The Vicar's Daughter - George MacDonald (read dune txt) 📗

next time she asked me to read from her collection, I made the request that she would listen to some which I believed she did not know, but would, I thought, like. She consented with eagerness, was astonished to find she knew none of them, expressed much approbation of some, and showed herself delighted with others.

That she must have had some literary faculty seems evident from the genuine pleasure she took in simple, quaint, sometimes even odd hymns of her own peculiar kind. But the very best of another sort she could not appreciate. For instance, the following, by John Mason, in my father’s opinion one of the best hymn-writers, had no attraction for her:—

“Thou wast, O God, and thou was blest Before the world begun; Of thine eternity possest Before time’s glass did run. Thou needest none thy praise to sing, As if thy joy could fade: Couldst thou have needed any thing, Thou couldst have nothing made.

“Great and good God, it pleaseth thee Thy Godhead to declare; And what thy goodness did decree, Thy greatness did prepare: Thou spak’st, and heaven and earth appeared, And answered to thy call; As if their Maker’s voice they Heard, Which is the creature’s All.

“Thou spak’st the word, most mighty Lord; Thy word went forth with speed: Thy will, O Lord, it was thy word; Thy word it was thy deed. Thou brought’st forth Adam from the ground, And Eve out of his side: Thy blessing made the earth abound With these two multiplied.

“Those three great leaves, heaven, sea, and land, Thy name in figures show; Brutes feel the bounty of thy hand, But I my Maker know. Should not I here thy servant be, Whose creatures serve me here? My Lord, whom should I fear but thee, Who am thy creatures’ fear?

“To whom, Lord, should I sing but thee, The Maker of my tongue? Lo! other lords would seize on me, But I to thee belong. As waters haste unto their sea, And earth unto its earth, So let my soul return to thee, From whom it had its birth.

“But, ah! I’m fallen in the night, And cannot come to thee: Yet speak the word, ‘Let there be light;’ It shall enlighten me. And let thy word, most mighty Lord, Thy fallen creature raise: Oh! make me o’er again, and I Shall sing my Maker’s praise.”

This and others, I say, she could not relish; but my endeavors were crowned with success in so far that she accepted better specimens of the sort she liked than any she had; and I think they must have had a good influence upon her.

She seemed to have no fear of death, contemplating the change she believed at hand, not with equanimity merely, but with expectation. She even wrote hymns about it,—sweet, pretty, and weak, always with herself and the love of her Saviour for her, in the foreground. She had not learned that the love which lays hold of that which is human in the individual, that is, which is common to the whole race, must be an infinitely deeper, tenderer, and more precious thing to the individual than any affection manifesting itself in the preference of one over another.

For the sake of revealing her modes of thought, I will give one more specimen of my conversations with her, ere I pass on. It took place the evening before her departure for her own house. Her husband had gone to make some final preparations, of which there had been many. For one who expected to be unclothed that she might be clothed upon, she certainly made a tolerable to-do about the garment she was so soon to lay aside; especially seeing she often spoke of it as an ill-fitting garment—never with peevishness or complaint, only, as it seemed to me, with far more interest than it was worth. She had even, as afterwards appeared, given her husband—good, honest, dog-like man—full instructions as to the ceremonial of its interment. Perhaps I should have been considerably less bewildered with her conduct had I suspected that she was not half so near death as she chose to think, and that she had as yet suffered little.

That evening, the stars just beginning to glimmer through the warm flush that lingered from the sunset, we sat together in the drawing-room looking out on the sea. My patient appearing, from the light in her eyes, about to go off into one of her ecstatic moods, I hastened to forestall it, if I might, with whatever came uppermost; for I felt my inability to sympathize with her in these more of a pain than my reader will, perhaps, readily imagine.

“It seems like turning you out to let you go to-morrow, Mrs. Cromwell,” I said; “but, you see, our three months are up two days after, and I cannot help it.”

“You have been very kind,” she said, half abstractedly. “And you are really much better. Who would have thought three weeks ago to see you so well to-day?”

“Ah! you congratulate me, do you?” she rejoined, turning her big eyes full upon me; “congratulate me that I am doomed to be still a captive in the prison of this vile body? Is it kind? Is it well?”

“At least, you must remember, if you are doomed, who dooms you.”

“‘Oh that I had the wings of a dove!’” she cried, avoiding my remark, of which I doubt if she saw the drift. “Think, dear Mrs. Percivale: the society of saints and angels!—all brightness and harmony and peace! Is it not worth forsaking this world to inherit a kingdom like that? Wouldn’t you like to go? Don’t you wish to fly away and be at rest?”

She spoke as if expostulating and reasoning with one she would persuade to some kind of holy emigration.

“Not until I am sent for,” I answered.

“I am sent for,” she returned.

“‘The wave may be cold, and the tide may be strong; But, hark! on the shore the angels’ glad song!’

“Do you know that sweet hymn, Mrs. Percivale? There I shall be able to love him aright, to serve him aright!

“‘Here all my labor is so poor! Here all my love so faint! But when I reach the heavenly door, I cease the weary plaint.’”

I couldn’t help wishing she would cease it a little sooner.

“But suppose,” I ventured to say, “it were the will of God that you should live many years yet.”

“That cannot be. And why should you wish it for me? Is it not better to depart and be with him? What pleasure could it be to a weak, worn creature like me to go on living in this isle of banishment?”

“But suppose you were to recover your health: would it not be delightful to do something for his sake? If you would think of how much there is to be done in the world, perhaps you would wish less to die and leave it.”

“Do not tempt me,” she returned reproachfully.

And then she quoted a passage the application of which to her own case appeared to me so irreverent, that I confess I felt like Abraham with the idolater; so far at least as to wish her out of the house, for I could bear with her, I thought, no longer.

She did leave it the next day, and I breathed more freely than since she had entered it.

My husband came down to fetch me the following day; and a walk with him along the cliffs in the gathering twilight, during which I recounted the affectations of my late visitor, completely wiped the cobwebs from my mental windows, and enabled me to come to the conclusion that Mrs. Cromwell was but a spoiled child, who would, somehow or other, be brought to her senses before all was over. I was ashamed of my impatience with her, and believed if I could have learned her history, of which she had told me nothing, it would have explained the rare phenomenon of one apparently able to look death in the face with so little of the really spiritual to support her, for she seemed to me to know Christ only after the flesh. But had she indeed ever looked death in the face?

 

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

MRS. CROMWELL GOES.

 

I heard nothing more of her for about a year. A note or two passed between us, and then all communication ceased. This, I am happy to think, was not immediately my fault: not that it mattered much, for we were not then fitted for much communion; we had too little in common to commune.

“Did you not both believe in one Lord?” I fancy a reader objecting. “How, then, can you say you had too little in common to be able to commune?”

I said the same to myself, and tried the question in many ways. The fact remained, that we could not commune, that is, with any heartiness; and, although I may have done her wrong, it was, I thought, to be accounted for something in this way. The Saviour of whom she spoke so often, and evidently thought so much, was in a great measure a being of her own fancy; so much so, that she manifested no desire to find out what the Christ was who had spent three and thirty years in making a revelation of himself to the world. The knowledge she had about him was not even at second-hand, but at many removes. She did not study his words or his actions to learn his thoughts or his meanings; but lived in a kind of dreamland of her own, which could be interesting only to the dreamer. Now, if we are to come to God through Christ, it must surely be by knowing Christ; it must be through the knowledge of Christ that the Spirit of the Father mainly works in the members of his body; and it seemed to me she did not take the trouble to “know him and the power of his resurrection.” Therefore we had scarcely enough of common ground, as I say, to meet upon. I could not help contrasting her religion with that of Marion Clare.

At length I had a note from her, begging me to go and see her at her house at Richmond, and apologizing for her not coming to me, on the score of her health. I felt it my duty to go, but sadly grudged the loss of time it seemed, for I expected neither pleasure nor profit from the visit. Percivale went with me, and left me at the door to have a row on the river, and call for me at a certain hour.

The house and grounds were luxurious and lovely both, two often dissociated qualities. She could have nothing to desire of this world’s gifts, I thought. But the moment she entered the room into which I had been shown, I was shocked at the change I saw in her. Almost to my horror, she was in a widow’s cap; and disease and coming death were plain on every feature. Such was the contrast, that the face in my memory appeared that of health.

“My dear Mrs. Cromwell!” I gasped out.

“You see,” she said, and sitting down, on a straight-backed chair, looked at me with lustreless eyes.

Death had been hovering about her windows before, but had entered at last; not to take the sickly young woman longing to die, but the hale man, who would have clung to the last edge of life.

“He is taken, and I am left,” she said abruptly, after a long pause.

Her drawl had vanished: pain and grief had made her simple. “Then,” I thought with myself, “she did love him!” But I could say nothing. She took