There & Back

She flung the heavy weapon from her, gave a great cry, not like an hysterical woman, but an enraged animal, stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth, pulled it out again, and began tearing at it with her teeth. The pistol fell in the middle of the room. Wingfold went and picked it up.

“I should deserve it if I did,” he said quietly, as he laid the pistol on the table. “—But you don’t fight fair, Mrs. Wylder; for you know I can’t take a pistol with me into the pulpit and shoot you. It is cowardly of you to take advantage of that.”

“Well! I like the assurance of you! Do I read so as to annoy any one?”

“Yes, you do. You daren’t read aloud, because you would be put out of the church if you did; but you annoy as many of the congregation as can see you, and you annoy me. Why should you behave in that house as if it were your own, and yet shoot me if I behaved so in yours? Is it fair? Is it polite? Is it acting like a lady?”

“It is my house—at least it is my pew, and I will do in it what I please.—Look here, Mr. Wingfold: I don’t want to lose my temper with you, but I tell you that pew is mine, as much as the chair you’re not ashamed to sit upon at this moment! And let me tell you, after the way I’ve been treated, my behaviour don’t splash much. When he’s brought a woman to my pass, I don’t see God Almighty can complain of her manners!”

“Well, thinking of him as you do, I don’t wonder you are rude!”

“What! You won’t curry favour with him?—You hold by fair play? Come now! I call that downright pluck!”

“I fear you mistake me a little.”

“Of course I do! I might have known that! When you think a parson begins to speak like a man, you may be sure you mistake him!”

“You wouldn’t behave to a friend of your own according to what another person thought of him, would you?”

“No, by Jove, I wouldn’t!”

“Then you won’t expect me to do so!”

“I should think not! Of course you stick by the church!”

“Never mind the church. She’s not my mistress, though I am her servant. God is my master, and I tell you he is as good and fair as goodness and fairness can be goodness and fairness!”

“What! Will you drive me mad! I wish he would serve you as he’s done me—then we should hear another tune—rather! You call it good—you call it fair, to take from a poor creature he made himself, the one only thing she cared for?”

“Which was the cause of a strife that made of a family in which he wanted to live, a very hell upon earth!”

“You dare!” she cried, starting to her feet.

Wingfold did not move.

“Mrs. Wylder,” he said, “dare is a word that needn’t be used again between you and me. If you dare tell God that he is a devil, I may well dare tell you that you know nothing about him, and that I do!”

“Say on your honour, then, if he had treated you as he has done me—taken from you the light of your eyes, would you count it fair? Speak like the man you are.”

“I know I should.”

“I don’t believe you. And I won’t worship him.”

“Why, who wants you to worship him? You must be a very different person before he will care much for your worship! You can’t worship him while you think him what you do. He is something quite different. You don’t know him to love, and you don’t know him to worship.”

“Why, bless my soul! ain’t it your business—ain’t you always making people say their prayers?”

“It is my business to help my brothers and sisters to know God, and worship him in spirit and in truth—because he is altogether and perfectly true and loving and fair. Do you think he would have you worship a being such as you take him to be. If your son is in good company in the other world, he must be greatly troubled at the way you treat God—at your unfairness to him. But your bad example may, for anything I know, have sent him where he has not yet begun to learn anything!”

“God have mercy!—will the man tell me to my face that my boy is in hell?”

“What would you have? Would you have him with the being you think so unjust that you hate him all the week, and openly insult him on Sunday?”

“You are a bad man, a hard-hearted brute, a devil, to say such things about my blessed boy! Oh my God! to think that the very day he was taken ill, I struck him! Why did he let me do it? To think that that very day he killed him, when he ought to have killed me!—killed him that I might never be able to tell him I was sorry!”

“If he had not taken him then, would you ever have been sorry you struck him!”

She burst into outcry and weeping, mingled with such imprecation, that Wingfold thought it one of those cases of possession in which nothing but prayer is of use. But the soul and the demon were so united, so entirely of one mind, that there was no room for prayer to get between them. He sat quiet, lifted up his heart, and waited. By and by there came a lull, and the redeemable woman appeared, emerging from the smoke of the fury.

“Oh my Harry! my Harry!” she cried. “To take him from my very bosom! He will never love me again! God shall know what I think of it! No mother could but hate him if he served her so!”

“Apparently you don’t want the boy back in your bosom again!”

“None of your fooling of me now!” she answered, drawing herself up, and drying her eyes. “I can stand a good deal, but I won’t stand that! What’s gone is gone! He’s dead, and the dead lie in no bosom but that of the grave! They go, and return never more!”

“But you will die too!”

“What do you mean by that? You will be talking! As if I didn’t know I’d got to die, one day or another! What’s that to me and Harry!”

“Then you think we’re all going to cease and go out, like the clouds that are carried away and broken up by the wind?”

“I know nothing about it, and I don’t care. Nothing’s anything to me but Harry, and I shall never see my Harry again!—Heaven! Bah! What’s heaven without Harry!”

“Nothing, of course! But don’t you ever think of seeing him again?”

“What’s the use! It’s all a mockery! Where’s the good of meeting when we shan’t be human beings any more? If we’re nothing but ghosts—if he’s never to know me—if I’m never to feel him in my arms—ugh! it’s all humbug! If he ever meant to give me back my Harry, why did he take him from me? If he didn’t mean me to rage at losing him, why did he give him to me?”

“He gave you his brother at the same time, and you refused to love him: what if he took the one away until you should have learned to love the other?”

“I can’t love him; I won’t love him! He has his father to love him! He don’t want my love! I haven’t got it to give him! Harry took it with him! I hate Peter!—What are you doing there—laughing in your sleeve? Did you never see a woman cry?”

“I’ve seen many a woman cry, but never without my heart crying with her. You come to my church, and behave so badly I can scarce keep from crying for you. It half choked me last Sunday, to see you lying there with that horrid book in your hand, and the words of Christ in your ears!”

“I didn’t heed them. It wasn’t a horrid book!”

“It was a horrid book. You left it behind you, and I took it with me. I laid it on my study-table, and went out again. When I came home to dinner, my wife brought it to me and said, ‘Oh, Tom, how can you read such books?’ ‘My dear,’ I answered, ‘I don’t know what is in the book; I haven’t read a word of it.’”

“And then you told her where you found it?”

“I did not.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I said to her, ‘If it’s a bad book, here goes!’ and threw it in the fire.”

“Then I’m not to know the end of the story! But I can send to London for another copy! I’m much obliged to you, Mr. Wingfold, for destroying my property!—But you didn’t tell her where you found it?”

“I did not. She never asked me.”