Chapter 60. A Birthday Gift

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_ CHAPTER LX. A BIRTHDAY GIFT

When Mark's little cloak was put in the earth, for a while the house felt cold--as if the bit of Paradise had gone out. Mark's room was like a temple forsaken of its divinity. But it was not to be drifted up with the sand of forgetfulness! The major put in a petition that it might continue to be called Mark's, but should be considered the major's: he would like to put some of his things in it and occupy it when he came! Every one was pleased with the idea. They no longer would feel so painfully that Mark was not there when his dear majie occupied the room!

To the major it was thenceforth chamber and chapel and monument. It should not be a tomb save as upon the fourth day the sepulchre in the garden! he would fill it with live memories of the risen child! Very different was his purpose from that sickly haunting of the grave in which some loving hearts indulge! We are bound to be hopeful, nor wrong our great-hearted father.

Mark's books and pictures remained undisturbed. The major dusted them with his own hands. Every day he read in Mark's bible. He never took it away with him, but always when he returned in whatever part of the bible he might have read in the meantime, he resumed his reading where he had left off in it, The sword the boy used so to admire for its brightness that he had placed it unsheathed upon the wall for the firelight to play upon it, he left there, shining still. In Mark's bed the major slept, and to Mark's chamber he went always to shut to the door. In solitude there he learned a thousand things his busy life had prepared him for learning. The master had come to him in the child. In him was fulfilled a phase of the promise that whosoever receives a child in the name of Jesus receives Jesus and his father. Through ministering to the child he had come to know the child's elder brother and master. It was the presence of the master in the child, that without his knowing it, opened his heart to him, and he had thus entertained more than an angel.

Time passed, and their hearts began, not through any healing power in time, but under the holy influences of duty and love and hope, to cover with flowers their furrows of grief. Hester's birthday was at hand. The major went up to London to bring her a present. He was determined to make the occasion, if he could, a cheerful one.

He wrote to his cousin Helen asking if he might bring a friend with him. He did not think, he said, his host or hostess knew him, but Hester did: he was a young doctor, and his name was Christopher. He had met him amongst "Hester's friends," and was much taken with him. He would be a great acquisition to their party. He had been rather ailing for some time, and as there was much less sickness now, he had persuaded him to take a little relaxation.

Hester said for her part she would be most happy to see Mr. Christopher; she had the highest esteem for him; and therewith she told them something of his history. Mr. Raymount had known his grandfather a little in the way of business, and was the more interested in him.

I may mention here that Corney soon began to show a practical interest in the place--first in the look of it--its order and tidiness, and then in its yield, beginning to develop a faculty for looking after property. Next he took to measuring the land. Here the major could give him no end of help; and having thus found a point of common interest, they began to be drawn a little together, and to conceive a mild liking for each other's company. Corney saw by degrees that the major knew much more than he; and the major discovered that Corney had some brains.

Everything was now going on well at Yrndale--thanks to the stormy and sorrowful weather that had of late so troubled its spiritual atmosphere, and killed so many evil worms in its moral soil!

As soon as the distress caused by Corney's offences was soothed by reviving love for the youth and fresh hope in him, Hester informed her parents of the dissolution of her engagement to lord Gartley. The mother was troubled: it is the girl that suffers evil judgment in such a case, and she knew how the tongue of the world would wag. But those who despise the ways of the world need not fret that low minds attribute to them the things of which low minds are capable. The world and its judgments will pass: the poisonous tongue will one day become pure, and make ample apology for its evil speaking. The tongue is a fire, but there is a stronger fire than the tongue. Her father and the major cared little for this aspect of the matter, for they had both come to the conclusion that the public is only a sort of innocent, whose behaviour may be troublesome or pleasant, but whose opinion is worth considerably less than that of a wise hound, The world is a fine thing to save, but a wretch to worship. Neither did the father care much for lord Gartley, though he had liked him; the major, we know, both despised and detested him.

Hester herself was annoyed to find how soon the idea of his lordship came to be altogether a thing of her past, looking there in its natural place, a thing to trouble her no more. At his natural distance from her, she could not fail to see what a small creature her imagination, and the self that had mingled with her noblest feelings concerning him, had chosen as her companion and help in her schemes of good. But she was able to look on the whole blunder with calmness, and a thankfulness that kept growing as the sting of her fault lost its burning, lenified in the humility it brought.

There was nothing left her now, she said to herself, but the best of all--a maiden life devoted to the work of her master. She was not willing any more to run the risk of loosing her power to help the Lord's creatures, down trodden of devils, _well-to-do_ people, and their own miserable weaknesses and vices. Even remaining constant to duty, she must, in continuous disappointment and the mockery of a false unity, have lost the health, and worse, the spirits necessary to wholesome contact and such work as she was fain to do. In constant opposition to her husband, spending the best part of her strength in resistance ere it could reach the place where it ought to be applied entire, with strife consciously destroying her love and keeping her in a hopeless unrest, how could any light have shone from her upon those whose darkness made her miserable! Now she would hold herself free! What a blessed thing it was to be her own mistress and the slave of the Lord, externally free! To be the slave of a husband was the worst of all slavery except self-slavery!

Nor was there in this her conclusion anything of chagrin, or pettish self-humiliation. St. Paul abstained from marriage that he might the better do the work given him by the Lord. For his perilous and laborious work it was better, he judged, that he should not be married. It was for the kingdom of heaven's sake.

Her spirits soon returned more buoyant than before. Her health was better. She found she had been suffering from an oppression she had refused to recognize--already in no small measure yoked, and right unequally. Only a few weeks passed, and, in the prime of health and that glorious thing feminine strength, she looked a yet grander woman than before. There was greater freedom in her carriage, and she seemed to have grown. The humility that comes with the discovery of error had made her yet more dignified: true dignity comes only of humility. Pride is the ruin of dignity, for it is a worshipping of self, and that involves a continuous sinking. Humility, the worship of the Ideal--that is, of the man Christ Jesus, is the only lifter-up of the head.

Everybody felt her more lovable than before. Her mother began to feel an enchantment of peace in her presence. Her father sought her company more than ever in his walks, and not only talked to her about Corney, but talked about his own wrong feelings towards him, and how he had been punished for them by what they wrought in him. He had begun, he told her, to learn many things he had supposed he knew he had only thought and written and talked about them! Father and daughter were therefore much to each other now. Even Corney perceived a change in her. For one thing, scarce a shadow of that "superiority" remained which used to irritate him so much, making him rebel against whatever she said. She became more and more Amy's ideal of womanhood, and by degrees she taught her husband to read more justly his beautiful sister. She pointed out to him how few would have tried to protect and deliver him as she had done; how few would have so generously taken herself, a poor uneducated girl, to a sister's heart. So altogether things were going well in the family: it was bidding fair to be a family forevermore.

Miss Dasomma came to spend a few days with Hester and help celebrate her birthday: she was struck with improvement where she would have been loath to allow it either necessary or possible. Compelled to admit its presence, she loved her yet more--for the one a fact, the other was a necessity.

Her birthday was the sweetest of summer days, and she looked a perfect summer-born woman. She dressed herself in white, but not so much for her own birthday as for Mark's into the heavenly kingdom.

After breakfast all except the mother went out. Hester was little inclined to talk, and the major was in a thoughtful, brooding mood. Miss Dasomma and Mr. Raymount alone conversed. When the rest reached a certain spot whither Mr. Raymount had led them for the sake of the view, Hester had fallen a little behind, and Christopher went back to meet her.

"You are thinking of your brother," he said, in a tone that made her feel grateful.

"Yes," she answered.

"I knew by your eyes," he returned. "I wish I could talk to you about him. The right way of getting used to death is to go nearer the dead. Suppose you tell me something about him! Such children are rare! They are prophets to whose word we have to listen."

He went on like this, drawing her from sadness with gentle speech about children and death, and the look and reality of things; and so they wandered about the moor for a little while before joining the rest.

Mr. Raymount was much pleased with Christopher, and even Corney found himself drawn to his side, feeling, though he did not know it, a strength in him that offered protection.

The day went on in the simplest, pleasantest intercourse. After lunch, Hester opened her piano, and asked Miss Dasomma, gifted in her art even to the pitch prophetic, to sit down and play---"upon _us_" she said. And in truth she did: for what the hammers were to the strings, such were the sounds she drew from them to the human chords stretched expectant before her. Vibrating souls responded in the music that is unheard. A rosy conscious silence pervaded the summer afternoon and the ancient drawing-room, in which the listeners were one here and one there, all apart--except Corney and "Mrs. Corney," as for love of Mark she liked to be called, on a sofa side by side, and Saffy playing with a white kitten, neither attending to the music, which may have been doing something for both notwithstanding. Mr. Raymount sat in a great soft chair with a book in his hand, listening more than reading: his wife lay on a couch, and soon passed into dreams of pleasant sounds; the major stood erect by Miss Dasomma, a little behind her, with his arms folded across his chest; and Christopher sat on a low window-seat in an oriel, where the balmiest of perfumed airs freely entered. Between him and all the rest hung the heavy folds of a curtain, which every now and then swelled out like the sail of Cleopatra's barge "upon the river Cydnus."

He sat with the tears rolling down his face, for the music to which he listened seemed such as he had only dreamed of before. It was the music of climes where sorrow is but the memory of that which has been turned into joy. He thought no one saw him, and no one would have seen him but for the traitor wind seeming only to play with the curtain but every now and then blowing it wide out, as if the sheet of the sail had been let go, and revealing him to Hester where she sat on a stool beside her mother and held her sleeping hand. It was to her the revelation of a heart, and she saw with reverence.

Lord Gartley could sing, lord Gartley could play, lord Gartley understood the technicalities of music; Christopher could neither play nor sing--at least anything more than a common psalm-tune to lead the groans of his poor--and understood nothing of music; but there was in him a whole sea of musical delight, to be set in motion by the enchantress who knew the spell! Such an enchantress might float in the bark of her own will across the heaving waves of that sea, moon and wind of its tides and currents! When the music ceased she saw him go softly from the room.

After an early dinner, early that they might have room for a walk in the twilight, the major proposed the health of his cousin Hester, and made a little speech in her honour and praise. Nor did his praise make Hester feel awkward, for praise which is the odour of love neither fevers nor sickens.

"And now, cousin Hester," concluded the major, "you know that I love you like a child of my own! It is a good thing you are not, for if you were then you would not be half so good, or so beautiful, or so wise, or so accomplished as you are! Will you oblige me by accepting this foolscap, which, I hope, will serve to make this blessed day yet a trifle more pleasant to look back upon when Mark has got his old majie again. It represents a sort of nut, itself too bulky for a railway truck. If my Hester choose to call it an empty nut, I don't mind: the good of it to her will be in the filling of it with many kernels."

With this enigmatical peroration the major made Hester a low bow, and handed her a sheet of foolscap, twice folded, and tied with a bit of white ribbon. She took it with a sweetly radiant curiosity. It was the title-deed of the house in Addison square. She gave a cry of joy, got up, threw her arms round majie's neck, and kissed him.

"Aha!" said the major, "if I had been a young man now, I should not have had that! But I will not be conceited; I know what it is she means it for: the kiss collective of all the dirty men and women in her dear slums, glorified into that of an angel of God!"

Hester was not a young lady given to weeping, but she did here break down and cry. Her long-cherished dream come true! She had no money, but that did not trouble her: there was always a way of doing when one was willing to begin small!

This is indeed a divine law! There shall be no success to the man who is not willing to begin small. Small is strong, for it only can grow strong. Big at the outset is but bloated and weak. There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing; but there never was any truly great thing that did not begin small.

In her delight Hester, having read the endorsement, handed the paper, without opening it, to Christopher, who sat next her, with the unconscious conviction that he would understand the delight it gave her. He took it and, with a look asking if he might, opened it.

The major had known for some time that Mr. Raymount wanted to sell the house, and believed, from the way Hester spent herself in London, he could not rejoice her better than by purchasing it for her; so, just as it was, with everything as it stood in it, he made it his birthday-gift to her.

"There is more here than you know," said Christopher, handing her back the paper. She opened it and saw something about a thousand pounds, for which again she gave joyous and loving thanks. But before the evening was over she learned that it was not a thousand pounds the dear majie had given her, but the thousand a year he had offered her if she would give up lord Gartley. Thus a new paradise of God-labour opened on the delighted eyes of Hester.

In the evening, when the sun was down, they went for another walk. I suspect the major, but am not sure:--anyhow, in the middle of a fir-wood Hester found herself alone with Christopher. The wood rose towards the moor, growing thinner and thinner as it ascended. They were climbing westward full in face of the sunset, which was barred across the trees in gold, blue, rosy pink, and a lovely indescribable green, such as is not able to live except in the after sunset. The west lay like the beautiful dead not yet faded into the brown dark of mother-earth. The fir-trees and bars of sunset made a glorious gate before them.

"Oh, Hester!" said Christopher--he had been hearing her called _Hester_ on all sides all day long, and it not only came of itself, but stayed unnoticed of either--"if that were the gate of heaven, and we climbing to it now to go in and see all the dear people!"

"That would be joy!" responded Hester.

"Come then: let us imagine it a while. There is no harm in dreaming."

"Sometimes when Mark would tell me one of his dreams, I could not help thinking," said Hester, "how much more of reality there was in it than in most so-called realities."

Then came a silence.

"Suppose," began Christopher again, "one claiming to be a prophet appeared, saying that in the life to come we were to go on living just such a life as here, with the one difference that we should be no longer deluded with the idea of something better; that all our energies would then be, and ought now to be spent in making the best of what we had--without any foolish indulgence in hope or aspiration:--what would you say to that?"

"I would say," answered Hester, "he must have had his revelation either from God, from a demon, or from his own heart: it could not be from God, because it made the idea of a God an impossibility; it must come from a demon or from himself, and in neither case was worth paying attention to.--I think," she went on, "my own feeling or imagination must be better worth my own heeding than that of another. The essential delight of this world seems to me to lie in the expectation of a better."

They emerged from the wood, the bare moor spread on all sides before them, and lo, the sunset was countless miles away! Hills, fields, rivers, mountains, lay between! Christopher stopped, and turning, looked at Hester.

"Is this the reality?" he said. "We catch sight of the gate of heaven, and set out for it. It comes nearer and nearer. All at once a something they call a reality of life comes between, and the shining gate is millions of miles away! Then cry some of its pilgrims, 'Alas, we are fooled! There is no such thing as the gate of heaven! Let us eat and drink and do what good we can, for to-morrow we die!' But is there no gate because we find none on the edge of the wood where it seemed to lie? There it is, before us yet, though a long way farther back. What has space or time to do with being? Can distance destroy fact? What if one day the chain of gravity were to break, and, starting from the edge of the pine wood, we fared or flew farther and farther towards the bars of gold and rose and green! And what if even then we found them recede and recede as we advanced, until heart was gone out of us, and we could follow no longer, but, sitting down on some wayside cloud, fell a thinking! Should we not say--Justly are we punished, and our punishment was to follow the vain thing we took for heaven-gate! Heaven-gate is too grand a goal to be reached foot or wing. High above us, it yet opens inside us; and when it opens, down comes the gate of amber and rose, and we step through both, at once!"

He was silent. They were on the top of the ridge. A little beyond stood the dusky group of their companions. And the world lay beneath them.

"Who would live in London who might live here?" said the major.

"No one," answered Hester and Christopher together.

The major turned and looked at them almost in alarm.

"But I _may not_," said Hester. "God chooses that I live in London."

Said Christopher,--

"Christ would surely have liked better to go on living in his father's house than go where so many did not know either him or his father! But he could not go on enjoying his heaven while those many lived only a death in life. He must go and start them for home! Who in any measure seeing what Christ sees and feeling as Christ feels, would rest in the enjoyment of beauty while so many are unable to desire it? We are not real human beings until we are of the same mind with Christ. There are many who would save the pathetic and interesting and let the ugly and provoking take care of themselves! Not so Christ, nor those who have learned of him!"

Christopher spoke so quietly there seemed even a contrast between his manner and the fervour of his words.

"I would take as many in with me," he said, turning to Hester, "as I might, should it be after a thousand years I went in at the gate of the sunset--the sunrise rather, of which the sunset is a leaf of the folding door! It would be sorrow to go in alone. My people, my own, my own humans, my men, my women, my little ones, must go in with me!"

Hester laboured, and Christopher laboured. And if one was the heart and the other the head, the major was the right hand. But what they did and how they did it, would require a book, and no small one, to itself.

It is no matter that here I cannot tell their story. No man ever did the best work who copied another. Let every man work out the thing that is in him! Who, according to the means he has, great or small, does the work given him to do, stands by the side of the Saviour, is a fellow-worker with him. Be a brother after thy own fashion, only see it be a brother thou art. The one who weighed, is found wanting the most, is the one whose tongue and whose life do not match--who says, "Lord! Lord!" and does not the thing the Lord says; the deacon who finds a good seat for the man in goodly apparel, and lets the poor widow stand in the aisle unheeded; the preacher who descants on the love of God in the pulpit, and looks out for a rich wife in his flock; the missionary who would save the heathen, but gives his own soul to merchandize; the woman who spends her strength for the poor, and makes discord at home.

[THE END]
George MacDonald's novel: Weighed and Wanting

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