The Seaboard Parish, Complete

“It is beautiful, certainly,” I answered. “And if it were only one, I should enjoy it—as a mood. But coming after the other, it seems but the same thing more weakly embodied.”

I confess I was a little vexed; for I had got much interested in Percivale, for his own sake as well as for my daughter’s, and I had expected better things from him. But I saw that I had gone too far.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Percivale,” I said.

“I fear I have been too free in my remarks. I know, likewise, that I am a clergyman, and not a painter, and therefore incapable of giving the praise which I have little doubt your art at least deserves.”

“I trust that honesty cannot offend me, however much and justly it may pain me.”

“But now I have said my worst, I should much like to see what else you have at hand to show me.”

“Unfortunately I have too much at hand. Let me see.”

He strode to the other end of the room, where several pictures were leaning against the wall, with their faces turned towards it. From these he chose one, but, before showing it, fitted it into an empty frame that stood beside. He then brought it forward and set it on the easel. I will describe it, and then my reader will understand the admiration which broke from me after I had regarded it for a time.

A dark hill rose against the evening sky, which shone through a few thin pines on its top. Along a road on the hill-side four squires bore a dying knight—a man past the middle age. One behind carried his helm, and another led his horse, whose fine head only appeared in the picture. The head and countenance of the knight were very noble, telling of many a battle, and ever for the right. The last had doubtless been gained, for one might read victory as well as peace in the dying look. The party had just reached the edge of a steep descent, from which you saw the valley beneath, with the last of the harvest just being reaped, while the shocks stood all about in the fields, under the place of the sunset. The sun had been down for some little time. There was no gold left in the sky, only a little dull saffron, but plenty of that lovely liquid green of the autumn sky, divided with a few streaks of pale rose. The depth of the sky overhead, which you could not see for the arrangement of the picture, was mirrored lovelily in a piece of water that lay in the centre of the valley.

“My dear fellow,” I cried, “why did you not show me this first, and save me from saying so many unkind things? Here is a picture to my own heart; it is glorious. Look here, Wynnie,” I went on; “you see it is evening; the sun’s work is done, and he has set in glory, leaving his good name behind him in a lovely harmony of colour. The old knight’s work is done too; his day has set in the storm of battle, and he is lying lapt in the coming peace. They are bearing him home to his couch and his grave. Look at their faces in the dusky light. They are all mourning for and honouring the life that is ebbing away. But he is gathered to his fathers like a shock of corn fully ripe; and so the harvest stands golden in the valley beneath. The picture would not be complete, however, if it did not tell us of the deep heaven overhead, the symbol of that heaven whither he who has done his work is bound. What a lovely idea to represent it by means of the water, the heaven embodying itself in the earth, as it were, that we may see it! And observe how that dusky hill-side, and those tall slender mournful-looking pines, with that sorrowful sky between, lead the eye and point the heart upward towards that heaven. It is indeed a grand picture, full of feeling—a picture and a parable.”

[Footnote: This is a description, from memory only, of a picture painted by Arthur Hughes.]

I looked at the girl. Her eyes were full of tears, either called forth by the picture itself or by the pleasure of finding Percivale’s work appreciated by me, who had spoken so hardly of the others.

“I cannot tell you how glad I am that you like it,” she said.

“Like it!” I returned; “I am simply delighted with it, more than I can express—so much delighted that if I could have this alongside of it, I should not mind hanging that other—that hopeless garret—on the most public wall I have.”

“Then,” said Wynnie bravely, though in a tremulous voice, “you confess—don’t you, papa?—that you were too hard on Mr. Percivale at first?”

“Not too hard on his picture, my dear; and that was all he had yet given me to judge by. No man should paint a picture like that. You are not bound to disseminate hopelessness; for where there is no hope there can be no sense of duty.”

“But surely, papa, Mr. Percivale has some sense of duty,” said Wynnie in an almost angry tone.

“Assuredly my love. Therefore I argue that he has some hope, and therefore, again, that he has no right to publish such a picture.”

At the word publish Percivale smiled. But Wynnie went on with her defence:

“But you see, papa, that Mr. Percivale does not paint such pictures only. Look at the other.”

“Yes, my dear. But pictures are not like poems, lying side by side in the same book, so that the one can counteract the other. The one of these might go to the stormy Hebrides, and the other to the Vale of Avalon; but even then I should be strongly inclined to criticise the poem, whatever position it stood in, that had nothing—positively nothing—of the aurora in it.”

Here let me interrupt the course of our conversation to illustrate it by a remark on a poem which has appeared within the last twelvemonth from the pen of the greatest living poet, and one who, if I may dare to judge, will continue the greatest for many, many years to come. It is only a little song, “I stood on a tower in the wet.” I have found few men who, whether from the influence of those prints which are always on the outlook for something to ridicule, or from some other cause, did not laugh at the poem. I thought and think it a lovely poem, although I am not quite sure of the transposition of words in the last two lines. But I do not approve of the poem, just because there is no hope in it. It lacks that touch or hint of red which is as essential, I think, to every poem as to every picture—the life-blood—the one pure colour. In his hopeful moods, let a man put on his singing robes, and chant aloud the words of gladness—or of grief, I care not which—to his fellows; in his hours of hopelessness, let him utter his thoughts only to his inarticulate violin, or in the evanescent sounds of any his other stringed instrument; let him commune with his own heart on his bed, and be still; let him speak to God face to face if he may—only he cannot do that and continue hopeless; but let him not sing aloud in such a mood into the hearts of his fellows, for he cannot do them much good thereby. If it were a fact that there is no hope, it would not be a truth. No doubt, if it were a fact, it ought to be known; but who will dare be confident that there is no hope? Therefore, I say, let the hopeless moods, at least, if not the hopeless men, be silent.

“He could refuse to let the one go without the other,” said Wynnie.

“Now you are talking like a child, Wynnie, as indeed all partisans do at the best. He might sell them together, but the owner would part them.—If you will allow me, I will come and see both the pictures again to-morrow.”

Percivale assured me of welcome, and we parted, I declining to look at any more pictures that day, but not till we had arranged that he should dine with us in the evening.

CHAPTER XIII. HOME AGAIN

I will not detain my readers with the record of the few days we spent in London. In writing the account of it, as in the experience of the time itself, I feel that I am near home, and grow the more anxious to reach it. Ah! I am growing a little anxious after another home, too; for the house of my tabernacle is falling to ruins about me. What a word home is! To think that God has made the world so that you have only to be born in a certain place, and live long enough in it to get at the secret of it, and henceforth that place is to you a home with all the wonderful meaning in the word. Thus the whole earth is a home to the race; for every spot of it shares in the feeling: some one of the family loves it as his home. How rich the earth seems when we so regard it—crowded with the loves of home! Yet I am now getting ready to go home—to leave this world of homes and go home. When I reach that home, shall I even then seek yet to go home? Even then, I believe, I shall seek a yet warmer, deeper, truer home in the deeper knowledge of God—in the truer love of my fellow-man. Eternity will be, my heart and my faith tell me, a travelling homeward, but in jubilation and confidence and the vision of the beloved.

When we had laid Connie once more in her own room, at least the room which since her illness had come to be called hers, I went up to my study. The familiar faces of my books welcomed me. I threw myself in my reading-chair, and gazed around me with pleasure. I felt it so homely here. All my old friends—whom somehow I hoped to see some day—present there in the spirit ready to talk with me any moment when I was in the mood, making no claim upon my attention when I was not! I felt as if I should like, when the hour should come, to die in that chair, and pass into the society of the witnesses in the presence of the tokens they had left behind them.

I heard shouts on the stair, and in rushed the two boys.

“Papa, papa!” they were crying together.

“What is the matter?”

“We’ve found the big chest just where we left it.”

“Well, did you expect it would have taken itself off?”

“But there’s everything in it just as we left it.”

“Were you afraid, then, that the moment you left it it would turn itself upside down, and empty itself of all its contents on the floor?”

They laughed, but apparently with no very keen appreciation of the attempt at a joke.

“Well, papa, I did not think anything about it; but—but—but—there everything is as we left it.”

With this triumphant answer they turned and hurried, a little abashed, out of the room; but not many moments elapsed before the sounds that arose from them were sufficiently reassuring as to the state of their spirits. When they were gone, I forgot my books in the attempt to penetrate and understand the condition of my boys’ thoughts; and I soon came to see that they were right and I was wrong. It was the movement of that undeveloped something in us which makes it possible for us in everything to give thanks. It was the wonder of the discovery of the existence of law. There was nothing that they could understand, à priori, to necessitate the remaining of the things where they had left them. No doubt there was a reason in the nature of God, why all things should hold together, whence springs the law of gravitation, as we call it; but as far as the boys could understand of this, all things might as well have been arranged for flying asunder, so that no one could expect to find anything where he had left it. I began to see yet further into the truth that in everything we must give thanks, and whatever is not of faith is sin. Even the laws of nature reveal the character of God, not merely as regards their ends, but as regards their kind, being of necessity fashioned after ideal facts of his own being and will.

I rose and went down to see if everybody was getting settled, and how the place looked. I found Ethel already going about the house as if she had never left it, and as if we all had just returned from a long absence and she had to show us home-hospitality. Wynnie had vanished; but I found her by and by in the favourite haunt of her mother before her marriage—beside the little pond called the Bishop’s Basin, of which I do not think I have ever told my readers the legend. But why should I mention it, for I cannot tell it now? The frost lay thick in the hollow when I went down there to find her; the branches, lately clothed with leaves, stood bare and icy around her. Ethelwyn and I had almost forgotten that there was anything out of the common in connection with the house. The horror of this mysterious spot had laid hold upon Wynnie. I resolved that that night I would, in her mother’s presence, tell her all the legend of the place, and the whole story of how I won her mother. I did so; and I think it made her trust us more. But now I left her there, and went to Connie. She lay in her bed; for her mother had got her thither at once, a perfect picture of blessed comfort. There was no occasion to be uneasy about her. I was so pleased to be at home again with such good hopes, that I could not rest, but went wandering everywhere—into places even which I had not entered for ten years at least, and found fresh interest in everything; for this was home, and here I was.

Now I fancy my readers, looking forward to the end, and seeing what a small amount of print is left, blaming me; some, that I have roused curiosity without satisfying it; others, that I have kept them so long over a dull book and a lame conclusion. But out of a life one cannot always cut complete portions, and serve them up in nice shapes. I am well aware that I have not told them the fate, as some of them would call it, of either of my daughters. This I cannot develop now, even as far as it is known to me; but, if it is any satisfaction to them to know this much—and it will be all that some of them mean by fate, I fear—I may as well tell them now that Wynnie has been Mrs. Percivale for many years, with a history well worth recounting; and that Connie has had a quiet, happy life for nearly as long, as Mrs. Turner. She has never got strong, but has very tolerable health. Her husband watches her with the utmost care and devotion. My Ethelwyn is still with me. Harry is gone home. Charlie is a barrister of the Middle Temple. And Dora—I must not forget Dora—well, I will say nothing about her fate, for good reasons—it is not quite determined yet. Meantime she puts up with the society of her old father and mother, and is something else than unhappy, I fully believe.

“And Connie’s baby?” asks some one out of ten thousand readers. I have no time to tell you about her now; but as you know her so little, it cannot be such a trial to remain, for a time at least, unenlightened with regard to her fate.

The only other part of my history which could contain anything like incident enough to make it interesting in print, is a period I spent in London some few years after the time of which I have now been writing. But I am getting too old to regard the commencement of another history with composure. The labour of thinking into sequences, even the bodily labour of writing, grows more and more severe. I fancy I can think correctly still; but the effort necessary to express myself with corresponding correctness becomes, in prospect, at least, sometimes almost appalling. I must therefore take leave of my patient reader—for surely every one who has followed me through all that I have here written, well deserves the epithet—as if the probability that I shall write no more were a certainty, bidding him farewell with one word: “Friend, hope thou in God,” and for a parting gift offering him a new, and, I think, a true rendering of the first verse of the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews:

“Now faith is the essence of hopes, the trying of things unseen.”

Good-bye.

THE END