There & Back

That’s “Thank you, God!”—He gave you
Of life this little taste;
And with more life he’ll save you,
Not let you go to waste!

So we’ll live on together,
And share our bite and sup;
Until he says, “Come hither,”—
And lifts us both high up!

Barbara was so much pleased with the verses that she thought them a great deal better than they were.

Wingfold walked home thinking how, in his dull parish, where so few seemed to care whether they were going back to be monkeys or on to be men, he had yet found two such interesting young people as Richard and Barbara.

He had come upon Richard again at his grandfather’s, had had a little more talk with him, and had found him not so far from the kingdom of heaven but that he cared to deny a false god; and he had just discovered in Barbara, who so seldom went to church and who came of such strange parents, one in whom the love of God was not merely innate, but keenly alive. The heart of the one recoiled from a God that was not; the heart of the other was drawn to a God of whom she knew little: were not the two upon converging tracks? What to most clergymen would have seemed the depth of a winter of unbelief, seemed to Wingfold a springtime full of the sounds of the rising sap.

“What man,” he said to himself, “knowing the care that some men have of their fellow-men, even to the spending of themselves for them, can doubt that, loving the children, they must one day love the father! Who more welcome to the heart of the eternal father, than the man who loves his brother, whom also the unchanging father loves!”

Personally, I find the whole matter of religious teaching and observance in general a very dull business—as dull as most secular teaching. If salvation is anything like what are commonly considered its means, it is to me a consummation devoutly to be deprecated. But no one ever found Wingfold dull. For one thing he scarcely thought about the church, and never mistook it for the kingdom of God. Its worldly affairs gave him no concern, and party-spirit was loathsome to him as the very antichrist. He was a servant of the church universal, of all that believed or ever would believe in the Lord Christ, therefore of all men, of the whole universe—and first, of every man, woman, and child in his own parish. But though he was the servant of the boundless church, no church was his master. He had no master but the one lord of life. Therefore the so-called prosperity of the church did not interest him. He knew that the Master works from within outward, and believed no danger possible to the church, except from such of its nominal pastors as know nothing of the life that works leavening from within. The will of God was all Wingfold cared about, and if the church was not content with that, the church was nothing to him, and might do to him as it would. He did not spend his life for the people because he was a parson, but he was a parson because the church of England gave him facilities for spending his life for the people. He gave himself altogether to the Lord, and therefore to his people. He believed in Jesus Christ as the everyday life of the world, whose presence is just us needful in bank, or shop, or house of lords, as at what so many of the clergy call the altar. When the Lord is known as the heart of every joy, as well as the refuge from every sorrow, then the altar will be known for what it is—an ecclesiastical antique. The Father permitted but never ordained sacrifice; in tenderness to his children he ordered the ways of their unbelieving belief. So at least thought and said Wingfold, and if he did not say so in the pulpit, it was not lest his fellows should regard him as a traitor, but because so few of his people would understand. He would spend no strength in trying to shore up the church; he sent his life-blood through its veins, and his appeal to the Living One, for whose judgment he waited.

The world would not perish if what is called the church did go to pieces; a truer church, for there might well be a truer, would arise out of her ruins. But let no one seek to destroy; let him that builds only take heed that he build with gold and silver and precious stones, not with wood and hay and stubble! If the church were so built, who could harm it! if it were not in part so built, it would be as little worth pulling down as letting stand. There is in it a far deeper and better vitality than its blatant supporters will be able to ruin by their advocacy, or the enviers of its valueless social position by their assaults upon that position.

Wingfold never thought of associating the anxiety of the heiress with the unbelief of the bookbinder. He laughed a laugh of delight when afterward he learned their relation to each other.

The next Sunday, Barbara was at church, and never afterward willingly missed going. She sought the friendship of Mrs. Wingfold, and found at last a woman to whom she could heartily look up. She found in her also a clergyman’s wife who understood her husband—not because he was small-minded, but because she was large-hearted—and fell in thoroughly with his modes of teaching his people, as well as his objects in regard to them. She never sought to make one in the parish a churchman, but tried to make every one she had to do with a scholar of Christ, a child to his father in heaven.

CHAPTER XXXII. THE SHOEING OF MISS BROWN

Two days after, on a lovely autumn evening, Barbara rode Miss Brown across the fields, avoiding the hard road even more carefully than usual. For Miss Brown, as I have said, was in want of shoes, and Barbara herself was to have a hand in putting them on.

The red-faced, white-whiskered, jolly old Simon stood at the smithy door to receive her: he had been watching for her, and had heard the gentle trot over the few yards of road that brought her in sight. With a merry greeting he helped her down from the great mare. It was but the sense that his blackness was not ingrain, that kept him from taking her in his arms like a child, and lifting her down—so small was she, and so friendly and childlike. She would have shaken hands with him, but he would not with her; it would make her glove, he said, as black as his apron. Barbara pulled off her glove, and gave him her dainty little hand, which the blacksmith took at once, being too much of a gentleman not to know where respect becomes rudeness. He clasped the lovely loan with the sturdy reverence of his true old heart, saying her hand should pay her footing in the trade.

“Lord, miss, ain’t I proud to make a smith of you!” he said. “Only you must do nothing but shoe! I can’t let you spoil your hands! You can keep Miss Brown shod without doing that!—Here comes Dick for his part! He might have left it to who taught him! Did he think the old man would be rough with missie?—I dare say, now, he’s been teaching you that woman’s work of his this long time!”

“Stop, stop, Mr. Armour!” cried Barbara. “When you see me shoe Miss Brown, perhaps you won’t care to talk about woman’s work again!”

Richard came up, took Miss Brown in, and put her in her place. The smith knew exactly what sort and size of shoes she wanted, and had them already so far finished that but a touch or so was necessary to make them an absolute fit. Barbara tucked up her skirt, and secured it with her belt. But this would not satisfy Simon. He had a little leather apron ready for her, and nothing would serve but she must put it on to protect her habit. Till this was done he would not allow her touch hammer or nail.

“Come, come, missie,” he said, “I’m king in my own shop, and you must do as I tell you!”

Thereupon Barbara, who had stood out only for the fun of the thing, put on the leather apron with its large bib, and set about her work.

Richard did not offer to put on the first shoe: he believed she had so often watched the operation, that she must know perfectly what to do. Nor was he disappointed. She proceeded like an adept. Happily Miss Brown was very good. She was neither hungry nor thirsty; she had had just enough exercise to make her willing to breathe a little; nothing had gone wrong on the way to upset her delicate nerves—for, gentle and loving as she always was, she was apt to be both apprehensive and touchy; her digestion was all right, for she had had neither too much corn nor too much grass; therefore she stood quite still, and if not exactly full of faith, was yet troubled by no doubt as to the ability of her mistress to put on her shoes for her—iron though they were, and to be fastened with long sharp nails.

Richard was nowise astonished at Barbara’s coolness, or her courage, or the business-like way in which she tucked the great hoof under her arm, or even at the accurate aim which brought the right sort of blow down on the head of nail after nail in true line with its length; but he was astonished at the strength of her little hand, the hardness of her muscles, covered with just fat enough to make form and movement alike beautiful, and the knowing skill with which she twisted off the ends of the nails: the quick turn necessary, she seemed to have by nature. In her keen watching, she had so identified herself with the operator, that perfect insight had supplied the place of active experience, and seemed almost to have waked some ancient instinct that operated independent of consciousness. The mare was shod, and well shod, without any accident; and Richard felt no anxiety as he lifted the little lady to her back, and saw her canter away as if she had been presented with fresh feathery wings instead of only fresh iron shoes.

He experienced, however, not a little disappointment: he had hoped to walk a part of her way alongside of Miss Brown. Barbara had in truth expected he would, but a sudden shyness came upon her, and made her start at speed the moment she was in the saddle. Simon and Richard stood looking after her.

With a sharp scramble she turned. Richard darted forward. But nothing was wrong with the mare. She came at a quick trot, and they were side by side in a moment. Barbara had bethought herself that it was a pity to get no more pleasure or profit out of the afternoon than just a horse-shoeing!

“She’s all right!” she cried.

Richard imagined she had but started to put her handiwork to the test. They walked back to the old man, and once more she thanked him—in such pretty fashion as made him feel a lord of the world. Then Richard and she moved away together in the direction of Mortgrange, and left Simon praying God to give them to each other before he died.

They had not gone far when it became Richard’s turn to stop.

“Oh, miss,” he said, “I must go back! Neither of us has been to see Alice, and I haven’t for more than a week! Think of her lying there, expecting and expecting, and no one coming! It’s just the history of the world! I must go back!”

He would not have said so much but that Barbara sat regarding him without response of word or look, appearing not to heed him. He began to wonder.

“Alice can’t be dead!” he thought with himself, “She was pretty well when I saw her last!”

“She is gone,” said Barbara quietly, and the thought just discarded returned on Richard with a sickening clearness.

He stood and stared. Barbara saw him turn white, and understood his mistake—so terrible to one who had no hope of ever again seeing a departed friend.

“She went home to her mother yesterday,” she said.

Richard gave a great sigh of relief.

“I thought she was dead!” he answered, “—and I had not been so good to her as I might have been!”

“Richard,” said Barbara—it was the first time she called him by his name—“did anybody in the world ever do all he might to make his best friends happy?”

“No, miss, I don’t think it. There must always be something more he might have done.”

“Then the better people become, the more lamentations, mourning, and woe”—the words had taken hold of her at church the Sunday before—“there must always be, because of those they shall never look upon again, those to whom they shall never say, I am sorry! How comes it that men are born into a world where there is nothing of what they most need—consolation for the one inevitable thing, sorrow and self-reproach?”

“There is consolation—that it will soon be over, that we go to them!”

“Go to them!” cried Barbara. “—We do not even go to look for them! We shall not even know that we would find them if we could! We shall not have even the consolation of suffering, of loving on in vain! The whole thing is the most wrongful scorn, the most insulting mockery!—the laughter of a devil at all that is noble and tender!—only there is not even a devil to be angry with and defy!”

Barbara spoke with an indignation that made her eloquent. Richard gave her no answer: there was no logic in what Barbara said—nothing to reply to! Why should life not be misery? Why should there be any one who cared? There was no ground for thinking there might be one! The proof was all the other way! The idea was too good to be true! Richard had said so to himself a thousand times. But was the world indeed on such a grand scale that to believe in anything better or other than it seemed, was to believe too much—was to believe more than, without proof which was not to be had, Richard would care to believe? The nature of the case grew clearer to him. As a man does not fear death while yet it seems far away, so a man may not shrink from annihilation while yet he does not realize what it means. To cease may well seem nothing to a man who neither loves much, nor feels the bitterness of regret for wrong done, the gnawing of that remorse whose mother is tenderness! He was beginning to understand this.

The silence grew oppressive. It was as if each was dreaming of the other dead. To break the pain of presence without communion, Richard spoke.

“Can you tell me, miss,” he said, “why Alice went away without letting me know? She might have done that!”

“She had a good reason,” answered Barbara.

“I can’t think what it could be!” he returned. “I never was so long without seeing her before, but surely she could not be so much offended at that! You see, miss, I knew you went every day! and I knew I should like that better than having any one else to come and see me! so I gave myself no trouble. I never thought of her going for a long time yet! Did her mother send her money?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Perhaps my grandfather lent her some! She couldn’t have any herself! I wonder why she dislikes me so much!”

He was doubting whether she would have taken money from him, if he had been in time to offer it. He did not like to ask Barbara if she had helped her.—And then what was she to do when she got home?

Barbara had let him talk, delighted to look in at the windows his words went on opening. In particular it pleased and attracted her, that he was so unconscious of the goodness he had shown Alice. Barbara and he made a rare conjunction of likeness. So many will do a kindness who are not yet capable of forgetting it!