Weighed and Wanting, George MacDonald [ebook reader android txt] 📗

conscious misery. Work on, ye who cannot see this. Do your best. You will be rewarded according to your honesty. You will be saved by the fire that will destroy your work, and will one day come to see that Christ's way, and no other whatever, can either redeem your own life, or render the condition of the poorest or the richest wretch such as would justify his creation. If by the passing of this or that more or less wise law, you could, in the person of his descendant of the third or fourth generation, make a well-to-do man of him, he would probably be a good deal farther from the kingdom of heaven than the beggar or the thief over whom you now lament. The criminal classes, to use your phrase, are not made up of quite the same persons in the eyes of the Supreme as in yours.

Vavasor began to think that if ever the day came when he might approach Hester "as a suitor for her hand," he must be very careful over what he called her philanthropic craze. But if ever he should in earnest set about winning her, he had full confidence in the artillery he could bring to the siege: he had not yet made any real effort to gain her affections.

Neither had he a doubt that, having succeeded, all would be easy, and he could do with her much as he pleased. He had no anxiety concerning the philanthropic craze thereafter. His wife, once introduced to such society as would then be her right, would speedily be cured of any such extravagance or enthusiasm as gave it the character of folly.

Under the influence of the lovely place, of the lovely weather, and of his admiration for Hester, the latent poetry of his nature awoke with increasing rapidity; and, this reacting on its partial occasion, he was growing more and more in love with Hester. He was now, to use the phrase with which he confessed the fact to himself, "over head and ears in love with her," and notwithstanding the difficulties in his way, it was a pleasant experience to him: like most who have gone through the same, he was at this time nearer knowing what bliss may be than he had ever been before. Most men have the gates once thus opened to them a little way, that they may have what poor suggestion may be given them, by their closing again, of how far off they are from them. Very hard! Is it? Then why in the name of God, will you not go up to them and enter? You do not like the conditions? But the conditions are the only natural possibilities of entrance. Enter as you are and you would but see the desert you think to leave behind you, not a glimpse of a promised land. The false cannot inherit the true nor the unclean the lovely.

And it began to grow plain to him that now his aunt could no longer look upon the idea of such an alliance, as she must naturally have regarded it before. It was a very different thing to see her in the midst of such grounds and in such a house, with all the old-fashioned comforts and luxuries of an ancient and prosperous family around her, and in that of a toiling litterateur in the dingy region of Bloomsbury, where everything was-of course respectable in a way, but that way a very inferior and-well, snuffy kind of way-where indeed you could not dissociate the idea of smoke and brokers' shops from the newest bonnet on Hester's queenly head! If he could get his aunt to see her in the midst of these surroundings, then her beauty would have a chance of working its natural effect upon her, tuned here to "its right praise and true perfection." She was not a jealous woman, and was ready to admire where she could, but not the less would keep even beauty at arm's length when prudence recommended: here, thought Vavasor, prudence would hold her peace. He would at least himself stand amid no small amount of justification.

By degrees, and without any transition marked of Hester, emboldened mainly by the influences of the soft dusky twilight, he came to speak with more warmth and nearer approach. His heart was tuned above its ordinary pitch, and he was borne a captive slave in the triumph of Nature's hour.

"How strangely this loveliness seems to sink into the soul," he said one evening, when the bats were coming and going like thoughts that refuse to take shape and be shared, and when with intensest listening you could not be sure whether it was a general murmur of nature you heard, low in her sleep, or only the strained nerves of your own being imitating that which was not.

"For the moment," he went on, "you seem to be the soul of that which is around you, yet oppressed with the weight of its vastness, and unable to account for what is going on in it."

"I think I understand you," returned Hester. "It is strange to feel at once so large and so small; but I presume that is how all true feeling seems to itself."

"You are right," responded Vavasor; "for when one loves, how it exalts his whole being, yet in the presence of the woman he worships, how small he feels, and how unworthy!"

In the human being humility and greatness are not only correlative, but are one and the same condition. But this was beyond Vavasor.

For the first time in her life Hester felt, nor knew what it was, a vague pang of jealousy. Whatever certain others may think, there are women who, having had their minds constantly filled with true and earnest things, have come for years to woman's full dignity, without having even speculated on what it may be to be in love. Such therefore are somewhat in the dark when first it begins to show itself within themselves: that it should be within them, they having never invited its presence, adds to their perplexity. She was silent, and Vavasor, whose experience was scarcely so valuable as her ignorance, judged he might venture a little farther. But with all his experience in the manufacture of compliments and in high-flown poetry, he was now at a loss; he had no fine theories of love to talk from! Love was with him, at its best , the something that preceded marriage-after which, whatever boys and girls might think, and although, of course, to a beautiful wife like Hester he could never imagine himself false, it must take its chance. But as he sat beside God's loveliest idea, exposed to the mightiest enchantment of life, little imagining it an essential heavenly decree for the redemption of the souls of men, he saw, for broken moments, and with half-dazed glimpses, into the eternal, and spoke as one in a gracious dream:

"If one might sit forever thus!" he said, almost in a whisper,-"forever and ever, needing nothing, desiring nothing! lost in perfect, in absolute bliss! so peacefully glad that you do not want to know what other joy lies behind! so content, that, if you were told there was no other bliss, you would but say, 'I am the more glad; I want no other! I refuse all else! let the universe hear, and trouble me with none! This and nought else ought ever to be-on and on! to the far-away end. The very soul of me is music, and needs not the softest sound of earth to keep it alive.'"

At that moment came a sigh of the night-wind, and bore to their ears the whispered moan of the stream away in the hollow, as it broke its being into voice over the pebbly troubles of its course. It came with a swell, and a faint sigh through the pines, and they woke and answered it with yet more ethereal voice.

"Still! still!" said Vavasor, apostrophizing the river as if it were a live thing and understood him; "do not speak to me. I cannot attend even to your watery murmur. A sweeter music, born of the motions of my own spirit, fills my whole hearing. Be content with thy flowing, as I am content with my being. Would that God in the mercy of a God would make this moment eternal!"

He ceased, and was silent.

Hester could not help being thrilled by the rhythm, moved by the poetic phrase, and penetrated by the air of poetic thought that pervaded the utterance-which would doubtless indeed have entranced many a smaller woman than herself, yet was not altogether pleased. Never yet had she reached anything like a moment concerning which even in transient mood she could pray, "Let it last forever!" Nor was the present within sight of any reason why she should not wish it to make way for a better behind it. But the show of such feeling in Vavasor, was at least the unveiling of a soul of song in him, of such a nature, such a relation to upper things that he must one day come to feel the highest, and know a bliss beyond all feeble delights of the mere human imagination. She must not be captious and contrary with the poor fellow, she thought-that would be as bad as to throw aside her poor people: he was afflicted with the same poverty that gave all the sting to theirs. To be a true woman she must help all she could help-rich or poor, nor show favor. "Thou shalt not countenance a poor man in his cause."

"I do not quite understand you," she said. "I can scarcely imagine the time should ever come when I should wish it, or even be content that it should last for ever."

"Have you had so little happiness?" he asked sympathetically.

"I do not mean that," she replied. "Indeed I have had a great deal-more than all but a very few, I should imagine. But I do not think much of happiness. Perhaps that is a sign-I daresay it is-that I have not had much of what is not happiness. But no amount of happiness that I have known yet would make me wish the time to stand still. I want to be always growing-and while one is growing Time cannot stand if he would: you drag him on with you! I want, if you would like it better put in that way, to be always becoming more and more capable of happiness. Whether I have it or not, I must be and ought to be capable of it."

"Ah!" returned Vavasor, "you are as usual out of sight beyond me. You must take pity on me and carry me with you, else you will leave me miles behind, and I shall never look on you again; and what eternity would be to me without your face to look at, God only knows. There will be no punishment necessary for me but to know that there is a gulf I cannot pass between us."

"But why should it be so!" answered Hester almost tenderly. "Our fate is in our own hands. It is ours to determine the direction in which we shall go. I don't want to preach to you, dear Mr. Vavasor, but so much surely one friend may say to another! Why should not every one be reasonable enough to seek the one best thing, and then there would be no parting; whereas all the love and friendship in the world would not suffice to keep people together if they were inwardly parted by such difference as you imply."

Vavasor's heart was