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THOU DIDST NOT LEAVE.
The next day the curate found himself so ill at ease, from the
reaction after excitement of various kinds, that he determined to
give himself a holiday. His notion of a holiday was a very simple
one: a day in a deep wood, if such could be had, with a volume fit
for alternate reading and pocketing as he might feel inclined. Of
late no volume had been his companion in any wanderings but his New
Testament.
There was a remnant of real old-fashioned forest on the Lythe, some
distance up: thither he went by the road, the shortest way, to
return by the winding course of the stream. It was a beautiful day
of St. Martin's summer. In the forest, if the leaves were gone,
there was the more light, and sun and shadow played many a lovely
game. But he saw them as though he saw them not, for fear and hope
struggled in his heart, and for a long time prayer itself could not
atone them. At length a calm fell, and he set out to return home,
down the bank of the river.
Many-hued and many-shaped had been the thoughts, not that came to
him from the forest, but that he had carried thither with him:
through all and each of them, ever and again had come dawning the
face of Helen, as he had seen it in church the day before, where she
sat between her aunt and her cousin, so unlike either. For, to their
annoyance, she had insisted on going to church, and to hers, they
had refused to let her go alone. And in her face the curate had seen
something he had never seen there until then,--a wistful look, as if
now she would be glad to pick up any suitable crumb to carry home
with her. In that dawn of coming childhood, though he dared not yet
altogether believe it such, the hard contemptuous expression of
Bascombe's countenance, and the severe disapproval in Mrs.
Ramshorn's, were entirely lost upon him.
All the way down the river, the sweet change haunted him. When he
got into the park, and reached that hollow betwixt the steep ferny
slopes where he sat on the day with which my narrative opens, he
seated himself again on the same stone, and reviewed the past twelve
months. This was much such a day as that, only the hour was
different: it was the setting sun that now shone upon the ferns, and
cast shadows from them big enough for oaks. What a change had passed
upon him! That day the New Testament had been the book of the
church--this day it was a fountain of living waters to the man
Thomas Wingfold. He had not opened his Horace for six months. Great
trouble he had had; both that and its results were precious. Now a
new trouble had come, but that also was a form of life: he would
rather love and suffer and love still, a thousand times rather, than
return to the poverty of not knowing Helen Lingard; yet a thousand
times rather would he forget Helen Lingard than lose from his heart
one word of the Master, whose love was the root and only pledge and
security of love, the only power that could glorify it--could
cleanse it from the mingled selfishness that wrought for its final
decay and death.
The sun was down ere he left the park, and the twilight was rapidly
following the sun as he drew near to the Abbey on his way home.
Suddenly, more like an odour than a sound, he heard the organ, he
thought. Never yet had he heard it on a week-day: the organist was
not of those who haunt their instrument. Often of late had the
curate gazed on that organ as upon a rock filled with sweet waters,
before which he stood a Moses without his rod; sometimes the solemn
instrument appeared to him a dumb Jeremiah that sat there from
Sunday to Sunday, all the week long, with his head bowed upon his
hands, and not a Jebusite to listen to him: if only his fingers had
been taught the craft, he thought, how his soul would pour itself
out through the song-tubes of that tabernacle of sweetness and
prayer, and on the blast of its utterance ascend to the throne of
the most high! Who could it be that was now peopling the silence of
the vast church with melodious sounds, worshipping creatures of the
elements? If the winds and the flames of fire are his augels, how
much more the grandly consorting tones of the heavenly organ! He
would go and see what power informed the vaporous music.
He entered the church by one of the towers, in which a stair led
skyward, passing the neighbourhood of the organ, and having a door
to its loft. As he ascended, came a pause in the music;--and then,
like the breaking up of a summer cloud in the heavenliest of
rain-showers, began the prelude to the solo in the Messiah, THOU
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