CHAPTER XXXIV.
CATCH YOUR HORSE
When Cosmo was left alone in his room, with orders from the doctor to put himself to bed, he sank wearily on a chair that stood with its back to the light; then first his eye fell upon the stick he carried. Joan had brought him his stick when he was ready to go into the garden, but this was not that stick. He must have caught it up somewhere instead of his own! Where could it have been? He had no recollection either of laying down his own, or of thinking he took it again. After a time he recalled this much, that, in the horrible room they had last left, at the moment when Joan cried out because of the sound of her brother's approach, he was walking to the closet to look at something in it that had attracted his attention—seeming in the dusk, from its dull shine, the hilt of a sword. The handle of the walking stick he now held must be that very thing! But he could not tell whether he had caught it up with any idea of defence, or simply in the dark his hand had come into contact with it and instinctively closed upon it, he could not even conjecture. But why should he have troubled his head so about a stick? Because this was a notably peculiar one: the handle of that stick was in form a repetition of the golden horse that had carried him to the university! Their common shape was so peculiar, that not only was there no mistaking it, but no one who saw the two could have avoided the conviction that they had a common origin, and if any significance, then a common one. There was an important difference however: even if in substance this were the same as the other, it could yet be of small value: the stick thus capped was a bamboo, rather thick, but handle and all, very light.
Proceeding to examine it, Cosmo found that every joint was double-mounted and could be unscrewed. Of joints there were three, each forming a small box. In the top one were a few grains of snuff, in the middle one a little of something that looked like gold dust, and the third smelt of opium. The top of the cane had a cap of silver, with a screw that went into the lower part of the horse, which thus made a sort of crutch-handle to the stick. He had screwed off, and was proceeding to replace this handle, when his eye was arrested, his heart seemed to stand still, and the old captain's foolish rime came rushing into his head. He started from his chair, took the thing to the window, and there stood regarding it fixedly. Beyond a doubt this was his great grand-uncle's, the auld captain's, stick, the only thing missed when his body was found! but whence such an assured conviction? and why did the old captain's rime, whose application to the golden horse his father and he had rejected, return at sight of this one, so much its inferior? In a word, whence the eagerness of curiosity that now possessed Cosmo?
In turning the handle upside down, he saw that from one of the horse's delicately finished shoes, a nail was missing, and its hole left empty. It was a hind shoe too!
"Caitch yer naig, an' pu' his tail;
In his bin' heel caw a nail!"
"I do believe," he said to himself, "this is the horse that was in the old villain's head every time he uttered the absurd rime!"
There must then be in the cane a secret, through which possibly the old man had overreached himself! Had that secret, whatever it was, been discovered, or did it remain for him now to discover?
A passion of curiosity seized him, but something held him back. What was it? The stick was not his property; any discovery concerning or by means of it, ought to be made with the consent and in the presence of the owner of it—her to whom the old lord had left his personal property!
And now Cosmo had to go through an experience as strange as it was new, for, in general of a quietly expectant disposition, he had now such a burning desire to conquer the secret of the stick, as appeared to him to savour of POSSESSION. It was so unlike himself, that he was both angry and ashamed. He set it aside and went to bed. But the haunting eagerness would not let him rest; it kept him tossing from side to side, and was mingled with strangest fears lest the stick should vanish as mysteriously as it had come—lest when he woke he should find it had been carried away. He got out of bed, unscrewed the horse, and placed it under his pillow. But there it tormented him like an aching spot. It went on drawing him, tempting him, mocking him. He could not keep his hands from it. A hundred times he resolved he would not touch it again, and of course kept his resolution so long as he thought of it; but the moment he forgot it, which he did repeatedly in wondering why Joan did not come, the horse would be in his hand. Every time he woke from a moment's sleep, he found it in his hand.
On his return from accompanying Lady Joan, Jermyn came to him, found him feverish, and prescribed for him. Disappointed that Joan was gone without seeing him, his curiosity so entirely left him that he could not recall what it was like, and never imagined its possible return. Nor did it reappear so long as he was awake, but all through his dreams the old captain kept reminding him that the stick was his own. "Do it; do it; don't put off," he kept saying; but as often as Cosmo asked him what, he could never hear his reply, and would wake yet again with the horse in his hand. In the morning he screwed it on the stick again, and set it by his bed-side.
CHAPTER XXXV.
PULL HIS TAIL
About noon, when both the doctors happened to be out, Joan came to see him, and was more like her former self than she had been for many days. Hardly was she seated when he took the stick, and said,
"Did you ever see that before, Joan?"
"Do you remember showing me a horse just like that one, only larger?" she returned. "It was in the drawing-room."
"Quite well," he answered.
"It made me think of this," she continued, "which I had often seen in that same closet where I suppose you found it yesterday."
Cosmo unscrewed the joints and showed her the different boxes.
"There's nothing in them," he said; "but I suspect there is something about this stick more than we can tell. Do you remember the silly Scotch rime I repeated the other day, when you told me I had been talking poetry in my sleep?"
"Yes, very well," she answered.
"Those are words an uncle of my father, whom you may have heard of as the old captain, used to repeat very often."—At this Joan's face turned pale, but her back was to the light, and he did not see it.—"I will say them presently in English, that you may know what sense there may be in the foolishness of them. Now I must tell you that I am all but certain this stick once belonged to that same great uncle of mine—how it came into your father's possession I cannot say—and last night, as I was looking at it, I saw something that made me nearly sure this is the horse, insignificant as it looks, that was in my uncle's head when he repeated the rime. But Iwould do nothing without you."
"How kind of you, Cosmo!"
"Not kind; I had no right; the stick is yours."
"How can that be, if it belonged to your great uncle?" said Joan, casting down her eyes.
"Because it was more than fifty years in your father's possession, and he left it to you. Besides, I cannot be absolutely certain it is the same."
"Then I give it to you, Cosmo."
"I will not accept it, Joan—at least before you know what it is you want to give me.—And now for this foolish rime—in English!"
"Catch your horse and pull his tail;
In his hind heel drive a nail;
Pull his ears from one another:
Stand up and call the king your brother!"
"What's to come of it, I know no more than you do, Joan," continued Cosmo; "but if you will allow me, I will do with this horse what the rime says, and if they belong to each other, we shall soon see."
"Do whatever you please, Cosmo," returned Joan, with a tremble in her voice.
Cosmo began to screw off the top of the stick. Joan left her chair, drew nearer to the bed, and presently sat down on the edge of it, gazing with great wide eyes. She was more moved than Cosmo; there was a shadow of horror in her look; she dreaded some frightful revelation. Her father's habit of muttering his thoughts aloud, had given her many things to hear, although not many to understand. When the horse was free in Cosmo's hand, he set the stick aside, looked up, and said,
"The first direction the rime gives, is to pull his tail." With that he pulled the horse's tail—of silver, apparently, like the rest of him—pulled it hard; but it seemed of a piece with his body, and there was no visible result. The first shadow of approaching disappointment came creeping over him, but he looked up at Joan, and smiled as he said,
"He doesn't seem to mind that! We'll try the next thing—which is, to drive a nail in his hind heel.—Now look here, Joan! Here, in one of his hind shoes, is a hole that looks as if one of the nails had come out! That is what struck me, and brought the rime into my head! But how drive a nail into such a hole as that?"
"Perhaps a tack would go in," said Joan, rising. "I shall pull one out of the carpet."
"A tack would be much too large, I think," said Cosmo. "Perhaps a brad out of the gimp of that chair would do.—Or, stay, I know! Have you got a hair-pin you could give me?"
Joan sat down again on the bed, took off her bonnet, and searching in her thick hair soon found one. Cosmo took it eagerly, and applied it to the hole in the shoe. Nothing the least larger would have gone in. He pushed it gently, then a little harder—felt as if something yielded a little, returning his pressure, and pushed a little harder still. Something gave way, and a low noise followed, as of a watch running down. The two faces looked at each other, one red, and one pale. The sound ceased. They waited a little, in almost breathless silence. Nothing followed.
"Now," said Cosmo, "for the last thing!"
"Not quite the last," returned Joan, with what was nearly an hysterical laugh, trying to shake off the fear that grew upon her; "the last thing is to stand up and call the king your brother."
"That much, as non-essential, I daresay we shall omit," replied Cosmo.—"The next then is, to pull his ears from each other."
He took hold of one of the tiny ears betwixt the finger and thumb of each hand, and pulled. The body of the horse came asunder, divided down the back, and showed inside of it a piece of paper. Cosmo took it out. It was crushed, rather than folded, round something soft. He handed it to Joan.
"It is your turn now, Joan," he said; "you open it. I have done my part."
Cosmo's eyes were now fixed on the movements of Joan's fingers undoing the little parcel, as hers had been on his while he was finding it. Within the paper was a piece of cotton wool. Joan dropped the paper, and unfolded the wool. Bedded in the middle of that were two rings. The eyes of Cosmo fixed themselves on one of them—the eyes of Joan upon the other. In the one Cosmo recognized a large diamond; in the other Joan saw a dark stone engraved with the Mergwain arms.
"This is a very valuable diamond," said Cosmo, looking closely at it.
"Then that shall be your share, Cosmo," returned Joan. "I will keep this if you don't mind."
"What have you got?" asked Cosmo.
"My father's signet-ring, I believe," she answered. "I have often heard him—bemoan the loss of it."
Lord Mergwain's ring in the old captain's stick! Things began to put themselves together in Cosmo's mind. He lay thinking.
The old captain had won these rings from the young lord and put them for safety in the horse; Borland suspected, probably charged him with false play; they fought, and his lordship carried away the stick to recover his own; but had failed to find the rings, taking the boxes in the bamboo for all there was of stowage in it.
It was by degrees, however, that this theory formed itself in his mind; now he saw only a glimmer of it here and there.
In the meantime he was not a little disappointed. Was this all the great mystery of the berimed horse? It was as if a supposed opal had burst, and proved but a soap-bubble!
Joan sat silent, looking at the signet-ring, and the tears came slowly in her eyes.
"I MAY keep this ring, may I not, Cosmo?" she said.
"My dear Joan!" exclaimed Cosmo, "the ring is not mine to give anybody, but if you will give me the stick, I shall be greatly obliged to you."
"I will give it you on one condition, Cosmo," answered Joan, "—that you take the ring as well. I do not care about rings."
"I do," answered Cosmo; "but sooner than take this from you, Joan, I would part with the hope of ever seeing you again. Why, dear Joan, you don't know what this diamond is worth!—and you have no money!"
"Neither have you," retorted Joan. "—What is the thing worth?"
"I do not like to say lest I should be wrong. If I could weigh it, I should be better able to tell you. But its worth must anyhow be, I think—somewhere towards two hundred pounds."
"Then take it, Cosmo. Or if you won't have it, give it to your father, with my dear love."
"My father would say to me—'How could you bring it, Cosmo!' But I will not forget to give him the message. That he will be delighted to have."
"But, Cosmo! it is of no use to me. How could I get the money you speak of for it? If I were to make an attempt of the kind, my brother would be sure to hear of it. It would be better to give it him at once."
"That difficulty is easily got over," answered Cosmo. "When I go, I will take it with me; I know where to get a fair price for it—not always easy for anything; I will send you the money, and you will be quite rich for a little while."
"My brother opens all my letters," replied Joan. "I don't think he cares to read them, but he sees who they are from."
"Do you have many letters, Joan?"
"Not many. Perhaps about one a month, or so."
"I could send it to Dr. Jermyn."
Joan hesitated a moment, but did not object. The next instant they heard the doctor's step at the door, and his hand on the lock. Joan rose hastily, caught up her bonnet, and sat down a little way off. Cosmo drew the ring and the pieces of the horse under the bed-clothes.
Jermyn cast a keen glance on the two as he entered, took for confusion the remains of excitement, and said to himself he must make haste. He felt Cosmo's pulse, and pronounced him feverish, then, turning to Joan, said he must not talk, for he had not got over yesterday; it might be awkward if he had a relapse. Joan rose at once, and took her leave, saying she would come and see him the next morning. Jermyn went down with her, and sent Cosmo a draught.
When he had taken it, he felt inclined to sleep, and turned himself from the light. But the stick, which was leaning against the head of the bed, slipped, and fell on a part of the floor where there was no carpet; the noise startled and roused him, and the thought came that he had better first of all secure the ring—for which purpose undoubtedly there could be no better place than the horse! There, however, the piece of cotton wool would again be necessary, for without it the ring would rattle. He put the ring in the heart of it, replaced both in the horse, and set about discovering how to close it again.
This puzzled him not a little. Spring nor notch, nor any other means of attachment between the two halves of the animal, could he find. But at length he noted that the tail had slipped a little way out, and was loose; and experimenting with it, by and by discovered that by holding the parts together, and winding the tail round and round, the horse—how, he could not tell—was restored to its former apparent solidity.
And now where would the horse be safest? Clearly in its own place on the stick. He got out of bed therefore to pick the stick up, and in so doing saw on the carpet the piece of paper which had been round the cotton. This he picked up also, and getting again into bed, had begun to replace the handle of the bamboo, when his eyes fell again on the piece of paper, and he caught sight of crossing lines on it, which looked like part of a diagram of some sort. He smoothed it out, and saw indeed a drawing, but one quite unintelligible to him. It must be a sketch or lineation of something—but of what? or of what kind of thing? It might be of the fields constituting a property; it might be of the stones in a wall; it might be of an irregular mosaic; or perhaps it might be only a school-boy's exercise in trigonometry for land-measuring. It must mean something; but it could hardly mean anything of consequence to anybody! Still it had been the old captain's probably—or perhaps the old lord's: he would replace it also where he had found it. Once more he unscrewed the horse from the stick, opened it with Joan's hair-pin, placed the paper in it, closed all up again, and lay down, glad that Joan had got such a ring, but thinking the old captain had made a good deal of fuss about a small matter. He fell fast asleep, slept soundly, and woke much better.
In the evening came the doctor, and spent the whole of it with him, interesting and pleasing him more than ever, and displaying one after another traits of character which Cosmo, more than prejudiced in his favour already, took for additional proofs of an altogether exceptional greatness of character and aim. Nor am I capable of determining how much or how little Jermyn may have deceived himself in regard of the same.
Now that Joan had this ring, and his personal attachment to the doctor had so greatly increased, Cosmo found himself able to revert to the offer Jermyn once made of lending him a little money, which he had then declined. He would take the ring to Mr. Burns on his way home, and then ask Joan to repay Dr. Jermyn out of what he sent her for it. He told Jermyn therefore, as he sat by his bed-side, that he found himself obliged after all to accept the said generous proposal, but would return the money before he got quite home.
The doctor smiled, with reasons for satisfaction more than Cosmo knew, and taking out his pocket-book, said, as he opened it,
"I have just cashed a cheque, fortunately, so you had better have the money at once.—Don't bother yourself about it," he added, as he handed him the notes; "there is no hurry. I know it is safe."
"This is too much," said Cosmo.
"Never mind; it is better to have too much than too little; it will be just as easy to repay."
Cosmo thanked him, and put the money under his pillow. The doctor bade him good night, and left him.
The moment he was alone, a longing greater than he had ever yet felt, arose in his heart to see his father. The first hour he was able to travel, he would set out for home! His camera obscura haunted with flashing water and speedwells and daisies and horse-gowans, he fell fast asleep, and dreamed that his father and he were defending the castle from a great company of pirates, with the old captain at the head of them.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE THICK DARKNESS
The next day he was still better, and could not think why the doctor would not let him get up. As the day went on, he wondered yet more why Joan did not come to see him. Not once did the thought cross him that it was the doctor's doing. If it had, he would but have taken it for a precaution—as indeed it was, for the doctor's sake, not his. Jermyn would have as little intercourse between them as might be, till he should have sprung his spiritual mine. But he did all he could to prevent him from missing her, and the same night opened all his heart to Cosmo—that is, all the show-part of it.
In terms extravagant, which he seemed to use because he could not repress them, he told his frozen listener that his whole nature, heart and soul, had been for years bound up in Lady Joan; that he had again and again been tempted to deliver himself by death from despair; that if he had to live without her, he would be of no use in the world, but would cease to care for anything. He begged therefore his friend Cosmo Warlock, seeing he stood so well with the lady, to speak what he honestly could in his behalf; for if she would not favour him, he could no longer endure life. His had never been over full, for he had had a hard youth, in which he had often been driven to doubt whether there was indeed a God that cared how his creatures went on. He must not say all he felt, but life, he repeated, would be no longer worth leading without at least some show of favour from Lady Joan.
At any former time, such words would have been sufficient to displace Jermyn from the pedestal on which Cosmo had set him. What! if all the ladies in the world should forsake him, was not God yet the all in all? But now as he lay shivering, the words entering his ears seemed to issue from his soul. He listened like one whom the first sting has paralyzed, but who feels the more every succeeding invasion of death. It was a silent, yet a mortal struggle. He held down his heart like a wild beast, which, if he let it up for one moment, would fly at his throat and strangle him. Nor could the practiced eye of the doctor fail to perceive what was going on in him. He only said to himself—"Better him than me! He is young and will get over it better than I should." He read nobility and self-abnegation in every shadow that crossed the youth's countenance, telling of the hail mingled with fire that swept through his universe; and said to himself that all was on his side, that he had not miscalculated a hair's-breadth. He saw at the same time Cosmo's heroic efforts to hide his sufferings, and left him to imagine himself successful. But how Cosmo longed for his departure, that he might in peace despair!—for such seemed to himself his desire for solitude.
What is it in suffering that makes man and beast long for loneliness? I think it is an unknown something, more than self, calling out of the solitude—"Come to me!—Come!" How little of the tenderness our human souls need, and after which consciously or unconsciously they hunger, do we give or receive! The cry of the hurt heart for solitude, seems to me the call of the heart of God—changed by the echo of the tiny hollows of the heart of his creature—"Come out from among them: come to me, and I will give you rest!" He alone can give us the repose of love, the peace after which our nature yearns.
Hurt by the selfishness and greed of men, to escape from which we must needs go out of the world, worse hurt by our own indignation at their wrong, and our lack of patience under it, we are his creatures and his care still. The RIGHT he claims as his affair, and he will see it done; but the wrong is by us a thousand times well suffered, if it but drive us to him, that we may learn he is indeed our very lover.
That was a terrible night for Cosmo—a night billowy with black fire. It reminded him afterwards of nothing so much as that word of the Lord—THE POWER OF DARKNESS. It was not merely darkness with no light in it, but darkness alive and operative. He had hardly dared suspect the nature, and only now knew the force, and was about to prove the strength of the love with which he loved Joan. Great things may be foreseen, but they cannot be known until they arrive. His illness had been ripening him to this possibility of loss and suffering. His heart was now in blossom: for that some hearts must break;—I may not say in FULL blossom, for what the full blossom of the human heart is, the holiest saint with the mightiest imagination cannot know—he can but see it shine from afar.
It was a severe duty that was now required of him—I do not mean the performance of the final request the doctor had made—that Cosmo had forgotten, neither could have attempted with honesty; for the emotion he could not but betray, would have pleaded for himself, and not for his friend; it was enough that he must yield the lady of his dreams, become the lady as well of his waking and hoping soul. Perhaps she did not love Jermyn—he could not tell; but Jermyn was his friend and had trusted in him, confessing that his soul was bound up in the lady; one of them must go to the torture chamber, and when the QUESTION lay between him and another, Cosmo knew for which it must be. He alone was in Cosmo's hands; his own self was all he held and had power over, all he could offer, could yield. Mr. Simon had taught him that, as a mother gives her children money to give, so God gives his children SELVES, with their wishes and choices, that they may have the true offering to lay upon the true altar; for on that altar nothing else will burn than SELVES.
"Very hard! A tyrannical theory!" says my reader? So will it forever appear to the man who has neither the courage nor the sense of law to enable him to obey. But that man shall be the eternal slave who says to Duty I WILL NOT. Nor do I care to tell such a man of the "THOUSAND FOLD"—of the truth concerning that altar, that it is indeed the nest of God's heart, in which the poor, unsightly, unfledged offering shall lie, until they come to shape and loveliness, and wings grow upon them to bear them back to us divinely precious. Cosmo THOUGHT none of all this now—it had vanished from his consciousness, but was present in his life—that is, in his action: he did not feel, he DID it all—did it even when nothing seemed worth doing.
How much greater a man than he was Jermyn! How much more worthy of the love of a woman like Joan! How good he had been to him! What a horrible thing it would be if Jermyn had saved his life that he might destroy Jermyn's! Perhaps Joan might have come one day to love him; but in the meantime how miserable she was with her brother, and when could he have delivered her! while here was one, and a far better than he, who could, the moment she consented, take her to a house of her own where she would be a free woman! For him to come in the way, would be to put his hand also to the rack on which the life of Joan lay stretched!
Again I say I do not mean that all this passed consciously through the mind of Cosmo during that fearful night. His suffering was too intense, and any doubt concerning duty too far from him, to allow of anything that could be called thought; but such were the fundamental facts that lay below his unselfquestioned resolve—such was the soil in which grew the fruits, that is, the deeds, the outcome of his nature. For himself, the darkness billowed and rolled about him, and life was a frightful thing.
For where was God this awful time? Nowhere within the ken of the banished youth. In his own feeling Cosmo was outside the city of life—not even among the dogs—outside with bare nothingness—cold negation. Alas for him who had so lately offered to help another to pray, thinking the hour would never come to him when he could not pray! It had COME! He did not try to pray. The thought of prayer did not wake in him! Let no one say he was punished for his overconfidence—for his presumption! There was no presumption in the matter; there was only ignorance. He had not learned—nor has any one learned more than in part—what awful possibilities lie the existence we call WE. He had but spoken from what he knew—that hitherto life for him had seemed inseparable from prayer to his Father. And was it separable? Surely not. He could not pray, true—but neither was he alive. To live, one must chose to live. He was dead with a death that was heavy upon him. There is a far worse death—the death that is content and suffers nothing; but annihilation is not death—is nothing like it. Cosmo's condition had no evil in it—only a ghastly imperfection—an abyssmal lack—an exhaustion at the very roots of being. God seemed away, as he could never be and be God. But every commonest day of his life, he who would be a live child of the living has to fight with the God-denying look of things, and believe that in spite of that look, seeming ever to assert that God has nothing to do with them, God has his own way—the best, the only, the live way, of being in everything, and taking his own pure, saving will in them; and now for a season Cosmo had fallen in the fight, and God seemed gone, and THINGS rushed in upon him and overwhelmed him. It was death. He did not yet know it—but it was not the loss of Joan, but the seeming loss of his God, that hollowed the last depth of his misery. But that is of all things the surest to pass; for God changing not, his life must destroy every false show of him. Cosmo was now one of those holy children who are bound hand and foot in the furnace, until the fire shall have consumed their bonds that they may pace their prison. Stifled with the smoke and the glow, he must yet for a time lie helpless; not yet could he lift up his voice and call upon the ice and the cold, the frost and the snow to bless the Lord, to praise and exalt him forever. But God was not far from him. Feelings are not scientific instruments for that which surrounds them; they but speak of themselves when they say, "I am cold; I am dark." Perhaps the final perfection will be when our faith is utterly and absolutely independent of our feelings. I dare to imagine this the final victory of our Lord, when he followed the cry of WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME? with the words, FATHER, INTO THY HANDS I COMMEND MY SPIRIT.
Shall we then bemoan any darkness? Shall we not rather gird up our strength to encounter it, that we too from our side may break the passage for the light beyond? He who fights with the dark shall know the gentleness that makes man great—the dawning countenance of the God of hope. But that was not for Cosmo just yet. The night must fulfil its hours. Men are meant and sent to be troubled—that they may rise above the whole region of storm, above all possibility of being troubled.