Kitabı oku: «There & Back», sayfa 7

CHAPTER XIII. THE BEECH-TREE

He went to bed, and after a dreamless night, rose to find the world overflowed with bliss. The sun was at his best, and every water-drop on the grass was shining all the colours of the rainbow. Surely the gems that are dug from the earth have their prototype in the dew-drops that lie on its surface. One might in a moment of sweet maundering imagine Nature hiding those sunless dew-drops of the mines in the darkness of a sweet sorrow that the youth of the morning must be so evanescent.

The whole world lay before Richard his inheritance. The sunlight gave it him, a gift from the height of his heaven. What was it to Richard that the park, its trees, its grass, its dew-drops, its cattle, its shadows, belonged to sir Wilton! He never even thought of the fact! He felt them his own! Was the soft, clear, fresh, damp air, with all the unreachable soul of it, not his, because it was sir Wilton’s?

The highest property, as Dante tells us, increases to each by the sharing of it with others. But the common mind does not care for such property. Was not the blue, uplifted, hoping sky, that spoke to the sky inside Richard—was not that sir Wilton’s? Yes, indeed; for were it not sir Wilton’s, it could not be Richard’s. But sir Wilton did not claim it, because he did not care for it, heard no sound of the speech it uttered. Happy would it have been for sir Wilton, that anything he called his, was his as it was Richard’s! He could not prevent Richard from possessing Mortgrange in a way he himself did not and would not possess it. But neither yet were they Richard’s in the full eternal way. Nature was a noble lady whose long visit made him glad; she was not yet at her own home in his house. There were things in the world that might come in and drive her out. Say rather, there was yet no chamber in that house in which she could take up her dwelling all night.

The setting sun had made Richard sad; his resurrection made him blessed! He dressed in haste, and went to find his way from the house.

Arrived in the park, and walking in cool delight on the wet grass, he began to think about the men and the races whom the greed of other men and races had pinched and shouldered and squeezed from the world. He thought of the men who, by preventing others and refusing to let them share, imagine to increase the length and breadth and depth of their own possessing; and thus by degrees he fell into a retributive mood. What should, what could, what would be done with such men?

“As they refuse their neighbours ground to stand upon,” he said to himself, “as the very cubic space they cannot disrobe them of they begrudge them because it measures from what they count their land, I should like to know how high their possession goes! Is there any law that lays that down? To what point above him can the landowner complain of trespass in the gliding or hovering balloon? When hawking comes in again, as it will one day, by the law of revival, at what height will another man’s falcon be an intruder on him who stands gazing up from his corn? Were I a power in the universe, I would cram the air over the heads of such incarnate greeds with clouds of souls! The sun should reach them only through the vapours of other life than theirs, inimical to them because of their selfishness. I would set the dead burrowing beneath them, so that the land they boast should heave under their feet with the writhing of the bodies they drove from the surface into the deeps. They should have but a carpet, wallowing in the waves of a continuous live earthquake. I know I am thinking like a fool; but surely at least there ought to be some set season for Truth and Justice to return to the forsaken earth! Are we for ever to bear without hope the presence of the cruel, the vulgar self-souled, the neighbour-crushing rich? Are the wicked the favourites of Nature, that they flourish like a green bay-tree? Doubtless it is right to forgive—but how to be able? Nobody has ever done me any harm yet; I have nothing to complain of; it cannot be revenge in me that longs for something, call it God, or Nature, or Justice, that will repay!—God it cannot be; but something sure there must be to which vengeance belongs!”

He might have gone further in his thinking, and perhaps come to ask what satisfaction there could be in any vengeance, so long as the evil-doer remained unhumbled by the perception and the shame of his doing, was neither sorry for it nor turned away from it—in a word, did not repent; but there came an interruption.

He was walking slowly along, unheeding where he went, when he heard a sound that made him look up. Then he saw that he was under a great beech, and the sound seemed to come from somewhere in the top of it—a sound like the pleased cooing of a dove. He looked hard into the branches and their wilderness of fresh leaves, but could descry nothing. Then came a little laugh, and with a preparatory rustling and rustling in its passage, a book—a small folio—fell plump at his feet.

“Will you please put it in the library!” said a voice he had heard before—long before, it seemed—but had not forgotten.

“I will bring it to you—at least I would, if I could see where you are!” answered Richard, gazing with yet keener search into the thick mass of leaf-cloud over his head.

“No, no; I don’t want more of it. I can’t see you, and don’t know who you are; but please take the book, and lay it on the middle table in the library. It may be hurt, and I don’t want to come down just yet.”

“Very well, miss!” answered Richard; “I will.—The fall from such a height, and through all those branches, must have done it quite enough harm already!”

“Oh!—I never thought of that!” said the voice.

Richard took up the book, and walked away with it, pondering.

“Is it possible,” he said to himself, “that the little lady, whose big mare I shod last year, is up there in that tree? It must be her voice!—I cannot, surely, be mistaken!—But how on earth, or rather how in heaven, did she get up? Yet why shouldn’t she climb as well as any other? It must be as easy as riding that huge mare. And then she’s not like other ladies! She’s not of the ordinary breed of this planet! Which of them would have spoken to a blacksmith-lad as she spoke to me! Who but herself would have tied up a scratch in a working man’s hand!”

He was right so far: she could climb as no other in that county, no other, perhaps, in England, man or boy or girl, could climb. She was like a squirrel at climbing; and for the last few mornings, the weather having grown decidedly summery, had gone before breakfast to say her prayers in that tree.

Richard carried the book to the house—it was Pope’s Letters—found his way to the library, and laid it where she said, hoping she would come to seek it, and that he might then be present. Would she recognize the fellow that shod her mare? he wondered.

He could do nothing till he knew where he was to work, and therefore, after breakfast in the servants’ hall, he asked one of the men to let him know when Mr. Lestrange would see him, and went to his room.

Richard had not yet become aware of any moral pressure. The duty of aspiration or self-conquest, had never in any shape been forced upon him, and his conscience had not made him acquainted with it. What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest; but Richard’s was not of that sort, and yet was very much at ease. I may say for him that he had done nothing he knew to be bad at the moment; and very little that he had to be ashamed of afterwards, either at school or since he left it. Partly through the care of his parents, he had never got into what is called bad company, had formed no undesirable intimacies. He had a natural cleanliness, a natural sense of the becoming, which did much to keep him from evil: he could not consent to regard himself with disgust, and he would have been easily disgusted with himself. If he did not, as I have indicated, set himself with any conscious effort to rise above himself, he did do something against sinking below himself. The books he chose were almost all of the better sort. He had instinctively laid aside some in which he recognized a degrading influence.

But here let me remark that it depends partly on the degree of a man’s moral development, whether this or that book will be to him degrading or otherwise. A book which one man ought to scorn, may be of elevating tendency to another, because it is a little above his present moral condition. A book which to enjoy would harm a more delicate mind, may perhaps benefit the nature that would have chosen a coarser book still. We cannot determine the operation of energies, when we do not know on what moral level they are at work. The dead may be left to bury their dead; it would be sad to see an angel haunting a charnel-house.

I have been led into this digression through the desire to give an approximate idea of the good, rather vacant, unselfish, and yet self-contented, if not self-satisfied condition of Richard’s being.

He got out a manuscript-book in which he was in the habit of setting down whatever came to him, and wrote for some time, happily making more than one spot of ink on the toilet-cover, which served to open the eyes of Mrs. Locke to her mistake in thinking a workman would not want a writing-table; so that before the next evening he found in his chamber everything comfortable for writing, as well as for sleeping and dressing.

He was interrupted by the entrance of a servant with the message that Mr. Lestrange was in the morning-room, and wished to see him.

He followed the man and found Lestrange at the breakfast-table, with a tall young woman, very ordinary-looking, except for her large, soft, dark eyes, and the little lady whose mare he had shod, and whose voice he had that morning heard from the tree-top.

He advanced half-way to the table, and stood.

“Ah, there you are!” said Lestrange, glancing up, and immediately reverting to his plate. “We’ve got to set to work, haven’t we?”

He had, I presume, found the ladies not uninterested in the restoration that was about to be initiated, and had therefore sent for Richard while breakfast was going on.

The fledgling baronet, except for his too favourable opinion of himself, in which he was unlike only a very few, and an amount of assumption not small toward his supposed inferiors, was not a disagreeable human, and now spoke pleasantly.

“Yes, sir,” answered Richard. “Shall I wait outside until you have done breakfast?”

He feared the servant might have made a mistake.

“I sent for you,” replied Lestrange curtly.

“Very well, sir. I have not yet learned whether the tools I sent on have been delivered, but there will be plenty to do in the way of preparation.—May I ask if you have settled where I am to work, sir?”

“Ah! I had not thought of that!”

“It seems to me, sir, that the library itself would suit best; that is, if I might have a good-sized kitchen-table in it, and roll up half the carpet. When I had to beat a book I could take it into the passage, or just outside the window. Nothing else would make any dust.”

Lestrange had been thinking how to have the binder under his eye, and yet not seem to watch a fellow so much above his notion of a working man; the family made very little use of the library, and Richard’s proposal seemed just the thing. He would be sure to stick to his work where some one might any moment be coming in!

“I don’t see any difficulty,” he answered.

“I should want a little fire for my glue-pot and polishing-iron. There will be gilding and lettering too, though I hope not much—title-pieces to replace, and a touch here and there to give to the tooling! No man with any reverence in him would meddle much with such delicate, lovely old things as many of these gildings! He would not dare more than just touch them!”

The little lady sat eating her toast, but losing no word that was said. She knew from his voice the young man was the same to whom she had called out of the beech-tree; but now she seemed to recognize him as the blacksmith whose hand she had bound up: what could a blacksmith do in a library? She was puzzled.

Richard noted that she was dressed in some green stuff, which perhaps was the cause of his having been unable to discover her in the tree! Her great eyes—they were bigger than those of the tall lady—every now and then looked up at him with a renewed question, to which they seemed to find no answer. They were big blue eyes—very dark for blue, and rather too round for perfection; but their roundness was at one with the prevailing expression of her face, which was innocent daring, inquiry, and confidence. The paleness of it was a healthy paleness, with just an inclination to freckle. Her dark, half-scorched-looking hair was so abundant and rebellious, that it had to be all over compelled with gold pins. Its manipulation had neither beginning, middle, nor end. She ate daintily enough, but as if she meant to have a breakfast that should last her till luncheon—when plainly the active little furnace of her life would want fresh fuel. But it was of another kind of fuel she was thinking now. In the man who stood there, so independent, yet so free from self-assertion, she saw a prospect of learning something. She was hungry after knowing, but, though fond of reading, was very ignorant of books. She thought like a poet, but had never read a real poem. She was full of imagination, but very imperfectly knew what the word meant. She had never in her life read a work of genuine imagination—not even Undine, not even The Ugly Duckling.

CHAPTER XIV. THE LIBRARY

After some talk, it was settled that Richard should work in the large oriel of the library. Mrs. Locke was called, and the necessary orders were given. Employer and workman were both anxious, the one to see, the other to make a commencement. In a few minutes Richard had looked out as many of the books in most need of attention as would keep him, turning from the one to the other, as each required time in the press or to dry, thoroughly employed.

“There is a volume here I should like to know your mind about, sir,” he said, after looking at one of them a moment or two, “—the first collected edition of Spenser’s works, actually bound up with Sir John Harrington’s translation of Ariosto! If it were a good, or even an old binding, I should have said nothing.”

“It don’t seem in a bad way.”

“No, but the one book is so unworthy of the other!”

“What would you propose?”

“I would separate them; put the Spenser in plain calf, and make the present cover, with a new back, do for Sir John; it is a good enough coat for him.”

“Very well. Do as you think best.”

“I should like to send them both to my father.”

“But you have undertaken everything!”

“I am quite ready, sir; but in that case these must wait. My faculty is best laid out on mending, and I must do some good work in that first. I don’t know that I’m quite up to my father in binding. I mentioned him because if he were to help me with those that must be bound, I should have the more time for what often takes longer. You may trust my father, sir; he does not want to make a fortune.”

“I will try him then,” answered the cautious heir. “At least I will send him the books, and learn what he would charge.”

He had more of the ordinary tradesman in him than Richard and his uncle put together.

“I will put the prices on them, and engage that my father will charge no more,” said Richard.

Lestrange was content on hearing them, and Richard set to work with the other volumes.

The bookbinder, always busy, soon began to be respected in the house, and before long had gained several indulgences—among the rest, to have a table for himself in the library, at which, when work-hours were over, he might read or write when he pleased. As his labours went on, the bookscape began to revive, and continued slowly putting on an autumnal radiance of light and colour. Dingy and broken backs gradually disappeared. Pamphlets and magazines, such as, from knowledge or inquiry, Richard thought worth the expense, were sent off to his father to be bound. But I must continue my narrative from a point long before his work began to make much of a show.

A few valuable books, much injured by time and rough usage,—among the rest a quarto of The Merry Wives—he had pulled apart, and was treating with certain solutions, in preparation for binding them, when Lestrange came in one morning, accompanied by the curate of the parish. His eyes fell on a loose title-page which he happened to know.

“What on earth are you doing?” he cried. “You will destroy that book! By Jove!—You little know what you’re about!”

“I do know what I am about, sir. I shall do the book nothing but good,” answered Richard. “It could not have lasted many years without what I am doing.”

“Leave it alone,” said Lestrange. “I must ask some one. The treatment is too dangerous.”

“Excuse me, sir; the treatment is by no means dangerous. After this bath, I shall take it through one of thin size, to help the paper to hold together. The book has suffered much, both from damp and insects.”

“No matter!” answered Lestrange imperiously. “I will not have you meddle further with that volume.—Would you believe it, Hardy,” he went on, turning to the curate, “it is that translation of Ovid he is experimenting upon!”

“I beg your pardon, I am not experimenting,” said Richard.

“I hardly think it is such a very rare book!” replied the curate. “I believe it could be replaced!”

“Ah, you don’t know, I see! I thought I had shown you!” returned Lestrange excitedly. “Look there!”

He pointed to the title-page, which was lying on the table.

“I see!” said Hardy. “It is a first edition—in black letter—of Arthur Golding’s Ovid!”

“But you don’t look! Why don’t you look? Have you no eyes for that faded ink just under the title?”

“Why! What’s this? Gul. Shaksper!—Is it possible!”

“You find it hard to believe your eyes, and well you may!—There, Tuke! I told you you didn’t know what you were doing!”

“I always examine the title-page of a book,” answered Richard. “You must allow me to do as I see fit, Mr. Lestrange, or I give up the job.”

“You undertook to work for a year, if required!”

“I did not undertake to receive orders as to my mode of working. I care for books far too much for that. Besides, I have my character to see to! I warn you that if I do not go on with that volume, it will be ruined.”

“You don’t consider the money you risk!—That name makes the book worth hundreds at least.”

“It is the greatest of names! Only that name was not written by him who owned it!”

“What do you know about it!” said Lestrange rudely.

“Are you an expert?” asked the curate.

“By no means,” answered Richard; “but I have been a good deal with old books, and my impression is you have got there one of the Ireland forgeries!”

“I believe it to be quite genuine!” said Lestrange.

“If it be, there is the more reason in what I am doing, sir.”

Lestrange turned abruptly to the curate, saying—“Come along, Hardy! I can’t bear to see the butchery!”

“Depend on it,” returned the curate laughing, “the surgeon knows his knife!—You know what you’re about, don’t you, Mr. Tuke?”

“If I did not, sir, I wouldn’t meddle with a book like that, forgery or no forgery! You should see the quantities of old print I’ve destroyed in learning how to save such books!—This is no vile body to experiment upon!”

“Mr. Lestrange, you may trust that man!” said the curate.

CHAPTER XV. BARBARA WYLDER

It was the height of the season, and sir Wilton and lady Ann were in London—I cannot say enjoying themselves, for I doubt if either of them ever enjoyed self, or anything else. Their daughters were at home, in the care of the governess. Theodora had been out a year or two, but preferred Mortgrange to London. She was one of the few girls—perhaps not very few—who imagine themselves uglier than they are. Miss Malliver, the governess, was a lady of uncertain age, for whom lady Ann had an uncertain liking. The younger girl, her pupil, was named Victoria, but commonly called Vic, and not uncommonly Vixen. The younger boy was at school, where they were constantly threatening to send him home. He had been already dismissed from Eton.

In their elder son, Arthur, his parents had as perfect a confidence as such parents could have in any son.

The little lady that rode the great mare, and sat in the beech-tree, was at present their guest—as she often was, in a fluctuating or intermittent fashion. She lived in the neighbourhood, but was more at Mortgrange than at home; one consequence of which was, that, as would-be-clever Miss Malliver phrased it, the house was very much B. Wyldered. Nor was that the first house the little lady had bewildered, for she was indeed an importation from a new colony rather startling to sedate old England. Her father, a younger son, had unexpectedly succeeded to the family-property, a few miles from Mortgrange. He was supposed to have made a fortune in New Zealand, where Barbara was born and brought up. They had been home nearly two years, and she was almost eighteen. Absurd rumours were abroad concerning their wealth, but there were no great signs of wealth about the place. Wylder Hall was kept up, and its life went on in good style, it is true, but mainly because the old servants perpetuated the customs of the house.

The squire was said to have shared in some of the roughest phases of colonial life. Whether he was better or worse for falling in love with the money of an older colonist, and marrying his daughter, it is certain that, for a time at least, he grew a shade or two more respectable. Far from being a woman of refinement, she had more character and more strength than he, and brought him, not indeed into the highways of wisdom, but into certain by-paths of prudence.

Upon his return to his native country, they were everywhere received; but had it not been for their reported wealth, I doubt if the ladies of the county, after some experience of her manners and speech, which were at times very rough, would have continued to call on Mrs. Wylder.

But everybody liked Barbara; and nobody could think how such a flower should have come of two such plants. She seemed to regard every one as of her own family. People were her property—hers to love! And her brain was as active as her heart, and constantly with it. She wanted to know what people thought and felt and imagined; what everything was; how a thing was done, and how it ought to be done. She seemed to understand what the animals were thinking, and what the flowers were feeling. She had from infancy spent the greater part of her life, both night and day, in the open air; and, having no companion, had sought the acquaintance of every live thing she saw—often to the disgust of her mother, and occasionally to the annoyance of her father. She was a child of the whole world, as the naiad is the child of the river, and the oread of the mountain. She could sit a horse’s bare back even better than a saddle, could guide him almost as well with a halter as with a bridle, and in general control him without either, though she had ridden more than one horse with terrible bit and spurs. She did not remember the time when she could not swim, and she tried her own running against every new horse, to find what he could do. Some highland girl might perhaps have beaten her, up hill, but I doubt it. She was so small that she looked fragile, but she had nerves such as few men can boast, and muscles like steel. It never occurred to her not to say what she thought, believed, or felt; she would show favour or dislike with equal readiness; and give the reason for anything she did as willingly as do the thing. She was a special favourite at Mortgrange. Not only did she bewitch the blasé man of the world, sir Wilton, but the cold eye of his lady would gleam a faint gleam at the thought of her dowry. Her father “prospected” a little for something higher than a mere baronetcy, but he had in no way interfered. Of herself, divine little savage, she would never have thought of love until she fell in love: a flower cannot know its own blossom until it comes. It did not yet interest her, and until it did, certainly marriage never would. Thus was she healthier-minded than any one born of society-parents, and brought up under the influences of nurse-morality, can well be. When she came to England, it was hard to teach her the ways of the so-called civilized. Servants would sometimes be out searching for her after midnight, perhaps to find her strayed beyond the park, out upon the solitary heath. She knew most of the stars, not by their astronomical names indeed, but by names she had herself given them. She had tales of her own, fashioned in part from the wild myths of the aborigines, to account for the special relations of such as made a group. She would weave the travels of the planets into the steady history of the motionless stars. Waning and waxing moons had a special and strange influence upon her. She would dart out of doors the moment she saw the new moon, and give a wild cry of joy if the old moon was in her arms. Any moon in a gusty night, with a scud of torn clouds, would wake in her an ecstasy. Her old nurse, who had come with her—a strange creature, of what mingled blood no one knew—told of her that she was sometimes seized with such a longing for the ocean, that she would lie for hours ere she went to sleep, moaning with the very moan of its pebble-margined waves. When “in the bush,” she would upon occasion wander about from morning to night. No trouble able to keep her still had ever yet laid hold of her. But she had grown neither coarse nor unfeeling through lack of human intercourse. Nature was to her what she was to Wordsworth’s Lucy, and made her a lady of her own.

As to what is commonly called education, she had not had the best. Since coming to England, she had had governesses, but none fit for the office. Not merely had no one of them that rare gift, the teaching genius—the faculty of waking hunger and thirst; that would have mattered little, for Barbara needed no such rousing; she was eager to know, and yet more eager to understand; but not one of those teachers knew enough to answer a quarter of Barbara’s questions, or was even capable of perceiving that those she could not answer, pointed to anything worth knowing.

Among fashionable girls, affecting a free and easy, or even rough style, Barbara was notable for a sweet, unconscious, graceful daring, never for even a playful rudeness. Nothing she ever did or said or attempted could be called rough, while yet she would say things to make a vulgar duchess stare. Had she been affected, she would have drawn fools and repelled men; real, she charmed alike men and fools.

She had read few books worth reading—had read a few which one would not have chosen she should read, for she grasped at anything a passer-by might have left. Of books properly so called, she knew nothing, therefore had not a notion which to read now she might choose. She imagined them all attractive—but at the first assay turned from the burlesque with a kind of loathing. This made some of her new acquaintance, not refined enough to understand the peculiarity, as it seemed to them, set her down as stupid.

As to religion, she had never been taught any. But from before her earliest recollection she had had the feeling of a Presence. For this feeling she never thought of attempting to account, neither would have recognized it as what I have called it. The sky over her head brought it; a sweep of the earth away from her feet would bring it; any horizon far or near called it up, perhaps most keenly of all. In England she often sorely missed her horizon, and in cities was even unhappy for lack of one. If she could have crystallized, and then formulated her feeling, she would have said she felt lonely, that something or somebody had gone away. Had she been a pagan, it would have been her gods that had forsaken her. Without a horizon she felt as if the wind had forgotten her, the sky did not know her. Often indeed even the farthest horizon could not prevent her from feeling that she had come to a dead country; that things here did not mean anything; that the life was out of them. Was the world so crowded with men and their works as to shut out from her the Presence? When she went to church, nothing received her, nothing came near her, nothing brought her any message. Something was done, she supposed, that ought to be done—something she had no inclination to dispute, no interest in questioning; a certain good power called God, required from people, in return for the gift of existence, the attention of going to church; therefore she went sometimes. She had no idea of ever having done wrong, no feeling that God was pleased or displeased with her, or had any occasion to be either. She did not know that it was God that came near her in her horse, in her dog, in the people about her who so often disappointed her. He came nearer in a thunderstorm, a moonlit night, a sweet wind—anything that woke the sense of the old freedom of her childhood. She felt the presence then, but never knew it a presence.

Neither did she know that there was a place where the very essence, of that whose loss made her sad was always waiting her—a place called in a certain old book “thy closet.” She did not know that there opened the one horizon—infinitely far, yet near as her own heart. But He is there for them that seek him, not for those who do not look for him. Till they do, all he can do is to make them feel the want of him. Barbara had not begun to seek him. She did not know there was anybody to seek: she only missed him without knowing what she missed. The blind, almost meaningless reverence for the name of God, which somehow she learned at church, had not led her in any way to associate him with her sense of loss and need.