The Seaboard Parish, Complete

“She won’t lag far behind, I flatter myself,” I returned. “Whose translation do you quote?”

He hesitated a moment; then said carelessly:

“I have cobbled a few passages after that fashion myself.”

“It has the merit of being near the original at least,” I returned; “and that seems to me one of the chief merits a translation can possess.”

“Then,” the painter resumed, rather hastily, as if to avoid any further remark upon his verses, “you see those white things in the air above?” Here he turned to Wynnie. “Miss Walton will remember—I think she was making a drawing of the rock at the same time I was—how the seagulls, or some such birds—only two or three of them—kept flitting about the top of it?”

“I remember quite well,” answered Wynnie, with a look of appeal to me.

“Yes,” I interposed; “my daughter, in describing what she had been attempting to draw, spoke especially of the birds over the rock. For she said the white lapping of the waves looked like spirits trying to get loose, and the white birds like foam that had broken its chains, and risen in triumph into the air.”

Here Mr. Niceboots, for as yet I did not know what else to call him, looked at Wynnie almost with a start.

“How wonderfully that falls in with my fancy about the rock!” he said. “Purgatory indeed! with imprisoned souls lapping at its foot, and the free souls winging their way aloft in ether. Well, this world is a kind of purgatory anyhow—is it not, Mr. Walton?”

“Certainly it is. We are here tried as by fire, to see what our work is—whether wood, hay, and stubble, or gold and silver and precious stones.”

“You see,” resumed the painter, “if anybody only glanced at my little picture, he would take those for sea-birds; but if he looked into it, and began to suspect me, he would find out that they were Dante and Beatrice on their way to the sphere of the moon.”

“In one respect at least, then, your picture has the merit of corresponding to fact; for what thing is there in the world, or what group of things, in which the natural man will not see merely the things of nature, but the spiritual man the things of the spirit?”

“I am no theologian,” said the painter, turning away, I thought somewhat coldly.

But I could see that Wynnie was greatly interested in him. Perhaps she thought that here was some enlightenment of the riddle of the world for her, if she could but get at what he was thinking. She was used to my way of it: here might be something new.

“If I can be of any service to Miss Walton with her drawing, I shall be happy,” he said, turning again towards me.

But his last gesture had made me a little distrustful of him, and I received his advances on this point with a coldness which I did not wish to make more marked than his own towards my last observation.

“You are very kind,” I said; “but Miss Walton does not presume to be an artist.”

I saw a slight shade pass over Wynnie’s countenance. When I turned to Mr. Niceboots, a shade of a different sort was on his. Surely I had said something wrong to cast a gloom on two young faces. I made haste to make amends.

“We are just going to have some coffee,” I said, “for my servants, I see, have managed to kindle a fire. Will you come and allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Walton?”

“With much pleasure,” he answered, rising from the rock whereon, as he spoke about his picture, he had again seated himself. He was a fine-built, black-bearded, sunburnt fellow, with clear gray eyes notwithstanding, a rather Roman nose, and good features generally. But there was an air of suppression, if not of sadness, about him, however, did not in the least interfere with the manliness of his countenance, or of its expression.

“But,” I said, “how am I to effect an introduction, seeing I do not yet know your name.”

I had had to keep a sharp look-out on myself lest I should call him Mr. Niceboots. He smiled very graciously and replied,

“My name is Percivale—Charles Percivale.”

“A descendant of Sir Percivale of King Arthur’s Round Table?”

“I cannot count quite so far back,” he answered, “as that—not quite to the Conquest,” he added, with a slight deepening of his sunburnt hue. “I do come of a fighting race, but I cannot claim Sir Percivale.”

We were now walking along the edge of the still retreating waves towards the group upon the sands, Mr. Percivale and I foremost, and Wynnie lingering behind.

“O, do look here papa!” she cried, from some little distance.

We turned and saw her gazing at something on the sand at her feet. Hastening back, we found it to be a little narrow line of foam-bubbles, which the water had left behind it on the sand, slowly breaking and passing out of sight. Why there should be foam-bubbles there then, and not always, I do not know. But there they were—and such colours! deep rose and grassy green and ultramarine blue; and, above all, one dark, yet brilliant and intensely-burnished, metallic gold. All of them were of a solid-looking burnished colour, like opaque body-colour laid on behind translucent crystal. Those little ocean bubbles were well worth turning to see; and so I said to Wynnie. But, as we gazed, they went on vanishing, one by one. Every moment a heavenly glory of hue burst, and was nowhere.

We walked away again towards the rest of our party.

“Don’t you think those bubbles more beautiful than any precious stones you ever saw, papa?”

“Yes, my love, I think they are, except it be the opal. In the opal, God seems to have fixed the evanescent and made the vanishing eternal.”

“And flowers are more beautiful things than jewels?’ she said interrogatively.

“Many—perhaps most flowers are,” I granted. “And did you ever see such curves and delicate textures anywhere else as in the clouds, papa?”

“I think not—in the cirrhous clouds at least—the frozen ones. But what are you putting me to my catechism for in this way, my child?”

“O, papa, I could go on a long time with that catechism; but I will end with one question more, which you will perhaps find a little harder to answer. Only I daresay you have had an answer ready for years lest one of us should ask you some day.”

“No, my love. I never got an answer ready for anything lest one of my children should ask me. But it is not surprising either that children should be puzzled about the things that have puzzled their father, or that by the time they are able to put the questions, he should have found out some sort of an answer to most of them. Go on with your catechism, Wynnie. Now for your puzzle!”

“It’s not a funny question, papa; it’s a very serious one. I can’t think why the unchanging God should have made all the most beautiful things wither and grow ugly, or burst and vanish, or die somehow and be no more. Mamma is not so beautiful as she once was, is she?”

“In one way, no; but in another and better way, much more so. But we will not talk about her kind of beauty just now; we will keep to the more material loveliness of which you have been speaking—though, in truth, no loveliness can be only material. Well, then, for my answer; it is, I think, because God loves the beauty so much that he makes all beautiful things vanish quickly.”

“I do not understand you, papa.”

“I daresay not, my dear. But I will explain to you a little, if Mr. Percivale will excuse me.”

“On the contrary, I am greatly interested, both in the question and the answer.”

“Well, then, Wynnie; everything has a soul and a body, or something like them. By the body we know the soul. But we are always ready to love the body instead of the soul. Therefore, God makes the body die continually, that we may learn to love the soul indeed. The world is full of beautiful things, but God has saved many men from loving the mere bodies of them, by making them poor; and more still by reminding them that if they be as rich as Croesus all their lives, they will be as poor as Diogenes—poorer, without even a tub—when this world, with all its pictures, scenery, books, and—alas for some Christians!—bibles even, shall have vanished away.”

“Why do you say alas, papa—if they are Christians especially?”

“I say alas only from their point of view, not from mine. I mean such as are always talking and arguing from the Bible, and never giving themselves any trouble to do what it tells them. They insist on the anise and cummin, and forget the judgment, mercy, and faith. These worship the body of the truth, and forget the soul of it. If the flowers were not perishable, we should cease to contemplate their beauty, either blinded by the passion for hoarding the bodies of them, or dulled by the hebetude of commonplaceness that the constant presence of them would occasion. To compare great things with small, the flowers wither, the bubbles break, the clouds and sunsets pass, for the very same holy reason, in the degree of its application to them, for which the Lord withdrew from his disciples and ascended again to his Father—that the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the Soul of things, might come to them and abide with them, and so the Son return, and the Father be revealed. The flower is not its loveliness, and its loveliness we must love, else we shall only treat them as flower-greedy children, who gather and gather, and fill hands and baskets, from a mere desire of acquisition, excusable enough in them, but the same in kind, however harmless in mode, and degree, and object, as the avarice of the miser. Therefore God, that we may always have them, and ever learn to love their beauty, and yet more their truth, sends the beneficent winter that we may think about what we have lost, and welcome them when they come again with greater tenderness and love, with clearer eyes to see, and purer hearts to understand, the spirit that dwells in them. We cannot do without the ‘winter of our discontent.’ Shakspere surely saw that when he makes Titania say, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

‘The human mortals want their winter here’—

namely, to set things right; and none of those editors who would alter the line seem to have been capable of understanding its import.”

“I think I understand you a little,” answered Wynnie. Then, changing her tone, “I told you, papa, you would have an answer ready; didn’t I?”

“Yes, my child; but with this difference—I found the answer to meet my own necessities, not yours.”

“And so you had it ready for me when I wanted it.”

“Just so. That is the only certainty you have in regard to what you give away. No one who has not tasted it and found it good has a right to offer any spiritual dish to his neighbour.”