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

of the child's life and the child's love came from Him. I do not question His power or His right to take my child from me. But I endure only because I must, not willingly or loyally or lovingly. It is not that I feel the injustice of His taking the boy away; it is a far deeper sense of injustice than that. The injustice lies in the fact that He made the child so utterly dear and desired; that He set him so firmly in my heart; this on the one hand; and on the other, that He does not, if He must rend the little life away and leave the bleeding gap, send at the same time some love, some strength, some patience to make the pain bearable. I cannot believe that the love I bore my boy was anything but a sweet and holy influence. It gave me the one thing of which I am in hourly need--something outside of myself and my own interests, to love better than I loved even myself. It seems indeed a pure and simple loss, unless the lesson God would have us learn is the stoical lesson of detachment, indifference, cold self-sufficiency. It is like taking the crutches away from a lame man, knocking the props away from a tottering building. An optimistic moralist would say that I loved Alec too selfishly, and even that the love of the child turned away my heart from the jealous Heart of God, who demands a perfect surrender, a perfect love. But how can one love that which one does not know or understand, a Power that walks in darkness and that gives us on the one hand sweet, beautiful, and desirable things, and on the other strikes them from us when we need them most? It is not as if I did not desire to trust and love God utterly. I should think even this sorrow a light price to pay, if it gave me a pure and deep trust in the mercy and goodness of God. But instead of that it fills me with dismay, blank suspicion, fretful resistance. I do not feel that there is anything which God could send me or reveal to me, which would enable me to acquit Him of hardness or injustice. I will not, though He slay me, say that I trust Him and love Him when I do not. He may crush me with repeated blows of His hand, but He has given me the divine power of judging, of testing, of balancing; and I must use it even in His despite. He does not require, I think, a dull and broken submissiveness, the submissiveness of the creature that is ready to admit anything, if only he can be spared another blow. What He requires, so my spirit tells me, is an eager co-operation, a brave approval, a generous belief in His goodness and His justice; and this I cannot give, and it is He that has made me unable to give it. The wound may heal, the dull pain may die away, I may forget, the child may become a golden memory--but I cannot again believe that this is the surrender God desires. What I think He must desire, is that I should love the child, miss him as bitterly as ever, feel my day darkened by his loss, and yet turn to Him gratefully and bravely in perfect love and trust. It may be that I may be drawn closer to those whom I love, but the loss must still remain irreparable, because I might have learned to love my dear ones better through Alec's presence, and not through his absence. It is His will, I do not doubt it; but I cannot see the goodness or the justice of the act, and I will not pretend to myself that I acquiesce.


September 25, 1889.


Yesterday was a warm, delicious, soft day, full of a gentle languor, the air balmy and sweet, the sunshine like the purest gold; we sate out all the morning under the cliff, in the warm dry sand. To the right and left of us lay the blue bay, the waves breaking with short, crisp sparkles on the shore. We saw headland after headland sinking into the haze; a few fishing-boats moved slowly about, and far down on the horizon we watched the smoke of a great ocean-steamer. We talked, Maud and I, for the first time, I think, without reserve, without bitterness, almost without grief, of Alec. What sustains her is the certainty that he is as he was, somewhere, far off, as brave and loving as ever, waiting for us, but waiting with a perfect understanding and knowledge of why we are separated. She dreams of him thus, looking down upon her, and seeming, in her dream, to wonder what there can be to grieve about. I suppose that a mother has a sense of oneness with a child that a father cannot have. It is a deep and marvellous faith, an intuition that transcends all reason, a radiant certainty. I cannot attain to it. But in the warmth and light of her belief, I grew to feel that at least there was some explanation of it all. Not by chance is the dear gift sent us, not by chance do we learn to love it, not by chance is it rent from us. Lying thus, talking softly, in so gracious a world, a world that satisfied every craving of the senses, I came to realise that the Father must wish us well, and that if the shadow fell upon our path, it was not to make us cold and bitter-hearted. Infinite Love! it came near to me in that hour, and clasped me to a sorrowful, tender, beating Heart. I read Maud, at her request, "Evelyn Hope," and the strong and patient love, that dwells so serenely and softly upon the incidents of death, yet without the least touch of morbidity and gloom, treating death itself as a quiet slumber of the soul, taught me for a moment how to be brave.

"You will wake and remember, and understand,"--my voice broke and tears came, unbidden tears which I did not even desire to conceal--and in that moment the spirit of my wife came near to me, and soul looked into the eyes of soul, with a perfect and bewildering joy, the very joy of God.


October 10, 1889.


We have had the kindest, dearest letters from our neighbours about our last misfortune. But no one seems to anticipate that we shall be obliged to leave the place. They naturally suppose that I shall be able to make as large an income as I want by writing. And so I suppose I could. I talked the whole matter over with Maud, and said I would abide by her decision. I confessed that I had an extreme repugnance to the thought of turning out books for money, books which I knew to be inferior; but I also said that if she could not bear to leave the place, I had little doubt that I could, for the present at all events, make enough money to render it possible for us to continue to live there. I said frankly that it would be a relief to me to leave a house so sadly haunted by memory, and that I should myself prefer to live elsewhere, framing our household on very simple lines--and to let the power of writing come back if it would, not to try and force it. It would be a dreadful prospect to me to live thus, overshadowed by recollection, working dismally for money; but I suppose it would be possible, even bracing. Maud did not hesitate: she spoke quite frankly; on the one hand the very associations, which I dread most, were evidently to her a source of sad delight; and the thought of strangers living in rooms so hallowed by grief was like a profanation. Then there was the fact of all her relations with our friends and neighbours; but she said quite simply that my feeling outweighed it all, and that she would far rather begin life afresh somewhere else, than put me in the position I described. We determined to try and find a small house in the neighbourhood of her own old home in Gloucestershire; and this thought, I am sure, gave her real happiness. We determined at once what we would do; we would let our house for a term of years, take what furniture we needed, and dispose of the rest; we arranged to go off to Gloucestershire, as soon as possible, to look for a house. We both realise that we must learn to retrench at once. We shall have less than half our former income, counting in what we hope to get from the old house. I am not at all afraid of that. I always vaguely disliked living as comfortably as we did--but it will not be agreeable to have to calculate all our expenses--that may perhaps mend itself, if I can but begin my writing again.

All this helps me--I am ashamed to say how much--though sometimes the thought of all the necessary arrangements weighs on me like a leaden weight, on days when I fall back into a sad, idle, hopeless repining. Sometimes it seems as if the old happy life was all broken up and gone for ever; and, so strange a thing is memory and imagination, that even the months overshadowed by the loss of my faculty of work seem to me now impossibly fragrant and beautiful, my sufferings unreal and unsubstantial. Real trouble, real grief, have at least the bracing force of actuality, and sweep aside with a strong hand all artificial self-made miseries and glooms.


December 15, 1889.


I have kept no record of these weeks. They have been full of business, sadness, and yet of hope. We went back home for a time; we made our farewells, and it moved me strangely to see that our departure was viewed almost with consternation. It is Maud's loss that will be felt. I have lived very selfishly and dully myself, but even so I was half-glad to find that even I should be missed. At such a time everything is forgotten and forgiven, and such grudging, peaceful neighbourliness as even I have shown seems appreciated and valued. It was a heartrending business reviving our sorrow, and it plunged me for a time into my old dry bitterness of spirit. But I hardened my heart as best I could, and felt more deeply than ever, how far beyond my powers of endurance it would have been to have taken up the old life, and Alec not there. Again and again it was like a knife plunged into my heart with an almost physical pain. Not so with Maud and Maggie--it was to them a treasure of precious memories, and they could dare to indulge their grief. I can't write of it, I can't think of it. Wherever I turned, I saw him in a hundred guises--as a tiny child, as a small, sturdy boy, as the son we lost.

We have let the house to some very kind and reasonable people, who have made things very easy to us; and to me at least it was a sort of heavy joy to take the last meal in the old home, to drive away, to see the landscape fade from sight. I shall never willingly return. It would seem to me like a wilful rolling among the thorns of life, a gathering-in of spears into one's breast. I seemed like a naked creature that had lost its skin, that shrank and bled at every touch.


February 10, 1890.


I have been house-hunting, and I