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CRITICISM.
"Extraordinary young man!" exclaimed Mrs. Ramshorn as they left the
church, with a sigh that expressed despair. "Is he an infidel or a
fanatic? a Jesuit or a Socinian?"
"If he would pay a little more attention to his composition," said
Bascombe indifferently, "he might in time make of himself a good
speaker. I am not at all sure there are not the elements of an
orator in him, if he would only reflect a little on the fine
relations between speech and passion, and learn of the best models
how to play upon the feelings of a congregation. I declare I don't
know, but he might make a great man of himself. As long as he don't
finish his sentences however, jumbles his figures, and begins and
ends abruptly without either exordium or peroration, he needn't look
to make anything of a preacher--and that seems his object."
"If that be his object, he had better join the Methodists at once.
He would be a treasure to them," said Mrs. Ramshorn.
"That is not his object, George. How can you say so?" remarked Helen
quietly, but with some latent indignation.
George smiled a rather unpleasant smile and held his peace.
Little more was said on the way home. Helen went to take off her
bonnet, but did not re-appear until she was called to their early
Sunday dinner.
Now George had counted upon a turn in the garden with her before
dinner, and was annoyed--more, it is true, because of the emotion
which he rightly judged the cause of her not joining him, than the
necessity laid on him of eating his dinner without having first
unburdened his mind; but the latter fact also had its share in
vexing him.
When she came into the drawing-room it was plain she had been
weeping; but, although they were alone, and would probably have to
wait yet a few minutes before their aunt joined them, he resolved in
his good nature to be considerate, and say nothing till after
dinner, lest he should spoil her appetite. When they rose from the
table, she would have again escaped, but when George left his wine
and followed her, she consented, at his urgent, almost expostulatory
request, to walk once round the garden with him.
As soon as they were out of sight of the windows, he began--in the
tone of one whose love it is that prompts rebuke.
"How COULD you, my dear Helen, have so little care of your health,
already so much shaken with nursing your brother, as to yield your
mind to the maundering of that silly ecclesiastic, and allow his
false eloquence to untune your nerves! Remember your health is the
first thing--positively the FIRST and foremost thing to be
considered, both for your own sake and that of your friends. Without
health, what is anything worth?"
Helen made no answer, but she thought with herself there were two or
three things for the sake of which she would willingly part with a
considerable portion of her health. Her cousin imagined her
conscience-stricken, and resumed with yet greater confidence.
"If you MUST go to church, you ought to prepare yourself beforehand
by firmly impressing on your mind the fact that the whole thing is
but part of a system--part of a false system; that the preacher has
been brought up to the trade of religion, that it is his business,
and that he must lay himself out to persuade people--himself first
of all if he can, but anyhow his congregation, of the truth of
everything contained in that farrago of priestly absurdities--
called the Bible, forsooth! as if there were no other book worthy to
be mentioned beside it. Think for a moment how soon, were it not for
their churches and prayers and music and their tomfoolery of
preaching, the whole precious edifice would topple about their ears,
and the livelihood, the means of contentment and influence, would be
gone from so many restless paltering spirits! So what is left them
but to play upon the hopes and fears and diseased consciences of men
as they best can! The idiot! To tell a man when he is hipped to COME
UNTO ME! Bah! Does the fool really expect any grown man or woman to
believe in his or her brain that the man who spoke those words, if
ever there was a man who spoke them, can at this moment anni
domini"--George liked to be correct--"1870, hear whatever silly
words the Rev. Mr. Wingfold, or any other human biped, may think
proper to address to him with his face buried in his blankets by his
bedside or in his surplice over the pulpit-bible?--not to mention
that they would have you believe, or be damned to all eternity, that
every thought vibrated in the convolutions of your brain is known to
him as well as to yourself! The thing is really too absurd! Ha! ha!
ha! The man died--the death of a malefactor, they say; and his body
was stolen from his grave by his followers, that they might impose
thousands of years of absurdity upon generations to come after them.
And now, when a fellow feels miserable, he is to cry to that dead
man, who said of himself that he was meek and lowly in heart, and
straightway the poor beggar shall find rest to his soul! All I can
say is that, if he find rest so, it will be the rest of an idiot!
Believe me, Helen, a good Havannah and a bottle of claret would be
considerably more to the purpose;--for ladies, perhaps rather a cup
of tea and a little Beethoven!" Here he laughed, for the rush of his
eloquence had swept away his bad humour. "But really," he went on,
"the whole is TOO absurd to talk about. To go whining after an old
Jew fable in these days of progress! Why, what do you think is the
last discovery about light?"
"You will allow this much in excuse for their being so misled,"
returned Helen, with some bitterness, "that the old fable pretends
at least to provide help for sore hearts; and except it be
vivisection, I----"
"Do be serious, Helen," interrupted George. "I don't object to
joking, you know, but you are not joking in a right spirit. This
matter has to do with the well-being of the race; and we MUST think
of others, however your Jew-gospel, in the genuine spirit of the
Hebrew of all time, would set everybody to the saving of his own
wind-bubble of a soul. Believe me, to live for others is the true
way to lose sight of our own fancied sorrows."
Helen gave a deep sigh. Fancied sorrows!--Yes, gladly indeed would
she live for ONE other at least! Nay more--she would die for him.
But alas! what would that do for one whose very being was consumed
with grief ineffable!--She must speak, else he would read her heart.
"There are real sorrows," she said. "They are not all fancied."
"There are very few sorrows," returned George, "in which fancy does
not bear a stronger proportion than even a woman of sense, while the
fancy is upon her, will be prepared to admit. I can remember bursts
of grief when I was a boy, in which it seemed impossible anything
should ever console me; but in one minute all would be gone, and my
heart, or my spleen, or my diaphragm, as merry as ever. Believe that
all is well, and you will find all will be well--very tolerably
well, that is, considering."
"Considering that the well-being has to be divided and apportioned
and accommodated to the various parts of such a huge whole, and that
there is no God to look after the business!" said Helen, who,
according to the state of the tide in the sea of her trouble,
resented or accepted her cousin's teaching.
Few women are willing to believe in death. Most of them love life,
and are faithful to hope; and I much doubt whether, if Helen had but
had a taste of trouble to rouse the woman within her before her
cousin conceived the wish of making her a proselyte, she would have
turned even a tolerably patient ear to his instructions. Yet it is
strange to see how even noble women, with the divine gift of
imagination, may be argued into unbelief in their best instincts by
some small man, as common-place as clever, who beside them is as
limestone to marble. The knowing craft comes creeping up into the
shadow of the rich galleon, and lo, with all her bountiful sails
gleaming in the sun, the ship of God glides off in the wake of the
felucca to the sweltering hollows betwixt the winds!
"You perplex me, my dear cousin," said Bascombe. "It is plain your
nursing has been too much for you. You see everything with a
jaundiced eye."
"Thank you, Cousin George," said Helen. "You are even more courteous
than usual."
She turned from him and went into the house. Bascombe walked to the
bottom of the garden and lighted his cigar, confessing to himself
that for once he could not understand Helen.--Was it then only that
he was ignorant of the awful fact that lay burrowing in her heart,
or was he not ignorant also of the nature of that heart in which
such a fact must so burrow? Was there anything in his system to wipe
off that burning, torturing red? "Such things must be: men who wrong
society must suffer for the sake of that society." But the red lay
burning on the conscience of Helen too, and she had not murdered!
And for him who had, he gave society never a thought, but shrieked
aloud in his dreams, and moaned and wept when he waked over the
memory of the woman who had wronged him, and whom he had, if
Bascombe was right, swept out of being like an aphis from a
rose-leaf.
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