Yeast: a Problem

Argemone began,—

‘The Church—’

‘Oh, Miss Lavington,’ cried he, impatiently, ‘will you, too, send me back to that cold abstraction?  I came to you, however presumptuous, for living, human advice to a living, human heart; and will you pass off on me that Proteus-dream the Church, which in every man’s mouth has a different meaning?  In one book, meaning a method of education, only it has never been carried out; in another, a system of polity,—only it has never been realised;—now a set of words written in books, on whose meaning all are divided; now a body of men who are daily excommunicating each other as heretics and apostates; now a universal idea; now the narrowest and most exclusive of all parties.  Really, before you ask me to hear the Church, I have a right to ask you to define what the Church is.’

‘Our Articles define it,’ said Argemone drily.

‘The “Visible Church,” at least, it defines as “a company of faithful men, in which,” etc.  But how does it define the “Invisible” one?  And what does “faithful” mean?  What if I thought Cromwell and Pierre Leroux infinitely more faithful men in their way, and better members of the “Invisible Church,” than the torturer-pedant Laud, or the facing bothways Protestant-Manichee Taylor?’

It was lucky for the life of young Love that the discussion went no further: Argemone was becoming scandalised beyond all measure.  But, happily, the colonel interposed,—

‘Look here; tell me if you know for whom this sketch is meant?’

‘Tregarva, the keeper: who can doubt?’ answered they both at once.

‘Has not Mellot succeeded perfectly?’

‘Yes,’ said Lancelot.  ‘But what wonder, with such a noble subject!  What a grand benevolence is enthroned on that lofty forehead!’

‘Oh, you would say so, indeed,’ interposed Honoria, ‘if you knew him!  The stories that I could tell you about him!  How he would go into cottages, read to sick people by the hour, dress the children, cook the food for them, as tenderly as any woman!  I found out, last winter, if you will believe it, that he lived on bread and water, to give out of his own wages—which are barely twelve shillings a week—five shillings a week for more than two months to a poor labouring man, to prevent his going to the workhouse, and being parted from his wife and children.’

‘Noble, indeed!’ said Lancelot.  ‘I do not wonder now at the effect his conversation just now had on me.’

‘Has he been talking to you?’ said Honoria eagerly.  ‘He seldom speaks to any one.’

‘He has to me; and so well, that were I sure that the poor were as ill off as he says, and that I had the power of altering the system a hair, I could find it in my heart to excuse all political grievance-mongers, and turn one myself.’

Claude Mellot clapped his white woman-like hands.

‘Bravo! bravo!  O wonderful conversion!  Lancelot has at last discovered that, besides the “glorious Past,” there is a Present worthy of his sublime notice!  We may now hope, in time, that he will discover the existence of a Future!’

‘But, Mr. Mellot,’ said Honoria, ‘why have you been so unfaithful to your original? why have you, like all artists, been trying to soften and refine on your model?’

‘Because, my dear lady, we are bound to see everything in its ideal—not as it is, but as it ought to be, and will be, when the vices of this pitiful civilised world are exploded, and sanitary reform, and a variety of occupation, and harmonious education, let each man fulfil in body and soul the ideal which God embodied in him.’

‘Fourierist!’ cried Lancelot, laughing.  ‘But surely you never saw a face which had lost by wear less of the divine image?  How thoroughly it exemplifies your great law of Protestant art, that “the Ideal is best manifested in the Peculiar.”  How classic, how independent of clime or race, is its bland, majestic self-possession! how thoroughly Norse its massive squareness!’

‘And yet, as a Cornishman, he should be no Norseman.’

‘I beg your pardon!  Like all noble races, the Cornish owe their nobleness to the impurity of their blood—to its perpetual loans from foreign veins.  See how the serpentine curve of his nose, his long nostril, and protruding, sharp-cut lips, mark his share of Phœnician or Jewish blood! how Norse, again, that dome-shaped forehead! how Celtic those dark curls, that restless gray eye, with its “swinden blicken,” like Von Troneg Hagen’s in the Niebelungen Lied!’

He turned: Honoria was devouring his words.  He saw it, for he was in love, and young love makes man’s senses as keen as woman’s.

‘Look! look at him now!’ said Claude, in a low voice.  ‘How he sits, with his hands on his knees, the enormous size of his limbs quite concealed by the careless grace, with his Egyptian face, like some dumb granite Memnon!’

‘Only waiting,’ said Lancelot, ‘for the day-star to arise on him and awake him into voice.’

He looked at Honoria as he spoke.  She blushed angrily; and yet a sort of sympathy arose from that moment between Lancelot and herself.

Our hero feared he had gone too far, and tried to turn the subject off.

The smooth mill-head was alive with rising trout.

‘What a huge fish leapt then!’ said Lancelot carelessly; ‘and close to the bridge, too!’

Honoria looked round, and uttered a piercing scream.

‘Oh, my dog! my dog!  Mops is in the river!  That horrid gazelle has butted him in, and he’ll be drowned!’

Alas! it was too true.  There, a yard above the one open hatchway, through which the whole force of the stream was rushing, was the unhappy Mops, alias Scratch, alias Dirty Dick, alias Jack Sheppard, paddling, and sneezing, and winking, his little bald muzzle turned piteously upward to the sky.

‘He will be drowned!’ quoth the colonel.

There was no doubt of it; and so Mops thought, as, shivering and whining, he plied every leg, while the glassy current dragged him back and back, and Honoria sobbed like a child.

The colonel lay down on the bridge, and caught at him: his arm was a foot too short.  In a moment the huge form of Tregarva plunged solemnly into the water, with a splash like seven salmon, and Mops was jerked out over the colonel’s head high and dry on to the bridge.

‘You’ll be drowned, at least!’ shouted the colonel, with an oath of Uncle Toby’s own.

Tregarva saw his danger, made one desperate bound upward, and missed the bridge.  The colonel caught at him, tore off a piece of his collar—the calm, solemn face of the keeper flashed past beneath him, and disappeared through the roaring gate.

They rushed to the other side of the bridge—caught one glimpse of a dark body fleeting and roaring down the foam-way.  The colonel leapt the bridge-rail like a deer, rushed out along the buck-stage, tore off his coat, and sprung headlong into the boiling pool, ‘rejoicing in his might,’ as old Homer would say.

Lancelot, forgetting his crutches, was dashing after him, when he felt a soft hand clutching at his arm.

‘Lancelot!  Mr. Smith!’ cried Argemone.  ‘You shall not go!  You are too ill—weak—’

‘A fellow-creature’s life!’

‘What is his life to yours?’ she cried, in a tone of deep passion.  And then, imperiously, ‘Stay here, I command you!’

The magnetic touch of her hand thrilled through his whole frame.  She had called him Lancelot!  He shrank down, and stood spell-bound.

‘Good heavens!’ she cried; ‘look at my sister!’

Out on the extremity of the buck-stage (how she got there neither they nor she ever knew) crouched Honoria, her face idiotic with terror, while she stared with bursting eyes into the foam.  A shriek of disappointment rose from her lips, as in a moment the colonel’s weather-worn head reappeared above, looking for all the world like an old gray shiny-painted seal.

‘Poof! tally-ho!  Poof! poof!  Heave me a piece of wood, Lancelot, my boy!’  And he disappeared again.

They looked round, there was not a loose bit near.  Claude ran off towards the house.  Lancelot, desperate, seized the bridge-rail, tore it off by sheer strength, and hurled it far into the pool.  Argemone saw it, and remembered it, like a true woman.  Ay, be as Manichæan-sentimental as you will, fair ladies, physical prowess, that Eden-right of manhood, is sure to tell upon your hearts!

Again the colonel’s grizzled head reappeared,—and, oh joy! beneath it a draggled knot of black curls.  In another instant he had hold of the rail, and quietly floating down to the shallow, dragged the lifeless giant high and dry on a patch of gravel.

Honoria never spoke.  She rose, walked quietly back along the beam, passed Argemone and Lancelot without seeing them, and firmly but hurriedly led the way round the pool-side.

Before they arrived at the bank, the colonel had carried Tregarva to it.  Lancelot and two or three workmen, whom his cries had attracted, lifted the body on to the meadow.

Honoria knelt quietly down on the grass, and watched, silent and motionless, the dead face, with her wide, awestruck eyes.