There & Back

But he must do something for the friend by whose side he had sat speechless for minutes!

“I will come and see you again soon, Arthur,” he said; “I must go now. Would you mind the loan of a few shillings? It is all I happen to have about me!”

Arthur shook his head, and wrote,

“Money is of no use—not the least.”

“Don’t you fancy anything that might do you good?”

“I can’t get out to get anything.”

“Your mother would get it for you!”

He shook his head.

“But there’s Alice!”

Arthur gave a great sigh, and said nothing. Richard laid the shillings on the chimneypiece, and proceeded to make up the fire before he went. He could see no sort of coal-scuttle, no fuel of any kind. With a heavy heart he left him, and went down into the street, wondering what he could do.

As he drew near the public-house that chiefly poisoned the neighbourhood, it opened its hell-jaws, and cast out a woman in frowzy black, wiping her mouth under her veil with a dirty pocket-handkerchief. She had a swollen red face, betokening the presence of much drink, walked erect, and went perfectly straight, but looked as if, were she to relax the least of her state, she would stagger. As she passed Richard, he recognized her. It was Mrs. Manson. Without a thought he stopped to speak to her. The same moment he saw that, although not dead drunk, she could by no tropical contortion be said to be sober.

She started, and gave a snort of indignation.

“You here!” she cried. “What the big devil do you want—coming here to insult your betters! You the son of the bookbinder! You’re no more John Tuke’s son than I am. You’re the son of that precious rascal, my husband! Go to sir Wilton; don’t come to me! You’re a base-born wretch,—Oh yes, run to your mother! Tell her what I say! Tell her she was lucky to get hold of her tradesman.”

She had told her son and daughter that Richard was the missing heir; and in what she now said she may have meant only to reflect on the humble birth of his mother and abuse his aunt, but it does not matter much what a drunkard means. At the same time the poison of asps may come from the lips of a drunkard as from those of a sober liar. As the woman staggered away, Richard gave a stagger too, and seemed to himself to go reeling along the street. He sat down on a doorstep to recover himself, but for a long way after resuming his walk went like one half stunned. His brain, nevertheless, seemed to go on working of itself. The wretched woman’s statement glowed in him with a lurid light. It seemed to explain so much! He had often felt that his father, though always just, did not greatly care for him. Then there was his mother’s strangeness—the hardness of her religion, the gloom that at times took possession of her whole being, her bursts of tenderness, and her occasional irritability! His mother! That his mother should—should have made him an outcast! The thought was sickening! It was horrible! Perhaps the woman lied! But no; something questionable in the background of his life had been unrecognizably showing from the first of his memory! All was clear now! His mother’s cruel breach with Alice, and her determination that there should be no intercourse between the families, was explained: had Alice and he fallen in love with each other, she would have had to tell the truth to part them! He must know the truth! He would ask his mother straight out, the moment he got home! But how could he ask her! How could any son go to his mother with such a question! Whatever the answer to it, he dared not! There was but one alternative left him—either to kill himself, or to smother his suffering, and let the miserable world go on! Why should he add to its misery by making his own mother more miserable? Such a question from her son would go through her heart like the claws of a lynx! How could she answer it! How could he look upon her shame! Had she not had trouble enough already, poor mother! It would be hard if her God assailed her on all sides—beset her behind and before! Poor mother indeed, if her son was no better than her God! He must be a better son to her than he had been! The child of her hurt must heal her! Must he as well as his father be cruel to her! But alas, what help was in him! What comfort could a heart of pain yield! what soothing stream flow from a well of sorrow! Truly his mother needed a new God!

But even this horror held its germ of comfort: he had his brother Arthur, his sister Alice, to care and provide for! They should not die! He had now the right to compel them to accept his aid!

He thought and thought, and saw that, in order to help them, to do his duty by them, he must make a change in his business relations with Mr. Tuke: he must have the command of his earnings! He could do nothing for his brother and sister as things were! To ask for money would wake inquiry, and he dared not let his mother know that he went to see them! If he did, she would be compelled to speak out, and that was a torture he would rather see her die than suffer. He must have money concerning which no questions would be asked!

Poor, poor creatures! Oh, that terrible mother! It was good to know that his mother was not like her!

The first thing then was, to ask his father to take him as a journeyman, and give him journeyman’s wages. His work, he knew, was worth much more, but that would be enough; his father was welcome to the rest. Out of his wages he would pay his share of the housekeeping, and do as he pleased with what was left. Buying no more books, he would have a nice little weekly sum free for Alice and Arthur. To see his brother and sister half starved was unendurable! he would himself starve first! But how was his money to reach them in the shape of food? That greedy, drunken mother of them swallowed everything! Like old Saturn she devoured her children; she ate and drank them to death! Sport of a low consuming passion, thought Richard, what matter whether she came of God or devil or nothing at all! Redemption, salvation from an evil self, had as yet no greater part in Richard’s theories than in Mrs. Manson’s thoughts. The sole good, the sole satisfaction in life the woman knew, was to eat and drink, if not what she pleased, at least what she liked. If there were an eternity in front, thought Richard, and she had her way in it, she would go on for ever eating and drinking, craving and filling, to all the ages unsatisfied: he would not have his hard-earned money go to fill her insatiable maw! It was not his part in life to make her drunk and comfortable! Wherever he came from, he could not be in the world for that! So what was he to do?

He seemed now to understand why Barbara had not written. She had known him as the son of honest tradespeople, and had no pride to make her despise him; but learning from Alice that he was base-born, she might well wish to drop him! It might not be altogether fair of Barbara—for how was he to blame? Almost as little was she to blame, brought up to count such as he disgraced from their birth! Doubtless her religion should have raised her above the cruel and false prejudice, for she said it taught her to be fair, insisted that she should be just! But with all the world against him, how could one girl stand up for him! True he needed fair play just so much the more; but that was the way things went in this best of possible worlds! No two things in it, meant to go together, fitted! He fought hard for Barbara, strained his strength with himself to be content beforehand with whatever she might do, or think, or say. One thing only he could not bear—to think less of Barbara! That would kill him, paralyze his very soul!—of a man make him a machine, a beast outright at best! In all the world, Barbara was likest the God she believed in: if she—the idea of her, that was, were taken from him, he must despair! He could stand losing herself, he said, but not the thought of her! Let him keep that! Let him keep that! He would revel in that, and defy all the evil gods in the great universe!

With his heart like a stone in his bosom, he reached the house, a home to him no more! and by effort supreme—in which, to be honest, for Richard was not yet a hero, he was aided by the consciousness of doing a thing of praise—managed to demean himself rather better than of late. The surges of the sea of troubles rose to overwhelm him; his courage rose to brave them: let them do their worst! he would be a man still! True, his courage had a cry at the heart of it; but there was not a little of the stoic in Richard, and if it was not the stoicism of Epictetus or of Marcus Aurelius, there was yet some timely, transient help in it. He was doing the best he could without God; and sure the Father was pleased to see the effort of his child! To suffer in patience was a step toward himself. No doubt self was potent in the patience, and not the best self, for that forgets itself—yet the better self, the self that chooses what good it knows.

The same night he laid his request for fixed wages before his father, who agreed to it at once. He believed it no small matter in education that a youth should have money at his disposal; and his wife agreed, with a pang, to what he counted a reasonable sum for Richard’s board. But she would not hear of his paying for his lodging; that was more than the mother heart could bear: it would be like yielding that he was not her very own child!

The trouble remained, that a long week must elapse before he could touch any wages, and he dared not borrow for fear of questions: there was no help!

At night, the moment his head was on the pillow, the strain of his stoicism gave way. Then first he felt alone, utterly alone; and the loneliness went into his soul, and settled there, a fearful entity. The strong stoic, the righteous unbeliever burst into a passion of tears. Sure they were the gift of the God he did not know!—say rather, of the God he knew a little, without knowing that he knew him—and they somewhat cooled his burning heart. But the fog of a fresh despair streamed up from the rain, and its clouds closed down upon him. What was left him to live for! what to keep his heart beating! what to make life a living thing! Sunned and showered too much, it was faded and colourless! Why must he live on, as in a poor dream, without even the interest of danger!—for where life is worth nothing, danger is gone, and danger is the last interest of life! All was gray! Nothing was, but the damp and chill of the grave! No cloak of insanest belief, of dullest mistake, would henceforth hide any more the dreary nakedness of the skeleton, life! The world lay in clearest, barest, coldest light, its hopeless deceit and its misery all revealed! It was well that a grumous fog pervaded the air, each atom a spike in a vesicle of darkness! it was well that no summer noon was blazing about the world! At least there was no mockery now! the world was not pretending to be happy! was not helping the demon of laughter to jeer at the misery of men! Oh, the hellish thing, life! Oh this devilish thing, existence!—a mask with no face behind it! a look with no soul that looked!—a bubble blown out of lies with the breath of a liar! Words! words! words! Lies! lies! lies!

All of a sudden he was crying, as if with a loud voice from the bottom of his heart, though never a sound rose through his throat, “Oh thou who didst make me, if thou art anywhere, if there be such a one as I cry to, unmake me again; undo that which thou hast done; tear asunder and scatter that which thou hast put together! Be merciful for once, and kill me. Let me cease to exist—rather, let me cease to die. Will not plenty of my kind remain to satisfy thy soul with torment!”

Up towered a surge of shame at his poltroonery; he prayed for his own solitary release, and abandoned his fellows to the maker of their misery!

“No!” he cried aloud, “I will not! I will not pray for that! I will not fare better than my fellows!—Oh God, pity—if thou hast any pity, or if pity can be born of any prayer—pity thy creatures! If thou art anywhere, speak to me, and let me hear thee. If thou art God, if thou livest, and carest that I suffer, and wouldst help me if thou couldst, then I will live, and bear, and wait; only let me know that thou art, and art good, and not cruel. If I had but a friend that would stand by me, and talk to me a little, and help me! I have no one, no one, God, to speak to! and if thou wilt not hear, then there is nothing! Oh, be! be! God, I pray thee, exist! Thou knowest my desolation—for surely thou art desolate, with no honest heart to love thee!”

He thought of Barbara, and ceased: she loved God!

A silence came down upon his soul. Ere it passed he was asleep, and knew no more till the morning waked him—to sorrow indeed, but from a dream of hope.

On a few-keyed finger-board, yet with multitudinous change, life struck every interval betwixt keen sorrow, lethargic gloom, and grayest hope, and the days passed and passed.

CHAPTER XLIII. TO BE REDEEMED, ONE MUST REDEEM

The moment he received his wages from his father at the end of the week, Richard set out for Everilda street, Clerkenwell, a little anxious at the thought of encountering the dreadful mother, but hoping she would be out of the way.

When he reached the place, he found no one at home. He could not go back with his mission unaccomplished, and hung about, keeping a sharp watch on each end of the street, and on the approaches to it that he passed in walking to and fro.

He had not waited long before Arthur appeared, stooping like an aged man, and moving slowly He was in the same shabby muffler as of old. His face brightened when he saw his friend, but a fit of coughing prevented him for some time from returning his salutation.

“When did you have your dinner?” asked Richard.

“I had something to eat in the middle of the day,” he answered feebly; “and when Alice comes, she will perhaps bring something with her; but we don’t care much about eating.—We’ve got out of the way of it somehow!” he added with an unreal laugh.

“It’s no wonder you can’t get rid of your cold!” returned Richard. “Come along, and have something to eat.”

“I can’t have Ally come home and not find me!” objected Arthur.

“You shall put something in your pocket for her!” suggested Richard.

He seemed to yield; but his every motion was full of indecision. Richard took his arm.

“Do you know any place near,” he asked, “where we could get some supper?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” answered Arthur.

“Then you go in and rest, while I go and see,” returned Richard.

He searched for some time, but came upon no place where a man could even sit down. At last he found a coffee-shop, and went to fetch Arthur.

He found him stretched on his bed, but he rose at once to accompany him—with the more difficulty that he had yielded to his weariness and lain down. They managed however to reach their goal, and the sight of food waking a little hunger, the poor fellow did pretty well for one who looked so ill. As he ate he revived, and by and by began to talk a little: he had never been much of a talker—had never had food enough for talking.

“It’s very good of you, Richard!” he said. “I suppose you know all about it!”

“I don’t. What is it? Anything new?”

“No, nothing! It’s all so miserable!”

“It’s not all miserable,” answered Richard, “so long as we are brothers!”

The tears came in Arthur’s eyes. Their mother had repented telling them the truth about Richard, and pretended to have discovered that, while sir Wilton was indeed Richard’s father, Mrs. Tuke was after all his mother.

“Yes, that is good,” he said, “though it be only in misfortune! But I am a wretched creature, and no good to anybody; you are a strong man, Richard; I shall never be worth calling your brother!”

“You can do one great thing for me.”

“What is that?”

“Live and grow well.”

“I wish I could; but that is just what I can’t do. I’m on my way home.”

“I would gladly go with you!”

“Why?”

Richard made no answer, and silence followed. Arthur got up.

“Ally will be home,” he said, “and thinking me too ill to get along!”

“Let’s go then!” said Richard.

When they entered Everilda street, they saw Alice on the door-step, looking anxiously up and down. The moment she caught sight of them, she ran away along the street. Richard would have followed her, but Arthur held him, and said,

“Never mind her to-night, Richard! She don’t know that you know. I will tell her; and when you come again, you will find her different. Go now, and come as soon as you can—at least, I mean, as soon as you like.”

“I will come to-morrow,” answered Richard. “Do you want me to go now?”

“It would be better for Alice. I will go to the end of the street, and she will see me from where she is hiding, and come. She always does.”

“Is she in the way of hiding then?”

“Yes, when my mother is—”

“Well, good-bye!” said Richard. “But where shall I find you to-morrow!”

They arranged their meeting, and parted.

The next day, they found a better place for their meal. Richard thought it better not to go quite home with Arthur, but, having learned from him where Alice worked, and at what hour she left, went the following night to wait for her not far from the shop.

At last she came along, looking very thin and pale, but she shone up when she saw him, and joined him without the least hesitation.

“How do you think Arthur is?” he asked.

“I’ve not seen him so well for ever so long,” she answered. “But that is not saying much!” she added with a sigh.

They walked along together. With a taste of happiness, say once a week, Alice would have been a merry girl. She was so content to be with Richard that she never heeded where he was taking her. But when she found him going into a shop with a ham in the window, she drew back.

“No, Richard,” she said; “I can’t let you feed me and Arthur too! Indeed I can’t! It would be downright robbery!”

“Nonsense!” returned Richard; “I want some supper, and you must keep me company!”

“You must excuse me!” she insisted. “It’s all right for Arthur: he’s ill; but for me, I couldn’t look myself in the face in the glass if I let you feed me—a strong girl, fit for anything!”

“Now look here!” said Richard; “I must come to the point, and you must be reasonable! Ain’t you my sister?—and don’t I know you haven’t enough to eat?”

“Who told you that?”

“No one. Any fool could see it with half an eye!”

“Artie has been telling tales!”

“Not one! Just listen to me. I earn so much a week now, and after paying for everything, have something over to spend as I please. If you refuse me for a brother, say so, and I will leave you alone: why should a man tear his heart out looking on where he can’t help!”

She stood motionless, and made him no answer.

“Look here!” he said; “there is the money for our supper: if you will not go with me and eat it, I will throw it in the street.”

With her ingrained feeling of the preciousness of money Alice did not believe him.

“Oh, no, Richard! you would never do that!” she said.

The same instant the coins rang faintly from the middle of the street, and a cab passed over them. Alice gave a cry as of bodily pain, and started to pick them up. Richard held her fast.

“It’s your supper, Richard!” she almost shrieked, and struggled to get away after the money.

“Yes,” he answered; “and yours goes after it, except you come in and share it with me!”

As he spoke he showed her his hand with shillings in it.

She turned and entered the shop. Richard ordered a good meal.

Alice stopped in the middle of her supper, laid down her knife and fork, and burst out crying.

“What is the matter?” said Richard, alarmed.

“I can’t bear to think of that money! I must go and look for it!” sobbed Alice.

Richard laughed, the first time for days.

“Alice,” he said, “the money was well spent: I got my own way with it!”

As she ate and drank, a little colour rose in her face, and on Richard fell a shadow of the joy of his creator, beholding his work, and seeing it good.

CHAPTER XLIV. A DOOR OPENED IN HEAVEN

Some men hunt their fellows to prey upon them, and fill their own greedy maws; Richard hunted and caught his brother and sister that he might feed them with the labour of his hands. I fear there was therefore a little more for the mother to guzzle, but it is of small consequence whether those that go down the hill arrive at the foot a week sooner or later. To Arthur and Alice, their new-found brother, strong and loving, was as an angel from high heaven. It was no fault in Richard that he did not find a correspondent comfort in them. It did in truth comfort him to see them improve in looks and in strength; but they had not many thoughts to share with him—had little coin for spiritual commerce. Even their religion, like that of most who claim any, had little shape or colour. What there was of it was genuine, which made it infinitely precious, but it was much too weak to pass over to the help of another. Divine aid, however, of a different sort, was waiting for him.

Hitherto he had heard little or no music. The little was from the church-organ, and his not unjustifiable prejudice against its surroundings, had disinclined him to listen when it spoke. The intellect of the youth had come to the front, and the higher powers to which art is ministrant, had remained much undeveloped, shut in darkened palace-rooms, where a ray of genial impulse not often entered. For the highest of those powers, the imagination, without which no discovery of any grandeur is made even in the realms of science, dwells in the halls of aspiration, outlook, desire, and hope, and round the windows and filling the air of these, hung the dry dust-cloud of Richard’s negation. But when Love, with her attendant Sorrow, came, they opened wide all the doors and windows of them to what might enter. Hitherto all his poetry, even what he produced, had come to Richard at second-hand, that is, from the inspiration of books; its flowers were of the moon, not of the sun; they sprang under the pale reflex light of other souls: for genuine life of any and every sort, the immediate inspiration of the Almighty is the one essential, and for that, Sorrow and Love now made a way.

First of all, the lower winds and sidelong rays of art, all from the father of lights, crept in, able now to work for his perfect will. For when a man has once begun to live, then have the thoughts and feelings of other men, and every art in which those thoughts or feelings are embodied by them, a sevenfold power for the strengthening and rousing of the divine nature in him. And as the divine nature is roused, the diviner nature, the immediate God, enters to possess it.

A gentleman who employed Richard, happened one day, in conversation with him as he pursued his work, to start the subject of music, and made a remark which, notwithstanding Richard’s ignorance, found sufficient way into his mind to make him think over what little experience he had had of sweet sounds, ere he made his reply. When made, it revealed in truth his ignorance, but his modesty as well, and his capacity for understanding—with the result that the gentleman, who was not only a lover of music but a believer in it, said to him in return things which roused in him such a desire to put them to the test for verification or disapproval, that he went the next Monday night to the popular concert at St. James’s Hall. In the crowd that waited more than an hour at the door of the orchestra to secure a shilling-place, there was not one that knew so little of music as he; but there never had been in it one whose ignorance was more worthy of destruction. The first throbbing flash of the violins cleft his soul as lightning cleaves a dark cloud, and set his body shivering as with its thunder—and lo, a door was opened in heaven! and, like the writhings of a cloud in the grasp of a heavenly wind, all the discords of spirit-pain were breaking up, changing, and solving themselves into the song of the violins! After that, he went every Monday night to the same concert-room. It was his church, the mount of his ascension, the place whence he soared—no, but was lifted up to what was as yet his highest consciousness of being. All that was best and simplest in him came wide awake as he sat and listened. What fact did the music prove? None whatever. Yet would not the logic of all science have persuaded Richard that the sea of mood and mystic response, tossing his soul hither and thither on its radiant waters, as, deep unto deep, it answered the marching array of live waves, fashioned one by one out of the still air, marshalled and ranked and driven on in symmetric relation and order by those strange creative powers with their curious symbols, throned at their godlike labour—that the answer of his soul, I say, was but an illusion, the babble of a sleeping child in reply to a question never put. If it was an illusion, how came it that such illusion was possible? If an illusion, whence its peculiar bliss—a bliss aroused by law imperative that ruled its factors, yet bore scant resemblance to the bliss? What he felt, he knew that he felt, and knew that he had never caused it, never commanded its presence, never foreseen its arrival, never known of its possible existence. The feeling was in him, but had been waked by some power beyond him, for he was not himself even present at its origin! The voice of that power was a voice all sweetness and persuading, yet a voice of creation, calling up a world of splendour and delight, the beams of whose chambers were indeed laid upon the waters, but had there a foundation the less lively earth could not afford. For the very essence of the creative voice, working wildest delirium of content, was law that could not be broken, the very law of the thought of God himself. Law is life, for God is law, and God is life. Law is the root and the stalk of life, beauty is the flower of life, and joy is its odour; but life itself is love. The flower and its odour are given unto men; the root and stalk they may search into if they will; the giver of life they must know, or they cannot live with his life, they cannot share in the life eternal.