CHAPTER XXV. THE CURATE’S COUNSEL
Not seeing yet what he had to say, but knowing that scintillation the smallest is light, the curate let the talk take its natural course, and said the next thing that came to him.
“How do you feel when you think that you may yet be found out?” he asked.
“At first I was more afraid of that than of anything else. Then after that danger seemed past, I was afraid of the life to come. That fear left me next, and now it is the thing itself that is always haunting me. I often wish they would come and take me, and deliver me from myself. It would be a comfort to have it all known, and never need to start again. I think I could even bear to see her in the prison. If it would annihilate the deed, or bring Emmeline back, I cannot tell you how gladly I would be hanged. I would, indeed, Mr. Wingfold. I I hope you will believe me, though I don’t deserve it.”
“I do believe you,” said the curate, and a silence followed.
“There is but one thing I can say with confidence at this moment,” he resumed: “it is, that I am your friend, and will stand by you. But the first part of friendship sometimes is to confess poverty, and I want to tell you that, of the very things concerning which I ought to know most, I knew least. I have but lately begun to feel after God, and I dare not say that I have found him, but I think I know now where to find him. And I do think, if we could find him, then we should find help. All I can do for you now is only to be near you, and talk to you, and pray to God for you, that so together we may wait for what light may come.—Does anything ever look to you as if it would make you feel better?”
“I have no right to feel better or take comfort from anything.”
“I am not sure about that.—Do you feel any better for having me come to see you?”
“Oh, yes, indeed I do!”
“Well, there is no wrong in that, is there?”
“I don’t know. It seems a sneaking kind of thing: she has got none of it. My sister makes excuses for me, but the moment I begin to listen to them I only feel the more horrid.”
“I have said nothing of that kind to you.”
“No, sir.”
“And yet you like to have me here?”
“Yes, indeed, sir,” he answered, earnestly.
“And it does not make you think less of your crime?”
“No. It makes me feel it worse than ever to see you sitting there, a clean, strong, innocent man, and think what I might have been.”
“Then the comfort you get from me does you no harm, at least. If I were to find my company made you think with less hatred of your crime, I should go away that instant.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Leopold humbly. “Oh, sir!” he resumed after a little silence, “—to think that never more to all eternity shall I be able to think of myself as I used to think!”
“Perhaps you used to think too much of yourself,” returned the curate. “For the greatest fool and rascal in creation there is yet a worse condition, and that is—not to know it, but think himself a respectable man. As the event proves, though you would doubtless have laughed at the idea, you were then capable of committing a murder. I have come to see—at least I think I have—that except a man has God dwelling in him, he may be, or may become, capable of any crime within the compass of human nature.”
“I don’t know anything about God,” said Leopold. “I daresay I thought I did before this happened—before I did it, I mean,” he added in correction,”—but I know now that I don’t, and never did.”
“Ah, Leopold!” said the curate, “think, if my coming to you comforts you, what would it be to have him who made you always with you!”
“Where would be the good? I daresay he might forgive me, if I were to do this and that, but where would be the good of it? It would not take the thing off me one bit.”
“Ah! now,” said Wingfold, “I fear you are thinking a little about your own disgrace and not only of the bad you have done. Why should you not be ashamed? Why would you have the shame taken off you? Nay; you must humbly consent to bear it. Perhaps your shame is the hand of love washing the defilement from off you. Let us keep our shame, and be made clean from the filth!”
“I don’t know that I understand you, sir. What do you mean by the defilement? Is it not to have done the deed that is the defilement?”
“Is it not rather to have that in you, a part, or all but a part of your being, that makes you capable of doing it? If you had resisted and conquered, you would have been clean from it; and now, if you repent and God comes to you, you will yet be clean. Again I say, let us keep our shame and be made clean! Shame is not defilement, though a mean pride persuades men so. On the contrary, the man who is honestly ashamed has begun to be clean.”
“But what good would that do to Emmeline? It cannot bring her up again to the bright world out of the dark grave.”
“Emmeline is not in the dark grave.”
“Where is she, then?” he said with a ghastly look.
“That I cannot tell. I only know that, if there be a God, she is in his hands,” replied the curate.
The youth gazed on in his face and made no answer. Wingfold saw that he had been wrong in trying to comfort him with the thought of God dwelling in him. How was such a poor passionate creature to take that for a comfort? How was he to understand or prize the idea, who had his spiritual nature so all undeveloped? He would try another way.
“Shall I tell you what seems to me sometimes the only one thing I want to help me out of my difficulties?”
“Yes, please, sir,” answered Leopold, as humbly as a child.
“I think sometimes, if I could but see Jesus for one moment—”
“Ah!” cried Leopold, and gave a great sigh.
“YOU would like to see him then, would you?”
“Oh, Mr. Wingfold!”
“What would you say to him if you saw him?”
“I don’t know. I would fall down on my face and hold his feet lest he should go away from me.”
“Do you think then he could help you?”
“Yes. He could make Emmeline alive again. He could destroy what I have done.”
“But still, as you say, the crime would remain.”
“But, as you say, he could pardon that, and make me that I would never never sin again.”
“So you think the story about Jesus Christ is true?”
“Yes. Don’t you?” said Leopold with an amazed, half-frightened look.
“Yes, indeed I do.—Then do you remember what he said to his disciples as he left them: ‘I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS UNTO THE END OF THE WORLD’?—If that be true, then he can hear you just as well now as ever he could. And when he was in the world, he said, ‘COME UNTO ME ALL YE THAT LABOUR AND ARE HEAVY-LADEN, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST.’ It is rest you want, my poor boy—not deliverance from danger or shame, but rest—such peace of mind as you had when you were a child. If he cannot give you that, I know not where or how it is to be had. Do not waste time in asking yourself how he can do it: that is for him to understand, not you—until it is done. Ask him to forgive you and make you clean and set things right for you. If he will not do it, then he is not the saviour of men, and was wrongly named Jesus.”
The curate rose. Leopold had hid his face. When he looked again he was gone.
CHAPTER XXVI. SLEEP
As Wingfold came out of the room, which was near the stair, Helen rose from the top of it, where she had been sitting all the time he had been with her brother. He closed the door gently behind him, and stepped softly along the landing. A human soul in guilt and agony is an awful presence, but there was more than that in the hush of the curate: he felt as if he had left the physician of souls behind him at the bedside; that a human being lay on the rack of the truth, but at his head stood one who watched his throes with the throbs of such a human heart as never beat in any bosom but his own, and the executioners were angels of light. No wonder if with such a feeling in his breast Wingfold walked softly, and his face glistened! He was not aware that the tears stood in his eyes, but Helen saw them.
“You know all!” she faltered.
“I do. Will you let me out by the garden again? I wish to be alone.”
She led the way down the stair, and walked with him through the garden. Wingfold did not speak.
“You don’t think very badly of my poor brother, do you, Mr. Wingfold?” said Helen, meekly.
“It is a terrible fate,” he returned. “I think I never saw a lovelier disposition. I do hope his mind will soon be more composed. I think he knows where alone he can find rest. I am well aware how foolish that of which I speak seems to some minds, Miss Lingard; but when a man is once overwhelmed in his own deeds, when they have turned into spectres to mock at him, when he loathes himself and turns with sickness from past, present, and future, I know but one choice left, and that is between the death your friend Mr. Bascombe preaches, and the life preached by Jesus, the crucified Jew. Into the life I hope your brother will enter.”
“I am so glad you don’t hate him.”
“Hate him! Who but a demon could hate him?”
Helen lifted a grateful look from eyes that swam in tears. The terror of his possible counsel for the moment vanished. He could never tell him to give himself up!
“But, as I told you, I am a poor scholar in these high matters,” resumed the curate, “and I want to bring Mr. Polwarth to see him.”
“The dwarf!” exclaimed Helen, shuddering at the remembrance of what she had gone through at the cottage.
“Yes. That man’s soul is as grand and beautiful and patient as his body is insignificant and distorted and troubled. He is the wisest and best man I have ever known.
“I must ask Leopold,” returned Helen, who, the better the man was represented, felt the more jealous and fearful of the advice he might give. Her love and her conscience were not yet at one with each other.
They parted at the door from the garden, and she returned to the sick-room.
She paused, hesitating to enter. All was still as the grave. She turned the handle softly and peeped in: could it be that Wingfold’s bearing had communicated to her mind a shadow of the awe with which he had left the place where perhaps a soul was being born again? Leopold did not move. Terror laid hold of her heart. She stepped quickly in, and round the screen to the side of the bed. There, to her glad surprise, he lay fast asleep, with the tears not yet dried upon his face. Her heart swelled with some sense unknown before: was it rudimentary thankfulness to the Father of her spirit?
As she stood gazing with the look of a mother over her sick child, he lifted his eyelids, and smiled a sad smile.
“When did you come into the room?” he said.
“A minute ago,” she answered.
“I did not hear you,” he returned.
“No, you were asleep.”
“Not I! Mr. Wingfold is only just gone.”
“I have let him out on the meadow since.”
Leopold stared, looked half alarmed, and then said,
“Did God make me sleep, Helen?”
She did not answer. The light of a new hope in his eye, as if the dawn had begun at last to break over the dark mountains, was already reflected from her heart.
“Oh! Helen,” he said, “that IS a good fellow, SUCH a good fellow!”
A pang of jealousy, the first she had ever felt, shot to her heart: she had hitherto, since his trouble, been all in all to her Leopold! Had the curate been a man she liked, she would not perhaps have minded it so much.
“You will be able to do without me now,” she said sadly. “I never could understand taking to people at first sight!”
“Some people are made so, I suppose, Helen. I know I took to you at first sight! I shall never forget the first time I saw you—when I came to this country a lonely little foreigner,—and you, a great beautiful lady, for such you seemed to me, though you have told me since you were only a great gawky girl—I know that could never have been—you ran to meet me, and took me in your arms, and kissed me. I was as if I had crossed the sea of death and found paradise in your bosom! I am not likely to forget you for Mr. Wingfold, good and kind and strong as he is! Even SHE could not make me forget you, Helen. But neither you nor I can do without Mr. Wingfold any more, I fancy. I wish you liked him better!—but you will in time. You see he’s not one to pay young ladies compliments, as I have heard some parsons do; and he may be a little—no, not unpolished, not that—that’s not what I mean—but unornamental in his manners! Only, you see,—”
“Only, you see, Poldie,” interrupted Helen, with a smile, a rare thing between them, “you know all about him, though you never saw him before.”
“That is true,” returned Leopold; “but then he came to me with his door open, and let me walk in. It doesn’t take long to know a man then. He hasn’t got a secret like us, Helen,” he added, sadly.
“What did he say to you?”
“Much what he said to you from the pulpit the other day, I should think.”
Then she was right! For all his hardness and want of sympathy, the curate had yet had regard to her entreaties, and was not going to put any horrid notions about duty and self-sacrifice into the poor boy’s head!
“He’s coming again to-morrow,” added Leopold, almost gleefully, “and then perhaps he will tell me more, and help me on a bit!”
“Did he tell you he wants to bring a friend with him?”
“No.”
“I can’t see the good of taking more people into our confidence.”
“Why should he not do what he thinks best, Helen? You don’t interfere with the doctor—why should you with him? When a man is going to the bottom as fast as he can, and another comes diving after him—it isn’t for me to say how he is to take hold of me. No, Helen; when I trust, I trust out and out.”
Helen sighed, thinking how ill that had worked with Emmeline.
Ever since George Bascombe had talked about the Polwarths that day they met him in the park, she had felt a sort of physical horror of them, as if they were some kind of unclean creature that ought not to be in existence at all. But when Leopold uttered himself thus, she felt that the current of events had seized her, and that she could only submit to be carried along.
CHAPTER XXVII. DIVINE SERVICE
The next day the curate called again on Leopold. But Helen happened to be otherwise engaged for a few minutes, and Mrs. Ramshorn to be in the sick-room when the servant brought his name. With her jealousy of Wingfold’s teaching, she would not have admitted him, but Lingard made such loud protest when he heard her say “Not at home,” insisting on seeing him, that she had to give way, and tell the maid to show him up. She HAD NO NOTION however of leaving him alone in the room with the invalid: who could tell what absurd and extravagant ideas he might not put into the boy’s head! He might make him turn monk, or Socinian, or latter-day-saint, for what she knew! So she sat, blocking up the sole small window in the youth’s dark dwelling that looked eastward, and damming back the tide of the dawn from his diseased and tormented soul. Little conversation was therefore possible. Still the face of his new friend was a comfort to Leopold, and ere he left him they had managed to fix an hour for next day, when they would not be thus foiled of their talk.
That same afternoon, Wingfold took the draper to see Polwarth.
Rachel was lying on the sofa in the parlour—a poor little heap, looking more like a grave disturbed by efforts at a resurrection, than a form informed with humanity. But she was cheerful and cordial, receiving Mr. Drew and accepted his sympathy most kindly.
“We’ll see what God will do for me,” she said in answer to a word from the curate. Her whole bearing, now as always, was that of one who perfectly trusted a supreme spirit under whose influences lay even the rugged material of her deformed dwelling.
Polwarth allowed Wingfold to help him in getting tea, and the conversation, as will be the case where all are in earnest, quickly found the right channel.
It is not often in real life that such conversations occur. Generally, in any talk worth calling conversation, every man has some point to maintain, and his object is to justify his own thesis and disprove his neighbour’s. I will allow that he may primarily have adopted his thesis because of some sign of truth in it, but his mode of supporting it is generally such as to block up every cranny in his soul at which more truth might enter. In the present case, unusual as it is for so many as three truth-loving men to come thus together on the face of this planet, here were three simply set on uttering truth they had seen, and gaining sight of truth as yet veiled from them.
I shall attempt only a general impression of the result of their evening’s intercourse, partly recording the utterances of Polwarth.
“I have been trying hard to follow you, Mr. Polwarth,” said the draper, after his host had for a while had the talk to himself, “but I cannot get a hold of your remarks. One moment I think I have got the end of the clew, and the next find myself all abroad again. Would you tell me what you mean by divine service, for I think you must use the phrase in some different sense from what I have been accustomed to?”
“Ah! I ought to remember,” said Polwarth, “that what has grown familiar to my mind from much solitary thinking, may not at once show itself to another, when presented in the forms of a foreign individuality. I ought to have premised that, when I use the phrase, DIVINE SERVICE, I mean nothing whatever belonging to the church, or its observances. I mean by it what it ought to mean—the serving of God—the doing of something for God. Shall I make of the church in my foolish imaginations a temple of idolatrous worship by supposing that it is for the sake of supplying some need that God has, or of gratifying some taste in him, that I there listen to his word, say prayers to him, and sing his praises? Shall I be such a dull mule in the presence of the living Truth? Or, to use a homely simile, shall I be as the good boy of the nursery rhyme, who, seated in his corner of selfish complacency, regards the eating of his pie as a virtuous action, enjoys the contemplation of it, and thinks what a pleasant object he thus makes of himself to his parents? Shall I, to take a step farther, degrade the sanctity of the closet, hallowed in the words of Jesus, by shutting its door in the vain fancy of there doing something that God requires of me as a sacred OBSERVANCE? Shall I foolishly imagine that to put in exercise the highest and loveliest, the most entrancing privilege of existence, that of pouring forth my whole heart into the heart of him who is ACCOUNTABLE FOR me, who hath glorified me with his own image—in my soul, gentlemen, sadly disfigured as it is in my body!—shall I say that THAT is to do anything for God? Was I serving my father when I ate the dinner he provided for me? Am I serving my God when I eat his bread and drink his wine?”
“But,” said Drew, “is not God pleased that a man should pour out his soul to him?”
“Yes, doubtless; but what would you think of a child who said, ‘I am very useful to my father, for when I ask him for anything, or tell him I love him, it gives him—oh, such pleasure!’?”
“I should say he was an unendurable prig. Better he had to be whipped for stealing!” said the curate.
“There would be more hope of his future,” returned Polwarth. “—Is the child,” he continued, “who sits by his father’s knee and looks up into his father’s face, SERVING that father, because the heart of the father delights to look down upon his child? And shall the moment of my deepest repose and bliss, the moment when I serve myself with the very life of the universe, be called a serving of my God? It is communion with God; he holds it with me, else never could I hold it with him. I am as the foam-froth upon his infinite ocean, but of the water of the ocean is the bubble on its waves.”
Not the eyes only, but the whole face of the man, which had grown of a pure, semi-transparent whiteness, appeared to Wingfold to emit light.
“When my child would serve me,” he went on, “he spies out some need I have, springs from his seat at my knee, finds that which will meet my necessity, and is my eager, happy servant, of consequence in his own eyes inasmuch as he has done something for his father. His seat by my knee is love, delight, well-being, peace—not service, however pleasing in my eyes.—‘Why do you seat yourself at my knee, my son?’ ‘To please you, father.’ ‘Nay then, my son! go from me, and come again when it shall be to please thyself.’—‘Why do you cling to my chair, my daughter? ‘Because I want to be near you, father. It makes me so happy!’ ‘Come nearer still—come to my bosom, my child, and be yet happier.’—Talk not of public worship as divine service; it is a mockery. Search the prophets and you will find the observances, fasts and sacrifices and solemn feasts, of the temple by them regarded with loathing and scorn, just because by the people they were regarded as DIVINE SERVICE.”
“But,” said Mr. Drew, while Wingfold turned towards him with some anxiety lest he should break the mood of the little prophet, “I can’t help thinking I have you! for how are poor creatures like us—weak, blundering creatures, sometimes most awkward when best-intentioned—how are we to minister to a perfect God—perfect in wisdom, strength, and everything—of whom Paul says that he is not worshipped with men’s hands as though he needed anything? I cannot help thinking that you are fighting merely with a word. Certainly, if the phrase ever was used in that sense, there is no meaning of the kind attached to it now: it stands merely for the forms of public worship.”
“Were there no such thing as Divine Service in the true sense of the word, then, indeed it would scarcely be worth while to quarrel with its misapplication. But I assert that true and genuine service may be rendered to the living God; and, for the development of the divine nature in man, it is necessary that he should do something for God. Nor is it hard to discover how; for God is in every creature that he has made, and in their needs he is needy, and in all their afflictions he is afflicted. Therefore Jesus says that whatever is done to one of his little ones is done to him. And if the soul of a man be the temple of the Spirit, then is the place of that man’s labour, his shop, his counting-house, his laboratory, the temple of Jesus Christ, where the spirit of the man is incarnate in work.—Mr. Drew!”—Here the gate-keeper stood up, and held out both his hands, palms upward, towards the draper on the other side of the table.—“Mr. Drew! your shop is the temple of your service where the Lord Christ, the only image of the Father is, or ought to be throned; your counter is, or ought to be his altar; and everything thereon laid, with intent of doing as well as you can for your neighbour, in the name of THE man Christ Jesus, is a true sacrifice offered to Him, a service done to the eternal creating Love of the universe.”
The little prophet’s head as he stood, did not reach the level of the draper’s as he sat, but at this Drew dropped his head on his hands upon the table, as if bowed down by a weight of thought and feeling and worship.
“I say not,” Polwarth went on, “that so doing you will grow a rich man, but I say that so doing you will be saved from growing too rich, and that you will be a fellow-worker with God for the salvation of his world.”
“I must live; I cannot give my goods away!” murmured Mr. Drew, thinkingly, as one that sought enlightenment.
“That would be to go direct against the order of his world,” said Polwarth. “No; a harder task is yours, Mr. Drew—to make your business a gain to you, and at the same time to be not only what is commonly counted just, but interested in, and careful of, and caring for your neighbour, as a servant of the God of bounty who giveth to all men liberally. Your calling is to do the best for your neighbour that you reasonably can.”
“But who is to fix what is reasonable?” asked Drew.
“The man himself, thinking in the presence of Jesus Christ. There is a holy moderation which is of God.”
“There won’t be many fortunes—great fortunes—made after that rule, Mr. Polwarth.”
“Very few.”
“Then do you say that no great fortunes have been righteously made?”
“If RIGHTEOUSLY means AFTER THE FASHION OF JESUS CHRIST.—But I will not judge: that is for the God-enlightened conscience of the man himself to do—not for his neighbour’s. Why should I be judged by another man’s conscience?—But you see, Mr. Drew,—and this is what I was driving at—that you have it in your power to SERVE God, through the needs of his children, all the working day, from morning to night, so long as there is a customer in your shop.”
“I do think you are right, sir,” said the linen-draper. “I had a glimpse of the same thing the other night myself. And yet it seems as if you spoke of a purely ideal state—one that could not be realised in this world.”
“Purely ideal or not, one thing is certain: it will never be reached by one who is so indifferent to it as to believe it impossible. Whether it may be reached in this world or not, that is a question of NO consequence; whether a man has begun to REACH AFTER it, is of the utmost awfulness of import. And should it be ideal, which I doubt, what else than the ideal have the followers of the ideal man to do with?”
“Can a man reach anything ideal before he has God dwelling in him—filling every cranny of his soul?” asked the curate with shining eyes.
“Nothing, I do most solemnly believe,” answered Polwarth. “It weighs on me heavily sometimes,” he resumed, after a pause, “to think how far all but a few are from being able even to entertain the idea of the indwelling in them of the original power of their life. True, God is in every man, else how could he live the life he does live? but that life God keeps alive for the hour when he shall inform the will, the aspiration, the imagination of the man. When the man throws wide his door to the Father of his spirit, when his individual being is thus supplemented—to use a poor miserable word—with the individuality that originated it, then is the man a whole, healthy, complete existence. Then indeed, and then only, will he do no wrong, think no wrong, love perfectly, and be right merry. Then will he scarce think of praying, because God is in every thought and enters anew with every sensation. Then will he forgive, and endure, and pour out his soul for the beloved who yet grope their way in doubt and passion. Then every man will be dear and precious to him, even the worst, for in him also lies an unknown yearning after the same peace wherein he rests and loves.”
He sat down suddenly, and a deep silence filled the room.