Miriam thanked him, and they parted.
A few days afterwards Mrs. and Mr. Farrow presented themselves at the vicarage. It was a lovely evening, and so clear that the outline of the constellations was obscured by the multitude of small stars, which usually are not seen, or seen but imperfectly. In the south was Jupiter, mild, magnificent, like a god amongst the crowd of lesser divinities.
Mr. Armstrong, with all the ardour of an enthusiast for his science, began a little preliminary lecture.
"I am not going to let you peep simply in order to astonish you. I abominate what are called popular lectures for that very reason. If you can be made to understand the apparent revolution of the heavens, that is better than all speculation. To understand is the great thing, not to gape. Now I assume you know that the earth goes round on its axis, and that consequently the stars seem to revolve round the earth. But the great difficulty is to realise how they go round, because the axis is not upright, nor yet horizontal, but inclined, and points to that star up there, the pole-star. Consequently the stars describe circles which are not at right angles with the horizon, nor yet parallel to it. That is my first lesson."
Mr. Farrow comprehended without the slightest difficulty, but Miriam could not. She had noticed that some of the stars appear in the east and disappear in the west, but beyond that she had not gone. Mr. Armstrong continued—
"The next thing you have to bear in mind is that the planets move about amongst the stars. Just think! They go round the sun, and so do we. The times of their revolution are not coincident with ours, and their path is sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards. Suppose we were in the centre of the planetary system, all these irregularities would disappear; but we are outside, and therefore it looks so complicated."
Again Mr. Farrow comprehended, but to Miriam it was all dark.
"Now," continued Mr. Armstrong, "these are the two great truths which I wish you not simply to acknowledge, but to feel. If you can once from your own observation realise the way the stars revolve—why some near the pole never set—why some never rise, and why Venus is seen both before the sun and after it—you will have done yourselves more real good than if you were to dream for years of immeasurable distances, and what is beyond and beyond and beyond, and all that nonsense. The great beauty of astronomy is not what is incomprehensible in it, but its comprehensibility—its geometrical exactitude. Now you may look."
Miriam looked first. Jupiter was in the field. She could not suppress a momentary exclamation of astonished ecstasy at the spectacle. While she watched, Mr. Armstrong told her something about the mighty orb. He pointed out the satellites, contrasted the size of Jupiter with that of the earth, and explained to her the distances at which parts of the planet are from each other as compared with those of New Zealand and America from London. But what affected her most was to see Jupiter's solemn, still movement, and she gazed and gazed, utterly absorbed, until at last he had disappeared. The stars had passed thus before her eyes ever since she had been born, but what was so familiar had never before been emphasised or put in a frame, and consequently had never produced its due effect.
Afterwards Mr. Farrow had his turn, and Mr. Armstrong then observed that they had had enough; that it was getting late, but that he hoped they would come again. They started homewards, but their teacher remained solitary till far beyond midnight at his lonely post. The hamlet lay asleep beneath him in profoundest peace. His study had a strange fascination for him. He never wrote anything about it; he never set himself up as a professional expert; he could not preach much about it; most of what he acquired was incommunicable at Marston-Cocking, or nearly so, and yet he was never weary. It was for some inexplicable reason the food and the medicine which his mind needed. It kept him in health, it pacified him, and contented him with his lot.
On the following evening Miriam and her husband sat at tea.
"You didn't quite understand Mr. Armstrong, Miriam?"
"No, not quite."
"Ah! it is not easy; it all lies in the axis not being perpendicular, and in our not being in the middle. Now look here!"
He took a long string; tied one end to the curtain-rod over the window, and brought the other down to the floor. He then took Miriam, placed her underneath it in the middle with her face to the window.
"Now, that is the north, and the top of the string is the pole star. Just imagine the string the axis of a great globe in which the stars are fixed, and that it goes round from your right hand to your left." But to Miriam, although she had so strong an imagination, it was unimaginable. It was odd that she could create Verona and Romeo with such intense reality, and yet that she could not perform such a simple feat as that of portraying to herself the revolution of an inclined sphere.
Mr. Farrow was not disappointed.
"It will be all right," he said, and the next morning he was busy in the shed in the bottom of the garden. He came to his afternoon meal with glee, and directly it was over, took his wife away to see what he had been doing. The shed had two floors, with a trap-door in the middle. To the topmost corner of the upper story he had fixed a pole which descended obliquely through a hole in the floor. This was the axis, and the floor was the horizon. He had also, by the help of some stoutish wire and some of his withies, fairly improvised a few meridians, so that when Miriam put her head through the trap-door, she seemed to be in the centre of a half globe.
"Now, my dear, it will all be plain. I cannot make the thing turn, but you can fancy a star fixed down there in the east at the end of that withy, and if the withy were to go round, or if the star were to climb up it, it would just go so," tracing its course with his finger, "and set there. Now, those stars near the pole, you see, would never set, and that is why we see them all night long."
It all came to her in an instant.
"Really, how clever you are!" she said.
"Do you think so?" and there was a trace of something serious, something of a surprise on his countenance.
"I have heard Mr. Armstrong talk about the stars before, although never so much as he did that night, and then I've watched them a good bit, and noticed the way they go. As for the planets, they are not so easy, but I think I have got hold of it all."
Miriam looked out of window when she went to bed, and felt a new pleasure. The firmament, instead of being a mere muddle—beautiful, indeed, she had always thought it—had a plan in it. She marked where one particularly bright star was showing itself in the south-east—it was Sirius; and in the night she rose softly, drew aside the blind, saw him again due south, and recognised the similarity of the arc with that which her husband had constructed with his withies and wire. She lay down again, thinking, as she went off to sleep, that still that silent, eternal march went on. At four she again awoke from light slumber, and crept to the blind again. Another portion of the same arc had been traversed, and Sirius with his jewelled flashes was beginning to descend. She thought she should like to see him actually sink, and she waited and waited till he had disappeared, till the first tint of dawn was discernible in the east, and that almost indistinguishable murmur was heard which precedes the day. She then once more lay down, and when she rose, she was richer by a very simple conception, but still richer. She felt as a novice might feel who had been initiated, and had been intrusted at least with the preliminary secrets of her community. She owed her initiation to Mr. Armstrong, but also to her husband. Experts no doubt may smile, and so may the young people who, in these days of universal knowledge, have got up astronomy for examinations, but nevertheless, in the profounder study of the science there is perhaps no pleasure so sweet and so awful as that which arises, not when books are read about it, but when the heavens are first actually watched, when the movement of the Bear is first actually seen for ourselves, and with the morning Arcturus is discerned punctually over the eastern horizon; when the advance of the stars westwards through the year, marking the path of the earth in its orbit, is noted, and the moon's path also becomes intelligible.
Mr. Armstrong had long desired to make an orrery for the purpose of instructing a few children and friends, but had never done anything towards it, partly for lack of time, and partly for lack of skill with joinery tools. He now, however, had in Farrow at once a willing pupil and an artist, and the work went forward in Farrow's house, Miriam watching its progress with great interest. She could even contribute her share, and the graduation of the rim was left to her, a task she performed with accuracy after a few failures in pencil. It was a handsome instrument when it was completed. The relative distances of the planets from the sun could not be preserved, nor their relative magnitudes; but what was of more importance, their relative velocities in their orbits were maintained. The day came when the machine was to be first used. Miriam insisted that there should be no experiments with it beforehand. She desired, even at the risk of disappointment, to see a dramatic start into existence. She did not wish her pleasure to be spoiled and her excitement to be diminished by trials. Her husband humoured her, but secretly he took care that every preventible chance of a breakdown should be removed. When she was absent, he tested every pinion and every cog, eased a wheel here and an axle there, and in truth what he had to do in this way with file and sandpaper was almost equal to the labour spent upon saw and chisel. Infinite adjustment was necessary to make the idea a noiseless, smooth practical success, and infinite precautions had to be taken and devices invented which were not foreseen when the drawing first appeared on paper. With some of these difficulties Miriam, of course, was acquainted. They would not probably have been so great to a professional instrument-maker, but they were very considerable to an amateur. Farrow selected the best-seasoned wood he could find, but it frequently happened that after it was cut it warped a little, and the slightest want of truth threw all the connected part out of gear. Miriam learned something when she saw that a wheel whose revolution was not in a perfect plane could give rise to so much annoyance, and she learned something also when she saw how her husband, in the true spirit of a genuine craftsman, remained discontented if there was the slightest looseness in a bearing.
"Do you think it matters?" said she.
"Matters! Don't you see that if it goes on it gets worse? Every wobble increases the next, and not only so, it sets the whole thing wobbling."
"Couldn't you manage to put a piece on? Suppose you lined that hole with something."
"Oh, no! Not the slightest use; out it must come, and a new one must be put in."
At length the day came for the start. Farrow had made a trial by himself the night before, and nothing could be better. Mr. Armstrong came over, and after tea they all three went upstairs into the large garret which had been used as a workshop. The great handle was taken down and fitted into its place, Mr. Armstrong standing at one end and Miriam and her husband at the other. Obedient to the impulse, every planet at once answered; Mercury with haste, and Saturn with such deliberation that scarcely any motion was perceptible. The Earth spun its diurnal round, the Moon went forward in her monthly orbit. The lighted ground-glass globe which did duty for the sun showed night and day and the seasons. Miriam was transported, when suddenly there was a jerk and a stop. Something was wrong, and Farrow, who was fortunately turning with great caution, gave a cry such as a man might utter who was suddenly struck a heavy blow. He recovered himself instantly, and luckily at the very first glance saw what was the matter. The nicety of his own handicraft was the cause of the disaster. A shaving not much thicker than a piece of writing-paper had dropped between two cogs. A gentle touch of a quarter of an inch backwards released it.
"Hooray!" he cried in his mad delight, and the mimic planets recommenced their journeys as silently almost as their great archetypes outside.
"Strange," he said with a smile, "that such a chip as that should upset the whole solar system."
Miriam looked at him for a moment inquiringly, and then fell to watching the orrery again. Slowly the moon waxed and waned. Slowly the winter departed from our latitude on the little ball representing our dwelling-place, and the summer came; and as she still watched, slowly and almost unconsciously her arms crept round her husband's waist.
"That is a fair representation," said Mr. Armstrong, "of all that is directly connected with us, excepting, of course, as I have told you, that we could not keep the distances." A little later on, although he disapproved of "gaping," as he called it, he taught Miriam so much of geometry as was sufficient to make her understand what he meant when he told her that a fixed star yielded no parallax, and that the earth was consequently the merest speck of dust in the universe. She found his simple trigonometry very, very hard, but to her husband it was easy, and with his help she succeeded.
One afternoon, wet and dreary, Miriam had taken up her book. There was nothing to do in the shop, and Mr. Farrow entered the parlour in one of his idle moods, repeating the same behaviour which had so often distressed Miriam when she was reading anything for which he did not care. She had recovered from the dust upstairs a ragged volume in paper boards, and she was musing over the lines—
"But bound and fixed in fettered solitude
To pine, the prey of every changing mood."
The poem was about as remote in its whole conception and treatment from Mr. Farrow as it could well be, and his monkey-tricks exasperated her. She shut her book in wrath and misery, left the room, dressed, and went out. The sky had cleared, and just after the sunset there lay a long lake of tenderest bluish-green above the horizon in the west, bounded on its upper coast by the dark grey cloud which the wind was slowly bearing eastward. In the midst of that lake of bluish-green lay Venus, glittering like molten silver. Miriam's first thought was her husband. She always thought of him when she looked at planets or stars, because he was so intimately connected with them in her mind. She waited till it was late and she then turned homewards. A man overtook her whom she recognised at once as Fitchew the jobbing gardener, porter, rough carpenter, creature of all work in Cowfold, one of the honestest souls in the place. He had his never-failing black pipe in his mouth, which he removed for a moment in order to bid her good-night. She kept up with him, for it was dusk, and she was glad to walk by his side. Fitchews had lived in Cowfold for centuries. An old parson always maintained that the name was originally Fitz-Hugh, but this particular representative of the family was certainly not a Fitz-Hugh but a Fitchew, save that he was as independent as a baron, and, notwithstanding his poverty, cared little or nothing what people thought about him. He could neither read nor write, and was full of the most obstinate and absurd prejudices. He was incredulous of everything which was said to him by people with any education, but what he had heard from those who were as uneducated as himself, or the beliefs, if such they can be called, which grew in his skull mysteriously, by spontaneous generation, he held most tenaciously. His literature was Cowfold, the people, the animals, the inanimate objects of which it was made up, and his criticism on these was often just. He never could be persuaded to enter either church or chapel. Of the arguments for Christianity, of the undesigned coincidences in the Bible, of the evidence from prophecy, of the metaphysical necessity for an incarnation and atonement, he knew nothing, and it was a marvel to all respectable young persons how Fitchew, whose ignorance would disgrace a charity child, and who did not know that the world was round, or the date of the battle of Hastings, should set himself up against those who were so superior to him.
"What should we say," observed the superintendent of the Dissenting Sunday-school one day to one of his classes, having Fitchew in his mind, "of a man who, if he was on a voyage in a ship commanded by a captain with a knowledge of navigation, should refuse in a storm to obey orders, affirming that they were all of no use, and should betake himself to his own little raft?"
Curiously enough, the Sunday before, the vicar, having the Dissenter in his mind, had said just the same of "unlettered schismatics," as he called them.
Fitchew always had one argument for those friends who strove to convert him. "I don't see as them that goes to church are any better than them as don't. What's he know about it?" meaning the parson or the minister, as the case might be.
Fitchew was very rough and coarse, and rather grasping in his dealings with those who employed him, not so much because he was naturally mean, but because he was always determined that well-dressed folk should not "put on him." Nevertheless, he was in his way sympathetic and even tender, particularly to those persons who suffered as he did, for he was afflicted with a kind of nervous dyspepsia, not infrequent even amongst the poor, and it kept him awake at night and gave him the "horrors."
"Well, Fitchew, are you any better?" said Miriam.
"Bad just now. Ain't had no regular sleep for a fortnight. Last night it was awful. I kicked about and sat up; the noise in my ears was something, I can tell you; and then the wind in me! It's my belief that that there noise in my ears is the wind a coming out through them. I couldn't stand it any longer, and I got up and walked up and down the road. Would you believe it, the missus never stirred; there she lay like a stone, and when I came in she says to me, 'Wot's the matter with you?' That's just like her. She goes to bed, turns round, and never knows nothing of anything till the morning. I could, have druv my head agin the door-post."
"Well, she cannot help sleeping."
"No," after a long pause, "that's true enough. I tell you what it is—I don't want to live for ever."
"Cannot you do anything to help yourself? Have you seen the doctor?"
"Doctor!" in great scorn. "He's no more use than that there dog behind me, nor yet half so much. I am better when I am at work, that's all as I can tell."
"Have you had plenty to do lately?"
"No, not much. Folk are allers after me in the summer-time, but in the winter, when their gardens don't want doing, they never have nothing to say to me. There's one thing about my missus, though. She's precious careful. I never touches the money part of the business. So we get's along."
Miriam knew the "missus" well. She was a little thin-lipped woman, who, notwithstanding her poverty, was most particularly clean. No speck of dirt was to be seen on her person or in her cottage, but she was as hard as flint. She never showed the least affection for her husband. They had married late in life—why, nobody could tell—and had one child, a girl, whom the mother seemed to disregard just as she did her husband, saving that she dressed her and washed her with the same care which she bestowed on her kettle and candlesticks.
"It's a good thing for you, Fitchew, that she is what she is."
Fitchew hesitated for some time.
"Yes, well, I said to myself, after I'd had a cup of tea and something to eat this morning—I didn't say it afore then, though—that it might be wuss. If she was allus a slaverin' on me and a pityin' me, it wouldn't do me no good; and then we are as we are, and we must make the best of it."
When Miriam parted from Fitchew she had still ten minutes' walk. Before the ten minutes had expired the black veil of rain-cloud was rolled still farther to the east, and the crescent of the young moon gleamed in the dying twilight.
It poured with rain nevertheless during the night Miriam lay and listened, thinking it would be wet and miserable on the following day. She dropped off to sleep, and at four she rose and went to the window and opened it wide. In streamed the fresh south-west morning air, pure, delicious, scented with all that was sweet from fields and woods, and the bearer inland even as far as Cowfold of Atlantic vitality, dissipating fogs, disinfecting poisons—the Life-Giver.
She put on her clothes silently, went downstairs and opened the back-door. The ever-watchful dog, hearing in his deepest slumbers the slightest noise, moved in his kennel, but recognised her at once and was still. She called to him to follow her, and he joyfully obeyed. He would have broken out into tumultuous barking if she had not silenced him instantly, and he was forced to content himself with leaping up at her and leaving marks of his paws all over her cloak. Not a soul was to be seen, and she went on undisturbed till she came to her favourite spot where she had first met Mr. Armstrong. She paced about for a little while, and then sat down and once more watched the dawn. It was not a clear sky, but barred towards the east with cloud, the rain-cloud of the night. She watched and watched, and thought after her fashion, mostly with incoherence, but with rapidity and intensity. At last came the first flash of scarlet upon the bars, and the dead storm contributed its own share to the growing beauty. The rooks were now astir, and flew, one after the other, in an irregular line eastwards black against the sky. Still the colour spread, until at last it began to rise into pure light, and in a moment more the first glowing point of the disc was above the horizon. Miriam fell on her knees against the little seat and sobbed, and the dog, wondering, came and sat by her and licked her face with tender pity. Presently she recovered, rose, went home, let herself in softly before her husband was downstairs, and prepared the breakfast. He soon appeared, was in the best of spirits, and laughed at her being able to leave the room without waking him. She looked happy, but was rather quiet at their meal; and after he had caressed the cat for a little while, he pitched her, as he had done before, on Miriam's lap. She was about to get up to cut some bread and butter, and she went behind him and kissed the top of his head. He turned round, his eyes sparkling, and tried to lay hold of her, but she stepped backward and eluded him. He mused a little, and when she sat down he said in a tone which for him was strangely serious—
"Thank you, my dear; that was very, very sweet."
MICHAEL TREVANION.
Michael Trevanion was a well-to-do stonemason in the town of Perran in Cornwall. He was both working-man and master, and he sat at one end of the heavy stone-saw, with David Trevenna, his servant, at the other, each under his little canopy to protect them a trifle from the sun and rain, slowly and in full view of the purple Cornish sea, sawing the stone for hours together: the water dripped slowly on the saw from a little can above to keep the steel cool, and occasionally they interchanged a word or two—always on terms of perfect equality, although David took wages weekly and Michael paid them. Michael was now a man of about five and forty. He had married young and had two children, of whom the eldest was a youth just one and twenty. Michael was called by his enemies Antinomian. He was fervently religious, upright, temperate, but given somewhat to moodiness and passion. He was singularly shy of talking about his own troubles, of which he had more than his share at home, but often strange clouds cast shadows upon him, and the reasons he gave for the change observable in him were curiously incompetent to explain such results. David, who had watched him from the other end of the saw for twenty years, knew perfectly what these attacks of melancholy or wrath meant, and that, though their assigned cause lay in the block before them or the weather, the real cause was indoors. His trouble was made worse, because he could not understand why he received no relief, although he had so often laid himself open before the Lord, and wrestled for help in prayer. In his younger days he had been subject to great temptation. One night he had nearly fallen, but an Invisible Power seized him. "It was no more I," he said, "than if somebody had come and laid hold of me by the scruff of my neck," and he was forced away in terror upstairs to his bedroom, where he went on his knees in agony, and the Devil left him, and he became calm and pure. But no such efficient help was given him in the trial of his life. He knew in his better moments, that the refusal of grace was the Lord's own doing, and he supposed that it was due to His love and desire to try him; but upon this assurance he could not continually rest. It slipped away from under him, and at times he felt himself to be no stronger than the merest man of the world.
His case was very simple and very common—the simplest, commonest case in life. He married, as we have said, when he was young, before he knew what he was doing, and after he had been married twelvemonths, he found he did not care for his wife. When they became engaged, he was in the pride of youth, but curbed by his religion. He mistook passion for love; reason was dumb, and had nothing to do with his choice; he made the one, irretrievable false step and was ruined. No strong antipathy developed itself; there were no quarrels, but there was a complete absence of anything like confidence. Michael had never for years really consulted his wife in any difficulty, because he knew he could not get any advice worth a moment's consideration; and he often contrasted his lot with that of David, who had a helpmate like that of the left arm to the right, who knew everything about his affairs, advised him in every perplexity, and cheered him when cast down—a woman on whom he really depended. As David knew well enough, although he never put it in the form of a proposition, there is no joy sweeter than that begotten by the dependence of the man upon the woman for something she can supply but he cannot—not affection only, but assistance.
Michael, as we have said, had two children, a girl and a boy, the boy being the eldest. Against neither could he ever utter a word of complaint. They were honest and faithful. But the girl, Eliza, although unlike her mother, was still less like her father, and had a plain mind, that is to say, a mind endowed with good average common sense, but unrelieved by any touch of genius or poetry. Her intellect was solid but ordinary—a kind of homely brown intellect, untouched by sunset or sunrise tint. A strain of the mother was in her, modified by the influence of the father, and the result was a product like neither father nor mother, so cunning are the ways of spiritual chemistry. The boy, Robert Trevanion, on the contrary, was his father; not only with no apparent mixture of the mother, but his father intensified. The outside fact was of far less consequence to him than the self-created medium through which it was seen, and his happiness depended much more intimately on himself as he chanced to be at the time than on the world around him. He was apprenticed to his father, and the two were bound together by the tie of companionship and friendship, intertwined with filial and paternal love. What Eliza said, although it was right and proper, never interested the father; but when Robert spoke, Michael invariably looked at him, and often reflected upon his words for hours.
There was in the town of Perran a girl named Susan Shipton. Michael knew very little of the family, save that her father was a draper and went to church. Susan was reputed to be one of the beauties of Perran, although opinion was divided. She had—what were not common in Cornwall—light flaxen hair, blue eyes, and a rosy face, somewhat inclined to be plump. The Shiptons lay completely outside Michael's circle. They were mere formalists in religion, fond of pleasure, and Susan especially was much given to gaiety, went to picnics and dances, rowed herself about in the bay with her friends, and sauntered about the town with her father and mother on Sunday afternoon. She was also fond of bathing, and was a good swimmer. Michael hardly knew how to put his objection into words, but he nevertheless had a horror of women who could swim. It seemed to him an ungodly accomplishment. He did not believe for a moment that St. Paul would have sanctioned it, and he sternly forbade Eliza the use of one of the bathing-machines which had lately been introduced into Perran for the benefit of the few visitors who had discovered its charms.
It was a summer's morning in June, and Robert had gone along the shore on business to a house which was being built a little way out of the town. The tide was running out fast to the eastward. A small river came down into the bay, and the current was sweeping round the rocks to the left in a great curve at a distance of about two hundred yards from the beach. Inside the curve was smooth water, which lay calmly rippling in the sun, while at its edge the buoys marking the channel were swaying to and fro, and the stream lifted itself against them, swung past them, with bright multitudinous eddies, and went out to sea. Half-way in the shallows was one of the bathing-machines, and Robert saw that a girl whom he could not recognise was having a bathe. She swam well, and presently she started off straight outwards. Robert watched her for a moment, and saw her go closer and closer to the dangerous line. He knew she could not see it so well as he could, and he knew too that the buoys which were placed to guide small craft into the harbour were well in the channel, and that at least twenty yards this side of them the ebb would be felt, and with such force that no woman could make headway against it. Suddenly he saw that her course was deflected to the left, and he knew that unless some help could arrive she would be lost. In an instant his coat, waistcoat, and boots were off, and he was rushing over the sandy shallows, which fortunately stretched out a hundred yards before he was out of his depth. Susan—for it was Miss Shipton—had now perceived her peril and had turned round, but she was overpowered, and he heard a shriek for help. Raising himself out of the water as far as he could, he called out and signalled to her not to go dead against the tide, or even to try and return, but to go on and edge her way to its margin, and so make for the point. This she tried to do, but her strength began to fail—the drift was too much for her. Meanwhile Robert went after her. He was one of the best swimmers in Perran, but when he felt the cooler, deeper water, he was suddenly seized with a kind of fainting and a mist passed over his eyes. He looked at the land, and he was in a moment convinced he should never set foot on it again. He was on the point of sinking, when he bethought himself that if he was to die, he might just as well die after having put forth all his strength; and in an instant, as if touched by some divine spell, the agitation ceased, and he was himself again. In three minutes more he was by Susan's side, had gripped her by the bathing-dress at the back of the neck, and had managed to avail himself of a little swirl which turned inwards just before the rocks were reached. They were safe. She nearly swooned, but recovered herself after a fit of sobbing.
"I owe you my life, Mr. Trevanion; you've saved me—you've saved me."
"Nonsense, Miss Shipton!" He hardly knew what to say. "I would not go so near the tide again, if I were you. You had better get back to the machine as soon as you can and go home. You are about done up." So saying, he ran away to the place where he had left his coat, and went up into the town, thinking intently as he went. Very earnestly he thought; so earnestly that he saw nothing of Perran, and nothing of his neighbours, who wondered at his dripping trousers; thinking very earnestly, not upon his own brave deed, nor even upon his strange attack of weakness, and equally strange recovery, but upon Miss Shipton as she stood by his side at the rock very earnestly picturing to himself her white arms, her white neck, her long hair falling to her waist, and her beautiful white feet, seen on the sand through the clear sun-sparkling water.
Robert Trevanion, although brought up in the same school of philosophy as his father, belonged to another generation. The time of my history is the beginning of the latter half of the present century, and Michael was already considered somewhat of a fossil. Robert was inconsistent, as the old doctrine when it is decaying, or the new at its advent always is; but the main difference between Michael and Robert was not any distinct divergence, but that truths believed by Michael, and admitted by Robert, failed to impress Robert with that depth and sharpness of cut with which they were wrought into his father. Mere assent is nothing; the question of importance is whether the figuration of the creed is dull or vivid—as vivid as the shadows of a June sun on a white house. Brilliance of impression, is not altogether dependent on mere processes of proof, and a faultless logical demonstration of something which is of eternal import may lie utterly uninfluential and never disturb us.
Robert walked out the next morning to the house he went to visit the day before. Nobody save Miss Shipton and himself knew anything about his adventure. He had made some excuse for his wet clothes. The beach of the little village in the early part of the day was almost always deserted, and the man who attended to the machine had been lying on his back on the shingle smoking his pipe during the few minutes occupied in Miss Shipton's rescue. It was settled weather. The sky was cloudless, and the blue seemed on fire. What little wind there was, was from the south-south-east, and every outline quivered in the heat. The water inshore was absolutely still, and of such an azure as nobody whose sea is that of the Eastern Coast or the Channel can imagine. A boat lay here and there idle, with its shadow its perfect double in unwavering detail and blackness. Just beyond this cerulean lake the river ebb, as yesterday, rippled swiftly round Deadman's Nose; the buoys, with their heads all eastward, breaking the stream as it impatiently hurried past them on its mysterious errand. Beyond and beyond lay the ocean, unruffled, melting into the white haze which united it with the sky on the horizon. Robert loved the summer, and especially a burning summer. The sun, of which other persons complained, some perhaps sincerely, but for the most part hypocritically—can anybody really hate the sun?—rejoiced him. He loved to be out in it when the light on the unsheltered Cornish rocks and in the whitewashed street was so "glaring," as silly people called it, that they put up parasols and umbrellas, and the warmth which made him withdraw his hand smartly from the old anchor that lay on the grass just above high-water-mark, exhilarated him like wine. He was not a poet, he knew nothing of Greek mythology; and yet on summer days like these, the landscape and seascape were all changed for him. To say that they were a dream would be untrue—they were the reality; the hideous winter, with its damp fogs and rain, were the dream; and yet upon seascape and landscape rested such a miraculous charm that they seemed visionary rather than actual. As he walked along, he naturally thought of yesterday, and the light, the heat, and the colour naturally also renewed in him the picture which he had been continually repainting for himself since yesterday morning. He went to the house, saw the stonework was going on all right, and as he returned, whom should he meet but Miss Shipton, who, undeterred by the fright of the day before, had just had another bathe, and was taking a turn along the cliff to dry her hair, which was hanging over her shoulders. She was not by any means what is called "fast," but she knew how to dress herself. She had a straw hat with a very large brim, a plain brown holland dress, a brown holland parasol, and pretty white shoes; for nothing would ever induce Miss Shipton to put her feet into the yellow abominations which most persons wore at Perran in the summer.
Robert took off his cap.
"Oh, Mr. Trevanion, I am so glad to see you. You must have thought me such a queer creature. I have not half thanked you. But what could I do? I couldn't write, and I couldn't call, and I thought you would not like a noise being made about it. Yet you saved me from being drowned."
"It was nothing, Miss Shipton," said Robert, smiling. "You were in the ebb there, and I pulled you out of it—just twenty yards, that was all. I hope you haven't told anybody."
"No; as I have said, I thought you wouldn't like it; but nevertheless, although it is all very well for you to talk in that way, I owe you my life."
"Are you going any farther?"
"Just a few steps till my hair is dry."
He turned and walked by her side.
"You see that the buoys are beyond where the channel really begins. I once tried to swim round two of them, but it was as much as ever I could do to get back. If I were you, I would give them a wide berth again; but if you should be caught, go on and do what we did yesterday—try to turn off into the back-stream just inside the point."
"You may be sure I shall never go near them any more."
"Unless you happen to see me," said Robert, his face flushed with his happy thought, "and then you will give me the pleasure of coming after you."
She looked at him, shifted her parasol, and laughed a little.
"Pleasure! really, Mr. Trevanion, were you not very much frightened?"
"Not for myself, except just for an instant."
"Oh, I was awfully frightened! I thought I must give up. I never, never shall forget that moment when you laid hold of me."
"But you have been in the water again this morning."
"Oh, yes! I do enjoy it so, and of course I did not go far. That stupid bathing-man, by the way, ought to have looked out yesterday. He might have come in the boat and have saved you a wetting. I believe he was asleep."
"He is old, and I am very, very glad he did not see you. Aren't you tired? Would you not like to sit down a moment before we go back?"
They sat down on one of the rocks near the edge of the water.
"You are a very good swimmer, Mr. Trevanion."
"No, not very; and yesterday I was particularly bad, for a kind of faintness came over me just before I reached you, and I thought I was done for."
"Dear me! how dreadful! How did you conquer it?"
"Merely by saying to myself I would not give in, and I struggled with it for a minute and then it disappeared."
"How strong you must be! I am sure I could not do that."
"Ah! there was something else, Miss Shipton. You see, I had you ahead of me, and I thought I could be of some service to you."
Miss Shipton made no direct reply, but threw some pebbles in the water. Robert felt himself gradually overcome, or nearly overcome, by what to him was quite new. He could not keep his voice steady, and although what he said was poor and of no importance, it was charged with expressionless heat. For example, Miss Shipton's parasol dropped and she stooped to pick it up. "Let me pick it up," he said, and his lips quivered, and the let me pick it up—a poor, little, thin wire of words—was traversed by an electric current raising them to white-hot glow, and as powerful as that which flows through many mightier and more imposing conductors. What are words? "Good-bye," for example, is said every morning by thousands of creatures in the London suburbs as they run to catch their train, and the present writer has heard it said by a mother to her beloved boy as she stepped on board the tug which was about to leave the big steamer, and she knew she would never see him again. Robert handed her the parasol, and unconsciously, by that curious sympathy by which we are all affected, without any obvious channel of communication, she felt the condition in which his nerves were. She was a little uncomfortable, and, rising, said she thought it was time she was at home. They rose and walked back slowly till their paths parted.
The next day Robert renewed his walk, but there was no Miss Shipton. The summer heat had passed into thunderstorms, and these were succeeded by miserable grey days with mist, confusing sea, land, and sky, and obliterating every trace of colour. As he went backwards and forwards to the house over the hill, he watched every corner and turned round a hundred times, although his reason would have told him that to expect Miss Shipton in the rain was ridiculously absurd.
Michael Trevanion loved his son with a father's love, but with a mother's too. He rejoiced to talk with him as his father and friend, but there was in him also that wild, ferocious passion for his child which generally belongs to the woman, a passion which in its intense vitality forecasts, apprehends, and truly discerns danger where, to the mere intellect, there is nothing. Michael wondered a little at Robert's unusually frequent visits to his work over the hill, and as he was in the town one morning, he determined to cross the hill himself and see how the house was going on. The mist, which had hung about for a week, had gradually rolled itself into masses as the sun rose higher. It was no longer without form and void, but was detaching itself into huge fragments, which let in the sun and were gradually sucked up by him. Rapidly everything became transformed, and lo! as if by enchantment, the whole sky resumed once more its deepest blue, the perfect semicircle of the horizon sharply revealed itself, and vessels five miles off were visible to their spars. Michael reached the end of his journey and waited, looking out from one of the upper stories. He saw nothing of the splendour of the scene before him. He was restless, he did not quite know why. He could not tell exactly why he was there, but nevertheless he determined to remain. He generally carried a Bible in his pocket, and he turned where he had turned so often before, to the fifteenth chapter of Luke, and read the parable of the prodigal son. He had affixed his own interpretation to that story, and he always held that the point of it was not the love of the father, but the magnificent repentance of the boy who could simply say, "I have sinned against Heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son; make me as one of thy hired servants." No wonder the fatted calf was killed for him. No excuses; a noble confession and a trust in his father's affection for him! His own Robert would never go wrong, but if he did, it would cost nothing to forgive him. Then, as he often did, he fell on his knees, and, in front of the space where the window was to come, which would open on a little southern balcony looking over the sea, there, amid the lumps of plaster and shavings, he besought his Maker to preserve the child. Michael was sincere in his prayers, nakedly sincere, and yet there were some things he kept to himself even when he was with his God. He never mentioned his disappointment with his wife, never a word; but he assumed a right to the perfect enjoyment of Robert by way of compensation. Calvinist as he was to the marrow, he would almost have impeached the Divine justice if Robert had been removed from him.
Robert, walking leisurely, turning to look behind him for the hundredth time, had spied Miss Shipton on her road to the town from her accustomed plunge. He intercepted her by going round a meadow to the left at a great rate, and found himself face to face with her as she was about to pass the corner. The third side of the meadow round which he had raced was an unfinished road, and was a way, though not the usual way, back to Perran.
"Good morning, Miss Shipton. Are you going home?"
"Yes! I suppose you are going to your house."
"Yes," and Robert walked slowly back along the way he had come, Miss Shipton accompanying him, for it was the way home. When they came to the corner, however, they both, without noticing it, went eastward, and not to the town.
"Should you like to be a sailor, Mr. Trevanion?" said Miss Shipton, catching sight of the fishing vessels over the low sea-beaten hedge.
"No, I think not. At least it would depend——"
"Depend on what?"
"I should not like to be away for weeks during the North Sea fishing, if——"
"If it were very cold?"
"Oh, no; that is not what I meant—if I had a wife at home who cared for me and watched for me!"
"Really, Mr. Trevanion, if you were a fisherman you would not take things so seriously. It would all come as a matter of course. Yon would be busy with your nets, and have no time to think of her."
"But she might think of me."
"Oh, well, perhaps she might now and then; but she would have her house to look after, and all her friends would be near her."
"On stormy nights," said Robert, musingly.
"How very serious you are! Such a lovely day, too—a nice time to be talking about stormy nights! Of course there are stormy nights, but the boats can run into harbour, and if they cannot, the men are not always drowned."
"Certainly not; how foolish, and to think of coming home after five or six weeks on the Doggerbank—oh me! But here is the very rock where we sat the other morning. I am sure you are tired, let us sit down again; your hair is not dry yet."
They sat down.
"It is quite wet still," and Robert ventured to touch it, putting his hand underneath it.
"An awful plague it is! Horrid sandy-coloured stuff, and such a nuisance in the water! I think I shall have it cut short."
"I am sure you won't. Sandy-coloured! it is beautiful."
Miss Shipton tossed her parasol about, shaking her hair loose from his fingers.
"When it is spread out in the sunshine," said Robert, as he separated a little piece of it between his fingers, "the sun shows its varying shades. How lovely they are!" His hand went a little higher, till it touched the back of her neck.
"On stormy nights.—on stormy nights," he almost whispered, "I should think of you if you did not think of me."
The hand went a little farther under the hair, his head inclined to it, and he was intoxicated with its own rich scent mingled with, that of the sweet sea-water. He trembled with emotion from head to foot. What is there in life like this? Old as creation, ever new; and under the almost tropical sun, fronting the ocean, in the full heat of youth, he drew her head to his. She yielded, and in a moment his eyes and mouth were buried in her loose-clustering tresses. Before, however, he could say another word he was interrupted. A sheep, feeding above them, alarmed by a stranger's approach, rushed down past them; and hastily recovering himself, Robert looked up. There was nobody, but he saw that they were near his house, and that his father, who had just come to the window, was looking down straight upon them. Miss Shipton immediately said that it was late, rose, and walked homewards; and Robert alone went up the cliff. Michael had seen the girl walk away and had recognised her, but he had not seen what had preceded her departure. Instantly, however, he penetrated the secret, and his first words when Robert presented himself were—
"Why, Robert, that was Miss Shipton."
"Yes, father."
"What were she and you doing here?"
"We happened to meet."
There was something in the tone in which Robert replied which showed the father at once that his son's confidence in him was not illimitable, as he had believed it to be hitherto. It is a heart-breaking time for father and mother when they first become aware that the deepest secrets in their children are intrusted not to them, but to others. Michael felt repelled and was silent; but after a while, as they both were leaning over the garden-wall and gazing upon the water, he said—
"Mere worldlings, those Shiptons, Robert!"
"I do not know much about them, but they seem an honest, good sort of people."
"Ah! yes, my son; they may be all that. But what is it? They are not the Lord's."
Robert made no reply, and presently father and son left the house and went back to Perran to their work, uncommunicative.
It was a peculiar misfortune for a man of Michael's temperament that he had nobody save his son who could assist him in the shaping of his resolves or in the correction of his conclusions. Brought up in a narrow sect, self-centred, moody, he needed continually that wholesome twist to another point of the compass which intercourse with equals gives. He was continually prone to subjection under the rigorous domination of a single thought, from which he deduced inference after inference, ending in absurdity, which would have been dissipated in an instant by discussion. We complain of people because they are not original, but we do not ask what their originality, if they had any, would be worth. Better a thousand times than the originality of most of us is the average common-sense which is not our own exclusively, but shared with millions of our fellow-beings, and is not due to any one of them. Michael ought to have talked over the events of the morning with his wife; but alas! his wife's counsel was never sought, and not worth having. He did seek counsel at the throne of heavenly grace that night, but the answer given by the oracle was framed by himself. He was in sore straits. Something seemed to have interposed itself between him and Robert, and when, instead of the old unveiled frankness, Robert was reticent and even suspicious, Michael's heart almost broke, and he went up to his room, and shutting the door, wept bitter tears. His sorrow clothed itself, even at its uttermost, with no words of his own, but always in those of the Book.
"O my son Absalom!" he cried, "my son, my son, Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"
He remembered also what his own married life had been; he always trusted that Robert would have a wife who would be a help to him, and he felt sure that this girl Shipton, with her pretty rosy face and blue eyes, had no brains. To think that his boy should repeat the same inexplicable blunder, that she was silly, that he would never hear from her lips a serious word! What will she be if trouble comes on him? What will she be when a twelvemonth has passed? What will he be when he sits by his fireside in long winter evenings, alone with her, and finds she cannot interest him for a moment?
Worse still, she was not a child of God. He did not know that she ever sought the Lord. She went to church once a day and read her prayers, and that was all. She was not one of the chosen, and she might corrupt him, and he might fall away, and so commit the sin against the Holy Ghost "O Lord, O Lord!" he prayed one evening, in rebellion rather than as a suppliant, "what has Thy servant done that Thou shouldst visit him thus?" He almost mutinied, but he was afraid, and his religion came to his rescue, and he broke down into "And yet not my will, the will of the meanest of sinners, but Thine be done." He made up his mind once or twice that he would solemnly remonstrate with his son, but his aspect was such whenever the subject was approached, even from a distance, that he dared not. Hitherto the boy had joyfully submitted to be counselled, and had sought his father's direction, but now, if the conversation turned in a certain direction, a kind of savage reserve was visible, at which Michael was frightened. He was a man of exceedingly slow conception. For days and days he would often debate within himself, and at the end the fog was as thick as ever. He complained once to David Trevenna of this failing, and David gave him a useful piece of practical advice.
"Leave it alone, master. The more you thinks, the more you muddle yourself. Leave it alone, and when it comes into your head, try to get rid of it. In a week or so the thing will do more for itself than you'll do for it. It will settle, like new beer, and come clear enough. That's what my missus has often said to me, and I know she's right."
But, do what he might, Michael could not in this instance leave it alone. He cast about incessantly for some device by which he could break his son loose from the girl. It was all in vain. She might be frivolous, but there was nothing against her character, and he saw evident signs that if he attempted any exercise of authority he would lose Robert altogether in open revolt. For Robert, it must be remembered, had never scattered his strength in loose love. He had grown up to manhood in perfect innocence, and all his stored-up passion spent itself in idealising the object which by chance had provoked it.
Michael one night—it was a Sunday night—he was always worse on Sundays when he had not been at work—was unable to sleep, and rose and read the Book. He turned to the Epistle to the Romans, a favourite epistle with him, and deservedly so, for there we come face to face with the divine apostle, with a reality unobscured by miracle or myth. And such a reality! Christianity becomes no longer a marvel, for a man with that force and depth of experience is sufficient to impose a religion on the whole human race, no matter what the form of the creed may be. Michael read in the ninth chapter, "I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." What did Paul mean? Accursed from Christ! What could he mean save that he was willing to be damned to save those whom he loved. Why not? Why should not a man be willing to be damned for others? The damnation of a single soul is shut up in itself, and may be the means of saving not only others, but their children and a whole race. Damnation! It is awful, horrible; millions of years, with no relief, with no light from the Most High, and in subjection to His Enemy. "And yet, if it is to save—if it is to save Robert," thought Michael, "God give me strength—I could endure it. Did not the Son Himself venture to risk the wrath of the Father that He might redeem man? What am I? what is my poor self?" And Michael determined that night that neither his life in this world nor in the next, if he could rescue his child, should be of any account.
How sublime a thing is this dust or dirt we call man! We grovel in view of the vast distances of the fixed stars and their magnitudes, but these distances and these dimensions are a delusion. There is nothing grander in Sirius than in a pebble, nor anything more worthy of admiration and astonishment in his remoteness than in the length of Oxford Street. The true sublime is in the self-negation of the martyr, and it became doubly magnificent in the case of Michael, who was willing not merely to give up a finite existence for something other than himself—to be shot and so end, or to be burnt with a hope of following glory—but to submit for ever to separation and torment, if only he might shield his child from God's displeasure. It may be objected that such a resolution is impossible. Doubtless it is now altogether incredible; but it is so because we no longer know what religion means, or what is the effect produced upon the mind by the constant study of one book and a perfectly unconditional belief in it. Furthermore, as before said, Michael never corrected himself or preserved his sanity by constant intercourse with his fellows. He incessantly brooded, and the offspring of a soul like his, begotten on itself, is monstrous and grotesque. He questioned himself and his oracle further. What could Paul mean exactly? God could not curse him if he did no wrong. He could only mean that he was willing to sin and be punished provided Israel might live. It was lawful then to tell a lie or perpetrate any evil deed in order to protect his child. Something suddenly crossed his mind; what it was we shall see later on. And yet the thought was too awful. He could not endure to sin, not only against his Creator, but against his boy. Perhaps God might pardon him after centuries of suffering; and yet He could not. The gates of hell having once closed upon him, there could be no escape. He struggled in agony, until at last he determined that, first of all, he would speak to Robert, although he knew it would be useless. He would conquer the strange dread he had of remonstrance, and then, if that failed, he would—do anything.
On the Sabbath following, as they came out of the meeting-house in the evening, Michael proposed to Robert that they should walk down to the shore. It was a very unusual proposal, for walking on the Sabbath, save to and from the means of grace, was almost a crime, and Robert assented, not without some curiosity and even alarm. The two went together in silence till they came to the deserted shore. The sun had set behind the point on their right, and far away in the distance could he seen the beneficent interrupted ray of the revolving light. Father and son walked side by side.
"Robert," said Michael at last, "I have long wished to speak to you. God knows I would not do it if He did not command me, but I cannot help it. I fear you have engaged yourself with a young woman who is not one of His children."
"Who told you she was not, father?"
"Who told me? Why, Robert, it is notorious. Who told me? Is she not known to belong to the world? does she ever appear before the Lord?"
"Do you think then, father, that because she does not come to our chapel she cannot be saved?"
"No, you know I do not. The Lord has His followers doubtless in other communions besides our own, but the Shiptons are not His."
"You mean, I suppose, that they do not believe exactly what we believe, and that they go to church?"
"No, no; I mean that she has not found Him, and that she is of the world—of the world! O Robert, Robert! think what you are doing—that you will mate yourself with one who is not elect, that you may have children who will he the children of wrath. You don't know what I have gone through for you. I have wrestled and prayed before I could bring myself to do my duty and talk with you, and even now I cannot speak. What is it which chokes me? O Robert, Robert!"
But Robert, usually docile and tender, was hard and obdurate. The image of Susan rose before his eyes with her head on his shoulder, and he thought to himself that it was necessary at once to make matters quite plain and stop all further trespass on his prerogative. So it is, and so it ever has been. For this cause shall a man leave father and mother and cleave to his wife. There comes a time when the father and mother find that they must withdraw; but it is the order of the world, and has to be accepted, like sickness or death.
"Father," said Robert, "I am not a boy, and you must allow me in these matters to judge for myself." As he spoke his spirit rose; the image of the head on his shoulder, defenceless against attack save for him, became clearer and clearer, and words escaped him which he never afterwards forgot, nor did his father forget. "And it is a shame—I say it is a shame to speak against her. You know nothing about her. Worldly! her children children of wrath, just because she is not of your way of thinking, and isn't—and isn't a humbug, as some of them are. From anybody else I wouldn't stand it," and Robert turned sharply away and went home.
Michael leant against a groyne to support himself, and looked over the water, seeing nothing. At first he was angry, and if his son had been there, he could have struck him; but presently his anger gave way to pity, to hatred of the girl who had thus seduced him, and to a fixed determination to save him, whatever it might cost. He pondered again and again over that verse of Paul's. He did not believe that he should be excused if he did evil that good might come. He knew that if he did evil, no matter what the result might be, the penalty to the uttermost farthing would be exacted. If Christ's purpose to save mankind could not prevent the Divine anger being poured out on perfect innocence, how much greater would not that anger have been if it had been necessary for Him to sin in order to make the world's salvation sure! Michael firmly believed, too, in the dreadful doctrine that a single lapse from the strait path is enough to damn a man for ever; that there is no finiteness in a crime which can be counterbalanced by finite expiation, but that sin is infinite. Monstrous, we say; and yet it is difficult to find in the strictest Calvinism anything which is not an obvious dogmatic reflection of a natural fact, a mere transference to theology of what had been pressed upon the mind of the creator of the creed as an everyday law of the world. A crime is infinite in its penalties, and the account is never really balanced, as many of us know too well, the lash being laid on us day after day, even to death, for the failings of fifty years ago.
Michael, with his slow ways, remained many weeks undecided. During these weeks he said nothing more to his son, nor did his son say anything to him upon the one subject. Robert was more than ever deferent, and even more than ever affectionate, but there were no signs of any conversion on his part, and to his deference and affection his father paid no regard. He walked in a world by himself, shut up in it, and incessantly repeated the one question, how could he save his son's soul? He pictured himself as a second Christ. If the Christ, the mighty Saviour, felt His Father's wrath on that one dreadful night, it was only fitting that he, Michael, a man who was of so much less worth, should feel it for ever to accomplish a similar end. He was a little exalted by his resolve, and spiritual pride began to show itself; so utterly impossible is it that the purest self-devotion should be, if we may use the word, chemically pure. It is very doubtful if he ever fully realised what he was doing, just as it is doubtful whether in the time of liveliest conviction there has been a perfect realisation of the world to come. Had he really appreciated the words "torment" and "infinite;" had he really put into "torment" the pangs of a cancer or a death through thirst; had he really put twenty years into "infinity," he would perhaps have recoiled. Nevertheless, the fact remains that this man by some means or other had educated himself into complete self-obliteration for the sake of his child. The present time is disposed to over-rate the intellectual virtues. No matter how unselfish a woman may be, if she cannot discuss the new music or the new metaphysical poetry, she is nothing and nobody cares for her. Centuries ago our standard was different, and it will have to be different again. We shall, it is to be hoped, spend ourselves not in criticism of the record of the saints who sat by the sepulchre, but we shall love as they loved.
Michael comforted himself by a piece of sophistry. He had made up his mind to attempt a stratagem, a wicked lie, if we choose to call it so, for his son's sake, and he was prepared to suffer the penalty for it. If he had thought that in thus sinning he was sinning as an ordinary sinner, he perhaps could not have dared to commit the crime; he could not have faced the Almighty's displeasure. But he thought that, although bound by the Divine justice to mete out to him all the punishment which the sin merited, God would, nevertheless, consider him as a sinner for His glory.
One evening—the summer had not yet departed—father and son walked out to the house on the cliff.
"Robert," said Michael suddenly, and with the strength of a man who gathers himself up to do what for a long time he has been afraid to do, and is even bolder apparently than if he had known no fear, "I have spoken my mind to you as God in heaven bade me about Miss Shipton, and this is the last word I shall say. He knows that I have prayed for you from your childhood up—that I have prayed that, above everything, he would grant that you should have one of His own for your wife, who should bring up your children in the fear of the Lord. He alone knows how I have wrestled for you day and night, ay, in the dark hours of the night; for you are my only son, and I looked that you and she whom God might choose for you should be the delight and support of my old age. But it is not to be. God has, for His own good purposes, not blessed me as He has blessed others, and the home for which I hoped I am not to have. Oh, my son, my son!" He had meant to say more, but at the moment he could not.
"Father, father!" said Robert, much moved—the anger he usually felt at his father's references to Susan Shipton melting into pity—"why not? why not? You don't know Susan; you condemn her just because she don't go to our meeting. She shall love you like your own child."
Another man would, perhaps, have relented, but his system was wrought into his very marrow—a part of himself in a manner incomprehensible. The distinction between the world and the Church is now nothing to us. We are on the best of terms with people who every Sunday are expressly assigned to everlasting fire. But to Michael the distinction was what it was to Ephraim MacBriar. The Spirit descended on him—whose spirit, it is not for us to say.
"Are you sure of Miss Shipton, Robert?"
"Sure of her, father! What do you mean?"
"Do you know what she has been in time past?"
"I don't understand you."
"Do you know why Cadman left the Shiptons?"
Robert stopped suddenly as if struck by a blow, and then his behaviour instantly changed. He completely forgot himself and was furious.
"Father, I say it is a wicked, cruel shame—a wicked, cruel lie. I do not care if I tell you so. I will not listen to it," and he tore himself away.
He believed it was a lie—believed it with the same distinctness as he believed in the existence of the hedge by his side which lacerated his hand as he turned round; and yet the lie struck him like a poisoned barbed arrow, and he could not drag himself loose from it. No man could have loved Desdemona better than Othello, and yet, before there was any evidence, did he not say of Iago—
"This honest creature doubtless
Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds."
He went home, and on his way to his room upstairs he passed through the little office in which he and his father made out their bills and kept their accounts. On the desk lay half a sheet of a letter. He looked at it at first mechanically, and then began to read with the most intense interest. It was only half a sheet, and the other half was nowhere to be found. It ran as follows:—
"and I can assure you I cannot afford to marry. Besides, I don't know that she cares anything for me now. It was very wrong; but, sir, when you remember that I am a young man and that Susan was so attractive, I think I may be forgiven. I hope some day to make her amends if she still loves me, but, sir, I must wait.—Yours truly,
"WALTER CADMAN.
"MR. MICHAEL TREVANION."
This was the plot. The Shiptons some short time ago had an assistant in their employ, who was dismissed for improper intimacy with a servant-girl named Susan Coleman, who lived next door. As was the case with most servant-girls in those days, nobody ever heard her surname, and she was known by the name of Susan only. The affair was kept a profound secret, for she was a member of the congregation to which Michael belonged; and Mr. Shipton, for trade reasons, was anxious that it should not be made public. Michael, as one of the deacons, knew all about it, but Robert knew nothing. The girl left her place before the consequences of her crime became public; and Michael had written to the man Cadman, telling him he ought to support the child of which he was the father. When he received the answer, a sudden thought struck him. The last page might be used for a purpose, and so he hatched his monstrous scheme, and left the paper where he knew that, sooner or later, Robert would see it.
When Michael came home, Robert was not there; a bill-head lay near
Cadman's note with the brief announcement—
"I have left for ever.—Your affectionate son,
"ROBERT."
Michael's first emotion, strange to say, was something like joy. He had succeeded, and Robert was removed from the wiles of the tempter. But when the morning came, he looked again, and he saw the words "for ever," and he realised that his son had gone; that he would never see him any more; that perhaps he might have committed self-murder. His human nature got the better of every other nature in him, divine or diabolic, and he was distracted. He could not pray after his wont; he tried, but he had no utterance; he felt himself rebellious, blasphemous, impious, and he rose from his bedside without a word. He went out into the street and down to the shore, trembling lest he should hear from the first man he saw that his son's body had been thrown up on the sand; and then he remembered how Robert could swim, and that he would probably hang a stone round his neck and be at the bottom of some deep pool. He could not go back; people would ask where his son was, and what could he say? He had murdered him. He had thought to save him, and he was dead. He walked and walked till he could walk no more, and a great horror came on him—a horror of great darkness. The Eternal Arms were unclasped, and he felt himself sinking—into what he knew not. He could not describe his terror to himself. It was nameless, shapeless, awful, infinite; and all he could do was to cry out in agony; the words of the Book, even in this his most desperate moment, serving to voice the experience for him—"My God! my God! why hast Thou forsaken me?" It became intolerable, and his brain began to turn. He reflected though, even then, upon the disgrace of suicide. For himself he did not care; for had not God abandoned him? and what worse thing could befall him? But then his good name, and the brand of infamy which would be affixed to Robert should he still live! Could he not die so that it might be set down as an accident? He could swim; and although he had not been often in the water of late years, it would not be thought extraordinary if on a blazing morning he should bathe. He took off his clothes, and in a moment was in the sea, striking out for the river channel and the ebbing tide, which he knew would bear him away to the ocean. He saw nothing, heard nothing, till just as he neared the buoy and the fatal eddy was before him, when there escaped from him a cry—a scream—a prayer of commitment to Him whom he believed he had so loyally served—served with such damnable, such treasonable fidelity—the God who had now turned away from him.