Wilfrid Cumbermede, George MacDonald [essential reading .txt] 📗

Miss Pease in the act of studying her "Cookery for Invalids"-in the hope of finding a patient in you, no doubt. She wanted to come and nurse you, but daren't propose it.'

'It was very kind of her.'

'No doubt. But then you see she's ready to commit suicide any day, poor old thing, but for lack of courage!'

'It must be dreary for her!'

'Dreary! I should poison the old dragon.'

'Well, perhaps I had better tell you, for Miss Pease's sake, who is evidently the only one that cares a straw about me in the matter, that possibly I shall be absent a good many days this week, and perhaps the next too.'

'Why, then-if I may ask-Mr Absolute?'

'Because a friend of mine is going to pay me a visit. You remember Charley Osborne, don't you? Of course you do. You remember the ice-cave, I am sure.'

'Yes, I do-quite well,' she answered.

I fancied I saw a shadow cross her face.

'When do you expect him?' she asked, turning away, and picking a book from the floor.

'In a week or so, I think. He tells me his mother and sister are coming here on a visit.'

'Yes-so I believe-to-morrow, I think. I wonder if I ought to be going. I don't think I will. I came to please them-at all events not to please myself; but as I find it pleasanter than I expected, I won't go without a hint and a half at least.'

'Why should you? There is plenty of room.'

'Yes; but don't you see?-so many inferiors in the house at once might be too much for Madame Dignity. She finds one quite enough, I suspect.'

'You do not mean that she regards the Osbornes as inferiors?'

'Not a doubt of it. Never mind. I can take care of myself. Have you any work for me to-day?'

'Plenty, if you are in a mood for it.'

'I will fetch Miss Brotherton.'

'I can do without her .'

She went, however, and did not return. As I walked home to dinner, she and Miss Brotherton passed me in the carriage, on their way, as I learned afterwards, to fetch the Osborne ladies from the rectory, some ten miles off. I did not return to Moldwarp Hall, but helped Styles in the lumber-room, which before night we had almost emptied.

The next morning I was favoured with a little desultory assistance from the two ladies, but saw nothing of the visitors. In the afternoon, and both the following days, I took my servant with me, who got through more work than the two together, and we advanced it so far that I was able to leave the room next the armoury in the hands of the carpenter and the housemaid, with sufficient directions, and did not return that week.


CHAPTER XXXV.


A TALK WITH CHARLEY.

The following Monday, in the evening, Charley arrived, in great spirits, more excited indeed than I liked to see him. There was a restlessness in his eye which made me especially anxious, for it raised a doubt whether the appearance of good spirits was not the result merely of resistance to some anxiety. But I hoped my companionship, with the air and exercise of the country, would help to quiet him again. In the late twilight we took a walk together up and down my field.

'I suppose you let your mother know you were coming, Charley?' I said.

'I did not,' he answered. 'My father must have nothing to lay to their charge in case he should hear of our meeting.'

'But he has not forbidden you to go home, has he?'

'No, certainly. But he as good as told me I was not to go home while he was away. He does not wish me to be there without his presence to counteract my evil influences. He seems to regard my mere proximity as dangerous. I sometimes wonder whether the severity of his religion may not have affected his mind. Almost all madness, you know, turns either upon love or religion.'

'So I have heard. I doubt it-with men. It may be with women.-But you won't surprise them? It might startle your mother too much. She is not strong, you say. Hadn't I better tell Clara Coningham? She can let them know you are here.'

'It would be better.'

'What do you say to going there with me to-morrow? I will send my man with a note in the morning.'

He looked a little puzzled and undetermined, but said at length,

'I dare say your plan is the best. How long has Miss Coningham been here?'

'About ten days, I think.'

He looked thoughtful and made no answer.

'I see, you are afraid of my falling in love with her again,' I said. 'I confess I like her much better than I did, but I am not quite sure about her yet. She is very bewitching anyhow, and a little more might make me lose my heart to her. The evident dislike she has to Brotherton would of itself recommend her to any friend of yours or mine.'

He turned his face away.

'Do not be anxious about me,' I went on. 'The first shadowy conviction of any untruthfulness in her, if not sufficient to change my feelings at once, would at once initiate a backward movement in them.'

He kept his face turned away, and I was perplexed. After a few moments of silence, he turned it towards me again, as if relieved by some resolution suddenly formed, and said with a smile under a still clouded brow,

'Well, old fellow, we'll see. It'll all come right, I dare say. Write your note early, and we'll follow it. How glad I shall be to have a glimpse of that blessed mother of mine without her attendant dragon!'

'For God's sake don't talk of your father so! Surely, after all, he is a good man!'

'Then I want a new reading of the word.'

'He loves God, at least.'

'I won't stop to inquire-' said Charley, plunging at once into argument-'what influence for good it might or might not have to love a non-existence: I will only ask-Is it a good God he loves or a bad one? If the latter, he can hardly be called good for loving him.'

'But if there be a God at all, he must be a good God.'

'Suppose the true God to be the good God, it does not follow that my father worships him . There is such a thing as worshipping a false God. At least the Bible recognizes it. For my part, I find myself compelled to say-either that the true God is not a good God, or that my father does not worship the true God. If you say he worships the God of the Bible, I either admit or dispute the assertion, but set it aside as altering nothing; for if I admit it, the argument lies thus: my father worships a bad God; my father worships the God of the Bible: therefore the God of the Bible is a bad God; and if I admit the authority of the Bible, then the true God is a bad God. If, however, I dispute the assertion that he worships the God of the Bible, I am left to show, if I can, that the God of the Bible is a good God, and, if I admit the authority of the Bible, to worship another than my father's God. If I do not admit the authority of the Bible, there may, for all that, be a good God, or, which is next best to a perfectly good God, there may be no God at all.'

'Put like a lawyer, Charley: and yet I would venture to join issue with your first assertion-on which the whole argument is founded-that your father worships a bad God.'

'Assuredly what he asserts concerning his God is bad.'

'Admitted; but does he assert only bad things of his God?'

'I daren't say that. But God is one. You will hardly dare the proposition that an infinite being may be partly good and partly bad.'

'No. I heartily hold that God must be one -a proposition far more essential than that there is one God-so far, at least, as my understanding can judge. It is only in the limited human nature that good and evil can co-exist. But there is just the point: we are not speaking of the absolute God, but of the idea of a man concerning that God. You could suppose yourself utterly convinced of a good God long before your ideas of goodness were so correct as to render you incapable of attributing anything wrong to that God. Supposing such to be the case, and that you came afterwards to find that you had been thinking something wrong about him, do you think you would therefore grant that you had been believing either in a wicked or in a false God?'

'Certainly not.'

'Then you must give your father the same scope. He attributes what we are absolutely certain are bad things to his God-and yet he may believe in a good God, for the good in his idea of God is that alone in virtue of which he is able to believe in him. No mortal can believe in the bad.'

'He puts the evil foremost in his creed and exhortations.'

'That may be. Few people know their own deeper minds. The more potent a power in us, I suspect it is the more hidden from our scrutiny.'

'If there be a God, then, Wilfrid, he is very indifferent to what his creatures think of him.'

'Perhaps very patient and hopeful, Charley-who knows? Perhaps he will not force himself upon them, but help them to grow into the true knowledge of him. Your father may worship the true God, and yet have only a little of that knowledge.'

A silence followed. At length-'Thank you for my father,' said Charley.

'Thank my uncle,' I said.

'For not being like my father?-I do,' he returned.

It was the loveliest evening that brooded round us as we walked. The moon had emerged from a rippled sea of grey cloud, over which she cast her dull opaline halo. Great masses and banks of cloud lay about the rest of the heavens, and, in the dark rifts between, a star or two were visible, gazing from the awful distance.

'I wish I could let it into me, Wilfrid,' said Charley, after we had been walking in silence for some time along the grass.

'Let what into you, Charley?'

'The night and the blue and the stars.'

'Why don't you, then?'

'I hate being taken in. The more pleasant a self-deception, the less I choose to submit to it.'

'That is reasonable. But where lies the deception?'

'I don't say it's a deception. I only don't know that it isn't.'

'Please explain.'

'I mean what you call the beauty of the night.'

'Surely there can be little question of that?'

'Ever so little is enough. Suppose I asked you wherein its beauty consisted: would you be satisfied if I said-In the arrangement of the blue and the white, with the sparkles of yellow, and the colours about the scarce visible moon?'

'Certainly not. I should reply that it lay in the gracious peace of the whole-troubled only with the sense