S. Baring-Gould

“ It is rather hard on us, Julia. There are other worms in the sour paste of life, other monsters in the drop of dirty water we call Society, who are at liberty to turn about, and stretch themselves, bound or coil as they list; only we—we must live and wriggle between two plates of glass, illuminated and made translucent by the most powerful known light, denied that privilege which belongs to the humble—opacity.”
“Is it the injured pines that have put you out of spirits to-night, Lamerton?” asked my lady, stroking the hand she held.
“Did you ever read about Matthew Hopkins, the witch finder?” ”

“ It was so with the captain’s speech. His words were threaded on the tremulous strings of his vocal organ, and not only quivered from a high pitch down, but also went up from a low one with much vibration on high. A voice of this quality is provocative of sympathy; as, when a violoncello string is touched, a piano chord trembles responsive. Such voices make not the voices, but the hearts of other men to tremble. I know a slater who, when I am ordering of him slates, brings tears into my eyes by asking if I will have “Duchess” or “Rag.”
“My words are quickly explained,” said Stephen Saltren. ”

“ Is not—to take a crucial case—marriage itself a grand transformation scene that closes the idyl of youth, and opens the drama of middle age? We live for a while in a fairy world, the flowers blaze with the most brilliant colours, the air is spiced as the breezes of Ceylon, angels converse with men, and sing æthereal music, manna floats down from heaven, containing in itself all sweetness ”

“ Society has attempted to discipline it and turn it to practical ends. But love is a fire which will consume all bonds and snap them, and is only finally extinguished with a handful of clay, when the breast in which it has burnt is reduced, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.
Unexpectedly, unaccountably, the fever laid hold of Stephen Saltren. He lost his heart to Marianne Welsh, who had been servant at the park, a handsome girl, with refinement of manner beyond her class. ”

“ Because they are borné in mental vision, ignorant and prejudiced, they throw the whole force of their wills in one direction, they become battering rams, and the harder their heads the heavier the blows they deal. If we have knowledge, breadth of vision, charity, we cease to be certain, are no longer bigots, and our power of impressing others fails in proportion to our liberality. I feel my own incompetence with Arminell, but not with Arminell alone. I am conscious of it when taking my Sunday class. I dare insist on nothing, because I am convinced of nothing. ”

“ She had fair, very fair hair, hair that would imperceptibly become white, so that on a certain day, those who knew her would exclaim, “Why Joan! who would have thought it? Your hair is white.” But some years must pass before the bleaching of Joan’s head was accomplished. She was only forty, and was hale and strongly built.
She unlinked her arm from that of her companion and came curtseying to Arminell, who saw that she wore a hideous crude green kerchief, and in her bonnet, magenta bows. ”

“ The Angel in the Apocalypse stood with one foot on the land, and the other in the sea; so Court stood half in the rich cultivated garden of the Western Paradise, and half in the utter desolation of treeless moor. To south and west lay woodlands and pasture, parks and villages, tufts of Scotch fir, cedars, oak and elm and beech, with rooks cawing and doves cooing, 133and the woodpecker hooting among them; to the east and north lay the haunt of the blackcock and hawk and wimbrel, and tracts of heather flushed with flower, and gorse ablaze with sun, and aromatic as incense. ”

“ Arminell was in this rebellious mood, when she was brought face to face with a problem beyond her powers to unravel. She might as well, with a rudimentary knowledge of algebraic symbols, have been set to work out Euler’s proof of the Binomial Theorem. She was like Fatima when she opened Blue-Beard’s secret chamber, and saw in it an array of victims. Of these victims disclosed to her, one was Jingles, another Patience Kite; then came Captain Saltren and his wife; and next hung in the dismal cabinet of horrors, Samuel Ceely and Joan Melhuish. The world was indeed a Blue-Beard’s room. ”

“ When one comes to consider it, after all, Stephen isn’t so very much out in his reckoning. When does a nobleman take a delicate lad out of a school and send him to a warm climate because his lungs are affected, and then give him scholarship and college education, without having something that makes him do it? Are there no other delicate lads with weak lungs besides Giles? Why did not his lordship send them to Bordighera? Are there no other clever young fellows in national schools besides my boy, to be taken up and pushed on? ”

“ I am not inclined for the Church, I have a positive distaste for the ministry, and yet Lord Lamerton is bent on my being a parson. If I do not become one, what am I to be? I cannot go back to the life whence I have been taken; I cannot endure to be with those who hold their knives by the middle when eating, and drink their tea out of their saucers, and take their meals in their shirt sleeves. ”

“ The magic begins to work once more, the little fingers weave a spell that lays hold of heart and brain, and conjures up a new world of fantasy. The flowers re-open and flush with colour, the balmy air fans our jaded faces, again the songs of angels reach our ears, the clouds dispel, the manna falls, Eve resumes her beauty, not the old beauty of childlike innocence and freshness, but that of ripened 171womanhood, of sweet maternity, of self-command and self-devotion. ”

“ Miss Inglett looked at him with unfeigned surprise. “As you said to me, so say I to you, and excuse the freedom. Mr. Saltren has everything to make life happy, education, comfortable quarters, kind friends, an assured future, an ideally perfect lot, absolutely deficient in disturbing elements.”
30“Now you judge by the outside. I admit to the full that Lord Lamerton has done everything he could think of to do me good, but can one man calculate what will suit another? Will a bog plant thrive in loam, or a heath in clay?” ”

“ He had, moreover, one of those flexible voices which go far towards making a man an orator. He was unaware of the value of his organ, he was devoid of skill in using it; but it was an impressive voice when used in times of deep emotion, thrilling those who heard it and sweeping them into sympathy with the speaker. His eyes were those of a mystic, looking into a far-off sphere, esteeming the world of sense as a veil, a painted film, disturbing, impeding distinct vision of the sole realities that existed in the world beyond. ”

“ But Saltren was not a man who could restrain himself under an over-mastering conviction, and he burst forth in a torrent of words, and as he spoke his sombre eyes gleamed with excitement, and sparks lit up and flashed in them. Soft they usually were, and dreamy, but now, all at once they kindled into vehement life.
“I tell you, Tubb, the Lord hath spoken. The last days are at hand. I read my Bible and I read my newspaper, and I know that the aristocracy are a scandal and a burden to the country. Now the long-suffering of heaven will not tarry. ”

“ We sit hushed with our head in our hands, and look with intense eye, and listen with sharpened ear, and the tears rise and run down our cheeks. We have forgotten the old Eden with its fantastic imaginations, in the more matured, the richer, the fuller, and above all the more real paradise that is now revealed.
In the case of Arminell Inglett there was no enchantment of colour, no setting of tableau, for the transformation scene ”

“ How the soul is drawn forth step by step over each rolling hill, down each half-disclosed valley. How it wonders at every sparkle where a far-off window reflects the sun, and admires where the mists gather in wooded clefts, and asks, what is that? when the sun discloses white specks far away on slopes of turquoise; as the Israelites asked when they saw the Manna. ”

“ Now what I want to know is, if a starved leech does bite, and suck and swell, and is not wiped off and sent to market, but gets reg’lar blown out with blood, hasn’t that leech a right to say that he has in him the blood of the man to whom he has attached himself? I’d ask any independent jury whether my Giles Inglett has eaten and drunk more at Saltren’s expense, or at that of his lordship, whether he does not owe his very life to his lordship as much as to me, for he’d have died of decline, if he had not been sent to the South? ”

“ But when we have our foot on the heather, and scent the incense of the gorse, and hear the stonechat and the pewit, and see the flicker of the silver cotton grass about us, why then—we feel we are in the best of worlds, and in the best little nook of the whole world, and that all mankind is pushing its way, like us, upward with a scramble over obstacles ”

“ The knights cast off their silver armour, the fairies shed their gauzy wings, kings and queens depose their crowns and sceptres, and there are revealed to us ordinary men and women, with streaks of paint on their faces, and patches of powder in their hair, perpetrating dismal jokes, the point of which we fancy is levelled at ourselves.
To some men and women the transformation scene arrives late in life, but to all inevitably at some time; and then when the scene on the stage before us is changed, a greater transformation ensues within. ”

“ This was the home of Jingles! What a change for him, from these mean surroundings, this tasteless affectation, to the stateliness and smoothness of life at Orleigh Park! How keenly he must feel the contrast when he returned home! Had her father dealt rightly by the young man, in giving him culture beyond his position? It is said that a man has sat in an oven whilst a chop has been done, and has eaten the chop, without being himself roasted, but then the temperature of the oven was gradually raised and gradually lowered. ”

“ We know very well, my dear Marianne, that the bread we buy of the bakers is composed of some flour, and some alum, and some plaster-of-paris, and some china-clay, but we don’t stop to analyse it at our breakfast; we cut ourselves a slice, butter it, and pop it into our mouths, and like it a thousand times better than home-made bread made of pure unadulterated flour. ”

“ On one side were men and women born to wealth and position and happiness; on the other, men and women denied the least of the blessings of life. Why were some of God’s creatures petted and pampered, and others kicked about and maltreated? Was the world of men so made from the beginning, or had things so come about through man’s mismanagement, and if so, where was the over-ruling Providence which governed the world? ”

“ And the British public don’t analyse, they swallow. What they consume they expect to be light and to taste agreeably—they don’t care a farthing what it is made up of.”
Mr. Welsh took out his pocket-book, and jotted down his ideas. “Of course,” said he, talking and laughing to himself, “we must touch this off with a light hand in a semi-jocose, and semi-serious manner. There are some folks who never see a joke, or rather they always see it as something grave. They are like earth-worms—all swallow.” ”

“ It probably comes to the birth at an early age, but there is this deserving of consideration about it that this cow born of calf can be bled to whiteness, and knocked on the head if taken in time.
If, however, it be allowed to attain to heiferhood, it is thenceforth unmanageable; we see everything through its medium, and like and dislike, love and hate all objects and persons as they stand within or without of the compass of the great cow-self, which has become our Varuna, our universe. ”

“ We, Julia, are treated in a way not unlike that pursued by Matthew Hopkins; and there are ten thousand amateur witch-finders searching us, tearing off our clothes, peering after defects, chucking us into the water or the fire. If we are found to have moles, how we are probed with lancets, and plucked with tweezers, and then we are cast to the flames of public indignation and democratic wrath. ”

“ In the window was a raven in a cage.
“This house is dangerous to live in,” said Arminell. “Does Mr. Macduff not see that repairs are done? It is unfit for human habitation.”
“Macduff!” scoffed Mrs. Kite. “Do y’ think that this house belongs to his lordship? It is mine, and because it is mine they cannot force me to leave it, and to go into the workhouse.”
“But you are in peril of your life here, the chimney might fall and bury you any windy night. The roof might crash in.” ”

“ Love, it is, which has softly dropped the veil over their eyes, or withdrawn from them the faculty of perceiving in each other these blemishes which, if perceived, would make common life unendurable. Love is well painted as blind, but the blindest of all loves is the love 269of the married. In the case of the Saltrens the blindness was on one side only, because on his side only was there true love. This had dulled his perception, so that he saw not the shallowness, untruthfulness, vanity, and heartlessness of Marianne, qualities which her brother saw clearly enough. ”

“ Having learned to put down his head and go along as a boy, he does the same all through life, not against weather only, but against everything that opposes, with teeth clenched, and fists rolled up in his breeches pocket. ”

“ There descend on our table at every quarter most bitter bills—those of the butcher and the green-grocer, the milliner’s little account, and the heavy itemless bill from the doctor. What shall we say about our Eve, the beautiful, the all-but divine, the ideal woman? ”

“ This has been hidden from the world, because the world was not ready to receive it. Now the time is come, and I am the humble instrument chosen for announcing these good tidings to men. I care not if, like Samson, I be crushed as I take hold of the pillars, and bow myself, and bring the House of Lords down.”
“Well,” said Welsh, “if you can work that line in the chapel, well and good. I keep to my province, and that is the manganese. Why, Condy’s fluid, I fancy, is permanganate of potash—I can lug that in somehow.” ”

“ Saltren had informed Arminell that she had a brother who was a gentleman. The term “gentleman” is derived from the Latin gens, and signifies a member of a patrician family. But this is not the signification now given it in the vernacular. On the tongue of the people, a gentleman and a lady are those who do no manual labour. A man informs you that he will be a gentleman on a bank-holiday, because he will lounge about with his hands in his pockets, and an old woman who has weeded turnips at ninepence a day becomes a lady when rheumatism invades her limbs, and sends her to the union. ”

“ The astronomer assures us that the fuel of the sun must fail, and then the world will congeal and life disappear out of it, and the critic announces the speedy expiring of Christianity. But, as—indifferent to the fact that the sun like a worn-out and made-up old beau is tottering to extinction—Lady Lamerton ordered summer bonnets, and laid out new azalea beds, just so was it with her religion. ”