There & Back

“Why?” asked Wingfold.

“Because I cannot receive the simile at all. I cannot allow expression of thought where no thought is.”

Here a certain look on the face of the young workman helped the parson toward understanding the position he meant to take, “Ah!” he answered, “I see I mistook you! I understand now! Sleep she or wake she, you will not allow thought on the face of Nature! Am I right?”

“That is what I would say, sir,” answered Richard.

“We must look at that!” returned Wingfold. “That would be scanned!—You would conceive the world as a sort of machine that goes for certain purposes—like a clock, for instance, whose duty it is to tell the time of the day?—Do I represent you truly?”

“So far, sir. Only one machine may have many uses!”

“True! A clock may do more for us than tell the time! It may tell how fast it is going, and wake solemn thought. But if you came upon a machine that constantly waked in you—not thoughts only, but the most delicate and indescribable feelings—what would you say then? Would you allow thought there?”

“Surely not that the machine was thinking!”

“Certainly not. But would you allow thought concerned in it? Would you allow that thought must have preceded and occasioned its existence? Would you allow that thought therefore must yet be interested in its power to produce thought, and might, if it chose, minister to the continuance or enlargement of the power it had originated?”

“Perhaps I should be compelled to allow that much in regard to a clock even!—Are we coming to the Paley-argument, sir?” said Richard.

“I think not,” answered Wingfold. “My argument seems to me one of my own. It is not drawn from design but from operation: where a thing wakes thought and feeling, I say, must not thought and feeling be somewhere concerned in its origin?”

“Might not the thought and feeling come by association, as in the case of the clock suggesting the flight of time?”

“I think our associations can hardly be so multiform, or so delicate, as to have a share in bringing to us half of the thoughts and feelings that nature wakes in us. If they have such a share, they must have reference either to a fore-existence, or to relations hidden in our being, over which we have no control; and equally in such case are the thoughts and feelings waked in us, not by us. I do not want to argue; I am only suggesting that, if the world moves thought and feeling in those that regard it, thought and feeling are somehow concerned in the world. Even to wake old feelings, there must be a likeness to them in what wakes them, else how could it wake them? In a word, feeling must have put itself into the shape that awakes feeling. Then there is feeling in the thing that bears that shape, although itself it does not feel. Therefore I think it may be said that there is more thought, or, rather, more expression of thought, in the face of the world when the sun is up, than when he is not—as there is more thought in a face awake than in a face asleep.—Ah, there is the sun! and there are things that ought never to be talked about in their presence! To talk of some things even behind their backs will keep them away!”

Richard neither understood his last words, nor knew that he did not understand them. But he did understand that it was better to watch the sunrise than to talk of it.

Up came the child of heaven, conquering in the truth, in the might of essential being. It was no argument, but the presence of God that silenced the racked heart of Job. The men stood lost in the swift changes of his attendant colours—from red to gold, from the human to the divine—as he ran to the horizon from beneath, and came up with a rush, eternally silent. With a moan of delight Richard turned to his gazing companion, when he beheld that on his face which made him turn from him again: he had seen what was not there for human eyes! The radiance of Wingfold’s countenance, the human radiance that met the solar shine, surpassed even that which the moon and the sky and the sleeping earth brought out that night upon the face of Barbara! The one was the waking, the other but the sweetly dreaming world.

Richard refused to let any emotion, primary or reflex, influence his opinions; they must be determined by fact and severe logical outline. Whatever was not to him definite—that is, was not by him formally conceivable, must not be put in the category of things to be believed; but he had not a notion how many things he accepted unquestioning, which were yet of this order; and not being only a thing that thought, but a thing as well that was thought, he could not help being more influenced by such a sight than he would have chosen to be, and the fact that he was so influenced remained. Happily, the choice whether we shall be influenced is not given us; happily, too, the choice whether we shall obey an influence is given us.

Without a word, Richard lifted his hat to the stranger, and walked on, leaving him where he stood, but taking with him a germ of new feeling, which would enlarge and divide and so multiply. When he got to the next stile, he looked back, and saw him seated as at first, but now reading.

CHAPTER XXV. WING FOLD AND HIS WIFE

Thomas Wingfold closed his book, replaced it in his pocket, got down from the stile, turned his face toward home, crossed field after field, and arrived just in time to meet his wife as she came down the stair to breakfast.

“Have you had a nice walk, Thomas?” she asked.

“Indeed I have!” he answered. “Almost from the first I was right out in the open.”—His wife knew what he meant.—“Before the sun came up”, he went on, “I had to go in, and come out at another door; but I was soon very glad of it. I had met a fellow who, I think, will pluck his feet out of the mud before long.”

“Have you asked him to the rectory?”

“No.”

“Shall I write and ask him?”

“No, my wife. For one thing, you can’t: I don’t know his name, and I don’t know what he is, or where he lives. But we shall meet again soon.”

“Then you have made an appointment with him!”

“No, I haven’t. But there’s an undertow bringing us on to each other. It would spoil all if he thought I threw a net for him. I do mean to catch him if I can, but I will not move till the tide brings him into my arms. At least, that is how the thing looks to me at present. I believe enough not to make haste. I don’t want to throw salt on any bird’s tail, but I do want the birds to come hopping about me, that I may tell them what I know!”

As near as he could, Wingfold recounted the conversation he had had with Richard.

“He was a fine-looking fellow,” he said, “—not exactly a gentleman, but not far off it; little would make him one. He looked a man that could do things, but I did not satisfy myself as to what might be his trade. He showed no sign of it, or made any allusion to it. But he was more at home in the workshop of his own mind than is at all usual with fellows of his age.”

“It must,” said Helen, “be old Simon Armour’s grandson! I have heard of him from several quarters; and your description would just fit him. I know somebody that could tell you about him, but I wish I know anybody that could tell us about her—I mean Miss Wylder.”

“I like the look of that girl!” said the parson warmly, “What makes you think she could tell us about my new acquaintance?”

“Only an impertinent speech of that little simian, Vixen Lestrange. I forget what she said, but it left the impression of an acquaintance between Bab, as she called her, and some working fellow the child could not bear.”

“The enmity of that child is praise. I wonder how the Master would have treated her! He could not have taken her between his knees, and said whosoever received her received him! A child-mask with a monkey inside it will only serve a sentimental mother to talk platitudes about!”

“Don’t be too hard on the monkeys, Tom!” said his wife. “You don’t know what they may turn out to be, after all!”

“Surely it is not too hard on the monkeys to call them monkeys!”

“No; but when the monkey has already begun to be a child!”

“There is the whole point! Has the monkey always begun to be a child when he gets the shape of a child?—Miss Wylder is not quite so seldom in church now, I think!”

“I saw her there last Sunday. But I’m afraid she wasn’t thinking much about what you were saying—she sat with such a stony look in her eyes! She did seem to come awake for one moment, though!”

“Tell me.”

“I could hardly take my eyes off her, my heart was so drawn to her. There was a mingling of love and daring, almost defiance, in her look, that seemed to say, ‘If you are worth it—if you are worth it—then through fire and water!’ All at once a flash lighted up her lovely child-face—and what do you think you were at the moment saying?—that the flower of a plant was deeper than the root of it: that was what roused her!”

“And I, when I found what I had said, thought within myself what a fool I was to let out things my congregation could not possibly understand!—But to reach one is, in the end, to reach all!”

“I must in honesty tell you, however,” pursued Mrs. Wingfold, “that the next minute she looked as far off as before; nor did she shine up once again that I saw.”

“I will be glad, though,” said Wingfold, “because of what you tell me! It shows there is a window in her house that looks in my direction: some signal may one day catch her eye! That she has a character of her own, a real one, I strongly suspect. Her mother more than interests me. She certainly has a fine nature. How much better is a fury than a fish! You cannot be downright angry save in virtue of the love possible to you. The proper person, who always does and says the correct thing—well, I think that person is almost sure to be a liar. At the same time, the contradictions in the human individual are bewildering, even appalling!—Now I must go to my study, and think out a thing that’s bothering me!—By the way,”—he always said that when he was going to make her a certain kind of present; she knew what was coming—“here’s something for you—if you can read it! I had just scribbled it this morning when the young man came up. I made it last night. I was hours awake after we went to bed!”

This is what he gave her:—

A SONG IN THE NIGHT

A brown bird sang on a blossomy tree,
Sang in the moonshine, merrily,
Three little songs, one, two, and three,
A song for his wife, for himself, and me.

He sang for his wife, sang low, sang high,
Filling the moonlight that filled the sky,
“Thee, thee, I love thee, heart alive!
Thee, thee, thee, and thy round eggs five!”