Friarswood Post Office

‘But how ought I to believe, Sir?’

‘You say you feel what your sins are; think of them all as you lie, each one as you remember it; say it out in your heart to our Saviour, and pray God to forgive it for His sake, and then think that it cost some of the pain He bore on the Cross, some of the drops of His agony in the Garden.  Each sin of ours was indeed of that burden!’

‘Oh, that will make them seem so bad!’

‘Indeed it does; but how it will make you love Him, and feel thankful to Him, and anxious not to waste the sufferings borne for your sake, and glad, perhaps, that you are bearing some small thing yourself.  But you are spent, and I had better not talk more now.  Let me read you a few prayers to help you, and then I will leave you, and come again to-morrow.’

How differently those Prayers and Psalms sounded to Alfred now that he had really a heart grieved and wearied with the burthen of sin!  The point was to make his not a frightened heart, but a contrite heart.

CHAPTER VII—HAROLD TAKES A WRONG TURN

Mrs. King was very anxious about Alfred for many hours after this visit from the Curate, for he was continually crying, not violently, but the tears flowing quietly from his eyes as he lay, thinking.  Sometimes it was the badness of the faults as he saw them now, looking so very different from what they did when they were committed in the carelessness of fun and high spirits, or viewed afterwards in the hardening light of self-justification.  Now they did look so wantonly hard and rude—unkind to his sister, ruinous to Harold, regardless of his widowed mother, reckless of his God—that each one seemed to cut into him with a sense of its own badness, and he was quite as much grieved as afraid; he hated the fault, and hated himself for it.

Indeed, he was growing less afraid, for the sorrow seemed to swallow that up; the grief at having offended One so loving was putting out the terror of being punished; or rather, when he thought that this illness was punishment, he was almost glad to have some of what he deserved; just as when he was a little boy, he really used to be happier afterwards for having been whipped and put in the corner, because that was like making it up.  Though he knew very well that if he had ten thousand times worse than this to bear, it would not be making up for his faults, and he felt now that one of them had been his ‘despising the chastening of the Lord.’  And then the thought of what had made up for it would come: and though he had known of it all his life, and heeded it all too little, now that his heart was tender, and he had felt some of the horror and pain of sin, he took it all home now, and clung to it.  He recollected the verses about that One kneeling—nay, falling on the ground, in the cold dewy night, with the chosen friends who could not watch with Him, and the agony and misery that every one in all the world deserved to feel, gathering on Him, Who had done no wrong, and making His brow stream with great drops of Blood.

And the tortures, the shame, the slow Death—circumstance after circumstance came to his mind, and ‘for me,’ ‘this fault of mine helped,’ would rise with it, and the tears trickled down at the thought of the suffering and of the Love that had caused it to be undergone.

Once he raised up his head, and saw through the window the deep dark-blue sky, and the stars, twinkling and sparkling away; that pale band of light, the Milky Way, which they say is made of countless stars too far off to be distinguished, and looking like a cloud, and on it the larger, brighter burnished stars, differing from one another in glory.  He thought of some lines in a book Miss Jane once gave Ellen, which said of the stars:

‘The Lord resigned them all to gain
The bliss of pardoning thee.’

And when he thought that it was the King of those stars Who was scourged and spit on, and for the sake of his faults, the loving tears came again, and he turned to another hymn of Ellen’s:

‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee!’

And going on with this, he fell into a more quiet sleep than he had had for many nights.

Alfred had worked up his mind to a point where it could not long remain; and when he awoke in the morning, the common affairs of the day occupied him in a way that was not hurtful to him, as the one chief thought was ever present, only laid away for a time, and helping him when he might have been fretful or impatient.

He was anxious for Mr. Cope, and grateful when he saw him coming early in the day.  Mr. Cope did not, however, say anything very new.  He chiefly wished to shew Alfred that he must not think all his struggle with sin over, and that he had nothing to do but to lie still and be pardoned.  There was much more work, as he would find, when the present strong feeling should grow a little blunt; he would have to keep his will bent to bear what was sent by God, and to prove his repentance by curing himself of all his bad habits of peevishness and exacting; to learn, in fact, to take up his cross.

Alfred feebly promised to try, and it did not seem so difficult just then.  The days were becoming cooler, and he did not feel quite so ill; and though he did not know how much this helped him, it made it much easier to act on his good resolutions.  Miss Selby came to see him, and was quite delighted to see him looking so much less uncomfortable and dismal.

‘Why, Alfred,’ said she, ‘you must be much better.’

Ellen looked mournful at this, and shook her head so that Miss Jane turned her bright face to her in alarm.

‘No, Ma’am,’ said Alfred.  ‘Dr. Blunt says I can never get over it.’

‘And does that make you glad?’ almost gasped Miss Jane.

‘No, Ma’am,’ said Alfred; ‘but Mr. Cope has been talking to me, and made it all so—’

He could not get out the words; and, besides, he saw Miss Jane’s eyes winking very fast to check the tears, and Ellen’s had begun to rain down fast.

‘I didn’t mean to be silly,’ said little Jane, in rather a trembling voice; ‘but I’m sorry—no—I’m glad you are happy and good, Alfred.’

‘Not good, Miss Jane,’ cried Alfred; ‘I’m such a bad boy, but there are such good things as I never minded before—’

‘Well then, I think you’ll like what I’ve brought you,’ said Jane eagerly.

It was a little framed picture of our Blessed Lord on His Cross, all darkness round, and the Inscription above His Head; and Miss Jane had painted, in tall Old English red letters, under it the two words, ‘For me.’

Alfred looked at it as if indeed it would be a great comfort to him to be always reminded by the eye, of how ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities.’

He thanked Miss Jane with all his heart, and she and Ellen soon found a place to hang it up well in his sight.  It was a pretty bright sight to see her insisting on holding the nail for it, and then playfully pretending to shrink and fancy that Ellen would hammer her fingers.

Alfred could enjoy the sunshine of his sick-room again; and Ellen and his mother down-stairs told Miss Selby, with many tears, of the happy change that had come over him ever since he had resigned himself to give up hopes of life.  Mrs. King looked so peaceful and thankful, that little Jane could hardly understand what it was that made her so much more at rest.

Even Ellen, though her heart ached at the hope having gone out, and left a dark place where it had been, felt the great relief from hour to hour of not being fretted and snarled at for whatever she either did or left undone.  Thanks and smiles were much pleasanter payment than groans, murmurs, and scoldings; and the brother and sister sometimes grew quite cheerful and merry together, as Alfred lay raised up to look over the hedge into the harvest-field across the meadow, where the reaper and his wife might be seen gathering the brown ears round, and cutting them with the sickle, and others going after to bind them into the glorious wheat sheaves that leant against each other in heaps of blessed promise of plenty.

Paul tried reaping; but the first thing he did was to make a terrible cut in his hand, which the shuffler told him was for good luck!  Some of the women in the field bound it up, but he was good for nothing after it except going after the cattle, and so he was likely to lose all the chance of earning himself any better clothes in harvest-time.

Harold grumbled dreadfully that his mother could not spare him to go harvesting beyond their own tiny quarter of an acre of wheat.  The post made it impossible for him to go out to work like the labourers; and besides, his mother did not think he had gained much good in hay-time, and wished to keep him from the boys.

Very hard he thought it; and to hear him grumble, any one would have thought Mrs. King was a tyrant far worse than Farmer Shepherd, working the flesh off his bones, taking away the fun and the payment alike.

The truth was, that the morning when Harold threw away from him the thought of his brother’s danger, and broke all his promises to him in the selfish fear of a rebuke from the clergyman, had been one of the turning-points of his life, and a turning-point for the bad.  It had been a hardening of his heart, just as it had begun to be touched, and a letting in of evil spirits instead of good ones.

He became more than ever afraid of Mr. Cope, and shirked going near him so as to be spoken to; he cut Ellen off short if she said a word to him, and avoided being with Alfred, partly because it made him melancholy, partly because he was afraid of Alfred’s again talking to him about the evil of his ways.  In reality, his secret soul was wretched at the thought of losing his brother; but he tried to put the notion away from him, and to drown it in the noisiest jokes and most riotous sports he could meet with, keeping company with the wildest lads about the parish.  That Dick Royston especially, whose honesty was doubtful, but who, being a clever fellow, was a sort of leader, was doing great harm by setting his face against the new parson, and laughing at the boys who went to him.  Mrs. King was very unhappy.  It was almost worse to think of Harold than of his sick brother; and Alfred grieved very much too, and took to himself the blame of having made home miserable to Harold, and driven him into bad company; of having been so peevish and unpleasant, that it was no wonder he would not come near him more than could be helped; and above all, of having set a bad example of idleness and recklessness, when he was well.  If the tears were brought into his eyes at first by some unkind neglect of Harold’s, they were sure to end in this thought at last; and then the only comfort was, that Mr. Cope had told him that he might make his sick-bed very precious to his brother’s welfare, by praying always for him.

Mr. Cope had talked it over with Mrs. King; and they had agreed that as Harold was under the regular age for Confirmation, and seemed so little disposed to prepare for it in earnest, they would not press it on him.  He was far from fit for it, and he was in such a mood of impatient irreverence, that Mr. Cope was afraid of making his sin worse by forcing serious things on him, and his mother was in constant fear of losing her last hold on him.

Yet Harold was not a bad or unfeeling boy by nature; and if he would but have paused to think, he would have been shocked to see how cruelly he was paining his widowed mother and dying brother, just when he should have been their strength and stay.

One afternoon in October, when Alfred was in a good deal of pain, Mr. Blunt said he would send out some cooling ointment for the wound at the joint, when Harold took the evening letters into Elbury.  Alfred reckoned much on the relief this was to give, and watched the ticks of the clock for the time for Harold to set off.

‘Make haste,’ were the last words his mother spoke—and Harold fully meant to make haste; nor was it weather to tempt him to stay long, for there was a chill raw fog hanging over the meadows, and fast turning into rain, which hung in drops upon his eyebrows, and the many-tiered cape of his father’s box-coat, which he always wore in bad weather.  It was fortunate he was likely to meet nothing, and that he and the pony both knew the road pretty well.

How fuzzy the grey fog made the lamps of the town look!  Did they disturb the pony?  What a stumble!  Ha! there’s a shoe off.  Be it known that it was Harold’s own fault; he had not looked at the shoes for many a morning, as he knew it was his duty to do.

He left Peggy with her ears back, much discomposed at being shod in a strange forge, and by any one but Bill Saunders.

Then Harold was going to leave his bag at the post-office, when, as he turned up the street, some one caught hold of him, and cried, ‘Ho!  Harold King on foot!  What’s the row?  Old pony tumbled down dead?’

‘Cast a shoe,’ said Harold.

‘Oh, jolly, you’ll have to wait!’ went on Dick Royston.  ‘Come in here!  Here’s such a lark!’

Harold looked into a court-yard belonging to a low public-house, and saw what was like a tent, with a bright red star on a blue ground at the end, lighted up.  A dark figure came between, and there was a sudden crack that made Harold start.

‘It’s the unique (he called it eu-ni-quee) royal shooting-gallery, patronized by his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales,’ (what a story!) said Dick.  ‘You’ve only to lay down your tin; one copper for three shots, and if you hit, you may take your choice—gingerbread-nuts, or bits of cocoa-nut, or, what’s jolliest, lollies with gin inside ’em!  Come, blaze away! or ha’n’t you got the money?  Does Mother keep you too short?’

If there was a thing Harold had a longing for, it was to fire off a gun!  If there was a person he envied more than another, it was old Isaac Coffin, when he prowled up and down Farmer Ledbitter’s fields with an old blunderbuss and some powder, to keep off the birds!

To be sure it was a public-house, but it was not inside one!  And Mother would call it gambling.  Oh, but it wasn’t cards or skittles!  And if he shot away his half-pence, how should he pay for the shoeing of the pony?  The blacksmith might trust him, or the clerk at the post-office would lend him the money, or Betsey Hardman.  And the time?  One shot would not waste much!  Pony must be shod.  Besides, Dick and all the rest would say he was a baby.