There & Back

One day he proposed to read something, and she consented. I will not say what he read, for I would avoid waking controversy as to fitness. He thought he knew what he was about. The good in a true book, he would say, is the best protection against what may not be so good in it; its wrong as well as its right may wake the conscience: the thoughts of a book accuse and excuse one another. In saying so, he took the true reader for granted; to an untrue reader the truth itself is untrue. The general sense of honour, he would say, has been stimulated not a little by the story of the treachery of Jael. Nor was it any wonder he should succeed in interesting Mrs. Wylder, for she had a strong brain as well as a big heart. More than half her faults came of an indignant sense of wrong. She had passionately loved her husband once, but he had soon ceased even the show of returning her affection,

And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.

After a fierce struggle against the lessons life would have her taught, a struggle continued to her fortieth year, she was now at length a pupil in another school, where the schoolroom was her bed, the book of Quiet her first study, her two attendants a clergyman and her own daughter, and her one teacher, God himself. In that schoolroom, the world began to open to her a little. Among men who could, without seeming to aim at it, make another think, I have not met the equal of Wingfold. His mode was that of the open-hearted apostle, who took men by guile. He called out the thoughts lurking in their souls, and set them dealing with those thoughts, not with him: they were slow to discover that he was a divine musician, playing upon the holy strings of their hearts; they thought the tunes came alive in their own air—as indeed they did, only another hand woke them. To work thus, he had to lay bare not a little of his own feeling, but where it was brotherly to show feeling, he counted it unchristian to hide it. Feeling by itself, however, that came and went without correspondent action, he counted not only weak and mawkish, but tending to the devilish.

Barbara was happy all day long. Life seemed about to blossom into a great flower of scarlet and gold. She had learned from the parson that the bookbinder was gone, but was at the time too busy and too anxious to question him as to the cause of his going. Till her mother was well, it was enough to know that Richard had wanted to see her, doubtless to tell her all about it. She often thought of him, what he had done for her, and what she had tried to do for him, and was certain he would one day believe in God. She did not suspect any quarrel with the people at Mortgrange. She thought perhaps the secret concerning him had come out, and he did not choose to remain in a house the head of which, if lady Ann’s tale was true, had so bitterly wronged his mother. As soon as she was able she would go and hear of him from his grandfather! There was no hurry! She would certainly see him again before long! And he would be sure to write! It did not occur to her that a man in his position would hardly venture to approach her again, without some renewed approach on her part; and for a long time she was nowise uneasy.

The hope alive in Wingfold made him a true consoler; and the very sight of him was a strength to Barbara. She regarded him with profound reverence, and his wife as most enviable of women: could she not learn from his mouth the rights of a thing, the instant she opened hers to ask them? Barbara did not know how much the sympathy, directness, and dear common sense of Helen, had helped to keep awake, support, and nourish the insight of her husband. She did not know, good and powerful as Wingfold must have been had he never married, how much wiser, more useful, and more aspiring he had grown because Helen was Helen, and his wife, sent as certainly as ever angel in the old time. The one fault she had in the eyes of her husband was, that she was so indignant with affectation or humbug of any sort, as hardly to give the better thing that might coexist with it, the needful chance.

So long as evil comes to the front, it appears an interminable, unconquerable thing. But all the time there may be a change, positive as inexplicable, at the very door. How is it that a child begins to be good? Upon what fulcrum rests the knife-edge of alteration? As undistinguishable is the moment in which the turn takes place; equally perplexing to keenest investigation the part of the being in which the renovation commences. Who shall analyze repentance, as a force, or as a phenomenon! You cannot see it coming! Before you know, there it is, and the man is no more what he was; his life is upon other lines! The wind hath blown. We saw not whence it came, or whither it went, but the new birth is there. It began in the spiritual infinitesimal, where all beginnings are. The change was begun in Mrs. Wylder. But the tug of her war was to come.

Lady Ann had not once been to see her since first calling when she arrived. Naturally she did not take to her. In the eyes of lady Ann, Mrs. Wylder was insufferable—a vulgar, arrogant, fierce woman, purse-proud and ignorant. But a keen moral eye would have perceived lady Ann vastly inferior to Mrs. Wylder in everything right-womanly. Lady Ann was the superior by the changeless dignity of her carriage, but her self-assured pre-eminence was offensive, and her drawling deliberation far more objectionable than Mrs. Wylder’s abrupt movements, or the rough and ready speech that accompanied her eager dart at the gist of a matter. Even the look that would kill a man if it could, never roused such hate as sprang to meet the icy stare of her passionless ladyship. Many a man with no admiration of the florid, would have sought refuge in Mrs. Wylder’s plump face, vivid with an irritable humanity, from the moveless pallor of lady Ann’s delicately formed cheek, and the pinched thinness of her fine, poverty-stricken nose. Oh those pinched nostrils, the very outcry of inward meanness! will they ever open to the full tide of a surging breath? What vital interweaving of gladness and grief will at length make strong and brave and unselfish the heart that sent out those nostrils? Less than a divine shame will never make it the heart of a fearless, bountiful, redeeming woman.

Mrs. Wylder was nowise annoyed that lady Ann did not call a second time. She did not care enough to mind, and preferred not seeing her. They had in common as near nothing as humanity permitted. “Stuck-up kangaroo!” she cried her.

“I’ll lay you my best sapphire,” she said to her daughter, in the hearing of Wingfold, whose presence she had forgotten, “that for the last three hundred years not a woman of her family has suckled her own young!”

Neither mother nor daughter had shown the least deference to lady Ann’s exalted position. The first movement of her dislike to Mrs. Wylder was caused by her laughing and talking as unrestrainedly in her presence as in that of the doctor’s wife, who happened to be in the room when lady Ann entered. But now that danger, not to say ruin, appeared in the distance, she must, for the sake of her son, wronged by his father’s having married another woman before his mother, neglect no chance! Arthur had been to Wylder Hall repeatedly, but Barbara had not seen him! She must go herself, and pay some court to the young heiress! She was anxious also to learn whether any chagrin was concerned in her continuous absence from Mortgrange.

Barbara received her heartily, and they talked a little, lady Ann imagining herself very pleasing: she rarely condescended to make herself agreeable, and measured her success by her exertion. She found Barbara in such good spirits that she pronounced her heartless—not to her son, or to any but herself, who would not have come near her but for the money to be got with her. She begged her, notwithstanding, for the sake of her complexion, to leave her mother an hour or two now and then, and ride over to Mortgrange. Incessant watching would injure her health, and health was essential to beauty! Barbara protested that nothing ever hurt her; that she was the only person she knew fit to be a nurse, because she was never ill. When her ladyship, for once oblivious of her manners, grew importunate, Barbara flatly refused.

“You must pardon me, lady Ann,” she said; “I cannot, and I will not leave my mother.”

Then lady Ann thought it might be wise to make a little more of the mother to whom she seemed so devoted. She had imagined the daughter of the coarse woman must feel toward her as she did, and suspected a coarser grain in the daughter than she had supposed, because she was not disgusted with her mother. She did not know that eyes of love see the true being where other eyes see only its shadow; and shadows differ a good deal from their bodies.

But meeting Mr. Wylder in the avenue as she returned, and stopping her carriage to speak to him, lady Ann changed her mind, and resolved to curry favour with the husband instead of the wife. For hitherto she had scarcely seen Mr. Wylder, and knew about him only by unfavourable hearsay; but she was charmed with him now, and drew from him a promise to go and dine at Mortgrange.

Bab went singing back to her mother, who was never so ill that she did not like to hear her voice. She could not always bear it in the room, but outside she was never tired of it. So Bab went about the house singing like a mavis. But she never passed a servant, male or female, without ceasing her song to say a kind word; and her mother, who, now that she had got on a little, lay listening with her keenest of ears, knew by the checks and changes of Bab’s song, something of what was going on in the house. If one asked Bab what made her so happy, she would answer that she had nothing to make her unhappy; and there was more philosophy in the answer than may at first appear. For certainly the normal condition of humanity is happiness, and the thing that should be enough to make us happy, is simply the absence of anything to make us unhappy.

“Everything,” she would answer another time, “is making me happy.”

“I think I am happiness,” she said once.

How could she naturally be other than happy, seeing she came of happiness! “Il lieto fattore,” says Dante; “whose happy-making sight,” says Milton.

Mr. Wylder went and dined with sir Wilton and lady Ann. The latter did her poor best to please him, and was successful. It had always been an annoyance to Mr. Wylder that his wife was not a lady. In the bush he did not feel it; but now he saw, as well as knew, wherein she was inferior, and did not see wherein she excelled. It was the more consolation to him that lady Ann praised his daughter, her beauty, her manners, her wit—praised her for everything, in short, that she thought hers, and for some things she thought were not hers. But she hinted that it would be of the greatest benefit to Barbara to have the next season in London. The girl had met nobody, and might, in her ignorance and innocence, being such an eager, impetuous, warm-hearted creature, with her powers of discrimination of course but little cultivated, make unsuitable friendships that would lead to entanglement; while, well chaperoned, she might become one of the first ladies in the county. She took care to let her father know at the same time, or think he knew, that, although her son would be only a baronet, he would be rich, for the estates were in excellent condition and free of encumbrance; and hinted that there was now a fine chance of enlarging the property, neighbouring land being in the market at a low price.

Mr. Wylder had indeed hoped for a higher match, but lady Ann, being an earl’s daughter, had influence with him. The remaining twin was so delicate that it was very doubtful if he would succeed: if he did not, and land could be had between to connect the two properties of Mortgrange and Wylder, the estate would be far the finest in the county; when, as lady Ann hinted, means might be used to draw down the favour of Providence in the form of a patent of nobility.

To lady Ann, London was the centre of love-making, and Arthur, she said to herself, would show to better advantage there than in the country. The place where she had herself been nearest to falling in love, was a ball-room: the heat apparently had half thawed her.

Mr. Wylder thought lady Ann was right, and the best thing for Barbara would be to go to London: lady Ann would present her at court, and she would doubtless be the belle of the season. Her chance would be none the worse of making a better match than with Arthur Lestrange.

It may seem odd that a like reflection did not occur to lady Ann: far more eligible men than her son might well be drawn to such a bit of sunshine as Barbara; but just what in Barbara was most attractive, lady Ann was least capable of appreciating.

CHAPTER XL. IN LONDON

It was into the first of the London fogs of the season that Richard, after a slow parliamentary journey, got out of his third-class carriage, at the great dim station. He took his portmanteau in one hand, and his bag of tools in the other, and went to look for an omnibus. How terribly dull the streets were! and how terribly dull and commonplace all inside him! Into the far dark, the splendour of life, Barbara, had vanished! Various memories of her, now this look, now that, now this attire, now that—a certain button half torn from her riding habit—the feeling of her foot in his hand as he lifted her to Miss Brown’s back—would enter his heart like the proclamation of a queen on a progress through her dominions. The way she drove the nails into her mare’s hoof; the way she would put her hand on his shoulder as she slid from the saddle; the commanding love with which she spoke to the great animal, and the way Miss Brown received it; the sweet coaxing respect she showed his blacksmith-grandfather; the tone of her voice when she said God;—a thousand attendant shadows glided in her queen-procession, one after the other in single file, through his brain, and his heart, and his every power. He forgot the omnibus, and went tramping through the dreary streets with his portmanteau and a small bag of tools—he had sent home his heavier things before—thinking ever of Barbara, and not scorning himself for thinking of her, for he thought of her as true lady herself would never scorn to be thought of by honest man. No genuine unselfish feeling is to be despised either by its subject or its object. That Barbara was lovely, was no reason why Richard should not love her! that she was rich, was no reason why he should forget her! She came into his life as a star ascends above the horizon of the world: the world cannot say to it, “Go down, star.” Yea, Richard’s star raised him as she rose. In her presence he was at once rebuked and uplifted. She was a power within him. He could not believe in God, but neither could he think belief in such a God as she believed in, degrading. He said to himself that everything depended on the kind of God believed in; and that the kind of God depended on the kind of woman. He wondered how many ideas of God there might be, for every one who believed in him must have a different idea. “Some of them must be nearer right than others!” he said to himself—nor perceived that he was beginning to entertain the notion of a real God. For he saw that the notions of the best men and women must be convergent, and was not far from thinking that such lines must point to some object, rather than an empty centre: the idea of the best men and women must be a believable idea, might be a true idea, might therefore be a real existence. He had not yet come to consider the fact, that the best of men said he knew God; that God was like himself, only greater; that whoever would do what he told him should know that God, and know that he spoke the truth concerning him; that he had come from him to witness of him that he was truth and love. Richard had indeed started on a path pointing thitherward, but as yet all concerning the one necessary entity was vaguest speculation with him. He did feel, however, that to give in to Barbara altogether, would not make him a believer such as Barbara. On the other hand, he was yet far from perceiving that no man is a believer, let him give his body to be burned, except he give his will, his life to the Master. No man is a believer with whom he and his father are not first; no man, in a word, who does not obey him, that is, who does not do what he said, and says. It seems preposterous that such definition should be necessary; but thousands talk about him for one that believes in him; thousands will do what the priests and scribes say he commands, for one who will search to find what he says that he may do it—who will take his orders from the Lord himself, and not from other men claiming either knowledge or authority. A man must come up to the Master, hearken to his word, and do as he says. Then he will come to know God, and to know that he knows him.

When he stopped thinking of Barbara, all was dreary about Richard. But he did not once say to himself, “She does not love me!” did not once ask, “Does she love me?” He said, “She cares for me; she is good to me! I wish I believed as she does, that I might hope to meet her again in the house of the one Father!”

It was Saturday night, and he had to go through a weekly market, a hurrying, pushing, loitering, jostling crowd, gathered thick about the butchers’ and fishmongers’ shops, the greengrocers’ barrows, and the trays upon wheels with things laid out for sale. Suddenly a face flashed upon him, and disappeared. He was not sure that it was Alice’s, but it suggested Alice so strongly that he turned and tried to overtake it. Impeded by his luggage, however, which caught upon hundreds of legs, he soon saw the attempt hopeless. Then with pain he remembered that he had not her address, and did not know how to communicate with her. He longed to learn why she had left him without a word, what her repeated avoidance of him meant; far more he desired to know where she was that he might help her, and how she fared. But Barbara was her friend! Barbara knew her address! He would ask her to send it him! He hardly thought she would, for she was in the secret of Alice’s behaviour, but, joy to think, it would be a reason for writing to her! His heart gave a bound in his bosom. Who could tell but she might please to send him the fan-wind of a letter now and then, keeping the door, just a chink of it, open between them, that the voice of her slave might reach her on the throne of her loveliness! He walked the rest of the way with a gladder heart; he was no longer without a future; there was something to do, and something to wait for! Days are dreary unto death which wrap no hope in their misty folds.

His uncle and aunt received him with more warmth than he had ever known them show. They were in good spirits about him, for they had all the time been receiving news of him and Barbara, with not a word of Alice, from old Simon. Jane’s heart swelled with the ambition that her boy should as a working-man gain the love of a well born girl, and reward her by making her my lady.

I do not think Mrs. Tuke could have loved a son of her own body more than this son of her sister; but she was constantly haunted with a vague uneasiness about the possible consequences to herself and her husband of what she had done, and the obstacles that might rise to prevent his restoration; and this uneasiness had its share both in repressing the show of her love, and in making her go to church so regularly. Her pleasure in going was not great, but she was not the less troubled that Richard did not care about going. She was still in the land of bullocks and goats; she went to church with the idea that she was doing something for God in going. It is always the way. Until a man knows God, he seeks to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about; while the things for the sake of which he sent his son, the man regards as of little or no consequence. What the son says about them, he takes as a matter of course for him to say, and for himself to neglect.

Mrs. Tuke noted, the next day, that, as often almost as he was still, a shadow settled on Richard’s face, and he looked lost and sad: but it only occurred to her that of course he must miss Barbara, never that he cherished no hope such as she would have counted hope. She took it almost as an omen of final success when in the evening he asked her if she would not like him to go to church with her. He felt as if in church he would be nearer Barbara, for he knew that now she went often. But alas, while there he sat, he felt himself drifting farther and farther from her! The foolish utterances of the parson made him deeply regret that he had gone. While he believed, or at least was willing to believe, that they misrepresented Christianity, they awoke all his old feelings of instinctive repulsion, and overclouded his discrimination. Almost as little could he endure the unnature as the untruth of what he heard. It had no ring of reality, no spark of divine fire, no appealing radiance of common sense, little of any verity at all. There was in it, as nearly as possible, nothing at all to mediate between mind and mind, between truth and belief, between God and his children. The clergyman was not a hypocrite—far from it! He was in some measure even a devout man. But in his whole presentation of God and our relation to him, there was neither thought nor phrase germane to sunrise or sunset, to the firmament or the wind or the grass or the trees; nothing that came to the human soul as having a reality true as that of the world but higher; as holding with the life lived in it, with the hopes and necessities of the heart and mind. If “the hope of the glory of God” must be fashioned in like sort, then were the whole affair of creation and redemption both dull and desperate. There was no glow, no enthusiasm in the man—neither could there be, with the notions he held. His God suggested a police magistrate—and not a just one.

Richard would gladly have left the place, and wandered up and down in the drizzle until, the service over, his mother should appear; but for her sake he sat out the misery.

“The man,” he said to himself, “does not give us one peg on which to hang the love of God that he tells us we ought to feel! Love a God like that! If he were as good as my mother, I would love him! But we have all to look out to protect ourselves from him! Mr. Parson, there’s no such being as you jabber about! It puzzles me to think what my mother gets from you.”

He had written his letter to Barbara, and when they came out he posted it. A long, long time of waiting followed; but no waiting brought any answer. Lady Ann had dropped a hint, and Mr. Wylder had picked it up, a hint delicate, but forcible enough to make him do what he had never done before—keep an outlook on the letters that came for his daughter. When Richard’s arrived, it did not look to him that of a gentleman. The writing was good, but precise; it was sealed with red wax, but the impression was sunk: a proper seal had not been used! Especially where his own family was concerned, Mr. Wylder was not the most delicate of men! he opened the letter, and in it found what he called a rigmarole of poetry and theology! “Confound the fellow!” he said to himself. Lady Ann did well to warn him! There should be no more of this! The scatter-brain took after her mother! He would give it her hot!

But he neither gave it her hot, nor gave her the letter; he did not say a word. He feared the little girl he pretended to protect, and knew that if he entered the lists with her, she would be too much for him. But he did not understand that the mean in him dared not confront the noble in his child. So Richard’s letter only had it hot; it went into the fire, and Bab never read the petition of her poor friend.

The next morning Richard went to the shop, and fell to the first job that came to his hand. He acquainted his father with Lestrange’s proposal in regard to the library: Mr. Tuke would have him accept it.

“You shall have all it brings,” he said.

“I don’t want the money!” returned Richard.

“But I want the honour of the thing,” replied his uncle. “You answered the young gentleman sharply: you had better let me write!”

Richard made no objection. He would gladly keep the door open to any place where the shadow of Barbara might fall, and was willing therefore to pocket the offence of his causeless dismissal. But no notice was taken of Tuke’s letter, and a gulf of negation seemed to yawn between the houses.

Thus was initiated a dreary time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, and it did not seem so unnatural to be without her now. Had it been summer, all the forms of earth and air would have brought to him the face and voice and motion of Barbara; and yet the soul would have been gone from them. The world would have been worse dead then than now in the winter. Barbara had been the soul of it—more than a sun to it.

He could not, however, dead as the world seemed, remain a moment indoors after his work was done. Whatever sort the weather, out he must go, often on the Thames, heedless of cold or wind or rain. His mother grew anxious about him, attributed his unrest to despair, and feared she might have to tell him her secret. She recoiled from setting free what she had kept in prison for so many years. In her own mind she had settled his coming of age as the term of his humiliation, and she would gladly keep to it. She shrunk from losing him, from breaking up the happiness that lay in seeing him about the house. But that her husband had insisted on accustoming themselves to live without him, she would hardly have consented to his late absence. She shrunk also from the measures necessary to reinstate him, and from the commotion those measures must occasion. It was so much easier to go on as they were doing! and delay could not prejudice his right! In fact, most of the things that made her take the baby, were present still, making her desire to keep the youth. A day would come when she must part with him, but that day was not yet! She dreaded uncaging her secret, because of the change it must work, whether immediate action were taken or not. She never suspected that anyone knew or surmised it but herself, or that she had to beware of any tongue but her own.

Her husband left the matter entirely to her. It was her business, he said, from the first, and he would let it be hers to the last.

CHAPTER XLI. NATURE AND SUPERNATURE

But Richard soon began to recover both from the separation and from his disappointment in regard to his letter. He was satisfied that whatever might be the cause of her silence, it came from no fault in Barbara. Nothing ever shook his faith in her.

And soon he found that he looked now upon the world with eyes from which a veil had been withdrawn. Barbara gone, mother Earth came nigh to comfort her child. He had always delighted in the beauty of the world—in what shows of earth and air were to be seen in London. The sunset that filled as with a glowing curtain the end of some street where he walked, would go on glowing in his heart when it left the street. Even in winter he would now and then go out to see the sunrise, and see it; and from the street might now and then, at rare times, he beheld a dappling and streaking, a mottling and massing of clouds on the blue. The fog of the London valley, and the smoke of the London chimneys, did not always, any more than the cares and sorrows and sins of its souls, blot out its heaven as if it had never looked on the earth. But he had learned much since he went to the country; he had gone nearer to Nature, and seen that in her lap she carried many more things than he knew of; and now that Barbara was gone, the memories of Nature came nearer to him: he remembered her and was glad. Soon he began to find that, both as regards Nature and those whom we love, absence is, for very nearness, often better than presence itself. He had been used to think and talk of Nature either as an abstraction, or as the personification of a force that knew nothing, and cared for nothing, was nobody, was nothing; now it gradually came to him, and gained upon him ere he knew, first that the things about him wore meanings, and held them up to him, then that something was thinking, something was meaning the things themselves, and so moving thoughts in him, that came and went unforeseen, unbidden. Thoughts clothed in things were everywhere about him, over his head, under his feet, and in his heart; and as often as anything brought him pleasure, either through memory or in present vision, it brought Barbara too; and she seemed their maker, when she was but one of the fair company, the lady of the land. Everything beautiful turned his face to the more beautiful, more precious, diviner Barbara. With each new sense of loveliness, she floated up from where she lay, ever ready to rise, in the ocean of his heart. She was the dweller of his everywhere!

He knew that Barbara did not make these things; it only seemed as if she made them because she was the better joy of them: did not the fact show how the fiction of a God might have sprung up in the minds that had no Barbara to look like the maker of the loveliness? But Barbara was there already, known and loved. The mind did not invent Barbara. And again, why should the mind want anyone to look like a maker, an indweller, an ingeniuer—to use a word of Shakespeare’s invention? Yet again, why should the thought of Barbara suggest a soul, that is, a causing, informing presence, to these things? Was there a meaning in them? How did they come to have that meaning? Could it be that, having come out of nothing—the mind of man, and all the things, out of the same nothing, they responded enough to each other for the man to find his own reflex wherever he pleased to look for it? Only, if man and Nature came both out of nothing, why should they not be nothing to each other? why should not man be nothing to himself? As it was, one nothing, having no thought, meant the same the other nothing meant, having thought!—and hence came all the beauty of the world! And once again, if these things meant nothing but what the mind put into them—its own thought, namely, of them—they did not really mean anything, they were only imagined to mean it; and why should he, if but for a moment, imagine Barbara at the root of nothing? And why should he not, seeing she was herself nothing? Or was he to consent to be fooled, and act as if there was something where he knew there was nothing?

The truth of Richard’s love appeared in this that he was more able now to see the other side of a thing, to start objection to his own idea from the side of one who thought differently.

“If I feel,” he would say to himself, “as if these things meant something, and conclude that they only mean me, being the body to me, who am the soul of them; and still more if I conclude that the sum of them is the blind cause of me; then, when I grow sick of myself, finding no comfort, no stay in myself for myself, and know that I need another, say another self, then the seeming sympathy that Nature offers me, is the merest mockery! It is only my own self—myself gone behind and peeping round a corner, grinning back sympathy at me from its sickening death-mask! Why should man need another if he came from nothing? But he came from a father and mother: man needed the woman: will not that explain the thing? No; for even the relation itself needs to be comforted and sustained and defended!”

Why was there so much, and most of all in himself, for which, as Richard was beginning to understand, even a Barbara could not suffice? Why also did her sufficiency depend so much on her faith in an all-sufficient? And why was there so often such a gulf betwixt the two that seemed made for each other? Ah! they were made for each other only in the general! For the individual, Nature did not care; she had no time! Then how was it that he cared for Nature? If Nature meant anything, was an intelligence, a sort of God, why should he, the individual, who loved as an individual, was a blessing or curse to himself as an individual—why should he care anything for one who loved only in the general? Could a man love in general? Yes; he himself loved his kind and sought to deliver them from superstition. But that was because he could think of them as a multitude of individuals. If he had never loved father, mother, or friend, would he have loved in the general? Would crowds of men and women have awaked love in him? If so, then the bigger crowd must always move the greater love! No; it is from the individual we go to the many. Love that was only in the general, that cared for the nation, the race, and let the individual perish, could not be love. He would be no God who cared only for a world or a race. The live conscious individual man could not love or worship him! And if no individual worshipped, where would be the worship of the crowd? Still less could a vague creator of masses, that knew nothing of individuals, being himself not individual, be worthy to be called God! Demon be might be—never God! But if God were a person, an individual, and so loved the individual!—ah, then indeed!—Barbara believed that such a God lived all about and in us! Mr. Wingfold said he was too great to prove, too near to see, but the greater and the nearer, the more fit to be loved! There were things against it! Nature herself seemed against it, for, lovely us she was, she did awful things! Could Nature have come from one source, and God be another source from which came man? He was too near Nature, too much at home with her, to believe it. Could it be one Nature that made all the lovely things, and another Nature that decreed their fate? That also he could not believe: they and their fate must be from one hand, or heart, or will! He could but hope there might be some way of reconciling the terrible dissonance between Nature and Barbara’s God! If there was such a way, if their contradiction was only in seeming, then the very depth of their unity might be the cause of their seeming discord!

Something in this way the mind of Richard felt and thought and saw and doubted and speculated. Then he would turn to the ancient story—still because “Barbara said.”