George MacDonald

“ Her voice was like that of a soul trying to speak with unproved lips.
“Miss Lingard,” said Wingfold, slowly and quietly—and if his voice trembled, he only was aware of it, “I cannot see your face, therefore you must pardon me if I ask you—are you quite honest with me?”
Helen’s first feeling was anger. She held her peace for a time. Then she said,
“So, Mr. Wingfold!—that is the way you help the helpless!”
“How can any man help without knowing what has to be helped?” returned the curate. “The very being of his help depends upon his knowing the truth. ”

“ Few women are willing to believe in death. Most of them love life, and are faithful to hope; and I much doubt whether, if Helen had but had a taste of trouble to rouse the woman within her before her cousin conceived the wish of making her a proselyte, she would have turned even a tolerably patient ear to his instructions. Yet it is strange to see how even noble women, with the divine gift of imagination, may be argued into unbelief in their best instincts by some small man, as common-place as clever, who beside them is as limestone to marble. ”

“ The curate rose hastily.
“It is so heartless of me.” said Leopold, “to take pleasure in such a childish innocence as this!”
“It merely shows,” said the curate, laying his hand gently on his shoulder, “that even in these lowly lovelinesses, there is a something that has its root deeper than your pain; that, all about us, in earth and air, wherever eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in a daisy, now in a windwaft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us ”

“ For the righteous do the wicked far more wrong than they think—the righteous being all the time, in reality, the wealthy, and the wicked the poor. But it is a blessed word that there are first that shall be last, and last that shall be first.”
Helen stared. This last sounded to her mere raving madness, and she thought how wrong she had been to allow such fanatics to gain power over her poor Leopold—who sat before them whiter than ever, and with what she took for a wilder gleam in his eye.
“Is there not the might of love, and all eternity for it to work in, to set things right?” ”

“ There a red cow was switching her tail as she gathered her milk from the world, and looking as if all were well. He liked the look of the cow, and the open meadow, and wanted to share it with her, he said. Helen, with the anxiety of a careful nurse, feared it might hurt him.
“What DOES it matter?” he returned. “Is life so sweet that every moment more of it is a precious boon? After I’m gone a few days, you won’t know a week from an hour of me. What a weight it will be off you! I envy you all the relief of it. It will be to you just what it would be to me to get into that meadow.” ”

“ Helen, if you will indeed be my sister, you must NOT prevent me now. I know it is hard upon you, awfully hard. I know I am dragging your life down with mine, but I cannot help it. If I don’t do it, I shall but go out of one madness into another, ever a deeper, until the devils can’t hold me. Mr. Polwarth, is it not my duty to give myself up? Ought not the evil thing to be made manifest and swept out of the earth? Most people grant it a man’s first duty to take care of his life: that is the only thing I can do for mine. ”

“ I do not mean those who are called Christians, but those who call and count themselves Christians. I tell you, and I speak to each one of whom it is true, that you hold and present such a withered, starved, miserable, death’s-head idea of Christianity; that you are yourselves such poverty-stricken believers, if believers you are at all; that the notion you present to the world as your ideal, is so commonplace, so false to the grand, gracious, mighty-hearted Jesus—that YOU are the cause why the truth hangs its head in patience, and rides not forth on the white horse, conquering and to conquer. ”

“ Tenderly he led her into the garden, and down the walks now bare of bordering flowers. To Helen it looked like a graveyard; the dry bushes were the memorials of the buried flowers, and the cypress and box trees rose like the larger monuments of shapely stone. The day was a cold leaden one, that would have rained if it could, to get rid of the deadness at its heart, but no tears came. To the summer-house they went, under the cedar, and sat down. Neither spoke for some time.
“Poor Leopold!” said George at length, and took Helen’s hand. ”

“ A human soul in guilt and agony is an awful presence, but there was more than that in the hush of the curate: he felt as if he had left the physician of souls behind him at the bedside; that a human being lay on the rack of the truth, but at his head stood one who watched his throes with the throbs of such a human heart as never beat in any bosom but his own, and the executioners were angels of light. No wonder if with such a feeling in his breast Wingfold walked softly, and his face glistened! He was not aware that the tears stood in his eyes, but Helen saw them. ”

“ Ever since Leopold said the word JURY, a ghastly fear had haunted Helen. She pressed her hand on her heart and made no answer.
“I speak from experience,” the curate went on—“from what else could I speak? I know that so long as we hang back from doing what conscience urges, there is no peace for us. I will not say our prayers are not heard, for Mr. Polwarth has taught me that the most precious answer prayer can have, lies in the growing strength of the impulse towards the dreaded duty, and in the ever sharper stings of the conscience. ”

“ Think not to make me afraid, for I fear nothing in the universe but that which I love the best.—I spake of the eyes of the Lord Jesus.—Then the shade that seemed no shadow answered me and spake and said: Little knowest thou what I am, seeing the very thing thou sayest I am not, that I am, and nought else, and there is no other but me. I am Shadow, the shadow, the only shadow—none such as those from which the light hideth in terror, yet like them, for life hideth from me and turneth away, yet if life were not, neither were I, for I am nothing ”

“ No more than you could have set that sun flaming overhead, with its million-miled billows and its limitless tempests of fire, can you tell what the love of God is, or what it can do for you, if only by enlarging your love with the inrush of itself. Few have such a cry to raise to the Father as you, such a claim of sin and helplessness to heave up before him, such a joy even to offer to the great Shepherd who cannot rest while one sheep strays from his flock, one prodigal haunts the dens of evil and waste. Cry to him, Leopold, my dear boy. ”

“ Existence, from a demon-haunted vapor, had begun to change to a morning of spring; life, the life of conscious well-being, of law and order and peace, had begun to dawn in obedience and self-renunciation; his resurrection was at hand. But you then, and now you and Mr. Bascombe, would stop this resurrection; you would seat yourselves upon his gravestone to keep him down!—And why?—Lest he, lest you, lest your family should be disgraced by letting him out of his grave to tell the truth.”
“Sir!” cried Helen, indignantly drawing herself to her full height and something more. ”

“ Then Helen turned upon Wingfold with a face white as linen, and eyes flashing with troubled wrath. The tigress-mother swelled in her heart, and she looked like a Maenad indeed.
“Is this then your religion?” she cried with quivering nostril. “Would he you dare to call your master have stolen into the house of a neighbour to play upon the weakness of a poor lad suffering from brain-fever? A fine trophy of your persuasive power and priestly craft you would make of him! What is it to you whether he confesses his sins or not? If he confesses them to him you say is your God, is not that enough? ”

“ Helen did not know to what gulfs of personal shame, nay, to what summits of public execration, a man may be glad to flee for refuge from the fangs of home-born guilt—if so be there is any refuge to be found in either. And some kind of refuge there does seem to be. Strange it is and true that in publicity itself lies some relief from the gnawing of the worm—as if even a cursing humanity were a barrier of protection between the torn soul and its crime. It flees to its kind for shelter from itself. ”

“ If we are but the creatures of a day, yet surely were the shadow-joys of this miserable pair not merely nobler in their essence, but finer to the soul’s palate than the shadow-joys of young Hercules Bascombe—Helen and horses and all! Poor Helen I cannot use for comparison, for she had no joy, save indeed the very divine, though at present unblossoming one of sisterly love. Still, and notwithstanding, if the facts of life are those of George Bascombe’s endorsing—AND HE CAN PROVE IT—let us by all means learn and accept them, be they the worst possible. ”

“ What a change had come upon him—slow, indeed, yet how vast, since the night when he sat in the same churchyard indignant and uneasy with the words of Bascombe like hot coals in his heart! He had been made ashamed of himself who had never thought much of himself, but the more he had lost of worthiness in his own eyes the more he had gained in worth. And the more his poor satisfaction with himself had died out, the more the world had awaked around him. For it must be remembered that a little conceit is no more to be endured than a great one, but must be swept utterly away. ”

“ I have no right to be lying here and Emmeline in her grave. I know I deserve to be miserable for ever and ever, and I don’t want not to be miserable—that is all right—but there is something in this wretchedness that I cannot bear. Tell me something to make me able to endure my misery. That is what you can do for me. I don’t want to go mad. And what is worst of all, I have made my sister miserable, and I can’t bear to see it. She is wasting away with it. And besides I fancy she loves George Bascombe—and who would marry the sister of a murderer? ”

“ In our poor weakness and narrowness and self-love, even of Jesus the bodily may block out the spiritual nearness, which, however in most moods we may be unable to realise the fact, is and remains a thing unutterably lovelier and better and dearer—enhancing tenfold what vision of a bodily presence may at some time be granted us. But how any woman can help casting herself heart and soul at the feet of such a lowly grandeur, such a tender majesty, such a self-dissolving perfection—I cannot imagine. The truth must be that those who kneel not have not seen. ”

“ But George was too honest in himself, and too true to his principles, to pretend anything to Helen. Hers was an altogether different case from Leopold’s. Here was a young woman full of health and life and hope, with all her joys before her! Many suns must set before her sun would go down, many pale moons look lovely in her eyes, ere came those that would mock her with withered memories—a whole hortus siccus of passion-flowers. Why should he lie to HER of a hope beyond the grave? Let the pleasures of the world be the dearer to her for the knowledge that they must so soon depart ”

“ Bascombe walked to the bottom of the garden and lighted his cigar, confessing to himself that for once he could not understand Helen.—Was it then only that he was ignorant of the awful fact that lay burrowing in her heart, or was he not ignorant also of the nature of that heart in which such a fact must so burrow? Was there anything in his system to wipe off that burning, torturing red? “Such things must be: men who wrong society must suffer for the sake of that society.” But the red lay burning on the conscience of Helen too, and she had not murdered! ”

“ Lingard.”
“I feel that I could kill myself to bring her back to life.”
“That is, you would gladly make amends for the wrong you have done her.”
“I would give my life, my soul, to do it.”
“And there is nothing you can do for it?”
Helen began to tremble.
“What is there that can be done?” answered Leopold. “It does seem hard that a man should be made capable of doing things that he is not made capable of undoing again.”
“It is indeed a terrible thought! And even the smallest wrong is, perhaps, too awful a thing for created being ever to set right again.” ”

“ Helen had hoped that the man who had spoken in public so tenderly, and at the same time so powerfully, of the saving heart of the universe, that would have no divisions of pride, no scatterings of hate, but of many would make one, would in private have spoken yet sweeter words of hope and consolation, which she might have carried home in gladness to her sick-souled brother, to comfort and strengthen him—words of might to allay the burning of the poison within him, and make him feel that after all there was yet a place for him in the universe, and that he was no outcast of Gehenna. ”

“ No more could they deprive the poor lad of the bliss of returning into the absolute nothingness whence he had crept—to commit a horrible crime against immortal society, and creep back again, with a heart full of love and remorse and self-abhorrence, into the black abyss. Therefore, why should he not let them tell their lies and utter their silly incantations? Aloof and unharmed he stood, safe on the shore, all ready to reach the rescuing hand to Helen, the moment she should turn her eyes to him, for the help she knew he had to give her. ”

“ All I should be sorry for then would be, that there was not enough of me left for a dim flitting Will-o’-the-wisp of praise, ever singing my thankfulness to him that I was no more.—Yet even then my deed would remain, for I dare not ask that she should die outright also—that would be to heap wrong upon wrong. What an awful thing being is! Not even my annihilation could make up for my crime, or rid it out of the universe.”
“True, Leopold!” said the curate. “Nothing but the burning love of God can rid sin out of anywhere. ”

“ Shall I, to take a step farther, degrade the sanctity of the closet, hallowed in the words of Jesus, by shutting its door in the vain fancy of there doing something that God requires of me as a sacred OBSERVANCE? Shall I foolishly imagine that to put in exercise the highest and loveliest, the most entrancing privilege of existence, that of pouring forth my whole heart into the heart of him who is ACCOUNTABLE FOR me, who hath glorified me with his own image—in my soul, gentlemen, sadly disfigured as it is in my body!—shall I say that THAT is to do anything for God? ”

“ Gently and modestly, almost shyly, she came up to Helen, made her a courtesy like a village school-girl, and said, while she glanced at Leopold now and then with an ocean of tenderness in her large, clear woman-eyes:
“My uncle is sorry, Miss Lingard, that he cannot come to see your brother to-day, but he is laid up with an attack of asthma. He wished Mr. Lingard to know that he was thinking of him:—shall I tell you just what he said?”
Helen bent her neck: she did not feel much interest in the matter. But Leopold said,
“Every word of such a good man is precious: tell me, please.” ”

“ Helen had taken Leopold by the hand, and she now led him straight to the closet whence the hidden room opened. He made no resistance, for the covering wings of the darkness had protection in them. How desolate must the soul be that welcomes such protection! But when, knowing that thence no ray could reach the outside, she struck a light, and the spot where he had so often shuddered was laid bare to his soul, he gave a cry and turned and would have rushed away. Helen caught him, he yielded, and allowed her to lead him into the room. ”

“ I thought it very sensible,” replied the curate.
“It all depends on the sort, don’t it?” said Rachel. “Some of mine I would not give for a library. They make me grow, telling me things I should never learn otherwise. I don’t mean any rubbish about future events, and such like. Of all useless things a knowledge of the future seems to me the most useless, for what are you to do with a thing before it exists? Such a knowledge could only bewilder you as to the right way to take—would make you see double instead of single. That’s not the sort I mean at all.—You won’t laugh at me, Mr. Wingfold?” ”

“ Nor must I fail to remind the man who has committed no grievous crime, that except he has repented of his evil self, and abjured all wrong, he is not safe from any, even the worst offence. There was a time when I could not understand that he who loved not his brother was a murderer: now I see it to be no figure of speech, but, in the realities of man’s moral and spiritual nature, an absolute simple fact. The murderer and the unloving sit on the same bench before the judge of eternal truth. ”