The Marquis of Lossie, George MacDonald [freda ebook reader .TXT] 📗

into the house where the refusal of the bad is followed by no embracing of the good- the house empty and swept and garnished-the bad will return, bringing with it seven evils that are worse.

If something of that sacred mystery, holy in the heart of the Father, which draws together the souls of man and woman, was at work between them, let those scoff at the mingling of love and religion who know nothing of either; but man or woman who, loving woman or man, has never in that love lifted the heart to the Father, and everyone whose divine love has not yet cast at least an arm round the human love, must take heed what they think of themselves, for they are yet but paddlers in the tide of the eternal ocean. Love is a lifting no less than a swelling of the heart, What changes, what metamorphoses, transformations, purifications, glorifications, this or that love must undergo ere it take its eternal place in the kingdom of heaven, through all its changes yet remaining, in its one essential root, the same, let the coming redemption reveal. The hope of all honest lovers will lead them to the vision. Only let them remember that love must dwell in the will as well as in the heart.

But whatever the nature of Malcolm's influence upon Lady Clementina, she resented it, thinking towards and speaking to him repellently. Something in her did not like him. She knew he did not approve of her, and she did not like being disapproved of. Neither did she approve of him. He was pedantic-and far too good for an honest and brave youth: not that she could say she had seen dishonesty or cowardice in him, or that she could have told which vice she would prefer to season his goodness withal, and bring him to the level of her ideal. And then, for all her theories of equality, he was a groom-therefore to a lady ought to be repulsive-at least when she found him intruding into the chambers of her thoughts -personally intruding-yes, and met there by some traitorous feelings whose behaviour she could not understand. She resented it all, and felt towards Malcolm as if he were guilty of forcing himself into the sacred presence of her bosom's queen-whereas it was his angel that did so, his Idea, over which he had no control. Clementina would have turned that Idea out, and when she found she could not, her soul started up wrathful, in maidenly disgust with her heart, and cast resentment upon everything in him whereon it would hang. She had not yet, however, come to ask herself any questions; she had only begun to fear that a woman to whom a person from the stables could be interesting, even in the form of an unexplained riddle, must be herself a person of low tastes; and that, for all her pride in coming of honest people, there must be a drop of bad blood in her somewhere.

For a time her eyes had been fixed on her work, and there had been silence in the little group.

"My lady!" said Malcolm, and drew a step nearer to Clementina.

She looked up. How lovely she was with the trouble in her eyes! Thought Malcolm, "If only she were what she might be! If the form were but filled with the spirit! the body with life!"

"My lady!" he repeated, just a little embarrassed, "I should like to tell you one thing that came to me only lately-came to me when thinking over the hard words you spoke to me that day in the park. But it is something so awful that I dare not speak of it except you will make your heart solemn to hear it."

He stopped, with his eyes questioning hers. Clementina's first thought once more was madness, but as she steadily returned his look, her face grew pale, and she gently bowed her head in consent.

"I will try then," said Malcolm. "-Everybody knows what few think about, that once there lived a man who, in the broad face of prejudiced respectability, truth hating hypocrisy, commonplace religion, and dull book learning, affirmed that he knew the secret of life, and understood the heart and history of men-who wept over their sorrows, yet worshipped the God of the whole earth, saying that he had known him from eternal days. The same said that he came to do what the Father did, and that he did nothing but what he had learned of the Father. They killed him, you know, my lady, in a terrible way that one is afraid even to think of. But he insisted that he laid down his life; that he allowed them to take it. Now I ask whether that grandest thing, crowning his life, the yielding of it to the hand of violence, he had not learned also from his Father. Was his death the only thing he had not so learned? If I am right, and I do not say if in doubt, then the suffering of those three terrible hours was a type of the suffering of the Father himself in bringing sons and daughters through the cleansing and glorifying fires, without which the created cannot be made the very children of God, partakers of the divine nature and peace. Then from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering, up to the loftiest pitch, the divinest acme of pain, there is not one pang to which the sensorium of the universe does not respond; never an untuneful vibration of nerve or spirit but thrills beyond the brain or the heart of the sufferer to the brain, the heart of the universe; and God, in the simplest, most literal, fullest sense, and not by sympathy alone, suffers with his creatures."

"Well, but he is able to bear it; they are not: I cannot bring myself to see the right of it."

"Nor will you, my lady, so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good they get by it.-My lady, when I was trying my best with poor Kelpie, you would not listen to me."

"You are ungenerous," said Clementina, flushing.

"My lady," persisted Malcolm, "you would not understand me. You denied me a heart because of what seemed in your eyes cruelty. I knew that I was saving her from death at the least, probably from a life of torture: God may be good, though to you his government may seem to deny it. There is but one way God cares to govern-the way of the Father King-and that way is at hand.-But I have yet given you only the one half of my theory: If God feels pain, then he puts forth his will to bear and subject that pain; if the pain comes to him from his creature, living in him, will the endurance of God be confined to himself, and not, in its turn, pass beyond the bounds of his individuality, and react upon the sufferer to his sustaining? I do not mean that sustaining which a man feels from knowing his will one with God's and God with him, but such sustaining as those his creatures also may have who do not or cannot know whence the sustaining comes. I believe that the endurance of God goes forth to uphold, that his patience is strength to his creatures, and that, while the whole creation may well groan, its suffering is more bearable therefore than it seems to the repugnance of our regard."

"That is a dangerous doctrine," said Clementina.

"Will it then make the cruel man more cruel to be told that God is caring for the tortured creature from the citadel of whose life he would force an answer to save his own from the sphinx that must at last devour him, let him answer ever so wisely? Or will it make the tender less pitiful to be consoled a little in the agony of beholding what they cannot alleviate? Many hearts are from sympathy as sorely in need of comfort as those with whom they suffer. And to such I have one word more-to your heart, my lady, if it will consent to be consoled: The animals, I believe, suffer less than we, because they scarcely think of the past, and not at all of the future. It is the same with children, Mr Graham says they suffer less than grown people, and for the same reason. To get back something of this privilege of theirs, we have to be obedient and take no thought for the morrow."

Clementina took up her work. Malcolm walked away.

"Malcolm," cried his mistress, "are you not going on with the book?"

"I hope your ladyship will excuse me," said Malcolm. "I would rather not read more just at present."

It may seem incredible that one so young as Malcolm should have been able to talk thus, and indeed my report may have given words more formal and systematic than his really were. For the matter of them, it must be remembered that he was not young in the effort to do and understand; and that the advantage to such a pupil of such a teacher as Mr Graham is illimitable.


CHAPTER XLIII: A PERPLEXITY


After Malcolm's departure, Clementina attempted to find what Florimel thought of the things her strange groom had been saying: she found only that she neither thought at all about them, nor had a single true notion concerning the matter of their conversation. Seeking to interest her in it and failing, she found however that she had greatly deepened its impression upon herself.

Florimel had not yet quite made up her mind whether or not she should open her heart to Clementina, but she approached the door of it in requesting her opinion upon the matter of marriage between persons of social conditions widely parted-"frightfully sundered," she said. Now Clementina was a radical of her day, a reformer, a leveller-one who complained bitterly that some should be so rich, and some so poor. In this she was perfectly honest. Her own wealth, from a vague sense of unrighteousness in the possession of it, was such a burden to her, that she threw it away where often it made other people stumble if not fall. She professed to regard all men as equal, and believed that she did so. She was powerful in her contempt of the distinctions made between certain of the classes, but had signally failed in some bold endeavours to act as if they had no existence except in the whims of society. As yet no man had sought her nearer regard for whom she would deign to cherish even friendship. As to marriage, she professed, right honestly, an entire disinclination, even aversion to it, saying to herself that if ever she should marry it must be, for the sake of protest and example, one notably beneath her in social condition. He must be a gentleman, but his claims to that rare distinction should lie only in himself, not his position, in what he was, not what he had. But it is one thing to have opinions, and another to be called upon to show them beliefs; it is one thing to declare all men equal, and another to tell the girl who looks up to you for advice, that she ought to feel herself at perfect liberty to marry-say a groom; and when Florimel proposed the general question, Clementina might well have hesitated. And indeed she did hesitate-but in vain she tried to persuade herself that it was solely for the sake of her young and inexperienced friend that she did so. As little could she honestly say that it was from doubt of the principles she had so