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Fearing lest some such fancy as had possessed Judy should be moving in her mind, namely, that I was, if not exactly going to put her through her Catechism, yet going in some way or other to act the clergyman, I hastened to speak.
“This is a most romantic spot, Miss Oldcastle,” I said; “and as surprising as it is romantic. I could hardly believe my eyes when I looked out of the window and saw it first.”
“Your surprise was the more natural that the place itself is not properly natural, as you must have discovered.”
This was rather a remarkable speech for a young lady to make. I answered—
“I only know that such a chasm is the last thing I should have expected to find in this gently undulating country. That it is artificial I was no more prepared to hear than I was to see the place itself.”
“It looks pretty, but it has not a very poetic origin,” she returned. “It is nothing but the quarry out of which the old house at the top of it was built.”
“I must venture to differ from you entirely in the aspect such an origin assumes to me,” I said. “It seems to me a more poetic origin than any convulsion of nature whatever would have been; for, look you,” I said—being as a young man too much inclined to the didactic, “for, look you,” I said—and she did look at me—“from that buried mass of rock has arisen this living house with its histories of ages and generations; and”—
Here I saw a change pass upon her face: it grew almost pallid. But her large blue eyes were still fixed on mine.
“And it seems to me,” I went on, “that such a chasm made by the uplifting of a house therefrom, is therefore in itself more poetic than if it were even the mouth of an extinct volcano. For, grand as the motions and deeds of Nature are, terrible as is the idea of the fiery heart of the earth breaking out in convulsions, yet here is something greater; for human will, human thought, human hands in human labour and effort, have all been employed to build this house, making not only the house beautiful, but the place whence it came beautiful too. It stands on the edge of what Shelley would call its ‘antenatal tomb’—now beautiful enough to be its mother—filled from generation to generation “—
Her face had grown still paler, and her lips moved as if she would speak; but no sound came from them. I had gone on, thinking it best to take no notice of her paleness; but now I could not help expressing concern.
“I am afraid you feel ill, Miss Oldcastle.”
“Not at all,” she answered, more quickly than she had yet spoken.
“This place must be damp,” I said. “I fear you have taken cold.”
She drew herself up a little haughtily, thinking, no doubt, that after her denial I was improperly pressing the point. So I drew back to the subject of our conversation.
“But I can hardly think,” I said, “that all this mass of stone could be required to build the house, large as it is. A house is not solid, you know.”
“No,” she answered. “The original building was more of a castle, with walls and battlements. I can show you the foundations of them still; and the picture, too, of what the place used to be. We are not what we were then. Many a cottage, too, has been built out of this old quarry. Not a stone has been taken from it for the last fifty years, though. Just let me show you one thing, Mr. Walton, and then I must leave you.”
“Do not let me detain you a moment. I will go at once,” I said; “though, if you would allow me, I should be more at ease if I might see you safe at the top of the stair first.”
She smiled.
“Indeed, I am not ill,” she answered; “but I have duties to attend to. Just let me show you this, and then you shall go with me back to mamma.”
She led the way to the edge of the pond and looked into it. I followed, and gazed down into its depths, till my sight was lost in them. I could see no bottom to the rocky shaft.
“There is a strong spring down there,” she said. “Is it not a dreadful place? Such a depth!”
“Yes,” I answered; “but it has not the horror of dirty water; it is as clear as crystal. How does the surplus escape?”
“On the opposite side of the hill you came up there is a well, with a strong stream from it into the river.”
“I almost wonder at your choosing such a place to read in. I should hardly like to be so near this pond,” said I, laughing.
“Judy has taken all that away. Nothing in nature, and everything out of it, is strange to Judy, poor child! But just look down a little way into the water on this side. Do you see anything?”
“Nothing,” I answered.
“Look again, against the wall of the pond,” she said.
“I see a kind of arch or opening in the side,” I answered.
“That is what I wanted you to see. Now, do you see a little barred window, there, in the face of the rock, through the trees?”
“I cannot say I do,” I replied.
“No. Except you know where it is—and even then—it is not so easy to find it. I find it by certain trees.”
“What is it?”
“It is the window of a little room in the rock, from which a stair leads down through the rock to a sloping passage. That is the end of it you see under the water.”
“Provided, no doubt,” I said, “in case of siege, to procure water.”
“Most likely; but not, therefore, confined to that purpose. There are more dreadful stories than I can bear to think of”–
Here she paused abruptly, and began anew “–As if that house had brought death and doom out of the earth with it. There was an old burial-ground here before the Hall was built.”
“Have you ever been down the stair you speak of?” I asked.
“Only part of the way,” she answered. “But Judy knows every step of it. If it were not that the door at the top is locked, she would have dived through that archway now, and been in her own room in half the time. The child does not know what fear means.”
We now moved away from the pond, towards the side of the quarry and the open-air stair-case, which I thought must be considerably more pleasant than the other. I confess I longed to see the gleam of that water at the bottom of the dark sloping passage, though.
Miss Oldcastle accompanied me to the room where I had left her mother, and took her leave with merely a bow of farewell. I saw the old lady glance sharply from her to me as if she were jealous of what we might have been talking about.
“Grannie, are you afraid Mr. Walton has been saying pretty things to Aunt Winnie? I assure you he is not of that sort. He doesn’t understand that kind of thing. But he would have jumped into the pond after me and got his death of cold if auntie would have let him. It WAS cold. I think I see you dripping now, Mr Walton.”
There she was in her dark corner, coiled up on a couch, and laughing heartily; but all as if she had done nothing extraordinary. And, indeed, estimated either by her own notions or practices, what she had done was not in the least extraordinary.
Disinclined to stay any longer, I shook hands with the grandmother, with a certain invincible sense of slime, and with the grandchild with a feeling of mischievous health, as if the girl might soon corrupt the clergyman into a partnership in pranks as well as in friendship. She fallowed me out of the room, and danced before me down the oak staircase, clearing the portion from the first landing at a bound. Then she turned and waited for me, who came very deliberately, feeling the unsure contact of sole and wax. As soon as I reached her, she said, in a half-whisper, reaching up towards me on tiptoe—
“Isn’t she a beauty?”
“Who? your grandmamma?” I returned.
She gave me a little push, her face glowing with fun. But I did not expect she would take her revenge as she did. “Yes, of course,” she answered, quite gravely. “Isn’t she a beauty?”
And then, seeing that she had put me hors de combat, she burst into loud laughter, and, opening the hall-door for me, let me go without another word.
I went home very quietly, and, as I said, stepping with curious care—of which, of course, I did not think at the time—over the yellow and brown leaves that lay in the middle of the road.
CHAPTER VII. THE BISHOP’S BASIN
I went home very quietly, as I say, thinking about the strange elements that not only combine to make life, but must be combined in our idea of life, before we can form a true theory about it. Now-a-days, the vulgar notion of what is life-like in any annals is to be realised by sternly excluding everything but the commonplace; and the means, at least, are often attained, with this much of the end as well—that the appearance life bears to vulgar minds is represented with a wonderful degree of success. But I believe that this is, at least, quite as unreal a mode of representing life as the other extreme, wherein the unlikely, the romantic, and the uncommon predominate. I doubt whether there is a single history—if one could only get at the whole of it—in which there is not a considerable admixture of the unlikely become fact, including a few strange coincidences; of the uncommon, which, although striking at first, has grown common from familiarity with its presence as our own; with even, at least, some one more or less rosy touch of what we call the romantic. My own conviction is, that the poetry is far the deepest in us, and that the prose is only broken-down poetry; and likewise that to this our lives correspond. The poetic region is the true one, and just, THEREFORE, the incredible one to the lower order of mind; for although every mind is capable of the truth, or rather capable of becoming capable of the truth, there may lie ages between its capacity and the truth. As you will hear some people read poetry so that no mortal could tell it was poetry, so do some people read their own lives and those of others.
I fell into these reflections from comparing in my own mind my former experiences in visiting my parishioners with those of that day. True, I had never sat down to talk with one of them without finding that that man or that woman had actually a HISTORY, the most marvellous and important fact to a human being; nay, I had found something more or less remarkable in every one of their histories, so that I was more than barely interested in each of them. And as I made more acquaintance with them, (for I had not been in the position, or the disposition either, before I came to Marshmallows, necessary to the gathering of such experiences,) I came to the conclusion—not that I had got into an extraordinary parish of characters—but that every parish must be more or less extraordinary from the same cause. Why did I not use to see such people about me before? Surely I had undergone a change of some sort. Could it be, that the trouble I had been going through of late, had opened the eyes of my mind to the understanding, or rather the simple SEEING, of my fellow-men?
But the people among whom I had been to-day belonged rather to such as might be put into a romantic story. Certainly I could not see much that was romantic in the old lady; and yet, those eyes and that tight-skinned face—what might they not be capable of in the working out of a story? And then the place they lived in! Why, it would hardly come into my ideas of a nineteenth-century country parish at all. I was tempted to try to persuade myself that all that had happened, since I rose to look out of the window in the old house, had been but a dream. For how could that wooded dell have come there after all? It was much too large for a quarry. And that madcap girl—she never flung herself into the pond!—it could not be. And what could the book have been that the lady with the sea-blue eyes was reading? Was that a real book at all? No. Yes. Of course it was. But what was it? What had that to do with the matter? It might turn out to be a very commonplace book after all. No; for commonplace books are generally new, or at least in fine bindings. And here was a shabby little old book, such as, if it had been commonplace, would not have been likely to be the companion of a young lady at the bottom of a quarry—
“A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.”
I know all this will sound ridiculous, especially that quotation from Kubla Khan coming after the close of the preceding sentence; but it is only so much the more like the jumble of thoughts that made a chaos of my mind as I went home. And then for that terrible pool, and subterranean passage, and all that—what had it all to do with this broad daylight, and these dying autumn leaves? No doubt there had been such places. No doubt there were such places somewhere yet. No doubt this was one of them. But, somehow or other, it would not come in well. I had no intention of GOING IN FOR—that is the phrase now—going in for the romantic. I would take the impression off by going to see Weir the carpenter’s old father. Whether my plan was successful or not, I shall leave my reader to judge.
I found Weir busy as usual, but not with a coffin this time. He was working at a window-sash. “Just like life,” I thought—tritely perhaps. “The other day he was closing up in the outer darkness, and now he is letting in the light.”
“It’s a long time since you was here last, sir,” he said, but without a smile.
Did he mean a reproach? If so, I was more glad of that reproach than I would have been of the warmest welcome, even from Old Rogers. The fact was that, having a good deal to attend to besides, and willing at the same time to let the man feel that he was in no danger of being bored by my visits, I had not made use even of my reserve in the shape of a visit to his father.
“Well,” I answered, “I wanted to know something about all my people, before I paid a second visit to any of them.”
“All right, sir. Don’t suppose I meant to complain. Only to let you know you was welcome, sir.”
“I’ve just come from my first visit to Oldcastle Hall. And, to tell the truth, for I don’t like pretences, my visit to-day was not so much to you as to your father, whom, perhaps, I ought to have called upon before, only I was afraid of seeming to intrude upon you, seeing we don’t exactly think the same way about some things,” I added—with a smile, I know, which was none the less genuine that I remember it yet.
And what makes me remember it yet? It is the smile that lighted up his face in response to mine. For it was more than I looked for. And his answer helped to fix the smile in my memory.
“You made me think, sir, that perhaps, after all, we were much of the same way of thinking, only perhaps you was a long way ahead of me.”
Now the man was not right in saying that we were much of the same way of THINKING; for our opinions could hardly do more than come within sight of each other; but what he meant was right enough. For I was certain, from the first, that the man had a regard for the downright, honest way of things, and I hoped that I too had such a regard. How much of selfishness and of pride in one’s own judgment might be mixed up with it, both in his case and mine, I had been too often taken in—by myself, I mean—to be at all careful to discriminate, provided there was a proportion of real honesty along with it, which, I felt sure, would ultimately eliminate the other. For in the moral nest, it is not as with the sparrow and the cuckoo. The right, the original inhabitant is the stronger; and, however unlikely at any given point in the history it may be, the sparrow will grow strong enough to heave the intruding cuckoo overboard. So I was pleased that the man should do me the honour of thinking I was right as far as he could see, which is the greatest honour one man can do another; for it is setting him on his own steed, as the eastern tyrants used to do. And I was delighted to think that the road lay open for further and more real communion between us in time to come.
“Well,” I answered, “I think we shall understand each other perfectly before long. But now I must see your father, if it is convenient and agreeable.”
“My father will be delighted to see you, I know, sir. He can’t get so far as the church on Sundays; but you’ll find him much more to your mind than me. He’s been putting ever so many questions to me about the new parson, wanting me to try whether I couldn’t get more out of you than the old parson. That’s the way we talk about you, you see, sir. You’ll understand. And I’ve never told him that I’d been to church since you came—I suppose from a bit of pride, because I had so long lefused to go; but I don’t doubt some of the neighbours have told him, for he never speaks about it now. And I know he’s been looking out for you; and I fancy he’s begun to wonder that the parson was going to see everybody but him. It WILL be a pleasure to the old man, sir, for he don’t see a great many to talk to; and he’s fond of a bit of gossip, is the old man, sir.”
So saying, Weir led the way through the shop into a lobby behind, and thence up what must have been a back-stair of the old house, into a large room over the workshop. There were bits of old carving about the walls of the room yet, but, as in the shop below, all had been whitewashed. At one end stood a bed with chintz curtains and a warm-looking counterpane of rich faded embroidery. There was a bit of carpet by the bedside, and another bit in front of the fire; and there the old man sat, on one side, in a high-backed not very easy-looking chair. With a great effort he managed to rise as I approached him, notwithstanding my entreaties that he would not move. He looked much older when on his feet, for he was bent nearly double, in which posture the marvel was how he could walk at all. For he did totter a few steps to meet me, without even the aid of a stick, and, holding out a thin, shaking hand, welcomed me with an air of breeding rarely to be met with in his station in society. But the chief part of this polish sprung from the inbred kindliness of his nature, which was manifest in the expression of his noble old countenance. Age is such a different thing in different natures! One man seems to grow more and more selfish as he grows older; and in another the slow fire of time seems only to consume, with fine, imperceptible gradations, the yet lingering selfishness in him, letting the light of the kingdom, which the Lord says is within, shine out more and more, as the husk grows thin and is ready to fall off, that the man, like the seed sown, may pierce the earth of this world, and rise into the pure air and wind and dew of the second life. The face of a loving old man is always to me like a morning moon, reflecting the yet unrisen sun of the other world, yet fading before its approaching light, until, when it does rise, it pales and withers away from our gaze, absorbed in the source of its own beauty. This old man, you may see, took my fancy wonderfully, for even at this distance of time, when I am old myself, the recollection of his beautiful old face makes me feel as if I could write poetry about him.
“I’m blithe to see ye, sir,” said he. “Sit ye down, sir.”
And, turning, he pointed to his own easy-chair; and I then saw his profile. It was delicate as that of Dante, which in form it marvellously resembled. But all the sternness which Dante’s evil times had generated in his prophetic face was in this old man’s replaced by a sweetness of hope that was lovely to behold.
“No, Mr Weir,” I said, “I cannot take your chair. The Bible tells us to rise up before the aged, not to turn them out of their seats.”
“It would do me good to see you sitting in my cheer, sir. The pains that my son Tom there takes to keep it up as long as the old man may want it! It’s a good thing I bred him to the joiner’s trade, sir. Sit ye down, sir. The cheer’ll hold ye, though I warrant it won’t last that long after I be gone home. Sit ye down, sir.”
Thus entreated, I hesitated no longer, but took the old man’s seat. His son brought another chair for him, and he sat down opposite the fire and close to me. Thomas then went back to his work, leaving us alone.
“Ye’ve had some speech wi’ my son Tom,” said the old man, the moment he was gone, leaning a little towards me. “It’s main kind o’ you, sir, to take up kindly wi’ poor folks like us.”
“You don’t say it’s kind of a person to do what he likes best,” I answered. “Besides, it’s my duty to know all my people.”
“Oh yes, sir, I know that. But there’s a thousand ways ov doin’ the same thing. I ha’ seen folks, parsons and others, ‘at made a great show ov bein’ friendly to the poor, ye know, sir; and all the time you could see, or if you couldn’t see you could tell without seein’, that they didn’t much regard them in their hearts; but it was a sort of accomplishment to be able to talk to the poor, like, after their own fashion. But the minute an ould man sees you, sir, he believes that you MEAN it, sir, whatever it is. For an ould man somehow comes to know things like a child. They call it a second childhood, don’t they, sir? And there are some things worth growin’ a child again to get a hould ov again.”
“I only hope what you say may be true—about me, I mean.”
“Take my word for it, sir. You have no idea how that boy of mine, Tom there, did hate all the clergy till you come. Not that he’s anyway favourable to them yet, only he’ll say nothin’ again’ you, sir. He’s got an unfortunate gift o’ seein’ all the faults first, sir; and when a man is that way given, the faults always hides the other side, so that there’s nothing but faults to be seen.”
“But I find Thomas quite open to reason.”
“That’s because you understand him, sir, and know how to give him head. He tould me of the talk you had with him. You don’t bait him. You don’t say, ‘You must come along wi’ me,’ but you turns and goes along wi’ him. He’s not a bad fellow at all, is Tom; but he will have the reason for everythink. Now I never did want the reason for everything. I was content to be tould a many things. But Tom, you see, he was born with a sore bit in him somewheres, I don’t rightly know wheres; and I don’t think he rightly knows what’s the matter with him himself.”
“I dare say you have a guess though, by this time, Mr. Weir,” I said; “and I think I have a guess too.”
“Well, sir, if he’d only give in, I think he would be far happier. But he can’t see his way clear.”
“You must give him time, you know. The fact is, he doesn’t feel at home yet.’ And how can he, so long as he doesn’t know his own Father?”
“I’m not sure that I rightly understand you,” said the old man, looking bewildered and curious.
“I mean,” I answered, “that till a man knows that he is one of God’s family, living in God’s house, with God up-stairs, as it were, while he is at his work or his play in a nursery below-stairs, he can’t feel comfortable. For a man could not be made that should stand alone, like some of the beasts. A man must feel a head over him, because he’s not enough to satisfy himself, you know. Thomas just wants faith; that is, he wants to feel that there is a loving Father over him, who is doing things all well and right, if we could only understand them, though it really does not look like it sometimes.”
“Ah, sir, I might have understood you well enough, if my poor old head hadn’t been started on a wrong track. For I fancied for the moment that you were just putting your finger upon the sore place in Tom’s mind. There’s no use in keeping family misfortunes from a friend like you, sir. That boy has known his father all his life; but I was nearly half his age before I knew mine.”
“Strange!” I said, involuntarily almost.
“Yes, sir; strange you may well say. A strange story it is. The Lord help my mother! I beg yer pardon, sir. I’m no Catholic. But that prayer will come of itself sometimes. As if it could be of any use now! God forgive me!”
“Don’t you be afraid, Mr Weir, as if God was ready to take offence at what comes naturally, as you say. An ejaculation of love is not likely to offend Him who is so grand that He is always meek and lowly of heart, and whose love is such that ours is a mere faint light—‘a little glooming light much like a shade’—as one of our own poets says, beside it.”
“Thank you, Mr Walton. That’s a real comfortable word, sir. And I am heart-sure it’s true, sir. God be praised for evermore! He IS good, sir; as I have known in my poor time, sir. I don’t believe there ever was one that just lifted his eyes and looked up’ards, instead of looking down to the ground, that didn’t get some comfort, to go on with, as it were—the ready—money of comfort, as it were—though it might be none to put in the bank, sir.”
“That’s true enough,” I said. “Then your father and mother—?”
And here I hesitated.
“Were never married, sir,” said the old man promptly, as if he would relieve me from an embarrassing position. “I couldn’t help it. And I’m no less the child of my Father in heaven for it. For if He hadn’t made me, I couldn’t ha’ been their son, you know, sir. So that He had more to do wi’ the makin’ o’ me than they had; though mayhap, if He had His way all out, I might ha’ been the son o’ somebody else. But, now that things be so, I wouldn’t have liked that at all, sir; and bein’ once born so, I would not have e’er another couple of parents in all England, sir, though I ne’er knew one o’ them. And I do love my mother. And I’m so sorry for my father that I love him too, sir. And if I could only get my boy Tom to think as I do, I would die like a psalm-tune on an organ, sir.”
“But it seems to me strange,” I said, “that your son should think so much of what is so far gone by. Surely he would not want another father than you, now. He is used to his position in life. And there can be nothing cast up to him about his birth or descent.”
“That’s all very true, sir, and no doubt it would be as you say. But there has been other things to keep his mind upon the old affair. Indeed, sir, we have had the same misfortune all over again among the young people. And I mustn’t say anything more about it; only my boy Tom has a sore heart.”
I knew at once to what he alluded; for I could not have been about in my parish all this time without learning that the strange handsome woman in the little shop was the daughter of Thomas Weir, and that she was neither wife nor widow. And it now occurred to me for the first time that it was a likeness to her little boy that had affected me so pleasantly when I first saw Thomas, his grandfather. The likeness to his great-grandfather, which I saw plainly enough, was what made the other fact clear to me. And at the same moment I began to be haunted with a flickering sense of a third likeness which I could not in the least fix or identify.
“Perhaps,” I said, “he may find some good come out of that too.”
“Well, who knows, sir?”
“I think,” I said, “that if we do evil that good may come, the good we looked for will never come thereby. But once evil is done, we may humbly look to Him who bringeth good out of evil, and wait. Is your granddaughter Catherine in bad health? She looks so delicate!”
“She always had an uncommon look. But what she looks like now, I don’t know. I hear no complaints; but she has never crossed this door since we got her set up in that shop. She never conies near her father or her sister, though she lets them, leastways her sister, go and see her. I’m afraid Tom has been rayther unmerciful, with her. And if ever he put a bad name upon her in her hearing, I know, from what that lass used to be as a young one, that she wouldn’t be likely to forget it, and as little likely to get over it herself, or pass it over to another, even her own father. I don’t believe they do more nor nod to one another when they meet in the village. It’s well even if they do that much. It’s my belief there’s some people made so hard that they never can forgive anythink.”
“How did she get into the trouble? Who is the father of her child?”
“Nay, that no one knows for certain; though there be suspicions, and one of them, no doubt, correct. But, I believe, fire wouldn’t drive his name out at her mouth. I know my lass. When she says a thing, she ‘ll stick to it.”
I asked no more questions. But, after a short pause, the old man went on.
“I shan’t soon forget the night I first heard about my father and mother. That was a night! The wind was roaring like a mad beast about the house;—not this house, sir, but the great house over the way.”
“You don’t mean Oldcastle Hall?” I said.
“‘Deed I do, sir,” returned the old man, “This house here belonged to the same family at one time; though when I was born it was another branch of the family, second cousins or something, that lived in it. But even then it was something on to the downhill road, I believe.”
“But,” I said, fearing my question might have turned the old man aside from a story worth hearing, “never mind all that now, if you please. I am anxious to hear all about that night. Do go on. You were saying the wind was blowing about the old house.”
“Eh, sir, it was roaring!-roaring as if it was mad with rage! And every now and then it would come down the chimley like out of a gun, and blow the smoke and a’most the fire into the middle of the housekeeper’s room. For the housekeeper had been giving me my supper. I called her auntie, then; and didn’t know a bit that she wasn’t my aunt really. I was at that time a kind of a under-gamekeeper upon the place, and slept over the stable. But I fared of the best, for I was a favourite with the old woman—I suppose because I had given her plenty of trouble in my time. That’s always the way, sir.—Well, as I was a-saying, when the wind stopped for a moment, down came the rain with a noise that sounded like a regiment of cavalry on the turnpike road t’other side of the hill. And then up the wind got again, and swept the rain away, and took it all in its own hand again, and went on roaring worse than ever. ‘You ‘ll be wet afore you get across the yard, Samuel,’ said auntie, looking very prim in her long white apron, as she sat on the other side of the little round table before the fire, sipping a drop of hot rum and water, which she always had before she went to bed. ‘You’ll be wet to the skin, Samuel,’ she said. ‘Never mind,’ says I. ‘I’m not salt, nor yet sugar; and I’ll be going, auntie, for you’ll be wanting your bed.’-’Sit ye still,’ said she. ‘I don’t want my bed yet.’ And there she sat, sipping at her rum and water; and there I sat, o’ the other side, drinking the last of a pint of October, she had gotten me from the cellar—for I had been out in the wind all day. ‘It was just such a night as this,’ said she, and then stopped again.—But I’m wearying you, sir, with my long story.”
