CHAPTER XXX. HELEN AWAKE
That Sunday-dinner was a very quiet meal. An old friend of Mrs. Ramshorn, a lady-ecclesiastic like herself, dined with them; what the two may have said to each other in secret conclave, I cannot tell, but not a word of remark upon Mr. Wingfold or his sermon was heard at table.
As she was leaving the room, Bascombe whispered Helen to put on something and come to him in the garden. Helen glanced at the window as if doubtful. It was cold, but the sun was shining; the weather had nothing to do with it; she had but taken a moment to think. She pressed her lips together—and consented. George saw she would rather not go, but he set it down to a sisterly unwillingness to enjoy herself when her brother could no longer behold the sun, and such mere sentiment must not be encouraged.
When the cypresses and box-trees had come betwixt them and the house, he offered his arm, but Helen preferred being free. She did not refuse to go into the summer-house with him; but she took her place on the opposite side of the little table. George however spied no hint of approaching doom.
“I am sorry to have to alter my opinion of that curate,” he said as he seated himself. “There was so much in him that I took to promise well. But old habit, the necessities of existence, and the fear of society have been too much for him—as they will always be for most men. He has succumbed at last, and I am sorry! I did think he was going to turn out an honest man!”
“And you have come to the certain conclusion that he is not an honest man, George?”
“Assuredly.”
“Why?”
“Because he goes on to teach what he confesses he is not sure about.”
“He professes to be sure that it is better than anything he is sure about.—You teach me there is no God: are you absolutely certain there is not?”
“Yes; absolutely certain.”
“On what grounds?”
“On grounds I have set forth to you twenty times, Helen, dear,” answered George a little impatiently. “I am not inclined to talk about them now.—I can no more believe in a god than in a dragon.”
“And yet a dragon was believable to the poets that made our old ballads; and now geology reveals that some-such creatures did at one time actually exist.”
“Ah! you turn the tables on me there, Helen! I confess my parallel a false one.”
“A truer one than you think, perhaps,” said Helen. “That a thing should seem absurd to one man, or to a thousand men, will not make it absurd in its own nature; and men as good and as clever as you, George, have in all ages believed in a God. Only their notion of God may have been different from yours. Perhaps their notion was a believable one, while yours is not.”
“By Jove, Helen! you’ve got on with your logic. I feel quite flattered! So far as I am aware you have had no tutor in that branch but myself! You’ll soon be too much for your master, by Jove!”
Like the pied piper, Helen smiled a little smile. But she said seriously,
“Well, George, all I have to suggest is—What if, after all your inability to believe it, things should at last prove, even to your—satisfaction, shall I say?—that there IS a God?”
“Don’t trouble yourself a bit about it, Helen,” returned George, whose mind was full of something else, to introduce which he was anxiously, and heedlessly, clearing the way: “I am prepared to take my chance, and all I care about is whether you will take your chance with me. Helen, I love you with my whole soul.”
“Oh! you have a soul, then, George? I thought you hadn’t!”
“It IS a foolish form of speech, no doubt,” returned Bascombe, a little disconcerted, as was natural. “—But to be serious, Helen, I do love you.”
“How long will you love me if I tell you I don’t love you?”
“Really, Helen, I don’t see how to answer such a question. I don’t understand you at all to-day! Have I offended you? I am very sorry if I have, but I am quite in the dark as to when or where or how.”
“Tell me then,” said Helen, heedless of his evident annoyance and discomfort, “how long will you love me if I love you in return?”
“For ever and ever.”
“Another form of speech?”
“You know what I mean well enough. I shall love you as long as I live.”
“George, I never could love a man who believed I was going to die for ever.”
“But, Helen,” pleaded Bascombe, “if it can’t be helped, you know!”
“But you are content it should be so. You believe it willingly. You scoff at any hint of a possible immortality.”
“Well, but, Helen, what difference can it make between you and me?” returned George, whom the danger of losing her had rendered for the moment indifferent even to his most cherished theory. “If there should be anything afterwards, of course I should go on loving you to the very extreme of the possible.”
“While now you don’t love me enough to wish I may live and not die! Leaving that out of view however, it makes all the difference to the love I should have to expect of you. It may be only a whim—I can prove nothing any more than you—but I have a—whim then—to be loved as an immortal woman, the child of a living God, and not as a helpless bastard of Nature!—I beg your pardon—I forget my manners.”
That a lady should utter such a word!—and that lady, Helen!—George was shocked. Coming on the rest, it absolutely bewildered him. He sat silent perforce. Helen saw it, and yielded to a moment’s annoyance with herself, but presently resumed:
“I have given you the advantage, George, and wronged myself. But I don’t care MUCH. I shall only take the better courage to speak my mind.—You come asking me to love you, and my brother lying mouldering in the earth—all there is of him, you tell me! If you believed he was alive still, and I should find him again some day, there would be no reason why you should not speak of love even now; for where does anyone need love more than at the brink of the grave? But to come talking of love to me, with the same voice that has but just been teaching me that the grave is the end of all, and my brother gone down into it for ever—I tell you, cousin—I must say it—it seems to me hardly decent. For me at least—I will NOT be loved with the love that can calmly accept such a fate. And I will never love any man, believing that, if I outlive him, my love must thereafter be but a homeless torrent, falling ever into a bottomless abyss. Why should I make of my heart a roaring furnace of regrets and self-accusations? The memory of my brother is for me enough. Let me keep what freedom is possible to me; let me rather live the life of a cold-blooded animal, and die in the ice that gathers about me. But before I sit down to await such an end, I shall know whether I am indeed compelled to believe as you do that there is no God, that Death is my lord and master, that he will take me as he has taken my brother and yet I shall never see him more. No, cousin George, I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one? Yes, I know you think you can explain it all, but the way you account for it is just as miserable as what you would put in its place. I am not complete in myself like you. I am not able to live without a God. I will seek him until I find him, or drop into the abyss where all question and answer ceases. Then in the end I shall be no worse than you would have me at the beginning—no, it will be nothing so bad, for then I shall not know my misery as you would have me know it now. If we are creatures of nothing, in spite of all the outcry of our souls against that fate, what mighty matter is it if, thus utterly befooled of Nature, we should also a little fool ourselves, by believing in a lovely hope that looks like a promise, and seems as if it ought to be true? How can a devotion to the facts of her existence be required of one whose nature has been proved to her a lie?—You speak from the facts of your nature, George; I speak from the facts of mine.”
Helen had come awake at last! It would have suited George better had she remained a half-quickened statue, responsive only to himself, her not over-potent Pygmalion. He sat speechless—with his eyes fixed on her.
“You need no God,” she went on, “therefore you seek none. If you need none, you are right to seek none, I dare say. But I need a God—oh, I cannot tell how I need him, if he be to be found! and by the same reasoning I will give my life to the search for him. To the last I will go on seeking him, for if once I give in, and confess there is no God, I shall go mad—mad, and perhaps kill somebody like poor Poldie. George, I have said my say. I would not have come into the garden but to say it. Good-bye.”
As she spoke she rose and held out her hand to him. But in the tumult of more emotions than I can well name—amongst the rest indignation, dismay, disappointment, pride, and chagrin, he lost himself while searching in vain for words, paid no heed to her movement, and lifted no hand to take that she offered.
With head erect she walked from the summer-house.
“The love of a lifetime!—a sweet invitation!” she said to herself, as with the slow step of restrained wrath she went up the garden.
George sat for some minutes as she had left him. Then he broke the silence in his own ears and said,
“Well, I’m damned!”
And so he was—for the time—and a very good thing too, for he required it.
CHAPTER XXXI. THOU DIDST NOT LEAVE
The next day the curate found himself so ill at ease, from the reaction after excitement of various kinds, that he determined to give himself a holiday. His notion of a holiday was a very simple one: a day in a deep wood, if such could be had, with a volume fit for alternate reading and pocketing as he might feel inclined. Of late no volume had been his companion in any wanderings but his New Testament.
There was a remnant of real old-fashioned forest on the Lythe, some distance up: thither he went by the road, the shortest way, to return by the winding course of the stream. It was a beautiful day of St. Martin’s summer. In the forest, if the leaves were gone, there was the more light, and sun and shadow played many a lovely game. But he saw them as though he saw them not, for fear and hope struggled in his heart, and for a long time prayer itself could not atone them. At length a calm fell, and he set out to return home, down the bank of the river.
Many-hued and many-shaped had been the thoughts, not that came to him from the forest, but that he had carried thither with him: through all and each of them, ever and again had come dawning the face of Helen, as he had seen it in church the day before, where she sat between her aunt and her cousin, so unlike either. For, to their annoyance, she had insisted on going to church, and to hers, they had refused to let her go alone. And in her face the curate had seen something he had never seen there until then,—a wistful look, as if now she would be glad to pick up any suitable crumb to carry home with her. In that dawn of coming childhood, though he dared not yet altogether believe it such, the hard contemptuous expression of Bascombe’s countenance, and the severe disapproval in Mrs. Ramshorn’s, were entirely lost upon him.
All the way down the river, the sweet change haunted him. When he got into the park, and reached that hollow betwixt the steep ferny slopes where he sat on the day with which my narrative opens, he seated himself again on the same stone, and reviewed the past twelve months. This was much such a day as that, only the hour was different: it was the setting sun that now shone upon the ferns, and cast shadows from them big enough for oaks. What a change had passed upon him! That day the New Testament had been the book of the church—this day it was a fountain of living waters to the man Thomas Wingfold. He had not opened his Horace for six months. Great trouble he had had; both that and its results were precious. Now a new trouble had come, but that also was a form of life: he would rather love and suffer and love still, a thousand times rather, than return to the poverty of not knowing Helen Lingard; yet a thousand times rather would he forget Helen Lingard than lose from his heart one word of the Master, whose love was the root and only pledge and security of love, the only power that could glorify it—could cleanse it from the mingled selfishness that wrought for its final decay and death.
The sun was down ere he left the park, and the twilight was rapidly following the sun as he drew near to the Abbey on his way home. Suddenly, more like an odour than a sound, he heard the organ, he thought. Never yet had he heard it on a week-day: the organist was not of those who haunt their instrument. Often of late had the curate gazed on that organ as upon a rock filled with sweet waters, before which he stood a Moses without his rod; sometimes the solemn instrument appeared to him a dumb Jeremiah that sat there from Sunday to Sunday, all the week long, with his head bowed upon his hands, and not a Jebusite to listen to him: if only his fingers had been taught the craft, he thought, how his soul would pour itself out through the song-tubes of that tabernacle of sweetness and prayer, and on the blast of its utterance ascend to the throne of the most high! Who could it be that was now peopling the silence of the vast church with melodious sounds, worshipping creatures of the elements? If the winds and the flames of fire are his angels, how much more the grandly consorting tones of the heavenly organ! He would go and see what power informed the vaporous music.
He entered the church by one of the towers, in which a stair led skyward, passing the neighbourhood of the organ, and having a door to its loft. As he ascended, came a pause in the music;—and then, like the breaking up of a summer cloud in the heavenliest of rain-showers, began the prelude to the solo in the Messiah, THOU DIDST NOT LEAVE HIS SOUL IN HELL. Up still the curate crept softly. All at once a rich full contralto voice—surely he had heard it before—came floating out on the torrent, every tone bearing a word of sorrowful triumph in its bosom.
He reached the door. Very gently he opened it, and peeped in. But the back of the organ was towards him, and he could see nothing. He stepped upon the tiles of the little apse. One stride cleared the end of the organ, and he saw the face of the singer: it WAS Helen Lingard!
She started. The music folded its wings and dropped—like a lark into its nest. But Helen recovered herself at once, rose from her ministration at the music-altar, and approached the curate.
“Have I taken too great a liberty?” she said, in a gentle, steady voice.
“No, surely,” he answered. “I am sorry I startled you. I wish you would wake such sounds oftener.”
“He didn’t leave my brother’s soul in hell, did he, Mr. Wingfold?” she said abruptly, and her eyes shone through the dusk.
“If ever a soul was taken out of hell, it was Leopold’s,” returned the curate. “And it lifts mine out of it too,” he added, “to hear you say so.”
“I behaved very badly to you. I confess my fault. Will you forgive me?” she said.
“I love you too much to be able to forgive you:” that was the word in the curate’s heart, but a different found its way to his lips.
“My heart is open to you, Miss Lingard,” he said: “take what forgiveness you think you need. For what I can tell, it may be my part to ask forgiveness, not to grant it. If I have been harder to you than there was need, I pray you to forgive me. Perhaps I did not enter enough into your difficulties.”
“You never said one word more than was right, or harder than I deserved. Alas! I can no more—in this world at least—ask Leopold to forgive me, but I can ask you and Mr. Polwarth, who were as the angels of God to him, to pardon me for him and for yourselves too. I was obstinate and proud and selfish.—Oh, Mr. Wingfold, can you, do you really believe that Leopold is somewhere? Is he alive this moment? Shall I ever—ever—I don’t mind if it’s a thousand years first—but shall I EVER see him again?”
“I do think so. I think the story must be true that tells us Jesus took to himself again the body he left on the cross, and brought it with him out of its grave.”
“Will you take me for a pupil—a disciple—and teach me to believe—or hope, if you like that word better—as you do?” said Helen humbly.
How the heart of the curate beat—like the drum of a praising orchestra!
“Dear Miss Lingard,” he answered, very solemnly, “I can teach you nothing; I can but show you where I found what has changed my life from a bleak November to a sunny June—with its thunder-storms no doubt—but still June beside November. Perhaps I could help you a little if you were really set out to find Jesus, but you must yourself set out. It is you who must find him. Words of mine, as the voice of one crying in the wilderness, may let you know that one is near who thinks he sees him, but it is you who must search, and you who must find. If you do search, you will find, with or without help of mine.—But it is getting dark.—You have the key of the north door, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“Then will you lock the door, and take the key to Mrs. Jenkins. I will stay here a while, and then follow you home, if you will allow we, where we can have a little talk together. Ah, what an anthem the silent organ will play for me!”
Helen turned and went down into the church, and thence home.
The curate remained with the organ. It was silent, and so were his lips, but his heart—the music was not latent there, for his praise and thanksgiving ascended, without voice or instrument, essential harmony, to the ear that hears thought, and the heart that vibrates to every chord of feeling in the hearts it has created. Ah! what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace? Alone in the dusky church, the curate’s ascended like a song of the angels, for his heart was all a thanksgiving—not for any perfected gift, but for many a lovely hope. He knelt down by the organ and worshipped the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ—that God and no other was the God of his expectation. When he rose from his knees, the church was dark, but through the windows of the clerestory many stars were shining.