The Vicar's Daughter, George MacDonald [important books to read .txt] 📗

was made of the same wood which was in being in Solomon’s time, namely, wood adorned with various shapes and figures.”

Her voice ceased, and a pause followed.

“We must go in now,” I whispered.

“She’ll be going to say something now; just wait till she’s started,” said Roger.

“Now, what do you think of it?” asked Marion in a meditative tone.

We crept within the scope of her vision, and stood. A voice, which I knew, was at the moment replying to her question.

“I don’t think it’s much of a chapter, that, grannie.”

The speaker was the keen-faced, elderly man, with iron-gray whiskers, who had come forward to talk to Percivale on that miserable evening when we were out searching for little Ethel. He sat near where we stood by the door, between two respectable looking women, who had been listening to the chapter as devoutly as if it had been of the true gospel.

“Sure, grannie, that ain’t out o’ the Bible?” said another voice, from somewhere farther off.

“We’ll talk about that presently,” answered Marion.

“I want to hear what Mr. Jarvis has to say to it: he’s a carpenter himself, you see,—a joiner, that is, you know.”

All the faces in the room were now turned towards Jarvis.

“Tell me why you don’t think much of it, Mr. Jarvis,” said Marion.

“‘Tain’t a bit likely,” he answered.

“What isn’t likely?”

“Why, not one single thing in the whole kit of it. And first and foremost, ‘tain’t a bit likely the old man ‘ud ha’ been sich a duffer.”

“Why not? There must have been stupid people then as well as now.”

“Not his father.” said Jarvis decidedly.

“He wasn’t but his step-father, like, you know, Mr. Jarvis,” remarked the woman beside him in a low voice.

“Well, he’d never ha’ been hers, then. She wouldn’t ha’ had a word to say to him.”

“I have seen a good—and wise woman too—with a dull husband,” said Marion.

“You know you don’t believe a word of it yourself, grannie,” said still another voice.

“Besides,” she went on without heeding the interruption, “in those times, I suspect, such things were mostly managed by the parents, and the woman herself had little to do with them.”

A murmur of subdued indignation arose,—chiefly of female voices.

“Well, they wouldn’t then,” said Jarvis.

“He might have been rich,” suggested Marion.

“I’ll go bail he never made the money then,” said Jarvis. “An old idget! I don’t believe sich a feller ‘ud ha’ been let marry a woman like her—I don’t.”

“You mean you don’t think God would have let him?”

“Well, that’s what I do mean, grannie. The thing couldn’t ha’ been, nohow.”

“I agree with you quite. And now I want to hear more of what in the story you don’t consider likely.”

“Well, it ain’t likely sich a workman ‘ud ha’ stood so high i’ the trade that the king of Jerusalem would ha’ sent for him of all the tradesmen in the town to make his new throne for him. No more it ain’t likely—and let him be as big a duffer as ever was, to be a jiner at all—that he’d ha’ been two year at work on that there throne—an’ a carvin’ of it in figures too!—and never found out it was four spans too narrer for the place it had to stand in. Do ye ‘appen to know now, grannie, how much is a span?”

“I don’t know. Do you know, Mrs. Percivale?”

The sudden reference took me very much by surprise; but I had not forgotten, happily, the answer I received to the same question, when anxious to realize the monstrous height of Goliath.

“I remember my father telling me,” I replied, “that it was as much as you could stretch between your thumb and little finger.”

“There!” cried Jarvis triumphantly, parting the extreme members of his right hand against the back of the woman in front of him—“that would be seven or eight inches! Four times that? Two foot and a half at least! Think of that!”

“I admit the force of both your objections,” said Marion. “And now, to turn to a more important part of the story, what do you think of the way in which according to it he got his father out of his evil plight?”

I saw plainly enough that she was quietly advancing towards some point in her view,—guiding the talk thitherward, steadily, without haste or effort.

Before Jarvis had time to make any reply, the blind man, mentioned in a former chapter, struck in, with the tone of one who had been watching his opportunity.

“I make more o’ that pint than the t’other,” he said. “A man as is a duffer may well make a mull of a thing; but a man as knows what he’s up to can’t. I don’t make much o’ them miracles, you know, grannie—that is, I don’t know, and what I don’t know, I won’t say as I knows; but what I’m sure of is this here one thing,—that man or boy as could work a miracle, you know, grannie, wouldn’t work no miracle as there wasn’t no good working of.”

“It was to help his father,” suggested Marion.

Here Jarvis broke in almost with scorn.

“To help him to pass for a clever fellow, when he was as great a duffer as ever broke bread!”

“I’m quite o’ your opinion, Mr. Jarvis,” said the blind man. “It ‘ud ha’ been more like him to tell his father what a duffer he was, and send him home to learn his trade.”

“He couldn’t do that, you know,” said Marion gently. “He couldn’t use such words to his father, if he were ever so stupid.”

“His step-father, grannie,” suggested the woman who had corrected Jarvis on the same point. She spoke very modestly, but was clearly bent on holding forth what light she had.

“Certainly, Mrs. Renton; but you know he couldn’t be rude to any one,—leaving his own mother’s husband out of the question.”

“True for you, grannie,” returned the woman.

“I think, though,” said Jarvis, “for as hard as he’d ha’ found it, it would ha’ been more like him to set to work and teach his father, than to scamp up his mulls.”

“Certainly,” acquiesced Marion. “To hide any man’s faults, and leave him not only stupid, but, in all probability, obstinate and self-satisfied, would not be like him. Suppose our Lord had had such a father: what do you think he would have done?”

“He’d ha’ done all he could to make a man of him,” answered Jarvis.

“Wouldn’t he have set about making him comfortable then, in spite of his blunders?” said Marion.

A significant silence followed this question.

“Well, no; not first thing, I don’t think,” returned Jarvis at length. “He’d ha’ got him o’ some good first, and gone in to make him comfortable arter.”

“Then I suppose you would rather be of some good and uncomfortable, than of no good and comfortable?” said Marion.

“I hope so, grannie,” answered Jarvis; and “I would;” “Yes;” “That I would,” came from several voices in the little crowd, showing what an influence Marion must have already had upon them.

“Then,” she said,—and I saw by the light which rose in her eyes that she was now coming to the point,—“Then, surely it must be worth our while to bear discomfort in order to grow of some good! Mr. Jarvis has truly said, that, if Jesus had had such a father, he would have made him of some good before he made him comfortable: that is just the way your Father in heaven is acting with you. Not many of you would say you are of much good yet; but you would like to be better. And yet,—put it to yourselves,—do you not grumble at every thing that comes to you that you don’t like, and call it bad luck, and worse—yes, even when you know it comes of your own fault, and nobody else’s? You think if you had only this or that to make you comfortable, you would be content; and you call it very hard that So-and-so should be getting on well, and saving money, and you down on your luck, as you say. Some of you even grumble that your neighbors’ children should be healthy when yours are pining. You would allow that you are not of much good yet; but you forget that to make you comfortable as you are would be the same as to pull out Joseph’s misfitted thrones and doors, and make his misshapen buckets over again for him. That you think so absurd that you can’t believe the story a bit; but you would be helped out of all your troubles, even those you bring on yourselves, not thinking what the certain consequence would be, namely, that you would grow of less and less value, until you were of no good, either to God or man. If you think about it, you will see that I am right. When, for instance, are you most willing to do right? When are you most ready to hear about good things? When are you most inclined to pray to God? When you have plenty of money in your pockets, or when you are in want? when you have had a good dinner, or when you have not enough to get one? when you are in jolly health, or when the life seems ebbing out of you in misery and pain? No matter that you may have brought it on yourselves; it is no less God’s way of bringing you back to him, for he decrees that suffering shall follow sin: it is just then you most need it; and, if it drives you to God, that is its end, and there will be an end of it. The prodigal was himself to blame for the want that made him a beggar at the swine’s trough; yet that want was the greatest blessing God could give to him, for it drove him home to his father.

“But some of you will say you are no prodigals; nor is it your fault that you find yourselves in such difficulties that life seems hard to you. It would be very wrong in me to set myself up as your judge, and to tell you that it was your fault. If it is, God will let you know it. But if it be not your fault, it does not follow that you need the less to be driven back to God. It is not only in punishment of our sins that we are made to suffer: God’s runaway children must be brought back to their home and their blessedness,—back to their Father in heaven. It is not always a sign that God is displeased with us when he makes us suffer. ‘Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons.’ But instead of talking more about it, I must take it to myself; and learn not to grumble when my plans fail.”

“That’s what you never goes and does, grannie,” growled a voice from somewhere.

I learned afterwards it was that of a young tailor, who was constantly quarrelling with his mother.

“I think I have given up grumbling at my circumstances,” she rejoined; “but then I have nothing to grumble at in them. I haven’t known hunger or cold for a great many years now. But I do feel discontented at times when I see some of you not getting better so fast as I should like. I ought to have patience, remembering how patient God is with my conceit and stupidity, and not expect too much of