There & Back, George MacDonald [early reader chapter books .TXT] 📗

saw the attempt hopeless. Then with pain he remembered that he had not her address, and did not know how to communicate with her. He longed to learn why she had left him without a word, what her repeated avoidance of him meant; far more he desired to know where she was that he might help her, and how she fared. But Barbara was her friend! Barbara knew her address! He would ask her to send it him! He hardly thought she would, for she was in the secret of Alice's behaviour, but, joy to think, it would be a reason for writing to her! His heart gave a bound in his bosom. Who could tell but she might please to send him the fan-wind of a letter now and then, keeping the door, just a chink of it, open between them, that the voice of her slave might reach her on the throne of her loveliness! He walked the rest of the way with a gladder heart; he was no longer without a future; there was something to do, and something to wait for! Days are dreary unto death which wrap no hope in their misty folds.

His uncle and aunt received him with more warmth than he had ever known them show. They were in good spirits about him, for they had all the time been receiving news of him and Barbara, with not a word of Alice, from old Simon. Jane's heart swelled with the ambition that her boy should as a working-man gain the love of a well born girl, and reward her by making her my lady .

I do not think Mrs. Tuke could have loved a son of her own body more than this son of her sister; but she was constantly haunted with a vague uneasiness about the possible consequences to herself and her husband of what she had done, and the obstacles that might rise to prevent his restoration; and this uneasiness had its share both in repressing the show of her love, and in making her go to church so regularly. Her pleasure in going was not great, but she was not the less troubled that Richard did not care about going. She was still in the land of bullocks and goats; she went to church with the idea that she was doing something for God in going. It is always the way. Until a man knows God, he seeks to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about; while the things for the sake of which he sent his son, the man regards as of little or no consequence. What the son says about them, he takes as a matter of course for him to say, and for himself to neglect.

Mrs. Tuke noted, the next day, that, as often almost as he was still, a shadow settled on Richard's face, and he looked lost and sad: but it only occurred to her that of course he must miss Barbara, never that he cherished no hope such as she would have counted hope. She took it almost as an omen of final success when in the evening he asked her if she would not like him to go to church with her. He felt as if in church he would be nearer Barbara, for he knew that now she went often. But alas, while there he sat, he felt himself drifting farther and farther from her! The foolish utterances of the parson made him deeply regret that he had gone. While he believed, or at least was willing to believe, that they misrepresented Christianity, they awoke all his old feelings of instinctive repulsion, and overclouded his discrimination. Almost as little could he endure the unnature as the untruth of what he heard. It had no ring of reality, no spark of divine fire, no appealing radiance of common sense, little of any verity at all. There was in it, as nearly as possible, nothing at all to mediate between mind and mind, between truth and belief, between God and his children. The clergyman was not a hypocrite-far from it! He was in some measure even a devout man. But in his whole presentation of God and our relation to him, there was neither thought nor phrase germane to sunrise or sunset, to the firmament or the wind or the grass or the trees; nothing that came to the human soul as having a reality true as that of the world but higher; as holding with the life lived in it, with the hopes and necessities of the heart and mind. If "the hope of the glory of God" must be fashioned in like sort, then were the whole affair of creation and redemption both dull and desperate. There was no glow, no enthusiasm in the man-neither could there be, with the notions he held. His God suggested a police magistrate-and not a just one.

Richard would gladly have left the place, and wandered up and down in the drizzle until, the service over, his mother should appear; but for her sake he sat out the misery.

"The man," he said to himself, "does not give us one peg on which to hang the love of God that he tells us we ought to feel! Love a God like that! If he were as good as my mother, I would love him! But we have all to look out to protect ourselves from him! Mr. Parson, there's no such being as you jabber about! It puzzles me to think what my mother gets from you."

He had written his letter to Barbara, and when they came out he posted it. A long, long time of waiting followed; but no waiting brought any answer. Lady Ann had dropped a hint, and Mr. Wylder had picked it up, a hint delicate, but forcible enough to make him do what he had never done before-keep an outlook on the letters that came for his daughter. When Richard's arrived, it did not look to him that of a gentleman. The writing was good, but precise; it was sealed with red wax, but the impression was sunk: a proper seal had not been used! Especially where his own family was concerned, Mr. Wylder was not the most delicate of men! he opened the letter, and in it found what he called a rigmarole of poetry and theology! "Confound the fellow!" he said to himself. Lady Ann did well to warn him! There should be no more of this! The scatter-brain took after her mother! He would give it her hot!

But he neither gave it her hot, nor gave her the letter; he did not say a word. He feared the little girl he pretended to protect, and knew that if he entered the lists with her, she would be too much for him. But he did not understand that the mean in him dared not confront the noble in his child. So Richard's letter only had it hot; it went into the fire, and Bab never read the petition of her poor friend.

The next morning Richard went to the shop, and fell to the first job that came to his hand. He acquainted his father with Lestrange's proposal in regard to the library: Mr. Tuke would have him accept it.

"You shall have all it brings," he said.

"I don't want the money!" returned Richard.

"But I want the honour of the thing," replied his uncle. "You answered the young gentleman sharply: you had better let me write!"

Richard made no objection. He would gladly keep the door open to any place where the shadow of Barbara might fall, and was willing therefore to pocket the offence of his causeless dismissal. But no notice was taken of Tuke's letter, and a gulf of negation seemed to yawn between the houses.

Thus was initiated a dreary time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, and it did not seem so unnatural to be without her now. Had it been summer, all the forms of earth and air would have brought to him the face and voice and motion of Barbara; and yet the soul would have been gone from them. The world would have been worse dead then than now in the winter. Barbara had been the soul of it-more than a sun to it.

He could not, however, dead as the world seemed, remain a moment indoors after his work was done. Whatever sort the weather, out he must go, often on the Thames, heedless of cold or wind or rain. His mother grew anxious about him, attributed his unrest to despair, and feared she might have to tell him her secret. She recoiled from setting free what she had kept in prison for so many years. In her own mind she had settled his coming of age as the term of his humiliation, and she would gladly keep to it. She shrunk from losing him, from breaking up the happiness that lay in seeing him about the house. But that her husband had insisted on accustoming themselves to live without him, she would hardly have consented to his late absence. She shrunk also from the measures necessary to reinstate him, and from the commotion those measures must occasion. It was so much easier to go on as they were doing! and delay could not prejudice his right! In fact, most of the things that made her take the baby, were present still, making her desire to keep the youth. A day would come when she must part with him, but that day was not yet! She dreaded uncaging her secret, because of the change it must work, whether immediate action were taken or not. She never suspected that anyone knew or surmised it but herself, or that she had to beware of any tongue but her own.

Her husband left the matter entirely to her. It was her business, he said, from the first, and he would let it be hers to the last.


CHAPTER XLI.


NATURE AND SUPERNATURE.

But Richard soon began to recover both from the separation and from his disappointment in regard to his letter. He was satisfied that whatever might be the cause of her silence, it came from no fault in Barbara. Nothing ever shook his faith in her.

And soon he found that he looked now upon the world with eyes from which a veil had been withdrawn. Barbara gone, mother Earth came nigh to comfort her child. He had always delighted in the beauty of the world-in what shows of earth and air were to be seen in London. The sunset that filled as with a glowing curtain the end of some street where he walked, would go on glowing in his heart when it left the street. Even in winter he would now and then go out to see the sunrise, and see it; and from the street might now and then, at rare times, be beheld a dappling and streaking, a mottling and massing of clouds on the blue. The fog of the London valley, and the smoke of the London chimneys, did not always , any more than the cares and sorrows and sins of its souls, blot out its heaven as if it had never looked on the earth. But he had learned much since he went to the country; he had gone nearer to Nature, and seen that in her lap she carried many more