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AN IMPORTANT LETTER.
It was, then, in the beginning of April that I received one morning an
epistle from an old college friend of mine, with whom I had renewed my
acquaintance of late, through the pleasure which he was kind enough to say
he had derived from reading a little book of mine upon the relation of the
mind of St. Paul to the gospel story. His name was Shepherd--a good name
for a clergyman. In his case both Christian name and patronymic might
remind him well of his duty. David Shepherd ought to be a good clergyman.
As soon as I had read the letter, I went with it open in my hand to find my
wife.
"Here is Shepherd," I said, "with a clerical sore-throat, and forced to
give up his duty for a whole summer. He writes to ask me whether, as he
understands I have a curate as good as myself--that is what the old fellow
says--it might not suit me to take my family to his place for the summer.
He assures me I should like it, and that it would do us all good. His
house, he says, is large enough to hold us, and he knows I should not like
to be without duty wherever I was. And so on Read the letter for yourself,
and turn it over in your mind. Weir will come back so fresh and active that
it will be no oppression to him to take the whole of the duty here. I will
run and ask Turner whether it would be safe to move Connie, and whether the
sea-air would be good for her."
"One would think you were only twenty, husband--you make up your mind so
quickly, and are in such a hurry."
The fact was, a vision of the sea had rushed in upon me. It was many years
since I had seen the sea, and the thought of looking on it once more, in
its most glorious show, the Atlantic itself, with nothing between us and
America, but the round of the ridgy water, had excited me so that my wife's
reproof, if reproof it was, was quite necessary to bring me to my usually
quiet and sober senses. I laughed, begged old grannie's pardon, and set off
to see Turner notwithstanding, leaving her to read and ponder Shepherd's
letter.
"What do you think, Turner?" I said, and told him the case. He looked
rather grave.
"When would you think of going?" he asked.
"About the beginning of June."
"Nearly two months," he said, thoughtfully. "And Miss Connie was not the
worse for getting on the sofa yesterday?"
"The better, I do think."
"Has she had any increase of pain since?"
"None, I quite believe; for I questioned her as to that."
He thought again. He was a careful man, although young.
"It is a long journey."
"She could make it by easy stages."
"It would certainly do her good to breathe the sea-air and have such a
thorough change in every way--if only it could be managed without fatigue
and suffering. I think, if you can get her up every day between this and
that, we shall be justified in trying it at least. The sooner you get her
out of doors the better too; but the weather is scarcely fit for that yet."
"A good deal will depend on how she is inclined, I suppose."
"Yes. But in her case you must not mind that too much. An invalid's
instincts as to eating and drinking are more to be depended upon than those
of a healthy person; but it is not so, I think with regard to anything
involving effort. That she must sometimes be urged to. She must not judge
that by inclination. I have had, in my short practice, two patients, who
considered themselves bedlars, as you will find the common people in
the part you are going to, call them--bedridden, that is. One of them I
persuaded to make the attempt to rise, and although her sense of inability
was anything but feigned, and she will be a sufferer to the end of her
days, yet she goes about the house without much inconvenience, and I
suspect is not only physically but morally the better for it. The other
would not consent to try, and I believe lies there still."
"The will has more to do with most things than people generally suppose,"
I said. "Could you manage, now, do you think, supposing we resolve to make
the experiment, to accompany us the first stage or two?"
"It is very likely I could. Only you must not depend upon me. I cannot tell
beforehand. You yourself would teach me that I must not be a respecter of
persons, you know."
I returned to my wife. She was in Connie's room.
"Well, my dear," I said, "what do you think of it?"
"Of what?" she asked.
"Why, of Shepherd's letter, of course," I answered.
"I've been ordering the dinner since, Harry."
"The dinner!" I returned with some show of contempt, for I knew my wife was
only teasing me. "What's the dinner to the Atlantic?"
"What do you mean by the Atlantic, papa?" said Connie, from whose roguish
eyes I could see that her mother had told her all about it, and that she
was not disinclined to get up, if only she could.
"The Atlantic, my dear, is the name given to that portion of the waters of
the globe which divides Europe from America. I will fetch you the Universal
Gazetteer, if you would like to consult it on the subject."
"O papa!" laughed Connie; "you know what I mean."
"Yes; and you know what I mean too, you squirrel!"
"But do you really mean, papa," she said "that you will take me to the
Atlantic?"
"If you will only oblige me by getting Well enough to go as soon as
possible."
The poor child half rose on her elbow, but sank back again with a moan,
which I took for a cry of pain. I was beside her in a moment.
"My darling! You have hurt yourself!"
"O no, papa. I felt for the moment as if I could get up if I liked. But I
soon found that I hadn't any back or legs. O! what a plague I am to you!"
"On the contrary, you are the nicest plaything in the world, Connie. One
always knows where to find you."
She half laughed and half cried, and the two halves made a very bewitching
whole.
"But," I went on, "I mean to try whether my dolly won't bear moving. One
thing is clear, I can't go without it. Do you think you could be got on the
sofa to-day without hurting you?"
"I am sure I could, papa. I feel better today than I have felt yet. Mamma,
do send for Susan, and get me up before dinner."
When I went in after a couple of hours or so, I found her lying on the
conch, propped up with pillows. She lay looking out of the window on the
lawn at the back of the house. A smile hovered about her bloodless lips,
and the blue of her eyes, though very gray, looked sunny. Her white face
showed the whiter because her dark brown hair was all about it. We had had
to cut her hair, but it had grown to her neck again.
"I have been trying to count the daisies on the lawn," she said.
"What a sharp sight you must have, child!"
"I see them all as clear as if they were enamelled on that table before
me."
I was not so anxious to get rid of the daisies as some people are. Neither
did I keep the grass quite so close shaved.
"But," she went on, "I could not count them, for it gave me the fidgets in
my feet."
"You don't say so!" I exclaimed.
She looked at me with some surprise, but concluding that I was only making
a little of my mild fun at her expense, she laughed.
"Yes. Isn't it a wonderful fact?" she said.
"It is a fact, my dear, that I feel ready to go on my knees and thank God
for. I may be wrong, but I take it as a sign that you are beginning to
recover a little. But we mustn't make too much of it, lest I should be
mistaken," I added, checking myself, for I feared exciting her too much.
But she lay very still; only the tears rose slowly and lay shimmering in
her eyes. After about five minutes, during which we were both silent,--
"O papa!" she said, "to think of ever walking out with you again, and
feeling the wind on my face! I can hardly believe it possible."
"It is so mild, I think you might have half that pleasure at once," I
answered..
And I opened the window, let the spring air gently move her hair for one
moment, and then shut it again. Connie breathed deep, and said after a
little pause,--
"I had no idea how delightful it was. To think that I have been in the way
of breathing that every moment for so many years and never thought about
it!"
"It is not always just like that in this climate. But I ought not to have
made that remark when I wanted to make this other: that I suspect we shall
find some day that the loss of the human paradise consists chiefly in the
closing of the human eyes; that at least far more of it than people think
remains about us still, only we are so filled with foolish desires and evil
cares, that we cannot see or hear, cannot even smell or taste the pleasant
things round about us. We have need to pray in regard to the right
receiving of the things of the senses even, 'Lord, open thou our hearts to
understand thy word;' for each of these things is as certainly a word of
God as Jesus is the Word of God. He has made nothing in vain. All is for
our teaching. Shall I tell you what such a breath of fresh air makes me
think of?"
"It comes to me," said Connie, "like forgiveness when I was a little girl
and was naughty. I used to feel just like that."
"It is the same kind of thing I feel," I said--"as if life from the Spirit
of God were coming into my soul: I think of the wind that bloweth where it
listeth. Wind and spirit are the same word in the Greek; and the Latin word
spirit comes even nearer to what we are saying, for it is the wind as
breathed. And now, Connie, I will tell you--and you will see how I am
growing able to talk to you like quite an old friend--what put me in such a
delight with Mr. Shepherd's letter and so exposed me to be teased by mamma
and you. As I read it, there rose up before me a vision of one sight of the
sea which I had when I was a young man, long before I saw your mamma. I had
gone out for a walk along some high downs. But I ought to tell you that I
had been working rather hard at Cambridge, and the life seemed to be all
gone out of me. Though my holidays had come, they did not feel quite like
holidays--not as holidays used to feel when I was a boy. Even when walking
along those downs with the scents of sixteen grasses or so in my brain,
like a melody with the odour of the earth for the accompaniment upon which
it floated, and with just enough of wind to stir them up and set them in
motion, I could not feel at all. I remembered something of what I had used
to feel in such places, but instead of believing in that, I doubted now
whether it had not been all a trick that I played myself--a fancied
pleasure only. I was walking along, then, with the sea behind me. It was
a warm, cloudy day--I had had no sunshine since I came out. All at once I
turned--I don't know why. There lay the gray sea, but not as I had seen
it last, not all gray. It was dotted, spotted, and splashed all over with
drops, pools, and lakes of light, of all shades of depth, from a light
shimmer of tremulous gray, through a half light that turned the prevailing
lead colour into translucent green that seemed to grow out of its depths--
through this, I say, to brilliant light, deepening and deepening till my
very soul was stung by the triumph of the intensity of its molten silver.
There was no sun upon me. But there were breaks in the clouds over the sea,
through which, the air being filled with vapour, I could see the long lines
of the sun-rays descending on the waters like rain--so like a rain of light
that the water seemed to plash up in light under their fall. I questioned
the past no more; the present seized upon me, and I knew that the past was
true, and that nature was more lovely, more awful in her loveliness than I
could grasp. It was a lonely place: I fell on my knees, and worshipped the
God that made the glory and my soul."
While I spoke Connie's tears had been flowing quietly.
"And mamma and I were making fun while you were seeing such things as
those!" she said pitifully.
"You didn't hurt them one bit, my darling--neither mamma nor you. If I had
been the least cross about it, as I should have been when I was as young
as at the time of which I was thinking, that would have ruined the vision
entirely. But your merriment only made me enjoy it more. And, my Connie, I
hope you will see the Atlantic before long; and if one vision should come
as brilliant as that, we shall be fortunate indeed, if we went all the way
to the west to see that only."
"O papa! I dare hardly think of it--it is too delightful. But do you think
we shall really go?"
"I do. Here comes your mamma--I am going to say to Shepherd, my dear, that
I will take his parish in hand, and if I cannot, after all, go myself, will
find some one, so that he need be in no anxiety from the uncertainty which
must hang over our movements even till the experiment itself is made."
"Very well, husband. I am quite satisfied."
And as I watched Connie, I saw that hope and expectation did much to
prepare her.
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