There & Back, George MacDonald [early reader chapter books .TXT] 📗

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.


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