menu_book Chapter 10

CHAPTER X. I slept in a little bed in the corner of the room, and my father in the ancestral four-poster nearer to the door. Very early, one bright September morning at the close of my eleventh year, my father called me over to him. I climbed up and was snugly wrapped in the cover lid, and then we held a momentous conversation. It began abruptly by his asking me whether I should like to have a new mama. I was never a sentimentalist, and I

therefore answered cannily that that would depend on who she was. He parried this and announced that, anyway, a new mama was coming. I was sure to like her. Still in a noncommittal mood, I asked, will she go with me to the back of the lime kiln? This question caused my father a great bewilderment. I had to explain that the ambition of my life was to go up behind the lime kiln on the top of the hill that hung over Barton, a spot which was forbidden ground, he locally held one of

extreme danger. Oh, I dare say she will, my father then said, but you must guess who she is. I guessed one or two of the less comely of the female saints, and this embarrassing my father, since the second I mentioned was a married woman who kept a sweet shop in the village, he cut my inquiry short by saying, It is Miss Brightwin. So far, so good. And I was well pleased. But unfortunately, I remembered that it was my duty to testify in season and out of season. I therefore asked with much earnestness,

But Papa, is she one of the Lord's children? He replied with gravity that she was. Has she taken up her cross in baptism, I went on, for this was my own strong point as a believer. My father looked a little shame-faced and replied, well, she has not as yet seen the necessity of that, but we must pray that the Lord may make her way clear before her. You see, she has been brought up hitherto in the so-called Church of England. Our positions were now curiously changed. It seemed as if it

were I, who was the jealous monitor, and my father the deprecating penitent. I sat up in the cover lid, and I shook a finger at him. Papa, I said, don't tell me that she's a pedo-baptist. I had lately acquired that valuable word, and I seized this remarkable opportunity of using it. It affected my father painfully, but he repeated his assurance that if we united our prayers and set the scripture plan plainly before Miss Brightwyn, there could be no doubt that she would see her

way to accepting the doctrine of adult baptism. And he said we must judge not, lest we ourselves be judged. I had just enough tact to let that pass, but I was quite aware that our whole system was one of judging, and that we had no intention whatever of being judged ourselves. Yet even at the age of eleven, one sees that on certain occasions to press home the truth is not convenient. Just before Christmas, on a piercing night of frost, my father brought to us his bride. The

smartening up of the house, the new furniture, the removal of my own possessions to a private bedroom, the wedding gifts of the saints, all these things paled in interest before the fact that Miss Marks had made a scene in the course of the afternoon. I was dancing about the drawing-room and was saying, Oh, I'm so glad my new Mama is coming, when Miss Marks called out in an unnatural voice, Oh, you cruel child! I stopped in amazement and stared at her, whereupon she threw prudence to

the winds and moaned, I once thought I should be your dear Mama. I was simply stupefied, and I expressed my horror in terms that were clear and strong. Thereupon Miss Marks had a wild fit of hysterics, while I looked on, wholly unsympathetic and still deeply affronted. She was right. I was cruel, alas. But then, what a silly woman she had been. The consequence was that she withdrew in a moist and quivering condition to her boudoir,

where she had locked herself in when I, all smiles and caresses, was welcoming the bride and bridegroom on the doorstep, as politely as if I had been a valued old family retainer. My stepmother immediately became a great ally of mine. She was never a tower of strength to me, but at least she was always a lodge in my garden of cucumbers. She was a very well-meaning pious lady, but she was not a fanatic, and her mind did not naturally revel in spiritual aspirations. Almost her only

social fault was that she was sometimes a little fretful. This was the way in which her bruised individuality asserted itself. But she was affectionate, serene, and above all refined. Her refinement was extraordinarily pleasant to my nerves, on which much else in our surroundings jarred. How life may have jarred, poor insulated lady, on her during her first experience of our life at the room, I know not. But I think she was a philosopher. She had, with surprising rashness

and in opposition to the wishes of every member of her own family, taken her cake, and now she realized that she must eat it, to the last crumb. Over her wishes and prejudices, my father exercised a constant, cheerful, and quiet pressure. He was never unkind or abrupt, but he went on adding avoir du poids until her will gave way under the sheer weight, even to public immersion which, as was natural in a shy and sensitive lady of advancing years, she regarded with a horror

which was long insurmountable, even to baptism she yielded, that my father had the joy to announce to the saints one Sunday morning at the breaking of bread, that my beloved wife has been able at length to see the Lord's will in the matter of baptism, and will testify to the faith which is in her on Thursday evening next. No wonder my stepmother was sometimes fretful. On the physical side, I owe her an endless debt of gratitude. Her relations, who objected strongly to her marriage,

had told her, among other pleasant prophecies, that the first thing you will have to do will be to bury that poor child. Under the old world sway of Miss Marks, I had slept me the load of blankets, had never gone out save waited with greatcoat and comforter, and had been protected from fresh air as if from a pestilence. With real courage, my stepmother reversed all this. My bedroom window stood wide open all night long, wraps were done away with, or exchanged for flannel garments next

the skin, and I was urged to be out and about as much as possible. All the quidnunks among the saints shook their heads. Mary Grace Birmingham, a little embittered by the downfall of her marks, made a solemn remonstrance to my father, who, however, allowed my stepmother to carry out her excellent plan. My health responded rapidly to this change of regime, but increase of health did not bring increase of spirituality. My father, fully occupied with molding the will and

inflaming the piety of my stepmother, left me now, to a degree not precedented, in undisturbed possession of my own devices. I did not lose my faith, but many other things took a prominent place in my mind. It will, I suppose, be admitted that there is no greater proof of complete religious sincerity than fervor in private prayer. If an individual, along by the side of his bed, prolongs his intercessions, lingers wrestling with his divine companion, and will not leave off

until he has what he believes to be evidence of a reply to his entreaties, then, no matter what the character of his public protestations, or what the frailty of his actions, it is absolutely certain that he believes in what he professes. My father prayed in private in what I may almost call a spirit of violence. He entreated for spiritual guidance with nothing less than importunity. It might be said that he stormed the citadels of God's grace, refusing to be baffled,

urging his intercessions without mercy upon a deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive to his prayers or wearied by them. My father's acts of supplication, as I used to witness them at night when I was supposed to be asleep, were accompanied by stretchings out of the hands, by crackings of the joints of the fingers, by deep breathings, by murmurous sounds which seemed just breaking out of silence, like Virgil's bees out of the hive, Magnus clamoribus. My father fortified his

religious life by prayer, as an athlete does his physical life by lung gymnastics and vigorous rubbings. It was a trouble to my conscience that I could not emulate this fervor. The poverty of my prayers had now long been a source of distress to me, but I could not discover how to enrich them. My father used to warn us very solemnly against lip service, by which he meant singing hymns of experience and joining administrations in which our hearts took no vital or personal part. This

was an outward act, a tendency of which I could well appreciate, but there was a lip service even more deadly than that, against which it never occurred to him to warn me. It assailed me when I had come alone by my bedside, and had blown out the candle, and had sunken on my knees in my nightgown. Then it was that my deadness made itself felt in the mechanical address I put up, the emptiness of my language, the absence of all real unction. I never could contrive to ask God

for spiritual gifts in the same voice and spirit in which I could ask a human being for objects which I knew he could give me and which I earnestly desired to possess. That sense of the reality of intercession was forever denied me, and it was, I now see, the stigma of my want of faith. But at the time, of course, I suspected nothing of the kind, and I tried to keep up my zeal by a desperate mental flogging, as if my soul had been a peg-top. In nothing did I gain from the advent

of my stepmother more than in the encouragement she gave to my friendships with a group of boys my own age, of whom I had now lately formed the acquaintance. These friendships she not merely tolerated, but fostered. It was even due to her kind arrangements that they took a certain set formed, that our excursions started from this house, or from that, on regular days. I hardly know by what stages I ceased to be a lonely little creature of mock monographs and mud pies,

and became a member of a sort of club of eight or ten active boys. The long summer holidays of 1861 were set in enchanting brightness. Looking back, I cannot see a cloud on the terrestrial horizon. I see nothing but a blaze of sunshine, descents of slippery grass, to moons of snow-white shingle, cold to the bare flesh, red promontories running out into a sea that was like sapphire, and our happy clan climbing, bathing, boating, lounging, chattering, all the hot day through.

Once more, I have to record the fact, which I think is not without interest, that precisely as my life ceases to be solitary, it ceases to be distinct. I have no difficulty in recalling, with the minuteness of a photograph, scenes in which my father and I were the sole actors within the four walls of a room. But of the glorious life among wild boys on the margin of the sea, I have nothing but

vague and broken impressions. delicious and elusive it was a remarkable proof of my father's temporary lapse into indulgence that he made no effort to thwart my intimacy with these my new companions he was in an unusually humane mood himself his marriage was one proof of it another was the composition at this time of the most picturesque easy and graceful of all his writings the romance of natural history even now a sort of classic everything combined to make him believe that the blessing of the lord was upon him and to clothe the darkness of the world with at least a mist of rose-color i do not recollect that ever at this time he bethought him when i started in the morning for a long day with my friends on the edge of the sea to remind me that i must speak to them in season and out of season of the blood of jesus

and i young coward that i was let sleeping dogmas lie my companions were not all of them the sons of saints in our communion their parents belonged to that professional class which we were only now beginning to attract to our services they were brought up in religious but not in fanatical families and i was the only converted one among them mrs paget of whom i shall have presently to speak characteristically said that it grieved her to see one lamb among so many kids But kid is a word of varied significance, and the symbol did not seem to us effectively applied. As a matter of fact, we made what I still feel was an excellent tacit compromise. My young companions never jeered at me for being in communion with the saints,

and I, on my part, never urged the atonement upon them. I began, in fact, more and more, to keep my own religion for use on Sundays. It will, I hope, have been observed that among the very curious grown-up people into whose company I was thrown, although many were frail and some were foolish, none, so far as I can discern, were hypocritical. I am not one of those who believe that hypocrisy is a vice that grows on

every bush. Of course, in religious, more than in any other matters, there is a perpetual contradiction between our thoughts and our deeds, which is inevitable to our social order, and is bound to lead to cette pomperie mutuelle, of which Pascal speaks. But I have often wondered, while admiring the splendid portrait of Tartuffe, whether such a monster ever, or at least often, has walked the stage of life, whether Molière observed or only invented him. To adopt a scheme

of religious pretension, with no belief whatever in its being true, merely for sensuous advantage, openly acknowledging to one's inner self the brazen system of deceit, such a course may, and doubtless has been, trodden, yet surely much less frequently than cynics love to suggest. But at the juncture which I have now reached in my narrative, I had the advantage of knowing a person who was branded before the whole world, and punished by the law of his country, as a

felonious hypocrite. My father himself could only sigh and admit the charge, and yet I doubt. About halfway between our village and the town, there lay a comfortable villa inhabited by a retired solicitor, or perhaps attorney, whom I shall name Mr. Dormant. We often called at his halfway house, and although he was a member of the town meeting, he not infrequently came to us for the breaking of bread. Mr. Dormant was a solid pink man of a cozy habit. He had beautiful white

hair, a very soft voice, and a welcoming wheedling manner. He was extremely fluent and zealous in using the pious phraseology of the set. My father had never been very much attracted to him, but the man professed, and I think felt, an overwhelming admiration for my father. Mr. Dormant was not very well off, and in the previous year he had persuaded an aged gentleman of wealth to come and board with him. When, in the course of the winter, this gentleman died,

much surprise was felt at the report that he had left almost his entire fortune, which was not inconsiderable, to Mr. Dormant. Much surprise, for the old gentleman had a son to whom he had always been warmly attached, who was far away, I think in South America, practicing a perfectly respectable profession of which his father entirely approved. My own father always preserved a delicacy and a sense of honor about money which could not have been more sensitive

if he had been an ungodly man, and I am very much pleased to remember that when the legacy was first spoken of, he regretted that Mr. Dorman should have allowed the old gentleman to make his will. If he knew the intention, my father said, it would have shown a more proper sense of his responsibility if he had dissuaded the testator from so unbecoming a disposition. That was long before any legal question arose, and now Mr. Dorman came into his fortune and began to make

handsome gifts to missionary societies and to his own meeting in the town. If I do not mistake, he gave, unsolicited, a sum to our building fund, which my father afterwards returned. But in process of time, we heard that the son had come back from the Antipodes and was making investigations. Before we knew where we were, the news burst upon us like a bombshell that Mr. Dormant had been arrested on a criminal charge and was now in jail at Exeter.

Sympathy was at first much extended amongst us to the prisoner, but it was lessened when we understood that the old gentleman had been converted while under Dormant's roof, and had given the fact that his son was an unbeliever as a reason for disinheriting him. All doubt was set aside when it was divulged under pressure by the nurse who attended on the old gentleman, herself one of the saints, that Dormant had traced the signature to the will by drawing the fingers

of the testator over the document when he was already and finally comatose. My father, setting aside by a strong effort of will, the repugnance which he felt, visited the prisoner in jail before this final evidence had been extracted. When he returned, he said that Dormant appeared to be enjoying a perfect confidence of heart and had expressed a sense of his joy and peace in the Lord. My father regretted that he had not been able to persuade him to admit any error, even of

judgment, but the prisoner's attitude in the dock, when the facts were proved and not by him denied, was still more extraordinary. He could be induced to exhibit no species of remorse, and to the obvious anger of the judge himself stated that he had only done his duty as a Christian, in preventing this wealth from coming into the hands of an ungodly man, who would have spent it in the service of the flesh and of the devil. Sternly reprimanded by

the judge, he made the final statement that at that very moment he was conscious of his lord's presence, in the dock, at his side, whispering to him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant. In this frame of conscience, and with a glowing countenance, he was hurried away to penal servitude. This was a very painful incident, and it is easy to see how compromising, how cruel, it was in its effect upon our communion. What occasion it gave to our enemies to blaspheme.

No one in either meeting could or would raise a voice to defend Mr. Dormant. We had to bow our heads when we met our enemies in the gate. The blow fell more heavily on the meeting, of which he had been a prominent and communicating member, but it fell on us, too, and my father felt it severely. For many years he would never mention the man's name, and he refused all discussion of the incident.

yet I was never sure, and I am not sure now, that the wretched being was a hypocrite. There are as many vulgar fanatics as there are distinguished ones, and I am not convinced that dormant, coarse and narrow as he was, may not have sincerely believed that it was better for the money to be used in religious propaganda than in the pleasures of the world, of which he doubtless formed a very vague idea. On this affair I meditated much, and it awakened in my mind for

the first time a doubt whether our exclusive system of ethics was an entirely salutary one, if it could lead the conscience of a believer to tolerate such acts as these, acts which my father himself had denounced as dishonorable and disgraceful. My stepmother brought with her a little library of such books as we had not previously seen, but which were known to all the world except us. Prominent among these was a set of poems by Walter Scott, and in his unwanted

geniality and provisional spirit of compromise, my father must do no less than read these works aloud to my stepmother in the quiet spring evenings. This was a sort of aftermath of courtship, a tribute of song to his bride very sentimental and pretty she would sit sedately at her work-box while he facing her poured forth the verses at her like a blackbird i was not considered in this arrangement which was wholly matrimonial but i was present and the exercise made more impression upon me than it did upon either of the principal agents my father read the verse admirably with a full some people but not i might say with a too full perception of the metre as well as of the rhythm rolling out the rhymes and glorying in the proper names

He began, and it was a happy choice, with the Lady of the Lake. It gave me singular pleasure to hear his large voice do justice to Dun Cranon and Cambus Kenneth and wake the echoes of Roderig Fick Alfin Du Ho Eroi. I almost gasped with excitement while a shudder floated down my backbone when we came to a sharp and shrieking echo gave

coer risk in thy goblin cave and the gray pass where birches wave on biala nambo a passage which seemed to me to achieve the ideal of sublime romance my thoughts were occupied all day long

with the adventures of fitzjames and the denizens of ellen's isle it became an obsession and when I was asked whether I remembered the name of the cottage where the minister of the Bible Christians lodged, I answered dreamily, yes, the Alanambo. Seeing me so much fascinated,

thrown indeed into a temporary frenzy by the epic poetry of Sir Walter Scott, my stepmother asked my father whether I might not start reading the Waverly novels, But he refused to permit this, on the ground that those tales gave false and disturbing pictures of life and would lead away my attention from heavenly things. I do not fully apprehend what distinction he drew between the poems, which he permitted, and the novels, which he refused, but I suppose he regarded a work in verse as more artificial, and therefore less likely to make a realistic impression than one in prose. there is something quaint in the conscientious scruple which allows the lord of the isles and excludes rob roy but stranger still and amounting almost to a whim was his sudden decision that although i might not touch the novels of scott i was free to read those of dickens

i recollect that my stepmother showed some surprise at this and that my father explained to her that dickens exposes the passion of love in a ridiculous light she did not seem to follow this recommendation which indeed tends to the ultra-subtle but she procured for me a copy of pickwick by which i was instantly and gloriously enslaved my shouts of laughing at the richer passages were almost scandalous and led to my being reproved for disturbing my father while engaged in an upper room in the study of god's word i must have expended months on the perusal of pickwick for i used to rush through a chapter and then read it over again very slowly word for word and then shut my eyes to realize the figures and the action i suppose no child will ever again enjoy that rapture of unresisting humorous appreciation of pickwick i felt myself to be in the company of a gentleman so extremely funny that i began to laugh before he began to speak

no sooner did he remark the sky was dark and gloomy the air was damp and raw than i was in fits of hilarity my retirement in our sequestered corner of life made me perhaps even in this matter somewhat old-fashioned and possibly i was the latest of the generation who accepted mr pickwick with an unquestioning and hysterical abandonment certainly few young people now seem sensitive as i was and as thousands before me had been to the quality of his fascination It was curious that living in a household where a certain delicate art of painting was diligently cultivated, I had yet never seen a real picture, and was scarcely familiar with the design of one in engraving. My stepmother, however, brought of flavor of the fine arts with her a kind of aesthetic odor, like that of lavender, clung to her as she moved.

She had known authentic artists in her youth. She had watched old chrome painting and had taken a course of drawing lessons from no less a person than cotman. She painted small watercolor landscapes herself, with a delicate economy of means and a graceful Norwich convention. Her sketchbooks were filled with abbeys gently washed in, riverbanks and sepia by which the elect might be dimly reminded of Liber Studiorum,

and woodland scenes over which the ghost of Creswick had faintly breathed. It was not exciting art, but it was, so far as it went, in its ladylike reserve, the real thing. Our sea anemones, our tropic birds, our bits of spongy rock filled and sprayed with corallines, had been very conscientious and skillful, but essentially, so far as art was concerned, the wrong thing. Thus I began to acquire, without understanding the value of it,

some conception of the elegant phases of early English watercolor painting, and there was one singular piece of a marble well brimming with water and a grayish-blue sky over it, and dark green poplars shaped like wet brooms menacing the middle distance which Cotman himself had painted, and this seemed beautiful and curious to me in its dim, flat frame, when it was hoisted to a place on our drawing-room wall, but still I had never seen a subject picture, although my stepmother

used to talk of the joys of the Royal Academy, and it was therefore with a considerable sense of excitement that I went with my father to examine Mr. Holman Hunt's finding of Christ in the temple, which at this time was announced to be on public show at our neighboring town. We paid our shillings and ascended with others to an upper room, bare of every disturbing object, in which a strong top light raked the large and uncompromising picture. We looked at it for some

time in silence, and then my father pointed out to me various details, such as the phylacteries and the miters, and the robes which distinguished the high priest. Some of the other visitors, as I recollect, expressed astonishment and dislike of what they called the pre-Raphaelite treatment, but we were not affected by that. Indeed, if anything, the exact, minute, and hard execution of Mr. Hunt was in sympathy with the methods we ourselves were in the habit of using

when we painted butterflies and seaweeds, placing perfectly pure pigments side by side, without any nonsense about chiaroscuro. This large, bright, comprehensive picture made a very deep impression upon me, not exactly as a work of art, but as a brilliant natural specimen. I was pleased to have seen it, as I was pleased to have seen the comet and the whale which was brought to our front door on a truck. It was a prominent addition to my experience. The slender expansions of my interest,

which were now buddying hither and thither, do not seem to have alarmed my father at all. His views were short. If I appeared to be contented and obedient, if I responded pleasantly when he appealed to me, he was not concerned to discover the source of my cheerfulness. he put it down to my happy sense of joy in Christ, a reflection of the sunshine of grace beaming upon me through no intervening clouds of sin or doubt. The saints were, as a rule,

very easy to comprehend. Their emotions lay upon the surface. If they were gay, it was because they had no burden on their consciences, while if they were depressed, the symptom might be depended upon as showing that their consciences were troubling them. And if they were indifferent and cold, it was certain that they were losing their faith and becoming hostile to godliness. It was almost a mechanical matter with these simple souls. But although I was so much younger,

I was more complex and more crafty than the peasant saints. My father, not a very subtle psychologist, applied to me the same formulas which served him well at the chapel, but in my case the results were less uniformly successful. The excitement of school life and the enlargement of my circle of interests combined to make Sunday, by contrast, a very tedious occasion. The absence of every species of recreation on the Lord's Day grew to be a burden which might scarcely be borne.

I have said that my freedom during the week had now become considerable. If I was at home punctually at mealtimes, the rest of my leisure was not challenged. But this liberty, which in the summer holidays came to surpass that of fishes that tipple in the deep, was put into more and more painful contrast with the unbroken servitude of Sunday. My father objected very strongly to the expression Sabbath day, as it is commonly used by Presbyterians and others, he said,

quite justly, that it was an inaccurate modern innovation, that Sabbath was Saturday, the seventh day of the week, not the first, a Jewish festival, and not a Christian commemoration. Yet his exaggerated view with regard to the observance of the first day, namely that it must be exclusively occupied with public and private exercises of divine worship, was based much more upon a Jewish than upon a Christian law. In fact, I do not remember that my father ever produced a definite

argument from the New Testament in support of his excessive passivity on the Lord's Day. It followed the early Puritan practice, except that he did not extend his observance, as I believe the old Puritans did, from sunset on Saturday to sunset on Sunday. The observance of the Lord's Day has already become universally so lax that I think there may be some value in preserving an accurate record of how our Sundays were spent five and

forty years ago. We came down to breakfast at the usual time. My father prayed briefly before we began the meal. After it, the bell was rung, and before the breakfast was cleared away, we had a lengthy service of exposition and prayer with the servants. If the weather was fine. We then walked about the garden, doing nothing, for about half an hour. We then sat, each in a separate room, with our Bibles open and some commentary on the text beside us,

and prepared our minds for the morning service. A little before 11 a.m., we sallied forth, carrying our Bibles and hymn books, and went through the morning service of two hours at the room. This was the central event of Sunday. We then came back to dinner, curiously enough, to a hot dinner, always with a joint, vegetables, and puddings, so that the cook at least must have been busily at work. And after it, my father and my stepmother took a nap, each in a different room,

while I slipped out into the garden for a little while, but never venturing further afield. In the Little evening afternoon, my stepmother and I proceeded up the village to Sunday school, where I was early promoted to the tuition of a few very little boys. We returned in time for tea, immediately after which we all marched forth, again armed as in the morning, with Bibles and hymn books, and we went through the evening service, at which my father preached. The hour

was now already past my weekday bedtime, but we had another service to attend, a believer's prayer meeting, which commonly occupied forty minutes more. Then we used to creep home, I often so tired that the weariness was like physical pain, and I was permitted, without further worship, to slip upstairs to bed. What made these Sundays, the observance of which was absolutely uniform, so peculiarly trying was that i was not permitted the indulgence of any secular respite i might unopen a scientific book nor make a drawing nor examine a specimen

i was not allowed to go into the road except to proceed with my parents to the room nor to discuss worldly subjects at meals nor to enter the little chamber where i kept my treasures i was hotly and tightly dressed in black all day long as though ready at any moment to attend a funeral with decorum sometimes towards evening i used to feel the monotony and weariness of my position to be almost unendurable but at this time i was meek and i bowed to what i supposed to be the order of the universe chapter ten