THERE & BACK

Some of the readers of this tale will be glad to know that the passage with which it ends is a real dream; and that, with but three or four changes almost too slight to require acknowledging, I have given it word for word as the friend to whom it came set it down for me.

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CHAPTER I. FATHER, CHILD, AND NURSE.

It would be but stirring a muddy pool to inquire—not what motives induced, but what forces compelled sir Wilton Lestrange to marry a woman nobody knew. It is enough to say that these forces were mainly ignoble, as manifested by their intermittent character and final cessation. The mésalliance occasioned not a little surprise, and quite as much annoyance, among the county families,—failing, however, to remind any that certain of their own grandmothers had been no better known to the small world than lady Lestrange. It caused yet more surprise, though less annoyance, in the clubs to which sir Wilton had hitherto been indebted for help to forget his duties: they set him down as a greater idiot than his friends had hitherto imagined him. For had he not been dragged to the altar by a woman whose manners and breeding were hardly on the level of a villa in St. John's Wood? Did any one know whence she sprang, or even the name which sir Wilton had displaced with his own? But sir Wilton himself was not proud of his lady; and if the thing had been any business of theirs, it would have made no difference to him; he would none the less have let them pine in their ignorance. Did not his mother, a lady less dignified than eccentric, out of pure curiosity beg enlightenment concerning her origin, and receive for answer from the high-minded baronet, “Madam, the woman is my wife!”—after which the prudent dowager asked no more questions, but treated her daughter-in-law with neither better nor worse than civility. Sir Wilton, in fact, soon came to owe his wife a grudge that he had married her, and none the less that at the time he felt himself of a generosity more than human in bestowing upon her his name. Creation itself, had he ever thought of it, would have seemed to him a small thing beside such a gift!

That Robina Armour, after experience of his first advances, should have at last consented to marry sir Wilton Lestrange, was in no sense in her favour, although after a fashion she was in love with him—in love, that is, with the gentleman of her own imagining whom she saw in the baronet; while the baronet, on his part, was what he called in love with what he called the woman. As he was overcome by her beauty, so was she by his rank—an idol at whose clay feet is cast many a spiritual birthright—and as mean a deity as any of man's device. But the blacksmith's daughter was in many respects, notwithstanding, a woman of good sense, with much real refinement, and a genuine regard for rectitude. Although sir Wilton had never loved her with what was best in him, it was not in spite of what was best in him that he fell in love with her. Had his better nature been awake, it would have justified the bond, and been strengthened by it.

Lady Lestrange's father was a good blacksmith, occasionally drunk in his youth, but persistently sober now in his middle age; a long-headed fellow, with reach and quality in the prudence which had long ceased to appear to him the highest of virtues. At one period he had accounted it the prime duty of existence to take care of oneself; and so much of this belief had he communicated to his younger daughter, that she deported herself so that sir Wilton married her—with the result that, when Death knocked at her door, she welcomed him to her heart. The first cry of her child, it is true, made her recall the welcome, but she had to go with him, notwithstanding, when the child was but an hour old.

Not one of her husband's family was in the house when she died. Sir Wilton himself was in town, and had been for the last six months, preferring London and his club to Mortgrange and his wife. When a telegram informed him that she was in danger, he did go home, but when he arrived, she had been an hour gone, and he congratulated himself that he had taken the second train.

There had been betwixt them no approach to union. When what sir Wilton called love had evaporated, he returned to his mire, with a resentful feeling that the handsome woman—his superior in everything that belongs to humanity—had bewitched him to his undoing. The truth was, she had ceased to charm him. The fault was not in her; it lay in the dulled eye of the swiftly deteriorating man, which grew less and less capable of seeing things as they were, and transmitted falser and falser impressions of them. The light that was in him was darkness. The woman that might have made a man of him, had there been the stuff, passed from him an unprized gift, a thing to which he made Hades welcome.

It was decent, however, not to parade his relief. He retired to the library, lit a cigar, and sat down to wish the unpleasant fuss of the funeral over, and the house rid of a disagreeable presence. Had the woman died of a disease to which he might himself one day have to succumb, her death might, as he sat there, have chanced to raise for an instant the watery ghost of an emotion; but, coming as it did, he had no sympathetic interest in her death any more than in herself. Lolling in the easiest of chairs, he revolved the turns of last night's play, until it occurred to him that he might soon by a second marriage take amends of his neighbours for their disapprobation of his first. So pleasant was the thought that, brooding upon it, he fell asleep.

He woke, looked, rubbed his eyes, stared, rubbed them again, and stared. A woman stood in front of him—one he had surely seen!—no, he had never seen her anywhere! What an odd, inquiring, searching expression in her two hideous black eyes! And what was that in her arms—something wrapt in a blanket?

The message in the telegram recurred to him: there must have been a child! The bundle must be the child! Confound the creature! What did it want?

“Go away,” he said; “this is not the nursery!”

“I thought you might like to look at the baby, sir!” the woman replied.

Sir Wilton stared at the blanket.

“It might comfort you, I thought!” she went on, with a look he felt to be strange. Her eyes were hard and dry, red with recent tears, and glowing with suppressed fire.

Sir Wilton was courteous to most women, especially such as had no claim upon him, but cherished respect for none. It was odd therefore that he should now feel embarrassed. From some cause the machinery of his self-content had possibly got out of gear; anyhow no answer came ready. He had not the smallest wish to see the child, but was yet, perhaps, unwilling to appear brutal. In the meantime, the woman, with gentle, moth-like touch, was parting and turning back the folds of the blanket, until from behind it dawned a tiny human face, whose angel was suppliant, it may be, for the baptism of a father's first gaze.

The woman held out the child to sir Wilton, as if expecting him to take it. He started to his feet, driving the chair a yard behind him, stuck his hands in his pockets, and, with a face of disgust, cried—

“Great God! take the creature away.”

But he could not lift his eyes from the face nested in the blanket. It seemed to fascinate him. The woman's eyes flared, but she did not speak.

“Uglier than sin!” he half hissed, half growled. “—I suppose the animal is mine, but you needn't bring it so close to me! Take it away—and keep it away. I will send for it when I want it—which won't be in a hurry! My God! How hideous a thing may be, and yet human!”

“He is as God made him!” remarked the nurse, quietly for very wrath.

“Or the devil!” suggested his father.

Then the woman looked like a tigress. She opened her mouth, but closed it again with a snap.

“I may say what I like of my own!” said the father. “Tell me the goblin is none of mine, and I will be as respectful to him as you please. Prove it, and I will give you fifty pounds. He's hideous! He's damnably ugly! Deny it if you can.”

The woman held her peace. She could not, even to herself, call him a child pleasant to look at. She gazed on him for a moment with pitiful, protective eyes, then covered his face as if he were dead, but she did not move.

“Why don't you go?” said the baronet.

Instead of replying, she began, as by a suddenly confirmed resolve, to remove the coverings at the other end of the bundle, and presently disclosed the baby's feet. The baronet gazed wondering. To what might not assurance be about to subject him? She took one of the little feet in a hard but gentle hand, and spreading out “the pink, five-beaded baby-toes,” displayed what even the inexperience of the baronet could not but recognize as remarkable: between every pair of toes was stretched a thin delicate membrane. She laid the foot down, took up the other, and showed the same peculiarity. The child was web-footed, as distinctly as any properly constituted duckling! Then she lifted, one after the other, the tiny hands, beautiful to any eye that understood, and showed between the middle and third finger of each, the same sort of membrane rising half-way to the points of them.

“I see!” said the baronet, with a laugh that was not nice, having in it no merriment, “the creature is a monster!—Well, if you think I am to blame, I can only protest you are mistaken. I am not web-footed! The duckness must come from the other side.”

“I hope you will remember, sir Wilton!”

“Remember? What do you mean? Take the monster away.”

The woman rearranged the coverings of the little crooked legs.

“Won't you look at your lady before they put her in her coffin?” she said when she had done.

“What good would that do her? She's past caring!—No, I won't: why should I? Such sights are not pleasant.”

“The coffin's a lonely chamber, sir Wilton; lonely to lie all day and all night in!”

“No lonelier for one than for another!” he replied, with an involuntary recoil from his own words. For the one thing a man must believe—yet hardly believes—is, that he shall one day die. “She'll be better without me, anyhow!”

“You are heartless, sir Wilton!”

“Mind your own business. If I choose to be heartless, I may have my reasons. Take the child away.”

Still she did not move. The baby, young as he was, had thrown the blanket from his face, and the father's eyes were fixed on it: while he gazed the nurse would not stir. He seemed fascinated by its ugliness. Without absolute deformity, the child was indeed as unsightly as infant well could be.

“My God!” he said again—for he had a trick of crying out as if he had a God—“the little brute hates me! Take it away, woman. Take it away before I strangle it! I can't answer for myself if it keeps on looking at me!”

With a glance whose mingled anger and scorn the father did not see, the nurse turned and went.

He kept staring after her till the door shut, then fell back into his chair, exclaiming once more, “My God!”—What or whom he meant by the word, it were hard to say.

“Is it possible,” he said to himself, “that the fine woman I married—for she was a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!—should have died to present the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human! It's an affront to the family! Ah! the strain will show! They say your sins will find you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I was! But she bewitched me! I was bewitched!—Curse the little monster! I shan't breathe again till I'm out of the house! Where was the doctor? He ought to have seen to it! Hang it all, I'll go abroad!”

Ugly as the child was, however, to many an eye the first thing evident in him would have been his strong likeness to his father—whose features were perfect, though at the moment, and at many a moment, their expression was other than attractive. Sir Wilton disliked children, and the dislike was mutual. Never did child run to him; never was child unwilling to leave him. Escaping from his grasp, he would turn and look back, like Christian emerging from the Valley of the Shadow, as if to weigh the peril he had been in.

As tenderly as if he had been the loveliest of God's children, the woman bore her charge up staircases, and through corridors and passages, to the remote nursery, where, in a cradle whose gay furniture contrasted sadly with the countenance of the child and the fierceness of her own eyes, she gently laid him down. But long after he was asleep, she continued to bend over him, as if with difficulty restraining herself from clasping him again to her bosom.

Jane Tuke had been married four or five years, but had no children, and the lack seemed to have intensified her maternity. Elder sister to lady Lestrange, she had gone gladly to receive her child in her arms, and had watched and waited for it with an expectation far stronger than that of the mother; for so thorough was lady Lestrange's disappointment in her husband, that she regarded the advent of his child almost with indifference. Jane had an absolute passion for children. She had married a quarter for faith, a quarter for love, and a whole half for hope. This divinely inexplicable child-passion is as unintelligible to those devoid of it, as its absence is marvellous to those possessed by it. Its presence is its justification, its being its sole explanation, itself its highest reason. Surely on those who cherish it, the shadow of the love-creative God must rest more than on some other women! Unpleasing as was the infant, to know him her own would have made the world a paradise to Jane. Her heart burned with divine indignation at the wrongs already heaped upon him. Hardly born, he was persecuted! Ugly! he was not ugly! Was he not come straight from the fountain of life, from the Father of children? That such a father as she had left in the library should repudiate him was well! She loved to think of his rejection. She brooded with delight, in the midst of her wrath, on every word of disgust that had fallen from his unfatherly lips. The more her baby was rejected, the more he was hers! He belonged to her, and her only, for she only loved him! She could say with France in King Lear, “Be it lawful I take up what's cast away!” To her the despised one was the essence of all riches. The joy of a miser is less than the joy of a mother, as gold is less than a live soul, as greed is less than love. No vision of jewels ever gave such a longing as this woman longed with after the child of her dead sister.

The body that bore was laid in the earth, the thing born was left upon it. The mother had but come, exposed her infant on the rough shore of time, and forsaken him in his nakedness. There he lay, not knowing whence he came, or whither he was going, urged to live by a hunger and thirst he had not invented, and did not understand. His mother had helplessly forsaken him, but the God in another woman had taken him up: there was a soul to love him, two arms to carry him, and a strong heart to shelter him.

Sir Wilton returned to London, and there enjoyed himself—not much, but a little the more that no woman sat at Mortgrange with a right to complain that he took his pleasure without her. He lived the life of the human animals frequenting the society of their kind from a gregarious instinct, and for common yet opposing self-ends. He had begun to assume the staidness, if not dullness, of the animal whose first youth has departed, but he was only less frolicsome, not more human. He was settling down to what he had made himself; no virtue could claim a share in the diminished rampancy of his vices. What a society is that which will regard as reformed the man whom assuaging fires have left an exhausted slag—a thing for which as yet no use is known, who suggests no promise of change or growth, gives no poorest hint of hope concerning his fate!

With the first unrecognized sense of approaching age, a certain habit of his race began to affect him, and the idea of a quieter life, with a woman whose possession would make him envied, grew mildly attractive. A brilliant marriage in another county would, besides, avenge him on the narrow-minded of his own, who had despised his first choice! With judicial family-eye he surveyed the eligible women of his acquaintance. It was, no doubt, to his disadvantage that already an heir lay “mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;” for a woman who might willingly be mother to the inheritor of such a property as his, might not find attractive the notion of her first being her husband's second son. But slips between cups and lips were not always on the wrong side! Such a moon-calf as Robina's son could not with justice represent the handsomest man and one of the handsomest women of their time. The heir that fate had palmed upon him might very well be doomed to go the way so many infants went!

He spread the report that the boy was sickly. A notion that he was not likely to live prevailed about Mortgrange, which, however originated, was nourished doubtless by the fact that he was so seldom seen. In reality, however, there was not a healthier child in all England than Richard Lestrange.

Sir Wilton's relations took as little interest in the heir as himself, and there was no inducement for any of them to visit Mortgrange; the aunt-mother, therefore, had her own way with him. She was not liked in the house. The servants said she cared only for the little toad of a baronet, and would do nothing for her comfort. They had, however, just a shadow of respect for her: if she encouraged no familiarity, she did not meddle, and was independent of their aid. Even the milking of the cow which had been, through her persistence, set apart for the child, she did herself. She sought no influence in the house, and was nothing loved and little heeded.

Sir Wilton had not again seen his heir, who was now almost a year old, when the rumour reached Mortgrange that the baronet was about to be married.

Naturally, the news was disquieting to Jane. The hope, however, was left her, that the stepmother might care as little for the child as did the father, and that so, for some years at least, he might be left to her. It was a terrible thought to the loving woman that they might be parted; a more terrible thought that her baby might become a man like his father. Of all horrors to a decent woman, a bad man must be the worst! If by her death she could have left the child her hatred of evil, Jane would have willingly died: she loved her husband, but her sister's boy was in danger!

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CHAPTER II. STEPMOTHER AND NURSE.

The rumour of sir Wilton's marriage was, as rumour seldom is, correct. Before the year was out, lady Ann Hardy, sister to the earl of Torpavy, representing an old family with a drop or two of very bad blood in it, became lady Ann Lestrange How much love there may have been in the affair, it is unnecessary to inquire, seeing the baronet was what he was, and the lady understood the what pretty well. She might have preferred a husband not so much what sir Wilton was, but she was nine-and-twenty, and her brother was poor. She said to herself, I suppose, that she might as well as another undertake his reform: some one must! and married him. She had not much of a trousseau, but was gorgeously attired for the wedding. It is true she had to return to the earl three-fourths of the jewels she wore; but they were family jewels, and why should she not have some good of them? She started with fifty pounds of her own in her pocket, and a demeanour in her person equal to fifty millions. When they arrived at Mortgrange, the moon was indeed still in the sky, but the honey-pot, to judge by the appearance of the twain, was empty: twain they were, and twain would be. The man wore a look of careless all-rightness, tinged with an expression of indifferent triumph: he had what he wanted; what his lady might think of her side of the bargain, he neither thought nor cared. As to the woman, let her reflections be what they might, not a soul would come to the knowledge of them. Whatever it was to others, her pale, handsome face was never false to herself, never betrayed what she was thinking, never broke the shallow surface of its frozen dignity. Will any man ever know how a woman of ordinary decency feels after selling herself? I find the thing hardly safe to ponder. No trace, no shadow of disappointment clouded the countenance of lady Ann that sultry summer afternoon as she drove up the treeless avenue. The education she had received—and education in the worst sense it was! for it had brought out the worst in her—had rendered her less than human. The form of her earthly presence had been trained to a fashionable perfection; her nature had not been left unaided in its reversion toward the vague animal type from which it was developed: in the curve of her thin lips as they prepared to smile, one could discern the veiled snarl and bite. Her eyes were grey, her eyebrows dark; her complexion was a clear fair, her nose perfect, except for a sharp pinch at the end of the bone; her nostrils were thin but motionless; her chin was defective, and her throat as slender as her horrible waist; her hands and feet were large even for “her tall personage.”

After his lady had had a cup of tea, sir Wilton, for something to do, proposed taking her over the house, which was old, and worthy of inspection. In their progress they came to a door at the end of a long and rather tortuous passage. Sir Wilton did not know how the room was occupied, or he would doubtless have passed it by; but as its windows gave a fine view of the park, he opened the door, and lady Ann entered. Sudden displeasure shortened her first step; pride or something worse lengthened the next, as she bore down on a woman too much occupied with a child on her knee to look up at the sound of her entrance. When, a moment after, she did look up, the dreaded stepmother was looking straight down on her baby. Their eyes encountered. Jane met an icy stare, and lady Ann a gaze of defiance—an expression by this time almost fixed on the face of the nurse, for in her spirit she heard every unspoken remark on her child. Not a word did the lady utter, but to Jane, her eyes, her very breath seemed to say with scorn, “Is that the heir?” Sir Wilton did not venture a single look: he was ashamed of his son, and already a little afraid of his wife, whom he had once seen close her rather large teeth in a notable way. As she turned toward the window, however, he stole a glance at his offspring: the creature was not quite so ugly as before—not quite so repulsive as he had pictured him! But, good heavens! he was on the lap of the same woman whose fierceness had upset him almost as much as his child's ugliness! He walked to the window after his wife. She gazed for a moment, turned with indifference, and left the room. Her husband followed her. A glance of fear, dislike, and defiance, went after them from Jane.

Stronger contrast than those two women it would be hard to find. Jane's countenance was almost coarse, but its rugged outline was almost grand. Her hair grew low down on her forehead, and she had deep-set eyes. Her complexion was rough, her nose large and thick. Her mouth was large also, but, when unaffected by her now almost habitual antagonism, the curve of her lip was sweet, and occasionally humorous. Her chin was strong, and the total of her face what we call masculine; but when she silently regarded her child, it grew beautiful with the radiant tenderness of protection.

Her visitors left the door open behind them; Jane rose and shut it, sat down again, and gazed motionless at the infant. Perhaps he vaguely understood the sorrow and dread of her countenance, for he pulled a long face of his own, and was about to cry. Jane clasped him to her bosom in an agony: she felt certain she would not long be permitted to hold him there. In the silent speech of my lady's mouth, her jealous love saw the doom of her darling. What precise doom she dared not ask herself; it was more than enough that she, indubitably his guardian as if sent from heaven to shield him, must abandon him to his natural enemy, one who looked upon him as the adversary of her own children. It was a thought not to be thought, an idea for which there should be no place in her bosom! Unfathomable as the love between man and woman is the love of woman to child.

She spent a wakeful night. From the decree of banishment sure to go forth against her, there was no appeal! Go she must! Yet her heart cried out that he was her own. In the same lap his mother had lain before him! She had carried her by day, and at night folded her in the same arms, herself but six years old—old enough to remember yet the richness unspeakable of her new possession. Never had come difference betwixt them until Robina began to give ear to sir Wilton, whom Jane could not endure. When she responded, as she did at once, to her sister's cry for her help, she made her promise that no one should understand who she was, but that she should in the house be taken for and treated as a hired nurse. Why Jane stipulated thus, it were hard to say, but so careful were they both, that no one at Mortgrange suspected the nurse as personally interested in the ugly heir left in her charge! No one dreamed that the child's aunt had forsaken her husband to nurse him, and was living for him day and night. She, in her turn, had promised her sister never to leave him, and this pledge strengthened the bond of her passion. The only question was how she was to be faithful to her pledge, how to carry matters when she was turned away. With those thin, close-pressed lips in her mind's eye, she could not count on remaining where she was beyond a few days.

She was not only a woman capable of making up her mind, but a woman of resource, with the advantage of having foreseen and often pondered the possibility of that which was now imminent. The same night, silent above the sleep of her darling, she sat at work with needle and scissors far into the morning, remodelling an old print dress. For nights after, she was similarly occupied, though not a scrap or sign of the labour was visible in the morning.

The crisis anticipated came within a fortnight. Lady Ann did not show herself a second time in the nursery, but sending for Jane, informed her that an experienced nurse was on her way from London to take charge of the child, and her services would not be required after the next morning.

“For, of course,” concluded her ladyship, “I could not expect a woman of your years to take an under-nurse's place!”

“Please your ladyship, I will gladly,” said Jane, eager to avoid or at least postpone the necessity forcing itself upon her.

“I intend you to go—and at once,” replied her ladyship; “—that is, the moment Mrs. Thornycroft arrives. The housekeeper will take care that you have your month's wages in lieu of warning.”

“Very well, my lady!—Please, your ladyship, when may I come and see the child?”

“Not at all. There is no necessity.”

“Never, my lady?”

“Decidedly.”

“Then at least I may ask why you send me away so suddenly!”

“I told you that I want a properly qualified nurse to take your place. My wish is to have the child more immediately under my own eye than would be agreeable if you kept your place. I hope I speak plainly!”

“Quite, my lady.”

“And let me, for your own sake, recommend you to behave more respectfully when you find another place.”

What she was doing lady Ann was incapable of knowing. A woman love-brooding over a child is at the gate of heaven; to take her child from her is to turn her away from more than paradise.

Jane went in silence, seeming to accept the inevitable, too proud to wipe away the tear whose rising she could not help—a tear not for herself, nor yet for the child, but for the dead mother in whose place she left such a woman. She walked slowly back to the nursery, where her charge was asleep, closed the door, sat down by the cot, and sat for a while without moving. Then her countenance began to change, and slowly went on changing, until at last, as through a mist of troubled emotion, out upon the strong, rugged face broke, with strange suggestion of a sunset, the glow of resolve and justified desire. A maid more friendly than the rest brought her some tea, but Jane said nothing of what had occurred. When the child awoke, she fed him, and played with him a long time—till he was thoroughly tired, when she undressed him, and laying him down, set about preparing his evening meal. No one could have perceived in her any difference, except indeed it were a subdued excitement in her glowing eyes. When it was ready, she went to her box, took from it a small bottle, and poured a few dark-coloured drops into the food.

“God forgive me! it's but this once!” she murmured.

The child seemed not quite to relish his supper, but did not refuse it, and was presently asleep in her arms. She laid him down, took a book, and began to read.

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CHAPTER III. THE FLIGHT.

She read until every sound had died in the house, every sound from garret to cellar, except the ticking of clock, and the tinkling cracks of sinking fires and cooling grates. In the regnant silence she rose, laid aside her book, softly opened the door, and stepped as softly into the narrow passage. A moment or two she listened, then stole on tiptoe to the main corridor, and again listened. She went next to the head of the great stair, and once more stood and listened. Then she crept down to the drawing-room, saw that there was no light in the library, billiard-room, or smoking-room, and with stealthy feet returned to the nursery. There she closed the door she had left open, and took the child. He lay in her arms like one dead. She removed everything he wore, and dressed him in the garments which for the last fortnight she had been making for him from clothes of her own. When she had done, he looked like any cottager's child; there was nothing in his face to contradict his attire. She regarded the result for a moment with a triumph of satisfaction, laid him down, and proceeded to put away the clothes he had worn.

Over the top of the door was a small cupboard in the wall, into which she had never looked until the day before, when she opened it and found it empty. She placed a table under it, and a chair on the table, climbed up, laid in it everything she had taken off the child, locked the door of it, put the key in her pocket, and got down. Then she took the cloak and hood he had hitherto worn out of doors, laid them down beside the wardrobe, and lifting the end of it with a strength worthy of the blacksmith's daughter, pushed them with her foot into the hollow between the bottom of the wardrobe and the floor of the room. This done, she looked at the timepiece on the mantelshelf, saw it was one o'clock, and sat down to recover her breath. But the next moment she was on her knees, sobbing. By and by she rose, wiped the hot tears from her eyes, and went carefully about the room, gathering up this and that, and putting it into her box. Then having locked it, she stuffed a number of small pieces of paper into the lock, using a crochet-needle to get them well among the wards. Lastly, she put on a dress she had never worn at Mortgrange, took up the child, who was still in a dead sleep, wrapped him in an old shawl, and stole with him from the room.

Like those of a thief—or murderess rather, her scared eyes looked on this side and that, as she crept to a narrow stair that led to the kitchen. She knew every turn and every opening in this part of the house: for weeks she had been occupied, both intellect and imagination, with the daring idea she was now carrying into effect.

She reached the one door that might yield a safe exit, unlocked it noiselessly, and stood in a little paved yard with a pump, whence another door in an ivy-covered wall opened into the kitchen-garden. The moon shone large and clear, but the shadow of the house protected her. It was the month of August, warm and still. If only it had been dark! Outside the door she was still in the shadow. For the first time in her life she loved the darkness. Along the wall she stole as if clinging to it. Yet another door led into a shrubbery surrounding the cottage of the head-gardener, whence a back-road led to a gate, over which she could climb, so to reach the highway, along whose honest, unshadowed spaces she must walk miles and miles before she could even hope herself safe.

She stood at length in the broad moonlight, on the white, far-reaching road. Her heart beat so fast as almost to stifle her. She dared not look down at the child, lest some one should see her and look also! The moon herself had an aspect of suspicion! Why did she keep staring so? For an instant she wished herself back in the nursery. But she knew it would only be to do it all over again: it had to be done! Leave the child of her sister where he was counted in the way! with those who hated him! where his helpless life was in danger! She could not!

But, while she thought, she did not stand. Softly, with great strides she went stalking along the road. She knew the country: she was not many miles from her father's forge, whence at moments she seemed to hear the ring of his hammer through the still night.

She kept to the road for three or four miles, then turned aside on a great moor stretching far to the south: daybreak was coming fast; she must find some cottage or natural shelter, lest the light should betray her. When the sun had made his round, and yielded his place to the friendly night, she would start afresh! In her bundle she had enough for the baby; for herself, she could hold out many hours unfed. A few more miles from Mortgrange, and no one would know her, neither from any possible description could they be suspected in the garments they wore! Her object in hiding their usual attire had been, that it might be taken for granted they had gone away in it.

She did not slacken her pace till she had walked five miles more. Then she stood a moment, and gazed about her. The great heath was all around, solitary as the heaven out of which the solitary moon, with no child to comfort her, was enviously watching them. But she would not stop to rest, save for the briefest breathing space! On and on she went until moorland miles five more, as near as she could judge, were behind her. Then at length she sat down upon a stone, and a timid flutter of safety stirred in her bosom, followed by a gush of love victorious. Her treasure! her treasure! Not once on the long way had she looked at him. Now she folded back the shawl, and gazed as not even a lover could have gazed on the sleeping countenance of his rescued bride. The passion of no other possession could have equalled the intensity of her conscious having. Not one created being had a right to the child but herself!—yet any moment he might be taken from her by a cold-hearted, cruel stepmother, and given to a hired woman! She started to her feet, and hurried on. The boy was no light weight, and she had things to carry besides, which her love said he could not do without; yet before seven o'clock she had cleared some sixteen miles, in a line from Mortgrange as straight as she could keep.

She thought she must now be near a village whose name she knew; but she dared not show herself lest some advertisement might reach it after she was gone, and lead to the discovery of the route she had taken. She turned aside therefore into an old quarry, there to spend the day, unvisited of human soul. The child was now awake, but still drowsy. She gave him a little food, and ate the crust she had saved from her tea the night before. During the long hours she slept a good deal by fits, and when the evening came, was quite fit to resume her tramp. To her joy it came cloudy, giving her courage to enter a little shop she saw on the outskirts of the village, and buy some milk and some bread. From this point she kept the road: she might now avail herself of help from cart or wagon. She was not without money, but feared the railway.

It is needless to follow her wanderings, always toward London, where was her husband, and her home. A weary, but happy, and almost no longer an anxious woman, she reached at length a certain populous suburb, and was soon in the arms of her husband.

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CHAPTER IV. THE BOOKBINDER AND HIS PUPIL.

It was the middle of the day before they were missed. Their absence caused for a time no commotion; the servants said nurse must have taken the child for his usual walk. But when the nurse from London came, and, after renewed search and inquiry, nothing was heard of them, their disappearance could no longer be kept from lady Ann. She sent to inform her husband.

Sir Wilton asked a question or two of her messenger, said the thing must be seen to, finished his cigar, threw the stump in the fire, and went to his wife; when at once they began to discuss, not the steps to be taken for the recovery of the child, but the woman's motive for stealing him. The lady insisted it was revenge for having been turned away, and that she would, as soon as she reached a suitable place, put an end to his life: she had seen murder in her eyes! The father opined there was no such danger: he remembered, though he did not mention it, the peculiarity of the woman's behaviour when first he saw her. There was no limit, he said, to the unnatural fancies of women; some were disgustingly fond of children, even other women's children. Plain as the infant was, he did not doubt she had taken a fancy to him, and therefore declined to part with him. The element of revenge might, he allowed, have a share in the deed; but that would be satisfied with leaving them in doubt of his fate. For his part, he made her welcome to him! To this lady Ann gave no answer: she was not easily shocked, and could, without consternation, have regarded his disappearance as final. But something must at least appear to be done! Unpleasant things might be said, and uncertainty was full of annoyance!

“You must be careful, sir Wilton,” she remarked. “Nobody thinks you believe the child your own.”

Sir Wilton laughed.

“I never had a doubt on the subject. I wish I had: he's not to my credit. If we never hear of him again, the better for the next!”

“That is true!” rejoined lady Ann. “But what if, after we had forgotten all about him, he were to turn up again?”

“That would be unpleasant—and is indeed a reason why we should look for him. Better find him than live in doubt! Besides, the world would be uncharitable enough to hint that you had made away with him: it's what ought to have been done when first he appeared. I give you my word, Ann, he was a positive monster! The object was actually web-footed!—web-footed like any frog!”

“You must let the police know,” said the lady.

“That the child is web-footed? No, I think not!” yawned sir Wilton.

He got up, went out, and ordered a groom to ride hard to the village—as hard as he could go—and let the police understand what had occurred. Within the hour a constable appeared, come to inquire when last the fugitives were seen, and what they wore—the answer to which latter question set the police looking for persons very different in appearance from Jane and her nursling. Nothing was heard of them, and the inquiry, never prosecuted with any vigour, was by degrees dropped entirely.

John Tuke had grumbled greatly at his wife's desertion of him for grandees who would never thank her; but he gave in to the prolongation of her absence with a better grace, when he learned how the motherless baby was regarded by his own people. The humanity of the man rose in defence of the injured. He felt also that, in espousing the cause of his wife's nephew, scorned by his baronet father, he was taking the part of his own down-trodden class. He was greatly perplexed, however, as to what end the thing was to have. Must he live without his wife till the boy was sent to school?

He was in bed and fast asleep, when suddenly opening his eyes, he saw beside him the wife he had not seen for twelve months, with the stolen child in her arms. When he heard how the stepmother had treated her, and how the babe was likely to fare among its gentle kin, he was filled with fresh indignation; but, while thoroughly appreciating and approving his wife's decision and energy, he saw to what the deed exposed them, and augured frightful consequences to the discovery that seemed almost certain. But when he understood the precautions she had taken, and bethought himself how often the police fail, he had better hopes of escape. One thing he never dreamed of—and that was, restoring the child. Often at night he would lie wondering how far, in case of their being tried for kidnapping, the defence would reach, that his wife was the child's aunt; and whether the fact that she was none the less a poor woman standing up against the rich, would not render that or any plea unavailing. Jane was, and long remained, serenely hopeful.

When she left for Mortgrange, they had agreed that her husband should say she was gone to her father's; and as nobody where they lived knew who or where her father was, nobody had the end of any clue. For some time after her return she did not show herself, leaving it to her husband to say she had come back with her baby. Then she began to appear with the child, and so managed her references to her absence, that no one dreamed of his not being her own, or imagined that she had left her husband for other reason than to be tended at her old home in her confinement. After a few years, even the fact of his not having been born in that house was forgotten; and Richard Lestrange grew up as the son of John Tuke, the bookbinder. Not in any mind was there a doubt as to his parentage.

They lived on the very bank of the Thames, in a poor part of a populous, busy, thriving suburb, far from fashionable, yet not without inhabitants of refinement. Had not art and literature sent out a few suckers into it, there would have been no place in it for John Tuke. For, more than liking his trade, being indeed fond of it, he would not work for the booksellers, but used his talent to the satisfaction of known customers, of whom he had now not a few, for his reputation had spread beyond the near neighbourhood. But while he worked cheaper, quality considered, than many binders, even carefully superintending that most important yet most neglected part of the handicraft, the sewing, he never undertook cheap work. Never, indeed, without persuasion on the part of his employer and expostulation on his own, did he consent to half-bind a book. Hence it comes to be confessed, that, when carte blanche was given him, he would not infrequently expend upon a book an amount of labour and a value of material quite out of proportion to the importance of the book. Still, being a thoroughly conscientious workman, who never hurried the forwarding, never cut from a margin a hair's breadth more than was necessary, and hated finger-marks on the whiteness of a page, he was well known as such, and had plenty of work—had often, indeed, to refuse what was offered him, hence was able to decline all such jobs as would give him no pleasure, and grew more fastidious as he grew older in regard to the quality of the work he would undertake. He had never employed a journeyman, and would never take more than two apprentices at a time.

As Richard Lestrange grew, his chief pleasure was to be in the shop with his uncle, and watch him at his varying work. I think his knowledge of books as things led him the sooner to desire them as realities, for to read he learned with avidity. When he was old enough to go to school, his adopted father spared nothing he could spend to make him fit for his future; wisely resolved, however, that he should know nothing of his rights until he was of an age to understand them—except, indeed, sir Wilton should die before that age arrived, when his cause would be too much prejudiced by farther postponement of claim. Heartily they hoped that their secret might remain a secret until their nephew should be capable of protecting them from any untoward consequence of their well intended crime.

Happily there was in the place, and near enough for the boy to attend it easily, a good day-school upon an old foundation, whose fees were within his father's means. Richard proved a fair student and became a great reader. But he took such an intelligent and practical interest in the work he saw going on at home, that he began, while yet a mere child, to use paste and paper of his own accord. First he made manuscript-books for his work at school, and for the copying of such verses as he took a fancy to in his reading. Then inside the covers of some of these he would make pockets for papers; and so advanced to small portfolios and pocket-books, of which he would make presents to his companions, and sometimes, when more ambitiously successful, to a master. In their construction he used bits of coloured paper and scraps of leather, chiefly morocco, which his father willingly made over to him, watching his progress with an interest quite paternal, and showing a workman's wisdom in this, that only when he saw him in a real difficulty would he come to his aid—as, for instance, when first he struggled with a piece of leather too thick for the bonds of paste, and must be taught how to pare it to the necessary flexibility and compliance.

To become able to make something is, I think, necessary to thorough development. I would rather have son of mine a carpenter, a watchmaker, a wood-carver, a shoemaker, a jeweller, a blacksmith, a bookbinder, than I would have him earn his bread as a clerk in a counting-house. Not merely is the cultivation of operant faculty a better education in faculty, but it brings the man nearer to every thing operant; humanity unfolds itself to him the readier; its ways and thoughts and modes of being grow the clearer to both intellect and heart. The poetry of life, the inner side of that nature which comes from him who, on the Sabbath-days even, “worketh hitherto,” rises nearer the surface to meet the eyes of the man who makes. What advantage the carpenter of Nazareth gathered from his bench, is the inheritance of every workman, in proportion as he does divine, that is, honest work.

Perceiving the faculty of the boy, his father—so let us call John Tuke for the present—naturally thought it well to make him a gift of his trade: it would always be a possession! “Whatever turn things may take,” he would remark to his wife, “the boy will have his bread in his hands. And say what they will, the man who can gather his food off his own bench, or screw it out of his own press, must be a freer man than he who but for his inheritance would have to beg, steal, or die of hunger. And who knows how long the world may permit idlers to fare of its best!”

For, after a fashion of his own, Tuke was a philosopher and a politician. But his politics were those of the philosopher, not of the politician.

Richard, with his great love of reading, and therefore of books, was delighted to learn the craft which is their attendant and servitor. When too young yet to wield the hammer without danger both to himself and the book under it, he began to sew, and in a few weeks was able to bring the sheets together entirely to the satisfaction of his father. From the first he set him to do that essential part of the work in the best way, that is, to sew every sheet round every cord: it is only when one can perfectly work after the perfect rule, that he may be trusted with variations and exceptions.

He went on teaching him until the boy could, he confessed, do almost everything better than himself—went on until he had taught him every delicacy, every secret of the craft. Richard developed a positive genius for the work, seeming almost to learn it by intuition. A pocket-book, with which he presented his father on his fiftieth birthday, brought out his unqualified praise.

In the process he gradually revealed a predilection for a rarer use of his faculty—a use more nice, while less distinguished, and not much favoured by his father. It had its prime source deeper than the art of book-binding—in the love of books themselves, not as leaves to be bound, but as utterances to be heard. Certain dealers in old books have loved some of them so as to refuse to part with them on any terms; Richard, unable to possess more than a very few, manifested his veneration for them in another and nearer fashion, running, as was natural and healthy, in the lines of his calling.

For many months in diligent attendance at certain of the evening-classes at King's College, he had developed a true insight into and sympathy with what is best in our literature—chiefly in that of the sixteenth century: from this grew an almost peculiar regard for old books. With three or four shillings weekly at his disposal, he laid himself out to discover and buy such volumes as, in themselves of value, were in so bad a condition as to be of little worth from the mere bookseller's point of view: with these for his first patients he opened a hospital, or angel-asylum, for the lodging, restorative treatment, and systematic invigoration of decayed volumes. Love and power combined made him look on the dilapidated, slow-wasting abodes of human thought and delight with a healing compassion—almost with a passion of healing. The worse gnawed of the tooth of insect-time, the farther down any choice book in the steep decline of years, the more intent was Richard on having it. More and more skillful he grew, not only in rebinding such whose clothing was past repair, but in restoring the tone of their very constitution; and in so mending the ancient and beggarly garments of others that they reassumed a venerable respectability. Through love, he passed from an artisan to an artist. His reverence for the inner reality, the book itself, in itself beyond time and decay, had roused in him a child-like regard for its body, for its broken inclosure and default of manifestation. He would espy the beauty of an old binding through any amount of abrasion and laceration. To his eyes almost any old binding was better for its book than any new one.

His father came to regard with wonder and admiration the redeeming faculty of his son, whereby he would reinstate in strength and ripe dignity a volume which he would have taken to pieces, and redressed like an age-worn woman in a fashionable gown. So far did his son's superior taste work upon his, that at length, if he opened a new binding, however sombre, and saw a time-browned paper and old type within, the sight would give him the shock of a discord.

But Tuke was in many things no other than a man of this world, and sorely he doubted if such labour would ever have its counterpoise in money. It paid better, because it was much easier, to reclothe than to restore! to destroy and replace than to renew! When he had watched many times for minutes together his son's delicate manipulation—in which he patched without pauperizing, and subaided without humiliating—and at last contemplating the finished result, he concluded him possessed of a quite original faculty for book-healing.—“But alas,” he thought, “genius seldom gets beyond board-wages!” It did not occur to him that genius least requires more than board-wages. He encouraged him, nevertheless, though mildly, in the pursuit of this neglected branch of the binding-art.

As the days went on, and their love for their nephew grew with his deserts, the uncle and aunt shrank more and more from the thought, which every year compelled them to think the oftener, that the day was drawing nigh when they must volunteer the confession that he was not their child.

When he was about seventeen, Richard settled down to work with his father, occasionally assisting him, but in general occupied with his own special branch, in which Tuke, through his long connection with book-lovers possessing small cherished libraries, was able to bring him almost as many jobs as he could undertake. The fact that a volume could be so repaired, stimulated the purchase of shabby books; and part of what was saved on the price of a good copy was laid out on the amendment of the poor one. But however much the youth delighted in it, he could not but find the work fidgety and tiring; whence ensued the advantage that he left it the oftener for a ramble, or a solitary hour on the river. He had but few companions, his guardians, wisely or not, being more fastidious about his associates than if he had been their very son. His uncle, of strong socialistic opinions, and wont to dilate on human equality—as if the thing that ought to be, and must one day come, could be furthered by the assertion of its present existence—was, like the holders of even higher theories, not a little apt to forget the practice necessarily involved: this son of a baronet, seeing that he was the son also of his wife's sister, was not to be brought up like one of the many!

Ugliness in infancy is a promise, though perhaps a doubtful one, of beauty in manhood; and in Richard's case the promise was fulfilled: hardly a hint was left of the baby-face which had repelled his father. He was now a handsome well-grown youth, with dark-brown hair, dark-green eyes, broad shoulders, and a little stoop which made his aunt uneasy: she would have had him join a volunteer corps, but he declared he had not the time. He accepted her encouragement, however, to forsake his work as often as he felt inclined. He had good health; what was better, a good temper; and what was better still, a willing heart toward his neighbour. A certain over-hanging of his brows was—especially when he contracted them, as, in perplexity or endeavour, he not infrequently did—called a scowl by such as did not love him; but it was of shallow insignificance, and probably the trick of some ancestor.

Before long, his thinking began to take form in verse-making. It matters little to my narrative whether he produced anything of original value or not; utterance aids growth, which is the prime necessity of human as of all other life. Not seldom, bent over his work, he would be evolving some musical fashion of words—with no relaxation, however, of the sharp attention and delicate handling required by the nature of that work. It is the privilege of some kinds of labour, that they are compatible with thoughts of higher things. At the book-keeper's desk, the clerk must think of nothing but his work; he is chained to it as the galley-slave to his oar; the shoemaker may be poet or mystic, or both; the ploughman may turn a good furrow and a good verse together; Richard could at once use hands and thoughts. It troubled his protectors that they could not send him to college, but they comforted themselves that it would not be too late when he returned to his natural position in society. They had no plan in their minds, no date settled at which to initiate his restoration. All they had determined was, that he must at least be a grown man, capable of looking after his own affairs, when the first step for it was taken.

John Tuke was one of those who acknowledge in some measure the claims of their neighbour, but assert ignorance of any one who must be worshipped. And in truth, the God presented to him by his teachers was one with little claim on human devotion. The religious system brought to bear on his youth had operated but feebly on his conscience, and not at all on his affections. It had, however, so wrought upon his apprehensions, that, when afterward persuaded there was no ground for agonizing anticipation, he welcomed the conviction as in itself a redemption for all men; “for, surely,” he argued, “fear is the worst of evils!” The very approach of such a relief predisposed him to receive whatever teaching might follow from the same source; and soon he believed himself satisfied that the notion of religion—of duty toward an unseen maker—was but an old-wives'-fable; and that, as to the hereafter, a mere cessation of consciousness was the only reasonable expectation. The testimony of his senses, although negative, he accepted as stronger on that side than any amount of what could, he said, be but the purest assertion on the other. Why should he heed an old book? why one more than another? The world was around him: some things he must believe; other things no man could! One thing was clear: every man was bound to give his neighbour fair-play! He would press nothing upon Richard as to God or no God! he would not be dogmatic! he only wanted to make a man of him! And was he not so far successful? argued John. Was not Richard growing up a diligent, honest fellow, loving books, and leading a good life; whereas, had he been left to his father, he could not have escaped being arrogant and unjust, despising the poor of his own flesh, and caring only to please himself! In the midst of such superior causes of satisfaction, it also pleased Tuke to reflect that the trade he had taught his nephew was a clean one, which, while it rendered him superior to any shrewd trick fortune might play him, would not make his hands unlike those of a gentleman.

His aunt, however, kept wishing that Richard were better “set up,” and looked more like his grandfather the blacksmith, whose trade she could not help regarding as manlier than that of her husband. Hence she had long cherished the desire that he should spend some time with her father. But John would not hear of it. He would get working at the forge, he said, and ruin his hands for the delicate art in which he was now unapproachable.

For in certain less socialistic moods, John would insist on regarding bookbinding, in all and any of its branches, not as a trade, but an art.

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CHAPTER V. THE MANSONS.

At school, Richard had been friendly with a boy of gentle nature, not many years older than himself. The boy had stood his friend in more than one difficulty, and Richard heartily loved him. But he had suddenly disappeared from the school, and so from Richard's ken: for years he had not seen him. One evening, as he was carrying home a book, he met this Arthur Manson, looking worn and sad. He would have avoided Richard, but he stopped him, and presently the old friendship was dominant. Arthur told him his story. He had had to leave school because of the sudden cessation, from what cause he did not know, of a certain annuity his mother had till then enjoyed—rendering it imperative that he should earn his own living, and contribute to her support, for although she still had a little money, it was not nearly enough. His sister was at work with a dressmaker, but as yet earning next to nothing. His mother was a lady, he said, and had never done any work. He was himself in a counting-house in the City, with a salary of forty pounds. He told him where they lived, and Richard promised to go and see him, which he did the next Sunday.

His friend's mother lived in a little house of two floors, one of a long row lately built. The furniture was much too large, and it was difficult to move in the tiny drawing-room. It showed a feeble attempt at decoration, which made it look the poorer. Accustomed to his mother's care of her things, Richard perceived a difference: these were much finer but neglected, and looked as if they felt it. At their evening meal, however, the tea was good, and the bread and butter were of the best.

The mother was a handsome middle-aged woman—not so old, Richard somehow imagined, as she looked. She was stout and florid, with plenty of black, rather coarse hair, and seemed to Richard to have the carriage of a lady, but not speech equal to her manners. She was polite to him, but not apparently interested in her son's friend. Yet several times he found her gazing at him with an expression that puzzled him. He had, however, too clear a conscience to be troubled by any scrutiny. All the evening Arthur's face wore the same look of depression, and Richard wondered what could be amiss. He learned afterward that the mother was so self-indulgent, and took so little care to make the money go as far as it could, that he had not merely to toil from morning to night at uncongenial labour, but could never have the least recreation, and was always too tired when he came home to understand any book he attempted to read. Richard learned also that he had no greatcoat, and went to the City in the winter with only a shabby comforter in addition to the clothes he had worn all the summer. But it was not Arthur who told him this.

The girl was a graceful little creature, with the same sad look her brother had, but not the same depression. She seemed more delicate, and less capable of labour; yet her hours were longer than his, and her confinement greater. Alice had to sit the whole day plying her needle, while Arthur was occasionally sent out to collect money. But her mistress was a kind-hearted woman, and not having a fashionable clientèle, had not yet become indifferent to the well-being of her work-women. She even paid a crippled girl a trifle for reading to them, stipulating only that she should read fast, for she found the rate of their working greatly influenced by the rate of the reading. Life, if harder, was therefore not quite so uninteresting to Alice as to Arthur, and that might be why she seemed to have more vitality. Like her mother she had a quantity of hair, as dark as hers, but finer; dark eyes, not without meaning; irregular but very pleasing and delicate features; and an unusually white rather than pale complexion, with a sort of sallow glow under the diaphanous skin. There was not a little piquancy in the expression of her countenance, and Richard felt it strangely attractive.

The youths found they had still tastes in common, although Arthur had neither time nor strength to follow them. Richard spoke of some book he had been reading. Arthur was interested, but Alice so much that Richard offered to lend it her: it was the first time she had heard a book spoken of in such a tone—one of suppressed feeling, almost veneration.

The mother did not join in their talk, and left them soon—her daughter said to go to church.

“She always goes by herself,” Alice added. “She sees we are too tired to go.”

They sat a long time with no light but that of the fire. Arthur seemed to gather courage, and confessed the hopeless monotony of his life. He complained of no privation, only of want of interest in his work.

“Do you like your work?” he asked Richard.

“Indeed I do!” Richard answered. “I would sooner handle an old book than a bunch of bank-notes!”

“I don't doubt it,” returned Arthur. “To me your workshop seems a paradise.”

“Why don't you take up the trade, then? Come to us and I will teach you. I do not think my father would object.”

“I learn nothing where I am!” continued Arthur.

“Our boat is not over-manned,” resumed Richard. “Say you will come, and I will speak to my father.”

“I wish I could! But how are we to live while I am learning?—No; I must grind away till—”

He stopped short, and gave a sigh.

“Till when, Arty?” asked his sister.

“Till death set me free,” he answered.

“You wouldn't leave me behind, Arty!” said Alice; and rising, she put her arm round his neck.

“I wouldn't if I could help it,” he replied.

“It's a cowardly thing to want to die,” said Richard.

“I think so sometimes.”

“There's your mother!”

“Yes,” responded Arthur, but without emotion.

“And how should I get on without you, Arty?” said his sister.

“Not very well, Ally. But it wouldn't be for long. We should soon meet.”

“Who told you that?” said Richard almost rudely.

“Don't you think we shall know each other afterwards?” asked Arthur, with an expression of weary rather than sad surprise.

“I would be a little surer of it before I talked so coolly of leaving a sister like that! I only wish I had one to care for!”

A faint flush rose on the pale face of the girl, and as swiftly faded.

“Do you think, then, that this life is only a dream?” she said, looking up at Richard with something in her great eyes that he did not understand.

“Anyhow,” he answered, “I would bear a good deal rather than run the risk of going so fast asleep as to stop dreaming it. A man can die any time,” he continued, “but he can't dream when he pleases! I would wait! One can't tell when things may take a turn! There are many chances on the cards!”

“That's true,” replied Arthur; but plainly the very chances were a weariness to him.

“If Arthur had enough to eat, and time to read, and a little amusement, he would be as brave as you are, Mr. Tuke!” said Alice. “—But you can't mean to say there will be no more of anything for us after this world! To think I should never see Arty again, would make me die before my time! I should be so miserable I would hardly care to keep him as long as I might. We must die some day, and what odds whether it be a few days sooner, or a few days later, if we're never going to meet again?”

“The best way is not to think about it,” returned Richard. “Why should you? Look at the butterflies! They take what comes, and don't grumble at their sunshine because there's only one day of it.”

“But when there's no sunshine that day?” suggested Alice.

“Well, when they lie crumpled in the rain, they're none the worse that they didn't think about it beforehand! We must make the best of what we have!”

“It's not worth making the best of,” cried Alice indignantly, “if that's all!”

My reader may well wonder at Richard: how could he be a lover of our best literature and talk as he did? or rather, talking as he did, how could he love it? But he had come to love it while yet under the influence of what his aunt taught him, poor as was her teaching. Then his heart and imagination were more in the ascendency. Now he had begun to admire the intellectual qualities of that literature more, and its imaginative less; for he had begun to think truth attainable through the forces of the brain, sole and supreme.

In matters of conduct, John Tuke and his wife were well agreed; in matters of opinion, they differed greatly. Jane went to church regularly, listened without interest, and accepted without question; had her husband gone, he would have listened with the interest of utter dissent. When Jane learned that her husband no longer “believed in the Bible,” she was seized with terror lest he should die without repentance and be lost. Thereupon followed fear for herself: was not an atheist a horribly wicked man?—and she could not feel that John was horribly wicked! She tried her hardest, but could not; and concluded therefore that his unbelief must be affecting her. She prayed him to say nothing against the Bible to Richard—at least before he arrived at years of discretion. This John promised; but subtle effluences are subtle influences.

John Tuke did right so far as he knew—at least he thought he did—and refused to believe in any kind of God; Jane did right, she thought, as far as she knew—and never imagined God cared about her: let him who has a mind to it, show the value of the difference!

Tuke was a thinking man;—that is, set a going in any direction that interested him, he could take a few steps forward without assistance. But he could start in no direction of himself. At a small club to which he belonged, he had been brought in contact with certain ideas new to him, and finding himself able to grasp them, felt at once as if they must be true. Certain other ideas, new to him, coming self-suggested in their train, he began immediately to imagine himself a thinker, able to generate notions to which the people around him were unequal. He began to grow self-confident, and so to despise. Taking courage then to deny things he had never believed, had only not thought about, and finding he thereby gave offence, he chose to imagine himself a martyr for the truth. He did not see that a denial involving no assertion, cannot witness to any truth; nor did he perceive that denial in his case meant nothing more than non-acceptance of things asserted. Had he put his position logically, it would have been this: I never knew such things; I do not like the notion of them; therefore I deny them: they do not exist. But no man really denies a thing which he knows only by the words that stand for it. When John Tuke denied the God in his notion, he denied only a God that could have no existence.

A man will be judged, however, by his truth toward what he professes to believe; and John was far truer to his perception of the duty of man to man than are ninety-nine out of the hundred of so-called Christians to the things they profess to believe. How many men would be immeasurably better, if they would but truly believe, that is, act upon, the smallest part of what they untruly profess to believe, even if they cast aside all the rest. John cast aside an allegiance to God which had never been more than a mockery, and set about delivering his race from the fear of a person who did not exist. For, true enough, there was no God of the kind John denied; only, what if, in delivering his kind from the tyranny of a false God, he aided in hiding from them the love of a true God—of a God that did and ought to exist? There are other passions besides fear, and precious as fear is hateful. If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that he could not get proof of his existence. Is a child not to seek his father, because he cannot prove he is alive?

The aunt continued to take the boy to church, and expose him, for it was little more she did, to a teaching she could not herself either supply or supplement. It was the business of the church to teach Christianity! her part was to accept it, and bring the child where he also might listen and accept! But what she accepted as Christianity, is another question; and whether the acceptance of anything makes a Christian, is another still.

How much of Christianity a child may or may not learn by going to church, it is impossible to say; but certainly Richard did not learn anything that drew his heart to Jesus of Nazareth, or caught him in any heavenly breeze, or even the smallest of celestial whirlwinds! He learned nothing even that made unwelcome such remarks as his father would now and then let fall concerning the clergy and the way they followed their trade; while the grin, full of conscious superiority, with which he unconsciously accompanied them, found its reflection in the honourable but not yet humble mind, beginning to be aware of its own faculty, and not aware that the religion presented in his aunt's church, a religion neither honourable nor elevating, was but the dullest travesty of the religion of St. Paul. Richard had, besides, read several books which, had his uncle been careful of the promise he had given his wife, he would have intentionally removed instead of unintentionally leaving about.

In the position Richard had just taken toward his new friends, he was not a little influenced by the desire to show himself untrammelled by prevailing notions, and capable of thinking for himself; but this was far from all that made him speak as he did. Many young fellows are as ready to deny as Richard, but not many feel as strongly that life rests upon what we know, that knowledge must pass into action. The denial of every falsehood under the sun would not generate one throb of life.

Richard told his adoptive parents where he had been, and asked if he might invite his new friends for the next Sunday. They made no objection, and when Arthur and Alice came, received them kindly. Richard took Arthur to the shop, and showed him the job he was engaged upon at the time, lauding his department as affording more satisfaction than mere binding.

“For,” he said, “the thing that is not, may continue not to be; but the thing that is, should be as it was meant to be. Where it is not such, there is an evil that wants remedy. It may be that the sole remedy is binding, but that involves destruction, therefore is a poor thing beside renovation.”

The argument came from a well of human pity in himself, deeper than Richard knew. But both the pity he felt and the truth in what he said came from a source eternal of which he yet knew nothing.

“It would be much easier,” continued Richard, “to make that volume look new, but how much more delightful to send it out with a revived assertion of its ancient self!”

Some natures have a better chance of disclosing the original in them, that they have not been to college, and set to think in other people's grooves, instead of those grooves that were scored in themselves long before the glacial era.

“For my part,” said Arthur, “I feel like a book that needs to be fresh printed, not to say fresh bound! I don't feel why I am what I am. I would part with it all, except just being the same man!”

While the youths were having their talk, Alice was in Jane's bedroom, undergoing an examination, the end and object of which it was impossible she should suspect. Caught by a certain look in her sweet face, reminding her of a look that was anything but sweet, Jane had set herself to learn from her what she might as to her people and history.

“Is your father alive, my dear?” she asked, with her keen black eyes on Alice's face.

That grew red, and for a moment the girl did not answer. Jane pursued her catechizing.

“What was his trade or profession?” she inquired.

The girl said nothing, and the merciless questioner went on.

“Tell me something about him, dear. Do you remember him? Or did he die when you were quite a child?”

“I do not remember him,” answered Alice. “I do not know if I ever saw him.”

“Did your mother never tell you what he was like?”

“She told me once he was very handsome—the handsomest man she ever saw—but cruel—so cruel! she said.—I don't want to talk about him, please, ma'am!” concluded Alice, the tears running down her cheeks.

“I'm sorry, my dear, to hurt you, but I'm not doing it from curiosity. You have a look so like a man I once knew,—and your brother has something of the same!—that in fact I am bound to learn what I can about you.”

“What sort was the man we put you in mind of?” asked Alice, with a feeble attempt at a smile. “Not a very bad man, I hope!”

“Well, not very good—as you ask me.—He was what people call a gentleman!”

“Was that all?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought he was a nobleman!”

“Oh!—well, he wasn't that; he was a baronet.”

Alice gave a little cry.

“Do tell me something about him,” she said. “What do you know about him?”

“More than I choose to tell. We will forget him now, if you please!”

There was in her voice a tone of displeasure, which Alice took to be with herself. She was in consequence both troubled and perplexed. Neither made any more inquiries. Jane took her guest back to the sitting-room.

The moment her brother came from the workshop, Alice said to him—

“Are you ready, Arthur? We had better be moving!”

Arthur was a gentle creature, and seldom opposed her; he seemed only surprised a little, and asked if she was ill. But Richard, who had all the week been looking forward to a talk with Alice, and wanted to show her his little library, was much disappointed, and begged her to change her mind. She insisted, however, and he put on his hat to walk with them.

But his aunt called him, and whispered that she would be particularly obliged to him if he would go to church with her that evening. He expostulated, saying he did not care to go to church; but as she insisted, he yielded, though not with the best grace.

Before another Sunday, there came, doubtless by his aunt's management, an invitation to spend a few weeks with his grandfather, the blacksmith.

Richard was not altogether pleased, for he did not like leaving his work; but his aunt again prevailed with him, and he agreed to go. In this, as in most things, he showed her a deference such as few young men show their mothers. Her influence came, I presume, through the strong impression of purpose she had made on him.

His uncle objected to his going, and grumbled a good deal. As the brewer looks down on the baker, so the bookbinder looked down on the blacksmith.

He said the people Richard would see about his grandfather, were not fit company for the heir of Mortgrange! But he knew the necessity of his going somewhere for a while, and gave in.

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CHAPTER VI. SIMON ARMOUR.

Simon Armour was past only the agility, not the strength of his youth, and in his feats of might and skill he cherished pride. Without being offensively conceited, he regarded himself—and well might—as the superior of any baronet such as his daughter's husband, and desired of him no recognition of the relationship. All he looked for from any man, whether he stood above or beneath his own plane, was proper pay for good work, and natural human respect. Some of the surrounding gentry, possibly not uninfluenced, in sentiment at least, by the growing radicalism of the age, enjoyed the free, jolly, but unpresuming carriage of the stalwart old man, to whom, if indeed on his head the almond-tree was already in blossom, the grasshopper was certainly not yet a burden: he could still ply a sledge-hammer in each hand. “My lord,” came from his lips in a clear, ringing tone of good-fellowship, which the nobleman who occasionally stopped at his forge to give him some direction about the shoeing of this or that horse, liked well to hear, and felt the friendlier for—though I doubt if he would have welcomed it from a younger man.

Besides his daughter Jane and her husband, he alone was aware of the real parentage of the lad who passed as their son; and he knew that, if he lived long enough, an hour would call him to stand up for the rights of his grandson. Perhaps it was partly in view of this, that he had for years been an abstainer from strong drink; but I am inclined to attribute the fact chiefly to his having found the love of it gaining upon him. “Damn the drink!” he had been more than once overheard to say, “it shall know which of us is master!” And when Simon had made up his mind to a thing, the thing was—not indeed as good, but almost as sure as done. The smallest of small beer was now his strongest drink.

He was a hard-featured, good-looking, white-haired man of sixty, with piercing eyes of quite cerulean blue, and a rough voice with an undertone of music in it. There was music, indeed, all through him. In the roughest part of his history it was his habit to go to church—mainly, I may say entirely, for the organ, but his behaviour was never other than reverent. How much he understood, may be left a question somewhat dependent on how much there may have been to understand; but he had a few ideas in religion which were very much his own, and which, especially some with regard to certain of the lessons from the Old Testament, would have considerably astonished some parsons, and considerably pleased others. He was a big, broad-shouldered man, with the brawniest arms, and eyes so bright and scintillant that one might fancy they caught and kept for their own use the sparks that flew from his hammer. His face was red, with a great but short white beard, suggesting the sun in a clean morning-fog.

A rickety omnibus carried Richard from the railway-station some five miles to the smithy. When the old man heard it stop, he threw down his hammer, strode hastily to the door, met his grandson with a gripe that left a black mark and an ache, and catching up his portmanteau, set it down inside.

“I'll go with you in a moment, lad!” he said, and seizing with a long pair of pincers the horse-shoe that lay in process on the anvil, he thrust it into the fire, blew a great roaring blast from the bellows, plucked out the shoe glowing white, and fell upon it as if it were a devil. Having thus cowed it a bit, he grew calm, and more deliberately shaped it to an invisible idea. His grandson was delighted with the mingling of determination, intent, and power, with certainty of result, manifest in every blow. In two minutes he had the shoe on the end of a long hooked rod, and was hanging it beside others on a row of nails in a beam. Then he turned and said—

“There, lad! that's off the anvil—and off my mind! Now I'm for you!”

“Grandfather,” said Richard, “I shouldn't like to have you for an enemy!”

“Why not, you rascal! Do you think I would take unfair advantage of you?”

“No, that I don't! But you've got awful arms and hands!”

“They've done a job or two in their day, lad!” he answered; “but I'm getting old now! I can't do what I thought nothing of once. Well, no man was made to last for ever—no more than a horse-shoe! There'd be no work for the Maker if he did!”

“I'm glad to see we're of one mind, grandfather!” said Richard.

“Well, why shouldn't we—if so be we're in the right mind!—Yes; we must be o' one mind if we're o' the right mind! The year or two I may be ahead o' you in gettin' at it, goes for nothing: I started sooner!—But what may be the mind you speak of, sonny?”

The look of keen question the old man threw on him, woke a doubt in Richard whether he might not have misunderstood his grandfather.

“I think,” he answered, “if a man was made to last for ever, the world would get tired of him. When a horse or a dog has done his work, he's content—and so is his master.”

“Nay, but I bean't! I bean't content to lose the old horse as I've shod mayhap for twenty years—no, not if I bean't his master!”

“There's no help for it, though!”

“None as I knows on. I'd be main glad to hear any news on the subjec' as you can supply!—No, I ain't content; I'm sorry!”

“Why don't the parsons say the old horse'll rise again?”

“'Cause the parsons knows nought about it. How should they?”

“They say we're going to rise again.”

“Why shouldn't they? I guess I'll be up as soon as I may! I don't want no night to lie longer than rest my bones!”

“I mistook what you meant, grandfather. I thought, when you said you weren't made to last for ever, that you meant there was an end of you!”

“Well, so you might, and small blame to you! It's a wrong way of speaking we all have. But you've set me thinking—whether by mistake or not, where's the matter! I never thought what come o' the old horse, a'ter all his four shoes takes to shinin' at oncet! For the old smith when he drops his hammer—I have thought about him. Lord!—to think o' that anvil never ringin' no more to this here fist o' mine!”

While they talked, the blacksmith had put off his thick apron of hide; and now, catching up Richard's portmanteau as if it had been a hand-basket, he led the way to a cottage not far from the forge, in a lane that here turned out of the high road. It was a humble place enough—one story and a wide attic. The front was almost covered with jasmine, rising from a little garden filled with cottage flowers. Behind was a larger garden, full of cabbages and gooseberry-bushes.

A girl came to the door, with a kind, blushing face, and hands as red as her cheeks—a great-niece of the old smith. He passed her and led the way into a room half kitchen, half parlour.

“Here you are, lad—at home, I hope! Sech as it is, an' as much as it's mine, it's yours, an' I hope you'll make it so.”

He deposited the portmanteau, glanced quickly round, saw that Jessie had not followed them, and said—

“You'll keep your good news till I've turned it over!”

“What good news, grandfather?”

“The good news that them as is close pared, has no call to look out for the hoof to grow. I'm not saying you're wrong, lad—not yet; but everybody mightn't think your news so good as to be worth a special messenger! So till you're quite sure of it—”

“I am quite sure of it, grandfather!”

“I'm not; and having charge of the girl there, I'll ha' no dish served i' my house as I don't think wholesome!”

“You're right there, grandfather! You may trust me!” answered Richard respectfully.

The blacksmith had spoken with a decision that was imperative. His red face shone out of his white beard, and his eyes sparkled out of his red face; his head gave a nod, and his jaws a snap.

They had tea, with bread and butter and marmalade, and much talk about John and Jane Tuke, in which the old man said oftener, “your aunt,” and “your uncle,” than “your father” or “your mother;” but Richard put it down to the confusion that often accompanies age. When the bookbinding came up, Richard was surprised to discover that the blacksmith was far from looking upon their trade as superior to his own. It was plain indeed that he regarded bookbinding as a quite inferior and scarce manly employment. To the blacksmith, bookbinding and tailoring were much the same—fit only for women. Richard did not relish this. He endeavoured to make his grandfather see the dignity of the work, insisting that its difficulty was the greater because of the less strength required in it: the strength itself had, he said, in certain of its operations, to be pared to the requisite fineness, to be modified with extreme accuracy; while in others, all the strength a man had was necessary, and especially in a shop like theirs, where everything was done by hand. But the fine work, he said, tired one much the most.

“Fine work!” echoed the smith with contempt. “There came a gentleman here to be shod t'other day from the Hall, who was a great traveller; and he told me he seen in Japan a blacksmith with a sprig of may on the anvil before him, an' him a-copyin' to the life them blossoms in hard iron with his one hammer! What say you to that, lad?”

“Wonderful! But that same man couldn't do the heavy work you think nothing of, grandfather!”

“Nay, for that I don't know. I know I couldn't do his!”

“Then we'll allow that fine work may be a manly thing as well as hard work. But I do wish I could shoe a horse!”

“What's to hinder you?”

“Will you let me learn, grandfather?”

“Learn! I'll learn you myself. You'll soon learn. It's not as if you was a bumpkin to teach! The man as can do anything, can do everything.”

“Come along then, grandfather! I want to let you see that though my hands may catch a blister or two, they're not the less fit for hard work that they can do fine. I'll be safe to shoe a horse before many days are over. Only you must have a little patience with me.”

“Nay, lad, I'll have a great patience with you. Before many days are over, make the shoe you may, and make it well; but to shoe a horse as the horse ought to be shod, that comes by God's grace.”

They went back to the smithy, and there, the very day of his arrival, more to Simon's delight than he cared to show, the soft-handed bookbinder began to wield a hammer, and compel the stubborn iron. So deft and persevering was he, that, ere they went from the forge that same night, he could not only bend the iron to a proper curve round the beak of the anvil, but had punched the holes in half a dozen shoes. At last he confessed himself weary; and when his grandfather saw the state of his hands, blistered and swollen so that he could not close them, he was able no longer to restrain his satisfaction.

“Come!” he cried; “you're a man after all, bookbinder! In six months I should have you a thorough blacksmith.”

“I wouldn't undertake to make a bookbinder of you, grandfather, in the time!” returned Richard.

“Tit for tat, sonny, and it's fair!” said Simon. “I should leave the devil his mark on your white pages.—How much of them do you rend now, as you stick them together?”

“Not a word as I stick them together. But many are brought me to be doctored and mended up, and from some of them I take part of my pay in reading them—books, I mean, that I wouldn't otherwise find it easy to lay my hands upon—scarce books, you know.”

“You would like to go to Oxford, wouldn't ye, lad—and lay in a stock to last your life out?”

“You might as well think to lay victuals into you for a lifetime, grandfather! But I should like to lay in a stock of the tools to be got at Oxford! It would be grand to be able to pick the lock of any door I wanted to see the other side of.”

“I'll put you up to pick any lock you ever saw, or are likely to see,” returned Armour. “I served my time to a locksmith. We didn't hit it off always, and so hit one another—as often almost as the anvil. So when I was out of my time, and couldn't get locksmith's work except in a large forge, I knew better than take it: for I couldn't help getting into rows, and was afraid of doing somebody a mischief when my blood was up. So I started for myself as a general blacksmith-in a small way, of course. But my right hand 'ain't forgot its cunning in locks! I'll teach you to pick the cunningest lock in the world—whether made in Italy or in China.”

“The lock I was thinking of,” said Richard, “was that of the tree of knowledge.”

“I've heerd,” returned Simon, with more humour than accuracy, “as that was a raither pecooliar lock. How it was kep' red hot all the time without coal and bellows, I don't seem to see!”

“Ah!” said Richard, “you mean the flaming sword that turned every way?”

“I reckon I do!”

“You don't say you believe that story, grandfather?”

“I don't say what I believe or what I don't believe. The flamin' iron as I've had to do with, has both kep' me out o' knowledge, an' led me into knowledge! I'll turn the tale over again! You see, lad, when I was a boy, I thought everything my mother said and my father did, old-fashioned, and a bit ignorant-like; but when I was a man, I saw that, if I had started right off from where they set me down, I would ha' been farther ahead. To honour your father an' mother don't mean to stick by their chimbley-corner all your life, but to start from their front door and go foret. I went by the back door, like the fool I was, to get into the front road, and had a long round to make.”

“I shan't do so with my father. He don't read much, but he thinks. He's got a head, my father!”

“There was fathers afore yours, lad! You needn't scorn yer gran'ther for your father!”

“Scorn you, grandfather! God forbid!—or, at least,—”

“You don't see what I'm drivin' at, sonny!—When an old tale comes to me from the far-away time, I don't pitch it into the road, any more'n I would an old key or an old shoe—a horse-shoe, I mean: it was something once, and it may be something again! I hang the one up, and turn the other over. An' if you be strong set on throwin' either away, lad, I misdoubt me you an' me won't blaze together like one flamin' sword!”

Richard held his peace. The old man had already somehow impressed him. If he had not, like his father, bid good-bye to superstition, there was in him a power that was not in his father—a power like that he found in his favourite books.

“Mind what he says, and do what he tells you, and you'll get on splendid!” his mother had said as he came away.

“Don't be afraid of him, but speak up: he'll like you the better for it,” his father had counselled. “I should never have married your mother if I'd been afraid of him.”

Richard, trying to follow both counsels, got on with his grandfather better than fairly.

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CHAPTER VII. COMPARISONS.

All things belong to every man who yields his selfishness, which is his one impoverishment, and draws near to his wealth, which is humanity—not humanity in the abstract, but the humanity of friends and neighbours and all men. Selfishness, I repeat, whether in the form of vanity or greed, is our poverty. John Tuke, being a clever man without a spark of genius, worshipped faculty as he called it—worshipped it where he was most familiar with it—that is, in his own mind and its operations, in his own hands and their handiwork. His natural atmosphere, however, was, happily, goodwill and kindliness: else the scorn of helplessness which sprang from his worship, would have supplied the other pole to his selfishness.

He even cherished unconsciously the feeling that his faculty was a merit. He took the credit of his individual humanity, as if the good working of his brain, the thing he most admired, was attributable to his own will and forethought. The idea had never arisen in that brain, that he was in the world by no creative intent of his own. Nothing had as yet suggested to him that, after all, if he was clever, he could not help it. It had not occurred to him that there was a stage in his history antecedent to his consciousness—a stage in which his pleasure with regard to the next could not have been appealed to, or his consent asked—a stage, for any satisfaction concerning which, his resultant consciousness must repose on a creative will, answerable to itself for his existence. A man's patent of manhood is, that he can call upon God—not the God of any theology, right or wrong, but the God out of whose heart he came, and in whose heart he is. This is his highest power—that which constitutes his original likeness to God. Had any one tried to wake this idea in Tuke, he would have mocked at the sound of it, never seeing it. The words which represented it he would have thought he understood, but he would never have laid hold of the idea. He found himself what he found himself, and was content with the find; therefore asked no questions as to whence he came—was to himself consequently as if he had come from nowhere—which made it easy for him to imagine that he was going nowhither. He had never reflected that he had not made himself, and that therefore there might be a power somewhere that had called him into being, and had a word to say to him on the matter. The region where he began to be, had never, in speculation or mirage any more than in direct vision, lifted itself above the horizon-line of his consciousness. An ordinarily well-behaved man, with a vague narrow regard for his moral nature, and an admiration of intellectual humanity in the abstract, he thought of himself as exceptionally worthy, and as having neighbours mostly inferior. In relation to Richard, he was specially pleased with himself: had he not, for the sake of the youth, put himself in the danger of the law!

With not much more introspection than his uncle, but with a keener conscience and quicker observation, Richard had early remarked that, notwithstanding her assiduity in church-going, his mother did not seem the happier for her religion: there was a cloud, or seeming cloud, on her forehead—a something that implied the lack of clear weather within. Had he known more he might have attributed it to anxiety about his own future, and the bearing her deed might have upon it. He might have argued that she dreaded the opposition she foresaw to the claim of her nephew; and felt that if her act should have despoiled him of his inheritance, life would be worthless to her. But in truth the cause of her habitual gloom was much deeper. She had from her mother inherited a heavy sense of responsibility, but not the confidence in whose strength her mother had borne it. She had, that is, an oppressive sense of the claims of a supernal power, but no feeling of the relationship which gives those claims, no knowledge of the loving help offered with the presentation of the claims. Where she might have rejoiced in the correlative claims bestowed upon her, she nourished only complaint. That God had made her, she could not sometimes help feeling a liberty he had taken. How could she help it, not knowing him, or the love that gave him both the power and the right to create! She had no window to let in the perpendicular light of heaven; all the light she had was the horizontal light of duty—invaluable, but, ever accompanied by its own shadow of failure, giving neither joy nor hope nor strength. Her husband's sense of duty was neither so strong nor so uneasy.

She had not attempted to teach Richard more, in the way of religion, than the saying of certain prayers, a ceremony of questionable character; but the boy, dearly loving his mother, and saddened by her lack of spirits, had put things together—amongst the rest, that she was always gloomiest on a Sunday—and concluded that religion was the cause of her misery. This made him ready to welcome the merest hint of its falsehood. Well might the doctrine be false that made such a good woman miserable! He had no opportunity of learning what any vital, that is, obedient believer in the lord of religion, might have to say. Nothing he did hear would, without the reflex of his mother's unhappiness, have waked in him interest enough for hate: what was there about the heap of ashes he heard called the means of grace, to set him searching in it for seeds of truth! If we consider, then, the dullness of the prophecy, the evident suffering of his mother, and the equally evident though silent contempt of his father, we need not wonder that Richard grew up in what seemed to him a conviction that religion was worse than a thing of nought, was an evil phantom, with a terrible power to blight; a miasm that had steamed up from the foul marshes of the world, before man was at home in it, or yet acquainted with the beneficent laws of Nature. It was not merely a hopeless task to pray to a power which could not be entreated, because it did not exist; to believe in what was not, must be ruinous to the nature that so believed! He would give the lie no quarter! The best thing to do for his fellow, the first thing to be done before anything else could be done, was to deliver him from this dragon called Faith—the more fearful that it had no life, but owed its being and strength to the falsehood of cowards! Had he known more of the working of what is falsely called religion, he would have been yet more eager to destroy it. But he knew something of the tares only; he knew nothing of the wheat among the tares; knew nothing of the wintry gleams of comfort shed on thousands of hearts by the most poverty-stricken belief in the merest and faultiest silhouette of a God. What a mission it would be, he thought, to deliver human hearts from the vampyre that, sucking away the very essence of life, kept fanning its unconscious victims with the promise of a dreary existence beyond the grave, secured by self-immolation on the desolate altar of an unlovable God, who yet called himself Love! Was it not a high emprise to rescue men from the incubus of such a misimagined divinity?

From the first dawn of consciousness, the young Lestrange had loved his kind. He gathered the chief joy of his life from a true relation to the life around him. Perhaps the cause of the early manifestation of this bent in him, was the longing of his mother in her loneliness after a love that grew the move precious as it seemed farther away. She had parted with those who always loved her, for the love of a man who never loved her! But left to think and think, she had come at last to see that her loss was her best gain. For, with the loss of their presence, she began to know and prize the simplicities of human affection; from lack of love began to lift up her heart to Love himself, the father of all our loves.

Richard's love was not such as makes of another the mirror wherein to realize self; he loved his kind objectively, and was ready to suffer for it. At school he was the champion of the oppressed. Almost always one or other of the little boys would be under his protection; and more than once, for the sake of a weaker he had got severely beaten. But having set himself to learn the art of self-defence, his favour alone became shelter; and successful coverture aroused in him yet more the natural passion of protection. It became his pride as well as delight to be a saviour to his kind. His championship now sought extension to his mother, and to all sufferers from usurping creeds.

His grandfather found him, as he said, a chip of the old block; and rejoiced that Nature had granted his humble blood so potent a part in this compound of gentle and plebeian; for Richard showed himself a worthy workman! Simon Armour declared there was nothing the fellow could not do; and said to himself there never was such a baronet in the old Hall as his boy Dick would make. If only, he said, all the breeds worn out with breeding-in, would revert to the old blood of Tubal Cain, they might recover his lease of life. The day was coming, he said to himself, when there would be a sight to see at Mortgrange—a baronet that could shoe a horse better than any smith in the land! If his people then would not stand up for a landlord able to thrash every man-jack of them, and win his bread with his own hands, they deserved to become the tenants of a London grocer or American money-dealer! For his part, the French might have another try! He would not lift hammer against them!

By right of inheritance, Richard's muscles grew sinewy and hard, and speedily was he capable of handling a hammer and persuading iron to the full satisfaction of his teacher. When it came to such heavy work as required power and skill at once, the difference between the two men was very evident: where the whole strength is tasked, skill finds itself in the lurch; but Simon understood what could not be at once, as well as what would be at length. Neither was he disappointed, for, in far less than half the time an ordinary apprentice would have taken, Richard could hold alternate swing with the blacksmith or his man, as, blow for blow, they pierced a block of metal to form the nave of a wheel. In ringing a wheel, he soon excelled; and his grandfather's smithy being the place for all kinds of blacksmith-work, Richard had learned the trade before he left. For, as his fortnight's holiday drew to an end, he heard from his parents that, as he was doing so well, they would like him to stay longer.

One reason for this their wish was, that he might become thoroughly attached to his grandfather: they desired to secure the prejudice of the future baronet for his own people. At the same time, by developing in him the workman, they thought to give him a better chance against further dishonouring and degrading his race, than his wretched father had ever had: the breed of Lestranges must, they said, be searched back for generations to find an honest man in it. A landlord above the selfishness, and free from the prejudices of his class, would be a new thing in the county-histories!

At the end of six weeks, Richard could shoe a sound horse as well as his grandfather himself. The old man had taken pains he would not have spent on an ordinary apprentice: it was worth doing, he said; and the return was great. Richard had made, not merely wonderful, but wonderfully steady progress. Not once had he touched the quick in driving those perfect nails through the rind of the marvellous hoof. From the first he disapproved of the mode of shoeing in use, and was certain a better must one day be discovered—one, namely, that would leave the natural motions of hoof and leg unimpeded; but in the meantime he shod as did other blacksmiths, and gave thorough satisfaction.

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CHAPTER VIII. A LOST SHOE.

It was now late in the autumn. Several houses in the neighbourhood were full of visitors, and parties on horseback frequently passed the door of the smithy—well known to not a few of the horses.

One evening, as the sun was going down red and large, with a gorgeous attendance of clouds, for the day had been wet but cleared in the afternoon, a small mounted company came pretty fast along the lane, which was deep in mud. They were no sooner upon the hard road by the smithy, than one of the ladies discovered her mare had lost a hind shoe.

“She couldn't have pulled it off in a more convenient spot!” said a handsome young fellow, as he dismounted and gave his horse to a groom. “I'll take you down, Bab! Old Simon will have a shoe on Miss Brown in no time!”

Richard followed his grandfather to the door. A little girl, as she seemed to him, was sliding, with her hand on the young man's shoulder, from the back of the huge mare. She was the daintiest little thing, as lovely as she was tiny, with clear, pale, regular features, under a quantity of dark-brown hair. But that she was not a child, he saw the moment she was down; and he soon discovered that, not her beauty, but her heavenly vivacity, was the more captivating thing in her. At once her very soul seemed to go out to meet whatever object claimed her attention. She must know all about everything, and come into relations with every live thing! As she stood by the side of the great brown creature from which she had dismounted—huge indeed, but carrying its bulk with a grand grace—her head reaching but half-way up the slope of its shoulder, she laid her cheek against it caressingly. So small and so bright, the little lady looked a very diamond of life.

A new shoe had to be forged; those already half-made were for work-horses. Partly from pride in his skill, Simon left the task to his grandson, and stood talking to the young man. Little thought Richard, as he turned the shoe on the anvil's beak, that he was his half-brother! He was a handsome youth, not so tall as Richard, and with more delicate features. His face was pale, and wore a rather serious, but self-satisfied look. He talked to the old blacksmith, however, without the slightest assumption: like others in the neighbourhood, he regarded him as odd and privileged. There were more ladies and gentlemen, but Richard, absorbed in his shoe, heeded none of the company.

He was not more absorbed, however, than the girl who stood beside him: she watched every point in the making of it. Heedless of the flying sparks, she gazed as if she meant to make the next shoe herself. Had Richard not been too busy even to glance at her, he might have noticed, now and then, an involuntary sympathetic motion, imitatively responsive to one of his, invariably recurrent when he changed the position of the glowing iron. Her mind seemed working in company with his hands; she was all the time doing the thing herself; Richard's activity was not merely reflected, but lived in her. When he carried the half-forged iron, to apply it for one tentative instant to the mare's hoof, Barbara followed him. The mare fidgeted. But her little mistress, who, noiseless and swift as a moth, was already at her head, spoke to her, breathed in her nostril, and in a moment made her forget what was happening in such a far-off province of her being as a hind foot. When Richard, back at the forge, was placing the shoe again in the fire, to his surprise her little gloved hand alighted beside his own on the lever of the bellows, powerfully helping him to blow. When once again the shoe was on the anvil, there again she stood watching—and watched until he had shaped the shoe to his intent.

Old Simon did not move to interfere: the hoof required no special attention. Almost every horse-hoof in a large circuit of miles was known to him—as well, he would remark, as the nail of his own thumb.

When Richard took up the foot, in order to prepare it for the reception of its new armour, again the mare was fidgety; and again the lady distracted her attention, comforting and soothing her while Richard trimmed the hoof a little.

“I say, my man,” cried Mr. Lestrange, “mind what you're about there with your paring! I don't want that mare lamed.—She's much too good for 'prentice hands to learn upon, Simon!”

“Keep your mind easy, sir,” answered the blacksmith. “That lad's ain't 'prentice hands. He knows what he's about as well as I do myself!”

“He's young!”

“Younger, perhaps, than you think, sir!—but he knows his work.”

It was a pretty picture—the girl peeping round under the neck of the great creature she was caressing, to see how the smith was getting on, whose back, alas! hid his hands from her. Just as he finished driving his second nail, the nervous animal gave her foot a jerk, and the point of the nail, through the hoof and projecting a little, tore his hand, so that the blood ran to the ground in a sudden rivulet.

“Hey! that don't look much like proper shoeing!” cried the young man. “I hope to goodness that's not the mare!”

“She's all right,” answered Richard, rearranging the animal's foot.

But Simon saw the blood, and sprang to his side.

“What the devil are you about, making a fool of me, Dick!” he cried. “Get out of the way.”

“It was my fault,” said the sweetest voice from under the neck of the mare, to the top of which a tiny hand was trying to reach. “My feather must have tickled her nose!”

She caught a glimpse of the blood, and turned white.

“I am so sorry!” she said, almost tearfully. “I hope you're not much hurt, Richard!”

Nothing seemed to escape her; she had already learned his name!

“It's not worth being sorry about, miss!” returned Richard, with a laugh. “The mare meant no harm!”

“That I'm sure she didn't—poor Miss Brown!” answered the girl, patting the mare's neck. “But I wish it had been my hand instead!”

“God forbid!” cried Richard. “That would have been a calamity!”

“It wouldn't have been half so great a one. My hand is—well, not of much use. Yours can shoe a horse!”

“Yours would have been spoiled; mine will shoe as well as before!” said Richard.

It did not occur to the lady that the youth spoke better than might have been expected of a country smith. She was one of the elect few that meet every one on the common human ground, that never fear and never hurt. Her childish size and look harmonized with the childlike in her style, but she affected nothing. She would have spoken in the same way to prince or poet-laureate, and would have pleased either as much as the blacksmith. At the same time she did have pleasure in knowing that her frankness pleased. She could not help being aware that she was a favourite, and she wanted to be; but she wanted nothing more than to be a favourite. She desired it with old Betty, sir Wilton's dairymaid, just as much as with Mr. Lestrange, sir Wilton's heir; and everybody showed her favour, for she showed everybody grace.

The old smith was finishing the shoeing, and the mare, well used to him, and with more faith in him, stood perfectly quiet. Richard, a little annoyed, had withdrawn, and scarce thinking what he did, had taken a rod of iron, thrust it into the fire, and begun to blow. The little lady approached him softly.

“I'm so sorry!” she said.

“I shall be sorry too, if you think of it any more, miss!” answered Richard. “Then there will be two sorry where there needn't be one!”

She looked up at him with a curious, interested, puzzled look, which seemed to say, “What a nice smith you are!”

The youth's manners had a certain—what shall I call it?—not polish, but rhythm, which came of, or at least was nourished by his love of the finer elements in literature. His friendly converse with books, and through them with certain of the dead who still speak, fell in with yet deeper influences, helping to set him in right atomic position toward other human atoms. His breed also contributed something. Happily for Richard, a man is not born only of his father or his grandfather; mothers have a share in the form of his being; ancestors innumerable, men and women, leave their traces in him. But what I have ventured to call the rhythm of his manner came of his love of verse, and of the true material of verse.

His hand kept on bleeding, and for a moment he was tempted, by bravado as well as kindness, to use the cautery so nigh, and prove to the girl how little he set by what troubled her; but he saw at once it would shock her, and took, instead, a handkerchief from his pocket to bind it with. Instantly the little lady was at his service, and he yielded to her ministration with a pleasure hitherto unknown to him. She took the handkerchief from his hand, but immediately gave it him again, saying, “It is too black!” and drawing her own from her pocket, deftly bound up his wound with it. Speech abandoned Richard. All present looked on in silence. Certain of the company had seen her the day before tie up the leg of a wounded dog, and had admired her for it; but this was different! She was handling the hand of a human being—man—a workman!—black and hard with labour! There was no necessity: the man was not in the least danger! It was nothing but a scratch! She was forgetting what was due to herself—and to them! Thus they thought, but thus they dared not speak. They knew her, and feared what she might say in reply. The mare was shod ere the handkerchief was tied to the lady's mind, and Simon stood, hammer in hand, looking on like the rest in silence, but with a curious smile.

As she took her hands from his, the young blacksmith looked thankfulness into her eyes—which sparkled and shone with the pleasure of human fellowship, and without the least shyness returned his gaze.

“There! Good-bye! I am so sorry! I hope your hand will be well soon!” she said, and at once followed her mare, which the smith's man was leading with caution through the door of the smithy, rather too low for Miss Brown.

Lestrange helped her to the saddle in silence, and before Richard realized that she was gone, he heard the merriment of the party mingling with the clang of their horses' hoofs, as they went swinging down the road. The fairy had set them all laughing already!

The instant they were gone, Simon showed a strange concern over the insignificant wound: he had been hasty with Richard, and unfair to him! Had he driven his nail one hair's-breadth too near the quick, Miss Brown would have made the smithy tight for them! He seemed anxious to show, without actual confession, that he knew he had spoken angrily, and was sorry for it. He could not have shod the mare better himself, he said—but why the deuce did he let her tear his hand! It was not likely to gather, though, seeing Richard drank water! He must do nothing for a day or two! To-morrow being Saturday, they would have a holiday together, and leave the work to George!

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CHAPTER IX. A HOLIDAY.

Richard was willing enough, and it only remained to settle what they would do with their holiday. Suppressing a chuckle, Simon proposed that they should have a walk, and a look at Mortgrange: it was a place well worth seeing! “And then,” he added, giving his grandson a poke, “we can ask after the mare, and learn how her new shoe fits.” They had known him there, he said, the last thirty years, and would let them have the run of the place, for sir Wilton and his lady were from home. Richard had never—to his knowledge—heard of Mortgrange, for Simon had hitherto avoided even mentioning the place; but he was ready to go wherever his grandfather pleased. Jessie would have company of her own, Simon said, with a nod and a wink: they need not trouble themselves about her!

So the next day, as soon us they had had their breakfast, they set out to walk the four or five miles that, by the road, lay between them and Mortgrange. It was a fine frosty morning. Not a few yellow leaves were still hanging, and the sun was warm and bright. It was one of those days near the death of the year, that make us wonder why the heart of man should revive and feel strong, while nature is falling into her dreary trance. Richard was dressed in a tradesman's Sunday clothes, but tradesman as he was, and was proud to be, he did not altogether look one. He was in high spirits—for no reason but that his spirits were high. He was happy because he was happy—“like any other body!” he would have said: where was the wonder such a fine day, with a pleasant walk before him, and his jolly grandfather for company! That he could not make one hair white or black, one hour blessed or miserable, did not occur to him. Yet he believed that joy or sorrow determined whether life was or was not worth living! He had never said to himself, “Here I am, and cannot help being, and yet can order nothing! Even to-day I am happy only because I cannot help it!” He had indeed begun to learn that a man has his duty to mind before his happiness, and that was much; but he had not yet been tried in the matter of doing his duty when unhappy. How would he feel then? Would he think duty without happiness worth living for? He was happy now, and that was enough! The putting forth of their strength and skill doubtless makes many men feel happy—so long as they are in health; but how when they come to feel that that health is nowise in their power? While they have it, it seems a part of their being inalienable; when they have lost it, a thing irrecoverable. Richard took the thing that came, asked no questions, returned no thanks. He found himself here:—whence he came he did not care; whither he went he did not inquire. The present was enough, for the present was good; when the present was no longer good, why, then,—!

There are those to whom the present cannot be good save as a mode of the infinite. In such their divine origin asserts itself. Once known for what it is, the poorest present is a phial holding the elixir of life.

On their way Simon talked about the place they were going to see, and said its present owner was an elderly man, not very robust, with a second wife, who looked as if she had not a drop of warm blood, and yet as if she might live for ever.

“That was their son that came with the little lady,” he said.

“And the little lady was their daughter, I suppose!” rejoined Richard, with an odd quiver somewhere near his heart.

“She's an Australian, they say,” answered his grandfather; “—no relation, I fancy.”

“Is Mortgrange a grand place?” asked Richard.

“It's a fine house and a great estate,” answered Simon. “More might be made of it, no doubt; and I hope one day more will be made of it.”

“What do you mean by that, grandfather?”

“That I hope the son will make a better landlord than the father.”

They came to a great iron gate, standing open, without any lodge.

“We're in luck!” said the blacksmith. “This will save us a long round! Somebody must have rode out, and been too lazy to shut it! We'd better leave it as we find it, though! Or say we bring the two halves together without snapping the locks! I know the locks; I put 'em both on myself.—See now what a piece of work that gate is! All done with the hand! None o' your beastly casting there! Up to your work, that, I'm thinking, lad!”

“Indeed it is! Those gates are worth reducing, for plates to stamp the covers of a right precious volume with!”

Simon misunderstood, and was on the point of flaring up, but what Richard followed with quieted him.

“I could almost give up bookbinding to work a pair of gates like those!” he said.

“I believe you, my boy!” returned his grandfather. “Come and live with me, and you shall!”

“But who would buy them when I had worked them?”

“If nobody had the sense, we'd put 'em up before the cottage!”

“Like a door-lock on a prayer-book!”

“No matter! They would be worth the worth of themselves!”

“You would have to make the wall so high, there would be no light in the house!” persisted Richard.

“Tut, man! did you never hear of a joke? All I say is, that if you'll come and work with me—I don't need to slave more than I like; I've got a few pounds in the bank!—if you'll work, I'll teach you. Leave me to find a fit place for what comes of it! They do most things at the foundries now, but there's a market yet for hammer-work—if it be good enough, and not too dear; for them as knows a good thing when they sees it, ain't generally got much money to buy things. It's my opinion the only way to learn the worth of a thing, is to have to go without it.”

“Few people fancy iron gates, I fear.”

“More might fancy them if they were to be had good,” returned the old man.

The gate had admitted them to a long winding road, with clumps of trees here and there on the borders of it. The road was apparently not much used, for it was more than sprinkled with grass all over. A ploughed field was on one side, and a wild heathy expanse, dotted with fir-trees, on the other. Suddenly on the side of the field, gradually on that of the heath, the ground changed to the green sward of a park.

“A grand place for thinking!” said Richard to himself.

But in truth Richard had hardly yet begun to think. He only followed the things that came to him; he never said to things, Come; neither, when they came, did he keep them, and make them walk up and down before him till he saw what they were; he did not search out their pedigree, get them to give an account of themselves, show what they could do, or, in short, be themselves to him. He had written a few verses—not bad verses, but with feeling only, not thought in them. For instance, he had addressed an ode to the allegorical personage called Liberty, in which he bepraised her until, had she been indeed a woman, she must have been ashamed: she was the one essential of life! the one glory of existence! he was no man who would not die for her! But what was the thing he thus glorified? Liberty to go where you pleased, do what you liked, say what you chose!—that was all. Of inward liberty, of freedom from mental or spiritual oppression, from passion, from prejudice, from envy, from jealousy, from selfishness, from unfairness, from ambition, from false admiration, from the power of public opinion, from any motive energy save that of love and truth—a freedom of which outward freedom is scarce the shadow—of such liberty, for all the good books he had read, for all the good poems he had admired, Richard had not yet begun to dream, not to say think. Then again, he would write about love, and he had never been in love in his life! All he knew of love was the pleasure of imagining himself the object of a tall, dark-eyed, long-haired, devoted woman's admiration. He had never even thought whether he was worthy of being loved. He was indeed more worthy of love than many to whom it is freely given; but he knew no more about it, I say, than a chicken in the shell knows of the blue sky. The shabby spinster, living with her cousin the baker in the house opposite, knew a hundred times better than he what the word love meant: she had a history, he had none.

I will not describe the house of Mortgrange. It seemed to Richard the oldest house he had ever seen, and it moved him strangely. He said to himself the man must be happy who called such a house his own, lived in it, and did what he liked with it. The road they had taken brought them to the back of the Hall, as the people on the estate called the house. The blacksmith went to a side-door, and asked if he and his grandson might have a look at the place: he had heard the baronet was from home! The man said he would see; and returning presently, invited them to walk in.

Knowing his grandson's passion, Simon's main thought in taking him was to see him in the library, with its ten thousand volumes: it would be such a joke to watch him pondering, admiring, coveting his own! As soon, therefore, as they were in the great hall, he asked the servant whether they might not see the library. The man left them again, once more to make inquiry.

It was a grand old hall where they stood, fitter for the house of a great noble than a mere baronet; but then the family was older than any noble family in the county, and the poor baronetcy, granted to a foolish ancestor, on carpet considerations, by the needy hand of the dominie-king, was no great feather in the cap of the Lestranges. The house itself was older than any baronetcy, for no part of it was later than the time of Elizabeth. It was of fine stone, and of great size. The hall was nearly sixty feet in height, with three windows on one side, and a great one at the end. They were thirty feet from the floor, had round heads, and looked like church-windows. The other side was blank. Mid-height along the end opposite the great window ran a gallery.

To the sudden terror of Richard, who stood absorbed in the stateliness of the place, an organ in the gallery burst out playing. He looked up trembling, but could see only the tops of the pipes. As the sounds rolled along the roof, reverberated from the solid walls, and crept about the corners, it seemed to him that the soul of the place was throbbing in his ears the words of a poem centuries old, which he had read a day or two before leaving London:—

“Erthe owte of erthe es wondirly wroghte, Erthe hase getyn one erthe a dignyte of noghte, Erthe appone erthe hase sett alle his thoghte, How that erthe appone erthe may be heghe broghte.”

As he listened, his eyes settled upon a suit of armour in position: it became to him a man benighted, lost, forgotten in the cold; the bones were all dusted out of him by the wintry winds; only the shell of him was left.

“Mr. Lestrange is in the library, and will see Mr. Armour,” said the voice of the servant.

An election was at hand, and at such a time certain persons are more courteous than usual.

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CHAPTER X. THE LIBRARY.

Simon and Richard followed the man through a narrow door in the thick wall, across a wide passage, and then along a narrow one. A door was thrown open, and they stepped into a sombre room. The floor of the hall was of great echoing slabs of stone, but now their feet sank in the deep silence of a soft carpet.

Here a new awe, dwelling, however, in an air of homeliness, awoke in Richard. Around him, from floor to ceiling, was ranged a whole army of books, mostly in fine old bindings; in spite of open window and great fire and huge chimney, the large lofty room was redolent of them. Their odour, however, was not altogether pleasing to Richard, whose practised organ detected in it the signs of a blamable degree of decay. The faint effluvia of decomposing paper, leather, paste, and glue, were to Richard as the air of an ill-ventilated ward in the nostrils of a physician. He sniffed and made an involuntary grimace: he had not seen Mr. Lestrange, who was close to him, half hidden by a bookcase that stood out from the wall.

“Good morning, Armour!” said Lestrange. “Your young man does not seem to relish books!”

“In a grand place like this, sir,” remarked Richard, taking answer upon himself, “such a library as I never saw, except, of course, at the British Museum, it makes a man sorry to discover indications of neglect.”

“What do you mean?” returned Lestrange in displeasure.

Richard's remark was the more offensive that his superior style issued in a comparatively common tone. Neither was there anything in the appearance of the place to justify it.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, fearing he had been rude, “but I am a bookbinder!”

“Well?” rejoined Lestrange, taking him now for a sneaking tradesman on the track of a big job.

“I know at once the condition of an old book by the smell of it,” pursued Richard. “The moment I came in, I knew there must be some here in a bad way—not in their clothes merely, but in their bodies as well—the paper of them, I mean. Whether a man has what they call a soul or not, a book certainly has: the paper and print are the body, and the binding is the clothes. A gentleman I know—but he's a mystic—goes farther, and says the paper is the body, the print the soul, and the meaning the spirit.”

A pretty fellow to be an atheist! my reader may well think.

Mr. Lestrange stared. He must be a local preacher, this blacksmith, this bookbinder, or whatever he was!

“I am sorry you think the books hypocrites,” he said. “They look all right!” he added, casting his eyes over the shelves before him.

“Would you mind me taking down one or two?” asked Richard. “My hands are rather black, but the colour is ingrain, as Spenser might say.”

“Do so, by all means,” answered Lestrange, curious to see how far the fellow could support with proof the accuracy of his scent.

Richard moved three paces, and took down a volume—one of a set, the original edition in quarto of “The Decline and Fall,” bound in russia-leather.

“I thought so!” he said; “going!—going!—Look at the joints of this Gibbon, sir. That's always the way with russia—now-a-days, at least!—Smell that, grandfather! Isn't it sweet? But there's no stay in it! Smell that joint! The leather's stone-dead!—It's the rarest thing to see a volume bound in russia, of which the joints are not broken, or at least cracking. These joints, you see, are gone to powder! All russia does—sooner or later, whatever be the cause.—Just put that joint to your nose, sir! That's part of what you smell so strong in the room.”

He held out the book to him, but Lestrange drew back: it was not fit his nose should stoop to the request of a tradesman!

Richard replaced the book, and took down one after another of the same set.

“Every one, you see, sir,” he said, “going the same way! Dust to dust!”

“If they're all going that way,” remarked the young man, “it would cost every stick on the estate to rebind them!”

“I should be sorry to rebind any of them. An old binding is like an old picture! Just look at this French binding! It's very dingy, and a good deal broken, but you never see anything like that nowadays—as mellow as modest, and as rich as roses! Here's one says the same thing as your grand hall out there, only in a piping voice.”

Lestrange was not exactly stuck-up; he had feared the fellow was bumptious, and felt there was no knowing what he might say next, but by this time had ceased to imagine his dignity in danger. The young blacksmith's admiration of the books and of the hall pleased him, and he became more cordial.

“Do you say all russia-leather behaves in the same fashion?” he asked.

“Yes, now. I fancy it did not some years ago. There may be some change in the preparation of the leather. I don't know. It is a great pity! Russia is lovely to the eye—and to the nostrils.—May I take a look at some of the old books, sir?”

“What do you call an old book?”

“One not later, say, than the time of James the First.—Have you a first folio, sir?”

Lestrange was thinking of his coming baronetcy.

“First folio?” he answered absently. “I dare say you will find a good many first folios on the shelves!”

“I mean the folio Shakespeare of 1623. There are, of course, many folios much scarcer! I saw one the other day that the booksellers themselves gave eight hundred guineas for!”

“What was it?” asked Lestrange carelessly.

“It was a wonderful copy—unique as to condition—of Gower's Confessio Amantis;—not a very interesting book, though I do not doubt Shakespeare was fond of it. You see Shakespeare could hear the stones preaching!”

“By Jove, a man may hear the sticks do that any Sunday!”

“True enough, sir, ha-ha!”

“Have you read Gower, then?”

“A good deal of him.”

“Was it that same precious copy you read him in?”

“It was; but I hadn't time for more than about the half. I must finish on another edition, I fear.”

“How did you get hold of a book of such value?”

“The booksellers who bought it, asked me to take it into my hospital. It wanted just a little, a very little patching. The copy in the museum is not to compare to it.”

“You say it was not interesting?”

“Not very interesting, I said, sir.”

“Why did you read so much of it, then?”

“When a book is hard to come at, you are the more ready to read it when you have the chance.”

“I suppose that's why one borrows his neighbour's books and don't read his own! I seldom take one down from those shelves.”

Richard felt as if a wall was broken down between them.

All the time they talked, old Simon stood beside, pleased to note how well his grandson could hold up the ball with the young squire, but saying nothing. If the matter had been hoof of horse, cow, or ass, he would not have been silent: he knew hoofs better than Richard knew books.

Richard took down a small folio, the back of which looked much too soft and loose. Opening it, he found what he expected—a wreck. It was hardly fit to be called any more a book. The clothes had forsaken the body, or rather the body had decayed away from the clothes.

“Now, look here!” he said. “Here is Cowley's Poems—in such a state that I doubt if anything would ever make a book of it again. I thought by the back all was wrong inside! See how the leaves have come away singly: the paper itself is rotten! I doubt if there is any way to make paper so far gone as this hold together. I know a good deal can be done, and I must learn what is known. I shan't be master of my trade till I know all that can be done now to stop such a book from crumbling into dust! Then I may find out something more!”

“Well, for that one, I don't think it matters: Cowley ain't much!” said Lestrange, throwing the volume on a table. “I remember once taking down the book, and trying to read some of it: I could not; it's the dullest rubbish ever written.”

“It's not so bad as that, sir!” answered Richard, and taking up the book he turned the leaves with light, practiced hand. “He was counted the greatest poet of his day, and no age loves dullness! Listen a moment, sir; I will read only one stanza.”

He had found the “Hymn to the Light,” and read:—

“First born of Chaos, who so fair didst come From the old Negro's darksome womb! Which when it saw the lovely Child, The melancholy Mass put on kind looks and smil'd.”

“I don't see much in that!” said Lestrange, as Richard closed the book, and glanced up expectant.

Richard was silent for an instant.

“At any rate,” he returned, “it is necessary to the understanding of our history, that we should know the kind of thing admired and called good at any given time of it: so our lecturer at King's used to tell us.”

“At King's!” cried Lestrange.

“King's college, London, I mean,” said Richard. “They have evening classes there, to which a man can go after his day's work. My father always took care I should have time for anything I wanted to do. I go still when I am at home—not always, but when the lecturer takes up any special subject I want to know more about.”

“You'll be an author yourself some day, I suppose!”

“There's little hope or fear of that, sir! But I can't bear not to know what's in my very hands. I can't be content with the outsides of the books I bind. It seems a shame to come so near light and never see it shine. If I were a tailor, I should learn anatomy. I know one tailor who is as familiar with the human form as any sculptor in London—more, perhaps!”

Lestrange began to feel uncomfortable. If he let this prodigy go on talking and asking questions, he would find out how little he knew about anything! But Richard was no prodigy. He was only a youth capable of interest in everything, with the stimulus of not finding the fountains of knowledge at his very door, and the aid of having to work all day at some pleasant task, nearly associated with higher things that he loved better. He did know a good deal for his age, but not so very much for his opportunity, his advantages being great. Most men who learn would learn more, I suspect, if they had work to do, and difficulty in the way of learning. Those counted high among Richard's advantages. He was, besides, considerably attracted by the mechanics of literature—a department little cultivated by those who have most need of what grows in it.

Further talk followed. Lestrange grew interested in the phenomenon of a blacksmith that bound books and read them. He began to dream of patronage and responsive devotion. What a thing it would be for him, in after years, with the cares of property and parliament combining to curtail his leisure, to have such a man at his beck, able to gather the information he desired, and to reduce, tabulate, and embody it so as to render his chief the best-informed man in the House! while at other times he would manage for him his troublesome tenants, and upon occasion shoe his wife's favourite horse! He could also depend upon him to provide, from the rich stores of his memory, suitable quotations when he wished to make a speech! Lestrange had never thought whether the wish to appear might not indicate the duty to be; had never seen that, until he was, to desire to appear was to cherish the soul of a sneak. He had no notion of anything but the look; no notion that, having made a good speech, he would deserve an atom the less praise for it that he could not have made it without his secretary. Did any one think the less of clearing a five-barred gate, he would have answered, that it could not be done without a horse? Where was the difference? A man you paid to be your secretary, still more a man whose education to be your secretary you had paid for—was he not yours in a way at least analogous to that in which a horse was yours? He could break away from you more easily, no doubt, but a man knew better than a horse on which side his bread was buttered!

“I think, squire, I'll go and have a pipe with the coachman!” said the blacksmith at length.

“As you please, Armour,” answered Lestrange. “I will take care of your—nephew, is he?”

“My grandson, sir—from London.”

“All right! There's good stuff in the breed, Armour!—I will bring him to you.”

Richard went on taking down book after book, and showing his host how much they required attention.

“And you could set all right for—?—for how much?” asked Lestrange.

“That no one could say. It would, however, cost little more than time and skill. The material would not come to much. Only, where the paper itself is in decay, I do not know about that. I have learned nothing in that department yet.”

“For generations none of us have cared about books—that must be why they have gone so to the bad!—the books, I mean,” he added with a laugh. “There was a bishop, and I think there was a poet, somewhere in the family; but my father—hm!—I doubt if he would care to lay out money on the library!”

“Tell him,” suggested Richard, “that it is a very valuable library—at least so it appears to me from the little I have seen of it; but I am sure of this, that it is rapidly sinking in value. After another twenty years of neglect it would not fetch half the price it might easily be brought up to now.”

“I don't know that that would weigh much with him. So long as he sees the shelves full, and the book-backs all right, he won't want anything better. He cares only how things look.”

“But the whole look of the library is growing worse—gradually, it is true, and in a measure it can't be helped—but faster than you would think, and faster than it ought. The backs, which, from a library point of view, are the faces of the books, may, up to a certain moment, look well, and after that go much more rapidly. I fear damp is getting at these from somewhere!”

“Would you undertake to set all right, if my father made you a reasonable offer?”

“I would—provided I found no injury beyond the scope of my experience.”

Richard spoke in book-fashion: he was speaking about books, and to a social superior! he was not really pompous.

“Well, if my father should come to see the thing as I do, I will let you know. Then will be the time for a definite understanding!”

“The best way would be that I should come and work for a set time: by the progress I made, and what I cost, you could judge.”

Lestrange rang the bell, and ordered the attendant to take the young man to his grandfather.

The two wandered together over the grounds, and Richard saw much to admire and wonder at, but nothing to approach the hall or the library.

On their way home, Simon, to his grandson's surprise, declared himself in favour of his working at the Mortgrange library. But the idea tickled his fancy so much, that Richard wondered at the oddity of his grandfather's behaviour.

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CHAPTER XI. ALICE.

Soon after his visit to Mortgrange, the young bookbinder went home, recalled at last by his parents. John Tuke was shocked with the hardness and blackness of his hands, and called his wife's attention to them. She, however, perhaps from nearer alliance with the smithy, professed to regard their condition as by no means a serious matter. She could not, nevertheless, quite conceal her regret, for she was proud of her boy's hands.

Richard supposed of course that his father's annoyance came only from the fear that his touch would be no longer sufficiently delicate for certain parts of his work; and certainly, when he looked at them, he thought the points of his fingers were broader than before, and was a little anxious lest they should have lost something of their cunning. He did not know that mechanical faculty, for fine work as well as rough, goes in general with square-pointed fingers. Delicately tapered fingers, whatever they may indicate in the way of artistic invention, are not the fingers of the painter or the sculptor. The finest fingers of the tapering kind I have ever seen, were those of a distinguished chemist of the last generation. Eager to satisfy both his father and himself, that the hands of the bookmender had not degenerated more than his skill could counteract, Richard selected, from a few that were waiting his return, the book worthiest of his labour, set to work, and by a thorough success quickly effected his purpose.

He was now, however, anxious, before doing anything else, to learn all that was known for the restoration and repair of the insides of books. In this an old-bookseller, a friend of his father, was able to give him no little help, putting him up to wrinkles not a few. Richard was surprised to see how, with a penknife, on a bit of glass, he would pare the edge of a scrap of paper to half the thickness, in order to place two such edges together, and join them without a scar. He taught him how to clean letterpress and engravings from ferruginous, fungous, and other kinds of spots. He made him acquainted with a process which considerably strengthened paper that had become weak in its cohesion; and when Richard would make further experiment, he supplied him with valueless letterpress to work upon. His time was thus more than ever occupied. For many weeks he scarcely even read.

It was not long, however, before he bethought him that he must see Arthur. He went the same evening to call on him, but found other people in the house, who could tell him nothing about the family that had left. His aunt said she had seen Alice once, and knew they were going, but did not know where they were gone. Richard would have inquired at the house in the City where Arthur was employed, but he did not know even the name of the firm. Once, from the top of an omnibus, he saw him—in the same shabby old comforter, looking feebler and paler and more depressed than ever; but when he got down, he had lost sight of him, and though he ran hither and thither, looking up this street and that, he recovered no glimpse of him. The selfish mother and the wasting children came back to him vividly as he walked sadly home.

He had counted Alice the nicest girl he had ever seen, but since going to the country had not thought much about her; and now, since seeing the fairy-like lady with the big brown mare, he had a higher idea of the feminine. But although therefore he would not have thought the pale, sweet-faced dressmaker quite so pleasing as before, he would, because of the sad look into which her countenance always settled, have felt her quite as interesting.

Richard had not yet arrived at any readiness to fall in love. It is well when this readiness is delayed until the individuality is sufficiently developed to have its own demands. I venture to think one cause of unhappiness in marriages is, that each person's peculiar self, was not, at the time of engagement, sufficiently grown for a natural selection of the suitable, that is, the correspondent; and that the development which follows is in most cases the development of what is reciprocally non-correspondent, and works for separation and not approximation. The only thing to overcome this or any other disjunctive power, is development in the highest sense, that is, development of the highest and deepest in us—which can come only by doing right. The man who is growing to be one with his own nature, that is, one with God who is the naturing nature, is coming nearer and nearer to every one of his fellow-beings. This may seem a long way round to love, but it is the only road by which we can arrive at true love of any kind; and he who does not walk in it, will one day find himself on the verge of a gulf of hate.

Individuality, forestalled by indifference, had no chance of keeping sir Wilton and lady Ann apart, but certainly had done nothing to bring them together. Where all is selfishness on both sides, what other correspondences may exist will hardly come into play. The loss of the unloved heir had perhaps done a little to approximate them; but they speedily ceased to hold any communication of ideas on the matter. As they did nothing to recover him, so they seemed to take almost no thought as to his existence or non-existence. If he were alive, neither father nor stepmother had the least desire to discover him. Answering honestly, each would have chosen that he should remain unheard of. As to the possibility of his dying in want, or being brought up in wickedness, that did not trouble either of them. His stepmother did not think the more tenderly of another woman's child that she cared for her own children only because they were hers. If you could have got the idea into the pinched soul of lady Ann, that the human race is one family, it would but have enhanced her general dislike, her feeble enmity to humanity. When she did or said anything to displease him, sir Wilton would sometimes hint at a new advertisement, but she did not much heed the threat. On the whole, however, they had got on better than might have been expected, partly in virtue of her sharp tongue and her thick skin, which combination of the offensive and defensive put sir Wilton at a disadvantage: however sharp his retort might be, she never felt it, but went on; and harping does not always mean such pleasant music, that you want to keep the harper awake. She had brought him four children—Arthur, the one whose acquaintance Richard had made, a younger brother who promised foully, and two girls—the elder common in feature and slow in wits, but with eyes and a heart; the younger clever and malicious.

One stormy winter night, as Richard was returning from a house in Park Crescent, to which he had carried home a valuable book restored to strength and some degree of aged beauty, from one of the narrow openings on the east side of Regent Street, came a girl, fighting with the wind and a weak-ribbed umbrella, and ran buffeted against him, notwithstanding his endeavour to leave her room. The collision was very slight, but she looked up and begged his pardon. It was Alice. Before he could speak, she gave a cry, and went from him in blind haste as fast as she could go; but with the fierce wind, her perturbation, and the unruliness of the umbrella, which she was vainly trying to close that she might run the better, she struck full against a lamp-post, and stood like one stunned and on the point of falling. Richard, however, was close behind her, and put an arm round her. She did not resist; she was indeed but half-conscious. The same moment he saw a cab and hailed it. The man heard and came. Richard lifted her into it, and got in after her. But Alice came to herself, got up, and leaning out of the cab on the street side, tried to open the door. Richard caught her, drew her back, and made her sit down again.

“Richard! Richard!” she cried, as she yielded to his superior strength, and burst into tears, “where are you taking me?”

“Wherever you like, Alice. You shall tell the cabman yourself. What is the matter with you? Don't be angry with me. It is not my fault that I have not been to see you and Arthur. You went away, and nobody could tell me where to find you! Give the cabman your address, Alice.”

“I'm not going home,” sobbed Alice.

“Where are you going, then? I will go with you. You're not fit to go anywhere alone! I'm afraid you're badly hurt!”

“No, no! Do let me out. Indeed, indeed, you must!”

“Well, then, I won't! You'll drop down and be left to the police! It's horrible to think of you out in such a night! Come home with me. If you are in any trouble, my mother will help you.”

Here Alice, who had yielded to the pressure with which Richard held her, broke from him, and pushed him away. Richard put his other arm across, and laid hold of the door of the cab, telling the man to get up on his box, and have a little patience. He obeyed, and Richard turned again to Alice.

“Richard,” she said, “your mother would kill me!”

“Nonsense!” he rejoined; “what a fancy! My mother!”

“I've seen her since you went. She made me promise—”

But there Alice stopped, and Richard could get from her nothing but entreaties to be let out.

“If you don't,” she said at last, growing desperate, “I will scream.”

“Let me take you at least, then, a little nearer where you want to go,” pleaded Richard.

“No! no I set me down.”

“Tell me where you live.”

“I daren't.”

“I must see my old friend, Arthur! and why shouldn't I see his sister? My father and mother ain't tyrants! They know what that would make of me! They let me go where I please, or give a good reason why I should not.”

“Oh, they'll do that fast enough!” returned Alice, in a tone of mingled despair and scorn. “But,” she added immediately, “the worst of it is, they'll be in the right. Let me out, Richard, or I shall hate you!”

But with the word she dropped her head on his shoulder, and sobbed as if her heart would sob its last.

He made repeated attempts to soothe her, but, as he made them, he felt them foolish, for he saw that nothing would alter her determination to be set down.

“Must I leave you, then, on this very spot?” he said.

“Yes, yes! here—here!” she answered, and rose with apparent eagerness to get away from him.

He got out, and turned to her, but she did not accept his offered help.

“Won't you shake hands with me?” he said. “I did not mean to offend you!”

She answered nothing, but hurried away a step or two, then turned and lifted her arms as if to embrace him, but turned again instantly, and fled away among the shadows of the wildly flickering lamps. By the time he had paid the cabman, he saw it would be useless to follow, for she was out of sight.

The wide street was almost deserted; its lamps shuddered flaring and streaming and darkening in the fierce gusts of the wind. A vague army of evil things seemed to start up and come crowding between him and Alice. He turned homeward, with a sense of loss and a great sadness at his heart, unable even to speculate as to the cause of Alice's behaviour. All he knew was, that his mother had something to do with it. For the first time since childhood, he felt angry with his mother.

“She fancies,” he said to himself, “that I am in love with the girl, and she thinks her not good enough for me! I'm not in love with her; but any good girl I cared for, I should count good enough! When my mother's turn comes, off she goes to the rest of the social tyrants that look down on a brother because he can do twenty things they can't! If the world went out of gear, would they make it go! I'll be fair whatever I be! It'll be my mother's own fault if I fall in love with Alice! She has made me pity her with all my heart—the poor, white thing!—so thin and pinched, and such big eyes! It would be just bliss to have a creature like that to trust you, so that you could comfort her! What can my mother have said to her? She has made her awfully miserable, anyhow! Perhaps her mother drinks!—What if she do! Alice don't!”

He was determined to have some explanation from his mother. But she foiled him. The moment she saw what he meant, she turned away, listened in silence, and spoke with a decision that savoured of anger.

“They're not people your father and I will have you know,” she said, without looking at him.

“But why, mother?” asked Richard.

“We're not bound to explain everything to you, Richard. It ought to be enough that we have a good reason.”

“If it be a good reason, why shouldn't I know it, mother?” he persisted. “Good things don't require to be hidden.”

“That's very true; they do not.”

“Then why hide this one?”

“Because it is not good.”

“You said it was a good reason!”

“So it is.”

“Good and not good! How can that be?” said Richard, with a great lack of logic. By this time he ought to have been able to see that the worst of facts may be the best of reasons.

His mother held her peace, knowing she was right, but not knowing how to answer what she thought his cleverness.

“I mean to go and see them, mother,” he said.

“You'll repent it, Richard. The woman is not respectable!”

“She won't bite me!”

“There's worse than biting!”

“I allow,” pursued Richard, “she may take a drop too much; her nose does look a little suspicious! But if she ain't what she should be, it's hard lines Arthur and Alice should suffer for the sins of their mother.”

“The Bible says the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.”

“The Bible! If the Bible says what ain't right, are we to do it?”

“Richard, I'll have no such word spoken again in my house!” exclaimed his mother.

“Are you going to turn me out, mother, because I say we should not do what is wrong, whoever tells us to?”

“No, Richard! You said the Bible said what was wrong; and that's blasphemy!”

“Didn't you say, mother, that the Bible said we ought to visit the sins of the fathers on the children?”

“God forbid!” cried the poor woman, driven almost to distraction; “I said nothing of the kind! That would be awful! What the Bible says is, that God does so.”

“Well, if God chooses, we must leave him to do as he chooses—not do likewise!”

“Surely, surely, Richard! If he does it, he knows what he's about, and we don't.”

“All right, mother! Then tell me where Arthur and Alice are gone. I want to go and see them.”

“I don't know. In fact, I took care not to know, that I mightn't be able to tell you.”

“But why?”

“Never mind why. I don't know where they are, and couldn't tell you if I would.”

Richard turned angrily away, and went to his room, weary and annoyed. In the morning his mother said to him—

“Richard, I can't bear there should be any misunderstanding between you and me! The moment you are one and twenty, ask me and I will tell you why I would not have you knowing those people. Believe me, I was right to stop it, for fear of what might follow.”

“If you are afraid of my falling in love with a girl you don't think good enough for me, you have taken the wrong way to keep me from thinking about her, mother. You remember the costermonger whose family quarrelled with him for marrying beneath him? If a girl be a good girl, she is good for me, whether she be the daughter of the cats'-meat-man or of a royal duke! I know that's not the way people who call themselves Christians think! They want, of course, to keep up the selfishness of the breed!”

It was horribly rude, and Jane burst into tears. Richard's heart softened. It is well our hearts are sometimes in advance of our consciences—we are so slow to recognize injustice in defence of the right! Richard's wrong to his mother was a lack of faith in her. Where he did not understand and she would not explain, he did not even give her the benefit of the doubt. He treated her just as many of us, calling ourselves Christians, treat the Father—not in words, perhaps, or even in definite thoughts, but in feelings and actions.

“You will be sorry for this one day, Richard!” she sobbed. “Whatever I do is from care over you!”

“To wrong another for my sake, never can be any good to me. If money wrong-got be a curse, so is any good wrong-got.”

“You won't trust me, Richard! My own father is a blacksmith: why should I look down upon a dressmaker?”

“That's just what I think, mother!—Why?”

“I don't!” returned Mrs. Tuke—and there she paused: another step might bring her to the edge of the gulf!

Richard looked at her moodily for a moment, then turned away to the workshop; where, after his ill success with his mother, he was hardly less disinclined to challenge his father than before, for he knew him inexpugnable.

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CHAPTER XII. MORTGRANGE.

In the spring came a letter from young Lestrange, through Simon Armour, asking Richard upon what terms he would undertake the work wanted in the library.

He handed the letter to his father, and they held a consultation.

“There's this to be considered,” said the bookbinder, “that, if you go there, you lose your connection here—in a measure, at least. Therefore you cannot do the work at the same rate as in your own shop.”

“On the other hand, I should have my keep.”

“That is true, and of course is something; but I think it may fairly be held to do no more than make up for the advantages of living in London—your classes, for instance.”

“Anyhow I must be paid so much a month, and do what I can in the time. I couldn't charge by the individual job in a man's own house!—The thing I am afraid of is, that, not knowing the niceties of the work, they may fancy I don't do enough.”

“In the other way they would fancy you charged too much, and that would come to the same thing!—But they will at least discover that you keep to your hours and stick to your work!—We must calculate by what the best hands in the trade get a week!”

The terms they concluded to ask appeared to Lestrange reasonable. He proposed then that Richard should bind himself for not less than a year, while Lestrange reserved the right of giving him a month's notice; and these points being willingly assented to by Richard, an agreement was drawn up and signed—much to the satisfaction of Simon Armour, whose first thought was that the work would not be too hard for Richard to want a little exercise at the forge after hours. Richard, however, well as he liked the anvil, was not so sure about this: there might be books to read after he had done his day's duty by their garments! He had half laid out for himself a plan of study in his leisure time, he said.

It was a lovely evening when he arrived at Mortgrange from his grandfather's. He was shown to his new quarters in the old mansion by the housekeeper, an elderly, worthy creature, with the air of a hostess. She liked the young man; the honest friendliness of his carriage pleased her. He was handsome too, though not strikingly so, and his expression was better than any handsomeness, inspiring the honest with confidence, and giving little hope to the designing. His brave outlook, not bold so much as fearless, and his ready smile, seemed those of a man more prepared than eager to do his part in the world. He was well set up, and of good figure, for the slight roundness of his shoulders had almost disappeared. The poise of his head, and the proportions of his limbs, left nothing to be desired. His foster-parents had encouraged him in every manly exercise, for they were wise enough to have regard to the impression he must make at first sight: they would have it easy to believe that he might be what they were about to swear he was. Nor had his sojourn with his grandfather been the least factor in the result that he sat down to his work as lightly as a gentleman to his dinner, turned from it as if he had been playing a game instead of earning his bread, and altogether gave the impression of being a painter or sculptor rather than a tradesman. There was that in his bearing which suggested a will rather than necessity to labour.

“Here is your room, young man,” said Mrs. Locke.

It was a large, rather neglected chamber, at the end of a long passage on the second floor—the very room out of which one midnight he had been borne in terror, twenty years before, by the woman he called his mother.

“And I hope you will find yourself comfortable,” continued the old lady, in a tone that implied—“You ought to be!”—“If you want anything, or have anything to complain of, let me know,” she added. “—I thought it better not to put you in the servant's quarters!”

“Thank you, ma'am,” said Richard. “This is a beautiful room for me! Do you know, ma'am, where I'm to work?”

“I have not been informed,” she answered, as she left the room. “Mr. Lestrange will see to that.”

Richard went to the window. Before him spread an extensive but somewhat bare park, for the trees in it were rather few. Some of them, however, were grand ones: many had been cut down, but a few of the finest left. A sea of grass lay in every direction, with islands of clumps and thickets, and vague shores of hedge and wood and ploughed field. On the grass were cattle and sheep and fallow deer. On this side, nothing came between the park and the house.

The day was late in the spring; summer was close at hand. There had been rain all the morning and afternoon, but the clouds were clearing away as now the sun went down. Everything was wet, but the undried tears of the day flashed in the sunset. Nature looked a child whose gladness had come, but who could not stop crying: so heartily had she gone in for sorrow, that her mind was shaped to weeping. Most of the clouds, late so dark and sullen, were putting on garments of light, as if resolved to forgive and forget, and leave no doubt of it. But the sun did not look satisfied with his day's work. Slant across the world to Richard's window came the last of his vanishing rays, blinding him as he brooded, and obliterating all between them in a throbbing splendour; yet somehow the sun seemed sad, as if atonement had come too late. The edge extreme of the glory vanished; a moment's cloud followed; and then, when the radiance of him who was gone grew rosy and golden above his grave, Richard began to see much that his presence had been hiding. But the revelation did not linger long. The clouds closed on the twilight, the world grew almost dismal, and the sadness crept into Richard; or was it not rather that his own hidden sadness rose up to meet the sadness of the world? Yet, even as he became aware of it, something in him recognised it as a thing foreign to the human heart: “We were not made for this!” he said. “—We are not here, I mean,” he corrected himself, “—we have not sprung into being in order to be sad! There is no reason in sadness! There is cause enough, man at least knows, but essential reason at the heart of its existence there is none!—Whence, then, comes this mistake, this sadness?” he went on with himself. “Why should there be so much of it in the world? Is it that, as for all other good things, a man must put forth his will for joy? It is plain a man must assert what is highest in him, else he cannot lay hold of the best: must a man will to be glad, else deserve to be sorrowful?” He began to whistle. “I will be glad!” he said, “even in the midst of a world of rain!—Yet again, why should the mere look of a rainy night make it needful for me to assert joy and resist sadness?—After all, what is there to be merry about, in this best of possible worlds? I like going to the theatre; but if I don't like the play, am I to be pleased all the same, sit it out with smiles, and applaud at the end?—I don't see what there is to make me miserable, and I don't see what there is to make me glad!”

Would it have cast any light either on Richard's gloom or his perplexity, had he been told that, in the place where he stood staring out on the gray, formless twilight, his mother had often sought refuge, and tasted the comfort of an assuagement of splendour. She had not appropriated the room, and it was some time before the household knew that she was in the way of going there: it was awkwardly situated in a remote part of the house and rarely used—which made its attraction for lady Lestrange. But the faithful sister did not forget where she had once found her on her knees weeping, and chose it for herself and her charge when she was gone.

In a few minutes Richard arrived at the conclusion that he would be all right as soon as he got among the wine-bins of the library. He did not reflect how little of a man is he whose sense of well-being is at the mercy of a Scotch mist or a cloudy twilight. Neither did he put to himself the question whether the mending of the old leather bottles in which lie stored the varied wines of the human spirit, ought to be labour and gladness enough for the soul of a man. It is a poor substitute for food that helps us to forget the want of it. But how can we wonder when he would have no father, and claimed the black Negation, the grandmother of Chaos, as his mother! Yet was it the presence all the time of that father he refused that made it possible for him to drink the water of any poorest little well of salvation that sprang in the field of his life; and such a well was his work among books.

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CHAPTER XIII. THE BEECH-TREE.

He went to bed, and after a dreamless night, rose to find the world overflowed with bliss. The sun was at his best, and every water-drop on the grass was shining all the colours of the rainbow. Surely the gems that are dug from the earth have their prototype in the dew-drops that lie on its surface. One might in a moment of sweet maundering imagine Nature hiding those sunless dew-drops of the mines in the darkness of a sweet sorrow that the youth of the morning must be so evanescent.

The whole world lay before Richard his inheritance. The sunlight gave it him, a gift from the height of his heaven. What was it to Richard that the park, its trees, its grass, its dew-drops, its cattle, its shadows, belonged to sir Wilton! He never even thought of the fact! He felt them his own! Was the soft, clear, fresh, damp air, with all the unreachable soul of it, not his, because it was sir Wilton's?

The highest property, as Dante tells us, increases to each by the sharing of it with others. But the common mind does not care for such property. Was not the blue, uplifted, hoping sky, that spoke to the sky inside Richard—was not that sir Wilton's? Yes, indeed; for were it not sir Wilton's, it could not be Richard's. But sir Wilton did not claim it, because he did not care for it, heard no sound of the speech it uttered. Happy would it have been for sir Wilton, that anything he called his, was his as it was Richard's! He could not prevent Richard from possessing Mortgrange in a way he himself did not and would not possess it. But neither yet were they Richard's in the full eternal way. Nature was a noble lady whose long visit made him glad; she was not yet at her own home in his house. There were things in the world that might come in and drive her out. Say rather, there was yet no chamber in that house in which she could take up her dwelling all night.

The setting sun had made Richard sad; his resurrection made him blessed! He dressed in haste, and went to find his way from the house.

Arrived in the park, and walking in cool delight on the wet grass, he began to think about the men and the races whom the greed of other men and races had pinched and shouldered and squeezed from the world. He thought of the men who, by preventing others and refusing to let them share, imagine to increase the length and breadth and depth of their own possessing; and thus by degrees he fell into a retributive mood. What should, what could, what would be done with such men?

“As they refuse their neighbours ground to stand upon,” he said to himself, “as the very cubic space they cannot disrobe them of they begrudge them because it measures from what they count their land, I should like to know how high their possession goes! Is there any law that lays that down? To what point above him can the landowner complain of trespass in the gliding or hovering balloon? When hawking comes in again, as it will one day, by the law of revival, at what height will another man's falcon be an intruder on him who stands gazing up from his corn? Were I a power in the universe, I would cram the air over the heads of such incarnate greeds with clouds of souls! The sun should reach them only through the vapours of other life than theirs, inimical to them because of their selfishness. I would set the dead burrowing beneath them, so that the land they boast should heave under their feet with the writhing of the bodies they drove from the surface into the deeps. They should have but a carpet, wallowing in the waves of a continuous live earthquake. I know I am thinking like a fool; but surely at least there ought to be some set season for Truth and Justice to return to the forsaken earth! Are we for ever to bear without hope the presence of the cruel, the vulgar self-souled, the neighbour-crushing rich? Are the wicked the favourites of Nature, that they flourish like a green bay-tree? Doubtless it is right to forgive—but how to be able? Nobody has ever done me any harm yet; I have nothing to complain of; it cannot be revenge in me that longs for something, call it God, or Nature, or Justice, that will repay!—God it cannot be; but something sure there must be to which vengeance belongs!”

He might have gone further in his thinking, and perhaps come to ask what satisfaction there could be in any vengeance, so long as the evil-doer remained unhumbled by the perception and the shame of his doing, was neither sorry for it nor turned away from it—in a word, did not repent; but there came an interruption.

He was walking slowly along, unheeding where he went, when he heard a sound that made him look up. Then he saw that he was under a great beech, and the sound seemed to come from somewhere in the top of it—a sound like the pleased cooing of a dove. He looked hard into the branches and their wilderness of fresh leaves, but could descry nothing. Then came a little laugh, and with a preparatory rustling and rustling in its passage, a book—a small folio—fell plump at his feet.

“Will you please put it in the library!” said a voice he had heard before—long before, it seemed—but had not forgotten.

“I will bring it to you—at least I would, if I could see where you are!” answered Richard, gazing with yet keener search into the thick mass of leaf-cloud over his head.

“No, no; I don't want more of it. I can't see you, and don't know who you are; but please take the book, and lay it on the middle table in the library. It may be hurt, and I don't want to come down just yet.”

“Very well, miss!” answered Richard; “I will.—The fall from such a height, and through all those branches, must have done it quite enough harm already!”

“Oh!—I never thought of that!” said the voice.

Richard took up the book, and walked away with it, pondering.

“Is it possible,” he said to himself, “that the little lady, whose big mare I shod last year, is up there in that tree? It must be her voice!—I cannot, surely, be mistaken!—But how on earth, or rather how in heaven, did she get up? Yet why shouldn't she climb as well as any other? It must be as easy as riding that huge mare. And then she's not like other ladies! She's not of the ordinary breed of this planet! Which of them would have spoken to a blacksmith-lad as she spoke to me! Who but herself would have tied up a scratch in a working man's hand!”

He was right so far: she could climb as no other in that county, no other, perhaps, in England, man or boy or girl, could climb. She was like a squirrel at climbing; and for the last few mornings, the weather having grown decidedly summery, had gone before breakfast to say her prayers in that tree.

Richard carried the book to the house—it was Pope's Letters—found his way to the library, and laid it where she said, hoping she would come to seek it, and that he might then be present. Would she recognize the fellow that shod her mare? he wondered.

He could do nothing till he knew where he was to work, and therefore, after breakfast in the servants' hall, he asked one of the men to let him know when Mr. Lestrange would see him, and went to his room.

Richard had not yet become aware of any moral pressure. The duty of aspiration or self-conquest, had never in any shape been forced upon him, and his conscience had not made him acquainted with it. What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest; but Richard's was not of that sort, and yet was very much at ease. I may say for him that he had done nothing he knew to be bad at the moment; and very little that he had to be ashamed of afterwards, either at school or since he left it. Partly through the care of his parents, he had never got into what is called bad company, had formed no undesirable intimacies. He had a natural cleanliness, a natural sense of the becoming, which did much to keep him from evil: he could not consent to regard himself with disgust, and he would have been easily disgusted with himself. If he did not, as I have indicated, set himself with any conscious effort to rise above himself, he did do something against sinking below himself. The books he chose were almost all of the better sort. He had instinctively laid aside some in which he recognized a degrading influence.

But here let me remark that it depends partly on the degree of a man's moral development, whether this or that book will be to him degrading or otherwise. A book which one man ought to scorn, may be of elevating tendency to another, because it is a little above his present moral condition. A book which to enjoy would harm a more delicate mind, may perhaps benefit the nature that would have chosen a coarser book still. We cannot determine the operation of energies, when we do not know on what moral level they are at work. The dead may be left to bury their dead; it would be sad to see an angel haunting a charnel-house.

I have been led into this digression through the desire to give an approximate idea of the good, rather vacant, unselfish, and yet self-contented, if not self-satisfied condition of Richard's being.

He got out a manuscript-book in which he was in the habit of setting down whatever came to him, and wrote for some time, happily making more than one spot of ink on the toilet-cover, which served to open the eyes of Mrs. Locke to her mistake in thinking a workman would not want a writing-table; so that before the next evening he found in his chamber everything comfortable for writing, as well as for sleeping and dressing.

He was interrupted by the entrance of a servant with the message that Mr. Lestrange was in the morning-room, and wished to see him.

He followed the man and found Lestrange at the breakfast-table, with a tall young woman, very ordinary-looking, except for her large, soft, dark eyes, and the little lady whose mare he had shod, and whose voice he had that morning heard from the tree-top.

He advanced half-way to the table, and stood.

“Ah, there you are!” said Lestrange, glancing up, and immediately reverting to his plate. “We've got to set to work, haven't we?”

He had, I presume, found the ladies not uninterested in the restoration that was about to be initiated, and had therefore sent for Richard while breakfast was going on.

The fledgling baronet, except for his too favourable opinion of himself, in which he was unlike only a very few, and an amount of assumption not small toward his supposed inferiors, was not a disagreeable human, and now spoke pleasantly.

“Yes, sir,” answered Richard. “Shall I wait outside until you have done breakfast?”

He feared the servant might have made a mistake.

“I sent for you,” replied Lestrange curtly.

“Very well, sir. I have not yet learned whether the tools I sent on have been delivered, but there will be plenty to do in the way of preparation.—May I ask if you have settled where I am to work, sir?”

“Ah! I had not thought of that!”

“It seems to me, sir, that the library itself would suit best; that is, if I might have a good-sized kitchen-table in it, and roll up half the carpet. When I had to beat a book I could take it into the passage, or just outside the window. Nothing else would make any dust.”

Lestrange had been thinking how to have the binder under his eye, and yet not seem to watch a fellow so much above his notion of a working man; the family made very little use of the library, and Richard's proposal seemed just the thing. He would be sure to stick to his work where some one might any moment be coming in!

“I don't see any difficulty,” he answered.

“I should want a little fire for my glue-pot and polishing-iron. There will be gilding and lettering too, though I hope not much—title-pieces to replace, and a touch here and there to give to the tooling! No man with any reverence in him would meddle much with such delicate, lovely old things as many of these gildings! He would not dare more than just touch them!”

The little lady sat eating her toast, but losing no word that was said. She knew from his voice the young man was the same to whom she had called out of the beech-tree; but now she seemed to recognize him as the blacksmith whose hand she had bound up: what could a blacksmith do in a library? She was puzzled.

Richard noted that she was dressed in some green stuff, which perhaps was the cause of his having been unable to discover her in the tree! Her great eyes—they were bigger than those of the tall lady—every now and then looked up at him with a renewed question, to which they seemed to find no answer. They were big blue eyes—very dark for blue, and rather too round for perfection; but their roundness was at one with the prevailing expression of her face, which was innocent daring, inquiry, and confidence. The paleness of it was a healthy paleness, with just an inclination to freckle. Her dark, half-scorched-looking hair was so abundant and rebellious, that it had to be all over compelled with gold pins. Its manipulation had neither beginning, middle, nor end. She ate daintily enough, but as if she meant to have a breakfast that should last her till luncheon—when plainly the active little furnace of her life would want fresh fuel. But it was of another kind of fuel she was thinking now. In the man who stood there, so independent, yet so free from self-assertion, she saw a prospect of learning something. She was hungry after knowing, but, though fond of reading, was very ignorant of books. She thought like a poet, but had never read a real poem. She was full of imagination, but very imperfectly knew what the word meant. She had never in her life read a work of genuine imagination—not even Undine, not even The Ugly Duckling.

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CHAPTER XIV. THE LIBRARY.

After some talk, it was settled that Richard should work in the large oriel of the library. Mrs. Locke was called, and the necessary orders were given. Employer and workman were both anxious, the one to see, the other to make a commencement. In a few minutes Richard had looked out as many of the books in most need of attention as would keep him, turning from the one to the other, as each required time in the press or to dry, thoroughly employed.

“There is a volume here I should like to know your mind about, sir,” he said, after looking at one of them a moment or two, “—the first collected edition of Spenser's works, actually bound up with Sir John Harrington's translation of Ariosto! If it were a good, or even an old binding, I should have said nothing.”

“It don't seem in a bad way.”

“No, but the one book is so unworthy of the other!”

“What would you propose?”

“I would separate them; put the Spenser in plain calf, and make the present cover, with a new back, do for Sir John; it is a good enough coat for him.”

“Very well. Do as you think best.”

“I should like to send them both to my father.”

“But you have undertaken everything!”

“I am quite ready, sir; but in that case these must wait. My faculty is best laid out on mending, and I must do some good work in that first. I don't know that I'm quite up to my father in binding. I mentioned him because if he were to help me with those that must be bound, I should have the more time for what often takes longer. You may trust my father, sir; he does not want to make a fortune.”

“I will try him then,” answered the cautious heir. “At least I will send him the books, and learn what he would charge.”

He had more of the ordinary tradesman in him than Richard and his uncle put together.

“I will put the prices on them, and engage that my father will charge no more,” said Richard.

Lestrange was content on hearing them, and Richard set to work with the other volumes.

The bookbinder, always busy, soon began to be respected in the house, and before long had gained several indulgences—among the rest, to have a table for himself in the library, at which, when work-hours were over, he might read or write when he pleased. As his labours went on, the bookscape began to revive, and continued slowly putting on an autumnal radiance of light and colour. Dingy and broken backs gradually disappeared. Pamphlets and magazines, such as, from knowledge or inquiry, Richard thought worth the expense, were sent off to his father to be bound. But I must continue my narrative from a point long before his work began to make much of a show.

A few valuable books, much injured by time and rough usage,—among the rest a quarto of The Merry Wives—he had pulled apart, and was treating with certain solutions, in preparation for binding them, when Lestrange came in one morning, accompanied by the curate of the parish. His eyes fell on a loose title-page which he happened to know.

“What on earth are you doing?” he cried. “You will destroy that book! By Jove!—You little know what you're about!”

“I do know what I am about, sir. I shall do the book nothing but good,” answered Richard. “It could not have lasted many years without what I am doing.”

“Leave it alone,” said Lestrange. “I must ask some one. The treatment is too dangerous.”

“Excuse me, sir; the treatment is by no means dangerous. After this bath, I shall take it through one of thin size, to help the paper to hold together. The book has suffered much, both from damp and insects.”

“No matter!” answered Lestrange imperiously. “I will not have you meddle further with that volume.—Would you believe it, Hardy,” he went on, turning to the curate, “it is that translation of Ovid he is experimenting upon!”

“I beg your pardon, I am not experimenting,” said Richard.

“I hardly think it is such a very rare book!” replied the curate. “I believe it could be replaced!”

“Ah, you don't know, I see! I thought I had shown you!” returned Lestrange excitedly. “Look there!”

He pointed to the title-page, which was lying on the table.

“I see!” said Hardy. “It is a first edition—in black letter—of Arthur Golding's Ovid!”

“But you don't look! Why don't you look? Have you no eyes for that faded ink just under the title?”

“Why! What's this? Gul. Shaksper!—Is it possible!”

“You find it hard to believe your eyes, and well you may!—There, Tuke! I told you you didn't know what you were doing!”

“I always examine the title-page of a book,” answered Richard. “You must allow me to do as I see fit, Mr. Lestrange, or I give up the job.”

“You undertook to work for a year, if required!”

“I did not undertake to receive orders as to my mode of working. I care for books far too much for that. Besides, I have my character to see to! I warn you that if I do not go on with that volume, it will be ruined.”

“You don't consider the money you risk!—That name makes the book worth hundreds at least.”

“It is the greatest of names! Only that name was not written by him who owned it!”

“What do you know about it!” said Lestrange rudely.

“Are you an expert?” asked the curate.

“By no means,” answered Richard; “but I have been a good deal with old books, and my impression is you have got there one of the Ireland forgeries!”

“I believe it to be quite genuine!” said Lestrange.

“If it be, there is the more reason in what I am doing, sir.”

Lestrange turned abruptly to the curate, saying—“Come along, Hardy! I can't bear to see the butchery!”

“Depend on it,” returned the curate laughing, “the surgeon knows his knife!—You know what you're about, don't you, Mr. Tuke?”

“If I did not, sir, I wouldn't meddle with a book like that, forgery or no forgery! You should see the quantities of old print I've destroyed in learning how to save such books!—This is no vile body to experiment upon!”

“Mr. Lestrange, you may trust that man!” said the curate.

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CHAPTER XV. BARBARA WYLDER.

It was the height of the season, and sir Wilton and lady Ann were in London—I cannot say enjoying themselves, for I doubt if either of them ever enjoyed self, or anything else. Their daughters were at home, in the care of the governess. Theodora had been out a year or two, but preferred Mortgrange to London. She was one of the few girls—perhaps not very few—who imagine themselves uglier than they are. Miss Malliver, the governess, was a lady of uncertain age, for whom lady Ann had an uncertain liking. The younger girl, her pupil, was named Victoria, but commonly called Vic, and not uncommonly Vixen. The younger boy was at school, where they were constantly threatening to send him home. He had been already dismissed from Eton.

In their elder son, Arthur, his parents had as perfect a confidence as such parents could have in any son.

The little lady that rode the great mare, and sat in the beech-tree, was at present their guest—as she often was, in a fluctuating or intermittent fashion. She lived in the neighbourhood, but was more at Mortgrange than at home; one consequence of which was, that, as would-be-clever Miss Malliver phrased it, the house was very much B. Wyldered. Nor was that the first house the little lady had bewildered, for she was indeed an importation from a new colony rather startling to sedate old England. Her father, a younger son, had unexpectedly succeeded to the family-property, a few miles from Mortgrange. He was supposed to have made a fortune in New Zealand, where Barbara was born and brought up. They had been home nearly two years, and she was almost eighteen. Absurd rumours were abroad concerning their wealth, but there were no great signs of wealth about the place. Wylder Hall was kept up, and its life went on in good style, it is true, but mainly because the old servants perpetuated the customs of the house.

The squire was said to have shared in some of the roughest phases of colonial life. Whether he was better or worse for falling in love with the money of an older colonist, and marrying his daughter, it is certain that, for a time at least, he grew a shade or two more respectable. Far from being a woman of refinement, she had more character and more strength than he, and brought him, not indeed into the highways of wisdom, but into certain by-paths of prudence.

Upon his return to his native country, they were everywhere received; but had it not been for their reported wealth, I doubt if the ladies of the county, after some experience of her manners and speech, which were at times very rough, would have continued to call on Mrs. Wylder.

But everybody liked Barbara; and nobody could think how such a flower should have come of two such plants. She seemed to regard every one as of her own family. People were her property—hers to love! And her brain was as active as her heart, and constantly with it. She wanted to know what people thought and felt and imagined; what everything was; how a thing was done, and how it ought to be done. She seemed to understand what the animals were thinking, and what the flowers were feeling. She had from infancy spent the greater part of her life, both night and day, in the open air; and, having no companion, had sought the acquaintance of every live thing she saw—often to the disgust of her mother, and occasionally to the annoyance of her father. She was a child of the whole world, as the naiad is the child of the river, and the oread of the mountain. She could sit a horse's bare back even better than a saddle, could guide him almost as well with a halter as with a bridle, and in general control him without either, though she had ridden more than one horse with terrible bit and spurs. She did not remember the time when she could not swim, and she tried her own running against every new horse, to find what he could do. Some highland girl might perhaps have beaten her, up hill, but I doubt it. She was so small that she looked fragile, but she had nerves such as few men can boast, and muscles like steel. It never occurred to her not to say what she thought, believed, or felt; she would show favour or dislike with equal readiness; and give the reason for anything she did as willingly as do the thing. She was a special favourite at Mortgrange. Not only did she bewitch the blasé man of the world, sir Wilton, but the cold eye of his lady would gleam a faint gleam at the thought of her dowry. Her father “prospected” a little for something higher than a mere baronetcy, but he had in no way interfered. Of herself, divine little savage, she would never have thought of love until she fell in love: a flower cannot know its own blossom until it comes. It did not yet interest her, and until it did, certainly marriage never would. Thus was she healthier-minded than any one born of society-parents, and brought up under the influences of nurse-morality, can well be. When she came to England, it was hard to teach her the ways of the so-called civilized. Servants would sometimes be out searching for her after midnight, perhaps to find her strayed beyond the park, out upon the solitary heath. She knew most of the stars, not by their astronomical names indeed, but by names she had herself given them. She had tales of her own, fashioned in part from the wild myths of the aborigines, to account for the special relations of such as made a group. She would weave the travels of the planets into the steady history of the motionless stars. Waning and waxing moons had a special and strange influence upon her. She would dart out of doors the moment she saw the new moon, and give a wild cry of joy if the old moon was in her arms. Any moon in a gusty night, with a scud of torn clouds, would wake in her an ecstasy. Her old nurse, who had come with her—a strange creature, of what mingled blood no one knew—told of her that she was sometimes seized with such a longing for the ocean, that she would lie for hours ere she went to sleep, moaning with the very moan of its pebble-margined waves. When “in the bush,” she would upon occasion wander about from morning to night. No trouble able to keep her still had ever yet laid hold of her. But she had grown neither coarse nor unfeeling through lack of human intercourse. Nature was to her what she was to Wordsworth's Lucy, and made her a lady of her own.

As to what is commonly called education, she had not had the best. Since coming to England, she had had governesses, but none fit for the office. Not merely had no one of them that rare gift, the teaching genius—the faculty of waking hunger and thirst; that would have mattered little, for Barbara needed no such rousing; she was eager to know, and yet more eager to understand; but not one of those teachers knew enough to answer a quarter of Barbara's questions, or was even capable of perceiving that those she could not answer, pointed to anything worth knowing.

Among fashionable girls, affecting a free and easy, or even rough style, Barbara was notable for a sweet, unconscious, graceful daring, never for even a playful rudeness. Nothing she ever did or said or attempted could be called rough, while yet she would say things to make a vulgar duchess stare. Had she been affected, she would have drawn fools and repelled men; real, she charmed alike men and fools.

She had read few books worth reading—had read a few which one would not have chosen she should read, for she grasped at anything a passer-by might have left. Of books properly so called, she knew nothing, therefore had not a notion which to read now she might choose. She imagined them all attractive—but at the first assay turned from the burlesque with a kind of loathing. This made some of her new acquaintance, not refined enough to understand the peculiarity, as it seemed to them, set her down as stupid.

As to religion, she had never been taught any. But from before her earliest recollection she had had the feeling of a Presence. For this feeling she never thought of attempting to account, neither would have recognized it as what I have called it. The sky over her head brought it; a sweep of the earth away from her feet would bring it; any horizon far or near called it up, perhaps most keenly of all. In England she often sorely missed her horizon, and in cities was even unhappy for lack of one. If she could have crystallized, and then formulated her feeling, she would have said she felt lonely, that something or somebody had gone away. Had she been a pagan, it would have been her gods that had forsaken her. Without a horizon she felt as if the wind had forgotten her, the sky did not know her. Often indeed even the farthest horizon could not prevent her from feeling that she had come to a dead country; that things here did not mean anything; that the life was out of them. Was the world so crowded with men and their works as to shut out from her the Presence? When she went to church, nothing received her, nothing came near her, nothing brought her any message. Something was done, she supposed, that ought to be done—something she had no inclination to dispute, no interest in questioning; a certain good power called God, required from people, in return for the gift of existence, the attention of going to church; therefore she went sometimes. She had no idea of ever having done wrong, no feeling that God was pleased or displeased with her, or had any occasion to be either. She did not know that it was God that came near her in her horse, in her dog, in the people about her who so often disappointed her. He came nearer in a thunderstorm, a moonlit night, a sweet wind—anything that woke the sense of the old freedom of her childhood. She felt the presence then, but never knew it a presence.

Neither did she know that there was a place where the very essence, of that whose loss made her sad was always waiting her—a place called in a certain old book “thy closet.” She did not know that there opened the one horizon—infinitely far, yet near as her own heart. But He is there for them that seek him, not for those who do not look for him. Till they do, all he can do is to make them feel the want of him. Barbara had not begun to seek him. She did not know there was anybody to seek: she only missed him without knowing what she missed. The blind, almost meaningless reverence for the name of God, which somehow she learned at church, had not led her in any way to associate him with her sense of loss and need.

Her father's desire was to see her so married as to raise his influence in the county. He was proud of her—selfishly proud. Was she not his? Was he not “the author of her being”? If he did not quite imagine he had created her, he certainly never thought of any one but himself as having to do with her existence. All the credit in it was his! He forgot even what share her mother might claim; not to mention what in her might belong to the Sum of Things, the insensate Pan. A self-glorious man is the biggest fool in the world.

Her mother, too, was proud of her—loved her indeed after a careless fashion—was even in a sort obliged to her for having come to her. But she did not care for her enough to interfere with her. Notwithstanding the mother's coarseness, her outbursts of temper, her intolerance of opposition, she and her daughter had never yet come into collision. The reason did not entirely lie in the sweetness of the daughter, but partly in the fact that the mother had two children besides, one of whom she loved far more, and the other far less.

Barbara had no pride. She spoke in the same tone to lord and tradesman. She had been the champion of the blacks in her own country, and in England looked lovingly on the gypsies in their little tents on the windy downs.

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CHAPTER XVI. BARBARA AND RICHARD.

Hardly had Lestrange left the room, when Barbara entered, noiseless as a moth, which creature she somehow resembled at times: one observant friend came to see that she resembled all swift, gay, and gentle creatures in turn. She was in the same green dress which had favoured her concealment in the beech, and in which Richard had seen her afterward at the breakfast-table, but of which he had not since caught a glimmer. Her blue eyes—at times they seemed black, but they were blue—settled upon Richard the moment she entered, and resting on him seemed to lead her up to the table where he was at work.

“What have you done to make Arthur so angry?” she said, her manner as if they had known each other all their lives.

“What I am doing now, miss—making this book last a hundred years longer.”

“Why should you, if he doesn't want you to do it? The book is his!”

“He will be pleased enough by and by. It's only that he thinks I can't, and is afraid I shall ruin it.”

“Hadn't you better leave it then?”

“That would be to ruin it. I have gone too far for that.”

“Why should you want to make it last so long? They are always printing books over again, and a new book is much nicer than an old one.”

“So some people think; but others would much rather read a book in its first shape. And then books get so changed by printers and editors, that it is absolutely necessary to have copies of them as they were at first. You see this little book, miss? It don't look much, does it?”

“It looks miserable—and so dirty!”

“By the time I have done with it, it will be worth fifty, perhaps a hundred pounds—I don't know exactly. It is a play of Shakespeare's us published in his lifetime.”

“But they print better and more correctly now, don't they?”

“Yes; but us I said, they often change things.”

“How is that?”

“Sometimes they will change a word, thinking it ought to be another; sometimes they will alter a passage because they do not understand it, putting it all wrong, and throwing aside a great meaning for a small one: the change of a letter may alter the whole idea. But they often do it just by blundering. Shall I tell you an instance that came to my knowledge yesterday? It is but a trifle, yet is worth telling.—Of course you know the Idylls of the King?”

“No, I don't Why do you say 'of course'?”

“Because I thought every English lady read Tennyson.”

“Ah, but I was born in New Zealand!—Tell me the blunder, though.”

“There was one thing in The Pausing of Arthur—that's the name of one of the Idylls—which I never could understand:—how sir Bedivere could throw a sword with both hands, and make it go in the way Tennyson says it went.”

“But who was sir Bedivere?”

“You must read the poem to know that, Miss. He was one of the knights of king Arthur's Round Table.”

“I don't know anything about king Arthur.”

“I will repeat us much of the poem as is necessary to make you understand about the misprint.”

“Do—please.”

“Then quickly rose sir Bedivere, and ran,
And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged
Among the bulrush beds, and clutch'd the sword,
And strongly wheeled and threw it. The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the northern sea.
So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur.”

“What does the brand Excalibur—is that it?—what does it mean? They put a brand on the cattle in the bush.”

“Brand means a sword, and Excalibur was the name of this sword. They seem to have baptized their swords in those days!”

“There's nothing about both hands!”

“True; that comes a little lower down, where sir Bedivere tells king Arthur what he has done. He says—

“'Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him'.

“—Now do you think anybody could do that, and make it go flashing round and round in an arch?”

Barbara thought for a moment, then said—

“No, certainly not. To make it go like that, you would have to take it in one hand, and swing it round your head—and then you couldn't without a string tied to it. Or perhaps it was a sabre, and he was so strong he could send it like a boomerang!”

“No; it was a straight, big, heavy sword.—How then do you think Tennyson came to describe the thing so?”

“Because he didn't know better—or didn't think enough about it.”

“There is more than that in it, I fancy: he was misled by a printer's blunder, I suspect. Some months ago I found the passage which Tennyson seems to follow, in a cheap reprint of sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur—then just out, and could not make sense of it. Yesterday I found here this long little book, evidently the edition from which the other was printed—and printed correctly too. In both issues, this is what the knight is made to say:

“'Then sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up and went to the water's side, and there he bound the girdle about the belts. And then he threw the sword into the water as far as he might.'”

“Well,” said Barbara, “you have not made me any wiser! You said the new one was printed correctly from that old one!”

“But I did not say the old one, as you call it, was itself printed correctly from the much older one! Look here now,” continued Richard—and mounting the library-steps, he took down another small volume, very like the former, “—here is another edition, of nearly the same date: let me read what is printed there:—

“'Then sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up, and went to the water side, and there he bound the girdle about the hilt. And then he threw the sword into the water as far as he might.'

“Now, most likely the copy from which both of these editions were printed, had the word hilts, for then they always spoke of the hilts, not hilt of a sword; and the one printer modernized it into hilt, and the other, perhaps mistaking the dim print, for hilts printed belts. To tie the girdle about the belts must simply be nonsense. But to tie the girdle to the hilts of the sword, would just give the knight what you said he would want—something long to swing it round his head with, and throw it like a stone, and the sling with it.”

“I understand.”

“You see then how the printer's blunder, which might not appear to matter much, has come to matter a great deal, for it has, it seems to me, caused a fault-spot in the loveliest poem!”

During this conversation Richard's work had scarcely relaxed; but now that a pause came it seemed to gather diligence.

“Why do you spend your time patching up books?” said Barbara.

“Because they are worth patching up; and because I earn my bread by patching them.”

“But you seem to care most for what is inside them!”

“If I did not, I should never have taken to mending, I should have been content with binding them. New covers make more show, and are much easier put on than patches.”

Another pause followed.

“What a lot you know!” said Barbara.

“Very little,” answered Richard.

“Then where am I!” she returned.

“Perhaps ladies don't need books! I don't know about ladies.”

“I think they don't care about them. I never hear them talk as you do—as if books were their friends. But why should they? Books are only books!”

“You would not say that if once you knew them!”

“I wish you would make me know them, then!”

“There are books, and you can read, miss!”

“Ah, but I can't read as you read! I understand that much! I was born where there ain't any books. I can shoot and fish and run and ride and swim, and all that kind of thing. I never had to fight. I think I could shoe a horse, if any one would give me a lesson or two.”

“I will, with pleasure, miss.”

“Oh, thank you. That will be jolly! But how is it you can do everything?”

“I can only do one or two things. I can shoe a horse, but I never had the chance of riding one.”

“Teach me to shoe Miss Brown, and I will teach you to ride her. How is your hand?”

“Quite well, thank you.”

“I would rather learn to read, though—the right way, I mean—the way that makes one book talk to another.”

“That would be better than shoeing Miss Brown; but I will teach you both, if you care to learn.”

“Thank you indeed! When shall we begin?”

“When you please.”

“Now?”

“I cannot before six o'clock. I must do first what I am paid to do!—What kind of reading do you like best?”

“I don't know any best. I used to read the papers to papa, but now I don't even do that. I hope I never may.”

“Where do you live, miss, when you're at home?” asked Richard, all the time busy with the quarto.

“Don't you know?”

“I don't even know who you are, miss!”

“I am Barbara Wylder. I live at Wylder Hall, a few miles from here.—I don't know the distance exactly, because I always go across country: that way reminds me a little of home. My father was the third son, and never expected to have the Hall. He went out to New Zealand, and married my mother, and made a fortune—at least people say so: he never tells me anything. They don't care much for me: I'm not a boy!”

“Have you any brothers?”

“I have one,” she answered sadly. “I had two, but my mother's favourite is gone, and my father's is left, and mamma can't get over it. They were twins, but they did not love each other. How could they? My father and mother don't love each other, so each loved one of the twins and hated the other.”

She mentioned the dismal fact with a strange nonchalance—as if the thing could no more be helped, and needed no more be wondered at, than a rainy day. Yet the sigh she gave indicated trouble because of it.

Richard held his peace, rather astonished, both that a lady should talk to him in such an easy way, and that she should tell him the saddest family secrets. But she seemed quite unaware of doing anything strange, and after a brief pause resumed.

“Yes, they had long been tired of each other,” she said, us if she had been reflecting anew on the matter, “but the quarrelling came all of taking sides about the twins! At least I do not remember any of it before that. They were both fine children, and they could not agree which was the finer, but, as the boys grew, quarrelled more and more about them. They would be at it whole evenings, each asserting the merits of one of the twins, and neither listening to a word about the other. Each was determined not to be convinced, and each called the other obstinate.”

“Were the twins older or younger than you, miss?” asked Richard.

“They were three years younger than me. But when I look back it seems as if I had been born into the bickering. It always looked as natural as the grassy slopes outside the door. I thought it was a consequence of twins, that all parents with twins went on so. When my father's next older brother fell ill, and there seemed a possibility of his succeeding to the property, the thing grew worse; now it was which of them should be heir to it. Waking in the middle of the night, I would hear them going on at it. Then which was the elder, no one could tell. My mother had again and again, before they began to quarrel, confessed she did not know. I don't think I ever saw either of my parents do a kindness to the other, or to the child favoured by the other. So from the first the boys understood that they were enemies, and acted accordingly. Each always wanted everything for himself. They scowled at each other long before they could talk. Their games, always games of rivalry and strife, would for a minute or two make them a little less hostile, but the moment the game ceased, they began to scowl again. They were both kind to me, and I loved them both, and naturally tried to make them love each other; but it was of no use. It seemed their calling to rival and obstruct one another. When they came to blows, as they frequently did, my father and mother would almost come to blows too, each at once taking the usual side. I would run away then, put a piece of bread in my pocket, and get on a horse. Nobody ever missed me.”

“Did you never lose your way?” asked Richard: he must say something, he felt so embarrassed.

“My horse always knew the way home. I have often been out all night, though; and how peaceful it was to be alone with Widow Wind, as I used to call the night I—I don't know why now; I suppose I once knew.”

Something in this way she ran on with her story, but I fail to approach the charm of her telling. Her narrative was almost childish in its utterance, but childlike in its insight. What could have moved her so to confide in a stranger and a workman? In truth, she needed little moving; her nature was to trust everybody; but there were not many to whom she could talk. Miss Brown helped her with no response; to her parents she had no impulse to speak; the young people she met stared at the least allusion to the wild ways of her past life, making her feel she was not one of them. Even Arthur Lestrange had more than once looked awkward at a remark she happened to make! So, instead of confiding in any of them, that is, letting her heart go in search of theirs, she had taken to amusing them, and in this succeeded so thoroughly as to be an immense favourite—which, however, did not make her happy, did not light up the world within her. Hence it was no great wonder that, being such as she was, she should feel drawn to Richard. He was the first man she had even begun to respect. In her humility she found him every way her superior. It was wonderful to her that he should know so much about books, the way people made them, what they meant, and how mistakes got into them, and went from one generation to another: they were his very friends! She thought it was his love for books that had made him a bookbinder, as indeed it was his love for them that had made him a book-mender. Her heart and mind were free from many social prejudices. She knew that people looked down upon men who did things with their hands; but she had done so many things herself with her hands, and been so much obliged to others who could do things with their hands better than she, that she felt the superiority of such whose hands were their own perfect servants, and ready to help others as well.

One of the things by which she wounded the sense of propriety in those about her was, that she would talk of some things that, in their judgment, ought to be kept secret. Now Barbara could understand keeping a great joy secret, but a misery was not a nice thing to cuddle up and hide; of a misery she must get rid, and if talking about it was any relief, why not talk? She soon found, however, that it was no relief to talk to Arthur or his sister; and from the commonplace governess, she recoiled. The bookbinder was different; he was a man; he was not what people called a gentleman; he was a man like the men in the Bible, who spoke out what they meant! The others were empty; Richard was full of man! As regarded her father and mother, she could betray no secret of theirs; everybody about them knew the things she talked of; and had they been secrets, neither would have cared a pin what a working man might know or think of them! Did they not quarrel in the presence of the very cat! Then Richard was such a gentlemanly workman! Of course he could not be a gentleman in England, but there must be, certainly there ought to be somewhere the place in which Richard, just as he was, would be a gentleman! She was sure he would not laugh at her behind her back, and she was not sure that Arthur, or Theodora even, would not. More than all, he was ready to open for her the door into the rich chamber of his own knowledge! Must a man be a workman to know about books? What then if a workman was a better and greater kind of man than a gentleman? In her own country, it did not matter so much about books, for there one had so many friends! Why read about the beauties of Nature, where she was at home with her always! What did any one want with poetry who could be out as long as she pleased with the old night, and the stars gray with glory, and the wind wandering everywhere and knowing all things! Here it was different! Here she could not do without books! Where the things themselves were not, she wanted help to think about them! And that help was in books, and Richard could teach her how to get at it!

It was indeed amazing that one who had read so little should have so good, although so imperfect a notion of what books could do. Just so much a few cheap novels had sufficed to reveal to her! But then Barbara was herself a world of uncrystallized poetry. What is feeling but poetry in a gaseous condition? What is fine thought but poetry in a fluid condition? What is thought solidified, but fine prose; thought crystallized, but verse?

“Here,” she would say, but later than the period of which I am now writing, “where the weather is often so stupid that it won't do anything, won't be weather at all; will neither blow, nor rain, nor freeze, nor shine, you need books to make a world inside you—to take you away, as by the spell of a magician or on the wings of an eagle, from the walls and the nothingness, into a world where one either finds everything or wants nothing.” She had yet to learn that books themselves are but weak ministers, that the spirit dwelling in them must lead back to him who gave it or die; that they are but windows, which, if they look not out on the eternal spaces, will themselves be blotted out by the darkness.

To end her story, she told Richard that, since their coming to this country, her mother's favourite had died. She nearly went mad, she said, and had never been like herself again. For not only had her opposition to her husband deepened into hate, but—here, to Richard's amusement when he found on what the reverential change was attendant, Barbara lowered her voice—she really and actually hated God also. “Isn't it awful?” Barbara said; but meeting no response in the honest eyes of Richard, she dropped hers, and went on.

“I have heard her say the wildest and wickedest things, careless whether any one was near. I think she must at times be out of her mind! One day not long ago I saw her shake her fist as high as she could reach above her head, looking up with an expression of rage and reproach and defiance that was terrible. Had we been in New Zealand, I should not have wondered so much: there are devils going about there. Nobody knows of any here, but it was here they got into my mother, and made her defy God. She does it straight out in church. That is why I always sit in the poor seats, and not in the little gallery that belongs to my father.—Have you ever been to our church, Mr. Tuke?”

Richard told her he never went to church except when his mother wanted him to go with her.

“My mother goes twice every Sunday; but what do you think she is doing all the time? The gallery has curtains about it, but she never allows those in front to be drawn, and anybody in the opposite gallery can see into it quite well, and the clergyman when he is in the pulpit: she lies there on a couch, in a nest of pillows, reading a novel, a yellow French one generally, just as if she were in her own room! She knows the clergyman sees her, and that is why she does it.”

“She disapproves of the whole thing!” said Richard.

“She used to like church well enough.”

“She must mean to protest, else why should she go? Has she any quarrel with the clergyman?”

“None that I know of.”

“What then do you think she means by going and not joining in? Why is she present and not taking part?”

“I believe she does it just to let God know she is not pleased with him. She thinks he has treated her cruelly and tyrannically, and she will not pretend to worship him. She wants to show him how bitterly she feels the way he has turned against her. She used to say prayers to him; she will do so no more! and she goes to church that he may see she won't.”

The absurdity of the thing struck Richard sharply, but he feared to hurt the girl and lose her confidence.

“Her behaviour is only a kind of insolent prayer!” he said. “—Has the clergyman ever spoken to her about it?”

“I don't think he has. He spoke to me, but when I said he ought to speak to her, he did not seem to see it. I should speak to her fast enough if it were my church!”

“I dare say he thinks her mind is affected, and fears to make her worse,” said Richard. “But he might, I think, persuade her that, as she is not on good terms with the person who lives in the church, she ought to stay away.”

Barbara looked at him with doubtful inquiry, but Richard went on.

“What sort of a man is the clergyman?” he asked.

“I don't know. He seems always thinking about things, and never finding out. I suppose he is stupid!”

“That does not necessarily follow,” said Richard with a smile, reflecting how hard it would be for the man to answer one of a thousand questions he might put to him in connection with his trade. “Your poor mother must be very unhappy!” he added.

“She may well be! I am no comfort to her. She never heeds me; or she tells me to go and amuse myself—she is busy. My father has his twin, and poor mamma has nobody!”

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CHAPTER XVII. BARBARA AND OTHERS.

At this point, Barbara's friend came into the room, and they went away together.

Theodora, so named by her mother because she was born on a Sunday, was a very different girl from Barbara. Nominally friends, neither understood the other. Theodora was the best of the family, but that did not suffice to make her interesting. She was short, stout, rather clumsy, with an honest, thick-featured face, and entirely without guile. Even when she saw it, she could not believe it there. She had not much sympathy, but was very kind. She never hesitated to do what she was sure was right; but then, except for rules, many of them far from right themselves, she would have been almost always in doubt. Anything in the shape of a rule, she received as an angel from heaven. If all the rules she obeyed had been right, and she had seen the right in them, she would have been making rapid progress; as it was, her progress was very slow. How Barbara and she managed to entertain each other, I find it hard to think; but all forms of innocent humanity must have much in common. A contrast, nevertheless, the two must have presented to any power able to read them. Barbara was like a heath of thyme and wild roses and sudden winds; Theodora like a Dutch garden without its flowers. They never quarrelled. I suspect they did not come near enough to quarrel.

Barbara left Richard almost bewitched, and considerably perplexed. He had never seen anything like her. No more had most people that met her. She seemed of another nature from his, a sort of sylph or salamander, yet, in simplest human fashion, she had come quite close to him. She had indeed brought to bear upon him, without knowing it, that humbling and elevating power which ideal womankind has always had, and will eternally have upon genuine manhood. There was an airiness about her, yet a reality, a lightness, yet a force, a readiness, a life, such as he could never have imagined. She was a revelation unrevealed—a presence lovely but incredible, suggesting facts and relations which the commonplace in him said could not exist. The vision was, to use a favourite but pagan phrase, “too good to be true.” Richard's knowledge of girls was small indeed, but he had now enough to make his first comparison: Alice was like China, Barbara like Venetian glass. He thought there was something in Alice if he could only get at it: he feared there was nothing in Barbara to get at. For one thing, how could she have such parents and take it so lightly!

There were certainly few things yet in flower in Barbara's garden, but there was a multitude of precious things on the way to unfold themselves to any one that might love her enough to give them a true welcome. She was nearly as far out of Richard's understanding as beyond that of the good Theodora. The consequence was that he felt himself full beside her emptiness. He was no coxcomb, neither dreamed of presenting himself for her admiration; but he pictured the delight of opening the eyes of this child-woman to the many doors of treasure-houses that stood in her own wall.

Only those who haunt the slopes of literature, know that marvels lie in the grass for the hand that will gather them. Multitudes who count themselves readers know no more of the books they read than the crowds that visit the Academy exhibitions know of the pictures they gaze upon. Yet are the realms of literature free as air, freer even than those of music. The man whose literary judgment and sympathy I prized beyond that of the world beside, was a clerk in the Bank of England. The man who by the spell of his words can set me in the heart of soft-stealing twilight—nay, rather, can set the very heart of the dying day in me—was a Lancashire weaver. And dainty, bird-moth-like Barbara had begun to suspect the existence of something hers yet beyond her in books, of an unknown world which lay at her very door. In that same world the bookbinder passed much of his time, and it was neither in pride nor in presumption that he desired to share it with Barbara. It is the home-born impulse of every true heart to give of its best, to infect with its own joy; and the thought of giving grandly to a woman, to a lady, might well fill the soul of a working man with a hitherto unnamed ecstasy. Another might have compared it to the housing of a strayed angel with frozen feathers, lost on the wintry wilds of this far-out, border world; but Richard did not believe in those celestial birds; and had he believed, a woman would yet have been to him, and rightly, more than any angel. What he did think of was the huntsman and the little lady in The Flight of the Duchess.

He began to ponder how to treat her—how to begin to open doors for her—what door to open first. Should it be of prose or of verse? He must have more talk with her ere he could tell! He must try her with something!

He had time to ponder, for she did not anew swim into his ken for three days. He wondered whether he had displeased her, but could think of nothing he had said or done amiss. He must be very careful not to offend her with the least roughness in word or manner, lest he should so lose the chance of helping her! It was the main part of his creed, as gathered from his adoptive father, that a man must do something for his neighbour: Miss Wylder was his neighbour; what better thing could he do for her than make her free of the greatest joy he knew?

Barbara had quite as much liberty as was good. Her mother sat in a darkened room, and took morphia; her father, to occupy his leisure, had begun to repair an old house on the estate with his own hands. Nobody heeded Barbara; she did as she pleased, going and coming as in the colony. A favourite with all about the place, she had never to use authority. Every one, for very love, was at her service. Whatever preposterous thing, at whatever unearthly moment, she might have wanted, it would have been ready—her mare at midnight, her breakfast at noon, a cow in the library to draw from. There was little regularity in the house; every one wanted to do what was right in his own eyes; but every one was ready to see right with the eyes of Barbara.

Home was, nevertheless, as one may well believe, a terribly dull place to her; and as, for some occult reason, Theodora Lestrange had taken a fancy to her, as sir Wilton was charmed with her, and lady Ann—for reasons—had little to say against her, she was at Mortgrange as much as she pleased—never too much even for Arthur, whose propriety, rather insular, a little provincial, and sometimes pedantic, she would shock twenty times a day; for he was fascinated by her grace and playfulness, though he declared he would as soon think of marrying a humming-bird as Barbara. He tried for a while to throw his net over her, for he would fain have tamed her to come at his call: but he soon arrived at the conclusion that nothing but the troubles of life would tame her, and then it would be a pity. She was a fine creature, he said, but hardly human; and for his part he preferred a woman to a fay!

But such was the report of her riches, that sir Wilton and lady Ann were both ready to welcome her as a daughter-in-law. Sir Wilton was delighted with her gaiety and the sharp readiness of her clever retort. All he regretted in her lack of an English education was that her speech was not quite that of a lady—on which point sir Wilton had not always been so fastidious. For the rest, intellectual development was of so little interest to him that he never suspected Barbara of having more than a usual share of intellect to develop. She was just the wife for the future baronet, he was once heard to say—though how he came once to say it I cannot think, for never before had he betrayed a consciousness that he would not be the present baronet for ever and ever. So long as he did not feel the approach of death, he would never think of dying, and then he would do his best to forget it. He seemed sometimes to grudge his son the dainty little wife Barbara would make him: “The rascal will be the envy of the clubs!” he said.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XVIII. MRS. WYLDER.

Mr. Wylder was lord of the manor, and chief land-owner, though his family had never been the most influential, in the parish next that in which lay Mortgrange. He was not much fitted for an English squire. He wished to stand well with his neighbours, but lacked the geniality which is the very body, the outside expression of humanity. Proud of his family, he had the peculiar fault of the Goth—that of arrogance, with its accompanying incapacity for putting oneself in the place of another. Mr. Wylder possessed a huge inability of conceiving the manner in which what he did or said must affect the person to whom he did or said it. So entirely was he thus disqualified for social interchange, that he remained supremely satisfied in his consequent isolation, hardly recognized it, and never doubted himself a perfect gentleman. Had any diffidence enabled him to perceive the reflection of himself in the mirroring minds of those around him, his self-opinion might have been troubled; but when he did begin to discover that the neighbours did not desire his company, he set it down to stupid prejudice against him because he had been so long absent from the country. He did not hunt, and when he went out shooting, which was seldom, he went alone, or with a game-keeper only. In fact he was so careless, that most men who had once shot with him, ever after gave him a wide berth when they saw him with a gun in his hand. On one occasion he shot his wife's twin in the calf of the leg; which, however, made her think no worse of his shooting, for she could never be persuaded he had not done it intentionally.

For a short time before leaving Australasia, the family had spent money in one of its larger cities, and had been a good deal followed; but neither there nor in England did they find that wealth could do everything. A few other qualities, not by any means of the highest order, are required by nearly all social agglomerations, and with some of these Mrs. Wylder was as scantily equipped as her husband with others.

Resenting the indifference of his neighbours, and not caring to remove it, Mr. Wylder betook himself to the exercise of certain constructive faculties, not unfrequently developed in circumstances in which a man has to be his own Jack-of-all-trades: finding a certain old manor-house which he had haunted as a boy, chiefly for the sake of its attendant goose-berries and apples, unoccupied and fallen into decay, he set about restoring it with his own hands. But it had not occurred to him that, although even in England it is not necessary, as they did at Lagado, in building to begin with the roof, in England especially is it necessary in repairing to begin with the roof. While the floors were rotting away, he would be busy panelling the walls, regardless of a drop falling steadily in the middle of the bench at which he was working.

The clergyman of the parish, one Thomas Wingfold, a man who loved his fellow, and would fain give him of the best he had, a man who was a Christian first, which means a man, and then a churchman, had now, for almost three years, often puzzled brain and heart together to find what could be done for these his new parishioners—from the world's point of view the first, yet in reality as insignificant as any he had; and not yet did he know how to get near them. He had not yet seen a glimmer of religion in the man, and had seen more than a glimmer of something else in the woman. Between him and either of them their common humanity had not yet shown a spark. What he had seen of the girl he liked, but he had not seen much.

It was a fine frosty day in February, about twelve o'clock, when Mr. Wingfold walked up the avenue of Scotch firs to call on Mrs. Wylder. He was dressed like any country gentleman in a tweed suit, carried a rather strong stick, and wore a soft felt hat, looking altogether more of a squire than a clergyman—for which his parishioners mostly liked him the better. Pious people in general seem to regard religion as a necessary accompaniment of life; to Wingfold it was life itself; with him religion must be all, or could be nothing. He did not accept the good news of God; he strained it to his heart, and was jubilant over it. He was a rather square-looking man, with projecting brows, and a grizzled beard. The upper part of his face would look dark while a smile was hovering about his mouth; at another time his mouth would look solemn, almost severe, while a radiance, as from some white cloud nobody could see, illuminated his forehead. He generally walked with his eyes on the ground, but would every now and then straighten his back, and gaze away to the horizon, as if looking for the far-off sails of help. He was noted among his farmers for his common sense, as they called it, and among the gentry for a certain frankness of speech, which most of them liked.

He rang the door-bell of the Hall, and asked if Mrs. Wylder was at home. The man hesitated, looked in the clergyman's face, and smiling oddly, answered, “Yes, sir.”

“Only you don't think she will care to see me!”

“Well, you know, sir,—”

“I do. Go up, and announce me.”

The man led the way, and Mr. Wingfold followed. He opened the door of a room on the first floor, and announced him. Mr. Wingfold entered immediately, that there might be no time for words with the man and a message of refusal.

Discouragement encountered him on the threshold. The lady sat by a blazing fire, with her back to a window through which the frosty sun of February was sending lovely prophecies of the summer. She was in a gorgeous dressing-gown, her plentiful black hair twisted carelessly, but with a show of defiance, round her head. She was almost a young woman still, with a hardness of expression that belonged neither to youth nor age. She sat sideways to the door, so that without turning her head she must have seen the parson enter, but she did not move a visible hair's-breadth. Her feet, in silk stockings and shabby slippers, continued perched on the fender. She made no sign of greeting when the parson came in front of her, but a scowl dark as night settled on her low forehead and black eyebrows, and her face shortened and spread out. Wingfold approached her with the air of a man who knew himself unwelcome but did not much mind—for he had not to care about himself.

“Good morning, Mrs. Wylder!” he said. “What a lovely morning it is!”

“Is it? I know nothing about it. You have a brutal climate!”

He knew she regarded him as the objectionable agent of a more objectionable Heaven.

“You would not dislike it so much if you met it out of doors. A walk on a day like this, now,—”

“Pray who authorized you to come and offer me advice I Have I concealed from you, Mr. Wingfold, that your presence gives me no pleasure?”

“You certainly have not! You have been quite honest with me. I did not come in the hope of pleasing you—though I wish I could.”

“Then perhaps you will explain why you are here!”

“There are visits that must be made, even with the certainty of giving annoyance!” answered Wingfold, rather cheerfully.

“That means you consider yourself justified in forcing your way into my room, before I am dressed, with the simple intention of making yourself disagreeable!”

“If I were here on my own business, you might well blame me! But what would you say to one of your men who told you he dared not go your message for fear of the lightning?”

“I would tell him he was a coward, and to go about his business.”

“That, then, is what I don't want to be told!”

“And for fear of being told it, you dare me!”

“Well—you may put it so;—yes.”

“I don't like you the worse for your courage. There's more than one man would face half a dozen bush-rangers rather than a woman I know!”

“I believe it. But it makes no extravagant demand on my courage. I am not afraid of you. I owe you nothing—except any service worth doing for you!”

“Let that blind down: the sun's putting the fire out.”

“It's a pity to put the sun out in such a brutal climate. He does the fire no harm.”

“Don't tell me!”

“Science says he does not.”

“He puts the fire out, I tell you!”

“I do not think so.”

“I've seen it with my own eyes. God knows which is the greater humbug—Science or Religion!—Are you going to pull that blind down?” Wingfold lowered the blind.

“Now look here!” said Mrs. Wylder. “You're not afraid of me, and I'm not afraid of you!—It's a low trade, is yours.”

“What is my trade?”

“What is your trade?—Why, to talk goody! and read goody! and pray goody! and be goody, goody!—Ugh!”

“I'm not doing much of that sort at this moment, any way!” rejoined Wingfold with a laugh.

“You know this is not the place for it!”

“Would you mind telling me which is the place to read a French novel in?”

“Church: there!”

“What would you do if I were to insist on reading a chapter of the Bible here?”

“Look!” she answered, and rising, snatched a saloon-pistol from the chimney-piece, and took deliberate aim at him.

Wingfold looked straight down the throat of the thick barrel, and did not budge.

“—I would shoot you with that,” she went on, holding the weapon as I have said. “It would kill you, for I can shoot, and should hit you in the eye, not on the head. I shouldn't mind being hanged for it. Nothing matters now!”

She flung the heavy weapon from her, gave a great cry, not like an hysterical woman, but an enraged animal, stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth, pulled it out again, and began tearing at it with her teeth. The pistol fell in the middle of the room. Wingfold went and picked it up.

“I should deserve it if I did,” he said quietly, as he laid the pistol on the table. “—But you don't fight fair, Mrs. Wylder; for you know I can't take a pistol with me into the pulpit and shoot you. It is cowardly of you to take advantage of that.”

“Well! I like the assurance of you! Do I read so as to annoy any one?”

“Yes, you do. You daren't read aloud, because you would be put out of the church if you did; but you annoy as many of the congregation as can see you, and you annoy me. Why should you behave in that house as if it were your own, and yet shoot me if I behaved so in yours? Is it fair? Is it polite? Is it acting like a lady?”

“It is my house—at least it is my pew, and I will do in it what I please.—Look here, Mr. Wingfold: I don't want to lose my temper with you, but I tell you that pew is mine, as much as the chair you're not ashamed to sit upon at this moment! And let me tell you, after the way I've been treated, my behaviour don't splash much. When he's brought a woman to my pass, I don't see God Almighty can complain of her manners!”

“Well, thinking of him as you do, I don't wonder you are rude!”

“What! You won't curry favour with him?—You hold by fair play? Come now! I call that downright pluck!”

“I fear you mistake me a little.”

“Of course I do! I might have known that! When you think a parson begins to speak like a man, you may be sure you mistake him!”

“You wouldn't behave to a friend of your own according to what another person thought of him, would you?”

“No, by Jove, I wouldn't!”

“Then you won't expect me to do so!”

“I should think not! Of course you stick by the church!”

“Never mind the church. She's not my mistress, though I am her servant. God is my master, and I tell you he is as good and fair as goodness and fairness can be goodness and fairness!”

“What! Will you drive me mad! I wish he would serve you as he's done me—then we should hear another tune—rather! You call it good—you call it fair, to take from a poor creature he made himself, the one only thing she cared for?”

“Which was the cause of a strife that made of a family in which he wanted to live, a very hell upon earth!”

“You dare!” she cried, starting to her feet.

Wingfold did not move.

“Mrs. Wylder,” he said, “dare is a word that needn't be used again between you and me. If you dare tell God that he is a devil, I may well dare tell you that you know nothing about him, and that I do!”

“Say on your honour, then, if he had treated you as he has done me—taken from you the light of your eyes, would you count it fair? Speak like the man you are.”

“I know I should.”

“I don't believe you. And I won't worship him.”

“Why, who wants you to worship him? You must be a very different person before he will care much for your worship! You can't worship him while you think him what you do. He is something quite different. You don't know him to love, and you don't know him to worship.”

“Why, bless my soul! ain't it your business—ain't you always making people say their prayers?”

“It is my business to help my brothers and sisters to know God, and worship him in spirit and in truth—because he is altogether and perfectly true and loving and fair. Do you think he would have you worship a being such as you take him to be. If your son is in good company in the other world, he must be greatly troubled at the way you treat God—at your unfairness to him. But your bad example may, for anything I know, have sent him where he has not yet begun to learn anything!”

“God have mercy!—will the man tell me to my face that my boy is in hell?”

“What would you have? Would you have him with the being you think so unjust that you hate him all the week, and openly insult him on Sunday?”

“You are a bad man, a hard-hearted brute, a devil, to say such things about my blessed boy! Oh my God! to think that the very day he was taken ill, I struck him! Why did he let me do it? To think that that very day he killed him, when he ought to have killed me!—killed him that I might never be able to tell him I was sorry!”

“If he had not taken him then, would you ever have been sorry you struck him!”

She burst into outcry and weeping, mingled with such imprecation, that Wingfold thought it one of those cases of possession in which nothing but prayer is of use. But the soul and the demon were so united, so entirely of one mind, that there was no room for prayer to get between them. He sat quiet, lifted up his heart, and waited. By and by there came a lull, and the redeemable woman appeared, emerging from the smoke of the fury.

“Oh my Harry! my Harry!” she cried. “To take him from my very bosom! He will never love me again! God shall know what I think of it! No mother could but hate him if he served her so!”

“Apparently you don't want the boy back in your bosom again!”

“None of your fooling of me now!” she answered, drawing herself up, and drying her eyes. “I can stand a good deal, but I won't stand that! What's gone is gone! He's dead, and the dead lie in no bosom but that of the grave! They go, and return never more!”

“But you will die too!”

“What do you mean by that? You will be talking! As if I didn't know I'd got to die, one day or another! What's that to me and Harry!”

“Then you think we're all going to cease and go out, like the clouds that are carried away and broken up by the wind?”

“I know nothing about it, and I don't care. Nothing's anything to me but Harry, and I shall never see my Harry again!—Heaven! Bah! What's heaven without Harry!”

“Nothing, of course! But don't you ever think of seeing him again?”

“What's the use! It's all a mockery! Where's the good of meeting when we shan't be human beings any more? If we're nothing but ghosts—if he's never to know me—if I'm never to feel him in my arms—ugh! it's all humbug! If he ever meant to give me back my Harry, why did he take him from me? If he didn't mean me to rage at losing him, why did he give him to me?”

“He gave you his brother at the same time, and you refused to love him: what if he took the one away until you should have learned to love the other?”

“I can't love him; I won't love him! He has his father to love him! He don't want my love! I haven't got it to give him! Harry took it with him! I hate Peter!—What are you doing there—laughing in your sleeve? Did you never see a woman cry?”

“I've seen many a woman cry, but never without my heart crying with her. You come to my church, and behave so badly I can scarce keep from crying for you. It half choked me last Sunday, to see you lying there with that horrid book in your hand, and the words of Christ in your ears!”

“I didn't heed them. It wasn't a horrid book!”

“It was a horrid book. You left it behind you, and I took it with me. I laid it on my study-table, and went out again. When I came home to dinner, my wife brought it to me and said, 'Oh, Tom, how can you read such books?' 'My dear,' I answered, 'I don't know what is in the book; I haven't read a word of it.'”

“And then you told her where you found it?”

“I did not.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I said to her, 'If it's a bad book, here goes!' and threw it in the fire.”

“Then I'm not to know the end of the story! But I can send to London for another copy! I'm much obliged to you, Mr. Wingfold, for destroying my property!—But you didn't tell her where you found it?”

“I did not. She never asked me.”

Mrs. Wylder was silent. She seemed a little ashamed, perhaps a little softened. Wingfold bade her good-morning. She did not answer him.

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CHAPTER XIX. MRS. WYLDER AND BARBARA.

To make all this quite credible to a doubting reader, it would be necessary to tell Mrs. Wylder's history from girlhood. She had had a very defective education, and what there was of it was all for show. Then she was married far too young, and to a man unworthy of any good woman. She indeed was not a good woman, but she was capable of being made worse; and in the bush, where she passed years not a few, and in cities afterward, she met women and men more lawless yet than herself or her husband. Overbearing where her likings were concerned, and full of a certain generosity where but her interests were in question, the slackness of the social bonds in the colonies had favoured her abnormal development. It is difficult to say how much man or woman is the worse for doing, when freed from restraint, what he or she would have been glad to do before, but for the restraint. Many who go to the colonies, and there to the dogs, only show themselves such as they dared not appear at home: they step on a steeper slope, and arrive, not at the pit, for they were in that already, but at the bottom of it, so much the faster. There were, however, in Mrs. Wylder, lovely rudimentary remnants of a good breed. She inherited feelings which gave her a certain intermittent and fugitive dignity, of some service to others in her wilder times, and to herself when she came into contact with an older civilisation. She would occasionally do a right generous thing—not seldom give with a freedom and judge with a liberality which were mainly rooted in carelessness.

She had much confidence in her daughter; and it said well for the mother that, with all her experience, she yet had this confidence—and none the less that she had never taken pains to instruct her in what was becoming. The most she had done in this way was once to snatch from her hand and throw in the fire a novel she had herself, a moment before, finished with unquestioning acceptance. If she had found her behaving like some of her acquaintance to whose conduct she did not give a second thought, for her friends might do as they pleased so long as they did not offend her, she would certainly, in some of her moods at least, have killed her.

While compelled, from lack of service, to employ herself in house affairs, she neither ate nor drank more than seemed good for her; but as soon as she had but to live and be served, she began to counterbalance ennui with self-indulgence, and continued to do so until the death of her boy, ever after which she had sought refuge from grief in narcotics. Possibly she would not have behaved as she did in church, but that her nervous being was a very sponge for morphia. Born to be a strong woman, she was a slave to her impulses, and, one of the weakest of her kind, went into a rage at the least show of opposition.

Scarcely had Mr. Wingfold left the room, when in came Barbara in her riding-habit, with the glow of joyous motion upon her face, for she had just ridden from Mortgrange.

“How do you do, mamma?” she said, but did not come within a couple of yards of her. “I've had such a ride—as straight as any crow could fly, between the two stations! I never could hit the line before. But I got a country-fellow to point me out a landmark or two, and here I am in just half the time I should have taken by the road! Such jumps!”

“You're a madcap!” said her mother. “You'll be brought home on a shutter some day! Mark my words, Bab! You'll see!—or at least I shall; you'll be past seeing! But it don't matter; it's what we're made for! Die or be killed, it's all one! I don't care!”

“I do though, mamma! I don't want to be killed just yet—and I don't mean to be! But I must have a second horse! I begin to suspect Miss Brown of treating me like a child. She takes care of me! I mean to let her see what I can do if she's up to it!”

“You'll do nothing of the kind! I'll have her shot if you go after any of your old pranks! And, while I think of it, Bab—your father has set his heart on your marrying Mr. Lestrange: I can see it perfectly, and I won't have it! If I hear of anything of that sort between you, I'll set a heavy foot on it.—How long have you been there this time?”

“A week.—But why shouldn't I marry Mr. Lestrange if I like?”

“Because your father has set his heart on it, I tell you! Isn't that enough, you tiresome little wretch? I will not have it—not if you break your heart over it!—There!”

Barbara burst out in a laugh that rang like a bronze bell.

“Break my heart for Mr. Lestrange! There's not a man in the world I would break my little finger for! But my heart! that is too funny! You needn't be uneasy, mamma; I don't like Arthur Lestrange one bit, and I wouldn't marry him if you and papa too wanted me. Oh, such a proper young man! He doesn't think me fit company for his sister!”

“He said so! and you didn't give him a cut over the eyes with your whip? My God!”

“Gracious, no! He never says anything half so amusing! He's scorchingly polite! I would sooner fall in love with the bookbinder!”

“The bookbinder? Who's that? You mean the tutor, I suppose! I'm not up to the slang of this old brute of a country!”

“No, mamma; there is a man binding—or mending rather, the books in the library. He's going to teach me to shoe Miss Brown! Papa wouldn't like me to marry a blacksmith—I mean a bookbinder—would he?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then you would, mamma?” said Bab demurely, with two catherine-wheels of fun in her downcast eyes.

“If you go to do anything mad now, I'll—”

“Don't strain your innocent invention, mammy! I think I'll take Mr. Lestrange! Better anger one than both of you!”

“Tease me any more with your nonsense, and I'll set your father on you! Be off with you!”

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CHAPTER XX. BARBARA AND HER CRITICS.

While the two talked in the same pulverous fashion, the words came very differently from the two mouths. In the speech of the mother was more than a tone of the vulgarity of a conscious right to lay down the law, of the rudeness born of feeling above obedience and incapable of error—a rudeness identical with that of the typical vulgar duchess; the daughter's tone was playful, but dainty in its playfulness, and not without a certain unconscious dignity; her lawlessness was the freedom of the bird that cannot trespass, not that of the quadruped forcing its way. Her almost baby-like cheeks, her musical voice clear of any strain of sorrow, her quick relations with the whole world of things, her grace, more child-like than womanly, whether she stood or sat or moved about, all indicated a simple, fearless, true and trusting nature. Everybody at Mortgrange liked her; nearly everybody at Mortgrange had some different fault to find with her; all agreed that she wanted taming—except sir Wilton, who allowed the wildness, but would not hear of the taming. The hour of the morning or the night at which she would not go wandering alone about the park, or even outside it, had not yet been discovered.

“Why don't you look better after your friend, Theo?” said her father one day when Barbara's chair was empty at dinner—with his cold incisive voice, a little rasping now that the clutch of age's hand was beginning to close on his throat.

“She doesn't mind me, papa,” Theodora answered. “Do say something to her, mamma!”

“'Tis not my business to reform other people's children,” lady Ann returned.

“I find her exceedingly original!” remarked the baronet.

“In her manners, certainly,” responded his lady.

“I find them perfect. Their very audacity renders them faultless. And the charm is that she does not even suspect herself audacious.”

“That is her charm, I confess,” responded Arthur; “but it is a dangerous one, and may one day cause her to be sadly misunderstood.”

“A London drawing-room is your high court of parliament, Arthur!” said his father.

“Miss Wylder, with all her sweetness,” remarked Miss Malliver, “has not an idea of social distinction. She cannot understand why she should not talk to any farmer's man or dairymaid she happens to meet! It is not her talking to them I mind so much as the familiar way she does it. If they take liberties, it will be her own fault. Any groom might be pardoned for fancying she thought him as good as herself!”

“But she does,” answered Theodora. “Yesterday, I found her talking to the bookbinder as familiarly as if he had been Arthur!”

This was hardly correct, for Barbara talked to the bookbinder with a deference she never showed Lestrange.

“She lacks self-respect!” said lady Ann. “But we must deal with her gently, and try to do her good. I think myself there is not much amiss with her beyond love of her own way. Her dislike of restraint certainly does not befit a communicant!”

Lady Ann was an unfaltering church-goer, rigidly decorous in rendering what she imagined God, and knew the clergyman expected, and as rank a mammon-worshipper as any in the land.

“But I so far agree with sir Wilton,” she went on, “as to grant that her manners have in them the germ of possible distinction; and I think they will come to be all, or nearly all, that could be desired. We ought at least to give her the advantage of any doubt, and do what we can to lead her in the right direction.”

“It's a fine thing to go to church and have your wits sharpened!” said the baronet, with an ungenial laugh.

Sir Wilton regarded lady Ann as the coldest-blooded and most selfish woman in creation, and certainly she was not less selfish and was colder-blooded than he. Full of his own importance as any Pharisee—as full as he could be without making himself ridiculous, he resented the slight regard she showed to that importance. He believed himself wise in human nature, when in truth he was only quick to read in another what lay within the limited range of his own consciousness. Of the noble in humanity he knew next to nothing. To him all men were only selfish. The cause, though by no means the logical ground of this his belief, was his own ingrained selfishness. With his hazy yet keen cold eye, he was quick to see in another, and prompt to lay to his charge, the faults he pardoned in himself. He had some power over himself, for he very seldom went into a rage; but he kept his temper like a devil, and was coldly cruel. His wife had tamed him a good deal, without in the least reforming him. He would have hated her quite, but for the sort of respect she roused in him by surpassing him in his own kind. He cringed to her with a sneer. It was long since he had learned from her society to remember, with the nearest approach to compunction of which his moth-eaten heart was capable, the woman who had forsaken her own rank to brave the perils of his, and had sunk frozen to death by the cold of his contact. For some years he felt far more friendly to the offspring of the high-born lady than to that of the blacksmith's daughter; but as time went on, and the memory of the more plebeian infant's ugliness faded, he began to think how jolly it would be—how it would serve out her ladyship and her brood of icicles, if after all the blacksmith's grandson turned up to oust the earl's. He grinned as he lay awake in the night, picturing to himself how the woman in the next room would take it. Him and his son together her ladyship might find almost too much for her! But for many years he had indulged in no allusion to the possible improbable, allowing her ladyship to refer to Arthur as the heir without hinting at the uncertainty of his position.

Lady Ann, from dwelling on what she counted the shame of his origin, had got so far toward persuading herself that the vanished child was base-born, that she scarcely doubted the possibility, were he to appear, of proving his claim false, and originated by conspiracy. Unable to learn from her husband when and where the baby was baptized, she concluded that he had never been baptized, and that there was no record of his birth. As the years went by, and nothing was heard of him, she grew more and more confident. Now and then a fear would cross her, but she always succeeded in stifling it—without, however, arriving at such a degree of certainty, that the thought of the child had no share in her regard for the wealthy Barbara, her encouragement of her general relations with the family, and her connivance at her frequent and prolonged visits during the absence of herself and sir Wilton.

She was now returned, and had found everything as she left it, with the insignificant difference that the bay-window of the library was occupied by a man at work repairing the books. She had resumed the reins of the family-coach, and now went on to play the part of a good providence, and drive the said coach to the top of the hill.

Sir Wilton, I have said, liked Barbara. She amused him, and amusement was the nearest to sunshine his soul was capable of reaching. All his weather else was gray, with a touch of the lurid on the western horizon—of which he was not weather-wise enough to take heed. He had been at school with Barbara's father, but did not like her any better for that. In youth they had not been friends, except in a way that brought their interests too much in collision for their friendship to last. It had ended in a quiet hate, each knowing too well how much the other knew to dare an open quarrel. But all that was many years away, and Tom Wylder had been long abroad and almost forgotten. Sir Wilton, notwithstanding, admired the forgivingness of his own disposition when he found himself wondering how Tom Wylder would regard an alliance with his old rival. Doubtless he would like his daughter to be my lady, but he might be looking for a loftier title than his son could give her!

Sir Wilton was incapable, however, of taking any active interest in the matter. The well-being of his family, when he himself should be out of the way, did not much affect him. Nothing but his lower nature had ever roused him to action of any kind. How far the idea of betterment had ever shown itself to him, God only knows. Apparently, he was a child of the evil one, whom nothing but the furnace could cleanse. Almost the only thing he could now imagine giving him vivid pleasure, was to see his wife thoroughly annoyed.

All he had ever had of the manners of a gentleman, remained with him. He was courteous to ladies, never swore in their presence—except sometimes in a mutter at his wife, and could upon occasion show a kindness that cost him nothing. Humanity was not all dead out of him; neither was there a purely human thought in him. On Barbara he smiled his sweetest smile: it owed most of its sweetness to the dentist.

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CHAPTER XXI. THE PARSON'S PARABLE.

Mr. Wingfold went as he had come, thoughtful even to trouble. What was to be done for the woman? What was his part, as parson of the parish, with regard to her behaviour in church? Was it or was it not his part to take public notice of what she intended, if not as a defiance to God, at least as an open expression of her bitter resentment of his dealing with her? The creator's discipline did not suit his creature's taste, and she would let him know it: whether it suited her necessities, she did not ask or care; she knew nothing of her necessities—only of her desires. Had she had a suspicion that she was an eternal creature, poor as well as miserable, blind and naked as well as bereaved and angry, she might have allowed some room for God to show himself right. But she was ignorant of herself as any savage. Was Wingfold to take her insolence in church as a thing done to himself, which he must endure with patience? or, putting himself out of the question, and regarding her conduct only as a protest against the ways of God with her, must he leave reproof as well as vengeance to the Lord? Was it his business, or was it not, to rebuke her, and make his rebuke as open as her offence? It troubled him almost beyond bearing to think that some of his flock might imagine that the great lady of the parish was allowed to behave herself unseemly, where another would be exposed to shame. But how abhorrent to him was a public contention in the church, and on the Lord's day! Mrs. Wylder was just the woman to challenge forcible expulsion, and make the circumstances of it as flagrant as possible! She might even use both pistol and whip! What better opportunity could she find for giving point to her appeal against God! A man might, in the rage of disappointment, cry out that there could be no God where baffle met the holiest instinct—that blundering chance must rule; he might, illogical with grief, declare that as God could treat him so, he would believe in him no longer; or he might assert that an evil being, not a good, was at the heart of life—a devil and not a God, for he was one who created and forgot, or who remembered and did not care—who quickened exposure but gave no shield! called from the void a being filled with doorless avenues to pain, and abandoned him to incarnate cruelty, that he might make him sport with the wildness of his dismay! but here was a woman who did not say that God was not, or that he was not good, but with passionate self-party-spirit cried out, “He is against me! he sides with my husband! He is not my friend, but his: I will let him know how I resent his unfairness!” Whether God was good or bad she did not care—that was not a point she was concerned in; all she heeded was how he behaved to her—whether he took part with her husband or herself. He had torn from her the desire of her heart and left her desolate: she would worship him no longer! She had been brought up to believe there was a God, and had never doubted his existence: with her whole will and passion she opposed that which she called God. She had never learned to yield when wrong, and now she was sure she was right. Though hopeless she resisted. She cried out against God, but believed him by his own act helpless to deliver her, for what could he do against the grave? Powerless for her as unfriendly toward her, why should she worship him? Why should she pay court to one who neither would nor could give her what she wanted? What was he God for? Was she to go to his house, and carry herself courteously, as if he were her friend! She would not! And that there might be no mistake as to how she regarded him, she would sit in her pew and read her novel, while the friends of God said their prayers to him! If she annoyed them, so much the better, for the surer she might hope that he was annoyed!

It may seem to some incredibly terrible that one should believe in God and defy him! But do none of us, who say also we believe in God, and who are far from defying him, ever behave like Mrs. Wylder? It is one thing to believe in a God; it is quite another to believe in God! Every time we grumble at our fate, every time we are displeased, hurt, resentful at this or that which comes to us, every time we do not receive the suffering sent us, “with both hands,” as William Law says, we are of the same spirit with this half-crazy woman. In some fashion, and that a real one, she must have believed in the God against whom she urged her complaint; and it is rather to her praise that, like Job, she did it openly, and not with mere base grumblings in her heart at her fireside. It is mean to believe half-way, to believe in words, and in action deny. One of four gates stands open to us: to deny the existence of God, and say we can do without him; to acknowledge his existence, but say he is not good, and act as true men resisting a tyrant; to say, “I would there were a God,” and be miserable because there is none; or to say there must be a God, and he must be perfect in goodness or he could not be, and give ourselves up to him heart and soul and hands and history.

But what was parson Wingfold to do in the matter? Was he to allow the simple sheep of his flock to think him afraid of the squire's lady? or was he to venture an uproar in the church on a Sunday morning? His wife and he had often talked the thing over, but had arrived at no conclusion. He went to her now, and told her all that had passed.

“Isn't it time to do something?” she said.

“Indeed I think so—but what?” he answered. “I wish you would show me what I ought to do! Let me see it, and I will do it.” She was silent for a moment.

“Couldn't you preach at her?” she said, with a laugh in which was an odd mingling of doubt and merriment.

“I have always thought that a mean thing, and have never done it—except by dwelling on broadest principles. That an evil principle has an advocate present, is no reason for sparing it: what am I there for? But to preach that the many may turn on the one—that I never could do!”

“This case is different from any other. The wrong is done continuously, in the very eyes of the congregation, and for the sake of its being seen,” Mrs. Wingfold answered. “Neither would you be the assailant; you would but accept, not give the challenge. For I don't know how many Sundays, she has been pitting her position in the pew against yours in the pulpit! Believing it out of your power to do anything, she flaunts her French novel in your face; and those that can't see her, see her yellow novel in your eyes, and think about her and you, instead of the things you are saying to them! For the sake of the work given you, for the sake of your influence with the people, you must do something!”

“It is God she defies, not me.”

“I think she defies you to say an honest word on his behalf. Your silence must seem to her an acknowledgment that she is right.”

“That cannot be, after what I have said to her more than once in her own house.”

“Then at least she must think that either you have no authority to drive from the little temple one of the cows of Bashan, or are afraid of her horns.”

“Quite right, Nelly!” cried the rector; “you are quite right. Only you don't give me a hint what to do!”

“Am I not saying as plain as I can that you must preach at her?”

“H'm! I didn't expect that of you!”

“No; for if you could have expected it of me, you would have thought of it yourself! But just think! A public scandal requires public treatment. You will not be dragging her before the people; she has put herself there! She is brazen, and must be treated as brazen—set in the full glare of opinion. And I think, if I were a clergyman, I should know how to do it!”

Wingfold was silent. She must be right! Something glimmered before him—something possible—he could not see plainly what.

“It is all very well to make such a clamour about her boy,” continued his wife, “but every one knows that she quarrelled with him dreadfully—that for days at a time they would be cat and dog with each other. Her animal instinct lasted it out, and she did not come to hate him; but I can't help thinking it must have been in a great measure because her husband favoured the other that she took up this one with such passion. I have been told she would abuse him in language not fit to repeat, the little wretch answering her back, and choking with rage that he could not tear her.”

“Who told you?” asked the parson.

“I would rather not say.”

“Are you sure it is not mere gossip?”

“Quite sure. To be gossip, a thing must go through two mouths at least, and I had it first-mouth. I tell it you because I think it worth your knowing.”

The next Sunday morning, there lay the lady as usual, only her novel was a red one. When the parson went into the pulpit, he cast one glance on the gallery to his right, then spoke thus:—

“My friends, I will follow the example of our Lord, and speak to you to-day in a parable. The Lord said there are things better spoken in parables, because of the eyes that will not see, and the ears that will not hear.

“There was once a mother left alone with her little boy—the only creature in the world or out of it that she cared for. She was a good mother to him, as good a mother as you can think, never overbearing or unkind. She never thought of herself, but always of the desire of her heart, the apple of her eye, her son born of her own body. It was not because of any return he could make her that she loved him. It was not to make him feel how good she was, that she did everything for him. It was not to give him reasons for loving her, but because she loved him, and because he needed her. He was a delicate child, requiring every care she could lavish upon him, and she did lavish it. Oh, how she loved him! She would sit with the child on her lap from morning till night, gazing on him; she always went to sleep with him in her bosom—as close to her as ever he could lie. When she woke in the dark night, her first movement was to strain him closer, her next to listen if he was breathing—for he might have died and been lost! When he looked up at her with eyes of satisfaction, she felt all her care repaid.

“The years went on, and the child grew, and the mother loved him more and more. But he did not love her as she loved him. He soon began to care for the things she gave him, but he did not learn to love the mother who gave them. Now the whole good of things is to be the messengers of love—to carry love from the one heart to the other heart; and when these messengers are fetched instead of sent, grasped at, that is, by a greedy, ungiving hand, they never reach the heart, but block up the path of love, and divide heart from heart; so that the greedy heart forgets the love of the giving heart more and more, and all by the things it gives. That is the way generosity fares with the ungenerous. The boy would be very pleasant to his mother so long as he thought to get something from her; but when he had got what he wanted, he would forget her until he wanted something more.

“There came at last a day when she said to him, 'Dear boy, I want you to go and fetch me some medicine, for I feel very poorly, and am afraid I am going to be ill!' He mounted his pony, and rode away to get the medicine. Now his mother had told him to be very careful, because the medicine was dangerous, and he must not open the bottle that held it. But when he had it, he said to himself, 'I dare say it is something very nice, and mother does not want me to have any of it!' So he opened the bottle and tasted what was in it, and it burned him terribly. Then he was furious with his mother, and said she had told him not to open the bottle just to make him do it, and vowed he would not go back to her! He threw the bottle from him, and turned, and rode another way, until he found himself alone in a wild forest, where was nothing to eat, and nothing to shelter him from the cold night, and the wind that blew through the trees, and made strange noises. He dismounted, afraid to ride in the dark, and before he knew, his pony was gone. Then he began to be miserably frightened, and to wish he had not run away. But still he blamed his mother, who might have known, he said, that he would open the bottle.

“The mother got very uneasy about her boy, and went out to look for him. The neighbours too, though he was not a nice boy, and none but his mother liked him, went out also, for they would gladly find him and take him home to her; and they came at last to the wood, with their torches and lanterns.

“The boy was lying under a tree, and saw the lights, and heard the voices, and knew it was his mother come. Then the old wickedness rose up fresh in his heart, and he said to himself: 'She shall have trouble yet before she finds me! Am I to come and go as she pleases!' He lay very still; and when he saw them coming near, crept farther, and again lay still. Thus he went on doing, and so avoided his saviours. He heard one say there were wolves in the wood, for that was the sound of them; but he was just the kind of boy that will not believe, but thinks every one has a purpose of his own in saying this or that. So he slipped and slipped away until at length all despaired of finding him, and left the wood.

“Suddenly he knew that he was again alone. He gave a great shriek, but no one heard it. He stood quaking and listening. Presently his pony came rushing past him, with two or three wolves behind him. He started to his feet and began to run, wild to get out of the wood. But he could not find the way, and ran about this way and that until utter despair came down upon him, and all he could do was to lie still as a mouse lest the wolves should hear him.

“And as he lay he began at last to think that he was a wicked child; that his mother had done everything to make him good, and he would not be good; and now he was lost, and the wolves alone would find him! He sank at last into a stupor, and lay motionless, with death and the wolves after him.

“He came to himself in the arms of a strange woman, who had taken him up, and was carrying him home.

“The name of the woman was Sorrow—a wandering woman, a kind of gypsy, always going about the world, and picking up lost things. Nobody likes her, hardly anybody is civil to her; but when she has set anybody down and is gone, there is often a look of affection and wonder and gratitude sent after her. For all that, however, very few are glad to be found by her again.

“Sorrow carried him weeping home to his mother. His mother came out, and took him in her arms. Sorrow made her courtesy, and went away. The boy clung to his mother's neck, and said he was sorry. In the midst of her joy his mother wept bitterly, for he had nearly broken her heart. She could not get the wolves out of her mind.

“But, alas! the boy forgot all, and was worse than ever. He grew more and more cruel to his mother, and mocked at every word she said to him; so that—”

There came a cry from the gallery. The congregation started in sudden terror to their feet. The rector stopped, and turning to the right, stood gazing. In the front of the squire's pew stood Mrs. Wylder, white, and speechless with rage. For a moment she stood shaking her fist at the preacher. Then, in a hoarse broken voice, came the words—

“It's a lie. My boy was never cruel to me. It's a wicked lie.”

She could say no more, but stood and glared, hate in her fierce eyes, and torture in her colourless face.

“Madam, you have betrayed yourself,” said the rector solemnly. “If your son behaved well to you, it makes it the worse in you to behave ill to your Father. From Sunday to Sunday you insult him with rude behaviour. I tell you so in the face of this congregation, which knows it as well as I. Hitherto I have held my tongue—from no fear of the rich, from no desire to spare them deserved disgrace in the eyes of the poor, but because I shrank from making the house of God a place of contention. Madam, you have behaved shamefully, and I do my duty in rebuking you.”

The whole congregation were on their feet, staring at her. A moment she stood, and would have brazened out the stare. But she felt the eyes of the motionless hundreds blazing upon her, and the culprit soul grew naked in the presence of judging souls. Her nerve gave way; she turned her back, left the pew, and fled from the church by the squire's door, into the grounds of Wylder Hall.

Happily Barbara was not in the church that morning.

The next Sunday the squire's pew was empty. The red volume lay open on its face upon the floor of it.

Wingfold's dear plot had palled. He had rough-hewed his end, but the divinity had shaped it. When the squire came to know what had taken place, he made his first call on the rector. He said nothing about his wife, but plainly wished it understood that he bore him no ill will for what he had done.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XXII. THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.

The rector had often wished his wife could in some natural way get hold of Miss Wylder; he suspected something exceptionally fine in her: how else could she, with such a father and such a mother, have such a countenance? There must be a third factor in the affair, and one worth knowing—namely herself! That she seemed to avoid being reckoned among church-goers might be a point in her favour! What reports reached him of her wild ways, mingled with exaggerated stories of her lawlessness, did not shock him: what was true in them might spring from mere exuberance of life, whose joy was her only law—and yet a real law to her!

He had had no opportunity of learning either how peculiar the girl was, or how capable. She was not yet up to his teaching; she had to have other water to drink first, and was now approaching a source that might have caused him anxiety for her, had he ever so little believed in chance. But a shepherd is none the less a true shepherd that he leaves plenty of liberty to the lamb to pick its own food. That its best instincts may not be to the taste either of its natural guardians or the public, is nothing against those instincts. Without appearing to their guardians both strange and headstrong, some sheep would never get near the food necessary to keep them alive. Confined to the provender even their shepherds would have them contented withal, many would die. Sometimes, to escape from the arid wastes of “society,” haunted with the cries of its spiritual greengrocers, and find the pasture on which their souls can live, they have to die, and climb the grassy slopes of the heavenly hills.

Barbara had as yet had no experience of pain—or of more at least than came from sympathy with suffering—a sympathy which, though ready, could hardly be deep in one who had never had a headache herself. To all dumb suffering things, she was very gentle and pitiful; but her pity was like that of a child over her doll.

She was always glad to get away from home. While her father was paying his long-delayed visit to the rector, she was flying over hedge and ditch and rail, in a line for that gate of Mortgrange which Simon Armour and his grandson found open when first the former took the latter to see the place: Barbara had a key to it.

She went with swift gliding step, like that of a red Indian, into the library. Richard was piecing the broken cords of a great old folio—the more easily that they were double—in order to re-attach the loosened sheets and the hanging board, and so get the book ready for a new cover. She carried in her hand something yet more sorely in need of mending—a pigeon with a broken wing, which she had seen lying in the park, and had dismounted to take. It kept opening and shutting its eyes, and she knew that nothing could be done for it; but the mute appeal of the dying thing had gone to her heart, and she wanted sympathy, whether for it or for herself she could hardly have distinguished. How she came to wake a little more just then, I cannot tell, but the fact is a joint in her history. The jar to the pigeon's life affected her as a catastrophe. She felt that there a crisis had come: a living conscious thing could do nothing for its own life, and lay helpless. Say rather—seemed so to lie. Oh, surely it is in reason that not a sparrow should fall to the ground without the Father! To whom but the father of the children that bemoan its fate, should the children carry his sparrow? But Barbara was carrying her pigeon where was no help for the heart of either.

“Ah, poor thing,” said Richard, “I fear we can do nothing for it! But it will be at rest soon! It is fast going.”

“Ah! but where?” said Barbara, to whom that moment came the question for the first time.

“Nowhere,” answered Richard.

“How can that be? If I were going, I should be going somewhere! I couldn't go nowhere if I tried ever so. I don't like you to say it is going nowhere! Poor little thing! I won't let you go nowhere!”

“Well!” returned Richard, a little bewildered, “what would you have me say? You know what I mean! It is going not to be, that is all.”

“That is all! How would you like to be told you were going nowhere—going not to be—that was all?”

Richard saw that to declare abruptly his belief that he was himself as much going nowhere as any pigeon that ever died, would probably be to close the door between them. At the same time, if he left her to imagine that he expected life for himself, but not for the animals, she must think him selfish! Unwilling therefore to answer, he took refuge in his genuine sympathy with suffering.

“Is it not strange,” he said, and would have taken from her hands the wounded bird, but she would not part with it, “that men should take pleasure in killing—especially a creature like that, so full of innocent content? It seems to me the greatest pity to stop such a life!”

As he spoke there came upon him the dim sense of a foaming reef of argument ahead—such as this: “Then there ought to be no death! And what ought not to be, cannot be! But there is death: what then is death? If it be a stopping of life, then that is which cannot be. But it may be only a change in the form of life that looks like a stopping, and is not! If Death be stronger than Life, so that he stops life, how then was Life able so to flout him, that he, the thing that was not, arose from the antenatal sepulchre on which Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it? Life alone is: nothingness is not; Death cannot destroy; he is not the antagonist, not the opposite of life.” Some such argument Richard, I say, saw vaguely through the gloom ahead, and began to beat to windward.

“Did you ever notice,” he said, “in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the point at which the dead bird falls from the neck of the man?”

It was a point, however, at which neither he nor Barbara was capable of seeing the depth of the poem. Richard thought it was the new-born love of beauty that freed the mariner; he did not see that it was the love of life, the new-born sympathy with life.

“I don't even know what you are talking of,” answered Barbara. “Do tell me. It sounds like something wonderful! Is it a story?”

“Yes—a wonderful story.”

Richard had not attempted to understand Coleridge's philosophy, taking it for quite obsolete; and it was but doubtfully that he had made trial of his poems. Happily choosing Christabel, however, for a tasting-piece, he was immediately enchanted and absorbed; and never again had he been so keenly aware of disappointment as when he came to the end, and found, as an Irishman might say, that it was not there: a lump gathered in his throat; he flung the book from him, and it was a week before he could open it again.

The next poem he tried was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which he read with almost equal delight, bewitched with many an individual phrase, with the melody unique of many a stanza, with the strangeness of its speech, with the loveliness of its real, and the wildness of its invented pictures. But he had not yet discovered, or even begun to foresee the marvel of its whole. A man must know something of repentance before he can understand The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The volume containing it had come into his hands as one of a set his father had to bind. It belonged to a worshipper of Coleridge, who had possessed himself of every edition of every book he had written, or had had a share in writing. There he read first the final form of The Rime as it appeared in the Sibylline Leaves of 1817: when he came to look at that in the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, he found differences many and great between the two. He found also in the set an edition with a form of the poem differing considerably from the last as well as the first. He had brought together and compared all these forms of the poem, noting every minutest variation—a mode of study which, in the case of a masterpiece, richly repays the student. It was no wonder, therefore, that Richard had almost every word of it on the very tip of his tongue.

He began to repeat the ballad, and went on, never for a moment intermitting his work. Without the least attempt at what is called recitation, of which happily he knew nothing, he made both sense and music tell, saying it as if he were for the hundredth time reading it aloud for his own delight. If his pronunciation was cockneyish, it was but a little so.

The very first stanza took hold of Barbara. She sat down by Richard's table, softly laid the dying bird in her lap, and listened with round eyes and parted lips, her rapt soul sitting in her ears.

But Richard had not gone far before he hesitated, his memory perplexed between the differing editions.

“Have you forgotten it? I am so sorry!” said Barbara. “It is wonderful—not like anything I ever heard, or saw, or tasted before. It smells like a New Zealand flower called—” Here she said a word Richard had never heard, and could never remember. “I don't wonder at your liking books, if you find things in them of that sort!”

“I've not exactly forgotten it,” answered Richard; “but I've copied out different editions for comparison, and they've got a little mixed in my head.”

“But surely the printers, with all their blunders and changes, can't keep you from seeing what the author wrote!”

“The editions I mean are those of the author himself. He kept making changes, some of them very great changes. Not many people know the poem as Coleridge first published it.”

“Coleridge! Who was he?”

“The man that wrote the poem.”

“Oh! He altered it afterwards?”

“Yes, very much.”

“Did he make it better?”

“Much better.”

“Then why should you care any more for the first way of it?”

“Just because it is different. A thing not so good may have a different goodness. A man may not be so good as another man, and yet have some good things in him the other has not. That implies that not every change he made was for the better. And where he has put a better phrase, or passage, the former may yet be good. So you see a new form may be much better, and yet the old form remain much too good to be parted with. In any case it is intensely interesting to see how and why he changed a thing or its shape, and to ponder wherein it is for the better or the worse. That is to take it like a study in natural history. In that we learn how an animal grows different to meet a difference in the supply of its needs; in the varying editions of a poem we see how it alters to meet a new requirement of the poet's mind. I don't mean the cases are parallel, but they correspond somehow. If I were a schoolmaster, I should make my pupils compare different forms of the same poem, and find out why the poet made the changes. That would do far more for them, I think, than comparing poets with each other. The better poets are—that is, the more original they are—the less there is in them to compare.”

“But I want to hear the rest of the story. Never mind the differences in the telling of it.”

“I'm afraid I can't get into the current of it now.”

“You can look at the book! It must be somewhere among all these!”

“No doubt. But I haven't time to look for it now.”

“It won't take you a minute to find it.”

“I must not leave my work.”

“It wouldn't cost you more than one tiny minute!” pleaded Barbara like a child.

“Let me explain to you, miss:—I find the only way to be sure I don't cheat, is to know I haven't stopped an instant to do anything for myself. Sometimes I have stopped for a while; and then when I wanted to make up the time, I couldn't be quite sure how much I owed, and that made me give more than I needed—which I didn't like when I would gladly have been doing something else. When the time is my own, it is of far more value to me for the insides than to my employer for the outsides of the books. So you see, for my own sake as well as his, I cannot stop till my time is up.”

“That is being honest!”

“Who can consent to be dishonest! It is the meanest thing to undertake work and then imagine you show spirit by shirking what you can of it. There's a lot of fellows like that! I would as soon pick a pocket as undertake and not do!”

Barbara begged no more.

“But I can talk while I work, miss,” Richard went on; “and I will try again to remember.”

“Please, please do.”

Richard thought a little, and presently resuming the poem, went on to the end of the first part. As he finished the last stanza—

God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?—With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross!'”—

“Ah!” cried Barbara, “I see now what made you think of the poem!”—and she looked down at the throbbing bird in her lap.

It opened its dark eyes once more—with a reeling, pitiful look at her, Barbara thought—quivered a little, and lay still. She burst into tears.

Richard dropped his work, and made a step toward her.

“Never mind,” she said. “One has got to cry so much, and I may as well cry for the bird! I'm all right now, thank you! Please go on. The bird is dead, and I'm glad. I will let it lie a little, and then bury it. If it be anywhere, perhaps it will one day know me, and then it will love me. Please go on with the poem. It will make me forget. I'm not bound to remember, am I—where I'm not to blame, I mean, and cannot help?”

“Certainly not!” acquiesced Richard, and began the second part.

“I see! I see!” cried Barbara, wiping her eyes. “They were cross with him for killing the bird, not because they loved the beautiful creature, but because it was unlucky to kill him! And then when nothing but good came, they said it was quite right to kill him, and told lies of him, and said he was a bad bird, and brought the fog and mist!—I wonder what's coming to them!—That's not the end, is it? It can't be!”

“No; it's not nearly done yet. It's only beginning.”

“I'm so glad! Do go on.”

She was eager as any child. Coleridge could not have desired a better listener.

“I know! I know!” she said presently. “We were caught in a calm as we came home! My father is fond of the sea, and brought us round the Cape in a sailing-vessel. It was horrid. It lasted only three days, but I felt as if I should die. It wasn't long enough, I suppose, to draw out the creeping things.”

“Perhaps it wasn't near enough to the equator for them,” answered Richard, and went on:—

“Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young;
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.”

“Poor man! And in such weather!” exclaimed Barbara. “And such a huge creature! I see! They thought now the killing of the bird had brought the calm, and they would have their revenge! A bad set, those sailors! People that deserve punishment always want to punish. Do go on.”

When the skeleton-ship came, her eyes grew with listening like those of one in a trance.

“What a horrid, live dead woman!” she said. “Her whiteness is worse than any blackness. But I wish he had told us what Death was like!”

“In the first edition,” returned Richard, much delighted that she missed what constructive symmetry required, “there is a description of Death. I doubt if you would like it, though. You don't like horrid things?”

“I do—if they should be horrid, and are horrid enough.”

“Coleridge thought afterwards it was better to leave it out!”

“Tell it me, anyhow.”

“His bones were black with many a crack,
All black and bare, I ween;
Jet-black and bare, save where with rust,
Of mouldy damps and charnel crust,
They were patched with purple and green.

“—There! What do you think of that?”

“He is nothing like so horrid as the woman!”

“She is more horrid in the first edition.”

“How?”

“Her lips are red, her looks are free,
Her locks are yellow as gold;
Her skin is as white as leprosy,
And she is far liker Death than he;
Her flesh makes the still air cold.”

“I do think that is worse. Tell me again how the other goes.”

“The Night-Mare Life-in-death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.”

“Yes, the other is worse! I can hardly tell why, except it be that you get at the sense of it easier. What does the Nightmare Life-in-Death mean?”

“I don't know. I can't quite get at it.”

How should he? Richard was too close to the awful phantom to know that this was her portrait.

“There's another dreadful stanza in the first edition,” he went on. “It is repeated in the second, but left out in the last. I fancy the poet let himself be overpersuaded to omit it. The poem was not actually printed without it until after his death: he had only put it in the errata, to be omitted.—When the woman whistles with joy at having won the ancient Mariner,

“'A gust of wind sterte up behind,'

“—as if, like the sailors, she had whistled for it:—

“'A gust of wind sterte up behind,
And whistled through his bones;
Through the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth,
Half whistles and half groans;'

“and the spectre-bark is blown along by this breath coming out of the bosom of the skeleton.”

“I think it was a great mistake to leave that verse out!” said Barbara. “There is no nasty horror in it! There is a little in the description of Death!”

“I think with you,” returned Richard, more and more astonished at the insight of a girl who had read next to nothing. “Our lecturer at King's,” he went on, “pointed out to us, in this part, what some call a blunder.”

“What is it?”

“I will give you the verses again; and you see if you can pick it out.”

“Do, please.”

“—Till clombe above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip.”

“I never saw a star there! But I see nothing wrong.”

“Which is the nearest to us of the heavenly bodies?”

“The moon, I suppose.”

“Certainly:—how, then, could a star come between us and it? For if the star were within the tip of the moon, it must be between us and the dark part of the moon!”

“I see! How stupid of me! But let me think!—If the star were just on the edge of the moon, between the horns, it would almost look as if it were within the tips—might it not?”

“That's the best that can be said for it anyhow,—except indeed that the poor ignorant sailor might, in the midst of such horrors, well make the blunder.—By the way, in the first edition it stood as you have just said: the line was,

“'Almost within the tips.'”

“What did he change it to?”

“He made it—

“'Within the nether tip.'”

“Why did he change it?”

“You would see that at the first glance, if you were used to riming.”

“Are you a poet, then, as well as a blacksmith and a bookbinder?”

“Too much of a poet, I hope, to imagine myself more than a whittler of reeds!” answered Richard.

He was not sorry, however, to let Barbara know him for a poor relation of the high family of poets. In truth, what best enabled him to understand their work, was the humble work of the same sort he did himself.

She did not understand what he meant by a whittler of reeds, but she rightly took what he said for a humble affirmative.

“I begin to be frightened at you!” she rejoined, half meaning it. “Who knows what else you may not be!”

“I am little enough of anything,” answered Richard, “but nothing that I do not wish to be more of.”

A short silence followed.

“You have not told me yet why he changed that line!” resumed Barbara.

“Better wait until I can show it you in the book: then you will see at once.”

“Please, go on then. I don't know anything about the poem yet! I don't know why it was written!”

“You like some dreams, though they have no reason in them, don't you?”

“Yes; but then I suppose there is reason in the poem!”

“There is, indeed!” said Richard, and went on.

But presently she stopped him.

“One thing I should like to know before we go further,” she said; “—why they all fell down except the ancient Mariner.”

“You remember that Death and the woman were casting dice?”

“Yes.”

“It is not very clear, but this is how I understand the thing:—They diced for the crew, one by one; Death won every one till they came to the last, the ancient Mariner himself, and the woman, a sort of live Death, wins him. That is why she cries, 'I've won, I've won!' and whistles thrice—though she has won only one out of two hundred. I should think she was used to Death having more than she, else she wouldn't have been so pleased. Perhaps she seldom got one!”

“Yes, I see all that. But things oughtn't to go by the casting of dice. Money may, for that does not signify, but not the souls and bodies of men. It should not be the way in a poem any more than in the open world.—Let me think!—I have it!—They were not good men, those sailors! They first blamed, and then justified, and then again blamed and cruelly punished the poor mariner, who had done wrong certainly, but was doubtless even then sorry for it. He was cruel to a bird he did not know, and they were cruel to a man they did know! So they are taken, and he is left—to come well out of it at last, I hope.—Yes, it's all right! Now you can go on.”

She said nothing as he showed her the deck strewn so thick with the dead bodies, whose cursing eyes all looked one way; but when the heavenly contrast came:—

The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside;—

she gave a deep sigh of delight, and said—

“Ah, don't I know her, the beauty! Isn't it just many a time she has made me sick with the love of her, and her peace, and her ways of looking, and walking, and talking—for talk she does to those that can listen hard! I dare say, in this old country where she's been about so long, you will think it silly to make so much of her; but you don't know here what it is to have her night after night for your one companion! She never grows a downright friend, though—a friend you've got at the heart of! She always looks at you as if she were saying—'Yes, yes; I know what you are thinking! but I have that in me you can never know, and I can never tell! It will go down with me to the grave of the great universe, and no one will ever know it! It is so lovely!—and oh, so sad!'”

She was silent. Richard could not answer. He saw her far away like the moon she spoke of. She was growing to him a marvel and a mystery. Something strange seemed befalling him. Was she weaving a spell about his soul? Was she fettering him for her slave? Was she one of the wild, bewildering creatures of ancient lonely belief, that are the souls of the loveliest things, but can detach themselves from them, and wander out in garments more immediately their own? Was she salamander or sylph, naiad or undine, oread or dryad?—But then she had such a head, and they were all rather silly!

When the ballad told how silvery were the sea-snakes in the moonlight, and how gorgeously varied in the red shadow, Richard looked for her to show delight in the play of their colours; but, though the sweet strong little mouth smiled, her brows looked more puzzled than pleased—which was a thing noteworthy.

Any marvel in Nature, however new, Barbara would have welcomed with bare delight; she would have asked neither the why, nor the how, nor the final cause of the phenomenon—as if, being natural, it must be right, and she needed not trouble herself; but here, in this poem, a world born of the imagination of a man, she wanted to know about everything, whether it was, or would be, or ought to be just so—whether, in a word, every fact was souled with a reason, as it ought to be. Perhaps she demanded such satisfaction too soon; perhaps she ought to have waited for the whole, and, having found that a harmonious thing, then first have inquired into the truth of its parts; but so it was: she must know as she went, that she might know when she arrived! But in this she revealed a genuine artistic faculty—that she gave herself up to the poet, and allowed him to inspire her, yet would have reason from him.

Richard went on:—

“O happy living things! No tongue
Their beauty might declare;
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware!
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

“The self-same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea.”

Barbara jumped up, clapping her hands with delight.

“I knew something was going to happen!” she cried. “I knew it was coming all right!”

“You have not heard the end yet! You don't know what may be coming!” protested Richard.

“Nothing can go wrong now! The man's love is awake, and he will be sorrier and sorrier for what he did! Instead of saying, 'The wrigglesome, slimy things!' he blesses them; and because he is going to be a friend to the other creatures in the house, and live on good terms with them, the body he had killed tumbles from his neck; the bad deed is gone down into the depth of the great sea, and he is able to say his prayers again;—no, not that exactly; it must be something better than saying prayers now!”—She paused a moment, then added, “It must be something I think I don't know yet!” and sat down.

Richard heard and admired: he thought that as she had perceived there was something better than saying prayers, she would pray no more!

“Go on; go on,” she said. “But if you like to stop, I shan't mind. I have no fear now. It's all going right, and must soon come all right!”

“O sleep! It is a gentle thing,”

said Richard, going on.

“There it is!” she interrupted. “I knew it was all coming right! He can sleep now!”

“O sleep! It is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle deep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.”

Some one was in the room, the door of which had been open all the time. The sky was so cloudy, and the twilight so far advanced, that neither of them, Barbara absorbed in the poem and Richard in the last of his day's work, had heard any one enter.

“Why don't you ring for a lamp?” said Lestrange.

“There is no occasion; I have just done,” answered Richard.

“You cannot surely see in this light!” said Arthur, who was short-sighted. “You certainly were not at your work when I came into the room!”

He thought Richard had caught up the piece of leather he was paring, in order to deceive him.

“Indeed, sir, I was.”

“You were not. You were reading!”

“I was not reading, sir. I was busy with the last of my day's work.”

“Do not tell me you were not reading: I heard you!”

“You did hear me, sir; but you did not hear me reading,” rejoined Richard, growing angry with the tone of the young man, and with his unreadiness to believe him.

Many workmen, having told a lie, would have been more indignant at not being believed, than was Richard speaking the truth; still, he was growing angry.

“You must have a wonderful memory, then!” said Lestrange. “But, excuse me, we don't care to hear your voice in the house.”

The same moment, he either discovered, or pretended to discover, Barbara's presence.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Wylder!” he said. “I did not know he was amusing you! I did not see you were in the room!”

“I suppose,” returned Barbara—and it savoured of the savage Lestrange sometimes called her—“you will be ordering the nightingales not to sing in your apple-trees next!”

“I don't understand you!”

“Neither do you understand Mr. Tuke, or you would not speak to him that way!”

She rose and walked to the door, but turned as she went, and added—

“He was repeating the loveliest poem I ever heard—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.—I didn't know there could be such a poem!” she added simply.

“It is not one I care about. But you need not take it second-hand from Tuke: I will lend it you.”

“Thank you!” said Barbara, in a tone which was not of gratitude, and left the room.

Lestrange stood for a moment, but finding nothing suitable to say, turned and followed her, while Richard bit his lip to keep himself silent. He knew, if he spoke, there would be an end; and he did not want this to be his last sight of the wonderful creature!

Barbara went to the door with the intention of going to the stables for Miss Brown and galloping straight home. But she bethought herself that so she might seem to be ashamed. She was not Arthur's guest! He had been insolent to her friend, who had done more for her already than ever Arthur was likely to do, but that was no reason why she should run away from him—just the contrary! She would like to punish him for it somehow!—not shoot him, for she would not kill a pigeon, and to kill a man would be worse, though he wasn't so nice as a pigeon!—but she would like—yes, she would like to give him just three good cuts across the shoulders with her new riding-whip! What right had he to speak so to his superior! By being a true workman, Mr. Tuke was a gentleman! Could Arthur Lestrange have talked like that? Could he have spoken the poetry like that? The bookbinder was worth a hundred of him! Could Arthur shoe a horse? What if the working man were to turn out the real lord of the creation, and the gentleman have to black his boots! There was something like it in the gospel!

She did not know that in general the working man is as foolish and unfit as the rich man; that he only wants to be rich, and trample on his own past. The working man may perish like the two hundred of the crew, and the rich man may be saved like the Ancient Mariner!

It is the poor man that gives the rich man all the pull on him, by cherishing the same feelings as the rich man concerning riches, by fancying the rich man because of his riches the greater man, and longing to be rich like him. A man that can do things is greater than any man who only has things. True, a rich man can get mighty things done, but he does not do them. He may be much the greater for willing them to be done, but he is not the greater for the actual doing of them.

“At any rate,” said Barbara to herself, “I like this working man better than that gentleman!”

Richard stood for a while boiling with indignation. He would have cared less if he had been sure he had answered him properly, but he could not remember what he had said.

The clock struck the hour that ended his workday. Instead of sitting down to read, he set out for the smithy. It was not a week since he had seen his grandfather, but he wanted motion, and desired a human face that belonged to him. It was rather dark when he reached it, but the old man had not yet dropped work. The sparks were flying wild about his gray head as Richard drew near.

“Can I help you, grandfather?” he said.

“No, no, lad; your hands are too soft by this time—with your bits of brass wheels, and scraps of leather, and needles, and paste! No, no, lad;—thou cannot help the old man to-night.—But you're not in earnest, are you?” he added, looking up suddenly. “You 'ain't left your place?”

“No, but my day's work being over, why shouldn't I help you to get yours over! When first I came you expected me to do so!”

“Look here, lad!—as a man gets older he comes to think more of fair play, and less of his rights: it seems to me that not your time only, but your strength as well belongs to the man who hires you; and if you weary yourself helping me, who have no claim, you cannot do so much or so good work for your master!—Do you see sense in that?”

“Indeed I do! I think you are quite right.”

“It is strange,” Simon went on, “how age makes you more particular! The thing I would have done without thinking when I was young, I think twice of now. Is that what we were sent here for—to grow honest, I wonder?—Depend upon it,” he resumed after a moment's silence, “there's a somewhere where the thing's taken notice of! There's a somebody as thinks about it!”

After more talk, and a cup of tea at the cottage, Richard set out for the lodgeless gate, already mentioned more than once, to which the housekeeper had lent him a key.

He had not got far into the park, when to his surprise he perceived, a little way off on the grass, a small figure gliding swiftly toward him through the dusk rather than the light of the moon, which, but just above the horizon, sent little of her radiance to the spot. It was Barbara.

“I have been watching for you ever so long!” she said. “They told me you had gone out, and I thought you might come home this way.”

“I wish I had known! I wouldn't have kept you waiting,” returned Richard.

“I want the rest of the poem,” she said. “It was horrid to have Arthur interrupt us! He was abominably rude too.”

“He certainly had no right to speak to me as he did. And if he had confessed himself wrong, or merely said he had made a mistake, I should have thought no more about it. I hope it is not true you are going to marry him, miss!—because—”

“If I thought one of the family said so, I would sleep in the park to-night. I would not enter the house again. When I marry, it will be a gentleman; and Mr. Lestrange is not a gentleman—at least he did not behave like one to-day. Come, tell me the rest of the poem. We have plenty of time here.”

The young bookbinder was perplexed. He had not much knowledge of the world, but he could not bear the thought of the servants learning that they were in the park together. At the same time he saw that he must not even hint at imprudence. Her will was not by him to be scanned! She must be allowed to know best! A single tone of hesitation would be an insult! He must take care of her without seeming to do so! If they walked gently, they would finish the poem as they came near the house: there he would leave her, and return by the lodge-gate.

“Where did we leave off?” he said.

His brief silence had seemed to Barbara but a moment spent in recalling.

“We left off at the place where the bird fell from his neck—no, just after that, where he falls asleep, as well he might, after it was gone.”

The moon was now peeping, in little spots of light, through the higher foliage, and casting a doubtful, ghostly sediment of shine around them. The night was warm. Glow-worms lay here and there, brooding out green light in the bosom of the thick soft grass. There was no wind save what the swift wing of a bat, sweeping close to their heads, would now and then awake. The creature came and vanished like an undefined sense of evil at hand. But it was only Richard who thought that; nothing such crossed the starry clearness of Barbara's soul. Her skirt made a buttony noise with the heads of the rib-grass. Her red cloak was dark in the moonlight. She threw back the hood, and coming out of its shadow like another moon from a cloud, walked the earth with bare head. Her hands too were bare, and glimmered in the night-gleam. He saw the rings on the small fingers shimmer and shine: she was as fond of colour and flash as lord St. Albans! Higher and higher rose the moon. Her light on the grass-blades wove them into a carpet with its weft of faint moonbeams. The small dull mirrors of the evergreen leaves glinted in the thickets, as the two went by, like the bits of ill-polished glass in an Indian tapestry. The moon was everywhere, filling all the hollow over-world, and for ever alighting on their heads. Far away they saw the house, a remote something, scarce existent in the dreaming night, the gracious-ghastly poem, and the mingling, harmonizing moon. It was much too far away to give them an anxious thought, and for long it seemed, like death, to be coming no nearer; but they were moving toward it all the time, and it was even growing a move insistent fact. Thus they walked at once in the two blended worlds of the moonlight and the tale, while Richard half-chanted the music-speech of the most musical of poets, telling of the roaring wind that the mariner did not feel, of the flags of electric light, of the dances of the wan stars, of the sighing of the sails, of the star-dogged moon, and the torrent-like falls of the lightning down the mountainous cloud—for so Barbara, who had seen two or three tropical thunder-storms, explained to Richard the lightning which

“fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide;”

—until that groan arose from the dead men, and the bodies heaved themselves up on their feet, and began to work the ropes, and worked on till sunrise, and the mariner knew that not the old souls but angels had entered into them, by their gathering about the mast, and sending such a strange lovely hymn through their dead throats up to the sun.

When Richard repeated the stanza—

“It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune;”

Barbara uttered a prolonged “Oh!” and again was silent, listening to the talk of the elemental spirits, feeling the very wind of home that blew on the mariner, seeing the lighthouse, and the hill, and the weathercock on the church-spire, and the white bay, and the shining seraphs with the crimson shadows, and the sinking ship, and the hermit that made the mariner tell his story as he was telling it now.

But when Richard came to the words—

“He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small,
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all,”

she clapped her hands together; and when he ended them, she cried out—

“I was sure of it! I knew something would come to tie it all up together into one bundle! That's it! That's it! The love of everything is the garden-bed out of which grow the roses of prayer!—But what am I saying!” she added, checking herself; “I love everything, at least everything that comes near me, and I never pray!”

“Of course not! Why should you?” said Richard.

“Why should I not?”

“You would if it were reasonable!”

“I will, then! To love all the creatures and not have a word to say to the God that made them for loving them before-hand—is that reasonable?”

“No, if a God did make them.”

“They could not make themselves!”

“No; nothing could make itself.”

“Then somebody must have made them!”

“Who?”

“Why, the one that could and did—who else?”

“We know nothing about such a somebody. All we know is, that there they are, and we have got to love them!”

“Ah!” she said, and looked up into the wide sky, where now the “wandering moon” was alone,

Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven's wide pathless way,

and gazed as if she searched for the Somebody. “I should like to see the one that made that!” she said at last. “Think of knowing the very person that made that poor pigeon, and has got it now!—and made Miss Brown—and the wind! I must find him! He can't have made me and not care when I ask him to speak to me! You say he is nowhere! I don't believe there is any nowhere, so he can't be there! Some people may be content with things; I shall get tired of them, I know, if I don't get behind them! A thing is nothing without what things it! A gift is nothing without what gives it! Oh, dear! I know what I mean, but I can't say it!”

“You don't know what you mean, but you do say it!” thought Richard.

He was nowise repelled by her enthusiasm, for there was in it nothing assailant, nothing too absurdly superstitious. He did not care to answer her.

They went walking toward the house and were silent. The moon went on with her silentness: she never stops being silent. When they felt near the house, they fell to walking slower, but neither knew it. Barbara spoke again:

“Just fancy!” she said, “—if God were all the time at our backs, giving us one lovely thing after another, trying to make us look round and see who it was that was so good to us! Imagine him standing there, and wondering when his little one would look round, and see him, and burst out laughing—no, not laughing—yes, laughing—laughing with delight—or crying, I don't know which! If I had him to love as I should love one like that, I think I should break my heart with loving him—I should love him to the killing of me! What! all the colours and all the shapes, and all the lights, and all the shadows, and the moon, and the wind, and the water!—and all the creatures—and the people that one would love so if they would let you!—and all—”

“And all the pain, and the dying, and the disease, and the wrongs, and the cruelty!” interposed Richard.

She was silent. After a moment or two she said—

“I think I will go in now. I feel rather cold. I think there must be a fog, though I can't see it.”

She gave a little shiver. He looked in her face. Was it the moon, or was it something in her thoughts that made the sweet countenance look so gray? Could his mere suggestion of the reverse, the wrong side of the web of creation, have done it? Surely not!

“I think I want some one to say must to me!” she said, after another pause. “I feel as if—”

There she stopped. Richard said nothing. Some instinct told him he might blunder.

He stood still. Barbara went on a few steps, then turned and said—

“Are you not going in?”

“Not just yet,” he answered. “Please to remember that if I can do anything for you,—”

“You are very kind. I am much obliged to you. If you know another rime,—But I think I shall have to give up poetry.”

“It will be hard to find another so good,” returned Richard.

“Good-night,” she said.

“Good-night, miss!” answered Richard, and walked away, with a loss at his heart. The poem has already ceased to please her! He had made the lovely lady more thoughtful, and less happy than before!

“She has been taught to believe in a God,” he said to himself. “She is afraid he will be angry with her, because, in her company, I dared question his existence! A generous God—isn't he! If he be anywhere, why don't he let us see him? How can he expect us to believe in him, if he never shows himself? But if he did, why should I worship him for being, or for making me? If I didn't want him, and I don't, I certainly shouldn't worship him because I saw him. I couldn't. If Nature is cruel, as she certainly is, and he made her, then he is cruel too! There cannot be such a God, or, if there be, it cannot be right to worship him!”

He did not reflect that if he had wanted him, he would not have waited to see him before he worshipped him.

But Barbara was saying to herself—

“What if he has shown himself to me some time—one of those nights, perhaps, when I was out till the sun rose—and I didn't know him!—How frightful if there should be nobody at all up there—nobody anywhere all round!”

She stared into the milky, star-sapphire-like blue, as if, out of the sweetly veiled terror-gulf, she would, by very gazing, draw the living face of God.

Verily the God that knows how not to reveal himself, must also know how best to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering father!

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XXIII. A HUMAN GADFLY.

From so early an age had Richard been accustomed to despise a certain form he called God, which stood in the gallery of his imagination, carved at by the hands of successive generations of sculptors, some hard, some feeble, some clever, some stupid, all conventional and devoid of prophetic imagination, that his antagonism had long taken the shape of an angry hostility to the notion of any God whatever. Richard could see a thing to be false, that is, he could deny, but he was not yet capable either of discovering or receiving what was true, because he had not yet set himself to know the truth. To oppose, to refuse, to deny, is not to know the truth, is not to be true any more than it is to be false. Whatever good may lie in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the iconoclast will not serve withal to carve the celestial form of the Real; and when the iconoclast becomes the bigot of negation, and declares the non-existence of any form worthy of worship, because he has destroyed so many unworthy, he passes into a fool. That he has never conceived a deity such as he could worship, is a poor ground to any but the man himself for saying such cannot exist; and to him it is but a ground lightly vaulted over the vacuity self-importance. Such a divine form may yet stand in the adytum of this or that man whom he and the world count an idiot.

Into the workshop of Richard's mind was now introduced, by this one disclosure of the mind of Barbara, a new idea of divinity, vague indeed as new, but one with which he found himself compelled to have some dealing. One of the best services true man can do a neighbour, is to persuade him—I speak in a parable—to house his children for a while, that he may know what they are: the children of another may be the saving of his children and his whole house. Alas for the man the children of whose brain are the curse of the household into which they are received! But from Barbara's house Richard had taken into his a vital protoplasmic idea that must work, and would never cease to work until the house itself was all divine—the idea, namely, of a being to call God, who was a delight to think of, a being concerning whom the great negation was that of everything Richard had hitherto associated with the word God. The one door to admit this formal notion was hard to open; and when admitted, the figure was not easy to set up so that it could be looked at. The human niche where the idea of a God must stand, was in Richard's house occupied by the most hideous falsity. On the pedestal crouched the goblin of a Japanese teapot.

It was not pleasant to Richard to imagine any one with rights over him. It may be that some persist in calling up the false idea of such a one hitherto presented to them, in order to avoid feeling obligation to believe in him. For the notion of a God is one from which naturally a thoughtful man must feel more or less recoil while as yet he knows nothing of the being himself, or of the nature of his creative rights, the rights of perfect, self-refusing, devoted fatherhood. It is one thing to seem to know with the brain, quite another to know with the heart. But even in the hope-lighted countenance of Barbara, even in the tones in which she suggested the presence of a soul that meant and was all that the beautiful world hinted and seemed, Richard could not fail to meet something of the true idea of a God.

Naturally also, his notion of the God in whom he felt that Barbara was at least ready to believe, assumed something of the look of Barbara who was being drawn toward him; so that now the graces of the world, all its lovely impacts upon his senses, began to be mixed up in his mind with Barbara and her God. Barbara was beginning to infect him with—shall I call it the superstition of a God? Whatever it may be called, it was very far from being religion yet. The fact was only this—that the idea of a God worth believing in, was coming a little nearer to him, was becoming to him a little more thinkable.

He began to feel his heart drawn at times, in some strange, tenderer fashion, hitherto unknown to him, to the blue of the sky, especially in the first sweetness of a summer morning. His soul would now and then seem to go out of him, in a passion of embrace, to the simplest flower: the flower would be, for a moment, just its self to him. He would spread out his arms to the wind, now when it met him in its strength, now when it but kissed his face. He never consented with himself that it was one force in all the forms that drew him—that perhaps it was the very God, the All in all about him. Neither did he question much with himself as to how the development, rather than change, had begun. Whether God did this, or was this, or it was only the possessing Barbara that cast her light out of his eyes on the things he saw and felt, he scarcely asked; but fully he recognised the fact that Nature was more alive than she ever had been to him who had always loved her.

The thought of Barbara went on growing dear to him. He never pondered anything but the girl herself, cherished no dreams of her becoming more to him, of her ever being nearer than away there; just to know her was now, and henceforward ever would be the gladness of his life. If that life was but for a season; if the very core of life was decay; if life was because nobody could help its being; if it died because no one could keep it from dying; yet were there two facts fit almost to embalm the body of this living death: Barbara, and the world which was the body of Barbara! So life carried the day, if but the day, and the heart of Richard rejoiced in the midst of perishings. Only, the night was coming in which no man can rejoice.

Was he then presuming to be in love with Barbara? I do not care to meet the question. If I knew what the mysterious word, love, meant, I might be able to answer it, but what should I thus gain or give? I know he loved her. I know that a divine power of truth and beauty had laid hold upon him, and was working in him as the powers of God alone can work in man, for they are the same by which he lives and moves and has his being, and to life are more than meat and drink, than sun and air.

Instead of blaming as a matter of course the person who does not believe in a God, we should think first whether his notional God is a God that ought, or a God that ought not to be believed in. Perhaps he only is to be blamed who, by inattention to duty, has become less able to believe in a God than he was once: because he did not obey the true voice, whencesoever it came, God may have to let him taste what it would be to have no God. For aught I know, a man may have been born of so many generations of unbelief, that now, at this moment, he cannot believe; that now, at this moment, he has no notion of a God at all, and cannot care whether there be a God or not; but he can mind what he knows he ought to mind. That will, that alone can clear the moral atmosphere, and make it possible for the true idea of a God to be born into it.

For some time Richard saw little of Barbara.

The heads of the house did not interfere with him. Lady Ann would now and then sail through the room like an iceberg; sir Wilton would come in, give a glance at the shelves and a grin, and walk out again with a more or less gouty gait; so much was about all their contact. Arthur was a little ashamed of having spoken to him as he did, and had again become in a manner friendly. He had seen several decaying masses, among the rest the Golding of their difference, become books in his hands, and again he had grown sufficiently interested in the workman to feel in him something more than the workman. He was on the way to perceive that, in certain insignificant things, such as imagination, reading, insight, and general faculty, not to mention conscience, generosity, and goodness of heart, Richard was out of sight before the ruck of gentlemen. He saw already that in some things, thought a good deal of at his college, Richard was more capable than himself. He found in him too what seemed to him a rare notion of art. In truth Richard's advance in this region was as yet but small, for he was guided only by his limited efforts in verse; none the less, however, was he far ahead of Arthur, who saw only what was shown him. In literature Arthur had already learned something from Richard, and knew it. He had, indeed, without knowing it, begun to look up to him.

Richard also had discovered good in Arthur—among other things a careful regard to his word, and to his father's tenantry. There was of course, in a scanty nature like his, a good deal of the lord bountiful mingled with his behaviour to his social inferiors on the property: he posed to himself as a condescending landlord.

The only one in the house who gave Richard trouble, was the child Victoria. The way she always took to show her liking, was to annoy its object. Never was name less fitting than hers: there was no victory in her. She could but fly about like veriest mosquito. Richard let her come and go unheeded, except when her proximity to his work made him anxious. But the little vixen would not consent to be naught any smallest while. She would rather be abused than remain unnoticed. When she found that her standing and staring procured no attention from the bookbinder, she would begin to handle his tools, and ask what this and that was for, giving, like a woman of fashion, no heed to any answer he accorded her. Learning thus, that is, by experiment, how to annoy him, she did not let opportunity lack. When school was over in the morning, and she could go where she pleased, she went often to the library; and as no one willingly asked where she was, the chief pleasure of her acquaintance lying in the assurance that she was nowhere at hand, Richard had to endure many things from her; and things that do not seem worth enduring, are not unfrequently the hardest to endure.

The behaviour of the child grew worse and worse. She would more than touch everything, and that thing the most persistently which Richard was most anxious to have let alone, causing him no little trouble at times to set right what she had injured. Worst of all was her persecution when she found him using gold-leaf. She would come behind him and blow the film away just as he had got it flat on his cushion, or laid on the spot where his tool was about to fix a portion of it. Her mischief was not even irradiated by childish laughter; there was never any sign of frolic on her monkey face, except the steely glitter of her sharp, black bead-eyes, might be supposed to contain some sprinkle of fun in its malice. Expostulation was not of the slightest use, and sometimes it was all Richard could do to keep his hands off her. Now she would look as stolid as if she did not understand a word he said; now pucker up her face into a most unpleasant grin of derision and contemptuous defiance.

One day when he happened to be using the polishing-iron, Vixen, as her brothers called her, came in, and began to play with the paste. Richard turned with the iron in his hand, which he had just taken from the brasier. He was rubbing it bright and clean, and she noted this, but had not seen him take it from the fire: she caught at it, to spoil it with her pasty fingers. As quickly she let it go, but did not cry, though her eyes filled. Richard saw, and his heart gave way. He caught the little hand so swift to do evil, and would have soothed its pain. She pulled it from him, crying, “You nasty man! How dare you!” and ran to the door, where she turned and made a hideous face at him. The same moment, by a neighbouring door that opened from another passage, in came Barbara, and before Vixen was well aware of her presence, had dealt her such a box on the ear that she burst into a storm of wrathful weeping.

“You're a brute, Bab,” she cried. “I'll tell mamma!”

“Do, you little wretch!” returned Barbara, whose flushed face looked lovely childlike in its indignation beside the furious phiz of the tormenting imp.

The monkey-creature left the room, sobbing; and Barbara turned and was gone before Richard could thank her.

He heard no more of the matter, and for some time had no farther trouble with Victoria.

Barbara had the kindest of hearts, but there was nothing soft about her She held it a sin to spoil any animal, not to say a child. For she had a strong feeling, initiated possibly by her black nurse, that the animals went on living after death, whence she counted it a shame not to teach them; and held that, if a sharp cut would make child or dog behave properly, the woman was no lover of either who would spare it.

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CHAPTER XXIV. RICHARD AND WINGFOLD.

Barbara had more than once or twice heard Mr. Wingfold preach, but had not once listened, or oven waked to the fact that she had not listened. Unaccustomed in childhood to any special regard of the Sunday, she had neither pleasant nor unpleasant associations with church-going; but she liked a good many things better, and as she always did as she liked except she saw reason to the contrary, she had hitherto gone to church rather seldom. She might perhaps have sooner learned to go regularly but for her mother's extraordinary behaviour there: certainly she could not sit in the same pew with her reading her novel. Since Mr. Wingfold had taken the part of the prophet Nathan, and rebuked her, she had indeed ceased to go to church, but Barbara, as I have said, was as yet only now and then drawn thitherward.

Mr. Wingfold was almost as different from the clergyman of Richard's idea, as was Richard's imagined God from any believable idea of God. The two men had never yet met, for what should bring a working-man and the clergyman of the next parish together? But one morning—he often went for a walk in the early morning—Richard saw before him, in the middle of a field-path, seated on a stile and stopping his way, the back of a man in a gray suit, evidently enjoying, like himself, the hour before sunrise. He knew somehow that he was not a working-man, but he did not suspect him one of the obnoxious class which lives by fooling itself and others. Wingfold heard Richard's step, looked round, knew him at once an artisan of some sort, and saw in him signs of purpose and character strong for his years.

“Jolly morning!” he said.

“It is indeed, sir!” answered Richard.

“I like a walk in the morning better than at any other time of the day!” said Wingfold.

“Well, sir, I do so too, though I can't tell why. I've often tried, but I haven't yet found out what makes the morning so different.”

“Come!” thought the clergyman; “here's something I haven't met with too much of!”

Richard remarked to himself that, whoever the gentleman was, he was certainly not stuck-up. They might have parted late the night before, instead of meeting now for the first time!

“Are you a married man?” asked Wingfold.

“No, sir,” answered Richard, surprised that a stranger should put the question.

“If you had been,” Wingfold went on, “I should have been surer of your seeing what I mean when I say, that to be out before sunrise is like looking at your best friend asleep—that is, before her sun, her thought, namely, is up. Watching her face then, you see it come to life, grow radiant with sunrise.”

“But,” rejoined Richard, “I have seen a person asleep whose face made it quite evident that thought was awake! It was shining through!”

“Shining through, certainly,” said Wingfold, “not up. I doubt indeed if during any sleep, thought is quite in abeyance.”

“Not when we are dead asleep, sir?—so dead that when we wake we don't remember anything?”

“If thought in such a case must be proved, it will have to go for non-existent. Yet, when you reflect that sometimes you discover that you must, a few minutes before, wide awake, have done something which you have no recollection of having done, and which, but for the fact remaining evident to your sight, you would not believe you had done, you must feel doubtful as to the loss of consciousness in sleep.”

“Yes; that must give us pause!”

“Hamlet!” said the clergyman to himself. “That's good! You may have read from top to bottom of a page, perhaps,” he went on, “without being able to recall a word: would you say no thought had passed through your mind in the process?—that the words had suggested nothing as you read them?”

“No, sir; I should be inclined to say that I forgot as fast as I read; that, as I read, I seemed to know the thing I read, but the process of forgetting kept pace for pace alongside the process of reading.”

“I quite agree with you.—Now I wonder whether you will agree with me in what I am going to suggest next!”

“I can't tell that, sir,” said Richard—somewhat unnecessarily; but Wingfold was pleased to find him cautious.

“I think,” the parson continued, “that what I want in order to be able afterward to recollect a thing, is to be not merely conscious of the thing when it comes, but at the same moment conscious of myself. To remember, I must be self-conscious as well as thing-conscious.”

“There I cannot quite follow you.”

“When I learn the meaning of a word, I know the word; but when I say to myself, 'I know the word,' there comes a reflection of the word back from the mirror of my mind, making a second impression, and after that I am at least not so likely to forget it.”

“I think I can follow you so far,” said Richard.

“When, then,” pursued the parson, “I think about the impression that the word makes upon me, how it is affecting me with the knowledge of itself, then I am what I should call self-conscious of the word—conscious not only that I know the word, but that I know the phenomena of knowing the word—conscious of what I am as regards my knowing of the word.”

“I understand so far, sir—at least I think I do.”

“Then you will allow that a word with its reflection and mental impact thus operated upon by the mind is not so likely to be forgotten as one understood only in the first immediate way?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Well, then—mind I am only suggesting; I am not proclaiming a fact, still less laying down a law; I am not half sure enough about it for that—so it is with our dreams. We see, or hear, and are conscious that we do, in our dreams; our consciousness shines through our sleeping features to the eyes that love us; but when we wake we have forgotten everything. There was thought there, but not thought that could be remembered. When, however, you have once said to yourself in a dream, 'I think I am dreaming;' you always, I venture to suspect, remember that experience when you wake from it!”

“I daresay you do, sir. But there are many dreams we never suspect to be dreams while we are dreaming them, which yet we remember all the same when we come awake!”

“Yes, surely; and many people have such memories as hold every word and every fact presented to them. But I was not meaning to discuss the phenomena of sleep; I only meant to support my simile that to see the world before the sun is up, is like looking on the sleeping face of a friend. There is thought in the sleeping face of your friend, and thought in the twilight face of nature; but the face awake with thought, is the world awake with sunlight.”

“There I cannot go with you, sir,” said Richard, who, for all the impression Barbara had made upon him, had not yet thought of the world as in any sense alive; it was to him but an aggregate of laws and results, the great dissecting-room of creation, the happy hunting ground of the goddess who calls herself Science, though she can claim to understand as yet no single fact.

“Why?” asked Wingfold.

“Because I cannot receive the simile at all. I cannot allow expression of thought where no thought is.”

Here a certain look on the face of the young workman helped the parson toward understanding the position he meant to take, “Ah!” he answered, “I see I mistook you! I understand now! Sleep she or wake she, you will not allow thought on the face of Nature! Am I right?”

“That is what I would say, sir,” answered Richard.

“We must look at that!” returned Wingfold. “That would be scanned!—You would conceive the world as a sort of machine that goes for certain purposes—like a clock, for instance, whose duty it is to tell the time of the day?—Do I represent you truly?”

“So far, sir. Only one machine may have many uses!”

“True! A clock may do more for us than tell the time! It may tell how fast it is going, and wake solemn thought. But if you came upon a machine that constantly waked in you—not thoughts only, but the most delicate and indescribable feelings—what would you say then? Would you allow thought there?”

“Surely not that the machine was thinking!”

“Certainly not. But would you allow thought concerned in it? Would you allow that thought must have preceded and occasioned its existence? Would you allow that thought therefore must yet be interested in its power to produce thought, and might, if it chose, minister to the continuance or enlargement of the power it had originated?”

“Perhaps I should be compelled to allow that much in regard to a clock even!—Are we coming to the Paley-argument, sir?” said Richard.

“I think not,” answered Wingfold. “My argument seems to me one of my own. It is not drawn from design but from operation: where a thing wakes thought and feeling, I say, must not thought and feeling be somewhere concerned in its origin?”

“Might not the thought and feeling come by association, as in the case of the clock suggesting the flight of time?”

“I think our associations can hardly be so multiform, or so delicate, as to have a share in bringing to us half of the thoughts and feelings that nature wakes in us. If they have such a share, they must have reference either to a fore-existence, or to relations hidden in our being, over which we have no control; and equally in such case are the thoughts and feelings waked in us, not by us. I do not want to argue; I am only suggesting that, if the world moves thought and feeling in those that regard it, thought and feeling are somehow concerned in the world. Even to wake old feelings, there must be a likeness to them in what wakes them, else how could it wake them? In a word, feeling must have put itself into the shape that awakes feeling. Then there is feeling in the thing that bears that shape, although itself it does not feel. Therefore I think it may be said that there is more thought, or, rather, more expression of thought, in the face of the world when the sun is up, than when he is not—as there is more thought in a face awake than in a face asleep.—Ah, there is the sun! and there are things that ought never to be talked about in their presence! To talk of some things even behind their backs will keep them away!”

Richard neither understood his last words, nor knew that he did not understand them. But he did understand that it was better to watch the sunrise than to talk of it.

Up came the child of heaven, conquering in the truth, in the might of essential being. It was no argument, but the presence of God that silenced the racked heart of Job. The men stood lost in the swift changes of his attendant colours—from red to gold, from the human to the divine—as he ran to the horizon from beneath, and came up with a rush, eternally silent. With a moan of delight Richard turned to his gazing companion, when he beheld that on his face which made him turn from him again: he had seen what was not there for human eyes! The radiance of Wingfold's countenance, the human radiance that met the solar shine, surpassed even that which the moon and the sky and the sleeping earth brought out that night upon the face of Barbara! The one was the waking, the other but the sweetly dreaming world.

Richard refused to let any emotion, primary or reflex, influence his opinions; they must be determined by fact and severe logical outline. Whatever was not to him definite—that is, was not by him formally conceivable, must not be put in the category of things to be believed; but he had not a notion how many things he accepted unquestioning, which were yet of this order; and not being only a thing that thought, but a thing as well that was thought, he could not help being more influenced by such a sight than he would have chosen to be, and the fact that he was so influenced remained. Happily, the choice whether we shall be influenced is not given us; happily, too, the choice whether we shall obey an influence is given us.

Without a word, Richard lifted his hat to the stranger, and walked on, leaving him where he stood, but taking with him a germ of new feeling, which would enlarge and divide and so multiply. When he got to the next stile, he looked back, and saw him seated as at first, but now reading.

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CHAPTER XXV. WING FOLD AND HIS WIFE.

Thomas Wingfold closed his book, replaced it in his pocket, got down from the stile, turned his face toward home, crossed field after field, and arrived just in time to meet his wife as she came down the stair to breakfast.

“Have you had a nice walk, Thomas?” she asked.

“Indeed I have!” he answered. “Almost from the first I was right out in the open.”—His wife knew what he meant.—“Before the sun came up”, he went on, “I had to go in, and come out at another door; but I was soon very glad of it. I had met a fellow who, I think, will pluck his feet out of the mud before long.”

“Have you asked him to the rectory?”

“No.”

“Shall I write and ask him?”

“No, my wife. For one thing, you can't: I don't know his name, and I don't know what he is, or where he lives. But we shall meet again soon.”

“Then you have made an appointment with him!”

“No, I haven't. But there's an undertow bringing us on to each other. It would spoil all if he thought I threw a net for him. I do mean to catch him if I can, but I will not move till the tide brings him into my arms. At least, that is how the thing looks to me at present. I believe enough not to make haste. I don't want to throw salt on any bird's tail, but I do want the birds to come hopping about me, that I may tell them what I know!”

As near as he could, Wingfold recounted the conversation he had had with Richard.

“He was a fine-looking fellow,” he said, “—not exactly a gentleman, but not far off it; little would make him one. He looked a man that could do things, but I did not satisfy myself as to what might be his trade. He showed no sign of it, or made any allusion to it. But he was more at home in the workshop of his own mind than is at all usual with fellows of his age.”

“It must,” said Helen, “be old Simon Armour's grandson! I have heard of him from several quarters; and your description would just fit him. I know somebody that could tell you about him, but I wish I know anybody that could tell us about her—I mean Miss Wylder.”

“I like the look of that girl!” said the parson warmly, “What makes you think she could tell us about my new acquaintance?”

“Only an impertinent speech of that little simian, Vixen Lestrange. I forget what she said, but it left the impression of an acquaintance between Bab, as she called her, and some working fellow the child could not bear.”

“The enmity of that child is praise. I wonder how the Master would have treated her! He could not have taken her between his knees, and said whosoever received her received him! A child-mask with a monkey inside it will only serve a sentimental mother to talk platitudes about!”

“Don't be too hard on the monkeys, Tom!” said his wife. “You don't know what they may turn out to be, after all!”

“Surely it is not too hard on the monkeys to call them monkeys!”

“No; but when the monkey has already begun to be a child!”

“There is the whole point! Has the monkey always begun to be a child when he gets the shape of a child?—Miss Wylder is not quite so seldom in church now, I think!”

“I saw her there last Sunday. But I'm afraid she wasn't thinking much about what you were saying—she sat with such a stony look in her eyes! She did seem to come awake for one moment, though!”

“Tell me.”

“I could hardly take my eyes off her, my heart was so drawn to her. There was a mingling of love and daring, almost defiance, in her look, that seemed to say, 'If you are worth it—if you are worth it—then through fire and water!' All at once a flash lighted up her lovely child-face—and what do you think you were at the moment saying?—that the flower of a plant was deeper than the root of it: that was what roused her!”

“And I, when I found what I had said, thought within myself what a fool I was to let out things my congregation could not possibly understand!—But to reach one is, in the end, to reach all!”

“I must in honesty tell you, however,” pursued Mrs. Wingfold, “that the next minute she looked as far off as before; nor did she shine up once again that I saw.”

“I will be glad, though,” said Wingfold, “because of what you tell me! It shows there is a window in her house that looks in my direction: some signal may one day catch her eye! That she has a character of her own, a real one, I strongly suspect. Her mother more than interests me. She certainly has a fine nature. How much better is a fury than a fish! You cannot be downright angry save in virtue of the love possible to you. The proper person, who always does and says the correct thing—well, I think that person is almost sure to be a liar. At the same time, the contradictions in the human individual are bewildering, even appalling!—Now I must go to my study, and think out a thing that's bothering me!—By the way,”—he always said that when he was going to make her a certain kind of present; she knew what was coming—“here's something for you—if you can read it! I had just scribbled it this morning when the young man came up. I made it last night. I was hours awake after we went to bed!”

This is what he gave her:—

A SONG IN THE NIGHT.
A brown bird sang on a blossomy tree,
Sang in the moonshine, merrily,
Three little songs, one, two, and three,
A song for his wife, for himself, and me.
He sang for his wife, sang low, sang high,
Filling the moonlight that filled the sky,
“Thee, thee, I love thee, heart alive!
Thee, thee, thee, and thy round eggs five!”
He sang to himself, “What shall I do
With this life that thrills me through and through!
Glad is so glad that it turns to ache!
Out with it, song, or my heart will break!”
He sang to me, “Man, do not fear
Though the moon goes down, and the dark is near;
Listen my song, and rest thine eyes;
Let the moon go down that the sun may rise!”
I folded me up in the heart of his tune,
And fell asleep in the sinking moon;
I woke with the day's first golden gleam,
And lo, I had dreamed a precious dream!

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CHAPTER XXVI. RICHARD AND ALICE.

One evening Richard went to see his grandfather, and asked if he would allow him to give Miss Wylder a lesson in horseshoeing: she wanted, he said, to be able to shoe Miss Brown—or indeed any horse. Simon laughed heartily at the proposal: it was too great an absurdity to admit of serious objection!

“Ah, you don't know Miss Wylder, grandfather!” said Richard.

“Of course not! Never an old man knew anything about a girl! It's only the young fellows can fathom a woman! Having girls of his own blinds a man to the nature of them! There's going to be a law passed against growing old! It's an unfortunate habit the world's got into somehow, and the young fellows are going to put a stop to it for fear of losing their wisdom!”

As the blacksmith spoke, he went on rasping and filing at a house-door key, fast in a vice on his bench; and his words seemed to Richard to fall from his mouth like the raspings from his rasp.

“Well, grandfather,” said Richard, “if Miss Wylder don't astonish you, she'll astonish me!”

“Have you ever seen her drive a nail, boy?”

“Not once; but I am just as sure she will do it—and better than any beginner you've seen yet!”

“Well, well, lad! we'll see! we'll see! She's welcome anyhow to come and have her try! What day shall it be?”

“That I can't tell yet.”

“It makes me grin to think o' them doll's hands with a great hoof in them!”

“They are little hands—she's little herself—but they ain't doll's hands, grandfather. You should have seen her box Miss Vixen's ears for making a face at me! Her ears didn't take them for doll's hands, I'll be bound! The room rang again!”

“Bring her when you like, lad,” said Simon.

It was moonlight, and when Richard arrived at the lodgeless gate, he saw inside it, a few yards away, seated on a stone, the form of a woman. He thought the first moment, as was natural, of Barbara, but the next, he knew that this was something strange. She sat in helpless, hopeless attitude, with her head in her hands. A strange dismay came upon him at the sight of her; his heart fluttered in a cage of fear. He did not believe in ghosts. If he saw one, it would but show that sometimes when a person died there was a shadow left that was like him! There might be millions of ghosts, and no God the more! What are we all but spectres of the unknown? What was death but a vanishing of the unknown? What are the dead but vanishments! Yet he shuddered at the thought that he had actually come upon one of the dead that are still alive, of whom, once or twice in a long century, one is met wandering vaguely about the world, unable to find what used to make it home. He peered through the iron bars as into a charnel-house: one such wanderer was enough to make the whole vault of night a gaping tomb.

Putting his key in the lock made a sharp little noise. The figure started up, her face gleaming white in the moon, but dropped again on her stone, unable to stand. Richard could not take his eyes off her. While closing the gate he dared not turn his back to her. She sat motionless as before, her head in her hands, her elbows on her knees. He stood for a moment staring and trembling, then, with an effort of the will that approached agony, went toward her. As he drew nearer, he began to feel as if he had once known her. He must have seen her in London somewhere, he thought. But why was her shadow sitting there, the lonely hostless guest of the night's caravansary?

He went nearer. The form remained motionless. Something reminded him of Alice Manson.

He laid his hand on the figure. It was a woman to the touch as well as to the eye. But not yet did she move an inch. He would have raised her face. Then she resisted. All at once he was sure she was Alice.

“Alice!” he cried. “Good God!—sitting in the cold night!”

She made him no answer, sat stone-still.

“What shall I do for you?” he said.

“Nothing,” she answered, in a voice that might well have been that of a spectre. “Leave me,” she added, as if with the last entreaty of despair.

“You are in trouble, Alice!” he persisted. “Why are you so far from home? Where's Arthur?”

“What right have you to question me?” she returned, almost fiercely.

“None but that I am your brother's friend.”

“Friend!” she echoed, in a faint far-away voice.

“You forget, Alice, that I did all I could to be your friend, and you would not let me!”

She neither spoke nor moved. Her stillness seemed to say, “Neither will I now.”

“Where are you going?” he asked, after a hopeless pause.

“Nowhere.”

“Why did you leave London?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“I think you will tell me!”

“I will not.”

“You know I would do anything for you!”

“I daresay!”

“You know I would!”

“I don't.”

“Try me.”

“I will not.”

Her voice grew more and more faint and forced. Her words and it were very unlike.

“Don't go on like that, Alice. You're not being reasonable,” pleaded Richard.

“Oh, do leave me alone!”

“I won't leave you.”

“As you please! It's nothing to me.”

“Alice, why do you speak to me like that? Tell me what's wrong.”

“Everything is wrong. Everybody is wrong. The whole world is wrong.”

Her voice was a little stronger. She raised herself, and looked him in the face.

“I hope not.”

“I hope it is!”

“Why should you?”

“To think things were right would be too terrible! I say everything's wrong.”

“What's to be done, then?” sighed Richard.

“I must get out of it all.”

“But how?”

“There is only one way.”

“What is that?”

“Everybody knows.”

“Alice,” cried Richard, nearly in despair like herself, “are you out of your mind?”

“Pretty nearly.—Why shouldn't I be? There are plenty of us!”

“Alice, if you won't tell me what is the matter with you, if you won't let me help you, I will sit down by you till the morning.”

“What if I drop?”

“Then I will carry you away. The sooner you drop the better.” Her resolution seemed to break.

“I 'ain't eaten a mouthful to-day,” she said.

“My poor girl! Promise me to wait till I come back. Here, put on my coat.”

She was past resisting more, and allowed him to button his coat about her.

But he was in great perplexity: where was he to get anything for her? And how was she to live till he brought it! It was terrible to think of! Alice with nothing to eat, and no refuge but a stone in the moonlight! This was what her religion had done for Alice!

“Miss Wylder's God!” he said to himself with contempt.

“He's well enough for the wind and the stars and the moonlight! but for human beings—for Alice—for creatures dying of hunger, what a mockery! If he were there, it would be a sickness to talk of him! Beauty is beauty, but for anything behind it—pooh!”

He stood a moment hesitating. Alice swayed on her seat, and would have fallen. He caught her—and in the act remembered a little cottage, a hut rather, down a lane a short way off. He took her in his arms and started for it.

She was dreadfully thin, but a strong man cannot walk very fast carrying a woman, however light she be, and she had half come to herself before he reached the cottage.

“Richard, dear Richard!” she murmured at his ear, “where are you carrying me? Are you going to kill me, or are you taking me home with you? Do set me down. Where's Arthur? I will let you be good to me! I will! I can't hold out for ever!”

She seemed to be dreaming—apparently about their meeting in Regent-street; or perhaps she was delirious from want of food. He walked on without attempting to answer her. Some great wrong had been done her, and his heart sank within him; for he believed in no judgment, no final setting right of wrongs. He knew of nothing better than that the wronged and the wronger would cease together. Certainly, if his creed represented fact, the best thing in existence is that it has no essential life in it, that it cannot continue, that it must cease: the good of living is that we must die. The hope of death is the inspiration of Buddhism! His heart ached with pity for the girl. His help, his tenderness expanded, and folded her in the wings of a shelter that was not empty because his creed was false.

“She belongs to me!” he said to himself. “The world has thrown her off: 'be it lawful I take up what's cast away!' Here is the one treasure, a human being! the best thing in the world! I will cherish it. Poor girl! she shall at least know one man a refuge!”

The cottage was a wretched place, but a labourer and his family lived in it. He knocked many times. A sleepy voice answered at last, and presently a sleepy-eyed man half opened the door.

“What's the deuce of a row?” he grunted.

“Here's a young woman half dead with hunger and cold!” said Richard. “You must take her in or she'll die!”

“Can't you take her somewhere else?”

“There's nowhere else near enough.—Come, come, let us in! You wouldn't have her die on your doorstep!”

“I don'ow as I see the sense o' bringin' her here!” answered the man sleepily. “We ain't out o' the hunger-wood ourselves yet!—Wife! here's a chap as says he's picked up a young 'oman a dyin' o' 'unger!—'tain't likely, be it, i' this land o' liberty?”

“Likely enough, Giles, where the liberty's mainly to starve!” replied a feminine voice. “Let un bring the poor thing in. There ain't nowhere to put her, an' there ain't nothin' to give her, but she can't lie out in the wide world!”

“'Ain't you got a drop o' milk?” asked Richard.

“Milk!” echoed the woman; “it's weeks an' weeks the childer 'ain't tasted of it! The wonder to me is that the cows let a poor man milk 'em!”

Richard set Alice on her feet, but she could not stand alone; had he taken his arm from round her, she would have fallen in a heap. But the woman while she spoke had been getting a light, and now came to the door with a candle-end. Her husband kept prudently in her shadow.

“Poor thing! poor thing! she be far gone!” she said, when she saw her. “Bring her in, sir. There's a chair she can sit upon. I'll get her a drop o' tea—that'll be better'n milk! There's next to no work, and the squire he be mad wi' Giles acause o' some rabbit or other they says he snared—which they did say it was a hare—I don'ow: take the skin off, an' who's to tell t'one from t'other! I do know I was right glad on't for the childer! An' if the parson tell me my man 'ill be damned for hare or rabbit, an' the childer starvin', I'll give him a bit o' my mind.—'No, sir!' says I; 'God ain't none o' your sort!' says I. 'An' p'r'aps the day may be at hand when the rich an' the poor 'ill have a turn o' a change together! Leastways there's somethin' like it somewheres i' the Bible,' says I. 'An' if it be i' the Bible,' says I, 'it's likely to be true, for the Bible do take the part o' the rich—mostly!'”

She was a woman who liked to hear herself talk, and so spoke as one listening to herself. Like most people, whether they talk or not, she got her ideas second-hand; but Richard was nowise inclined to differ with what she said about the Bible, for he knew little more and no better about it than she. Had parson Wingfold, who did know the Bible as few parsons know it, heard her, he would have told her that, by search express and minute, he had satisfied himself that there was not a word in the Bible against the poor, although a multitude of words against the rich. The sins of the poor are not once mentioned in the Bible, the sins of the rich very often. The rich may think this hard, but I state the fact, and do not much care what they think. When they come to judge themselves and others fairly, they will understand that God is no respecter of persons, not favouring even the poor in his cause.

Richard set Alice on the one chair, by the poor little fire the woman was coaxing to heat the water she had put on it in a saucepan. Alice stared at the fire, but hardly seemed to see it. The woman tried to comfort her. Richard looked round the place: the man was in the bed that filled one corner; a mattress in another was crowded with children; there was no spot where she could lie down.

“I shall be back as soon's ever I can,” he said, and left the cottage.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XXVII. A SISTER.

He hurried back over the bare, moon-white road. He had seen Miss Wylder come that morning, and hoped to reach the house, which was not very far off, before she should have gone to bed. Of her alone in that house did he feel he could ask the help he needed. If she had gone home, he would try the gardener's wife! But he wanted a woman with wit as well as will. He would help himself from the larder if he could not do better—but there would be no brandy there!

Many were the thoughts that, as now he walked, now ran, passed swiftly through his mind. It was strange, he said to himself, that this girl, of whom he had seen so little, yet in whom he felt so great an interest, should reappear in such dire necessity! When last he saw her, she hurt herself in frantic escape from him: now she could not escape!

“And this is the world,” he went on, “that the priests would have you believe ruled by the providence of an all powerful and all good being! My heart is sore for the girl—a good girl, if ever there was one, so that I would give—yes, I think I would give my life for her! I certainly would, rather than see her in misery! Of course I would! Any man would, worth calling a man! When it came to the point, I should not think twice about it! And there is he, sitting up there in his glory, and looking down unmoved upon her wretchedness! I will not believe in any such God!”

Of course he was more than right in refusing to believe in such a God! Were such a being possible, he would not be God. If there were such a being, and all powerful, he would be the one not to be worshipped. But was Richard, therefore, to believe in no God altogether different? May a God only be such as is not to be believed in? Is it not rather that, to be God, the being must be so good that a man is hardly to be found able—must I say also, or willing—to believe in him? Perhaps, if he had been as anxious to do his duty all over, out and out, as he was where his feelings pointed to it, Richard might have had a “What if” or two to propose to himself. Might he not for instance have said, “What if a certain being should even now be putting in my way the honour and gladness of helping this woman—making me his messenger to her?” What if his soul was too impatient to listen for the next tick of the clock of eternity, and was left therefore to declare there was no such clock going! Ought he not even now to have been capable of thinking that there might be a being with a design for his creatures yet better than merely to make them happy? What if, that gained, the other must follow! Here was a man judging the eternal, who did not even know his own name!

As he drew near the house, the question arose in his mind: if Miss Wylder was gone to her room, what was he to do to find her? He did not know where her room was! He knew that, when she went up the stair, at the top of it she turned to the right—and he knew no more.

The side-gate at the lodge was yet open; so was the great door of the house. He entered softly, and going along a wide passage, arrived at the foot of the great staircase, which ascended with the wide sweep of half an oval, just in time to see at the top the reflection of a candle disappearing to the right. There were many chances against its being Barbara's, but with an almost despairing recklessness he darted up, and turning, saw again the reflection of the candle from the wall of a passage that crossed the corridor. He followed as swiftly and lightly as he could, and at the corner all but overturned an elderly maid, whose fright gave place to wrath when she saw who had endangered her.

“I want to see Miss Wylder!” said Richard hurriedly.

“You have no call to be in this part of the house,” returned the woman.

“I can't stop to explain,” answered Richard. “Please tell me which is her room.”

“Indeed I will not.”

“When she knows my business, she will be glad I came to her.”

“You may find it for yourself.”

“Will you take a message for me then?”

“I am not Miss Wylder's maid!” she replied. “Neither is it my place to wait on my fellow-servants.”

She turned away, tossing her head, and rounded the corner into the corridor.

Richard looked down the passage. A light was burning at the other end of it, and he saw there were not many doors in it. With a sudden resolve to go straight ahead, he called out clear and plain—

“Miss Wylder!” and again, “Miss Wylder!”

A door opened and, to his delight, out peeped Barbara's dainty little head. She saw Richard, gave one glance in the opposite direction, and made him a sign to come to her. He did so. She was in her dressing-gown: it was not her candle he had followed, but its light had led him to her!

“What is it!” she said hurriedly. “Don't speak loud: lady Ann might hear you!”

“There's a girl all but dying—” began Richard.

“Go to the library,” she said. “I will come to you there. I shan't be a minute!”

She went in, and her door closed with scarce a sound. Then first a kind of scare fell upon Richard: one of those doors might open, and the pale, cold face of the formidable lady look out Gorgon-like! If it was her candle he had followed, she could hardly have put it down when he called Miss Wylder! He ran gliding through passage and corridor, and down the stair, noiseless and swift as a bat. Arrived in the library, he lighted a candle, and, lest any one should enter, pretended to be looking out books. Within five minutes Barbara was at his side.

“Now!” she said, and stood silent, waiting.

There was a solemn look on her face, and none of the smile with which she usually greeted him. Their last interview had made her miserable for a while, and more solemn for ever. For hours the world was black about her, and she felt as if Richard had struck her. To say there was no God behind the loveliness of things, was to say there was no loveliness—nothing but a pretence of loveliness! The world was a painted thing! a toy for a doll! a phantasm!

He told her where and in what state he had found the girl, and to what a poor place he had been compelled to carry her, saying he feared she would die before he could get anything for her, except Miss Wylder would help him.

“Brandy!” she said, thinking. “Lady Ann has some in her room. The rest I can manage!—Wait here; I will be with you in three minutes.”

She went, and Richard waited—without anxiety, for whatever Barbara undertook seemed to those who knew her as good as done.

She reappeared in her red cloak, with a basket beneath it. Richard, wondering, would have taken the basket from her.

“Wait till we are out of the house,” she said. “Open that bay window, and mind you don't make a noise. They mustn't find it undone: we have to get in that way again.”

Richard obeyed scrupulously. It was a French window, and issue was easy.

“What if they close the shutters?” he ventured to say.

“They don't always. We must take our chance,” she replied.

He thought she must mean to go as far as the lodge only.

“You won't forget, miss, to fasten the window again?” he whispered, as he closed it softly behind them.

“We must always risk something!” she answered. “Come along!”

“Please give me the basket,” said Richard.

She gave it him; and the next moment he found her leading to the way through the park toward the lodgeless gate.

They had walked a good many minutes, and Barbara had not said a word.

“How good of you, miss, to come!” ventured Richard.

“To come!” she returned. “What else did you expect? Did you not want me to come?”

“I never thought of your coming! I only thought you would get the right things for me—if you could!”

“You don't think I would leave the poor girl to the mercy of a man who would tell her there was nobody anywhere to help her out of her troubles!”

“I don't think I should have told her that; I might have told her there was nobody to bring worse trouble upon her!”

“What comfort would that be, when the trouble was come—and as strong as she could bear!”

Richard was silent a moment, then in pure self-defence answered—

“A man must neither take nor give the comfort of a lie!”

“Tell me honestly then,” said Barbara, “—for I do believe you are an honest man—tell me, are you sure there is no God? Have you gone all through the universe looking for him, and failed to find him? Is there no possible chance that there may be a God!”

“I do not believe there is.”

“But are you sure there is not? Do you know it, so that you have a right to say it?”

Richard hesitated.

“I cannot say,” he answered, “that I know it as I know a proposition in Euclid, or as I know that I must not do what is wrong.”

“Then what right have you to go and make people miserable by saying there is no God—as if you, being an honest man, knew it, and would not say it if you did not know it? You take away the only comfort left the unhappy! Of course you have a right to say you don't believe it—but only that! And I would think twice before I said even that, where all the certainty was that it would make people miserable!”

“I don't know anybody it would make miserable,” said Richard.

“It would make me dead miserable,” returned Barbara.

“I know many it would redeem from misery,” rejoined Richard. “To believe in a cruel being ready to pounce upon them is enough to make the strongest miserable.”

“The cruel being that made the world, you mean?”

“Yes—if the world was made.”

“If one believes in any God, it must be the same God that made this lovely night—and the gladness it would give me, if you did not take it from me!”

Richard was silent for a moment.

“How can I take it from you?” he said, “if you think what I say is not true?”

“You make me fear lest it should be true; and then farewell to all joy in life—not only for want of some one to love right heartily, but because there is no refuge from the evils that are all about us. I have no quarrel with you if you say these evils are brought upon us by an evil being, who lives to make men miserable; there you leave room to believe also in one fighting against him, to whom we can go for help! The God our parson believes in he calls 'God, our saviour.' To take away the notion of any kind of God, is to make life too dreary to live!”

“Yours is the old doctrine of the Magians,” remarked Richard.

“Well?”

“I could accept it easily beside what people believe now.”

“What do they believe?”

“They believe in the God of the Bible, who makes pets of a few of his creatures, and sends all the rest into eternal torment. Would you comfort people with the good news of a God like that?”

“Such a God is not to be believed in! Deny him all you can. But because there cannot be an evil God, what right have you to say there cannot be a good one? That is to reason backward! The very notion of a night like this having no meaning in it—no God in it who intends it to look just so, is enough to make me miserable. But I will not believe it! I shall hate you if you make me believe it!”

“The Bible says there is an evil being behind it!”

“I don't know much about the Bible, but I don't believe it says that.”

“Of course it calls him good, but it says he does certain things which we know to be bad.”

“You make too much of the Bible, if it says such things. Throw it out of the window and have done with it. But how dare you tell me there is nobody greater than me to account for me! You make of me a creature that was not worth being made; a mere ooze from nothing, like the scum on the pond, there because it cannot help it. If I have no God to be my justification, my being becomes loathsome to me. I don't know how I came to be, where I came from, or where I am going to; and you say there can be nobody that knows; you tell me there is no help; that I must die in the dark I came out of; that there is no love about me knowing what it loves. Even if I found myself alive and awake and happy after I was dead, what comfort would there be if there was no God? How should I ever grow better?—how get rid of the wrong things in myself?—If life has no better thing for this poor woman, be kind and let her die and have done with it. Why keep her in such a hopeless existence as you believe in? You can have but little regard for her surely! I beg of you don't say that thing to her, for you don't know it.”

Richard was again silent for a while; then he said—

“I had no intention of saying anything of the sort, but I promise because you wish it.”

“Thank you! thank you!”

“I promise too,” added Richard, “that I will not say anything more of that kind until I have thought a good deal more about it.”

“Thank you again heartily!” said Barbara. “I am sure of one thing—that you cannot have ground for not hoping! Is not hope all we have got? He is the very butcher of humanity who kills its hope! It is hope we live by!”

“But if it be a false hope?”

“A false hope cannot do so much harm as a false fear!”

“The false fear is just what I oppose. The Bible tells people—”

“There you are back to the book you don't believe in! And because you don't believe in the book that makes people afraid, you insist there can be no such thing as the gladness my heart cries out for! If you want to make people happy, why don't you preach a good God instead of no God?”

“I will think about what you say,” replied Richard.

“Mind,” said Barbara, “I don't pretend to know anything! I only say I have a right to hope. And for the Bible, I must have a better look at it! A man who, being a good man, wants to comfort us poor women, whom men knock about so, by taking from us the idea of a living God that cares for us, cannot be so wise but that he may be wrong about a book! Have you read it all through now, Mr. Tuke—so that you are sure it says what you say it says?”

“I have not,” answered Richard; “but everybody knows what it says!”

“Well, I don't! Nobody has taken the trouble to tell me, and I haven't read it.—But I'll just give you a little bit of my life to look at. I was with my father and mother for a while in Sydney, and there a terrible lie was told about me, and everybody believed it, and nobody would speak to me. Somehow people are always ready to believe lies—even people who would not tell lies! We had to leave Sydney in consequence, and to this day everybody in Sydney believes me a wicked, ugly girl!—Now I know I am not! See—I can hold my face to the stars! It was trying to help a poor creature that nobody would do anything for, that got the lie said of me. I thought my first business was to take care of my neighbour, and I did it, and that's what came of it!”

“And you believe in a God that would let that come to you for doing what was good?” said Richard, with an indignation that exploded in all directions.

“Stop! stop! the thing's not over yet! The world is not done with yet! What if there be a God who loves me, and cares as little what people say about me, because he knows the truth, as I care about it because I know the truth!—But that is not what I wanted to say; this is it: if such lies were told, and believed, about an innocent girl trying to do her duty, why may not people have told lies about God, and other people believed them? The same thing may hold with the book. Perhaps it does not speak such lies about God, but stupid or lying people have said that it speaks them, and other people have believed those, and said it again. I hope with all my heart you are saying what is false when you say there is no God; but that is not nearly so bad as saying there is a God who is not good. I can't think anybody believing in a God like that, would have been able to write a book about him that so many good people care to read.”

Richard was thoroughly silenced now. I do not mean that he was at all convinced, but how could he find much to say with that appeal of Barbara to her own sore experience echoing in his heart! And they were just at the door of the cottage. He knocked, and receiving no answer, opened the door, and they went in.

There was light enough from the glow of a mere remnant of fire in a corner, to see, on a stool by its side, the good woman of the house fast asleep, with her head against the wall. Her husband was snoring in bed. The children lay still as death on their mattress upon the floor. Alice sat on the one chair, her head fallen back, and her face as white as human face could be; but when they listened, they could hear her breathing. Beside the pale, worn, vanishing girl, Barbara looked the incarnation of concentrated life and energy. Her cheeks were flushed with the rapid walk, and her eyes were still flashing with the thoughts that had been rising in her, and the words that had been going from her. For a moment she stood radiant with the tender glow of an infinite pity, as she looked down on the death-like girl; then, with a sigh in which trembled the very luxury of service, she put her arm under the poor back-fallen head, and lifted it gently up. With the motion, Alice's eyes opened, like those of certain wonderful dolls, but they did not seem to have so much life in them.

“Quick!” said Barbara; “give me a little brandy in the cup.”

Richard made haste, and Barbara put the cup to Alice's lips.

“Dear, take a little brandy; it will revive you,” she said.

Alice came to her windows and looked, and saw the face of an angel bending over her. She obeyed the heavenly vision, and drank what it offered. It made her cough, and their hostess started to her feet as if dreading censure; but a smile and a greeting from Barbara reassured her. She thanked her for her hospitality as if Alice had been her sister, and slipping money into her hand, coaxingly begged her to make up the fire a little, that she might warm some soup.

Almost at once upon her tasting the soup, a little colour began to come in Alice's cheek. Barbara was feeding her, and a feeble smile flickered over the thin face every time it looked up in Barbara's. Richard stood gazing, and saw that hope in God could not much have lessened one woman's tenderness. He had scarcely seen tenderness in his mother; and certainly he had seen little hope. She was thoroughly kind to him, and he knew she would have died for her husband; but he had seen no sweetness in their intercourse, neither could remember any sweetness to himself. The hot spring of his aunt's love to him was no geyser, and he never knew in this world how hot it was. Hence was it to Richard more than a gracious sight, it was a revelation to him, as he watched the electric play of the love that passed from the strong, tender, child-like girl to the delicate, weary, starved creature to whom she was ministering.

At length Barbara thought it better she should have no more food for the present, when naturally the question arose, what was to be done next. The saviours went out into the night to have a free talk, and a little fresh air—sorely wanted in the cottage.

Richard then told Barbara that, if she did not disapprove, he would take Alice to his grandfather: he was certain he would receive her cordially, and both he and Jessie would do what they could for her. But he did not know of any vehicle he could get to carry her, except his grandfather's pony-cart, and that was four miles away!

“All right!” said Barbara. “I will stay with her, in and out, till you come.”

“But how will you get home after?”

“As I came, of course. Don't trouble yourself about me; I can look after myself.”

“But if they should have fastened the library-window?”

“Then I will take refuge with mother Night. There will be room enough in the park. Perhaps I may go to roost in that beech-tree. Don't you think about me. I shall come to no harm. Go at once and fetch the pony-cart.”

Richard set off running, and came to his grandfather's while it was yet unreviving night; but he had little difficulty in rousing the old man. He told him all he knew about Alice, as well as the plight in which he had found her. Simon looked grave when he heard how his daughter had come between Richard and his friends. He hurried on his clothes, put the pony to, and got into the cart: he would himself fetch the girl! In another moment they were spinning along the gray road.

When they reached the hut, there was Barbara standing sentry near the door. She went and talked to Simon. Richard got down and went in. He found Alice wide awake, staring into the fire, with a look that brought a great rush of pity into his heart afresh. Remembering how the girl had shrunk from him before, he feared himself unfit to help, and knew himself unable to comfort her. For the first time he vaguely felt that there might be troubles needing a hand which neither man nor woman could hold out. Their kind hostess had crept into bed beside her husband, and was snoring as loud as he. Without a word he wrapped Alice in the blanket he had brought, and taking her once more in his arms, carried her to the cart. Leaning down from his perch, the sturdy old man received her in his, placed her comfortably beside him, put his arm round her, and with a nod to Barbara, and never a word to his grandson, drove away. Richard knew his rugged goodness too well to mind how he treated him, and was confident in him for Alice, as one to do not less but more than he promised. He was thus free to walk home with Barbara, glad at heart to know Alice in harbour, but a little anxious until Miss Wylder should be safe shut in her chamber.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XXVIII. BARBARA AND LADY ANN.

As they went, neither said much. Both seemed to avoid the subject of their conversation as they came. They talked of poetry and fiction, and did not differ. Though Barbara there also had precious insights, happily she had no opinions.

When they reached a certain point, Richard drew back, and, from a coign of vantage, saw Barbara try the study-window and fail. He then followed her as she went round to the door, and, still covertly, saw her ring the bell. The door was opened with what seemed to him a portentous celerity, and she disappeared. He turned away into the park, and wandered about, revolving many things, till by slow gradations the sky's gray idea unfolded to a brilliant conviction, and, lo, there was the morning, not to be controverted! But he took care to let the house not only come awake, but come to its senses, before he sought admission. When it seemed well astir, he rang the bell; and when the door, after some delay, was opened, he went straight to the library, and was fairly at work by five o'clock.

He saw nothing of Barbara all day, or indeed of any of the family except Vixen, who looked in, made a face at him, and went away, leaving the door open. At eight o'clock he had his breakfast, and at nine he was again in the library; so that by lunch-time he had been seven of his eight hours at work, and by half-past two found himself free to go to his grandfather's and inquire after Alice.

On his way to the road through the park, he met Arthur Lestrange. Richard touched his hat as was his wont, and would have passed, but, with no friendly expression on his countenance, Arthur stopped.

“Where are you going, Tuke?” he said.

“I am going to my grandfather's, sir,” answered Richard.

“Excuse me, but your day's work is not over by many hours yet.”

Richard found his temper growing troublesome, but tried hard to keep it in hand.

“If you remember, sir,” he said, “our agreement mentioned no hour for beginning or leaving off work.”

“That is true, but you undertook to give me eight hours of your day!”

“Yes, sir. I was at work by five o'clock this morning, and have given you more than eight hours.”

“Hm!” said Arthur.

“I am quite as anxious,” pursued Richard, “to fulfill my engagement, as you can be to have it fulfilled.”

Arthur said nothing.

“Ask Thomas, who let me in this morning,” resumed Richard, “whether I was not at work in the library by five o'clock.”

It went a good deal against the grain with Richard to appeal to any witness for corroboration: he was proud of being a man of his word; but although not greatly anxious to keep his temporary position, he was anxious the compact should not be broken through anything he did or said.

“Let you in?” exclaimed Arthur; “—let you in before five o'clock in the morning? Then you were out all night!”

“I was.”

“That cannot be permitted.”

“I am surely right in believing that, when my work is over, I am my own master! I had something to do that must be done. My grandfather knows all I was about!”

“Oh, yes, I remember! old Simon Armour, the blacksmith!” returned Arthur. “But,” he went on, plainly softening a little, “you ought not to work for him while you are in my employment.”

“I know that, sir; and if I wanted, my grandfather would not let me. While my work is yours, it is all yours, sir.”

With that he turned, and left Arthur where he stood a little relieved, though now annoyed as well that a man in his employment should not have waited to be dismissed. Hastening to the smithy, he found his grandfather putting off his apron to go home for a cup of tea.

“Oh, there you are!” he said. “I thought we should be catching sight of you before long!”

“How's Alice, grandfather? You might be sure I should want to know!”

“She's been asleep all day, the best thing for her!”

“I hope, grandfather,” said Richard, for Simon's tone troubled him a little, “you are not vexed with me! I assure you I had nothing to do with her coming down here—that I know of. You would not have had me leave her sitting there, out on that stone in the moonlight, all night long, a ghost before her time without a grave to go to? She would have been dead before the morning! She must have been! I am certain you would not have left her there!”

“God forbid, lad! If you thought me out of temper with you, it was a mistake. I confess the thing does bother me, but I'm not blaming you. You acted like a Christian.”

Richard hardly relished the mode of his grandfather's approbation. A man ought to do the right thing because he was a man, not because he was something else than a man! He had yet to learn that a man and a Christian are precisely and entirely the same thing; that a being who is not a Christian is not a man. I perfectly know how absurd this must seem to many, but such do not see what I see. No one, however strong he may feel his obligations, will ever be man enough to fulfill them except he be a Christian—that is, one who, like Christ, cares first for the will of the Father. One who thinks he can meet his obligations now, can have no idea what is required of him in virtue of his being what he is—no idea of what his own nature requires of him. So much is required that nothing more could be required. Let him ask himself whether he is doing what he requires of himself. If he answer, “I can do it without Christianity anyway,” I reply, “Do it; try to do it, and I know where the honest endeavour will bring you. Don't try to do it, and you are not man enough to be worth reasoning with.”

Simon and his grandson had not yet turned the corner, when Richard heard a snort he knew: there, sure enough, stood Miss Brown, hitched to the garden-paling, peaceable but impatient.

“Miss Wylder here!” said Richard.

“Yes, lad! She's been here an hour and more. Jessie came and told me, but I knew it: I heard the mare, and knew the sound of my own shoes on her!—I doubt if she'll stand it much longer though!” he added, as she pawed the road. “Well, she's a fine creature!”

“Yes, she's a good mare!”

“I don't mean the mare! I mean the mistress!”

“Miss Wylder is just noble!” said Richard. “But I'm afraid she got into trouble last night!”

“It don't sound much like it!” returned the old man, as Barbara's musical, bird-like laugh came from the cottage. “She ain't breaking her heart!—Alice, as you call her, must be doing well, or missie wouldn't be laughing like that!”

As they entered, Barbara came gliding down the perpendicular stair in front of them, her face yet radiant with the shadow of the laugh they had heard.

“Good morning, Mr. Armour!” she said. “—I did not expect to see you so soon again, Mr. Tuke. Will you put me up!”

Richard released Miss Brown, got her into position, and gave his hand to Barbara's foot, as he had seen Mr. Lestrange do. But lifting, he nearly threw her over Miss Brown's back. She burst into her lovely laugh, clutched at a pommel, and held fast.

“I'm not quite ready to go to heaven all at once!” she said.

“I thought you were!” answered Richard. “But indeed I beg your pardon! I might have known how light you must be!”

“I am very heavy for my size!”

“May I walk a little way alongside of you, miss?”

“You have a right; I have offered you my company more than once,” answered Barbara.

They walked a little way in silence.

“Why is there no way to the heaven you believe in, but the terrible gate of death?” asked Richard at length. “If a God of love, as you say your God is, made the world, and could not—for want of room, I suppose—let his creatures live on in it, he would surely have thought of some better way out of it than such a ghastly one!”

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Barbara was her readiness. Very seldom had one to wait for her answer.

“This morning,” she said, “for the first time with me on her back at least, Miss Brown refused a jump—and I grant the place looked ugly! But I gave her a little sharp persuasion, and she took it beautifully, coming away as proud of herself as possible.—If there be a God, he must know as much better than you and I, as I know better than Miss Brown. One who never did anything we couldn't understand, couldn't be God. How else could he make things?”

“Yes, if they are made!”

“If I were you, I would be quite sure first, before I said they were not. You won't assert anything you are not sure of; don't deny anything either. Good-bye.—Go, Miss Brown!”

She was more peremptory than usual, but he liked it—rather. He felt she had some right to speak to him so: positive as he had hitherto been, he was not really sure of anything!

The fact was, Barbara had been irritated that morning, and had got over the irritation, but not quite over the excitement of it. She thought Miss Brown should never again set hoof within the gates of Mortgrange.

After breakfast, lady Ann had sent for her to her dressing-room, and Barbara had gone, prepared to hear of something to her disadvantage. The same woman who had been so uncivil to Richard, had watched and seen them go out together. She fastened the library window behind them, and went and told lady Ann, who requested her to mind her own business.

When Barbara rang the bell, not caring much—for a night in the park was of little consequence to her—the door was immediately opened, but only a little way, by some one without a light, whose face or even person she could not distinguish, for the door was quite in shadow. It closed again, and she was left darkling, to find her way to her room as best she might. She stood for a moment.

“Who is it?” she said.

No one answered. She heard neither footstep nor sound of garments. Carefully feeling her way, she got to the foot of the great stair, and in another minute was in her room.

When Barbara entered lady Ann's dressing-room, she greeted her with less than her usual frigidity.

“Good morning, my love! You were late last night!” she said.

“I thought I was rather early,” answered Barbara, laughing.

“May I ask where you were?” said her ladyship, with her habitual composure.

“About a mile and a half from here, at that little cottage in Burrow-lane.”

“How did you come to be there—and for so long? You were hours away!”

Even lady Ann could not prevent a little surprise in her tone as she said the words.

“Mr. Tuke came and told me——”

“I beg your pardon, but do I know Mr. Tuke?”

“The bookbinder, at work in the library.”

“Wouldn't your mother be rather astonished at your having secrets with a working-man?”

“Secrets, lady Ann!” exclaimed Barbara. “Your ladyship forgets herself!”

Lady Ann looked up with a languid stare in the fresh young face, rosy with anger.

“Was I not in the act,” pursued the girl, “of telling you all about it? You dare accuse me of such a thing! I only wish you would carry that tale of me to my mother!”

“I am not accustomed to be addressed in this style, Barbara!” drawled lady Ann, without either raising or quickening her voice.

“Then it is time you began, if you are accustomed to speak to girls as you have just spoken to me! I am not accustomed to be told that I have a secret with any man—or woman either! I don't know which I should like worse! I have no secrets. I hate them.”

“Compose yourself, my child. You need not be afraid of me!” said lady Ann. “I am not your enemy.”

She thought Barbara's anger came from fear, for she regarded herself as a formidable person. But for victory she rested mainly on her imperturbability.

“Look me in the face, lady Ann, and tell yourself whether I am afraid of you!” answered Barbara, the very soul of indignation flashing in her eyes. “I fear no enemy.”

Lady Ann found she had a new sort of creature to deal with.

“That I am your friend, you will not doubt when I tell you it was I who let you in last night! I did not wish your absence or the hour of your return to be known. My visitors must not be remarked upon by my servants!”

“Then why did you not speak to me?”

“I wished to give you a lesson.”

“You thought to frighten me, as if I were a doughy, half-baked English girl! Allow me to ask how you were aware I was out.”

Lady Ann was not ready with her answer. She wanted to establish a protective claim on the girl—to have a secret with, and so a hold upon her.

“If the servants do not know,” Barbara went on, “would you mind saying how your ladyship came to know? Have the servants up, and I will tell the whole thing before them all—and prove what I say too.”

“Calm yourself, Miss Wylder. You will scarcely do yourself justice in English society, if you give way to such temper. As you wish the whole house to know what you were about, pray begin with me, and explain the thing to me.”

“Mr. Tuke told me he had found a young woman almost dead with hunger and cold by the way-side, and carried her to a cottage. I came to you, as you well remember, and begged a little brandy. Then I went to the larder, and got some soup. She would certainly have been dead before the morning, if we had not taken them to her.”

“Why did you not tell me what you wanted the brandy for?”

“Because you would have tried to prevent me from going.”

“Of course I should have had the poor creature attended to!—I confess I should have sent a more suitable person.”

“I thought myself the most suitable person in the house.”

“Why?”

“Because the thing came to me to get done, and I had to go; and because I knew I should be kinder to her than any one you could send. I know too well what servants are, to trust them with the poor!”

“You may be far too kind to such people!”

“Yes, if one hasn't common sense. But this girl you couldn't be too kind to.”

“It is just as I feared: she has taken you in quite! Those tramps are all the same!”

“The same as other people—yes; that is, as different from each other as your ladyship and I.”

Lady Ann found Barbara too much for her, and changed her attack.

“But how came you to be so long? As you have just said, Burrow-lane can't be more than a mile and a half from here!”

“We could not leave her at the cottage; it was not a fit place for her. Mr. Tuke had to go to his grandfather's—four miles—and I had to stay with her till he came back. Old Simon came himself in his spring-cart, and took her away.”

“Was there no woman at the cottage?”

“Yes, but worn out with work and children. Her night's rest was of more consequence to her than ten nights' waking would be to me.”

“Thank you, Barbara! I was certain I should not prove mistaken in you! But I hope such a necessity will not often occur.”

“I hope not; but when it does, I hope I may be at hand.”

“I was certain it was some mission of mercy that had led you into the danger. A girl in your position must beware of being peculiar, even in goodness. There are more important things in the world than a little suffering!”

“Yes; your duty to your neighbour is more important.”

“Not than your duty to yourself, Barbara!” said lady Ann, in such a gently severe tone of righteous reproof, that Barbara's furnace of a heart made the little pot that held her temper nearly boil over.

“Lady Ann,” she said, unconsciously drawing herself up to her full little height, “I am sorry I gave you the trouble of sitting up to open the door for me. That at least shall not happen again. Good morning.”

“There is nothing to be annoyed at, Barbara. I am quite pleased with what you have told me. I say only it was unwise of you not to let me know.”

“It may not have been wise for my own sake, but it was for the woman's.”

“There is no occasion to say more about the woman; I am quite satisfied with you, Barbara!” said lady Ann, looking up with an icy smile, her last Parthian arrow.

“But I am not satisfied with you, lady Ann,” rejoined Barbara. “I have submitted to be catechized because the thing took place while I was your guest; but if such a thing were to happen again, I should do just the same; therefore I have no right, understanding perfectly how much it would displease you, to remain your guest. I ought, perhaps, to have gone home instead of returning to you, but I thought that would be uncivil, and look as if I were ashamed. My mother would never have treated me as you have done! You may think her a strange woman, but her heart is as big as her head—much bigger when it is full!”

It was not right of Barbara to get so angry, and answer lady Ann so petulantly, for she knew her pretty well by this time, and yet was often her guest. That it was impossible for such a girl to feel respect for such a woman, if it accounts for her bearing to her, condemns the familiarity that gave occasion to that bearing. At the same time, but for lady Ann's superiority in age, Barbara would have spoken her mind with yet greater freedom. Her rank made no halo about her in Barbara's eyes.

Lady Ann took no more trouble to appease her: the foolish girl would, she judged, be ashamed of herself soon, and accept the favour she knew to be undeserved! Lady Ann understood Barbara no more than lady Ann understood the real woman underlying lady Ann. She was not afraid of losing Barbara, for she believed her parents could not but be strongly in favour of an alliance with her family. She knew nothing of the personal opposition between Mr. and Mrs. Wylder: she never opposed sir Wilton except it was worth her while to do so; and sir Wilton never opposed her at all—openly. It gave lady Ann no more pleasure to go against her husband, than to comply with his wishes; and she had anything but an adequate notion of the pleasure it gave sir Wilton to see any desire of hers frustrated.

Barbara went to the stable, where man and boy had always his service in his right hand ready for her—got Miss Brown saddled, and was away from Mortgrange before Richard, early as he had begun, was half-way through his morning's work.

She went to see Alice almost every day from that afternoon; and as no one could resist Barbara, Alice's reserve, buttressed and bastioned as it was with pain, soon began to yield before the live sympathy that assailed it. They became fast friends.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XXIX. ALICE AND BARBARA.

It was weeks before Alice was able to leave her bed: she had been utterly exhausted.

On a lovely summer morning she woke to a sense of returning health. She had been lying like a waste shore, at low spring-tide, covered with dry seaweeds, withered jelly-fishes, and a multitudinous life that gasped for the ocean: at last, at last, the cool, washing throb of the great sea of bliss, whose fountain is the heart of God, had stolen upon her consciousness, and she knew that she lived. She lay in a neat little curtained bed, in a room with a sloping roof on both sides, covered, not with tiles or slates, but with warm thatch, thick and sound. Ivy was creeping through the chinks of the ill-fitting window-frame; but through the little dormer window itself the sun shone freely, and made shadows of shivering ivy-leaves upon the deal floor. It was a very humble room, and Alice had been used to much better furniture—but neither to room nor furniture so clean. There was a wholesomeness and purity everywhere about her, very welcome to the lady-eyes with which Alice was born; for it is God that makes ladies, not stupid society and its mawkish distinctions. One brief moment she felt as if she had gained the haven of her rest, for she lay at peace, and nothing gnawed. But suddenly a pang shot through her heart, and she knew that some harassing thought was at hand: pain was her portion, and had but to define itself to grow sharp. She rose on her elbow to receive the enemy. He came; she fell back with a fainting heart and a writhing will. She had left love and misery behind her to seek help, and she had not found it! she had but lost sight of those for whom she sought the help! She could not tell how long it was since she had seen her mother and Arthur: she lay covered with kindness by people she had never before seen; and how they were faring, she could but conjecture, and conjecture had in it no comfort!

Alice had little education beyond what life had given her; but life is the truest of all teachers, however little the results of her teaching may be valued by school-enthusiasts. She did not put the letter H in its place except occasionally, but she knew how to send a selfish thought back to its place. She did not know one creed from another, but she loved what she saw to be good. She knew nothing of the Norman conquest, but she knew much of self-conquest. She could make her breakfast off dry bread, that her mother might have hot coffee and the best of butter. She wore very shabby frocks, but she would not put bad work into the seams of a rich lady's dress. She stooped as she walked, and there was a lack of accord between her big beautiful eyes and the way she put her feet down; but it was the same thing that made her eyes so large, and her feet so heavy; and if she could not trip lightly along the street, she could lay very tender hands on her mother's head when it ached with drinking. She had suffered much at the hands of great ladies, yet she had but to see Barbara to love her.

As she lay with her heart warming in that sunshine in which every heart must one day flash like the truest of diamonds, she heard the sound of a horse's hoofs on the road. Her angel came to Alice with no flapping of great wings, or lighting of soft-poised heavenly feet on wooden floor, but with the sounds of ringing iron shoes and snorting breath, to be followed by a girl's feet on the stair, whose herald was the smell, now of rosiest roses, now of whitest lilies, in the chamber of her sad sister. Well might Alice have sung, “How beautiful are the feet!” At the music of those mounting feet, death and fear slunk from the room, and Alice knew there was salvation in the world. What evil can there be for which there is no help in another honest human soul! What sorrow is there from which a man may not be some covert, some shadow! Alas for the true soul which cannot itself save, when it has no notion where help is to be found!

“Well, how are you to-day, little one?” said Barbara, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

Alice was older and taller than Barbara, but Barbara never thought about height or age: strong herself, she took the maternal relation to all weakness.

“Ever so much better, miss!” answered Alice.

“Now, none of that!” returned the little lady, “or I walk out of the room! My name is Barbara, and we are friends—except you think it cheeky of me to call you Alice!”

Alice stretched out her thin arms, folded them gently around Barbara, and burst into weeping, which was not all bitter.

“Will you let me tell you everything?” she cried.

“What am I here for?” returned Barbara, deep in her embrace. “Only don't think I'm asking you to tell me anything. Tell me whatever you like—whatever will help me to know you—not a thing more.”

Alice lay silent for an instant, then said—

“I wish you would ask me some question! I don't know how to begin!”

Without a moment's hesitation, Barbara said in response—

“What do you do all day in London?”

“Sew, sew, sit and sew, from morning to night,” answered Alice. “No sooner one thing out of your hands, than another in them, so that you never feel, for all you do, that you've done anything! The world is just as greedy of your work as before. I sometimes wish,” she went on, with a laugh that had a touch of real merriment in it, “that ladies were made with hair like a cat, I am so tired of the everlasting bodice and skirt!—Only what would become of us then! It would only be more hunger for less weariness!—It's a downright dreary life, miss!”

“Have a care!” said Barbara solemnly, and Alice laughed.

“You see,” she said, and paused a moment as if trying to say Barbara, “I'm used to think of ladies as if they were a different creation from us, and it seems rude to call you—Barbara!”

She spoke the name with such a lingering sweetness as made its owner thrill with a new pleasure.

“It seems,” she went on, “like presuming to—to—to stroke an angel's feathers!”

“And much I'd give for the angel,” cried Barbara, “that wouldn't like having his feathers stroked by a girl like you! He might fly for me, and go—where he'd have them singed!”

“Then I will call you Barbara; and I will answer any question you like to put to me!”

“And your mother, I daresay, is rather trying when you come home?” said Barbara, resuming her examination, and speaking from experience. “Mothers are—a good deal!”

“Well, you see, miss—Barbara, my mother wasn't used to a hard life like us, and Artie—that's my brother—and I have to do our best to keep her from feeling it; but we don't succeed very well—not as we should like to, that is. Neither of us gets much for our day's work, and we can't do for her as we would. Poor mamma likes to have things nice; and now that the money she used to have is gone—I don't know how it went: she had it in some bank, and somebody speculated with it, I suppose!—anyhow, it's gone, and the thing can't be done. Artie grows thinner and thinner, and it's no use! Oh, miss, I know I shall lose him! and when I think of it, the whole world seems to die and leave me in a brick-field!”

She wept a moment, very quietly, but very bitterly.

“I know he does his very best,” she resumed, “but she won't see it! She thinks he might do more for her! and I'm sure he's dying!”

“Send him to me,” said Barbara; “I'll make him well for you.”

“I wish I could, miss—I mean Barbara!—Oh, ain't there a lot of nice things that can't ever be done!”

“Does your mother do nothing to help?”

“She don't know how; she 'ain't learned anything like us. She was brought up a lady. I remember her saying once she ought to 'a' been a real lady, a lady they say my lady to!”

“Indeed! How was it then that she is not?”

“I don't know. There are things we don't dare ask mamma about. If she had been proud of them, she would have told us without asking.”

“What was your father, Alice?”

The girl hesitated.

“He was a baronet, Barbara.—But perhaps you would rather I said miss again!”

“Don't be foolish, child!” Barbara returned peremptorily.

“I suppose my mother meant that he promised to marry her, but never did. They say gentlemen think no harm of making such promises—without even meaning to keep them!—I don't know!—I've got no time to think about such things,—only—”

“Only you're forced!” supplemented Barbara. “I've been forced to think about them too—just once. They're not nice to think about! but so long as there's snakes, it's better to know the sort of grass they lie in!—Did he take your mother's money and spend it?”

“Oh, no, not that! He was a gentleman, a baronet, you know, and they don't do such things!”

“Don't they!” said Barbara. “I don't know what things gentlemen don't do!—But what happened to the money? There may be some way of getting it back!”

“There's no hope of that! I'll tell you how I think it was: my father didn't care to marry my mother, for he wanted a great lady; so he said good-bye to her, and she didn't mind, for he was a selfish man, she said. So she took the money, for of course she had to bring us up, and couldn't do it without—and what they call invested it. That means, you know, that somebody took charge of it. So it's all gone, and she gets no interest on it, and the shops won't trust us a ha'penny more. We can't always pay down for the kind of thing she likes, and must take what we can pay for, or go without; and she thinks we might do better for her if we would, and we don't know how. The other day—I don't like to tell it of her, even to you, Barbara, but I'm afraid she had been taking too much, for she went to Mrs. Harman and took me away, and said I could get much better wages, and she didn't give me half what my work was worth. I cried, for I couldn't help it, I was that weak and broken-like, for I had had no breakfast that morning—at least not to speak of, and I got up to go, for I couldn't say a word, and wanted my mother out of the place. But Mrs. Harman—she is a kind woman!—she interfered, and said my mother had no right to take me away, and I must finish my month. So I sat down again, and my mother was forced to go. But when she was gone, Mrs. Harman said to me, 'The best thing after all,' says she, 'that you can do, Ally, is to let your mother have her way. You just stop at home till she gets you a place where they'll pay you better than I do! She'll find out the sooner that there isn't a better place to be had, for it's a slack time now, and everybody has too many hands! When her pride's come down a bit, you come and see whether I'm able to take you on again.' Now wasn't that good of her?”

“M-m-m!” said Barbara. “It was a slack time!—So you went home to your mother?”

“Yes—and it was just as Mrs. Harman said: there wasn't a stitch wanted! I went from place to place, asking—I nearly killed myself walking about: walking's harder for one not used to it than sitting ever so long! So I went back to Mrs. Harman, and told her. She said she couldn't have me just then, but she'd keep her eye on me. I went home nearly out of my mind. Artie was growing worse and worse, and I had nothing to do. It's a mercy it was warm weather; for when you haven't much to eat, the cold is worse than the heat. Then in summer you can walk on the shady side, but in winter there ain't no sunny side. At last, one night as I lay awake, I made up my mind I would go and see whether my father was as hard-hearted as people said. Perhaps he would help us over a week or two; and if I hadn't got work by that time, we should at least be abler to bear the hunger! So the next day, without a word to mother or Artie, I set out and came down here.”

“And you didn't see sir Wilton?”

“La, miss! who told you? Did I let out the name?”

“No, you didn't; but, though there are a good many baronets, they don't exactly crowd a neighbourhood! What did he say to you?”

“I 'ain't seen him yet, miss,—Barbara, I mean! I went up to the lodge, and the woman looked me all over, curious like, from head to foot; and then she said sir Wilton wasn't at home, nor likely to be.”

“What a lie!” exclaimed Barbara.

“You know him then, Barbara?”

“Yes; but never mind. I must ask all my questions first, and then it will be your turn. What did you do next?”

“I went away, but I don't know what I did. How I came to be sitting on that stone inside that gate, I can't tell. I think I must have gone searching for a place to die in. Then Richard came. I tried hard to keep him from knowing me, but I couldn't.”

“You knew that Richard was there?”

“Where, miss?”

“At the baronet's place—Mortgrange.”

“Lord, miss! Then they've acknowledged him!”

“I don't know what you mean by that. He's there mending their books.”

“Then I oughtn't to have spoken. But it don't matter—to you, Barbara! No; I knew nothing about him being there, or anywhere else, for I'd lost sight of him. It was a mere chance he found me. I didn't know him till he spoke to me. I heard his step, but I didn't look up. When I saw who it was, I tried to make him leave me—indeed I did, but he would take me! He carried me all the way to the cottage where you found me.”

“Why didn't you want him to know you? What have you against him?”

“Not a thing, miss! He would be a brother to me if I would let him. It's a strange story, and I'm not quite sure if I ought to tell it.”

“Are you bound in any way not to tell it?”

“No. She didn't tell me about it.”

“You mean your mother?”

“No; I mean his mother.”

“I am getting bewildered!” said Barbara.

“No wonder, miss! You'll be more bewildered yet when I tell you all!” She was silent. Barbara saw she was feeling faint.

“What a brute I am to make you talk!” she cried, and ran to fetch her a cup of milk, which she made her drink slowly.

“I must tell you everything!” said Alice, after lying a moment or two silent.

“You shall to-morrow,” said Barbara.

“No; I must now, please! I must tell you about Richard!”

“Have you known him a long time?”

“I call him Richard,” said Alice, “because my brother does. They were at school together. But it is only of late—not a year ago, that I began to know him. He came to see Arthur once, and then I went with Arthur to see him and his people. But his mother behaved very strangely to me, and asked me a great many questions that I thought she had no business to ask me. Before that, I had noticed that she kept looking from Arthur to Richard, and from Richard to Arthur, in the oddest way; I couldn't make it out. Then she asked me to go to her bedroom with her, and there she told me. She was very rough to me, I thought, but I must say the tears were in her own eyes! She said she could not have Richard keeping company with us, for she knew what my mother was, and who my father was, and we were not respectable people, and it would never do. If she heard of Richard going to our house once again, she would have to do something we shouldn't like. Then she cried quite, and said she was sorry to hurt me, for I seemed a good girl, and it wasn't my fault, but she couldn't help it; the thing would be a mischief. And there she stopped as if she had said too much already. You may be sure I thought myself ill-used, and Arthur worse; for we both liked Richard, though my mother didn't think him at all our equal, or fit to be a companion to Arthur; for Arthur was a clerk, while Richard worked with his hands. Arthur said he worked with his hands too, and turned out far poorer work than Richard—stupid figures instead of beautiful books; and I said I worked with my needle quite as hard as Richard with his tools; but it had no effect on my mother: her ways of looking at things are not the same as ours, because she was born a lady. Why don't a lady have ladies, Barbara?”

“Never you mind, Alice! Every good woman will be a lady one day—I am sure of that! It was cruel to treat you so! How anybody belonging to Richard could do it, I can't think; he's so gentle and good himself!”

“He's the kindest and best of—of men, and I love him,” said Alice earnestly. “But I must tell you, Barbara—I must make you understand that I have a right to love him. When I told poor Arthur, as we went home that night, that he wasn't to see any more of Richard, he could not help crying. I saw it, though he tried to hide it. Of course I didn't let him know I saw him cry. Men are ashamed of crying. I ain't a bit. For Richard was the only schoolfellow ever was a friend to Artie. He once fought a big fellow that used to torment him! By the time we got home, I was boiling over with rage, and told mamma all about it. Angry as I was, her anger frightened mine out of me. 'The insolent woman!' she cried. 'But I'll soon have a rod in pickle for her! I'll have my revenge of her—that you shall soon see! My children weren't good enough for her tradesman-fellow, weren't they! She said that, did she? She ain't the only one has got eyes in her head! Didn't you see me look at him as sharp as she did at you? If ever face told tale without meaning to tell it, that's the face of the young man you call Richard! He's a Lestrange, as sure's there's a God in heaven! He's got the mark as plain as sir Wilton himself!—not a feature the same, I grant, but Lestrange is writ in every one of them! I'll take my oath who was his father!—And there she goes as mim and as prim—!' 'No, mamma,' I said, 'that she does not. She looks as fierce as a lioness!' I said. 'What's her name?' asked my mother. 'Tuke,' I answered. 'Was there ever such a name!' she cried. 'It's fitter for a dog than a human being! But it's good enough for her anyway. What was her maiden name? Who was she? There's the point!' 'But if what you suspect be true, mamma,' I said, 'then she had good reason for wishing us parted!' 'She ought to have come to me about it!' said my mother. 'She ought to have left it to me to say what should be done! I'm not married to a dirty tradesman!' I'm not telling you exactly what she said, miss, because when she loses her temper, poor mamma don't always speak quite like a lady, though of course she is one, all the same! I said no more, but I thought how kindly Richard always looked at me, and my heart grew big inside me to think that Artie and I had him for our own brother. Nobody could touch that! He had notions I didn't like—for, do you know, Barbara, he believes we just go out like a candle that can never again be lighted any more. He thinks there's no life after this one! He can't have loved anybody much, I fear, to be able to think that! You don't agree with him, I'm certain, miss! But I thought, if he was my brother, I might be able to help change his mind about it. I thought I would be so good to him that he wouldn't like me to die for ever and ever, and would come to see things differently. I had no friend, not one, you see, miss—Barbara, I mean—except Arthur, and he never has much to say about anything, though he's as true as steel; and I thought it would be bliss to have a man-friend—I mean a good man for a real friend, and I knew Richard would be that, though he was a brother! Most brothers are not friends to poor girls. I know three whose brothers get all they can out of them, and don't care how they have to slave for it, and then spend it on treats to other girls! But I was sure Richard was good, though he wasn't religious! So I said to mamma that, now we knew all about it, there could be no reason why we shouldn't see as much of each other as ever we liked, seeing Richard was our brother. But she paid no heed to me; she sat thinking and thinking; and I read in her face that she was not in a brown study, but trying to get at something. It was many minutes before she spoke, but she did at last, and what she told us is my secret, Barbara! But I'm not bound to keep it from you, for I know you would not hurt Richard, and you have a right to know whatever I know, for you found my life and wrapped it up in love and gave it back to me, dear Barbara!—It was not a pretty story for a mother to tell her children—and it's a sore grief not to be able to think everything that's good of your mother; but it's all past now;—and it ain't our fault—is it, Barbara?”

“Your fault!” cried Barbara. “What do you mean?”

“People treat us as if it were.”

“Never you mind. You've got a Father in heaven to see to that!”

“Thank you, Barbara! You make me so happy! Now I can tell you all!—'I've got it!' cried my mother. 'Bless my soul, what an ass I was not to see through it at once! Now you just listen to me: sir Wilton was married before he married his present wife. He never thought of getting rid of me for the first one, you understand, for she wasn't a lady—though they do say she was a handsome creature! She was that low, you wouldn't believe!—just nobody at all! Her father was—what do you think?—a country blacksmith! And though he had me, he would marry her! Oh the men! the men! they are incomprehensible! It made me mad! To think he wouldn't marry me, and he would marry her, and I might have had him myself if I'd only been as hard-hearted and stood out as long! But the fact was, I was in love with your father! No one could help it, when he laid himself out to make you! I couldn't anyhow, though I tried hard. But she could! For all her beauty, she was that cold! ice was nothing to her! He told me so himself!—Well, when her time came, she died—never more than just saw the child, and died. I believe myself she died of fright; for sir Wilton told me he was the ugliest child ever came into this world! He must, said his father, have come straight from the devil, for no one else could have made him so ugly! Well, what must your father go and do next, but marry an earl's daughter!—nobody too good for him after the blacksmith's!—and within a month or so, what should his nurse do but walk off with the child! From that day to this, so far as ever I've heard, there's been no news of him. It's years and years that all the world has given him up for lost. Now, mark what I say: I feel morally certain that this Richard, as you call him, is that same child, and heir to all the Lestrange property! That woman, Tuke—what a name!—she's the nurse that carried him off; and who knows but the man married her for the chance of what the child's succession might bring them! They mean to tell the fellow, when the proper time comes, how they saved him from being murdered by his stepmother, and carried him off at the risk of their lives! Well they knew him for a pot of money! You may be certain they've got all the proofs safe! I hate the ugly devil! What right has he to come to an estate, and have my children looked down upon by Mrs. Bookbinder! I'll put a spoke in her wheel, though! I'll have one little finger in their pie! They shan't burn their mouths with it—no, not they!' I treasured every word my mother said—I was so glad all the while to think of Richard as the head of the family. I could not help the feeling that I belonged to the family, for was not the same blood in Richard and in us? 'Alice,' my mother said, 'mark my words! That Richard, as you call him, is heir to the title and estate! But if you speak one word on the subject until I give you leave, to your Richard or to any live soul, I'll tear your tongue out—I will!—And you know well that what I say, I do!' I knew well that poor mamma very seldom did what she said, and I was not afraid of her; but I grew more and more afraid of doing anything to interfere with Richard's prospects. I met him one night in Regent-street, a terrible, stormy night, and was so fluttered at seeing him, and so frightened lest I should let something out that might injure him, that I nearly killed myself by running against a lamp-post in my hurry to get away from him. But to be quite honest with you, Barbara, what I was most afraid of was, that he would go on falling in love with me; and that, when he found out what we were to each other, it would break his heart: I have heard of such a thing! For you see I durst not tell him! And besides, it mightn't be so, after all! So I had to be cruel to him! He must have thought me a brute! And now for him to appear, far away from everywhere, just in time to save me from dying of cold and hunger—ain't it wonderful?”

But Barbara sat silent. It was her turn to sit thinking and thinking. Why had the strange story come to her ears? There must be something for her to do in the next chapter of it!

“How much do you think Richard may know about the thing?” she asked.

“I don't believe he has a suspicion that he is anything but the son of the bookbinder,” Alice answered. “If Mrs. Tuke did take him, I wonder why it really was. What do you think, Barbara? To me she does not look at all a designing woman. She may be a daring one: I could fancy her sticking at nothing she saw reason for! If she did it she must have done it for the sake of the child!”

“It was much too great a risk to run for any advantage to herself,” assented Barbara “Then they have had to provide for him all the time! Have they any children of their own?”

“I don't think any.”

“Then it is possible she took such a fancy to the child she was nursing, that she could not bear to part with him. I have heard of women like that, out with us.—But what are we to do, Alice? Is it right to leave the thing so? Ought we not to do anything?”

“I don't know; I can't tell a bit!” answered Alice. “I have thought and thought, lying alone in the night, but never could make up my mind. Supposing you were sure it was so, there is yet the danger of interfering with those who know all about him, and can do the best for him; and there's the danger of what my mother might be tempted to do the moment any one moved in the matter. To hasten the thing might spoil all!—Isn't it strange, Barbara, how much your love for your mother seems independent of her—her character?”

“I don't know;—yes, I think you are right. There is my mother, who has no guile in her, but is ready to burn you to ashes before you know what she is angry about! When you trust her, and go to her for help, she is ready to die for you. I love her with all my heart, but I can't say she's an exemplary woman. I don't think Mr. Wingfold—that's our clergyman—would say so either, though he professes quite an admiration of her.”

Thereupon Barbara told Alice the story of her mother's behaviour in church, and how the parson had caught her.

“But nobody knows to this day,” she concluded, “whether he intended so to catch her, or was only teaching his people by a parable, and she caught herself in its meshes. Caught she was, anyhow, and has never entered the church since! But she speaks very differently of the clergyman now.”

“I feel greatly tempted sometimes,” resumed Alice, “to let Richard know; for, surely, whatever be the projects of other people concerning him, a man has the right to know where he came from!”

“Yes,” answered Barbara, “a man must have the right to know what other people know about him! And yet it would be a pity to ruin the plans of good people who had all the time been working and caring for him. I wonder if he was in danger from lady Ann? I have heard out there of terrible things done to get one's way! She is a death-like woman! His nurse might well be afraid of what his stepmother might do! I can quite fancy her making off with him in an agony of terror lost he should be poisoned, or smothered, or buried alive! But what if they sent him away, with a hint to the nurse that his absence might as well be permanent? What if any search they made for him was nothing but a farce? I wish we knew what ground there is for inquiring whether he may not be the child that was lost—if indeed there was a child lost! I have not heard at the house any allusion to such an occurrence.”

Much more talk ensued. The girls came to the conclusion that, for the present, they must do nothing that might let the secret out of their keeping. They must wait and watch: when the right thing grew plain, they would do it!

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XXX. BARBARA THINKS.

Barbara rode home with strange things in her mind. Here was a romance brought to her very door! She was nowise hungry after romance, being of the essence of romance her own lovely self, in the simplicity which carried her direct to the heart of things. She was life in such relation to life, that her very existence was natural romance. How should there be any romance to equal that of pure being, of existence regarded and encountered face to face, of the voyage forth from the heart of life, and the toilsome journey, peril-beset, back to the home of that same heart of hearts! Here was one wrapt in a strange cloud: why should she not pass through the cloud, and join her fellow-traveller within?

Naturally then, from this time, the thoughts of Barbara rested not a little upon the person and undeveloped history of the man with whose being she was before linked by a greater indebtedness than any but herself could understand. Any enlargement of relation to the unseen world—the world, I mean, of thought and reality, region of recognizable relation, or force—is an immeasurably more precious gift than any costliest thing that a mortal may call his own until death, but must then pass on to another; and Richard had thrown open to Barbara the wealthiest regions of the literature of her race! She, on her part, had so much influenced him, that he had at least become far less overbearing in the presentment of his unbelief. For Barbara's idea, call it, if you will, her imagination of a God, was one with which none of those things for the hate's sake of which he had become the champion of a negation, held fellowship; and he carried himself toward it with so much courtesy that she had begun to hope he was slowly following her out of the desert places, where, little as she yet knew about God, she felt life impossible. The strongest bonds were thus in process of binding them; and Barbara's feeling toward Richard might very naturally develop into one or other of the million forms to which we give the common name of love.

As for Richard, he was already aware that his feeling toward Barbara could be no other than love; but he knew love as only the few know it who give themselves, who cherish no hope, look for no response, dream of no claim. To expect any return of his devotion would have seemed to Richard the simplest absurdity. He did not even say to himself that the thing could not be. Not therefore, however, was he to escape suffering; the seeds of it were already sown in him plentifully, though its first leaves are not to be distinguished from those of other plants, and it sometimes takes long for the flower to appear. Barbara was lovely to Richard as the Luna of a heavenly sky, descending and talking with him, the Diana of a lower world, bound by her destiny, and without a choice, to return to her heaven, and be once more the far, unapproachable Luna. She shone in his eyes like a lovely mysterious gem which he might wear for an hour, but which must presently, with its hundred-fold shadow and shine, pass from his keeping. He knew that love was his, but he did not know that he was Love's. He knew he loved Barbara, but he did not know that her exquisiteness was permeating his whole being with an endless possession. In truth no man good and free could have kept her soul out of his. She was so delicate, yet so strong; so steady, yet so ready; so original, yet so infinitely responsive—what could he do but throw his doors wide to her! what could he do but love her!

And now that Barbara believed she knew more about him than he did himself; now that the road appeared to lie open between them, would she escape falling in love with such a man whose hands of labour were mastered with a head full of understanding, and whose head was quickened by a heart in which dwelt an imagination at once receptive and productive? Could any true woman despise the love of such a workman?

From this time, for some weeks, they saw less of each other. Without knowing it, Barbara had, since the revelation of Alice, grown a little shy of Richard. It came of her truthfulness, mainly. As Dante felt ashamed of the discourteous advantage of alone possessing eyesight in the presence of the poor souls upon the second cornice of the purgatorial mountain, just so Barbara, without altogether defining to herself her feeling, regarded it as unfair to Richard, as indeed taking an advantage of him, to seek his company knowing about him more than she seemed to know. She felt even deceitful in appearing to know of him only what he chose to tell her, while in truth she more than suspected she knew of him what he did not know himself. She not only knew more than she seemed to know, but she knew more than Richard himself knew! At the same time she felt that she had no right to tell him what she almost believed; she ought first to be certain of it! If the conjecture were untrue, what harm might it not, believed by him, occasion both to him and his parents! Supposing it true, if those who had cherished him all his life did not tell him the fact, could it be right in her, coming by accident upon it, to acquaint him with it? Whether true or not, it must, if believed by him, change the whole tenor of his way—might perhaps, seeing he had no faith in God, destroy the very tone of his life; certainly, if untrue, it would cause endless grief to the parents whom to believe it would be to repudiate! Richard was indeed, she allowed, in less danger of being injured by the suggestion than any other young man she had known; but the risk, a great one, was there.

She did not now, therefore, go so often to Mortgrange. Every day she went out for her gallop—unattended, for, accustomed to the freedom of hundreds of leagues of wild country, the very notion of a groom behind her was hateful—and would often find herself making for some point whence she could see the chimneys of the house when the resolve of the day was one of abstinence, but that resolve she never broke. If it was not the drawing-room and Theodora, but the library and Richard; not the hideous flowers that happily never came alive from lady Ann's needle, but the old books reviving to autumnal beauty under the patient, healing touch of the craftsman, that ever drew her all the way, who can wonder! Or who will blame her but such as lady Ann, whose kind, though slowly, yet surely vanishes—melting, like the grimy snow of our streets, before the sun of righteousness, and the coming kingdom.

Lady Ann and she were now on the same footing as before their misunderstanding, if indeed their whole relation was anything better than a misunderstanding; for what lady Ann knew of Barbara she misunderstood, and what she did not know of Barbara was the best of her; while what Barbara knew of lady Ann, she also misunderstood, and what she did not know of lady Ann was the worse of her. But Barbara had told lady Ann that she was sorry she had spoken to her as she had, and lady Ann had received the statement as an expected apology. Their quarrel had indeed given lady Ann no uneasiness. Daughter of one ancient house, and mother in another, a pillar of society, a live dignity with matronly back flat as any coffin-lid, she was of course in the right, and could afford to await the acknowledgment of wrong due and certain from an ill bred and ill educated chit of the colonies! For how could any one continue indifferent to the favour of lady Ann! She was incapable of perceiving the merit of Barbara's apology, or appreciating the sweetness from which it came. For the genial Barbara could not bear dissension. She had seen enough of it to hate it. In just defence of a friend she would fight to the last, but in any matter of her own, she was ready to see, or even imagine herself in the wrong. Anger in its reaction always made her feel ill, which feeling she was apt to take for a reminder from conscience, when she would make haste to apologize.

Lady Ann's relations with Barbara were therefore not so much restored as unchanged. The elder lady neither sought nor avoided the younger, gave her always the same cold welcome and farewell, yet was as much pleased to see her as ever to see anybody. She regarded her as the merest of butterflies, with pretty flutter and no stay—a creature of wings and nonsense, carried hither and thither by slightest puff of inclination: it was the judgment of a caterpillar upon a humming bird. There was more stuff in Barbara, with all her seeming volatility, than in a wilderness of lady Anns. The friendship between such a twain could hardly consist in more than the absence of active disapproval.

When Barbara went into the library, she would always greet Richard as if she had seen him but the day before, asking what piece of work he was at now, and showing an interest in it as genuine as her interest in himself. If there was anything in it she did not quite understand, he must there and then explain it. So eager was she to know, that he had not seldom to remind her that his minutes were not his own. But now and then he would lay aside his work for a time, never forgetting to make up for the interval afterward, and show her some process from beginning to end. For Barbara, finding now more time on her hands, had begun to try her repairing faculty on some of the old books in the house, hoping one day to surprise Richard with what she had done, and this led to her asking many and far-reaching questions in the art.

But Richard continued to give her his more important aid: he was still her master in literature, directing her what to read and what to meditate, and instructing her how to get her mind to rest on things. He was the most capable of teachers, for he followed simply the results of his own experience. Having prepared for her, with his father's help, a manuscript-book of hand-made paper, bound in levant morocco, the edges gilded in the rough, he made her copy certain poems into it, attending carefully to every point, and each minutest formality. He would not have her copy whatever she might choose; she could not yet, he said, choose to advantage; for she was of such a “keen clear joyance,” that, happy over what was not the best, she would waste her love. But neither would he altogether choose for her: from among the poems he had already brought before her, she must take those she liked best! This, he said, would make her choice a real one, for it would take place between poems already known to her, with regard to which therefore she was in a position to determine her own preference. Then the unavoidable brooding over it caused in the copying of the one chosen, would make it grow in her mind, and assume something of the shape it had in the author's.

To Arthur Lestrange, who, notwithstanding the unlikeness between him and Barbara, and notwithstanding the frequent shocks his conventional propriety received from her divine liberty, had been for some time falling in love with her, these interviews, which he never hesitated to interrupt the moment he pleased, could hardly be agreeable. He never supposed that in them anything passed of which he could have complained had he been the girl's affianced lover; but he did not relish the thought that she looked to the workman and not his employer for help in her studies. Nor was it consolation to him to be aware that he could no more give her what the workman gave her, than he could teach her his bookbinding—at which also the eager Barbara grasped.

At Wylder Hall no questions were ever asked as to how she had spent the day. Her mother, although now that her twin was gone, she loved her best in the world, never troubled her head about what she did with herself. Although Barbara was now a little more at home than formerly, she and her mother were scarcely together an hour in a week except at meals. She thought Arthur Lestrange would make a good enough husband for Bab, and, having chanced on some sign that her husband cherished hopes of a loftier alliance, grew rather favourable to a match between them.

There was, however, a little betterment in Mrs. Wylder, and her ceasing to go to church was only one of the indications of it. She had in her a foundation of genuine simplicity, and was in essence a generous soul. Any one who wondered at the combination of strange wild charm and honest strength in the daughter, would have wondered much less had he gained the least insight into what, beneath the ruin of earthquake and tornado, lay buried in the soul of her mother. The best of changes is slow in most natures, and the main question is, perhaps, whether it goes slowly because of feebleness and instability, and consequent frequency of relapse, or because of the root-nature, the thoroughness, and the magnitude of what has been initiated. But Mrs. Wylder was tropical: any real change in her would soon reach a point where it must become swift as well as comprehensive.

Since returning to the trammels of a more civilized life, Mr. Wylder had grown self-absorbed, and from a loud, lawless man had become a sombre, sometimes morose person. One great cause of the change, however, was, that the remaining twin, his favourite, had for some time shown signs of a failing constitution. His increasing feebleness weighed heavily on his father. He had had a tutor ever since they came to England, but now they did little or no work together, spending their hours mostly in wandering about the grounds, and in fitful reading of books of any sort in which the boy could be led to take a passing interest. Barbara's heart yearned after him, but he was greatly attached to his nurse, and did not care for Barbara.

The dissension between husband and wife about the twins, had its origin mainly with the mother, but sprang from the generosity of her nature: the twin she favoured was sickly from infancy. A woman such as Mrs. Wylder might have been expected to shrink from the puny, suffering creature, and give her affection and approbation to the other, as did her husband; but it was just here that the true in her, the pure womanly, came to the surface and then to the front: the child had an appealing look, which, when first she saw him, went straight to the heart of the strong mother, and afterward roused, if not enough of the protective, yet all the defensive in her. From herself she did not, and from death she could not save him. He died rather suddenly, and now the strong one seemed slowly sinking. The mother did not heed him, and the father, for very misery, could scarcely look at him: he was to him like one dead already, only not dead enough to be buried.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

CHAPTER XXXI. WINGFOLD AND BARBARA.

The bickerings between her father and mother had had not a little to do with the peculiar features of Barbara's life in the colony. As soon as she saw a cloud rising, having learned by frequent experience what it was sure to result in, she would creep away, mount one of the many horses at her choice, and race from the house like a dog in terror, till she was miles from the spot where her father and mother would by that time be writhing in fiercest wordy warfare. What the object of their wrangling might be, she never inquired. It was plain to her almost from the first that nothing was gained by it beyond the silence of fatigue; and as that silence was always fruitful of new strife, it brought a comfort known to be but temporary. Had she not been accustomed to it from earliest childhood, it would have been terrible to her to see human lives going off in such a foul smoke of hell! Not a sentence was uttered by the one but was furiously felt as a wrong by the other—to be remorselessly met by wrong as flagrant, rousing in its turn the indignation of injury to a pain unendurable. It is strange that the man who most keenly feels the wrong done him, should so often be the most insensible to the wrong he does. So dominant is the unreason of the moment, that the injury he inflicts appears absolute justice, and the injury he suffers absolute injustice. Yet such disputes turn seldom upon the main point at issue between the parties; it may not even once be mentioned, while some new trifle is fought over with all the bitterness of the alienation that lies gnawing and biting and burning beneath. War is raging between kingdoms for the possession of a hovel, which possessed, the quarrel were no nearer settlement than before!

Hence it came that Barbara paid so little regard to her mother's challenge of the clergyman. Single combat of the sort she seemed to seek was an experience of Barbara's life too often recurrent to be interesting; the thunders of its artillery, near or afar, passed over her almost unheeded. She had indeed sufficient respect for the forms of religion to regret that her mother should make her behaviour in church the talk of the parish, and to be rather pleased that the clergyman should have had the best of it in his joust of arms with her, but further interest in the matter she scarcely took.

On a certain day, Miss Brown wanting at least one pair of new shoes, and her mistress cherishing the idea of a lesson in shoeing her, for which lesson arrangement had not even yet been made, Barbara, having been all the afternoon in the house, went out toward sunset, to have a walk with a book.

She was sauntering along a grassy road which, though within their own park, belonged to the public, when she almost ran against a man similarly occupied with herself, for he also was absorbed in the book he carried. I should like to know what two books brought them thus together! Each started back with an apology, then both burst into a modest laugh, which renewed itself with merrier ring, when the first and then the second attempt to pass, with all space for elbow-room, failed, and they stood opposite each other in a hopeless mental paralysis.

“Fate is opposed to our unneighbourliness!” said Mr. Wingfold. “She will not allow us to pass, and depart in peace! What do you say, Miss Wylder?—shall we yield or shall we resist?” As he spoke, he held out his hand.

Now Barbara was the last person in the world to refuse, without a painfully good reason, any offered hand. She had never seen cause to desire the acquaintance of a man because he was a clergyman; but neither had she any unwillingness, because he was a clergyman, to make his acquaintance; while to Thomas Wingfold she already felt some attraction: the strong little hand was in his immediately, and felt comfortable in the great honest clasp, which it returned heartily.

“I never saw you on your own feet before, Miss Wylder!” said the clergyman.

“Nor on anybody else's, I hope!” she returned.

“Oh, yes, indeed!—on Miss Brown's many a time!”

“You know Miss Brown then? She is my most intimate friend!”

“I am well aware of that! Everything worth knowing in the parish, and a good deal that is not, comes to my ears.”

“May I hope you count Miss Brown's affairs worth hearing about, then?”

“Of course I do! Does not a lady call her friend, whose acquaintance I have long wished to make! and do I not know that Miss Brown loves her in return! I cannot help sometimes regretting for a moment that four-footed friends in general are so short-lived.”

“Why only for a moment?” said Barbara.

“Because I remind myself that it must be best for them and us—best for the friendship between us, best for us every way. But indeed I have more to be thankful for in the relation than most people of my acquaintance, for I sometimes drive a pony yet that is over forty!”

“Forty years of age!”

“Yes.”

“I should like to see that pony!”

“You shall see her, any day you will come to the parsonage. I will gladly introduce her to you, but it is getting rather late to desire her acquaintance: she does not see very well, and is not so good-tempered as she once was. But she will soon be better.”

“How do you mean?”

“She has a process to go through out of which she will come ever so much the better.”

“Good gracious! you're not going to have an operation performed on her—at her age?”

“She is going to have her body stript off her!”

“Good gracious!” cried Barbara again, but with yet greater energy—then seeing what he meant, laughed at her mistake.

“But then,” she said, with eager resumption, “you must believe there is something to strip her body off? I do! I have always thought so!”

“So have I, and so I do indeed!” answered Wingfold. “I can't prove it. I can't prove anything—to my own satisfaction, that is, though I dare say I might to the satisfaction of one who did not love the creatures enough to be anxious about them. I don't think you can prove anything that is worth being anxious about.”

“Then why do you believe it?” asked Barbara, influenced by the talk of the century.

“Because I can,” answered Wingfold. “To believe and to be able to prove, have little or nothing to do with each other. To believe and to convince have much to do with each other.”

“But,” persisted Barbara, with Richard in her mind, “how are you to be sure of a thing you can't prove?”

“That's a good question, and this is my answer,” said Wingfold:—“What you love, you already believe enough to put it to the proof of trial. My life is such a proving; and the proof is so promising that it fills me with the happiest hope. To prove with your brains the thing you love, would be to deck the garments of salvation with a useless fringe. Shall I search heaven and earth for proof that my wife is a good and lovely woman? The signs of it are everywhere; the proofs of it nowhere.”

They walked along for a while, side by side, in silence. Which had turned and gone with the other neither knew. Barbara was beginning already to feel that safety which almost everybody sooner or later came to feel in Wingfold's company—a safety born of the sense that, in the closest talk, he never lay in wait for a victory, but took his companion, as one of his own people, into the end after which he was striving.

“Then,” said Barbara at length, still thinking of Richard, “if you believe that even the beasts are saved, you must think it very bad of a man not to believe in a God!”

“I should think anyhow that he didn't care much about the beasts—that he hadn't a heart big enough to take the beasts in!”

“But he couldn't, you know, if he didn't believe in God!”

“I understand; only, if he loved the poor beasts very much, and thought what a bad time they have of it in the world, I don't know how he could help hoping at least, that there was a God somewhere who would somehow make up to them for it all! For my own part I don't know how to be content except the beasts themselves, when it is all over and the good time come, are able to say, 'After all, it is well worth it, bad as it was!'”

“But what if it was just that suffering that made the man think there could not be a God, or he would put a stop to it?”

“That looks to me very close to believing in God.”

“How do you make that out?”

“If a man believed in a God that did not heed the suffering of the creation, one who made men and women and beasts knowing that they must suffer, and suffer only—and went on believing so however you set him thinking about it, I should say to him, 'You believe in a devil, and so are in the way to become a devil yourself.' A thousand times rather would I believe that there was no God, and that the misery came by chance from which there was no escape. What I do believe is, that there is a God who is even now doing his best to take all men and all beasts out of the misery in which they find themselves.”

“But why did he let them come into it?”

“That the God will tell them, to their satisfaction, so soon as ever they shall have become capable of understanding it. There must be things so entirely beyond our capacity, that we cannot now see enough of them to be able even to say that they are incomprehensible. There must be millions of truths that have not yet risen above the horizon of what we call the finite.”

“Then you would not think a person so very, very wicked, for not believing in a God?”

“That depends on the sort of God he fancied himself asked to believe in. Would you call a Greek philosopher wicked for not believing in Mercury or Venus? If a man had the same notion of God that I have, or anything like it, and did not at least desire that there might be such a God, then I confess I should have difficulty in understanding how he could be good. But the God offered him might not be worth believing in, might even be such that it was a virtuous act to refuse to believe in him.”

“One thing more, Mr. Wingfold—and you must not think I am arguing against you or against God, for if I thought there was no God, I should just take poison:—tell me, mightn't a man think the idea of such a God as you believe in, too good to be true?”

“I should need to know something of his history, rightly to understand that. Why should he be able to think anything too good to be true? Why should a thing not be true because it was good? It seems to me, if a thing be bad, it cannot possibly be true. If you say the thing is, I answer it exists because of something under the badness. Badness by itself can have no life in it. But if the man really thought as you suggest, I would say to him, 'You cannot know such a being does not exist: is it possible you should be content that such a being should not exist? If such a being did exist, would you be content never to find him, but to go on for ever and ever saying, He can't be! He can't be! He's so good he can't be! Supposing you find one day that there he is, will your defence before him be satisfactory to yourself: “There he is after all, but he was too good to believe in, therefore I did not try to find him”? Will you say to him—“If you had not been so good, if you had been a little less good, a little worse, just a trifle bad, I could and would have believed in you?”'”

“But if the man could not believe there was any such being, how could he have heart to look for him?”

“If he believed the idea of him so good, yet did not desire such a being enough to wish that he might be, enough to feel it worth his while to cry out, in some fashion or other, after him, then I could not help suspecting something wrong in his will, or his moral nature somewhere; or, perhaps, that the words he spoke were but words, and that he did not really and truly feel that the idea of such a God was too good to be true. In any such case his maker would not have cause to be satisfied with him. And if his maker was not satisfied with what he had made, do you think the man made would have cause to be satisfied with himself?”

“But if he was made so?”

“Then no good being, not to say a faithful creator, would blame him for what he could not help. If the God had made his creature incapable of knowing him, then of course the creature would not feel that he needed to know him. He would be where we generally imagine the lower animals—unable, therefore not caring to know who made him.”

“But is not that just the point? A man may say truly, 'I don't feel I want to know anything about God; I do not believe I am made to understand him; I take no interest in the thought of a God'!”

“Before I could answer you concerning such a man, I should want to know whether he had not been doing as he knew he ought not to do, living as he knew he ought not to live, and spoiling himself, so spoiling the thing that God had made that, although naturally he would like to know about God, yet now, through having by wrong-doing injured his deepest faculty of understanding, he did not care to know anything concerning him.”

“What could be done for such a man?”

“God knows—God does know. I think he will make his very life a terrible burden, so that for pure misery he will cry to him.”

“But suppose he was a man who tried to do right, who tried to help his neighbour, who was at least so far a good man as to deny the God that most people seem to believe in—what would you say then?”

“I would say, 'Have patience.' If there be a good God, he cannot be altogether dissatisfied with such a man. Of course it is something wanting that makes him like that, and it may be he is to blame, or it may be he can't help it: I do not know when any man has arrived at the point of development at which he is capable of believing in God: the child of a savage may be capable, and a gray-haired man of science incapable. If such a man says, 'The question of a God is not interesting to me,' I believe him; but, if he be such a man as you have last described, I believe also that, as God is taking care of him who is the God of patience, the time must come when something will make him want to know whether there be a God, and whether he cannot get near him, so as to be near him.' I would say, 'He is in God's school; don't be too much troubled about him, as if God might overlook and forget him. He will see to all that concerns him. He has made him, and he loves him, and he is doing and will do his very best for him.'”

“Oh, I am so glad to hear you speak like that!” cried Barbara. “I didn't know clergymen were like that! I'm sure they don't talk like that in the pulpit!”

“Well, you know a man can't just chat with his people in the pulpit as he may when he has one alone to himself! For, you see, there are hundreds there, and they are all very different, and that must make a difference in the way he can talk to them. There are multitudes who could not understand a word of what we have been saying to each, other! But if a clergyman says anything in the pulpit that differs in essence from what he says out of it, he is a false prophet, and has no business anywhere but in the realm of falsehood.”

“Why is he in the church, then?”

“If there be any such man in the church of England, we have to ask first how he got into it. I used to think the bishop who ordained him must be to blame for letting such a man in. But I am told the bishops haven't the power to keep out any one who passes their examination, provided he is morally decent; and if that be true, I don't know what is to be done. What I know is, that I have enough to do with my parish, and that to mind my work is the best I can do to set the church right.”

“I suppose the bishops—some of them at least—would say, 'If we do not take the men we can get, how is the work of the church to go on?'”

“I presume that even such bishops would allow that the business of the church is to teach men about God: that they cannot get men who know God, is a bad argument for employing men who do not know him to teach others about him. It is founded on utter distrust of God. I believe the only way to set the thing right is to refuse the bad that there may be room for God to send the good. By admitting the false they block the way for the true. But the poor bishops have great difficulties. I am glad I am not a bishop! My parish is nearly too much for me sometimes!”

Barbara could not help thinking how her mother alone had been almost too much for him.

Their talk the rest of the way was lighter and more general; and to her great joy Barbara discovered that the clergyman loved books the same way the bookbinder loved them. But she did not mention Richard.

The parson took leave of her at a convenient issue from the park. But before she had gone many steps he came running after her and said—

“By the way, Miss Wylder, here are some verses that may please you! We were talking about our hopes for the animals! I heard the story they are founded on the other day from my friend the dissenting minister of the village. The little daughter of Dr. Doddridge, the celebrated theologian, was overheard asking the dog if he knew who made him. Receiving no reply, she said what you will find written there as the text of the poem.”

He put a paper in her hand, and left her. She opened it, and found what follows:—