CHAPTER LX: AN OFFERING
Clementina was always ready to accord any reasonable request Florimel could make of her; but her letter lifted such a weight from her heart and life that she would now have done whatever she desired, reasonable or unreasonable, provided only it was honest. She had no difficulty in accepting Florimel's explanation that her sudden disappearance was but a breaking of the social gaol, the flight of the weary bird from its foreign cage back to the country of its nest; and that same morning she called upon Demon. The hound, feared and neglected, was rejoiced to see her, came when she called him, and received her caresses: there was no ground for dreading his company. It was a long journey, but if it had been across a desert instead of through her own country, the hope that lay at the end of it would have made it more than pleasant. She, as well as Lady Bellair, had friends upon the way, but no desire to lengthen the journey or shorten its tedium by visiting them.
The letter would have found her at Wastbeach instead of London, had not the society and instructions of the schoolmaster detained her a willing prisoner to its heat and glare and dust. Him only in all London must she see to bid goodbye. To Camden Town therefore she went that same evening, when his work would be over for the day. As usual now, she was shown into his room – his only one. As usual also, she found him poring over his Greek Testament. The gracious, graceful woman looked lovelily strange in that mean chamber – like an opal in a brass ring.
There was no such contrast between the room and its occupant. His bodily presence was too weak to "stick fiery off" from its surroundings, and to the eye that saw through the bodily presence to the inherent grandeur, that grandeur suggested no discrepancy, being of the kind that lifts everything to its own level, casts the mantle of its own radiance around its surroundings. Still to the eye of love and reverence it was not pleasant to see him in such entourage, and now that Clementina was going to leave him, the ministering spirit that dwelt in the woman was troubled.
"Ah!" he said, and rose as she entered; "this is then the angel of my deliverance!" But with such a smile he did not look as if he had much to be delivered from. "You see," he went on, "old man as I am, and peaceful, the summer will lay hold upon me. She stretches out a long arm into this desert of houses and stones, and sets me longing after the green fields and the living air – it seems dead here – and the face of God – as much as one may behold of the Infinite through the revealing veil of earth and sky and sea. Shall I confess my weakness, my poverty of spirit, my covetousness after the visual? I was even getting a little tired of that glorious God and man lover, Saul of Tarsus – no, not of him, never of him, only of his shadow in his words. Yet perhaps, yes I think so, it is God alone of whom a man can never get tired. Well, no matter; tired I was; when lo! here comes my pupil, with more of God in her face than all the worlds and their skies he ever made!"
"I would my heart were as full of him, too, then, sir!" answered Clementina. "But if I am anything of a comfort to you, I am more than glad, – therefore the more sorry to tell you that I am going to leave you – though for a little while only, I trust."
"You do not take me by surprise, my lady. I have of course been looking forward for some time to my loss and your gain. The world is full of little deaths, deaths of all sorts and sizes, rather let me say. For this one I was prepared. The good summer land calls you to its bosom, and you must go."
"Come with me," cried Clementina, her eyes eager with the light of the sudden thought, while her heart reproached her grievously that only now first had it come to her.
"A man must not leave the most irksome work for the most peaceful pleasure," answered the schoolmaster. "I am able to live – yes, and do my work, without you, my lady," he added with a smile, "though I shall miss you sorely."
"But you do not know where I want you to come," she said.
"What difference can that make, my lady, except indeed in the amount of pleasure to be refused, seeing this is not a matter of choice? I must be with the children whom I have engaged to teach, and whose parents pay me for my labour – not with those who, besides, can do well without me."
"I cannot, sir – not for long, at least."
"What! not with Malcolm to supply my place?"
Clementina blushed, but only like a white rose. She did not turn her head aside; she did not lower their lids to veil the light she felt mount into her eyes; she looked him gently in the face as before, and her aspect of entreaty did not change.
"Ah! do not be unkind, master," she said.
"Unkind!" he repeated. "You know I am not. I have more kindness in my heart than my lips can tell. You do not know, you could not yet imagine the half of what I hope of and for and from you."
"I am going to see Malcolm," she said, with a little sigh. "That is, I am going to visit Lady Lossie at her place in Scotland – your own old home, where so many must love you. – Can't you come? I shall be travelling alone, quite alone, except my servants."
A shadow came over the schoolmaster's face.
"You do not think, my lady, or you would not press me. It pains me that you do not see at once it would be dishonest to go without timely notice to my pupils, and to the public too. But, beyond that quite, I never do anything of myself. I go, not where I wish, but where I seem to be called or sent. I never even wish much – except when I pray to him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. After what he wants to give me I am wishing all day long. I used to build many castles, not without a beauty of their own – that was when I had less understanding: now I leave them to God to build for me – he does it better and they last longer. See now, this very hour, when I needed help – could I have contrived a more lovely annihilation of the monotony that threatened to invade my weary spirit, than this inroad of light in the person of my lady Clementina? Nor will he allow me to get over wearied with vain efforts. I do not think he will keep me here long, for I find I cannot do much for these children. They are but some of his many pagans – not yet quite ready to receive Christianity, I think – not like children with some of the old seeds of the truth buried in them, that want to be turned up nearer to the light. This ministration I take to be more for my good than theirs – a little trial of faith and patience for me – a stony corner of the lovely valley of humiliation to cross. True, I might be happier where I could hear the larks, but I do not know that anywhere have I been more peaceful than in this little room, on which I see you so often cast round your eyes curiously – perhaps pitifully, my lady?"
"It is not at all a fit place for you," said Clementina, with a touch of indignation.
"Softly, my lady – – lest, without knowing it, your love should make you sin! Who set thee, I pray, for a guardian angel over my welfare? I could scarce have a lovelier – true! but where is thy brevet? No, my lady! it is a greater than thou that sets me the bounds of my habitation. Perhaps he may give me a palace one day. If I might choose, it would be the things that belong to a cottage – the whiteness and the greenness and the sweet odours of cleanliness. But the father has decreed for his children that they shall know the thing that is neither their ideal nor his. Who can imagine how in this respect things looked to our Lord when he came and found so little faith on the earth! But, perhaps, my lady, you would not pity my present condition so much, if you had seen the cottage in which I was born, and where my father and my mother loved each other, and died happier than on their wedding day. There I was happy too until their loving ambition decreed that I should be a scholar and a clergyman. Not before then did I ever know anything worthy of the name of trouble. A little cold and a little hunger at times, and not a little restlessness always was all. But then – ah then, my troubles began! Yet God, who bringeth light out of darkness, hath brought good even out of my weakness and presumption and half unconscious falsehood! – When do you go?"
"Tomorrow morning – as I purpose."
"Then God be with thee. He is with thee, only my prayer is that thou mayest know it. He is with me and I know it. He does not find this chamber too mean or dingy or unclean to let me know him near me in it."
"Tell me one thing before I go," said Clementina: "are we not commanded to bear each other's burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ? I read it today."
"Then why ask me?"
"For another question: does not that involve the command to those who have burdens that they should allow others to bear them?"
"Surely, my lady. But I have no burden to let you bear."
"Why should I have everything, and you nothing? – Answer me that?"
"My lady, I have millions more than you, for I have been gathering the crumbs under my master's table for thirty years."
"You are a king," answered Clementina. "But a king needs a handmaiden somewhere in his house: that let me be in yours. No, I will be proud, and assert my rights. I am your daughter. If I am not, why am I here? Do you not remember telling me that the adoption of God meant a closer relation than any other fatherhood, even his own first fatherhood could signify? You cannot cast me off if you would. Why should you be poor when I am rich? – You are poor. You cannot deny it," she concluded with a serious playfulness.
"I will not deny my privileges," said the schoolmaster, with a smile such as might have acknowledged the possession of some exquisite and envied rarity.
"I believe," insisted Clementina, "you are just as poor as the apostle Paul when he sat down to make a tent – or as our Lord himself after he gave up carpentering."
"You are wrong there, my lady. I am not so poor as they must often have been."
"But I don't know how long I may be away, and you may fall ill, or – or – see some – some book you want very much, or"
"I never do," said the schoolmaster.
"What! never see a book you want to have?"
"No; not now. I have my Greek Testament, my Plato, and my Shakspere – and one or two little books besides, whose wisdom I have not yet quite exhausted."
"I can't bear it!" cried Clementina, almost on the point of weeping. "You will not let me near you. You put out an arm as long as the summer's and push me away from you. Let me be your servant."
As she spoke, she rose, and walking softly up to him where he sat kneeled at his knees, and held out suppliantly a little bag of white silk, tied with crimson.
"Take it – father," she said, hesitating, and bringing the word out with an effort; "take your daughter's offering – a poor thing to show her love, but something to ease her heart."
He took it, and weighed it up and down in his hand with an amused smile, but his eyes full of tears. It was heavy. He opened it. A chair was within his reach, he emptied it on the seat of it, and laughed with merry delight as its contents came tumbling out.
"I never saw so much gold in my life, if it were all taken together," he said. "What beautiful stuff it is! But I don't want it, my dear. It would but trouble me." And as he spoke, he began to put it in the bag again. "You will want it for your journey," he said.
"I have plenty in my reticule," she answered. "That is a mere nothing to what I could have tomorrow morning for writing a cheque. I am afraid I am very rich. It is such a shame! But I can't well help it. You must teach me how to become poor. – Tell me true: how much money have you?"
She said this with such an earnest look of simple love that the schoolmaster made haste to rise, that he might conceal his growing emotion.
"Rise, my dear lady," he said, as he rose himself, "and I will show you."
He gave her his hand, and she obeyed, but troubled and disappointed, and so stood looking after him, while he went to a drawer. Thence, searching in a corner of it, he brought a half sovereign, a few shillings, and some coppers, and held them out to her on his hand, with the smile of one who has proved his point.
"There!" he said; "do you think Paul would have stopped preaching to make a tent so long as he had as much as that in his pocket? I shall have more on Saturday, and I always carry a month's rent in my good old watch, for which I never had much use, and now have less than ever."
Clementina had been struggling with herself; now she burst into tears.
"Why, what a misspending of precious sorrow!" exclaimed the schoolmaster. "Do you think because a man has not a gold mine he must die of hunger? I once heard of a sparrow that never had a worm left for the morrow, and died a happy death notwithstanding."
As he spoke he took her handkerchief from her hand and dried her tears with it. But he had enough ado to keep his own back.
"Because I won't take a bagful of gold from you when I don't want it," he went on, "do you think I should let myself starve without coming to you? I promise you I will let you know – come to you if I can, the moment I get too hungry to do my work well, and have no money left. Should I think it a disgrace to take money from you? That would show a poverty of spirit such as I hope never to fall into. My sole reason for refusing it now is that I do not need it."
But for all his loving words and assurances Clementina could not stay her tears. She was not ready to weep, but now her eyes were as a fountain.
"See, then, for your tears are hard to bear, my daughter," he said, "I will take one of these golden ministers, and if it has flown from me ere you come, seeing that, like the raven, it will not return if once I let it go, I will ask you for another. It may be God's will that you should feed me for a time."
"Like one of Elijah's ravens," said Clementina, with an attempted laugh that was really a sob.
"Like a dove whose wings are covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold," said the schoolmaster.
A moment of silence followed, broken only by Clementina's failures in quieting herself.
"To me," he resumed, "the sweetest fountain of money is the hand of love, but a man has no right to take it from that fountain except he is in want of it. I am not. True, I go somewhat bare, my lady; but what is that when my Lord would have it so?"
He opened again the bag, and slowly, reverentially indeed, drew from it one of the new sovereigns with which it was filled. He put it into a waistcoat pocket, and laid the bag on the table.
"But your clothes are shabby, sir," said Clementina, looking at him with a sad little shake of the head.
"Are they?" he returned, and looked down at his lower garments, reddening and anxious. "– I did not think they were more than a little rubbed, but they shine somewhat," he said. "– They are indeed polished by use," he went on, with a troubled little laugh; "but they have no holes yet – at least none that are visible," he corrected. "If you tell me, my lady, if you honestly tell me that my garments" – and he looked at the sleeve of his coat, drawing back his head from it to see it better – "are unsightly, I will take of your money and buy me a new suit."
Over his coat sleeve he regarded her, questioning.
"Everything about you is beautiful!" she burst out "You want nothing but a body that lets the light through!"
She took the hand still raised in his survey of his sleeve, pressed it to her lips, and walked, with even more than her wonted state, slowly from the room. He took the bag of gold from the table, and followed her down the stair. Her chariot was waiting her at the door. He handed her in, and laid the bag on the little seat in front.
"Will you tell him to drive home," she said, with a firm voice, and a smile which if anyone care to understand, let him read Spenser's fortieth sonnet. And so they parted. The coachman took the queer shabby un-London-like man for a fortune teller his lady was in the habit of consulting, and paid homage to his power with the handle of his whip as he drove away. The schoolmaster returned to his room, not to his Plato, not even to Saul of Tarsus, but to the Lord himself.
CHAPTER LXI: THOUGHTS
When Malcolm took Kelpie to her stall the night of the arrival of Lady Bellair and her nephew, he was rushed upon by Demon, and nearly prostrated between his immoderate welcome and the startled rearing of the mare. The hound had arrived a couple of hours before, while Malcolm was out. He wondered he had not seen him with the carriage he had passed, never suspecting he had had another conductress, or dreaming what his presence there signified for him.
I have not said much concerning Malcolm's feelings with regard to Lady Clementina, but all this time the sense of her existence had been like an atmosphere surrounding and pervading his thought. He saw in her the promise of all he could desire to see in woman. His love was not of the blind little boy sort, but of a deeper, more exacting, keen eyed kind, that sees faults where even a true mother will not, so jealous is it of the perfection of the beloved.
But one thing was plain even to this seraphic dragon that dwelt sleepless in him, and there was eternal content in the thought, that such a woman, once started on the right way, would soon leave fault and weakness behind her, and become as one of the grand women of old, whose religion was simply what religion is – life – neither more nor less than life. She would be a saint without knowing it, the only grand kind of sainthood.
Whoever can think of religion as an addition to life, however glorious – a starry crown, say, set upon the head of humanity, is not yet the least in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever thinks of life as a something that could be without religion, is in deathly ignorance of both. Life and religion are one, or neither is anything: I will not say neither is growing to be anything. Religion is no way of life, no show of life, no observance of any sort. It is neither the food nor the medicine of being. It is life essential. To think otherwise is as if a man should pride himself on his honesty, or his parental kindness, or hold up his head amongst men because he never killed one: were he less than honest or kind or free from blood, he would yet think something of himself! The man to whom virtue is but the ornament of character, something over and above, not essential to it, is not yet a man.
If I say then, that Malcolm was always thinking about Lady Clementina when he was not thinking about something he had to think about, have I not said nearly enough on the matter? Should I ever dream of attempting to set forth what love is, in such a man for such a woman? There are comparatively few that have more than the glimmer of a notion of what love means. God only knows how grandly, how passionately yet how calmly, how divinely the man and the woman he has made, might, may, shall love each other. One thing only I will dare to say: that the love that belonged to Malcolm's nature was one through the very nerves of which the love of God must rise and flow and return, as its essential life. If any man think that such a love could no longer be the love of the man for the woman, he knows his own nature, and that of the woman he pretends or thinks he adores, but in the darkest of glasses.
Malcolm's lowly idea of himself did not at all interfere with his loving Clementina, for at first his love was entirely dissociated from any thought of hers. When the idea – the mere idea of her loving him presented itself, from whatever quarter suggested, he turned from it with shame and self reproof: the thought was in its own nature too unfit! That splendour regard him!
From a social point of view there was of course little presumption in it. The Marquis of Lossie bore a name that might pair itself with any in the land; but Malcolm did not yet feel that the title made much difference to the fisherman. He was what he was, and that was something very lowly indeed. Yet the thought would at times dawn up from somewhere in the infinite matrix of thought, that perhaps, if he went to college, and graduated, and dressed like a gentleman, and did everything as gentlemen do, in short, claimed his rank, and lived as a marquis should, as well as a fisherman might, – then – then – was it not – might it not be within the bounds of possibility – just within them – that the great hearted, generous, liberty loving Lady Clementina, groom as he had been, menial as he had heard himself called, and as, ere yet he knew his birth, he had laughed to hear, knowing that his service was true, – that she, who despised nothing human, would be neither disgusted nor contemptuous nor wrathful, if, from a great way off, at an awful remove of humility and worship, he were to wake in her a surmise that he dared feel towards her as he had never felt and never could feel towards any other?
For would it not be altogether counter to the principles he had so often heard her announce and defend, to despise him because he had earned his bread by doing honourable work – work hearty, and up to the worth of his wages? Was she one to say and not see – to opine and not believe? or was she one to hold and not practise – to believe for the heart and not for the hand – to say I go, and not go – I love, and not help? If such she were, then there were for him no further searchings of the heart upon her account; he could but hold up her name in the common prayer for all men, only praying besides not to dream about her when he slept.
At length, such thoughts rising again and again, and ever accompanied by such reflections concerning the truth of her character, and by the growing certainty that her convictions were the souls of actions to be born them, his daring of belief in her strengthened until he began to think that perhaps it would be neither his early history, nor his defective education, nor his clumsiness, that would prevent her from listening to such words wherewith he burned to throw open the gates of his world, and pray her to enter and sit upon its loftiest throne – its loftiest throne but one. And with the thought he felt as if he must run to her, calling aloud that he was the Marquis of Lossie, and throw himself at her feet.
But the wheels of his thought chariot, self moved, were rushing, and here was no goal at which to halt or turn! – for, feeling thus, where was his faith in her principles? How now was he treating the truth of her nature? where now were his convictions of the genuineness of her professions? Where were those principles, that truth, those professions, if after all she would listen to a marquis and would not listen to a groom? To suppose such a thing was to wrong her grievously. To herald his suit with his rank would be to insult her, declaring that he regarded her theories of humanity as wordy froth. And what a chance of proving her truth would he not deprive her of, if, as he approached her, he called on the marquis to supplement the man! – But what then was the man, fisherman or marquis, to dare even himself to such a glory as the Lady Clementina? – This much of a man at least, answered his waking dignity, that he could not condescend to be accepted as Malcolm, Marquis of Lossie, knowing he would have been rejected as Malcolm MacPhail, fisherman and groom.
Accepted as marquis, he would for ever be haunted with the channering question whether she would have accepted him as groom? And if in his pain he were one day to utter it, and she in her honesty were to confess she would not, must she not then fall prone from her pedestal in his imagination? Could he then, in love for the woman herself condescend as marquis to marry one who might not have married him as any something else he could honestly have been, under the all enlightening sun: but again! was that fair to her yet? Might she not see in the marquis the truth and worth which the blinding falsehoods of society prevented her from seeing in the groom? Might not a lady – he tried to think of a lady in the abstract – might not a lady, in marrying a marquis, a lady to whom from her own position a marquis was just a man on the level, marry in him the man he was, and not the marquis he seemed? Most certainly, he answered: he must not be unfair. – Not the less however did he shrink from the thought of taking her prisoner under the shield of his marquisate, beclouding her nobility, and depriving her of the rare chance of shining forth as the sun in the splendour of womanly truth. No; he would choose the greater risk of losing her, for the chance of winning her greater.
So far Malcolm got with his theories; but the moment he began to think in the least practically, he recoiled altogether from the presumption. Under no circumstances could he ever have the courage to approach Lady Clementina with a thought of himself in his mind. How could he have dared even to raise her imagined eidolon for his thoughts to deal withal. She had never shown him personal favour. He could not tell whether she had listened to what he had tried to lay before her. He did not know that she had gone to hear his master; Florimel had never referred to their visit to Hope Chapel; his surprise would have equalled his delight at the news that she had already become as a daughter to the schoolmaster.
And what had been Clementina's thoughts since learning that Florimel had not run away with her groom? It were hard to say with completeness. Accuracy however may not be equally unattainable. Her first feeling was an utterly inarticulate, undefined pleasure that Malcolm was free to be thought about. She was clear next that it would be matter for honest rejoicing if the truest man she had ever met except his master, was not going to marry such an unreality as Florimel – one concerning whom, as things had been going of late, it was impossible to say that she was not more likely to turn to evil than to good.
Clementina with all her generosity could not help being doubtful of a woman who could make a companion of such a man as Liftore, a man to whom every individual particle of Clementina's nature seemed for itself to object. But she was not yet past befriending.
Then she began to grow more curious about Malcolm. She had already much real knowledge of him, gathered both from himself and from Mr Graham; – as to what went to make the man, she knew him indeed, not thoroughly, but well; and just therefore, she said to herself, there were some points in his history and condition concerning which she had curiosity. The principal of these was whether he might not be engaged to some young woman in his own station of life. It was not merely possible, but was it likely he could have escaped it? In the lower ranks of society, men married younger – they had no false aims to prevent them that implied earlier engagements. On the other hand, was it likely that in a fishing village there would be any choice of girls who could understand him when he talked about Plato and the New Testament? If there was one however, that might be – worse – Yes, worse; she accepted the word. Neither was it absolutely necessary in a wife that she should understand more of a husband than his heart. Many learned men had had mere housekeepers for wives, and been satisfied, at least never complained.
And what did she know about the fishers, men or women – there were none at Wastbeach? For anything she knew to the contrary, they might all be philosophers together, and a fitting match for Malcolm might be far more easy to find amongst them than in the society to which she herself belonged, where in truth the philosophical element was rare enough. Then arose in her mind, she could not have told how, the vision, half logical, half pictorial, of a whole family of brave, believing, daring, saving fisher folk, father, mother, boys and girls, each sacrificing to the rest, each sacrificed to by all, and all devoted to their neighbours.
Grand it was and blissful, and the borders of the great sea alone seemed fit place for such beings amphibious of time and eternity! Their very toils and dangers were but additional atmospheres to press their souls together! It was glorious! Why had she been born an earl's daughter, – never to look a danger in the face – never to have a chance of a true life – that is, a grand, simple, noble one? – Who then denied her the chance? Had she no power to order her own steps, to determine her own being? Was she nailed to her rank? Or who was there that could part her from it? Was she a prisoner in the dungeons of the House of Pride?
When the gates of paradise closed behind Adam and Eve, they had this consolation left, that "the world was all before them where to choose." Was she not a free woman – without even a guardian to trouble her with advice? She had no excuse to act ignobly! – But had she any for being unmaidenly? – Would it then be – would it be a very unmaidenly thing if? The rest of the sentence did not take even the shape of words. But she answered it nevertheless in the words: "Not so unmaidenly as presumptuous." And alas there was little hope that he would ever presume to? He was such a modest youth with all his directness and fearlessness! If he had no respect for rank, – and that was – yes, she would say the word, hopeful – he had, on the other hand, the profoundest respect for the human, and she could not tell how that might, in the individual matter, operate.
Then she fell a-thinking of the difference between Malcolm and any other servant she had ever known. She hated the servile. She knew that it was false as well as low: she had not got so far as to see that it was low through its being false. She knew that most servants, while they spoke with the appearance of respect in presence, altered their tone entirely when beyond the circle of the eye – theirs was eye service – they were men pleasers – they were servile. She had overheard her maid speak of her as Lady Clem, and that not without a streak of contempt in the tone.