George MacDonald

“ The thunder followed, like a pursuing wild beast, close on the traces of the vanishing light; as if the darkness were hunting the light from the earth, and bellowing with rage that it could not overtake and annihilate it. Without the usual prelude of a few great drops, the rain poured at once, in continuous streams, from the dense canopy overhead; and in a few moments there were six inches of water all round the house, which the force of the falling streams made to foam, and fume, and flash like a seething torrent. Harry had crept close to Hugh, who stood looking out of the window ”

“ Although he had often felt that Euphra was not very good, not a suspicion had crossed his mind as to what he would have called the purity of her nature. Like many youths, even of character inferior to his own, he had the loftiest notions of feminine grace, and unspottedness in thought and feeling, not to say action and aim. Now he found that he had loved a woman who would creep from her chamber, at the cost of great suffering, and almost at the risk of her life, to meet, in the night and the woods, a man no better than an assassin—probably a thief. ”

“ But though knowledge is good for man, foreknowledge is not so good.
And, though Love be good, a tempest of it in the brain will not ripen the fruits like a soft steady wind, or waft the ships home to their desired haven.
Perhaps, what enslaved Hugh most, was the feeling that the damsel stooped to him, without knowing that she stooped. She seemed to him in every way above him. She knew so many things of which he was ignorant; could say such lovely things; could, he did not doubt, write lovely verses; could sing like an angel ”

“ That birth of nature in his soul, which enabled him to understand and love Margaret, helped him likewise to contemplate with admiration and awe, the towering peaks of David’s hopes, trusts, and aspirations. He had taught the ploughman mathematics, but that ploughman had possessed in himself all the essential elements of the grandeur of the old prophets, glorified by the faith which the Son of Man did not find in the earth, but left behind him to grow in it, and which had grown to a noble growth of beauty and strength in this peasant, simple and patriarchal in the midst of a self-conceited age. ”

“ The pretty foot lay aching in Hugh’s heart. When Harry went to bed, he used to walk out and loiter about the grounds, full of anxious fears and no less anxious hopes. If the night was at all obscure, he would pass, as often as he dared, under Euphra’s window; for all he could have of her now was a few rays from the same light that lighted her chamber. Then he would steal away down the main avenue, and thence watch the same light, whose beams, in that strange play which the intellect will keep up in spite of—yet in association with—the heart, made a photo-materialist of him. ”

“ Had Hugh seen into the core of that grand heart—what form sat there, and how—he would have been at peace—would almost have fallen down to do the man homage. He was silent.
“My dear fellow!” said Falconer, as if he divined his feeling—for Falconer’s power over men and women came all from sympathy with their spirits, and not their nerves—“if you have any hold of that woman, do not lose it; for as sure as there’s a sun in heaven, she is one of the winged ones. Don’t I know a woman when I see her!” ”

“ It is, however, but a seeming: the emotion is so deep, that consciousness can lay hold of its physical result only.—The cottage looked the same as ever, only the peat-stack outside was smaller. In the shadowiness of the firs, the glimmer of a fire was just discernible on the kitchen window. He trembled so much that he could not enter. He would go into the fir-wood first, and see Margaret’s tree, as he always called it in his thoughts and dreams.
Very poor and stunted and meagre looked the fir-trees of Turriepuffit, after the beeches and elms of Arnstead. ”

“ But he cannot bear wicked people.”
“Who dares to say that?” cried Margaret. “Has he not been making the world go on and on, with all the wickedness that is in it; yes, making new babies to be born of thieves and murderers and sad women and all, for hundreds of years? God help us, Lady Emily! If he cannot bear wicked people, then this world is hell itself, and the Bible is all a lie, and the Saviour did never die for sinners. It is only the holy Pharisees that can’t bear wicked people.” ”

“ Arnold, in Madeira.
“I have never seen her look so happy,” added Margaret. “She hopes to be able to see you in the evening, if you would not mind calling again.”
Hugh did call, and saw her. She received him most kindly. He was distressed to see how altered she was. The fire of one life seemed dying out—flowing away and spending from her eyes, which it illuminated with too much light as it passed out. But the fire of another life, the immortal life, which lies in thought and feeling, in truth and love divine, which death cannot touch, because it is not of his kind, was growing as fast. ”

“ For he remembered that, when consciousness first returned, he felt as if he had seen Euphra’s face bending down close over his.—Could it be possible? Had Euphra herself come to see how he had fared?—The room lay in the grey light of the dawn, but Euphra was nowhere visible. Could she have vanished ashamed through the secret door? Or had she been only a phantasy, a projection outwards of the form that dwelt in his brain; a phenomenon often occurring when the last of sleeping and the first of waking are indistinguishably blended in a vague consciousness? ”

“ Is it not strange?”
“It is very natural, I think,” answered Margaret.
“I seem now to have known him for years.”
But what is most worthy of record is, that ever as the picture of David grew on the vision of Euphra, the idea of God was growing unawares upon her inward sight. She was learning more and more about God all the time. The sight of human excellence awoke a faint Ideal of the divine perfection. Faith came of itself, and abode, and grew; for it needs but a vision of the Divine, and faith in God is straightway born in the soul that beholds it. Thus, faith and sight are one. ”

“ I daresay Miss Cameron would have called a mountain a darling or a beauty. But there are other ways of showing affection than by patting and petting—though Margaret, for her part, would have needed no art-expression, because she had the things themselves. It is not always those who utter best who feel most; and the dumb poets are sometimes dumb because it would need the “large utterance of the early gods” to carry their thoughts through the gates of speech.
But the fancy and skin-sympathy of Miss Cameron began already to tell upon Hugh. ”

“ Hugh went on, in a state of utter bewilderment, to his own apartment; shut the door and locked it—a thing he had never done before; lighted both the candles on his table; and then walked up and down the room, trying, like one aware that he is dreaming, to come to his real self.
“Pshaw!” he said at last. “It was only a little bird, or a large moth. How odd it is that darkness can make a fool of one! I am ashamed of myself. I wish I had gone out at the window, if only to show Euphra I was not afraid, though of course there was nothing to be seen.” ”

“ But there is an aching that is worse to bear than pain.
I trust my reader will not judge very hardly of Hugh, because of the change which had thus suddenly passed upon his feelings. He felt now just as he had felt on waking in the morning and finding that he had been in love with a dream-lady all the night: it had been very delightful, and it was sad that it was all gone, and could come back no more. But the wonder to me is, not that some loves will not stand the test of absence, but that, their nature being what it is, they should outlast one week of familiar intercourse. ”

“ Behind her couch stood Margaret, like a guardian angel. Margaret could bear the day, for she belonged to it; and therefore she looked more beautiful still than by the lamp-light. Euphra held out a pale little hand to Hugh, and before she withdrew it, led Hugh’s towards Margaret. Their hands joined. How different to Hugh was the touch of the two hands! Life, strength, persistency in the one: languor, feebleness, and fading in the other.
“I can never thank you enough,” said Euphra; “therefore I will not try. It is no bondage to remain your debtor.” ”

“ But Margaret was in mourning: was David indeed dead?
He was dead.—Yet his name will stand as the name of my story for pages to come; because, if he had not been in it, the story would never have been worth writing; because the influence of that ploughman is the salt of the whole; because a man’s life in the earth is not to be measured by the time he is visible upon it; and because, when the story is wound up, it will be in the presence of his spirit. ”

“ Thou seest how much I need thee to come close to me, to put thy arm round me, to say to me, my child; for the worse my state, the greater my need of my father who loves me. Come to me, and my day will dawn. My beauty and my love will come back; and oh! how I shall love thee, my God! and know that my love is thy love, my blessedness thy being.’”
As Margaret spoke, she seemed to have forgotten Lady Emily’s presence, and to be actually praying. Those who cannot receive such words from the lips of a lady’s-maid, must be reminded what her father was, and that she had lost him. ”

“ There is but one cure: the fellow-feeling of the human God, which converts the agony itself into the creative fire of a higher life.
As for Von Funkelstein, Hugh comforted himself with the conviction that they were destined to meet again.
The day went on, as days will go, unstayed, unhastened by the human souls, through which they glide silent and awful. After such lessons as he was able to get through with Harry,—who, feeling that his tutor did not want him, left the room as soon as they were over—he threw himself on the couch, and tried to think. ”

“ The fact was, that as soon as he began to be capable of loving Margaret, he had begun to love her. He had never been able to understand her till he was driven into the desert. But now that Nature revealed herself to him full of Life, yea, of the Life of Life, namely, of God himself, it was natural that he should honour and love that ‘lady of her own’; that he should recognize Margaret as greater than himself, as nearer to the heart of Nature—yea, of God the father of all. She had been one with Nature from childhood, and when he began to be one with nature too, he must become one with her. ”

“ I am annoyed only when good-hearted people, with small natures and cultivated intellects, patronise him, and talk forgivingly of his warm heart and unsound judgment. To these, theology must be like a map—with plenty of lines in it. They cannot trust their house on the high table-land of his theology, because they cannot see the outlines bounding the said table-land. It is not small enough for them. They cannot take it in. Such can hardly be satisfied with the creation, one would think, seeing there is no line of division anywhere in it. ”

“ In ordinary, the labourers would have had sufficient respect for Sutherland’s superior position, to prevent them from giving such decided and articulate utterance to their feelings. But they were incited by the presence and example of a man of doubtful character from the neighbouring village, a travelled and clever ne’er-do-weel, whose reputation for wit was equalled by his reputation for courage and skill, as well as profligacy. Roused by the effervescence of his genius, they went on from one thing to another, till Hugh saw it must be put a stop to somehow, else he must abandon the field. ”

“ But the effect on Hugh was different from what the ordinary reader of human nature might anticipate. Instead of being torn in pieces by storms of jealousy, all the summer growths of his love were chilled by an absolute frost of death. A kind of annihilation sank upon the image of Euphra. There had been no such Euphra. She had been but a creation of his own brain. It was not so much that he ceased to love, as that the being beloved—not died, but—ceased to exist. ”

“ But poor Euphra’s own nature and true education had been sadly neglected. A fine knowledge of music and Italian, and the development of a sensuous sympathy with nature, could hardly be called education. It was not certainly such a development of her own nature as would enable her to sympathise with the necessities of a boy’s nature. Perhaps the worst that could justly be said of her behaviour to Harry was, that, with a strong inclination to despotism, and some feeling of loneliness, she had exercised the one upon him in order to alleviate the other in herself. ”

“ Woods of the richest growth were around him; heaps on heaps of leaves floating above him like clouds, a trackless wilderness of airy green, wherein one might wish to dwell for ever, looking down into the vaults and aisles of the long-ranging boles beneath. But no peace could rest on his face; only, at best, a false mask, put on to hide the trouble of the unresting heart. Had he been doing his duty to Harry, his love for Euphra, however unworthy she might be, would not have troubled him thus. ”

“ I was the wicked ghost that night in the Ghost’s Walk, you know—the white one: there is the good ghost, the nun, the black one.”
“Who? Margaret?”
“Yes, indeed. She has just been confessing it to me. I had my two angels, as one whose fate was undetermined; my evil angel in the count—my good angel in Margaret. Little did I think then that the holy powers were watching me in her. I knew the evil one; I knew nothing of the good. I suppose it is so with a great many people.”
Hugh sat silent in astonishment. Margaret, then, had been at Arnstead with Mrs. Elton all the time. ”

“ It seems to me, too, that that can be but an imperfect religion, as it would be a poor salvation, from which one corner of darkness may hide us; from whose blessed health and freedom a disordered brain may snatch us; making us hopeless outcasts, till first the physician, the student of physical laws, shall interfere and restore us to a sound mind, or the great God’s-angel Death crumble the soul-oppressing brain, with its thousand phantoms of pain and fear and horror, into a film of dust in the hollow of the deserted skull. ”

“ What made Hugh go to Turriepuffit? His love to Margaret? No. A better motive even than that:—Repentance. Better I mean for Hugh as to the individual occasion; not in itself; for love is deeper than repentance, seeing that without love there can be no repentance. He had repented before; but now that he haunted in silence the regions of the past, the whole of his history in connection with David returned on him clear and vivid, as if passing once again before his eyes and through his heart ”

“ Away they went, Fatima infusing life and frolic into the equine as Euphra into the human portion of the cavalcade. Having reached the common, out of sight of the house, Miss Cameron, instead of looking after Harry, lest he should have too much exercise, scampered about like a wild girl, jumping everything that came in her way, and so exciting Harry’s pony, that it was almost more than he could do to manage it, till at last Hugh had to beg her to go more quietly, for Harry’s sake. ”

“ Most first loves are childish, quite irrespective of age. I do not blame you in the least.”
This seemed to Hugh rather a strange style to assume, if all was true that his own eyes had reported. She went on:
“Nor must you think it has cost me much to lose it.”
Hugh felt hurt, at which no one who understands will be surprised.
“But I cannot afford to lose you, the only friend I have,” she added.
Hugh turned towards her with a face full of manhood and truth.
“You shall not lose me, Euphra, if you will be honest to yourself and to me.”
“Thank you. I can trust you. I will be honest.” ”