Chapter IV: Aim Higher

BEYOND the ancient gate, through which Philomel emerged from the grounds belonging to the abbey, spread to the left a tract of moorland. On the further side of this were seen the spire of the church, village roofs, and the shrubbery surrounding the vicarage, to which Philomel Lamb was now bound. To the right lay the pleasant meadow-path which she had pursued when coming from Lady Macaw's on the breaking-up of the little working-party at the Villa of Roses. Philomel paused before crossing the moor, as she saw the stunted figure of Miss Eccles, conspicuous from afar by the long green veil which she wore, coming from the direction of the villa. The elderly lady quickened her pace as much as a slight lameness would permit when she caught sight of the vicar's daughter, and Philomel, turning out of her way, went to meet her old friend.

"My dear, you've just come from the abbey?" cried Miss Eccles, as she limped towards Philomel, panting partly from eagerness to know the result of the visit, partly from breathlessness caused by walking unusually fast.

"Yes, I've seen my uncle," said Philomel.

"And what success have you had?" cried Miss Eccles.

Philomel sighed and shook her head as she answered, "None."

"If Mr. Coffin does not care for what you say, it is not likely that he will care for what Lady Macaw writes," said Miss Eccles with a look of disappointment, glancing down on a pink-tinted and musk-scented note which she held in her hand.

"Are you carrying a letter from Lady Macaw to my uncle?"

"I offered to do it; her servants are busy preparing for to-morrow's archery-meeting, you know. I am sure that I would do anything to help to keep up the school," continued the lady, raising her cotton handkerchief to her heated face, "but there's nothing that a poor old creature like me can do, except heartily wish and pray that those who have the means to do great good may have the heart also."

"Better to have the heart than the means, Miss Eccles," said Philomel kindly.

"It may be, my dear, it may be; but I own that I did feel a little covetous to-day. I've everything I need for myself, but I should like to be able to give something more than good wishes. But I will not detain you, my dear; I promised to take the letter at once."

Philomel pressed her old friend's hand, cased in its neatly-mended cotton glove, for, except upon very rare occasions, kid was a luxury unknown to Miss Eccles. The two then separated, and Philomel watched for a minute the little limping form as it hurried away on an errand of kindness.

"There," thought she, "goes one who is ready to take a servant's office, and to press on tired and heated on a mission which will bring her no credit and scarcely a word of thanks. I sometimes think," reflected Philomel, as she turned to the path across the moor, "that Miss Eccles cares less about self than any one else in our village circle. She is 'content to fill a little space,' which is more than can be said of most of us. I wonder whether in her youth she ever got up little dramas in her own fancy of which she was the heroine, inventing speeches that would never be spoken, and imagining looks that would never be given." Philomel sighed as she pursued her reflections. "What idle folly was mine! How my charity was but a froth covering the surface of vanity—a froth so light, that a breath of satire could blow it away! My uncle's society oppresses and chills me. He has no faith in what is lofty, noble, and generous; he cannot believe in any motive higher than that of covetousness or vanity. He would do with life what he is going to do with his beautiful old abbey—tear away the clinging associations, the blossoming hopes, silence the wild music, and reduce all, if he could, to one tame uniformity of selfish comfort! All charm of poetry destroyed, the beautiful sacrificed to the useful; as if the beautiful had not a use of its own, and as if the heart were not likely to be the happier and the purer for the poetry in it!"

As Philomel approached the cottage on the edge of the moor, she saw that the little scholars of Thwayte were dispersing to their various homes, as their afternoon lessons were just over. But there was no joyful sound from—

"The playful children just let loose from school."

Tidings had already spread through the village that the place where the little ones and their parents before them had learned to fear God and read His Word was to be turned into a public-house, and the children were thronging together in groups, with looks of grave concern that were strange on their chubby faces. Philomel could scarcely bear to think that the drunkard's song might soon be heard within those walls which had so often resounded with hymns.

Without her usual merry smile, the vicar's daughter acknowledged the bobs and curtseys from the various groups that she passed. As she went up to the cottage porch, a little child ran up to her, caught her by the dress, and looked up wistfully at Philomel, with her eyes brimming over with tears.

"What ails you, my little Mary?" said Philomel, tenderly, stooping down to the child.

"Oh, I hopes, I hopes it's not true as teacher is goin' away, and we won't never have no more school! You won't let it be true, will you?" pleaded the child.

It was bitter to Philomel to be able to speak no word of hope to the child, who seemed to have such confidence in the lady's power to help.

"Shall I find Mrs. Arkwright within?" asked Philomel, glancing towards the cottage.

Little Mary nodded her head. "She's a bin a-crying, and so has a lot on us—we be all so sorry as teacher is goin' away." And the tears that had been glistening in the eyes overflowed and ran down the sunburnt cheeks.

With a sigh, Philomel crossed the threshold of the little schoolhouse, and found the mistress not resting after her teaching was over for the day, but busily engaged with her needle, while her foot rocked the cradle of her baby. Two elder children, but lately emerged from infancy, were quietly playing together in a corner of the room. Through the open backdoor, Arkwright, with his eldest son, could be seen digging up potatoes in his garden. The cottage-scene would have presented a picture of domestic happiness, but for the shadow of approaching trouble darkening what had appeared to Philomel one of the most cheerful homes in the world.

Philomel had known Mrs. Arkwright so long, and had so often come to consult her in any difficulties that might arise in the parish that the schoolmistress had become to the vicar's daughter almost like a personal friend. Mrs. Arkwright poured out no complaints—her manner as she greeted the young lady was quiet and placid as ever. But the sight of her pale cheek and reddened eyelids touched the heart of Philomel Lamb.

"I own, miss, that we were both taken aback when the notice to quit came yesterday," Mrs. Arkwright observed, in reply to something said by her guest; "it was so sudden, and we had not looked for it, seeing that all had been going on so well. But John and I have been reminding each other that nothing happens by chance, and that if the school be a blessing to the place, God can find some way of keeping it going still."

"I see none," said Philomel, sadly.

And then she told the quiet listener by whom she was seated of the vicar's futile endeavours, and then of her own unsuccessful attempt to move her uncle to change his intentions.

"But I might as well have wasted my breath in attempting to stir the monument by it," said Philomel, in conclusion. "I wish that I had not gone near him; I might have known that all would be useless."

"And yet, dear Miss Lamb," said Mrs. Arkwright, "surely it was better to fail than not to try. You have the comfort of knowing that you have done what you could to please our heavenly Master, and what is done unto Him can never be quite in vain."

"'Unto Him,'" repeated Philomel, thoughtfully; "I am afraid," she added, looking down, "that not much of what we do, even in charity, can be said to be done 'unto Him.'"

The conversation then took another turn, and ere long, the vicar's daughter rose and quitted the cottage with her spirit calmed by contact with the meek piety and submission of the schoolmistress of Thwayte. Philomel's eyes had almost unconsciously rested on a copy in round text-hand of a rhyme which had lain on the table,—

"'Our good works will be judged—and few will bear the trial—
By our purity of motive and our strength of self-denial.'"

And now the simple lines haunted her mind as she walked on. Was Caleb right, after all; was there no such thing to be found as pure disinterested charity; was the name but borrowed to cover vanity, ostentation, and pride? Philomel thought of Lady Macaw's patronizing beneficence, Lucy Langton's impulsive activity, Delia's sentimental pity, Sir John's free and careless liberality, her own dreamy delicious musings when going on an errand of mercy.

"'Unto Him,'" repeated Philomel to herself; "may not all true charity be concentrated in these two words, as the future oak in the acorn? What, then, is much to which we so readily, so self-complacently give the name? Is it not as the mistletoe, clinging to the tree and yet not of the tree, mingling its leaves with the oak's leaves, yet neither drinking of its sap nor partaking of its nature? The cynic grasped the parasite plant and it yielded to his grasp, but he could not have thrown down the oak. He pulled down the false, because it was false—even he would have reverenced the true.

"What chords did I attempt to touch in the heart of my uncle? I spoke of pleasing his neighbours, gratifying myself, satisfying his own mind, doing good to the village; the deeper notes never were struck; the key-note of all was not struck; I never alluded to the work of giving instruction to the Lord's lambs being a good work done 'unto Him.'"

Philomel looked on the sky, now crimson with the last glow of sunset, and then over the moor to the abbey. Why should she not go back to her uncle, impelled by a higher, holier, purer motive, to plead again the cause of the poor? Caleb Coffin was a worldly, a selfish man; but he was one who showed respect for at least the forms of religion, and who dared affirm that there was no spark of its real life within him? Philomel felt, indeed, a natural repugnance to entering on serious subjects with her uncle. On such subjects, above all she dreaded his sneer. But the vicar's daughter was thoroughly in earnest; she had promised to do her best, and she felt that she, as yet, had not done it. It was at least in no spirit of vanity or emulation that Philomel Lamb, for the second time on that day, entered through the ancient gateway the grounds that enthroned the abbey.