The Seaboard Parish, Complete

“True,” said Turner, after a pause. “I must think more about such things. The science the present day is going wild about will not give us that rest.”

“No; but that rest will do much to give you that science. A man with this repose in his heart will do more by far, other capabilities being equal, to find out the laws that govern things. For all law is living rest.”

“What you have been saying,” resumed Turner, after another pause, “reminds me much of one of Wordsworth’s poems. I do not mean the famous ode.”

“You mean the ‘Ninth Evening Voluntary,’ I know—one of his finest and truest and deepest poems. It begins, ‘Had this effulgence disappeared.’”

“Yes, that is the one I mean. I shall read it again when I go home. But you don’t agree with Wordsworth, do you, about our having had an existence previous to this?”

He gave a little laugh as he asked the question.

“Not in the least. But an opinion held by such men as Plato, Origen, and Wordsworth, is not to be laughed at, Mr. Turner. It cannot be in its nature absurd. I might have mentioned Shelley as holding it, too, had his opinion been worth anything.”

“Then you don’t think much of Shelley?”

“I think his feeling most valuable; his opinion nearly worthless.”

“Well, perhaps I had no business to laugh, at it; but—”

“Do not suppose for a moment that I even lean to it. I dislike it. It would make me unhappy to think there was the least of sound argument for it. But I respect the men who have held it, and know there must be something good in it, else they could not have held it.”

“Are you able then to sympathise with that ode of Wordsworth’s? Does it not depend for all its worth on the admission of this theory?”

“Not in the least. Is it necessary to admit that we must have had a conscious life before this life to find meaning in the words,—

‘But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home’?

Is not all the good in us his image? Imperfect and sinful as we are, is not all the foundation of our being his image? Is not the sin all ours, and the life in us all God’s? We cannot be the creatures of God without partaking of his nature. Every motion of our conscience, every admiration of what is pure and noble, is a sign and a result of this. Is not every self-accusation a proof of the presence of his spirit? That comes not of ourselves—that is not without him. These are the clouds of glory we come trailing from him. All feelings of beauty and peace and loveliness and right and goodness, we trail with us from our home. God is the only home of the human soul. To interpret in this manner what Wordsworth says, will enable us to enter into perfect sympathy with all that grandest of his poems. I do not say this is what he meant; but I think it includes what he meant by being greater and wider than what he meant. Nor am I guilty of presumption in saying so, for surely the idea that we are born of God is a greater idea than that we have lived with him a life before this life. But Wordsworth is not the first among our religious poets to give us at least what is valuable in the notion. I came upon a volume amongst my friend Shepherd’s books, with which I had made no acquaintance before—Henry Vaughan’s poems. I brought it with me, for it has finer lines, I almost think, than any in George Herbert, though not so fine poems by any means as his best. When we go into the house I will read one of them to you.”

“Thank you,” said Turner. “I wish I could have such talk once a week. The shades of the prison-house, you know, Mr. Walton, are always trying to close about us, and shut out the vision of the glories we have come from, as Wordsworth says.”

“A man,” I answered, “who ministers to the miserable necessities of his fellows has even more need than another to believe in the light and the gladness—else a poor Job’s comforter will he be. I don’t want to be treated like a musical snuff-box.”

The doctor laughed.

“No man can prove,” he said, “that there is not a being inside the snuff-box, existing in virtue of the harmony of its parts, comfortable when they go well, sick when they go badly, and dying when it is dismembered, or even when it stops.”

“No,” I answered. “No man can prove it. But no man can convince a human being of it. And just as little can anyone convince me that my conscience, making me do sometimes what I don’t like, comes from a harmonious action of the particles of my brain. But it is time we went in, for by the law of things in general, I being ready for my dinner, my dinner ought to be ready for me.”

“A law with more exceptions than instances, I fear,” said Turner.

“I doubt that,” I answered. “The readiness is everything, and that we constantly blunder in. But we had better see whether we are really ready for it, by trying whether it is ready for us.”

Connie went to bed early, as indeed we all did, and she was rather better than worse the next morning. My wife, for the first time for many nights, said nothing about the crying of the sea. The following day Turner and I set out to explore the neighbourhood. The rest remained quietly at home.

It was, as I have said, a high bare country. The fields lay side by side, parted from each other chiefly, as so often in Scotland, by stone walls; and these stones being of a laminated nature, the walls were not unfrequently built by laying thin plates on their edges, which gave a neatness to them not found in other parts of the country as far as I am aware. In the middle of the fields came here and there patches of yet unreclaimed moorland.

Now in a region like this, beauty must be looked for below the surface. There is a probability of finding hollows of repose, sunken spots of loveliness, hidden away altogether from the general aspect of sternness, or perhaps sterility, that meets the eye in glancing over the outspread landscape; just as in the natures of stern men you may expect to find, if opportunity should be afforded you, sunny spots of tender verdure, kept ever green by that very sternness which is turned towards the common gaze—thus existent because they are below the surface, and not laid bare to the sweep of the cold winds that roam the world. How often have not men started with amaze at the discovery of some feminine sweetness, some grace of protection in the man whom they had judged cold and hard and rugged, inaccessible to the more genial influences of humanity! It may be that such men are only fighting against the wind, and keep their hearts open to the sun.

I knew this; and when Turner and I set out that morning to explore, I expected to light upon some instance of it—some mine or other in which nature had hidden away rare jewels; but I was not prepared to find such as I did find. With our hearts full of a glad secret we returned home, but we said nothing about it, in order that Ethelwyn and Wynnie might enjoy the discovery even as we had enjoyed it.

There was another grand fact with regard to the neighbourhood about which we judged it better to be silent for a few days, that the inland influences might be free to work. We were considerably nearer the ocean than my wife and daughters supposed, for we had made a great round in order to arrive from the land-side. We were, however, out of the sound of its waves, which broke all along the shore, in this part, at the foot of tremendous cliffs. What cliffs they were we shall soon find.

CHAPTER VIII. THE KEEVE

“Now, my dear! now, Wynnie!” I said, after prayers the next morning, “you must come out for a walk as soon as ever you can get your bonnets on.”

“But we can’t leave Connie, papa,” objected Wynnie.

“O, yes, you can, quite well. There’s nursie to look after her. What do you say, Connie?”

For, for some time now, Connie had been able to get up so early, that it was no unusual thing to have prayers in her room.

“I am entirely independent of help from my family,” returned Connie grandiloquently. “I am a woman of independent means,” she added. “If you say another word, I will rise and leave the room.”

And she made a movement as if she would actually do as she had said. Seized with an involuntary terror, I rushed towards her, and the impertinent girl burst out laughing in my face—threw herself back on her pillows, and laughed delightedly.

“Take care, papa,” she said. “I carry a terrible club for rebellious people.” Then, her mood changing, she added, as if to suppress the tears gathering in her eyes, “I am the queen—of luxury and self-will—and I won’t have anybody come near me till dinner-time. I mean to enjoy myself.”

So the matter was settled, and we went out for our walk. Ethelwyn was not such a good walker as she had been; but even if she had retained the strength of her youth, we should not have got on much the better for it—so often did she and Wynnie stop to grub ferns out of the chinks and roots of the stone-walls. Now, I admire ferns as much as anybody—that is, not, I fear, so much as my wife and daughter, but quite enough notwithstanding—but I do not quite enjoy being pulled up like a fern at every turn.

“Now, my dear, what is the use of stopping to torture that harmless vegetable?” I say, but say in vain. “It is much more beautiful where it is than it will be anywhere where you can put it. Besides, you know they never come to anything with you. They always die.”

Thereupon my wife reminds me of this fern and that fern, gathered in such and such places, and now in such and such corners of the garden or the greenhouse, or under glass-shades in this or that room, of the very existence of which I am ignorant, whether from original inattention, or merely from forgetfulness, I do not know. Certainly, out of their own place I do not care much for them.

At length, partly by the inducement I held out to them of a much greater variety of ferns where we were bound, I succeeded in getting them over the two miles in little more than two hours. After passing from the lanes into the fields, our way led downwards till we reached a very steep large slope, with a delightful southern exposure, and covered with the sweetest down-grasses. It was just the place to lie in, as on the edge of the earth, and look abroad upon the universe of air and floating worlds.

“Let us have a rest here, Ethel,” I said. “I am sure this is much more delightful than uprooting ferns. What an awful thing to think that here we are on this great round tumbling ball of a world, held by the feet, and lifting up the head into infinite space—without choice or wish of our own—compelled to think and to be, whether we will or not! Just God must know it to be very good, or he would not have taken it in his hands to make individual lives without a possible will of theirs. He must be our Father, or we are wretched creatures—the slaves of a fatal necessity! Did it ever strike you, Turner, that each one of us stands on the apex of the world? With a sphere, you know, it must be so. And thus is typified, as it seems to me, that each one of us must look up for himself to find God, and then look abroad to find his fellows.”

“I think I know what you mean,” was all Turner’s reply.

“No doubt,” I resumed, “the apprehension of this truth has, in otherwise ill-ordered minds, given rise to all sorts of fierce and grotesque fanaticism. But the minds which have thus conceived the truth, would have been immeasurably worse without it; nay, this truth affords at last the only possible door out of the miseries of their own chaos, whether inherited or the result of their own misconduct.”

“What’s that in the grass?” cried Wynnie, in a tone of alarm.

I looked where she indicated, and saw a slow-worm, or blind-worm, lying basking in the sun. I rose and went towards it.

“Here’s your stick,” said Turner.

“What for?” I asked. “Why should I kill it? It is perfectly harmless, and, to my mind, beautiful.”

I took it in my hands, and brought it to my wife. She gave an involuntary shudder as it came near her.

“I assure you it is harmless,” I said, “though it has a forked tongue.” And I opened its mouth as I spoke. “I do not think the serpent form is essentially ugly.”

“It makes me feel ugly,” said Wynnie.