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

words, ‘If any man is willing to do the will of the Father, he shall know whether I speak of myself or he sent me;’ suppose all these things, might not the man then say to himself, ‘I cannot tell whether all this is true, but I know nothing that seems half so good, and I will try to do the will of the Father in the hope of the promised knowledge’? Do you think God would, or would not, count that to the man for faith?”

I had no more to say, and a silence followed. After a pause of some duration, Percivale said,—

“I will go with you, my dear;” and that was all his answer.

When we came out of the little chapel,—the same into which Marion had stepped on that evening so memorable to her,—we walked homeward in silence, and reached our own door ere a word was spoken. But, when I went to take off my things, Percivale followed me into the room and said,—

“Whether that man is certain of the facts or not, I cannot tell yet; but I am perfectly satisfied he believes in the manner of which you were speaking,—that of obedience, Wynnie. He must believe with his heart and will and life.”

“If so, he can well afford to wait for what light God will give him on things that belong to the intellect and judgment.”

“I would rather think,” he returned, “that purity of life must re-act on the judgment, so as to make it likewise clear, and enable it to recognize the true force of the evidence at command.”

“That is how my father came to believe,” I said.

“He seems to me to rest his conviction more upon external proof.”

“That is only because it is easier to talk about. He told me once that he was never able to estimate the force and weight of the external arguments until after he had believed for the very love of the eternal truth he saw in the story. His heart, he said, had been the guide of his intellect.”

“That is just what I would fain believe. But, O Wynnie! the pity of it if that story should not be true, after all!”

“Ah, my love!” I cried, “that very word makes me surer than ever that it cannot but be true. Let us go on putting it to the hardest test; let us try it until it crumbles in our hands,—try it by the touchstone of action founded on its requirements.”

“There may be no other way,” said Percivale, after a thoughtful pause, “of becoming capable of recognizing the truth. It may be beyond the grasp of all but the mind that has thus yielded to it. There may be no contact for it with any but such a mind. Such a conviction, then, could neither be forestalled nor communicated. Its very existence must remain doubtful until it asserts itself. I see that.”

 

CHAPTER XXXII.

MY SECOND TERROR.

 

“Please, ma’am, is Master Fido to carry Master Zohrab about by the back o’ the neck?” said Jemima, in indignant appeal, one afternoon late in November, bursting into the study where I sat with my husband.

Fido was our Bedlington terrier, which, having been reared by Newcastle colliers, and taught to draw a badger,—whatever that may mean,—I am hazy about it,—had a passion for burrowing after any thing buried. Swept away by the current of the said passion, he had with his strong forepaws unearthed poor Zohrab, which, being a tortoise, had ensconced himself, as he thought, for the winter, in the earth at the foot of a lilac-tree; but now, much to his jeopardy, from the cold and the shock of the surprise more than from the teeth of his friend, was being borne about the garden in triumph, though whether exactly as Jemima described may be questionable. Her indignation at the inroad of the dog upon the personal rights of the tortoise had possibly not lessened her general indifference to accuracy.

Alarmed at the danger to the poor animal, of a kind from which his natural defences were powerless to protect him, Percivale threw down his palette and brushes, and ran to the door.

“Do put on your coat and hat, Percivale!” I cried; but he was gone.

Cold as it was, he had been sitting in the light blouse he had worn at his work all the summer. The stove had got red-hot, and the room was like an oven, while outside a dank fog filled the air. I hurried after him with his coat, and found him pursuing Fido about the garden, the brute declining to obey his call, or to drop the tortoise. Percivale was equally deaf to my call, and not until he had beaten the dog did he return with the rescued tortoise in his hands. The consequences were serious,—first the death of Zohrab, and next a terrible illness to my husband. He had caught cold: it settled on his lungs, and passed into bronchitis.

It was a terrible time to me; for I had no doubt, for some days, that he was dying. The measures taken seemed thoroughly futile.

It is an awful moment when first Death looks in at the door. The positive recognition of his presence is so different from any vividest imagination of it! For the moment I believed nothing,—felt only the coming blackness of absolute loss. I cared neither for my children, nor for my father or mother. Nothing appeared of any worth more. I had conscience enough left to try to pray, but no prayer would rise from the frozen depths of my spirit. I could only move about in mechanical and hopeless ministration to one whom it seemed of no use to go on loving any more; for what was nature but a soulless machine, the constant clank of whose motion sounded only, “Dust to dust; dust to dust,” forevermore? But I was roused from this horror-stricken mood by a look from my husband, who, catching a glimpse of my despair, motioned me to him with a smile as of sunshine upon snow, and whispered in my ear,—

“I’m afraid you haven’t much more faith than myself, after all, Wynnie.”

It stung me into life,—not for the sake of my professions, not even for the honor of our heavenly Father, but by waking in me the awful thought of my beloved passing through the shadow of death with no one beside him to help or comfort him, in absolute loneliness and uncertainty. The thought was unendurable. For a moment I wished he might die suddenly, and so escape the vacuous despair of a conscious lingering betwixt life and the something or the nothing beyond it.

“But I cannot go with you!” I cried; and, forgetting all my duty as a nurse, I wept in agony.

“Perhaps another will, my Wynnie,—one who knows the way,” he whispered; for he could not speak aloud, and closed his eyes.

It was as if an arrow of light had slain the Python coiled about my heart. If he believed, I could believe also; if he could encounter the vague dark, I could endure the cheerless light. I was myself again, and, with one word of endearment, left the bedside to do what had to be done.

At length a faint hope began to glimmer in the depths of my cavernous fear. It was long ere it swelled into confidence; but, although I was then in somewhat feeble health, my strength never gave way. For a whole week I did not once undress, and for weeks I was half-awake all the time I slept. The softest whisper would rouse me thoroughly; and it was only when Marion took my place that I could sleep at all.

I am afraid I neglected my poor children dreadfully. I seemed for the time to have no responsibility, and even, I am ashamed to say, little care for them. But then I knew that they were well attended to: friends were very kind—especially Judy—in taking them out; and Marion’s daily visits were like those of a mother. Indeed, she was able to mother any thing human except a baby, to whom she felt no attraction,—any more than to the inferior animals, for which she had little regard beyond a negative one: she would hurt no creature that was not hurtful; but she had scarcely an atom of kindness for dog or cat, or any thing that is petted of woman. It is the only defect I am aware of in her character.

My husband slowly recovered, but it was months before he was able to do any thing he would call work. But, even in labor, success is not only to the strong. Working a little at the short best time of the day with him, he managed, long before his full recovery, to paint a small picture which better critics than I have thought worthy of Angelico, I will attempt to describe it.

Through the lighted windows of a great hall, the spectator catches broken glimpses of a festive company. At the head of the table, pouring out the red wine, he sees one like unto the Son of man, upon whom the eyes of all are turned. At the other end of the hall, seated high in a gallery, with rapt looks and quaint yet homely angelican instruments, he sees the orchestra pouring out their souls through their strings and trumpets. The hall is filled with a jewelly glow, as of light suppressed by color, the radiating centre of which is the red wine on the table; while mingled wings, of all gorgeous splendors, hovering in the dim height, are suffused and harmonized by the molten ruby tint that pervades the whole.

Outside, in the drizzly darkness, stands a lonely man. He stoops listening, with one ear laid almost against the door. His half-upturned face catches a ray of the light reflected from a muddy pool in the road. It discloses features wan and wasted with sorrow and sickness, but glorified with the joy of the music. He is like one who has been four days dead, to whose body the music has recalled the soul. Down by his knee he holds a violin, fashioned like those of the orchestra within; which, as he listens, he is tuning to their pitch.

To readers acquainted with a poem of Dr. Donne’s,—“Hymn to God, my God, in my sickness,”—this description of mine will at once suggest the origin of the picture. I had read some verses of it to him in his convalescence; and, having heard them once, he requested them often again. The first stanza runs thus:—

“Since I am coming to that holy room Where with the choir of saints forevermore I shall be made thy musique, as I come, I tune the instrument here at the door; And what I must do then, think here before.”

The painting is almost the only one he has yet refused to let me see before it was finished; but, when it was, he hung it up in my own little room off the study, and I became thoroughly acquainted with it. I think I love it more than any thing else he has done. I got him, without telling him why, to put a touch or two to the listening figure, which made it really like himself.

During this period of recovery, I often came upon him reading his Greek New Testament, which he would shove aside when I entered. At length, one morning, I said to him,—

“Are you ashamed of the New Testament, Percivale? One would think it was a bad book from the way you try to hide it.”

“No, my love,” he said: “it is only that I am jealous of appearing to do that from suffering and weakness only, which I did