The History of David Grieve Part 116

Nurse looked at me with meaning, startled eyes, as much as to say, "Look closely, it is not as you think." And as I went up to her, lying still and even smiling on her couch, there was an imperceptible raising of her little white hand as though to keep me off. Then in a flash I saw that it was not my living Lucy; that it could only be her spirit. I felt an awful sense of separation and yet of yearning; sitting down on one of the mossy stones beside her, I wept bitterly, and so woke, bathed in tears.

'... It has often seemed to me lately that certain elements in the Resurrection stories may be originally traced to such experiences as these. I am irresistibly drawn to believe that the strange and mystic scene beside the lake, in the appendix chapter to the Gospel of St. John, arose in some such way. There is the same mixture of elements--of the familiar with the ghostly, the trivial with the pa.s.sionate and exalted--which my own consciousness has so often trembled under in these last visionary months.

The well-known lake, the old scene of fishers and fis.h.i.+ng-boats, and on the sh.o.r.e the mysterious figure of the Master, the same, yet not the same, the little, vivid, dream-like details of the fire of coals, the broiled fish, and bread, the awe and longing of the disciples--it is borne in upon me with extraordinary conviction that the whole of it sprang, to begin with, from the dream of grief and exhaustion. Then, in an age which attached a peculiar and mystical importance to dreams, the beautiful thrilling fancy pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth, became almost immediately history instead of dream,--just as here and there a parable misunderstood has taken the garb of an event,--was after a while added to and made more precise in the interest of apologetics, or of doctrine, or of the simple love of elaboration, and so at last found a final resting-place as an epilogue to the fourth Gospel.'

'NOVEMBER 4TH.--To-night I have dared to read again Browning's "Rabbi ben Ezra." For months I have not been able to read it, or think of it, though for days and weeks towards the end of her life it seemed to be graven on my heart.

Look not thou down, but up!

To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peal The new wine's foaming glow, The Master's lips a-glow!

Thou heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel?

'Let me think again, my G.o.d, of that astonis.h.i.+ng ripening of her last days!--of all her little acts of love and grat.i.tude towards me, towards her nurse, towards the people in the house, who had helped to tend her--of her marvellous submission, when once the black cloud of the fear of death, and the agony of parting from life had left her.

'And such facts alone in the world's economy are to have no meaning, point no-whither? I could as soon believe it as that, in the physical universe, the powers of the magnet, or the flash of the lightning, are isolated and meaningless--tell us nothing and lead nowhere.

_'November 10th._--In the old days--there is a pa.s.sage of the kind in an earlier part of this journal--I was constantly troubled, and not for myself only, but for others, the poor and unlearned especially, who, as it seemed to me, would lose most in the crumbling of the Christian mythology--as to the intellectual difficulties of the approach to G.o.d. All this philosophical travail of two thousand years--and so many doubts and darknesses! A world athirst for preaching, and nothing simple or clear to preach--when once the miracle-child of Bethlehem had been dispossessed. And _now_ it is daylight-plain to me that in the simplest act of loving self-surrender there is the germ of all faith, the essence of all lasting religion. Quicken human service, purify and strengthen human love, and have no fear but that the conscience will find its G.o.d! For all the time this quickening and this purification are His work in thee. Around thee are the inst.i.tutions, the ideals, the knowledge and beliefs, ethical or intellectual, in which that work, that life, have been so far fragmentarily and partially realised. Submit thyself and press forward. Thou knowest well what it means to be _better:_ more pure, more loving, more self-denying. And in thy struggle to be all these, G.o.d cometh to thee and abides.... _But the greatest of these is love!_'

_'November 20th._--To-day I have finished the last of my New Testament tracts, the last at any rate for a time. While Ancrum lives I have resolved to suspend them. They trouble him deeply; and I, who owe him so much, will not voluntarily add to his burden. His wife is with him, a somewhat heavy, dark-faced woman, with a slumbrous eye, which may, however, be capable of kindling. They have left Mortimer Street, and have gone to live in a little house on the road to Cheadle. He seems perfectly happy, and though the doctor is discouraging, I at least can see no change for the worse.

She sits by him and reads or works, without much talking, but is all the time attentive to his lightest movement. Friends send them flowers which brighten the little house, his "boys" visit him in the evenings, he is properly fed, and altogether I am more happy about him than I have been for long. It required considerable courage, this move, on her part; for there are a certain number of people still left who knew Ancrum at college, and remember the story; and those who believed him a bachelor are of course scandalised and wondering. But the talk, whatever it is, does not seem to molest them much. He offered to leave Manchester, but she would not let him. "What would he do away from you and his boys?"

she said to me. There is a heroism in it all the same.

'... So my New Testament work may rest a while.--During these autumn weeks, it has helped me through some terrible hours.

'When I look back over the ma.s.s of patient labour which has acc.u.mulated during the present century round the founder of Christianity and the origins of his society--when I compare the text-books of the day with the text-books of sixty years ago--I no longer wonder at the empty and ignorant arrogance with which the French eighteenth century treated the whole subject. The first stone of the modern building had not been laid when Voltaire wrote, unless perhaps in the Wolfenb.u.t.tel fragments. He knew, in truth, no more than the Jesuits, much less in fact than the better men among them.

'... It has been like the unravelling of a piece of fine and ancient needlework--and so discovering the secrets of its make and craftsmans.h.i.+p. A few loose ends were first followed up; then gradually the whole tissue has been involved, till at last the nature and quality of each thread, the purpose and the skill of each st.i.tch, are becoming plain, and what was mystery rises into knowledge.

'... But how close and fine a web!--and how difficult and patient the process by which Christian reality has to be grasped! There is no short cut--one must toil.

'But after one has toiled, what are the rewards? Truth first--which is an end in itself and not a means to anything beyond. Then--the great figure of Christianity given back to you--with something at least of the first magic, the first "natural truth" of look and tone. Through and beyond dogmatic overlay, and Messianic theory and wonder-loving addition, to recover, at least fragmentarily, the actual voice, the first meaning, which is also the eternal meaning, of Jesus--Paul--"John"!

'Finally--a conception of Christianity in which you discern once more its lasting validity and significance--its imperishable place in human life. It becomes simply that preaching of the Kingdom of G.o.d which belongs to and affects you--you, the modern European--just as Greek philosophy, Stoic or Cynic, was that preaching of it which belonged to and affected Epictetus.'

'November 24th.--Mr. O'Kelly writes to me to-day his usual hopeless report. No news! I do not even know whether she is alive, and I can do nothing--absolutely nothing.

'Yes--let me correct myself, there is some news of an event which, if we could find her, might simplify matters a little. Montjoie is dead in hospital--at the age of thirty-six--

'Is there any other slavery and chain like that of temperament? As I look back on the whole course of my relation to Louie, I am conscious only of a sickening sense of utter failure. Our father left her to me, and I have not been able to hold her back from--nay, I have helped to plunge her into the most obvious and commonplace ruin. Yet I am always asking myself, if it were to do again, could I do any better? Has any other force developed in me which would make it possible for me _now_ to break through the barriers between her nature and mine, to love her sincerely, asking for nothing again, to help her to a saner and happier life?

'If sometimes I dream that so it is, it is to _her_ I owe it--to _her_ whom I carry on my bosom, and whose hand did once, or so it seemed, unlock to me the gates of G.o.d. _Lucy! my Lucy!_

'... All my past life becomes sometimes intolerable to me. I can see nothing in it that is not tarnished and flecked with black stains of egotism, pride, hardness, moral indolence.

'And the only reparation possible, "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds," at which my fainting heart sinks.

'Sometimes I find much comfort in the saying of a lonely thinker, "Let us humbly accept from G.o.d even our own nature; not that we are called upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us accept _ourselves_ in spite of the evil and the disease."

_'Que vivre est difficile--o mon coeur fatigue!'_

CHAPTER XI

By the end of December David Grieve was near breaking down.

Dr. Mildmay insisted brusquely on his going away.

'As far as I can see you will live to be an old man,' he said, 'but if you go on like this, it will be with shattered powers. You are driving yourself to death, yet at the present moment you have no natural driving force. It is all artificial, a matter of will. Do, for heaven's sake, get away from these skies and these streets, and leave all work and all social reforms behind. The first business of the citizen--prate as you like!--is to keep his nerves and his digestion in going order.'

David laughed and yielded. The advice, in fact, corresponded to an inward thirst, and had, moreover, a coincidence to back it. In one of the Manchester papers two or three mornings before he had seen the advertis.e.m.e.nt of a farm to let, which had set vibrating all his pa.s.sion for and memory of the moorland. It was a farm about half a mile from Needham Farm, on one of the lower slopes of Kinder Low.

It had belonged to a peasant owner, lately dead. The heirs wished to sell, but failing a purchaser were willing to let on a short lease.

It was but a small grazing farm, and the rent was low. David went to the agent, took it at once, and in a few days, to the amazement of Reuben and Hannah, to whom he wrote only the night before he arrived, he and Sandy, and a servant, were established with a minimum of furniture, but a sufficiency of blankets and coals, in two or three rooms of the little grey-walled house.

'Well, it caps me, it do!' Hannah said to herself, in her astonishment as she stood on her own doorstep the day after the arrival, and watched the figures of David and Sandy disappearing along the light crisp snow of the nearer fields in the direction of the Red Brook and the sheep-fold. They had looked in to ask for Reuben, and had gone in pursuit of him.

What on earth should make a man in the possession of his natural senses leave a warm town-house in January, and come to camp in 'owd Ben's' farm, was, indeed, past Hannah's divination. In reality, no sudden resolve could have been happier. Sandy was a hardy little fellow, and with the first breath of the moorland wind David felt a load, which had been growing too heavy to bear, lifting from his breast. His youth, his manhood, rea.s.serted themselves. The bracing clearness of what seemed to be the setting-in of a long frost put a new life into him; winter's 'bright and intricate device' of ice-fringed stream, of rimy gra.s.s, of snow-clad moor, of steel-blue skies, filled him once more with natural joy, carried him out of himself. He could not keep himself indoors; he went about with Reuben or the shepherd, after the sheep; he fed the cattle at Needham Farm, and brought his old knowledge to bear on the rearing of a sickly calf; he watched for the grouse, or he carried his pockets full of bread for the few blackbirds or moor-pippits that cheered his walks into the fissured solitudes of the great Peak plateau, walks which no one to whom every inch of the ground was not familiar dared have ventured, seeing how misleading and treacherous even light snow-drifts may become in the black bog-land of these high and lonely moors; or he toiled up the side of the Scout with Sandy on his back, that he might put the boy on one of the boulders beside the top of the Downfall, and, holding him fast, bid him look down at the great icicles which marked its steep and waterless bed, gleaming in the short-lived sun.

The moral surroundings, too, of the change were cheering. There, over the brow, in the comfortable little cottage, where he had long since placed her, with a woman to look after her, was Margaret--quite childish and out of her mind, but happy and well cared for. He and Sandy would trudge over from time to time to see her, he carrying the boy in a plaid slung round his shoulders when the snow was deep. Once Sandy went to Frimley with the Needham Farm shepherd, and when David came to fetch him he found the boy and Margaret playing cat's-cradle together by the fire, and the eagerness in Sandy's pursed lips, and on the ethereally blanched and shrunken face of Margaret, brought the tears to David's eyes, as he stood smiling and looking on. But she did not suffer; for memory was gone; only the gentle 'imperishable child' remained.

And at Needham Farm he had never known the atmosphere so still.

Reuben was singularly cheerful and placid. Whether by the mere physical weakening of years, or by some slow softening of the soul, Hannah and her ways were no longer the daily scourge and perplexity to her husband they had once been. She was a harsh and tyrannous woman still, but not now openly viperish or cruel. With the disappearance of old temptations, the character had, to some extent, righted itself. Her sins of avarice and oppression towards Sandy's orphans had raised no Nemesis that could be traced, either within or without. It is doubtful whether she ever knew what self-reproach might mean; in word, at any rate, she was to the end as loudly confident as at the first. Nevertheless it might certainly be said that at sixty she was a better and more tolerable human being than she had been at fifty.

'Aye, if yo do but live long enoof, yo get past t' bad bits o' t'

road,' Reuben said one night, with a long breath, to David, and then checked himself, brought up either by a look at his nephew's mourning dress, or by a recollection of what David had told him of Louie the night before.

It troubled Reuben indeed, something in the old fas.h.i.+on, that his wife would show no concern whatever for Louie when he repeated to her the details of that disappearance whereof so far he and she had known only the bare fact.

'Aye, I thowt she'd bin and married soom mak o' rabblement,'

remarked Hannah. 'Yo doant suppose ony decent mon ud put up wi her.

What Davy wants wi lookin for her I doant know. He'll be hard-set when he's fand her, I should think.'

She was equally impervious and sarcastic with regard to David's social efforts. Her sharp tongue exercised itself on the 'poor way'

in which he seemed to live, and when Reuben repeated to her, with some bewilderment, the facts which she had egged him on to get out of David, her scorn knew no bounds.

'Weel, it's like t' Bible after aw, Hannah,' said Reuben, perplexed and remonstrating; 'theer's things, yo'll remember, abeawt gien t'

coat off your back, an sellin aw a mon has, an th' loike, 'at fairly beats me soomtimes.'

'Oh--go long wi yo!' said Hannah in high wrath. 'He an his loike'll mak a halliblash of us aw soon, wi their silly faddle, an pamperin o' workin men, wha never wor an never will be noa better nor they should be. But--thank the Lord--_I_'ll not be theer to see.'

And after this communication she found it very difficult to treat David civilly.

But to David's son--to Sandy--Hannah Grieve capitulated, for the first and only time in her life.

On the second and third day after his arrival, Sandy came over with the servant to ask Hannah's help in some small matter of the new household. As they neared the farm door, Tim, the aged Tim, who was slouching behind, was suddenly set upon by a new and ill-tempered collie of Reuben's, who threatened very soon to shake the life out of his poor toothless victim. But Sandy, who had a stick, rushed at him, his cheeks and eyes glowing with pa.s.sion.