Chapter IX: Part 9

The old man sate down again, smiling, and pointed me to a chair. The other two left us; and there followed what was to me a very memorable conversation. "We must make the best use of our time, you see," he said, "though I hope that this will not be the last time we shall meet. You will confer a very great obligation on me, if you can sometimes come to see me--and perhaps we may get a walk together occasionally. So we won't waste our time in conventional remarks," he added; "I will only say that I am heartily glad you have come to live here, and I am sure you will find it a beautiful place--you are wise enough to prefer the country to the town, I gather." Then he went on: "I have read all your books--I did not read them," he added with a smile, "that I might talk to you about them, but because they have interested me. May I say that each book has been stronger and better than the last, except in one case"--he mentioned the name of a book of mine--"in which you seemed to me to be republishing earlier work." "Yes," I said, "you are quite right; I was tempted by a publisher and I fell." "Well," he said, "the book was a good one--and there is something that we lose as we grow older, a sort of youthfulness, a courageous indiscretion, a beautiful freedom of thought; but we can't have everything, and one's books must take their appropriate colours from the mind. May I say that I think your books have grown more and more mature, tolerant, artistic, wise?--and the last was simply admirable. It entirely engrossed me, and for a blessed day or two I lived in your mind, and saw out of your eyes. I am sure it was a great book--a noble and a large-hearted book, full of insight and faith--the best kind of book." I murmured something; and he said, "You may think it is arrogant of me to speak like this; but I have lived among books, and I am sure that I have a critical gift, mainly because I have no power of expression. You know the best kind of critics are the men who have tried to write books, and have failed, as long as their failure does not make them envious and ungenerous; I have failed many times, but I think I admire good work all the more for that. You are writing now?" "No," I said, "I am writing nothing." "Well, I am sorry to hear it," he said, "and may I venture to ask why?" "Simply because I cannot," I said; and now there came upon me a strange feeling, the same sort of feeling that one has in answering the questions of a great and compassionate physician, who assumes the responsibility of one's case. Not only did I not resent these questions, as I should often have resented them, but it seemed to give me a sense of luxury and security to give an account of myself to this wise and unaffected old man. He bent his brows upon me: "You have had a great sorrow lately?" he said. "Yes," I said, "we have lost our only boy, nine years old." "Ah," he said, "a sore stroke, a sore stroke!" and there was a deep tenderness in his voice that made me feel that I should have liked to kneel down before him, and weep at his knee, with his hand laid in blessing on my head. We sate in silence for a few moments. "Is it this that has stopped your writing?" he said. "No," I said, "the power had gone from me before--I could not originate, I could only do the same sort of work, and of weaker quality than before." "Well," he said, "I don't wonder; the last book must have been a great strain, though I am sure you were happy when you wrote it. I remember a friend of mine, a great Alpine climber, who did a marvellous feat of climbing some unapproachable peak--without any sense of fatigue, he told me, all pure enjoyment--but he had a heart-attack the next day, and paid the penalty of his enjoyment. He could not climb for some years after that." "Yes," I said, "I think that has been my case--but my fear is that if I lose the habit--and I seem to have lost it--I shall never be able to take it up again." "No, you need not fear that," he replied; "if something is given you to say, you will be able to say it, and say it better than ever--but no doubt you feel very much lost without it. How do you fill the time?" "I hardly know," I said, "not very profitably--I read, I teach my daughter, I muddle along." "Well," he said, smiling, "the hours in which we muddle along are not our worst hours. You believe in God?" The suddenness of this question surprised me. "Yes," I said, "I believe in God. I cannot disbelieve. Something has placed me where I am, something urges me along; there is a will behind me, I am sure of that. But I do not know whether that will is just or unjust, kind or unkind, benevolent or indifferent. I have had much happiness and great prosperity, but I have had to bear also things which are inconceivably repugnant to me, things which seem almost satanically adapted to hurt and wound me in my tenderest and innermost feelings, trials which seem to be concocted with an almost infernal appropriateness, not things which I could hope to bear with courage and faith, but things which I can only endure with rebellious resistance." "Yes," he said, "I understand you perfectly; but does not their very appropriateness, the satanical ingenuity of which you speak, help you to feel that they are not fortuitous, but sent deliberately to you yourself and to none other?" "Yes," I said, "I see that; but how can I believe in the justice of a discipline which I could not inflict, I will not say upon a dearly loved child, but upon the most relentless and stubborn foe." "Ah," said he, "now I see your heart bare, the very palpitating beat of the blood. Do you think you are alone in this? Let me tell you my own story. Over fifty years ago I left Oxford with, I really think I may say, almost everything before me--everything, that is, which is open to an instinctively cheerful, temperate, capable, active man--I was not rich, but I could afford to wait to earn money. I was sociable and popular; I was endowed with an immense appetite for variety of experience; I don't think that there was anything which appeared to me to be uninteresting. But I could persevere too, I could stick to work, I had taken a good degree. Then an accidental fall off a chair, on which I was standing to get a book, laid me on my back for a time. I fretted over it at first, but when I got about again, I found that I was a man maimed for life. I don't know what the injury was--some obscure lesion of the spinal marrow or brain, I believe--some flaw about the size of a pin's head--the doctors have never made out. But every time that I plunged into work, I broke down; for a long time I thought I should struggle through; but at last I became aware that I was on the shelf, with other cracked jars, for life--I can't tell you what I went through, what agonies of despair and rebellion. I thought that at least literature was left me. I had always been fond of books, and was a good scholar, as it is called; but I soon became aware that I had no gift of expression, and moreover that I could not hope to acquire it, because any concentrated effort threw me into illness. I was an ambitious fellow, and success was closed to me--I could not even hope to be useful. I tried several things, but always with the same result; and at last I fell into absolute despair, and just lived on, praying daily and even hourly that I might die. But I did not die, and then at last it dawned upon me, like a lightening sunrise, that THIS was life for me; this was my problem, these my limitations; that I was to make the best I could out of a dulled and shattered life; that I was to learn to be happy, even useful, in spite of it--that just as other people were given activity, practical energy, success, to learn from them the right balance, the true proportion of life, and not to be submerged and absorbed in them, so to me was given a simpler problem still, to have all the temptations of activity removed--temptations to which with my zest for experience I might have fallen an easy victim--and to keep my courage high, my spirit pure and expectant, if I could, waiting upon God. This little estate fell to me soon afterwards, and I soon saw what a tender gift it was, because it gave me a home; every other source of interest and pleasure was removed, because the simplest visits, the wildest distractions were too much for me--the jarring of any kind of vehicle upset me. By what slow degrees I attained happiness I can hardly say. But now, looking back, I see this--that whereas others have to learn by hard experience, that detachment, self-purification, self-control are the only conditions of happiness on earth, I was detached, purified, controlled by God Himself. I was detached, because my life was utterly precarious, I was taught purification and control, because whereas more robust people can defer and even defy the penalties of luxury, comfort, gross desires, material pleasures, I was forced, every day and hour, to deny myself the smallest freedom--I was made ascetic by necessity. Then came a greater happiness still; for years I was lost in a sort of individualistic self-absorption, with no thoughts of anything but God and His concern with myself--often hopeful and beautiful enough--when I found myself drawn into nearer and dearer relationships with those around me. That came through my niece, whom I adopted as an orphan child, and who is one of those people who live naturally and instinctively in the lives of other people. I got to know all the inhabitants of this little place--simple country people, you will say--but as interesting, as complex in emotion and intellect, as any other circle in the world. The only reason why one ever thinks people dull and limited, is because one does not know them; if one talks directly and frankly to people, one passes through the closed doors at once. Looking back, I can see that I have been used by God, not with mere compassion and careless tenderness, but with an intent, exacting, momentary love, of an almost awful intensity and intimacy. It is the same with all of us, if we can only see it. Our faults, our weaknesses, our qualities good or bad, are all bestowed with an anxious and deliberate care. The reason why some of us make shipwreck--and even that is mercifully and lovingly dispensed to us--is because we will not throw ourselves on the side of God at every moment. Every time that the voice says 'Do this,' or 'Leave that undone,' and we reply fretfully, 'Ah, but I have arranged otherwise,' we take a step backwards. He knocks daily, hourly, momently, at the door, and when we have once opened, and He is entered, we have no desire again but to do His will to the uttermost." He was silent for a moment, his eyes in-dwelling upon some secret thought; then he said, "Everything about you, your books, your dear wife, your words, your face, tell me that you are very near indeed to the way--a step or two, and you are free!" He sate back for a moment, as though exhausted, and then said: "You will forgive me for speaking so frankly, but I feel from hour to hour how short my time may be; and I had no doubt when I saw you, even before I saw you, that I should have some message to give you, some tidings of hope and patience."

I despair, as I write, of giving any idea of the impressiveness of the old man; now that I have written down his talk, it seems abrupt and even strained. It was neither. The perfect naturalness and tranquillity of it all, the fatherly smile, the little gestures of his frail hand, interpreted and filled up the gaps, till I felt as though I had known him all my life, and that he was to me as a dear father, who saw my needs, and even loved me for what I was not and for what I might be.

At this point Miss ---- came in, and led me away. As Maud and I walked back, we spoke to each other of what we had seen and heard. He had talked to her, she said, very simply about Alec. "I don't know how it was," she added, "but I found myself telling him everything that was in my mind and heart, and it seemed as though he knew it all before." "Yes, indeed," I said, "he made me desire with all my heart to be different--and yet that is not true either, because he made me wish not to be something outside of myself, but something inside, something that was there all the time: I seem never to have suspected what religion was before; it had always seemed to me a thing that one put on and wore, like a garment; but now it seems to me to be the most natural, simple, and beautiful thing in the world; to consist in being oneself, in fact." "Yes, that is exactly it," said Maud, "I could not have put it into words, but that is how I feel." "Yes," I said, "I saw, in a flash, that life is not a series of things that happen to us, but our very selves. It is not a question of obeying, and doing, and acting, but a question of being. Well, it has been a wonderful experience; and yet he told me nothing that I did not know. God in us, not God with us." And presently I added: "If I were never to see Mr. ---- again, I should feel he had somehow done more for me than a hundred conversations and a thousand books. It was like the falling of the spirit at Pentecost."

That strange sense of an uplifted freedom, of willing co-operation has dwelt with me, with us both, for many days. I dare not say that life has become easy; that the cloud has rolled away; that there have not been hours of dismay and dreariness and sorrow. But it is, I am sure, a turning-point of my life; the way which has led me downwards, deepening and darkening, seems to have reached its lowest point, and to be ascending from the gloom; and all from the words of a simple, frail old man, sitting among his books in a panelled parlour, in a soft, summer afternoon.

July 10, 1890.

I have been sitting out, this hot, still afternoon, upon the lawn, under the shade of an old lime-tree, with its sweet scent coming and going in wafts, with the ceaseless murmur of the bees all about it; but for that slumberous sound, the place was utterly still; the sun lay warm on the old house, on the box hedges of the garden, on the rich foliage of the orchard. I have been lost in a strange dream of peace and thankfulness, only wishing the sweet hours could stay their course, and abide with me thus for ever. Part of the time Maggie sate with me, reading. We were both silent, but glad to be together; every now and then she looked up and smiled at me. I was not even visited by the sense that used to haunt me, that I must bestir myself, do something, think of something. It is not that I am less active than formerly; it is the reverse. I do a number of little things here, trifling things they would seem, not worth mentioning, mostly connected with the village or the parish. My writing has retired far into the past, like a sort of dream. I never even plan to begin again. I teach a little, not Maggie only, but some boys and girls of the place, who have left school, but are glad to be taught in the evenings. I have plenty of good easy friends here, and have the blessed sense of feeling myself wanted. Best of all, a sense of poisonous hurry seems to have gone out of my life. In the old days I was always stretching on to something, the end of my book, the next book--never content with the present, always hoping that the future would bring me the satisfaction I seemed to miss. I did not always know it at the time, for I was often happy when I was writing a book--but it was, at best, a rushing, tortured sort of happiness. My great sorrow--what has that become to me? A beautiful thing, full of patience and hope. What but that has taught me to learn to live for the moment, to take the bitter experiences of life as they come, not crushing out the sweetness and flinging the rind aside, but soberly, desirously, only eager to get from the moment what it is meant to bring. Even the very shrinking back from a bitter duty, the indolent rejection of the thought that touches one's elbow, bidding one again and again arise and go, means something; to defer one's pleasure, to break the languid dream, to take up the tiny task, what strength is there! Thus no burden seems too heavy, too awkward, too slippery, too ill-shaped, but one can lift it. The yoke is easy, because one bears it in quiet confidence, not overtaxing ability or straining hope. Instead of watching life, as from high castle windows, feeling it common and unclean, not to be mingled with, I am in it and of it. And what is become of all my old dreams of art, of the secluded worship, the lonely rapture! Well, it is all there, somehow, flowing inside life, like a stream that is added to a river, not like a leat drawn aside from the current. The force I spent on art has gone to swell life and augment it; it heightens perception, it intensifies joy--it was the fevered lust of expression that drained the vigour of my days and hours.

But am I then satisfied with the part I play? Do I feel that my faculties are being used, that I am lending a hand to the great sum of toil? I used to feel that, or thought I felt it, in the old days, but now I see that I walked in a vain delusion, serving my own joy, my own self-importance. Not that I think my old toil all ill-spent; that was my work before, as surely as it is not now; but the old intentness, the old watching for tone and gesture, for action and situation, that has all shifted its gaze, and waits upon God. It may be, nay it is certain, that I have far to go, much to learn; but now that I may perhaps recover my strength, life spreads out into sunny shallows, moving slow and clear. It is like a soft sweet interlude between two movements of fire and glow; for I see now, what then I could not see, that something in my life was burnt and shrivelled up in my enforced silence and in my bitter loss--then, when I felt my energies at their lowest, when mind and bodily frame alike flapped loose, like a flag of smut upon the bars of a grate, I was living most intensely, and the soul's wings grew fast, unfolding plume and feather. It was then that life burnt with its fiercest heat, when it withdrew me, faintly struggling, away from all that pleased and caressed the mind and the body, into the silent glow of the furnace. Strange that I should not have perceived it! But now I see in all maimed and broken lives, the lives that seem most idle and helpless, most futile and vain, that the same fierce flame is burning bright about them; that the reason why they cannot spread and flourish, like flowers, into the free air, is because the strong roots are piercing deep, entwining themselves firmly among the stones, piercing the cold silent crevices of the earth. Ay, indeed! The coal in the furnace, burning passively and hotly, is as much a force, though it but lies and suffers, as the energy that throbs in the leaping piston-rod or the rushing wheel. Not in success and noise and triumph does the soul grow; when the body rejoices, when the mind is prodigal of seed, the spirit sits within in a darkened chamber, like a folded chrysalis, stiff as a corpse, in a faint dream. But when triumphs have no savour, when the cheek grows pale and the eye darkens, then the dark chrysalis opens, and the rainbow wings begin to spread and glow, uncrumpling to the suns of paradise. My soul has taken wings, and sits poised and delicate, faint with long travail, perhaps to hover awhile about the garden blooms and the chalices of honied flowers, perhaps to take her flight beyond the glade, over the forest, to the home of her desirous heart. I know not! Yet in these sunlit hours, with the slow, strong pulse of life beating round me, it seems that something is preparing for one struck dumb and crushed with sorrow to the earth. How soft a thrill of hope throbs in the summer air! How the bird-voices in the thicket, and the rustle of burnished leaves, and the hum of insects, blend into a secret harmony, a cadence half-heard! I wait in love and confidence; and through the trees of the garden One seems ever to draw nearer, walking in the cool of the day, at whose bright coming the flowers look upwards unashamed. Shall I be bidden to meet Him! Will He call me loud or low?

August 25, 1890.

Maud has been ailing of late--how much it is impossible to say, because she is always cheerful and indomitable. She never complains, she never neglects a duty; but I have found her, several times of late, sitting alone, unoccupied, musing--that is unlike her--and with a certain shadow upon her face that I do not recognise; but the strange, new, sweet companionship in which we live seems at the same time to have heightened and deepened. I seem to have lived so close to her all these years, and yet of late to have found a new and different personality in her, which I never suspected. Perhaps we have both changed somewhat; I do not feel the difference in myself. But there is something larger, stronger, deeper about Maud now, as if she had ascended into a purer air, and caught sight of some unexpected, undreamed-of distance; but instead of giving her remoteness, she seems to be sharing her wider outlook with me; she was never a great talker--perhaps it was that in old days my own mind ran like an ebullient fountain, evoking no definite response, needing no interchange; but she was always a sayer of penetrating things. She has a wonderful gift of seeing the firm issue through a cloud of mixed suggestions; but of late there has been a richness, a generosity, a wisdom about her which I have never recognised before. I think, with contrition, that I under-estimated, not her judgment or instinct, but her intellect. I am sure I lived too much in the intellectual region, and did not guess how little it really solves, in what a limited region it disports itself. I see that this wisdom was hers all along, and that I have been blind to it; but now that I have travelled out of the intellectual region, I perceive what a much greater thing that further wisdom is than I had thought. Living in art and for art, I used to believe that the intellectual structure was the one thing that mattered, but now I perceive dimly that the mind is but on the threshold of the soul, and that the artist may, nay does, often perceive, by virtue of his trained perception, what is going on in the sanctuary; but he is as one who kneels in a church at some great solemnity--he sees the movements and gestures of the priests; he sees the holy rite proceeding, he hears the sacred words; something of the inner spirit of it all flows out to him; but the viewless current of prayer, the fiery ray streaming down from God, that smites itself into the earthly symbol--all this is hidden from him. Those priests, intent upon the sacred work, feel something that they not only do not care to express, but which they would not if they could; it would be a profanation of the awful mystery. The artist is not profane in expressing what he perceives, because he can be the interpreter of the symbol to others more remote; but he is not a real partaker of the mystery; he is a seer of the word and not a doer. What now amazes me is that Maud, to whom the heart of the matter, the inner emotion, has always been so real, could fling herself, and all for love of me, into the outer work of intellectual expression. I have always, God forgive me, believed my work to be in some way superior to hers. I loved her truly, but with a certain condescension of mind, as one loves a child or a flower; and now I see that she has been serenely ahead of me all the time, and it has been she that has helped me along; I have been as the spoilt and wilful child, and she as the sweet and wise mother, who has listened to its prattle, and thrown herself, with all the infinite patience of love, into the tiny bounded dreams. I have told her all this as simply as I could, and though she deprecated it all generously and humbly, I feel the blessed sense of having caught her up upon the way, of seeing--how dimly and imperfectly!--what I have owed her all along. I am overwhelmed with a shame which it is a sweet pleasure to confess to her; and now that I can spare her a little, anticipate her wishes, save her trouble, it is an added joy; a service that I can render and which she loves to receive. I never thought of these things in the old days; she had always planned everything, arranged everything, forestalled everything.

I have at last persuaded her to come up to town and see a doctor. We plan to go abroad for a time. I would earn the means if I could, but, if not, we will sacrifice a little of our capital, and I will replace it, if I can, by some hack-work; though I have a dislike of being paid for my name and reputation, and not for my best work.

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

September 6, 1890.

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

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

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

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

February 6, 1891.

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. ---- has been very good to me; I have seen him almost daily. He seems the only person who perfectly understands. He has hardly said a word to me about my sorrow. He said once that he should not speak of it; before, he said, I was like a boy learning a lesson with the help of another boy, but that now I was being taught by the Master Himself. That may be so; but the Master has a very scared and dull pupil, alas, who cannot even discern the letters. I care nothing whether God be pleased or displeased; I bear His will, without either pain or resistance. I simply feel as if there had been some vast and overwhelming mistake somewhere; a mistake so incredible and inconceivable that nothing else mattered; as if--I do not speak profanely--God Himself were appalled at what He had done, and dared not smite further one whom He had stunned into silence and apathy.

With Mr. ---- I talk; he talks of simple, quiet things, of old books and thoughts. He tells me, sometimes, when I am too weary to speak, long, beautiful, quiet stories of his younger days, and I listen like a child to his grave voice, only sorry when it comes to an end. So the days pass, and I will not say I have no pleasure in them, because I have won back a sort of odd childish pleasure in small incidents, sights, and sounds. The part of me that can feel seems to have been simply cut gently away, and I live in the hour, just glad when the sun is out, sorry when it is dull and cheerless.

I read the other day one of my old books, and I could not believe it was mine. It seemed like the voice of some one I had once known long ago, in a golden hour. I was amused and surprised at my own quickness and inventiveness, at the confidence with which I interpreted everything so glibly and easily. I cannot interpret any more, and I do not seem to desire to do so. I seem to wait, with a half-amused smile, to see if God can make anything out of the strange tangle of things, as a child peers in within a scaffolding, and sees nothing but a forest of poles, little rising walls of chambers, a crane swinging weights to and fro. What can ever come, he thinks, out of such strange confusion, such fruitless hurry?

Well, I will not write any more; a sense of weariness and futility comes over me. I will go back to my garden to see what I can see, only dumbly and mutely thankful that it is not required of me to perform any dull and monotonous task, which would interrupt my idle dreams.

February 8, 1891.

I tried this morning to look through some of the old letters and papers in Maud's cabinet. There were my own letters, carefully tied up with a ribbon; letters from her mother and father; from the children when we were away from them. I began to read, and was seized with a sharp, unreasoning pain, surprised by sudden tears. I seemed dumbly to resent this, and I put them all away again. Why should I disturb myself to no purpose? "There shall be no more sorrow nor crying, for the former things are passed away"--so runs the old verse, and I had almost grown to feel like that. Why distrust it? Yet I could not forbear. I got the papers out again, and read late into the night, like one reading an old and beautiful story. Suddenly the curtain lifted, and I saw myself alone, I saw what I had lost. The ineffectual agony I endured, crying out for very loneliness! "That was all mine," said the melting heart, so long frozen and dumb. Grief, in waves and billows, began to beat upon me like breakers on a rock-bound shore. A strange fever of the spirit came on me, scenes and figures out of the years floating fiercely and boldly past me. Was my strength and life sustained for this, that I should just sleep awhile, and wake to fall into the pit of suffering, far deeper than before?

If they could but come back to me for a moment; if I could feel Maud's cheek by mine, or Maggie's arms round my neck; if they could but stand by me smiling, in robes of light! Yet as in a vision I seem to see them leaning from a window, in a blank castle-wall rising from a misty abyss, scanning a little stairway that rises out of the clinging fog, built up through the rocks and ending in a postern gate in the castle-wall. Upon that stairway, one by one emerging from the mist, seem to stagger and climb the figures of men, entering in, one by one, and the three, with smiles and arms interlaced, are watching eagerly. Cannot I climb the stair? Perhaps even now I am close below them, where the mist hangs damp on rock and blade? Cannot I set myself free? No, I could not look them in the face, they would hide their eyes from me, if I came in hurried flight, in passionate cowardice. Not so must I come before them, if indeed they wait for me.

The morning was coming in about the dewy garden, the birds piping faint in thicket and bush, when I stumbled slowly, dizzied and helpless, to my bed. Then a troubled sleep; and ah, the bitter waking; for at last I knew what I had lost.

February 10, 1891.

"All things become plain to us," said the good vicar, pulling on his gloves, "when we once realise that God is love--Perfect Love!" He said good-bye; he trudged off to his tea, a trying visit manfully accomplished, leaving me alone.

He had sate with me, good, kindly man, for twenty minutes. There were tears in his eyes, and I valued that little sign of human fellowship more than all the commonplaces he courageously enunciated. He talked in a soft, low tone, as if I was ill. He made no allusions to mundane things; and I am grateful to him for coming. He had dreaded his call, I am sure, and he had done it from a mixture of affection and duty, both good things.

"Perfect Love, yes--if we could feel that!" I sate musing in my chair.

I saw, as in a picture, a child brought up in a beautiful and stately house by a grave strong man, who lavished at first love and tenderness, ease and beauty, on the child, laughing with him, and making much of him; all of which the child took unconsciously, unthinkingly, knowing nothing different; running to meet his guardian, glad to be with him, sorry to leave him.

Then I saw in my parable that one day, when the child played in the garden, as he had often played before, he noticed a little green alley, with a pleasant arch of foliage, that he had never seen before, leading to some secluded place. The child was dimly aware that there were parts of the garden where he was supposed not to go; he had been told he must not go too far from the house, but it was all vague and indistinct in his mind; he had never been shown anything precisely, or told the limits of his wanderings. So he went in joy, with a sense of a sweet mystery, down the alley, and presently found himself in a still brighter and more beautiful garden, full of fruits growing on the ground and on the trees, which he plucked and ate. There was a building, like a pavilion, at the end, of two storeys; and while he wandered thither with his hands full of fruits, he suddenly saw his guardian watching him, with a look he had never seen on his face before, from the upper windows of the garden-house. His first impulse was to run to him, share his joy with him, and ask him why he had not been shown the delicious place; but the fixed and inscrutable look on his guardian's face, neither smiling nor frowning, the stillness of his attitude, first chilled the child and then dismayed him; he flung the fruits on the ground and shivered, and then ran out of the garden. In the evening, when he was with his guardian, he found him as kind and tender as ever. But his guardian said nothing to him about the inner garden of fruits, and the child feared to ask him.

But the next day he felt as though the fruits had given him a new eagerness, a new strength; he hankered after them long, and at last went down the green path again; this time the summer-house seemed empty. So he ate his fill, and this he did for many days. Then one day, when he was bending down to pluck a golden fruit, that lay gem-like on the ground among green leaves, he heard a sudden step behind him, and turning, saw his guardian draw swiftly near, with a look of anger on his face; the next instant he was struck down, again and again; lifted from the ground at last, as in a passion of rage, and flung down bleeding on the earth; and then, without a word, his guardian left him; at first he lay and moaned, but then he crawled away, and back to the house. And there he found the old nurse that tended him, who greeted him with tears and words of comfort, and cared for his hurts. And he asked her the reason of his hard usage, but she could tell him nothing, only saying that it was the master's will, and that he sometimes did thus, though she thought he was merciful at heart.

The child lay sick many days, his guardian still coming to him and sitting with him, with gentle talk and tender offices, till the scene in the garden was like an evil dream; but as his guardian spoke no word of displeasure to the child, the child still feared to ask him, and only strove to forget. And then at last he was well enough to go out a little; but a few days after--he avoided the inner garden now out of a sort of horror--he was sitting in the sun, near the house, feebly trying to amuse himself with one of his old games--how poor they seemed after the fruits of the inner paradise, how he hankered desirously after the further place, with its hot, sweet, fragrant scents, its rich juices!--when again his guardian came upon him in a sudden wrath, and struck him many times, dashing him down to the ground; and again he crept home, and lay long ill, and again his guardian was unwearyingly kind; but now a sort of horror of the man grew up in the mind of the child, and he feared that his strange anger might break out at any moment in a storm of blows.

And at last he was well again; and had half forgotten, in the constant kindness, and even merriment, of his guardian, the horror of the two assaults. He was out and about again; he still shunned the paradise of fruits, but wearying of the accustomed pleasaunce, he went further and passed into the wood; how cool and mysterious it was among the great branching trees! the forest led him onwards; now the sun lay softly upon it, and a stream bickered through a glade, and now the path lay through thickets, which hid the further woodland from view; and now passing out into a more open space, he had a thrill of joy and excitement; there was a herd of strange living creatures grazing there, great deer with branching horns; they moved slowly forwards, cropping the grass, and the child was lost in wonder at the sight. Presently one of them stopped feeding, began to sniff the air, and then looking round, espied the child, and began slowly to approach him. The child had no terror of the great dappled stag, and held out his hand to him, when the great beast suddenly bent his head down, and was upon him with one bound, striking him with his horns, lifting him up, smiting him with his pointed hooves. Presently the child, in his terror and faintness, became aware that the beast had left him, and he began to drag himself, all bruised as he was, along the glade; then he suddenly saw his guardian approaching, and cried out to him, holding out his hands for help and comfort--and his guardian strode straight up to him, and, with the same fierce anger in his face, struck at him again and again, and spurned him with his feet. And then, when he left him, the child at last, with accesses of deadly faintness and pain, crept back home, to be again tended by the old nurse, who wept over him; and the child found that his guardian came to visit him, as kind and gentle as ever. And at last one day when he sate beside the child, holding his hand, stroking his hair, and telling him an old tale to comfort him, the child summoned up courage to ask him a question about the garden and the wood; but at the first word his guardian dropped his hand, and left him without a word.