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

a time. I would earn the means if I could, but, if not, we will sacrifice a little of our capital, and I will replace it, if I can, by some hack-work; though I have a dislike of being paid for my name and reputation, and not for my best work.

I am not exactly anxious; it is all so slight, what they call a want of tone, and she has been through so much; even so, my anxiety is conquered by the joy of being able to serve her a little; and that joy brings us together, hour by hour.


September 6, 1890.


Again the shadow comes down over my life. The doctor says plainly that Maud's heart is weak; but he adds that there is nothing organically wrong, though she must be content to live the life of an invalid for a time; he was reassuring and quiet; but I cannot keep a dread out of my mind, though Maud herself is more serene than she has been for a long time; she says that she was aware that she was somehow overtaxing herself, and it is a comfort to be bidden, in so many words, to abstain a little. We are to live quietly at home for a while, until she is stronger, and then we shall go abroad.

Maud does not come down in the mornings now, and she is forbidden to do more than take the shortest stroll. I read to her a good deal in the mornings; Maggie has proudly assumed the functions of housekeeper; the womanly instinct for these things is astonishing. A man would far sooner not have things comfortable, than have the trouble of providing them and seeing about them. Women do not care about comforts for themselves; they prefer haphazard meals, trays brought into rooms, vague arrangements; and yet they seem to know by instinct what a man likes, even though he does not express it, and though he would not take any trouble to secure it. What centuries of trained instincts must have gone to produce this. The new order has given me a great deal more of Maggie's society. We are sent out in the afternoon, because Maud likes to be quite alone to receive the neighbours, small and great, that come to see her, now that she cannot go to see them. She tells me frankly that my presence only embarrasses them. And thus another joy has come to me, one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me in my life, and which I can hardly find words to express--the contact with, the free sight of the mind and soul of an absolutely pure, simple and ingenuous girl. Maggie's mind has opened like a flower. She talks to me with perfect openness of all she feels and thinks; to walk thus, hour by hour, with my child's arm through my own, her wide-opened, beautiful eyes looking in mine, her light step beside me, with all her pretty caressing ways--it seems to me a taste of the purest and sweetest love I have ever felt. It is like the rapture of a lover, but without any shadow of the desirous element that mingles so fiercely and thirstily with our mortal loves, to find myself dear to her. I have a poignant hunger of the heart to save her from any touch of pain, to smooth her path for her, to surround her with beauty and sweetness. I did not guess that the world held any love quite like this; there seems no touch of selfishness about it; my love lavishes itself, asking for nothing in return, except that I may be dear to her as she to me.

Her fancies, her hopes, her dreams--how inexplicable, how adorable! She said to me to-day that she could never marry, and that it was a real pity that she could not have children of her own without. "We don't want any one else, do we, except just some little children to amuse us." She is a highly imaginative child, and one of our amusements is to tell each other long, interminable tales of the adventures of a family we call the Pickfords. I have lost all count of their names and ages, their comings and goings; but Maggie never makes a mistake about them, and they seem to her like real people; and when I sometimes plunge them into disaster, she is so deeply affected that the disasters have all to be softly repaired. The Pickfords must have had a very happy life; the kind of life that people created and watched over by a tender, patient and detailed Providence might live. How different from the real world!

But I don't want Maggie to live in the real world yet awhile. It will all come pouring in upon her, sorrow, anxiety, weariness, no doubt--alas that it should be so! Perhaps some people would blame me, would say that more discipline would be bracing, wholesome, preparatory. But I don't believe that. I had far rather that she learnt that life was tender, gentle and sweet--and then if she has to face trouble, she will have the strength of feeling that the tenderness, gentleness and sweetness are the real stuff of life, waiting for her behind the cloud. I don't want to disillusion her; I want to establish her faith in happiness and love, so that it cannot be shaken. That is a better philosophy, when all is said and done, than the stoical fortitude that anticipates dreariness, that draws the shadow over the sun, that overvalues endurance. One endures by instinct; but one must be trained to love.


February 6, 1891.


It is months since I have opened this book; it has lain on my table all through the dreadful hours--I write the word down conventionally, and yet it is not the right word at all, because I have merely been stunned and numbed. I simply could not suffer any more. I smiled to myself, as the man in the story, who was broken on the wheel, smiled when they struck the second and the third blow. I knew why he smiled; it was because he had dreaded it so much, and when it came there was nothing to dread, because he simply did not feel it.

To-night I just pick up idly the dropped thread. Perhaps it is a sign, this faint desire to make a little record, of the first tingling of returning life. Something stirs in me, and I will not resist it; it may be read by some one that comes after me, by some one perhaps who feels that his own grief is supreme and unique, and that no one has ever suffered so before. He may learn that there have been others in the dark valley before him, that the mist is full of pilgrims stumbling on, falling, rising again, falling again, lying stupefied in a silence which is neither endurance nor patience.

Maud was taken from me first; she went without a word or a sign. She was better that day, she declared, than she had felt for some time; she was on the upward grade. She walked a few hundred yards with Maggie and myself, and then she went back; the last sight I had of her alive was when she stood at the corner and waved her hand to us as we went out of sight. I am glad I looked round and saw her smile. I had not the smallest or faintest premonition of what was coming; indeed, I was lighter of mood than I had been for some time. We came in; we were told that she was tired and had gone up to lie down. As she did not come down to tea, I went up and found her lying on her bed, her head upon her hand--dead. The absolute peace and stillness of her attitude showed us that she had herself felt no access of pain. She had lain down to rest, and she had rested indeed. Even at my worst and loneliest, I have been able to be glad that it was even so. If I could know that I should die thus in joy and tranquillity, it would be a great load off my mind.

But the grief, the shock to Maggie was too much for my dear, love-nurtured child. A sort of awful and desperate strength came on me after that; I felt somehow, day by day, that I must just put away my own grief till a quiet hour, in order that I might sustain and guard the child; but her heart was broken, I think, though they say that no one dies of sorrow. She lay long ill--so utterly frail, so appealing in her grief, that I could think of nothing but saving her. Was it a kind of selfishness that needed to be broken down in me? Perhaps it was! Every single tendril of my heart seemed to grow round the child and clasp her close; she was all that I had left, and in some strange way she seemed to be all that I had lost too. And then she faded out of life, not knowing that she was fading, but simply too tired to live; and my desire alone seemed to keep her with me. Till at last, seeing her weariness and weakness, I let my desire go; I yielded, I gave her to God, and He took her, as though He had waited for my consent.

And now that I am alone, I will say, with such honesty as I can muster, that I have no touch of self-pity, no rebellion. It is all too deep and dark for that. I am not strong enough even to wish to die; I have no wishes, no desires at all. The three seem for ever about me, in my thoughts and in my dreams. When Alec died, I used to wake up to the fact, day after day, with a trembling dismay. Now it is not like that. I can give no account of what I do. The smallest things about me seem to take up my mind. I can sit for an hour by the hearth, neither reading nor thinking, just watching the flame flicker over the coals, or the red heart of the fire eating its way upwards and outwards. I can sit on a sunshiny morning in the garden, merely watching with a strange intentness what goes on about me, the uncrumpling leaf, the snowdrop pushing from the mould, the thrush searching the lawn, the robin slipping from bough to bough, the shapes of the clouds, the dying ray. I seem to have no motive either to live or to die. I retrace in memory my walks with Maggie, I can see her floating hair, and how she leaned to me; I can sit, as I used to sit reading by Maud's side, and see her face changing as the book's mood changed, her clear eye, her strong delicate hands. I seem as if I had awaked from a long and beautiful dream. People sometimes come and see me, and I can see the pity in their faces and voices; I can see it in the anxious care with which my good servants surround me; but I feel that it is half disingenuous in me to accept it, because I need no pity. Perhaps there is something left for me to do in the world: there seems no reason otherwise why I should linger here.

Mr. ---- has been very good to me; I have seen him almost daily. He seems the only person who perfectly understands. He has hardly said a word to me about my sorrow. He said once that he should not speak of it;