Weighed and Wanting, George MacDonald [ebook reader android txt] 📗

it did present itself.

The father came back from his lonely walk, in which his communion with nature had been of the smallest, as determined as before that his son, having unsonned himself, should no more be treated as a son. He could not refuse him shelter in his house for a time, but he should be in it on sufferance-in no right of sonship, and should be made to understand it was so!

But the heart of the mother was longing after her boy, like a human hen whose chicken had run from under her wing and come to grief. He had sinned, he had suffered, and was in disgrace-good reasons why the mother's heart should cling to the youth, why her arms should long to fold him to her bosom! The things which made his father feel he could not speak to him again, worked in the deeper nature of the mother in opposite fashion. In her they reached a stratum of the Divine. Was he unlovely?-she must love him the more! Was he selfish and repellent?-she must get the nearer to him! Everything was reason to her for love and more love. If he were but with her! She would clasp him so close that evil should not touch him! Satan himself could not get at him with her whole mother-being folded round him! She had been feeling of late as if she could not get near him: now that sickness had reduced his strength, and shame his proud spirit, love would have room to enter and minister! The good of all evil is to make a way for love, which is essential good. Therefore evil exists, and will exist until love destroy and cast it out. Corney could not keep his mother out of his heart now! She thought there were ten things she could do for him now to one she could have done for him before! When, oh when would he appear, that her heart might go out to meet him!


CHAPTER LI.

THE RETURN.


The day came. It was fine in London. The invalid was carefully wrapt up for the journey. Hester, the major and Miss Dasomma followed the young couple to the station. There the latter received the poor little wife, and when the train was out of sight, took her home with her. The major who got into the next carriage, at every stop ran to see if anything was wanted; and when they reached the station got on the box of the carriage the mother had sent to meet them. Thus Hester bore her lost sheep home-in little triumph and much anxiety. When they stopped at the door no one was on the outlook for them. The hall was not lighted and the door was locked. The major rang the bell. Ere the door was opened Hester had got down and stood waiting. The major took the youth in his arms and carried him into the dining-room, so weary that he could scarcely open his eyes. There seemed no light in the house, except the candle the man brought when he came to open the door. Corney begged to be put to bed. "I wish Amy was here!" he murmured. Hester and the major were talking together.

She hurried from the room and returned in a moment.

"I was sure of it," she whispered to the major. "There is a glorious fire in his room, and everything ready for him. The house is my father, but the room is my mother, and my mother is God."

The major took him again, and carried him up the stair-so thin and light was he. The moment they were past the door of her room, out came the mother behind them in her dressing gown, and glided pale and noiseless as the disembodied after them. Hester looked round and saw her, but she laid her finger on her lips, and followed without a word. When they were in the room, she came to the door, looked in, and watched them, but did not enter. Cornelius did not open his eyes. The major laid him down on the sofa near the fire. A gleam of it fell on his face. The mother drew a sharp quick breath and pressed her hands against her heart: there was his sin upon his face, branding him that men might know him. But therewith came a fresh rush from the inexhaustible fountain of mother-love. She would have taken him into her anew, with all his sin and pain and sorrow, to clear away in herself brand and pollution, and bear him anew-even as God bears our griefs, and carries our sorrows, destroys our wrongs, taking their consequences on himself, and gives us the new birth from above. Her whole wounded heart seemed to go out to him in one trembling sigh, as she turned to go back to the room where her husband sat with hopeless gaze fixed on the fire. She had but strength to reach the side of the bed, and fell senseless upon it. He started up with a sting of self-accusation: he had killed her, exacting from her a promise that by no word would she welcome the wanderer that night. For she would not have her husband imagine in his bitterness that she loved the erring son more than the father whose heart he had all but broken, and had promised. She was, in truth, nearly as anxious about the one as the other, for was not the unforgivingness of the one as bad-was it not even worse than the theft of the other.

He lifted her, laid her on the bed, and proceeded to administer the restoratives he now knew better than any other how to employ. In a little while he was relieved, her eyelids began to tremble. "My baby!" she murmured, and the tears began to flow.

"Thank God!" he said, and got her to bed.

But strange to say, for all his stern fulfilment of duty, he did not feel fit to lie down by his wife. He would watch: she might have another bad turn!

From the exhaustion that followed excess of feeling, she slept. He sat watchful by the fire. She was his only friend, he said, and now she and he were no more of one mind! Never until now had they had difference!

Hester and the major got Corney to bed, and instantly he was fast asleep. The major arranged himself to pass the night by the fire, and Hester went to see what she could do for her mother. Knocking softly at the door and receiving no answer, she peeped in: there sat her father and there slept her mother: she would not disturb them, but, taking her share in the punishment of him she had brought home, retire without welcome or good-night. She too was presently fast asleep. There was no gnawing worm of duty undone or wrong unpardoned in her bosom to keep her awake. Sorrow is sleepy, pride and remorse are wakeful.


CHAPTER LII.

A HEAVENLY VISION.


The night began differently with the two watchers. The major was troubled in his mind at what seemed the hard-heartedness of the mother, for he loved her with a true brotherly affection. He had not seen her looking in at the door; he did not know the cause of her appearing so withdrawn and unmotherly: he forgot his shilling novel and his sherry and water, and brooded over the thing. He could not endure the low-minded cub, he said to himself; he would gladly, if only the wretch were well enough, give him a sound horse-whipping; but to see him so treated by father and mother was more than he could bear: he began to pity a lad born of parents so hard-hearted. What would have become of himself, he thought, if his mother had treated him so? He had never, to be sure, committed any crime against society worse than shocking certain ridiculously proper people; but if she had made much of his foibles and faults, he might have grown to be capable of doing how could he tell what? who would turn out a mangy dog that was his own dog! If the fellow were his he would know what to do with him! He did not reflect that just because he was not his, he did not feel the wounds that disabled from action. It was easy for him unhurt to think what he would do if he were hurt. Some things seem the harder to forgive the greater the love. It is but a false seeming, thank God, and comes only of selfishness, which makes both the love and the hurt seem greater than they are.

And as the major sat thinking and thinking, the story came back to him which his mother had so often told him and his brothers, all now gone but himself, as they stood or sat or lay gathered round her on the Sunday evenings in the nursery-about the boy that was tired of being at home, and asked his father for money to go away; and how his father gave it him, thinking it better he should go than grumble at the best he could give him; and how he grew very naughty, and spent his money in buying things that were not worth having, and in eating and drinking with greedy, coarse, ill behaved people, till at last he had nothing left to buy food with, and had to feed swine to earn something; and how he fell a thinking, and would go home. It all came back to his mind just as his mother used to tell it-how the poor prodigal, ragged and dirty and hungry, set out for home, and how his father spied him coming a great way off, and knew him at once, and set out running to meet him, and fell on his neck and kissed him. This father would not even look at the son that had but just escaped the jaws of death! True, the prodigal came home repentant; but the father did not wait to know that, but ran to meet him and fell on his neck and kissed him!

As the major thus reflected, he kept coming nearer and nearer to the individual I lurking at the keyhole of every story. Only he had to go home, else how was his father to receive him.

"I wonder now," he said, "if when a man die that is counted for going home! I hardly think it; that is a thing the man can't help at all; he has no hand in the doing of it. Who would come out to meet a fellow because he was flung down dead at his door. I fear I should find myself in no better box than this young rascal when he comes home because he can't help it!"

The end of it was that the major, there in the middle of the night, went down on his knees, and, as he had not now done since the eve of his last battle, tried to say the prayers his mother had taught him. Presently he found himself saying things she had not taught him-speaking from his heart as if one was listening, one who in the dead of the night did not sleep, but kept wide awake lest one of his children should cry.

"It is time," said the major to himself the next day, "that I began to think about going home. I will try again to-night!"

In his wife's room Gerald Raymount sat on into the dead waste and middle of the night. At last, as his wife continued quietly asleep, he thought he would go down to his study, and