The Altar Fire, Arthur Christopher Benson [book recommendations for young adults txt] 📗

not to have prepared me more to lose him; it was too good to be true, too perfectly pure and brave. Yet I never even dreamed that he would leave us; I should have treasured the bright days better if I had. There are times of sharpest sorrow, days when I wake and have forgotten; when I think of him as with us, and then the horror of my loss comes curdling and weltering back upon me; when I thrill from head to foot with hopeless agony, rebelling, desiring, hating the death that parts us.

Maggie seems to feel it differently. A child accepts a changed condition with perhaps a sharper pang, but with a swift accustoming to what irreparably IS. She weeps at the thought of him sometimes, but without the bitter resistance, the futile despair which makes me agonise. That she can be interested, distracted, amused, is a great help to me; but nothing seems to minister to my dear Maud, except the impassioned revival, for it is so, of our earliest first love. It has come back to bless us, that deep and intimate absorption that had moved into a gentler comradeship. The old mysterious yearning to mingle life and dreams, and almost identities, has returned in fullest force; the years have rolled away, and in the loss of her calm strength and patience, we are as lovers again. The touch of her hand, the glance of her eye, thrill through me as of old. It is a devout service, an eager anticipation of her lightest wish that possesses me. I am no longer tended; I tend and serve. There is something soft, appealing, wistful about her that seems to give her back an almost childlike dependence, till my grief almost goes from me in joy that I can sustain and aid her.


September 7, 1889.


Another trouble has fallen upon us. I have had a very grievous letter from my cousin, who succeeded by arrangement, on my father's death, to the business. He has been unfortunate in his affairs; he has thrown money away in speculation. The greater part of my income came from the business. I suppose the arrangement was a bad one, but the practice was so sound and secure in my father's life that it never occurred to me to doubt its stability. The chief part of my income, some nine hundred a year, came to me from this source. Apart from that, I have some three or four hundreds from invested money of my own, and Maud has upwards of two hundred a year. I am going off to-morrow to L---- to meet my cousin, and go into the matter. I don't at present understand how things are. His letter is full of protestations and self-recrimination. We can live, I suppose, if the worst comes to the worst, but in a very different way. Perhaps we may even have to sell our pleasant house. The strange thing is that I don't feel this all more acutely, but I seem to have lost the power of suffering for any other reason than because Alec is dead.


September 12, 1889.


I have come back to-night from some weary nightmare days with my poor cousin. The thing is as bad as it can be. The business will be acquired by Messrs. F----, the next most leading solicitors. With the price they will give, and with the sacrifice of my cousin's savings, and the assets of the firm, the money can just be paid. We shall have some six hundred a year to live upon; my cousin is to enter the office of the F---- firm as an ordinary clerk. The origin of the disaster is a melancholy one; it was not that he himself might profit, but to increase the income of some clients who had lost money and desired a higher rate of interest for funds left in the hands of the firm. If my cousin had resisted the demand, there would have been some unpleasantness, because the money lost had been invested on his advice; he could not face this, and proceeded to speculate with other money, of which he was trustee, to fill the gap. Good-nature, imprudence, credulousness, a faulty grasp of the conditions, and not any deliberate dishonesty, have been the cause of his ruin. It is a fearful blow to him, but he is fortunate, perhaps, in being unmarried; I have urged him to try and get employment elsewhere, but he insists upon facing the situation in the place where he is known, with a fantastic idea, which is at the same time noble and chivalrous, of doing penance. Of course he has no prospects whatever; but I am sure of this, that he grieves over my lost inheritance far more than he grieves over his own ruin. His great misery is that some years ago he refused an offer from Messrs. F---- to amalgamate the two firms.

I feared at first that I might have to sacrifice the rest of my money as well--money slowly accumulated out of my own labours. And the relief of finding that this will not be necessary is immense. We must sell our house at once, and find a smaller one. At present I am not afraid of the changed circumstances; indeed, if I could only recover my power of writing, we need not leave our home. The temptation is to get a book written somehow, because I could make money by any stuff just now. On the other hand, it will almost be to me a relief to part from the home so haunted with the memory of Alec--though that will be a dreadful pain to Maud and Maggie. As far as living more simply goes, that does not trouble me in the least. I have always been slightly uncomfortable about the ease and luxury in which we lived. I only wish we had lived more simply all along, so that I could have put by a little more. I have told Maud exactly how matters stand, and she acquiesces, though I can see that, just at this time, the thought of handing over to strangers the house where we have lived all our married life, the rooms where Alec and the baby died, is a deep grief to her. To me that is almost a relief. I have dreaded going back there. To-night I told Maggie, and she broke out into long weeping. But even so there is something about the idea of being poor, strange to say, which touches a sense of romance in the child. She does not realise the poky restrictions of the new life.

And still stranger to me is the way in which this solid, tangible trouble seems to have restored my energy and calm. I found myself clear-headed, able to grasp the business questions which arose, gifted with a hard lucidity of mind that I did not know I possessed. It is a relief to get one's teeth into something, to have hard, definite occupation to distract one; indeed, it hardly seems to me in the light of a misfortune at present, so much as a blessed tangible problem to be grappled with and solved. What I should have felt if all had been lost, and if I had had to resign my liberty, and take up some practical occupation, I hardly know. I do not think I should even have dreaded that in my present frame of mind.


September 15, 1889.


I have been thinking all day long of my last walk with Alec, the day before he was taken ill. Maud had gone out with Maggie; and the little sturdy figure came to my room to ask if I was going out. I was finishing a book that I was reading for the evening's work; I had been out in the morning, and I had not intended to go out again, as it was cold and drizzling. I very nearly said that I could not go, and I had a shadow of vexation at being interrupted. But I looked up at him, as he stood by the door, and there was a tiny shadow of loneliness upon his face; and I thank God now that I put my book down at once, and consented cheerfully. He brightened up at this; he fetched my cap and stick, and we went off together. I am glad to think that I had him to myself that day. He was in a more confidential mood than usual. Perhaps--who knows?--there was some shadow of death upon him, some instinct to clasp hands closer before the end. He asked me to tell him some stories of my schooldays, and what I used to do as a boy--but he was full of alertness and life, breaking into my narratives to point out a nest that we had seen in the spring, and that now hung, wind-dried and ruinous, among the boughs. Coming back, he flagged a little, and did what he seldom did, put his arm in my own; how tenderly the touch of the little hand, the restless fingers on my arm thrilled me--the hand that lies cold and folded and shrivelled in the dark ground! He was proud that evening of having had me all to himself, and said to Maggie that we had talked secrets, "such as MEN talk when there are no women to ask questions." But thinking that this had wounded Maggie a little, he went and put his arm round her, and I heard him say something about its being all nonsense, and that we had wished for her all the time. . . .

Ah, how can I endure it, the silence, the absence, the lost smile, the child of my own whom I loved from head to foot, body soul and spirit all alike! I keep coming across signs of his presence everywhere, his books, his garden tools in the summerhouse, the little presents he gave me, on my study chimney-piece, his cap and coat hanging in the cupboard--it is these little trifling things, signs of life and joyful days, that sting the heart and pierce the brain with sorrow. If I could but have one sight of him, one word with him, one smile, to show that he is, that he remembers, that he waits for us, I could endure it; but I look into the dark and no answer comes; I send my wild entreaties pulsating through the worlds of space, crying, "Are you there, my child?" That his life is there, hidden with God, I do not doubt; but is it he himself, or has he fallen back, like the drop of water in the fountain, into the great tide of life? That is no comfort to me; it is he that I want, that union of body and mind, of life and love, that was called my child and is mine no more.


September 20, 1889.


Such a loss as mine passes over the soul like a plough cleaving a pasture line by line. The true stuff of the spirit is revealed and laid out in all its bareness. That customary outline, that surface growth of herb and blade, is all pared away. I have been accustomed to think myself a religious man--I have never been without the sense of God over and about me. But when an experience like this comes, it shows me what my religion is worth. I do not turn to God in love and hope; I do not know Him, I do not understand Him. I feel that He must have forgotten me, or that He is indifferent to me, or that He is incapable of love, and works blindly and sternly. My reason in vain says that the great and beautiful gift itself