, and from the commotion those measures must occasion. It was so much easier to go on as they were doing! and delay could not prejudice his right! In fact, most of the things that made her take the baby, were present still, making her desire to keep the youth. A day would come when she must part with him, but that day was not yet! She dreaded uncaging her secret, because of the change it must work, whether immediate action were taken or not. She never suspected that anyone knew or surmised it but herself, or that she had to beware of any tongue but her own.

Her husband left the matter entirely to her. It was her business, he said, from the first, and he would let it be hers to the last.



CHAPTER XLI.

NATURE AND SUPERNATURE.

But Richard soon began to recover both from the separation and from his disappointment in regard to his letter. He was satisfied that whatever might be the cause of her silence, it came from no fault in Barbara. Nothing ever shook his faith in her.

And soon he found that he looked now upon the world with eyes from which a veil had been withdrawn. Barbara gone, mother Earth came nigh to comfort her child. He had always delighted in the beauty of the world—in what shows of earth and air were to be seen in London. The sunset that filled as with a glowing curtain the end of some street where he walked, would go on glowing in his heart when it left the street. Even in winter he would now and then go out to see the sunrise, and see it; and from the street might now and then, at rare times, be beheld a dappling and streaking, a mottling and massing of clouds on the blue. The fog of the London valley, and the smoke of the London chimneys, did not always, any more than the cares and sorrows and sins of its souls, blot out its heaven as if it had never looked on the earth. But he had learned much since he went to the country; he had gone nearer to Nature, and seen that in her lap she carried many more things than he knew of; and now that Barbara was gone, the memories of Nature came nearer to him: he remembered her and was glad. Soon he began to find that, both as regards Nature and those whom we love, absence is, for very nearness, often better than presence itself. He had been used to think and talk of Nature either as an abstraction, or as the personification of a force that knew nothing, and cared for nothing, was nobody, was nothing; now it gradually came to him, and gained upon him ere he knew, first that the things about him wore meanings, and held them up to him, then that something was thinking, something was meaning the things themselves, and so moving thoughts in him, that came and went unforeseen, unbidden. Thoughts clothed in things were everywhere about him, over his head, under his feet, and in his heart; and as often as anything brought him pleasure, either through memory or in present vision, it brought Barbara too; and she seemed their maker, when she was but one of the fair company, the lady of the land. Everything beautiful turned his face to the more beautiful, more precious, diviner Barbara. With each new sense of loveliness, she floated up from where she lay, ever ready to rise, in the ocean of his heart. She was the dweller of his everywhere!

He knew that Barbara did not make these things; it only seemed as if she made them because she was the better joy of them: did not the fact show how the fiction of a God might have sprung up in the minds that had no Barbara to look like the maker of the loveliness? But Barbara was there already, known and loved. The mind did not invent Barbara. And again, why should the mind want anyone to look like a maker, an indweller, an ingeniuer—to use a word of Shakespeare's invention? Yet again, why should the thought of Barbara suggest a soul, that is, a causing, informing presence, to these things? Was there a meaning in them? How did they come to have that meaning? Could it be that, having come out of nothing—the mind of man, and all the things, out of the same nothing, they responded enough to each other for the man to find his own reflex wherever he pleased to look for it? Only, if man and Nature came both out of nothing, why should they not be nothing to each other? why should not man be nothing to himself? As it was, one nothing, having no thought, meant the same the other nothing meant, having thought!—and hence came all the beauty of the world! And once again, if these things meant nothing but what the mind put into them—its own thought, namely, of them—they did not really mean anything, they were only imagined to mean it; and why should he, if but for a moment, imagine Barbara at the root of nothing? And why should he not, seeing she was herself nothing? Or was he to consent to be fooled, and act as if there was something where he knew there was nothing?

The truth of Richard's love appeared in this that he was more able now to see the other side of a thing, to start objection to his own idea from the side of one who thought differently.

"If I feel," he would say to himself, "as if these things meant something, and conclude that they only mean me, being the body to me, who am the soul of them; and still more if I conclude that the sum of them is the blind cause of me; then, when I grow sick of myself, finding no comfort, no stay in myself for myself, and know that I need another, say another self, then the seeming sympathy that Nature offers me, is the merest mockery! It is only my own self—myself gone behind and peeping round a corner, grinning back sympathy at me from its sickening death-mask! Why should man need another if he came from nothing? But he came from a father and mother: man needed the woman: will not that explain the thing? No; for even the relation itself needs to be comforted and sustained and defended!"

Why was there so much, and most of all in himself, for which, as Richard was beginning to understand, even a Barbara could not suffice? Why also did her sufficiency depend so much on her faith in an all-sufficient? And why was there so often such a gulf betwixt the two that seemed made for each other? Ah! they were made for each other only in the general! For the individual, Nature did not care; she had no time! Then how was it that he cared for Nature? If Nature meant anything, was an intelligence, a sort of God, why should he, the individual, who loved as an individual, was a blessing or curse to himself as an individual—why should he care anything for one who loved only in the general? Could a man love in general? Yes; he himself loved his kind and sought to deliver them from superstition. But that was because he could think of them as a multitude of individuals. If he had never loved father, mother, or friend, would he have loved in the general? Would crowds of men and women have awaked love in him? If so, then the bigger crowd must always move the greater love! No; it is from the individual we go to the many. Love that was only in the general, that cared for the nation, the race, and let the individual perish, could not be love. He would be no God who cared only for a world or a race. The live conscious individual man could not love or worship him! And if no individual worshipped, where would be the worship of the crowd? Still less could a vague creator of masses, that knew nothing of individuals, being himself not individual, be worthy to be called God! Demon be might be—never God! But if God were a person, an individual, and so loved the individual!—ah, then indeed!—Barbara believed that such a God lived all about and in us! Mr. Wingfold said he was too great to prove, too near to see, but the greater and the nearer, the more fit to be loved! There were things against it! Nature herself seemed against it, for, lovely us she was, she did awful things! Could Nature have come from one source, and God be another source from which came man? He was too near Nature, too much at home with her, to believe it. Could it be one Nature that made all the lovely things, and another Nature that decreed their fate? That also he could not believe: they and their fate must be from one hand, or heart, or will! He could but hope there might be some way of reconciling the terrible dissonance between Nature and Barbara's God! If there was such a way, if their contradiction was only in seeming, then the very depth of their unity might be the cause of their seeming discord!

Something in this way the mind of Richard felt and thought and saw and doubted and speculated. Then he would turn to the ancient story—still because "Barbara said."

The God Barbara believed in was like Jesus Christ!—not at all like the God his mother believed in! Jesus was one that could be loved: he could not have come to reveal such a God as his mother's, for he was no revelation of that kind of a God! He was gentle, and cared for the individual! And he said he loved the Father! But he was his son, and a good son might love a bad father. Yes, but could a bad God have a good son? No; the son of God must be the revelation of his father; such as the Son is, just such and no other must the Father be; there cannot but be harmony between the beings of the two!

In very truth there must appear schism in Nature, yea schism in God himself, until we see that the ruling Father and the suffering Son are of one mind, one love, one purpose; that in the Father the Son rules, in the Son the Father suffers; that with the Son the other children must suffer and rise to rule. To Richard's eyes there was schism everywhere; no harmony, no right, no concord, no peace! And yet all science pointed to harmony, all imagination thirsted for it, all conscience commanded it! all music asserted and prophesied it! all progress was built on the notion of it! all love, the only thing yielding worth to existence, was a partial realization of it! So that the schism came even to this, that harmony itself was divided against itself, asserting that the thing that was not, and could not be, yet ought to be! Nothing but harmony has a real, a true, an essential being; yet here were thousands of undeniable things which seemed to exist in very virtue of their lack of harmony! There were shocks and recoils in every part of every thinking soul, in every part of the object-world! And yet in certain blissful pauses, unlooked for, uncaused by man, certain sudden silences of the world, an eternal harmony would for one moment manifest itself behind the seething conflicting discords that fill the atmosphere of the soul—straightway to vanish again, it is true, but into the heart of Hope that saves men. If harmony was not at one with itself in its harmony, neither was discord at one with itself in its discordancy! Now and then all nature seemed on the point of breaking into a smile, and saying, "Ah, children! if you but knew what I know!" Why did she not say what she knew? Why should she hide the thing that would make her children blessed?

The thought, half way to an answer, did not come to Richard then: What if we are not yet able to understand her secret—therefore not able to see it although it lies open before us? What if the difficulty lies in us! What if Nature is doing her best to reveal! What if God is working to make us know—if we would but let him—as fast as ever he can! There is one thing that will not be pictured, cannot be made notionally present to the mind by any effort of the imagination—one thing that requires the purest faith: a man's own ignorance and incapacity. It is impossible to think of the object of our ignorance, how then realize the ignorance whose very centre is a blank, a negation! When a man knows, then first he gets a glimpse of his ignorance as it vanishes. Ignorance, I say, cannot be the object of knowledge. We must believe ourselves ignorant. And for that we must be humble of heart. When our world seems clear to the horizon, when the constellations beyond look plainest, when we seem to be understanding all within our scope, then have we yet to believe that, unseen, formally unsuspected, beyond, lies that which may wither up many forms of our belief, and must modify every true form in which we hold the truth. For God is infinite, and we are his little ones, and his truth is eternally better than the best shape in which we see it. Jesus is perfect, but is our idea of him perfect? One thing only is changeless truth in us, and that is—obedient faith in him and his father. Even that has to grow—but with a growth which is not change. That there is a greater life than that we feel—yea, a life that causes us, and is absolutely and primarily essential to us—of this truth we have a glimpse; but no man will arrive at the peace of it by struggling with the roots of his nature to understand them, for those roots go down and out, out and down infinitely into the infinite. It is by acting upon what he sees and knows, hearkening to every whisper, obeying every hint of the good, following whatever seems light, that the man will at length arrive. Thus obedient, instead of burying himself in the darkness about its roots, he climbs to the tree-top of his being; and looking out thence on the eternal world in which its roots vanish and from which it draws its nourishment, he will behold and understand at least enough to give him rest—and how much more, let his Hope of the glory of God stand at its window and tell him. For in his climbing, the man will, somewhere in his progress upward, the progress of obedience, of accordance to the law of things, awake to know that the same spirit is in him that is in the things he beholds; and that his will, his individuality, his consciousness, as it infolds, so it must find the spirit, that root of himself, which is infinitely more than himself, that "one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all." When He is known, then all is well. Then is being, and in it the growth of being, laid open to him. God is the world, the atmosphere, the element, the substance, the essence of his life. In him he lives and moves and has his being. Now he lives indeed; for his Origin is his, and this rounds his being to eternity. God himself is his, as nothing else could be his. The serpent of doubt is gagged with his own tail, and becomes the symbol of the eternal.

Dissatisfaction is but the reverse of the medal of life. So long as a man is satisfied, he seeks nothing; when a fresh gulf is opened in his being, he must rise and find wherewithal to fill it. Our history is the opening of such gulfs, and the search for what will fill them.

But Richard was far yet from having his head above the cloudy region of moods and in the blue air of the unchangeable. As the days went by and brought him no word from Barbara, the darkness again began to gather around him. There are as many changes in a lover's weather as in that of England. The sad consolations of nature by degrees forsook him; they grew all sadness and no consolation. The winter of his soul wept steadily upon him, laden with frost and death. He went back to his stern denial of a God. He thought he had no need of any God, because he had no hope in any.

Strangely, but in accordance with his nature, while he denied God, he denied him resentfully. "If there were a God," he said, "why should I pray to him? He has taken from me the one good his world held for me!" Not an hour would he postpone judgment of him; not one century would he give the God of patience to justify himself to his impatient child! He lost his love of reading. A book was to him like a grinning death's-head. He ministered to it no longer with his mind, but only with his hands. He hated the very look of poetry. The straggling lines of it were loathsome to his eyes. Where, in such a world as he now lived in, could live a God worth being? Where indeed? Richard made his own weather, and it was bad enough. Happily, there is no law compelling a man to keep up the weather or the world he has made. Never will any man devise or develop mood or world fit to dwell in. He must inhabit a world that inhabits him, a world that envelops and informs every thought and imagination of his heart.

In Richard's world, the one true, the one divine thing was its misery, for its misery was its need of God.



CHAPTER XLII.

YET A LOWER DEEP.

But while thus Richard suffered, scarce knew, and cared nothing, how the days went and came, he did his best to conceal his suffering from his father and mother, and succeeded wonderfully. As if in reward for this unselfishness, it flashed into his mind what a selfish fellow he was: his trouble had made him forget Alice and Arthur! he must find them!

He knew the street where the firm employing Arthur used to have its offices; but it had removed to other quarters. He went to the old address, and learned the new one. The next day he told his father he would like to have a holiday. His father making no objection, he walked into the city. There he found the place, but not Arthur. He had not been there for a week, they said. No one seemed to know where he lived; but Richard, regardless of rebuffs, went on inquiring, until at length he found a carman who lived in the same street. He set out for it at once.

After a long walk he came to it, a wretched street enough, in Pentonville, with its numbers here obliterated, there repeated, and altogether so confused, that for some time he could not discover the house. Coming at length to one of the dingiest, whose number was illegible, but whose door stood open, he walked in, and up to the second floor, where he knocked at the first door on the landing. The feeble sound of what was hardly a voice answered. He went in. There sat Arthur, muffled in an old rug, before a wretched fire, in the dirtiest, rustiest grate he had ever seen. He held out a pallid hand, and greeted him with a sunless smile, but did not speak.

"My poor, dear fellow!" said Richard; "what is the matter with you? Why didn't you let me know?"

The tears came in Arthur's eyes, and he struggled to answer him, but his voice was gone. To Richard he seemed horribly ill—probably dying. He took a piece of paper from his pocket, and a pencil-conversation followed.

"What is the matter with you?"

"Only a bad cold."

"Where is Alice?"

"At the shop. She will be back at eight o'clock."

"Where is your mother?"

"I do not know; she is out."

"Tell me anything I can do for you."

"What does it matter! I do not know anything. It will soon be over."

"And this," reflected Richard, "is the fate of one who believes in a God!" But the thought followed close, "I wish I were going too!" And then came the suggestion, "What if some one cares for him, and is taking him away because he cares for him! What if there be a good time waiting him! What if death be the way to something better! What if God be going to surprise us with something splendid! What if there come a glorious evening after the sad morning and fog-sodden night! What if Arthur's dying be in reality a waking up to a better sunshine than ours! We see only one side of the thing: he may see the other! What if God could not manage to ripen our life without suffering! If only there were a God that tried to do his best for us, finding great difficulties, but encountering them for the sake of his children!"—"How dearly I should love such a God!" thought Richard. He would hold by him to the last! He would do his best to help him! He would fight for him! He would die for him!

His hour was not yet come to know that there is indeed such a God, doing his best for us in great difficulties, with enemies almost too much for him—the falsehood, namely, the unfilialness of his children, so many of whom will not be true, priding themselves on the good he has created in them, while they refuse to make it their own by obeying it when they are disinclined.

If even he might but hope that with his last sigh Arthur would awake to a consciousness justifying his existence, let him be the creation of a living power or the helpless product of a senseless, formless Ens-non-ens, he would be content! For then they might one day meet again—somewhere—somewhen, somehow; together encounter afresh the troubles and dissatisfactions of life, and perhaps work out for themselves a world more endurable!

But with that came the thought of Barbara.

"No!" he said to himself, "let us all die—die utterly! Why should we grumble at our poor life when it means nothing, is so short, and gives such a sure and certain hope of nothing more! Who would prolong it in such a world, with which every soul confesses itself disappointed, of which every heart cries that it cannot have been made for us! When they grow old, men always say they have found life a delusion, and would not live it again. From the first, things have been moving toward the worse; life has been growing more dreary; men are more miserable now than when they were savage: how can we tell that the world was not started at its best, to go down hill for ever and ever, with a God to urge its evil pace, for surely there is none to stop it! What if the world be the hate-contrivance of a being whose delight it is to watch its shuddering descent into the gulf of extinction, its agonized slide into the red foam of the lake of fire!"

But he must do something for the friend by whose side he had sat speechless for minutes!

"I will come and see you again soon, Arthur," he said; "I must go now. Would you mind the loan of a few shillings? It is all I happen to have about me!"

Arthur shook his head, and wrote,

"Money is of no use—not the least."

"Don't you fancy anything that might do you good?"

"I can't get out to get anything."

"Your mother would get it for you!"

He shook his head.

"But there's Alice!"

Arthur gave a great sigh, and said nothing. Richard laid the shillings on the chimneypiece, and proceeded to make up the fire before he went. He could see no sort of coal-scuttle, no fuel of any kind. With a heavy heart he left him, and went down into the street, wondering what he could do.

As he drew near the public-house that chiefly poisoned the neighbourhood, it opened its hell-jaws, and cast out a woman in frowzy black, wiping her mouth under her veil with a dirty pocket-handkerchief. She had a swollen red face, betokening the presence of much drink, walked erect, and went perfectly straight, but looked as if, were she to relax the least of her state, she would stagger. As she passed Richard, he recognized her. It was Mrs. Manson. Without a thought he stopped to speak to her. The same moment he saw that, although not dead drunk, she could by no tropical contortion be said to be sober.

She started, and gave a snort of indignation.

"You here!" she cried. "What the big devil do you want—coming here to insult your betters! You the son of the bookbinder! You're no more John Tuke's son than I am. You're the son of that precious rascal, my husband! Go to sir Wilton; don't come to me! You're a base-born wretch,—Oh yes, run to your mother! Tell her what I say! Tell her she was lucky to get hold of her tradesman."

She had told her son and daughter that Richard was the missing heir; and in what she now said she may have meant only to reflect on the humble birth of his mother and abuse his aunt, but it does not matter much what a drunkard means. At the same time the poison of asps may come from the lips of a drunkard as from those of a sober liar. As the woman staggered away, Richard gave a stagger too, and seemed to himself to go reeling along the street. He sat down on a doorstep to recover himself, but for a long way after resuming his walk went like one half stunned. His brain, nevertheless, seemed to go on working of itself. The wretched woman's statement glowed in him with a lurid light. It seemed to explain so much! He had often felt that his father, though always just, did not greatly care for him. Then there was his mother's strangeness—the hardness of her religion, the gloom that at times took possession of her whole being, her bursts of tenderness, and her occasional irritability! His mother! That his mother should—should have made him an outcast! The thought was sickening! It was horrible! Perhaps the woman lied! But no; something questionable in the background of his life had been unrecognizably showing from the first of his memory! All was clear now! His mother's cruel breach with Alice, and her determination that there should be no intercourse between the families, was explained: had Alice and he fallen in love with each other, she would have had to tell the truth to part them! He must know the truth! He would ask his mother straight out, the moment he got home! But how could he ask her! How could any son go to his mother with such a question! Whatever the answer to it, he dared not! There was but one alternative left him—either to kill himself, or to smother his suffering, and let the miserable world go on! Why should he add to its misery by making his own mother more miserable? Such a question from her son would go through her heart like the claws of a lynx! How could she answer it! How could he look upon her shame! Had she not had trouble enough already, poor mother! It would be hard if her God assailed her on all sides—beset her behind and before! Poor mother indeed, if her son was no better than her God! He must be a better son to her than he had been! The child of her hurt must heal her! Must he as well as his father be cruel to her! But alas, what help was in him! What comfort could a heart of pain yield! what soothing stream flow from a well of sorrow! Truly his mother needed a new God!

But even this horror held its germ of comfort: he had his brother Arthur, his sister Alice, to care and provide for! They should not die! He had now the right to compel them to accept his aid!

He thought and thought, and saw that, in order to help them, to do his duty by them, he must make a change in his business relations with Mr. Tuke: he must have the command of his earnings! He could do nothing for his brother and sister as things were! To ask for money would wake inquiry, and he dared not let his mother know that he went to see them! If he did, she would be compelled to speak out, and that was a torture he would rather see her die than suffer. He must have money concerning which no questions would be asked!

Poor, poor creatures! Oh, that terrible mother! It was good to know that his mother was not like her!

The first thing then was, to ask his father to take him as a journeyman, and give him journeyman's wages. His work, he knew, was worth much more, but that would be enough; his father was welcome to the rest. Out of his wages he would pay his share of the housekeeping, and do as he pleased with what was left. Buying no more books, he would have a nice little weekly sum free for Alice and Arthur. To see his brother and sister half starved was unendurable! he would himself starve first! But how was his money to reach them in the shape of food? That greedy, drunken mother of them swallowed everything! Like old Saturn she devoured her children; she ate and drank them to death! Sport of a low consuming passion, thought Richard, what matter whether she came of God or devil or nothing at all! Redemption, salvation from an evil self, had as yet no greater part in Richard's theories than in Mrs. Manson's thoughts. The sole good, the sole satisfaction in life the woman knew, was to eat and drink, if not what she pleased, at least what she liked. If there were an eternity in front, thought Richard, and she had her way in it, she would go on for ever eating and drinking, craving and filling, to all the ages unsatisfied: he would not have his hard-earned money go to fill her insatiable maw! It was not his part in life to make her drunk and comfortable! Wherever he came from, he could not be in the world for that! So what was he to do?

He seemed now to understand why Barbara had not written. She had known him as the son of honest tradespeople, and had no pride to make her despise him; but learning from Alice that he was base-born, she might well wish to drop him! It might not be altogether fair of Barbara—for how was he to blame? Almost as little was she to blame, brought up to count such as he disgraced from their birth! Doubtless her religion should have raised her above the cruel and false prejudice, for she said it taught her to be fair, insisted that she should be just! But with all the world against him, how could one girl stand up for him! True he needed fair play just so much the more; but that was the way things went in this best of possible worlds! No two things in it, meant to go together, fitted! He fought hard for Barbara, strained his strength with himself to be content beforehand with whatever she might do, or think, or say. One thing only he could not bear—to think less of Barbara! That would kill him, paralyze his very soul!—of a man make him a machine, a beast outright at best! In all the world, Barbara was likest the God she believed in: if she—the idea of her, that was, were taken from him, he must despair! He could stand losing herself, he said, but not the thought of her! Let him keep that! Let him keep that! He would revel in that, and defy all the evil gods in the great universe!

With his heart like a stone in his bosom, he reached the house, a home to him no more! and by effort supreme—in which, to be honest, for Richard was not yet a hero, he was aided by the consciousness of doing a thing of praise—managed to demean himself rather better than of late. The surges of the sea of troubles rose to overwhelm him; his courage rose to brave them: let them do their worst! he would be a man still! True, his courage had a cry at the heart of it; but there was not a little of the stoic in Richard, and if it was not the stoicism of Epictetus or of Marcus Aurelius, there was yet some timely, transient help in it. He was doing the best he could without God; and sure the Father was pleased to see the effort of his child! To suffer in patience was a step toward himself. No doubt self was potent in the patience, and not the best self, for that forgets itself—yet the better self, the self that chooses what good it knows.

The same night he laid his request for fixed wages before his father, who agreed to it at once. He believed it no small matter in education that a youth should have money at his disposal; and his wife agreed, with a pang, to what he counted a reasonable sum for Richard's board. But she would not hear of his paying for his lodging; that was more than the mother heart could bear: it would be like yielding that he was not her very own child!

The trouble remained, that a long week must elapse before he could touch any wages, and he dared not borrow for fear of questions: there was no help!

At night, the moment his head was on the pillow, the strain of his stoicism gave way. Then first he felt alone, utterly alone; and the loneliness went into his soul, and settled there, a fearful entity. The strong stoic, the righteous unbeliever burst into a passion of tears. Sure they were the gift of the God he did not know!—say rather, of the God he knew a little, without knowing that he knew him—and they somewhat cooled his burning heart. But the fog of a fresh despair streamed up from the rain, and its clouds closed down upon him. What was left him to live for! what to keep his heart beating! what to make life a living thing! Sunned and showered too much, it was faded and colourless! Why must he live on, as in a poor dream, without even the interest of danger!—for where life is worth nothing, danger is gone, and danger is the last interest of life! All was gray! Nothing was, but the damp and chill of the grave! No cloak of insanest belief, of dullest mistake, would henceforth hide any more the dreary nakedness of the skeleton, life! The world lay in clearest, barest, coldest light, its hopeless deceit and its misery all revealed! It was well that a grumous fog pervaded the air, each atom a spike in a vesicle of darkness! it was well that no summer noon was blazing about the world! At least there was no mockery now! the world was not pretending to be happy! was not helping the demon of laughter to jeer at the misery of men! Oh, the hellish thing, life! Oh this devilish thing, existence!—a mask with no face behind it! a look with no soul that looked!—a bubble blown out of lies with the breath of a liar! Words! words! words! Lies! lies! lies!

All of a sudden he was crying, as if with a loud voice from the bottom of his heart, though never a sound rose through his throat, "Oh thou who didst make me, if thou art anywhere, if there be such a one as I cry to, unmake me again; undo that which thou hast done; tear asunder and scatter that which thou hast put together! Be merciful for once, and kill me. Let me cease to exist—rather, let me cease to die. Will not plenty of my kind remain to satisfy thy soul with torment!"

Up towered a surge of shame at his poltroonery; he prayed for his own solitary release, and abandoned his fellows to the maker of their misery!

"No!" he cried aloud, "I will not! I will not pray for that! I will not fare better than my fellows!—Oh God, pity—if thou hast any pity, or if pity can be born of any prayer—pity thy creatures! If thou art anywhere, speak to me, and let me hear thee. If thou art God, if thou livest, and carest that I suffer, and wouldst help me if thou couldst, then I will live, and bear, and wait; only let me know that thou art, and art good, and not cruel. If I had but a friend that would stand by me, and talk to me a little, and help me! I have no one, no one, God, to speak to! and if thou wilt not hear, then there is nothing! Oh, be! be! God, I pray thee, exist! Thou knowest my desolation—for surely thou art desolate, with no honest heart to love thee!"

He thought of Barbara, and ceased: she loved God!

A silence came down upon his soul. Ere it passed he was asleep, and knew no more till the morning waked him—to sorrow indeed, but from a dream of hope.

On a few-keyed finger-board, yet with multitudinous change, life struck every interval betwixt keen sorrow, lethargic gloom, and grayest hope, and the days passed and passed.



CHAPTER XLIII.

TO BE REDEEMED, ONE MUST REDEEM.

The moment he received his wages from his father at the end of the week, Richard set out for Everilda street, Clerkenwell, a little anxious at the thought of encountering the dreadful mother, but hoping she would be out of the way.

When he reached the place, he found no one at home. He could not go back with his mission unaccomplished, and hung about, keeping a sharp watch on each end of the street, and on the approaches to it that he passed in walking to and fro.

He had not waited long before Arthur appeared, stooping like an aged man, and moving slowly He was in the same shabby muffler as of old. His face brightened when he saw his friend, but a fit of coughing prevented him for some time from returning his salutation.

"When did you have your dinner?" asked Richard.

"I had something to eat in the middle of the day," he answered feebly; "and when Alice comes, she will perhaps bring something with her; but we don't care much about eating.—We've got out of the way of it somehow!" he added with an unreal laugh.

"It's no wonder you can't get rid of your cold!" returned Richard. "Come along, and have something to eat."

"I can't have Ally come home and not find me!" objected Arthur.

"You shall put something in your pocket for her!" suggested Richard.

He seemed to yield; but his every motion was full of indecision. Richard took his arm.

"Do you know any place near," he asked, "where we could get some supper?"

"No, I'm afraid I don't," answered Arthur.

"Then you go in and rest, while I go and see," returned Richard.

He searched for some time, but came upon no place where a man could even sit down. At last he found a coffee-shop, and went to fetch Arthur.

He found him stretched on his bed, but he rose at once to accompany him—with the more difficulty that he had yielded to his weariness and lain down. They managed however to reach their goal, and the sight of food waking a little hunger, the poor fellow did pretty well for one who looked so ill. As he ate he revived, and by and by began to talk a little: he had never been much of a talker—had never had food enough for talking.