In a day or two Connie was permitted to rise and take to her couch once more. It seemed strange that she should look so much worse, and yet be so much stronger. The growth of her power of motion was wonderful. As they carried her, she begged to be allowed to put her feet to the ground. Turner yielded, though without quite ceasing to support her. He was satisfied, however, that she could have stood upright for a moment at least. He would not, of course, risk it, and made haste to lay her down.
The time of his departure was coming near, and he seemed more anxious the nearer it came; for Connie continued worn-looking and pale; and her smile, though ever ready to greet me when I entered, had lost much of its light. I noticed, too, that she had the curtain of her window constantly so arranged as to shut out the sea. I said something to her about it once. Her reply was:
“Papa, I can’t bear it. I know it is very silly; but I think I can make you understand how it is: I was so fond of the sea when I came down; it seemed to lie close to my window, with a friendly smile ready for me every morning when I looked out. I daresay it is all from want of faith, but I can’t help it: it looks so far away now, like a friend that had failed me, that I would rather not see it.”
I saw that the struggling life within her was grievously oppressed, that the things which surrounded her were no longer helpful. Her life had been driven as to its innermost cave; and now, when it had been enticed to venture forth and look abroad, a sudden pall had descended upon nature. I could not help thinking that the good of our visit to Kilkhaven had come, and that evil, from which I hoped we might yet escape, was following. I left her, and sought Turner.
“It strikes me, Turner,” I said, “that the sooner we get out of this the better for Connie.”
“I am quite of your opinion. I think the very prospect of leaving the place would do something to restore her. If she is so uncomfortable now, think what it will be in the many winter nights at hand.”
“Do you think it would be safe to move her?”
“Far safer than to let her remain. At the worst, she is now far better than when she came. Try her. Hint at the possibility of going home, and see how she will take it.”
“Well, I sha’n’t like to be left alone; but if she goes they must all go, except, perhaps, I might keep Wynnie. But I don’t know how her mother would get on without her.”
“I don’t see why you should stay behind. Mr. Weir would be as glad to come as you would be to go; and it can make no difference to Mr. Shepherd.”
It seemed a very sensible suggestion. I thought a moment. Certainly it was a desirable thing for both my sister and her husband. They had no such reasons as we had for disliking the place; and it would enable her to avoid the severity of yet another winter. I said as much to Turner, and went back to Connie’s room.
The light of a lovely sunset was lying outside her window. She was sitting so that she could not see it. I would find out her feeling in the matter without any preamble.
“Would you like to go back to Marshmallows, Connie?” I asked.
Her countenance flashed into light.
“O, dear papa, do let us go,” she said; “that would be delightful.”
“Well, I think we can manage it, if you will only get a little stronger for the journey. The weather is not so good to travel in as when we came down.”
“No; but I am ever so much better, you know, than I was then.”
The poor girl was already stronger from the mere prospect of going home again. She moved restlessly on her couch, half mechanically put her hand to the curtain, pulled it aside, looked out, faced the sun and the sea, and did not draw back. My mind was made up. I left her, and went to find Ethelwyn. She heartily approved of the proposal for Connie’s sake, and said that it would be scarcely less agreeable to herself. I could see a certain troubled look above her eyes, however.
“You are thinking of Wynnie,” I said.
“Yes. It is hard to make one sad for the sake of the rest.”
“True. But it is one of the world’s recognised necessities.”
“No doubt.”
“Besides, you don’t suppose Percivale can stay here the whole winter. They must part some time.”
“Of course. Only they did not expect it so soon.”
But here my wife was mistaken.
I went to my study to write to Weir. I had hardly finished my letter when Walter came to say that Mr. Percivale wished to see me. I told him to show him in.
“I am just writing home to say that I want my curate to change places with me here, which I know he will be glad enough to do. I see Connie had better go home.”
“You will all go, then, I presume?” returned Percivale.
“Yes, yes; of course.”
“Then I need not so much regret that I can stay no longer. I came to tell you that I must leave to-morrow.”
“Ah! Going to London?”
“Yes. I don’t know how to thank you for all your kindness. You have made my summer something like a summer; very different, indeed, from what it would otherwise have been.”
“We have had our share of advantage, and that a large one. We are all glad to have made your acquaintance, Mr. Percivale.”
He made no answer.
“We shall be passing through London within a week or ten days in all probability. Perhaps you will allow us the pleasure of looking at some of your pictures then?”
His face flushed. What did the flush mean? It was not one of mere pleasure. There was confusion and perplexity in it. But he answered at once:
“I will show you them with pleasure. I fear, however, you will not care for them.”
Would this fear account for his embarrassment? I hardly thought it would; but I could not for a moment imagine, with his fine form and countenance before me, that he had any serious reason for shrinking from a visit.
He began to search for a card.
“O, I have your address. I shall be sure to pay you a visit. But you will dine with us to-day, of course?” I said.
“I shall have much pleasure,” he answered; and took his leave.
I finished my letter to Weir, and went out for a walk.
I remember particularly the thoughts that moved in me and made that walk memorable. Indeed, I think I remember all outside events chiefly by virtue of the inward conditions with which they were associated. Mere outside things I am very ready to forget. Moods of my own mind do not so readily pass away; and with the memory of some of them every outward circumstance returns; for a man’s life is where the kingdom of heaven is—within him. There are people who, if you ask the story of their lives, have nothing to tell you but the course of the outward events that have constituted, as it were, the clothes of their history. But I know, at the same time, that some of the most important crises in my own history (by which word history I mean my growth towards the right conditions of existence) have been beyond the grasp and interpretation of my intellect. They have passed, as it were, without my consciousness being awake enough to lay hold of their phenomena. The wind had been blowing; I had heard the sound of it, but knew not whence it came nor whither it went; only, when it was gone, I found myself more responsible, more eager than before.
I remember this walk from the thoughts I had about the great change hanging over us all. I had now arrived at the prime of middle life; and that change which so many would escape if they could, but which will let no man pass, had begun to show itself a real fact upon the horizon of the future. Death looks so far away to the young, that while they acknowledge it unavoidable, the path stretches on in such vanishing perspective before them, that they see no necessity for thinking about the end of it yet; and far would I be from saying they ought to think of it. Life is the true object of a man’s care: there is no occasion to make himself think about death. But when the vision of the inevitable draws nigh, when it appears plainly on the horizon, though but as a cloud the size of a man’s hand, then it is equally foolish to meet it by refusing to meet it, to answer the questions that will arise by declining to think about them. Indeed, it is a question of life then, and not of death. We want to keep fast hold of our life, and, in the strength of that, to look the threatening death in the face. But to my walk that morning.
I wandered on the downs till I came to the place where a solitary rock stands on the top of a cliff looking seaward, in the suggested shape of a monk praying. On the base on which he knelt I seated myself, and looked out over the Atlantic. How faded the ocean appeared! It seemed as if all the sunny dyes of the summer had been diluted and washed with the fogs of the coming winter, when I thought of the splendour it wore when first from these downs I gazed on the outspread infinitude of space and colour.
“What,” I said to myself at length, “has she done since then? Where is her work visible? She has riven, and battered, and destroyed, and her destruction too has passed away. So worketh Time and its powers! The exultation of my youth is gone; my head is gray; my wife is growing old; our children are pushing us from our stools; we are yielding to the new generation; the glory for us hath departed; our life lies weary before us like that sea; and the night cometh when we can no longer work.”
Something like this was passing vaguely through my mind. I sat in a mournful stupor, with a half-consciousness that my mood was false, and that I ought to rouse myself and shake it off. There is such a thing as a state of moral dreaming, which closely resembles the intellectual dreaming in sleep. I went on in this false dreamful mood, pitying myself like a child tender over his hurt and nursing his own cowardice, till, all at once, “a little pipling wind” blew on my cheek. The morning was very still: what roused that little wind I cannot tell; but what that little wind roused I will try to tell. With that breath on my cheek, something within me began to stir. It grew, and grew, until the memory of a certain glorious sunset of red and green and gold and blue, which I had beheld from these same heights, dawned within me. I knew that the glory of my youth had not departed, that the very power of recalling with delight that which I had once felt in seeing, was proof enough of that; I knew that I could believe in God all the night long, even if the night were long. And the next moment I thought how I had been reviling in my fancy God’s servant, the sea. To how many vessels had she not opened a bounteous highway through the waters, with labour, and food, and help, and ministration, glad breezes and swelling sails, healthful struggle, cleansing fear and sorrow, yea, and friendly death! Because she had been commissioned to carry this one or that one, this hundred or that thousand of his own creatures from one world to another, was I to revile the servant of a grand and gracious Master? It was blameless in Connie to feel the late trouble so deeply that she could not be glad: she had not had the experience of life, yea, of God, that I had had; she must be helped from without. But for me, it was shameful that I, who knew the heart of my Master, to whom at least he had so often shown his truth, should ever be doleful and oppressed. Yet even me he had now helped from within. The glory of existence as the child of the Infinite had again dawned upon me. The first hour of the evening of my life had indeed arrived; the shadows had begun to grow long—so long that I had begun to mark their length; this last little portion of my history had vanished, leaving its few gray ashes behind in the crucible of my life; and the final evening must come, when all my life would lie behind me, and all the memory of it return, with its mornings of gold and red, with its evenings of purple and green; with its dashes of storm, and its foggy glooms; with its white-winged aspirations, its dull-red passions, its creeping envies in brown and black and earthy yellow. But from all the accusations of my conscience, I would turn me to the Lord, for he was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins. Then I thought what a grand gift it would be to give his people the power hereafter to fight the consequences of their sins. Anyhow, I would trust the Father, who loved me with a perfect love, to lead the soul he had made, had compelled to be, through the gates of the death-birth, into the light of life beyond. I would cast on him the care, humbly challenge him with the responsibility he had himself undertaken, praying only for perfect confidence in him, absolute submission to his will.
I rose from my seat beside the praying monk, and walked on. The thought of seeing my own people again filled me with gladness. I would leave those I had here learned to love with regret; but I trusted I had taught them something, and they had taught me much; therefore there could be no end to our relation to each other—it could not be broken, for it was in the Lord, which alone can give security to any tie. I should not, therefore, sorrow as if I were to see their faces no more.
I now took my farewell of that sea and those cliffs. I should see them often ere we went, but I should not feel so near them again. Even this parting said that I must “sit loose to the world”—an old Puritan phrase, I suppose; that I could gather up only its uses, treasure its best things, and must let all the rest go; that those things I called mine—earth, sky, and sea, home, books, the treasured gifts of friends—had all to leave me, belong to others, and help to educate them. I should not need them. I should have my people, my souls, my beloved faces tenfold more, and could well afford to part with these. Why should I mind this chain passing to my eldest boy, when it was only his mother’s hair, and I should have his mother still?
So my thoughts went on thinking themselves, until at length I yielded passively to their flow.
I found Wynnie looking very grave when I went into the drawing-room. Her mother was there, too, and Mr. Percivale. It seemed rather a moody party. They wakened up a little, however, after I entered, and before dinner was over we were all chatting together merrily.
“How is Connie?” I asked Ethelwyn.
“Wonderfully better already,” she answered.
“I think everybody seems better,” I said. “The very idea of home seems reviving to us all.”
Wynnie darted a quick glance at me, caught my eyes, which was more than she had intended, and blushed; sought refuge in a bewildered glance at Percivale, caught his eye in turn, and blushed yet deeper. He plunged instantly into conversation, not without a certain involuntary sparkle in his eye.
“Did you go to see Mrs. Stokes this morning?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “She does not want much visiting now; she is going about her work, apparently in good health. Her husband says she is not like the same woman; and I hope he means that in more senses than one, though I do not choose to ask him any questions about his wife.”
I did my best to keep up the conversation, but every now and then after this it fell like a wind that would not blow. I withdrew to my study. Percivale and Wynnie went out for a walk. The next morning he left by the coach—early. Turner went with him.
Wynnie did not seem very much dejected. I thought that perhaps the prospect of meeting him again in London kept her up.
Chapter XII. The Studio
I will not linger over our preparations or our leave-takings. The most ponderous of the former were those of the two boys, who, as they had wanted to bring down a chest as big as a corn-bin, full of lumber, now wanted to take home two or three boxes filled with pebbles, great oystershells, and sea-weed.
Weir, as I had expected, was quite pleased to make the exchange. An early day had been fixed for his arrival; for I thought it might be of service to him to be introduced to the field of his labours. Before he came, I had gone about among the people, explaining to them some of my reasons for leaving them sooner than I had intended, and telling them a little about my successor, that he might not appear among them quite as a stranger. He was much gratified with their reception of him, and had no fear of not finding himself quite at home with them. I promised, if I could comfortably manage it, to pay them a short visit the following summer, and as the weather was now getting quite cold, hastened our preparations for departure.
I could have wished that Turner had been with us on the journey, but he had been absent from his cure to the full extent that his conscience would permit, and I had not urged him. He would be there to receive us, and we had got so used to the management of Connie, that we did not feel much anxiety about the travelling. We resolved, if she seemed strong enough as we went along, to go right through to London, making a few days there the only break in the transit.
It was a bright, cold morning when we started. But Connie could now bear the air so well, that we set out with the carriage open, nor had we occasion to close it. The first part of our railway journey was very pleasant. But when we drew near London, we entered a thick fog, and before we arrived, a small dense November rain was falling. Connie looked a little dispirited, partly from weariness, but no doubt from the change in the weather.
“Not very cheerful, this, Connie, my dear,” I said.
“No, papa,” she answered; “but we are going home, you know.”
Going home. It set me thinking—as I had often been set thinking before, always with fresh discovery and a new colour on the dawning sky of hope. I lay back in the carriage and thought how the November fog this evening in London, was the valley of the shadow of death we had to go through on the way home. A. shadow like this would fall upon me; the world would grow dark and life grow weary; but I should know it was the last of the way home.
Then I began to question myself wherein the idea of this home consisted. I knew that my soul had ever yet felt the discomfort of strangeness, more or less, in the midst of its greatest blessedness. I knew that as the thought of water to the thirsty soul, for it is the soul far more than the body that thirsts even for the material water, such is the thought of home to the wanderer in a strange country. As the weary soul pines for sleep, and every heart for the cure of its own bitterness, so my heart and soul had often pined for their home. Did I know, I asked myself, where or what that home was? It could consist in no change of place or of circumstance; no mere absence of care; no accumulation of repose; no blessed communion even with those whom my soul loved; in the midst of it all I should be longing for a homelier home—one into which I might enter with a sense of infinitely more absolute peace, than a conscious child could know in the arms, upon the bosom of his mother. In the closest contact of human soul with human soul, when all the atmosphere of thought was rosy with love, again and yet again on the far horizon would the dun, lurid flame of unrest shoot for a moment through the enchanted air, and Psyche would know that not yet had she reached her home. As I thought this I lifted my eyes, and saw those of my wife and Connie fixed on mine, as if they were reproaching me for saying in my soul that I could not be quite at home with them. Then I said in my heart, “Come home with me, beloved—there is but one home for us all. When we find—in proportion as each of us finds—that home, shall we be gardens of delight to each other—little chambers of rest—galleries of pictures—wells of water.”
Again, what was this home? God himself. His thoughts, his will, his love, his judgment, are man’s home. To think his thoughts, to choose his will, to love his loves, to judge his judgments, and thus to know that he is in us, with us, is to be at home. And to pass through the valley of the shadow of death is the way home, but only thus, that as all changes have hitherto led us nearer to this home, the knowledge of God, so this greatest of all outward changes—for it is but an outward change—will surely usher us into a region where there will be fresh possibilities of drawing nigh in heart, soul, and mind to the Father of us. It is the father, the mother, that make for the child his home. Indeed, I doubt if the home-idea is complete to the parents of a family themselves, when they remember that their fathers and mothers have vanished.
At this point something rose in me seeking utterance.
“Won’t it be delightful, wife,” I began, “to see our fathers and mothers such a long way back in heaven?”
But Ethelwyn’s face gave so little response, that I felt at once how dreadful a thing it was not to have had a good father or mother. I do not know what would have become of me but for a good father. I wonder how anybody ever can be good that has not had a good father. How dreadful not to be a good father or good mother! Every father who is not good, every mother who is not good, just makes it as impossible to believe in God as it can be made. But he is our one good Father, and does not leave us, even should our fathers and mothers have thus forsaken us, and left him without a witness.
Here the evil odour of brick-burning invaded my nostrils, and I knew that London was about us. A few moments after, we reached the station, where a carriage was waiting to take us to our hotel.
Dreary was the change from the stillness and sunshine of Kilkhaven to the fog and noise of London; but Connie slept better that night than she had slept for a good many nights before.
After breakfast the next morning, I said to Wynnie,
“I am going to see Mr. Percivale’s studio, my dear: have you any objection to going with me?”
“No, papa,” she answered, blushing. “I have never seen an artist’s studio in my life.”
“Come along, then. Get your bonnet at once. It rains, but we shall take a cab, and it won’t matter.”
She ran off, and was ready in a few minutes. We gave the driver directions, and set off. It was a long drive. At length he stopped at the door of a very common-looking house, in a very dreary-looking street, in which no man could possibly identify his own door except by the number. I knocked. A woman who looked at once dirty and cross, the former probably the cause of the latter, opened the door, gave a bare assent to my question whether Mr. Percivale was at home, withdrew to her den with the words “second-floor,” and left us to find our own way up the two flights of stairs. This, however, involved no great difficulty. We knocked at the door of the front room. A well-known voice cried, “Come in,” and we entered.
Percivale, in a short velvet coat, with his palette on his thumb, advanced to meet us cordially. His face wore a slight flush, which I attributed solely to pleasure, and nothing to any awkwardness in receiving us in such a poor place as he occupied. I cast my eyes round the room. Any romantic notions Wynnie might have indulged concerning the marvels of a studio, must have paled considerably at the first glance around Percivale’s room—plainly the abode if not of poverty, then of self-denial, although I suspected both. A common room, with no carpet save a square in front of the fireplace; no curtains except a piece of something like drugget nailed flat across all the lower half of the window to make the light fall from upwards; two or three horsehair chairs, nearly worn out; a table in a corner, littered with books and papers; a horrible lay-figure, at the present moment dressed apparently for a scarecrow; a large easel, on which stood a half-finished oil-painting—these constituted almost the whole furniture of the room. With his pocket-handkerchief Percivale dusted one chair for Wynnie and another for me. Then standing before us, he said:
“This is a very shabby place to receive you in, Miss Walton, but it is all I have got.”
“A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things he possesses,” I ventured to say.
“Thank you,” said Percivale. “I hope not. It is well for me it should not.”
“It is well for the richest man in England that it should not,” I returned. “If it were not so, the man who could eat most would be the most blessed.”
“There are people, even of my acquaintance, however, who seem to think it does.”
“No doubt; but happily their thinking so will not make it so even for themselves.”
“Have you been very busy since you left us, Mr. Percivale?” asked Wynnie.
“Tolerably,” he answered. “But I have not much to show for it. That on the easel is all. I hardly like to let you look at it, though.”
“Why?” asked Wynnie.
“First, because the subject is painful. Next, because it is so unfinished that none but a painter could do it justice.”
“But why should you paint subjects you would not like people to look at?”
“I very much want people to look at them.”
“Why not us, then?” said Wynnie.
“Because you do not need to be pained.”
“Are you sure it is good for you to pain anybody?” I said.
“Good is done by pain—is it not?” he asked.
“Undoubtedly. But whether we are wise enough to know when and where and how much, is the question.”
“Of course I do not make the pain my object.”
“If it comes only as a necessary accompaniment, that may alter the matter greatly,” I said. “But still I am not sure that anything in which the pain predominates can be useful in the best way.”
“Perhaps not,” he returned.—“Will you look at the daub?”
“With much pleasure,” I replied, and we rose and stood before the easel. Percivale made no remark, but left us to find out what the picture meant. Nor had I long to look before I understood it—in a measure at least.
It represented a garret-room in a wretchedly ruinous condition. The plaster had come away in several places, and through between the laths in one spot hung the tail of a great rat. In a dark corner lay a man dying. A woman sat by his side, with her eyes fixed, not on his face, though she held his hand in hers, but on the open door, where in the gloom you could just see the struggles of two undertaker’s men to get the coffin past the turn of the landing towards the door. Through the window there was one peep of the blue sky, whence a ray of sunlight fell on the one scarlet blossom of a geranium in a broken pot on the window-sill outside.
“I do not wonder you did not like to show it,” I said. “How can you bear to paint such a dreadful picture?”
“It is a true one. It only represents a fact.”
“All facts have not a right to be represented.”
“Surely you would not get rid of painful things by huddling them out of sight?”
“No; nor yet by gloating upon them.”
“You will believe me that it gives me anything but pleasure to paint such pictures—as far as the subject goes,” he said with some discomposure.
“Of course. I know you well enough by this time to know that. But no one could hang it on his wall who would not either gloat on suffering or grow callous to it. Whence, then, would come the good I cannot doubt you propose to yourself as your object in painting the picture? If it had come into my possession, I would—”
“Put it in the fire,” suggested Percivale with a strange smile.
“No. Still less would I sell it. I would hang it up with a curtain before it, and only look at it now and then, when I thought my heart was in danger of growing hardened to the sufferings of my fellow-men, and forgetting that they need the Saviour.”
“I could not wish it a better fate. That would answer my end.”
“Would it, now? Is it not rather those who care little or nothing about such matters that you would like to influence? Would you be content with one solitary person like me? And, remember, I wouldn’t buy it. I would rather not have it. I could hardly bear to know it was in my house. I am certain you cannot do people good by showing them only the painful. Make it as painful as you will, but put some hope into it—something to show that action is worth taking in the affair. From mere suffering people will turn away, and you cannot blame them. Every show of it, without hinting at some door of escape, only urges them to forget it all. Why should they be pained if it can do no good?”
“For the sake of sympathy, I should say,” answered Percivale.
“They would rejoin, ‘It is only a picture. Come along.’ No; give people hope, if you would have them act at all, in anything.”
“I was almost hoping you would read the picture rather differently. You see there is a bit of blue sky up there, and a bit of sunshiny scarlet in the window.”
He looked at me curiously as he spoke.
“I can read it so for myself, and have metamorphosed its meaning so. But you only put in the sky and the scarlet to heighten the perplexity, and make the other look more terrible.”
“Now I know that as an artist I have succeeded, however I may have failed otherwise. I did so mean it; but knowing you would dislike the picture, I almost hoped in my cowardice, as I said, that you would read your own meaning into it.”
Wynnie had not said a word. As I turned away from the picture, I saw that she was looking quite distressed, but whether by the picture or the freedom with which I had remarked upon it, I do not know. My eyes falling on a little sketch in sepia, I began to examine it, in the hope of finding something more pleasant to say. I perceived in a moment, however, that it was nearly the same thought, only treated in a gentler and more poetic mode. A girl lay dying on her bed. A youth held her hand. A torrent of summer sunshine fell through the window, and made a lake of glory upon the floor. I turned away.
“You like that better, don’t you, papa?” said Wynnie tremulously.
“It is beautiful, certainly,” I answered. “And if it were only one, I should enjoy it—as a mood. But coming after the other, it seems but the same thing more weakly embodied.”
I confess I was a little vexed; for I had got much interested in Percivale, for his own sake as well as for my daughter’s, and I had expected better things from him. But I saw that I had gone too far.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Percivale,” I said.
“I fear I have been too free in my remarks. I know, likewise, that I am a clergyman, and not a painter, and therefore incapable of giving the praise which I have little doubt your art at least deserves.”
“I trust that honesty cannot offend me, however much and justly it may pain me.”
“But now I have said my worst, I should much like to see what else you have at hand to show me.”
“Unfortunately I have too much at hand. Let me see.”
He strode to the other end of the room, where several pictures were leaning against the wall, with their faces turned towards it. From these he chose one, but, before showing it, fitted it into an empty frame that stood beside. He then brought it forward and set it on the easel. I will describe it, and then my reader will understand the admiration which broke from me after I had regarded it for a time.
A dark hill rose against the evening sky, which shone through a few thin pines on its top. Along a road on the hill-side four squires bore a dying knight—a man past the middle age. One behind carried his helm, and another led his horse, whose fine head only appeared in the picture. The head and countenance of the knight were very noble, telling of many a battle, and ever for the right. The last had doubtless been gained, for one might read victory as well as peace in the dying look. The party had just reached the edge of a steep descent, from which you saw the valley beneath, with the last of the harvest just being reaped, while the shocks stood all about in the fields, under the place of the sunset. The sun had been down for some little time. There was no gold left in the sky, only a little dull saffron, but plenty of that lovely liquid green of the autumn sky, divided with a few streaks of pale rose. The depth of the sky overhead, which you could not see for the arrangement of the picture, was mirrored lovelily in a piece of water that lay in the centre of the valley.
“My dear fellow,” I cried, “why did you not show me this first, and save me from saying so many unkind things? Here is a picture to my own heart; it is glorious. Look here, Wynnie,” I went on; “you see it is evening; the sun’s work is done, and he has set in glory, leaving his good name behind him in a lovely harmony of colour. The old knight’s work is done too; his day has set in the storm of battle, and he is lying lapt in the coming peace. They are bearing him home to his couch and his grave. Look at their faces in the dusky light. They are all mourning for and honouring the life that is ebbing away. But he is gathered to his fathers like a shock of corn fully ripe; and so the harvest stands golden in the valley beneath. The picture would not be complete, however, if it did not tell us of the deep heaven overhead, the symbol of that heaven whither he who has done his work is bound. What a lovely idea to represent it by means of the water, the heaven embodying itself in the earth, as it were, that we may see it! And observe how that dusky hill-side, and those tall slender mournful-looking pines, with that sorrowful sky between, lead the eye and point the heart upward towards that heaven. It is indeed a grand picture, full of feeling—a picture and a parable.”
[Footnote: This is a description, from memory only, of a picture painted by Arthur Hughes.]
I looked at the girl. Her eyes were full of tears, either called forth by the picture itself or by the pleasure of finding Percivale’s work appreciated by me, who had spoken so hardly of the others.
“I cannot tell you how glad I am that you like it,” she said.
“Like it!” I returned; “I am simply delighted with it, more than I can express—so much delighted that if I could have this alongside of it, I should not mind hanging that other—that hopeless garret—on the most public wall I have.”
“Then,” said Wynnie bravely, though in a tremulous voice, “you confess—don’t you, papa?—that you were too hard on Mr. Percivale at first?”
“Not too hard on his picture, my dear; and that was all he had yet given me to judge by. No man should paint a picture like that. You are not bound to disseminate hopelessness; for where there is no hope there can be no sense of duty.”
“But surely, papa, Mr. Percivale has some sense of duty,” said Wynnie in an almost angry tone.
“Assuredly my love. Therefore I argue that he has some hope, and therefore, again, that he has no right to publish such a picture.”
At the word publish Percivale smiled. But Wynnie went on with her defence:
“But you see, papa, that Mr. Percivale does not paint such pictures only. Look at the other.”
“Yes, my dear. But pictures are not like poems, lying side by side in the same book, so that the one can counteract the other. The one of these might go to the stormy Hebrides, and the other to the Vale of Avalon; but even then I should be strongly inclined to criticise the poem, whatever position it stood in, that had nothing—positively nothing—of the aurora in it.”
Here let me interrupt the course of our conversation to illustrate it by a remark on a poem which has appeared within the last twelvemonth from the pen of the greatest living poet, and one who, if I may dare to judge, will continue the greatest for many, many years to come. It is only a little song, “I stood on a tower in the wet.” I have found few men who, whether from the influence of those prints which are always on the outlook for something to ridicule, or from some other cause, did not laugh at the poem. I thought and think it a lovely poem, although I am not quite sure of the transposition of words in the last two lines. But I do not approve of the poem, just because there is no hope in it. It lacks that touch or hint of red which is as essential, I think, to every poem as to every picture—the life-blood—the one pure colour. In his hopeful moods, let a man put on his singing robes, and chant aloud the words of gladness—or of grief, I care not which—to his fellows; in his hours of hopelessness, let him utter his thoughts only to his inarticulate violin, or in the evanescent sounds of any his other stringed instrument; let him commune with his own heart on his bed, and be still; let him speak to God face to face if he may—only he cannot do that and continue hopeless; but let him not sing aloud in such a mood into the hearts of his fellows, for he cannot do them much good thereby. If it were a fact that there is no hope, it would not be a truth. No doubt, if it were a fact, it ought to be known; but who will dare be confident that there is no hope? Therefore, I say, let the hopeless moods, at least, if not the hopeless men, be silent.
“He could refuse to let the one go without the other,” said Wynnie.
“Now you are talking like a child, Wynnie, as indeed all partisans do at the best. He might sell them together, but the owner would part them.—If you will allow me, I will come and see both the pictures again to-morrow.”
Percivale assured me of welcome, and we parted, I declining to look at any more pictures that day, but not till we had arranged that he should dine with us in the evening.
Chapter XIII. Home Again
I will not detain my readers with the record of the few days we spent in London. In writing the account of it, as in the experience of the time itself, I feel that I am near home, and grow the more anxious to reach it. Ah! I am growing a little anxious after another home, too; for the house of my tabernacle is falling to ruins about me. What a word home is! To think that God has made the world so that you have only to be born in a certain place, and live long enough in it to get at the secret of it, and henceforth that place is to you a home with all the wonderful meaning in the word. Thus the whole earth is a home to the race; for every spot of it shares in the feeling: some one of the family loves it as his home. How rich the earth seems when we so regard it—crowded with the loves of home! Yet I am now getting ready to go home—to leave this world of homes and go home. When I reach that home, shall I even then seek yet to go home? Even then, I believe, I shall seek a yet warmer, deeper, truer home in the deeper knowledge of God—in the truer love of my fellow-man. Eternity will be, my heart and my faith tell me, a travelling homeward, but in jubilation and confidence and the vision of the beloved.
When we had laid Connie once more in her own room, at least the room which since her illness had come to be called hers, I went up to my study. The familiar faces of my books welcomed me. I threw myself in my reading-chair, and gazed around me with pleasure. I felt it so homely here. All my old friends—whom somehow I hoped to see some day—present there in the spirit ready to talk with me any moment when I was in the mood, making no claim upon my attention when I was not! I felt as if I should like, when the hour should come, to die in that chair, and pass into the society of the witnesses in the presence of the tokens they had left behind them.
I heard shouts on the stair, and in rushed the two boys.
“Papa, papa!” they were crying together.
“What is the matter?”
“We’ve found the big chest just where we left it.”
“Well, did you expect it would have taken itself off?”
“But there’s everything in it just as we left it.”
“Were you afraid, then, that the moment you left it it would turn itself upside down, and empty itself of all its contents on the floor?”
They laughed, but apparently with no very keen appreciation of the attempt at a joke.
“Well, papa, I did not think anything about it; but—but—but—there everything is as we left it.”
With this triumphant answer they turned and hurried, a little abashed, out of the room; but not many moments elapsed before the sounds that arose from them were sufficiently reassuring as to the state of their spirits. When they were gone, I forgot my books in the attempt to penetrate and understand the condition of my boys’ thoughts; and I soon came to see that they were right and I was wrong. It was the movement of that undeveloped something in us which makes it possible for us in everything to give thanks. It was the wonder of the discovery of the existence of law. There was nothing that they could understand, à priori, to necessitate the remaining of the things where they had left them. No doubt there was a reason in the nature of God, why all things should hold together, whence springs the law of gravitation, as we call it; but as far as the boys could understand of this, all things might as well have been arranged for flying asunder, so that no one could expect to find anything where he had left it. I began to see yet further into the truth that in everything we must give thanks, and whatever is not of faith is sin. Even the laws of nature reveal the character of God, not merely as regards their ends, but as regards their kind, being of necessity fashioned after ideal facts of his own being and will.
I rose and went down to see if everybody was getting settled, and how the place looked. I found Ethel already going about the house as if she had never left it, and as if we all had just returned from a long absence and she had to show us home-hospitality. Wynnie had vanished; but I found her by and by in the favourite haunt of her mother before her marriage—beside the little pond called the Bishop’s Basin, of which I do not think I have ever told my readers the legend. But why should I mention it, for I cannot tell it now? The frost lay thick in the hollow when I went down there to find her; the branches, lately clothed with leaves, stood bare and icy around her. Ethelwyn and I had almost forgotten that there was anything out of the common in connection with the house. The horror of this mysterious spot had laid hold upon Wynnie. I resolved that that night I would, in her mother’s presence, tell her all the legend of the place, and the whole story of how I won her mother. I did so; and I think it made her trust us more. But now I left her there, and went to Connie. She lay in her bed; for her mother had got her thither at once, a perfect picture of blessed comfort. There was no occasion to be uneasy about her. I was so pleased to be at home again with such good hopes, that I could not rest, but went wandering everywhere—into places even which I had not entered for ten years at least, and found fresh interest in everything; for this was home, and here I was.
Now I fancy my readers, looking forward to the end, and seeing what a small amount of print is left, blaming me; some, that I have roused curiosity without satisfying it; others, that I have kept them so long over a dull book and a lame conclusion. But out of a life one cannot always cut complete portions, and serve them up in nice shapes. I am well aware that I have not told them the fate, as some of them would call it, of either of my daughters. This I cannot develop now, even as far as it is known to me; but, if it is any satisfaction to them to know this much—and it will be all that some of them mean by fate, I fear—I may as well tell them now that Wynnie has been Mrs. Percivale for many years, with a history well worth recounting; and that Connie has had a quiet, happy life for nearly as long, as Mrs. Turner. She has never got strong, but has very tolerable health. Her husband watches her with the utmost care and devotion. My Ethelwyn is still with me. Harry is gone home. Charlie is a barrister of the Middle Temple. And Dora—I must not forget Dora—well, I will say nothing about her fate, for good reasons—it is not quite determined yet. Meantime she puts up with the society of her old father and mother, and is something else than unhappy, I fully believe.
“And Connie’s baby?” asks some one out of ten thousand readers. I have no time to tell you about her now; but as you know her so little, it cannot be such a trial to remain, for a time at least, unenlightened with regard to her fate.
The only other part of my history which could contain anything like incident enough to make it interesting in print, is a period I spent in London some few years after the time of which I have now been writing. But I am getting too old to regard the commencement of another history with composure. The labour of thinking into sequences, even the bodily labour of writing, grows more and more severe. I fancy I can think correctly still; but the effort necessary to express myself with corresponding correctness becomes, in prospect, at least, sometimes almost appalling. I must therefore take leave of my patient reader—for surely every one who has followed me through all that I have here written, well deserves the epithet—as if the probability that I shall write no more were a certainty, bidding him farewell with one word: “Friend, hope thou in God,” and for a parting gift offering him a new, and, I think, a true rendering of the first verse of the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews:
“Now faith is the essence of hopes, the trying of things unseen.”
Good-bye.