The Seaboard Parish - vol.3
Home - George MacDonald - The Seaboard Parish - vol.3A WALK WITH MY WIFE.
The autumn was creeping up on the earth, with winter holding by its skirts behind; but before I loose my hold of the garments of summer, I must write a chapter about a walk and a talk I had one night with my wife. It had rained a good deal during the day, but as the sun went down the air began to clear, and when the moon shone out, near the full, she walked the heavens, not "like one that hath been led astray," but as "queen and huntress, chaste and fair."
"What a lovely night it is!" said Ethelwyn, who had come into my study--where I always sat with unblinded windows, that the night and her creatures might look in upon me--and had stood gazing out for a moment.
"Shall we go for a little turn?" I said.
"I should like it very much," she answered. "I will go and put on my bonnet at once."
In a minute or two she looked in again, all ready. I rose, laid aside my Plato, and went with her. We turned our steps along the edge of the down, and descended upon the breakwater, where we seated ourselves upon the same spot where in the darkness I had heard the voices of Joe and Agnes. What a different night it was from that! The sea lay as quiet as if it could not move for the moonlight that lay upon it. The glory over it was so mighty in its peacefulness, that the wild element beneath was afraid to toss itself even with the motions of its natural unrest. The moon was like the face of a saint before which the stormy people has grown dumb. The rocks stood up solid and dark in the universal aether, and the pulse of the ocean throbbed against them with a lapping gush, soft as the voice of a passionate child soothed into shame of its vanished petulance. But the sky was the glory. Although no breath moved below, there was a gentle wind abroad in the upper regions. The air was full of masses of cloud, the vanishing fragments of the one great vapour which had been pouring down in rain the most of the day. These masses were all setting with one steady motion eastward into the abysses of space; now obscuring the fair moon, now solemnly sweeping away from before her. As they departed, out shone her marvellous radiance, as calm as ever. It was plain that she knew nothing of what we called her covering, her obscuration, the dimming of her glory. She had been busy all the time weaving her lovely opaline damask on the other side of the mass in which we said she was swallowed up.
"Have you ever noticed, wifie," I said, "how the eyes of our minds--almost our bodily eyes--are opened sometimes to the cubicalness of nature, as it were?"
"I don't know, Harry, for I don't understand your question," she answered.
"Well, it was a stupid way of expressing what I meant. No human being could have understood it from that. I will make you understand in a moment, though. Sometimes--perhaps generally--we see the sky as a flat dome, spangled with star-points, and painted blue. Now I see it as an awful depth of blue air, depth within depth; and the clouds before me are not passing away to the left, but sinking away from the front of me into the marvellous unknown regions, which, let philosophers say what they will about time and space,--and I daresay they are right,--are yet very awful to me. Thank God, my dear," I said, catching hold of her arm, as the terror of mere space grew upon me, "for himself. He is deeper than space, deeper than time; he is the heart of all the cube of history."
"I understand you now, husband," said my wife.
"I knew you would," I answered.
"But," she said again, "is it not something the same with the things inside us? I can't put it in words as you do. Do you understand me now?"
"I am not sure that I do. You must try again."
"You understand me well enough, only you like to make me blunder where you can talk," said my wife, putting her hand in mine. "But I will try. Sometimes, after thinking about something for a long time, you come to a conclusion about it, and you think you have settled it plain and clear to yourself, for ever and a day. You hang it upon your wall, like a picture, and are satisfied for a fortnight. But some day, when you happen to cast a look at it, you find that instead of hanging flat on the wall, your picture has gone through it--opens out into some region you don't know where--shows you far-receding distances of air and sea--in short, where you thought one question was settled for ever, a hundred are opened up for the present hour."
"Bravo, wife !" I cried in true delight. "I do indeed understand you now. You have said it better than I could ever have done. That's the plague of you women! You have been taught for centuries and centuries that there is little or nothing to be expected of you, and so you won't try. Therefore we men know no more than you do whether it is in you or not. And when you do try, instead of trying to think, you want to be in Parliament all at once."
"Do you apply that remark to me, sir?" demanded Ethelwyn.
"You must submit to bear the sins of your kind upon occasion," I answered.
"I am content to do that, so long as yours will help mine," she replied.
"Then I may go on?" I said, with interrogation.
"Till sunrise if you like. We were talking of the cubicalness--I believe you called it--of nature."
"And you capped it with the cubicalness of thought. And quite right too. There are people, as a dear friend of mine used to say, who are so accustomed to regard everything in the flat, as dogma cut and--not always dried my moral olfactories aver--that if you prove to them the very thing they believe, but after another mode than that they have been accustomed to, they are offended, and count you a heretic. There is no help for it. Even St. Paul's chief opposition came from the Judaizing Christians of his time, who did not believe that God could love the Gentiles, and therefore regarded him as a teacher of falsehood. We must not be fierce with them. Who knows what wickedness of their ancestors goes to account for their stupidity? For that there are stupid people, and that they are, in very consequence of their stupidity, conceited, who can deny? The worst of it is, that no man who is conceited can be convinced of the fact."
"Don't say that, Harry. That is to deny conversion."
"You are right, Ethelwyn. The moment a man is convinced of his folly, he ceases to be a fool. The moment a man is convinced of his conceit, he ceases to be conceited. But there must be a final judgment, and the true man will welcome it, even if he is to appear a convicted fool. A man's business is to see first that he is not acting the part of a fool, and next, to help any honest people who care about the matter to take heed likewise that they be not offering to pull the mote out of their brother's eye. But there are even societies established and supported by good people for the express purpose of pulling out motes.--'The Mote-Pulling Society!'--That ought to take with a certain part of the public."
"Come, come, Harry. You are absurd. Such people don't come near you."
"They can't touch me. No. But they come near good people whom I know, brandishing the long pins with which they pull the motes out, and threatening them with judgment before their time. They are but pins, to be sure--not daggers."
"But you have wandered, Harry, into the narrowest underground, musty ways, and have forgotten all about 'the cubicalness of nature.'"
"You are right, my love, as you generally are," I answered, laughing. "Look at that great antlered elk, or moose--fit quarry for Diana of the silver bow. Look how it glides solemnly away into the unpastured depths of the aerial deserts. Look again at that reclining giant, half raised upon his arm, with his face turned towards the wilderness. What eyes they must be under those huge brows! On what message to the nations is he borne as by the slow sweep of ages, on towards his mysterious goal?"
"Stop, stop, Harry," said my wife. "It makes me unhappy to hear grand words clothing only cloudy fancies. Such words ought to be used about the truth, and the truth only."
"If I could carry it no further, my dear, then it would indeed be a degrading of words. But there never was a vagary that uplifted the soul, or made the grand words flow from the gates of speech, that had not its counterpart in truth itself. Man can imagine nothing, even in the clouds of the air, that God has not done, or is not doing. Even as that cloudy giant yields, and is 'shepherded by the slow unwilling wind,' so is each of us borne onward to an unseen destiny--a glorious one if we will but yield to the Spirit of God that bloweth where it listeth--with a grand listing-- coming whence we know not, and going whither we know not. The very clouds of the air are hung up as dim pictures of the thoughts and history of man."
"I do not mind how long you talk like that, husband, even if you take the clouds for your text. But it did make me miserable to think that what you were saying had no more basis than the fantastic forms which the clouds assume. I see I was wrong, though."
"The clouds themselves, in such a solemn stately march as this, used to make me sad for the very same reason. I used to think, What is it all for? They are but vapours blown by the wind. They come nowhence, and they go nowhither. But now I see them and all things as ever moving symbols of the motions of man's spirit and destiny."
A pause followed, during which we sat and watched the marvellous depth of the heavens, deep as I do not think I ever saw them before or since, covered with a stately procession of ever-appearing and ever-vanishing forms--great sculpturesque blocks of a shattered storm--the icebergs of the upper sea. These were not far off against a blue background, but floating near us in the heart of a blue-black space, gloriously lighted by a golden rather than silvery moon. At length my wife spoke.
"I hope Mr. Percivale is out to-night," she said. "How he must be enjoying it if he is!"
"I wonder the young man is not returning to his professional labours," I said. "Few artists can afford such long holidays as he is taking."
"He is laying in stock, though, I suppose," answered my wife.
"I doubt that, my dear. He said not, on one occasion, you may remember."
"Yes, I remember. But still he must paint better the more familiar he gets with the things God cares to fashion."
"Doubtless. But I am afraid the work of God he is chiefly studying at present is our Wynnie."
"Well, is she not a worthy object of his study?" returned Ethelwyn, looking up in my face with an arch expression.
"Doubtless again, Ethel; but I hope she is not studying him quite so much in her turn. I have seen her eyes following him about."
My wife made no answer for a moment. Then she said,
"Don't you like him, Harry?"
"Yes. I like him very much."
"Then why should you not like Wynnie to like him?"
"I should like to be surer of his principles, for one thing."
"I should like to be surer of Wynnie's."
I was silent. Ethelwyn resumed.
"Don't you think they might do each other good?"
Still I could not reply.
"They both love the truth, I am sure; only they don't perhaps know what it is yet. I think if they were to fall in love with each other, it would very likely make them both more desirous of finding it still."
"Perhaps," I said at last. "But you are talking about awfully serious things, Ethelwyn."
"Yes, as serious as life," she answered.
"You make me very anxious," I said. "The young man has not, I fear, any means of gaining a livelihood for more than himself."
"Why should he before he wanted it? I like to see a man who can be content with an art and a living by it."
"I hope I have not been to blame in allowing them to see so much of each other," I said, hardly heeding my wife's words.
"It came about quite naturally," she rejoined. "If you had opposed their meeting, you would have been interfering just as if you had been Providence. And you would have only made them think more about each other."
"He hasn't said anything--has he?" I asked in positive alarm.
"O dear no. It may be all my fancy. I am only looking a little ahead. I confess I should like him for a son-in-law. I approve of him," she added, with a sweet laugh.
"Well," I said, "I suppose sons-in-law are possible, however disagreeable, results of having daughters."
I tried to laugh, but hardly succeeded.
"Harry," said my wife, "I don't like you in such a mood. It is not like you at all. It is unworthy of you."
"How can I help being anxious when you speak of such dreadful things as the possibility of having to give away my daughter, my precious wonder that came to me through you, out of the infinite--the tender little darling!"
"'Out of the heart of God,' you used to say, Henry. Yes, and with a destiny he had ordained. It is strange to me how you forget your best and noblest teaching sometimes. You are always telling us to trust in God. Surely it is a poor creed that will only allow us to trust in God for ourselves--a very selfish creed. There must be something wrong there. I should say that the man who can only trust God for himself is not half a Christian. Either he is so selfish that that satisfies him, or he has such a poor notion of God that he cannot trust him with what most concerns him. The former is not your case, Harry: is the latter, then?--You see I must take my turn at the preaching sometimes. Mayn't I, dearest?"
She took my hand in both of hers. The truth arose in my heart. I never loved my wife more than at that moment. And now I could not speak for other reasons. I saw that I had been faithless to my God, and the moment I could command my speech, I hastened to confess it.
"You are right, my dear," I said, "quite right. I have been wicked, for I have been denying my God. I have been putting my providence in the place of his--trying, like an anxious fool, to count the hairs on Wynnie's head, instead of being content that the grand loving Father should count them. My love, let us pray for Wynnie; for what is prayer but giving her to God and his holy, blessed will?"
We sat hand in hand. Neither spoke aloud for some minutes, but we spoke in our hearts to God, talking to him about Wynnie. Then we rose together, and walked homeward, still in silence. But my heart and hand clung to my wife as to the angel whom God had sent to deliver me out of the prison of my faithlessness. And as we went, lo! the sky was glorious again. It had faded from my sight, had grown flat as a dogma, uninteresting as "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours;" the moon had been but a round thing with the sun shining upon it, and the stars were only minding their own business. But now the solemn march towards an unseen, unimagined goal had again begun. Wynnie's life was hid with Christ in God. Away strode the cloudy pageant with its banners blowing in the wind, which blew where it grandly listed, marching as to a solemn triumphal music that drew them from afar towards the gates of pearl by which the morning walks out of the New Jerusalem to gladden the nations of the earth. Solitary stars, with all their sparkles drawn in, shone, quiet as human eyes, in the deep solemn clefts of dark blue air. They looked restrained and still, as if they knew all about it--all about the secret of this midnight march. For the moon--she saw the sun, and therefore made the earth glad.
"You have been a moon to me this night, my wife," I said. "You were looking full at the truth, while I was dark. I saw its light in your face, and believed, and turned my soul to the sun. And now I am both ashamed and glad. God keep me from sinning so again."
"My dear husband, it was only a mood--a passing mood," said Ethelwyn, seeking to comfort me.
"It was a mood, and thank God it is now past; but it was a wicked one. It was a mood in which the Lord might have called me a devil, as he did St. Peter. Such moods have to be grappled with and fought the moment they appear. They must not have their way for a single thought even."
"But we can't help it always, can we, husband?"
"We can't help it out and out, because our wills are not yet free with the freedom God is giving us as fast as we will let him. When we are able to will thoroughly, then we shall do what we will. At least, I think we shall. But there is a mystery in it God only understands. All we know is, that we can struggle and pray. But a mood is an awful oppression sometimes when you least believe in it and most wish to get rid of it. It is like a headache in the soul."
"What do the people do that don't believe in God?" said Ethelwyn.
The same moment Wynnie, who had seen us pass the window, opened the door of the bark-house for us, and we passed into Connie's chamber and found her lying in the moonlight, gazing at the same heavens as her father and mother had been revelling in.