The Project Gutenberg EBook of There & Back, by George MacDonald

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: There & Back

Author: George MacDonald

Release Date: September, 2005  [EBook #8879]
[This file was first posted on August 19, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THERE & BACK ***




E-text prepared by Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders



THERE & BACK

BY

GEORGE MACDONALD







CONTENTS

CHAP.

       I. FATHER, CHILD, AND NURSE
      II. STEPMOTHER AND NURSE
     III. THE FLIGHT
      IV. THE BOOKBINDER AND HIS PUPIL
       V. THE MANSONS
      VI. SIMON ARMOUR
     VII. COMPARISONS
    VIII. A LOST SHOE
      IX. A HOLIDAY
       X. THE LIBRARY
      XI. ALICE
     XII. MORTGRANGE
    XIII. THE BEECH-TREE
     XIV. AGAIN THE LIBRARY
      XV. BARBARA WYLDER
     XVI. BARBARA AND RICHARD
    XVII. BARBARA AND OTHERS
   XVIII. MRS. WYLDER
     XIX. MRS. WYLDER AND BARBARA
      XX. BARBARA AND HER CRITICS
     XXI. THE PARSON'S PARABLE
    XXII. THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
   XXIII. A HUMAN GADFLY
    XXIV. RICHARD AND WINGFOLD
     XXV. WINGFOLD AND HIS WIFE
    XXVI. RICHARD AND ALICE
   XXVII. A SISTER
  XXVIII. BARBARA AND LADY ANN
    XXIX. ALICE AND BARBARA
     XXX. BARBARA THINKS
    XXXI. WINGFOLD AND BARBARA
   XXXII. THE SHOEING OF MISS BROWN
  XXXIII. RICHARD AND VIXEN
   XXXIV. BARBARA'S DUTY
    XXXV. THE PARSON'S COUNSEL
   XXXVI. LADY ANN MEDITATES
  XXXVII. LADY ANN AND RICHARD
 XXXVIII. RICHARD AND ARTHUR
   XXXIX. MR., MRS., AND MISS WYLDER
      XL. IN LONDON
     XLI. NATURE AND SUPERNATURE
    XLII. YET A LOWER DEEP
   XLIII. TO BE REDEEMED, ONE MUST REDEEM
    XLIV. A DOOR OPENED IN HEAVEN
     XLV. THE CARRIAGE
    XLVI. RICHARD'S DILEMMA
   XLVII. THE DOORS OF HARMONY AND DEATH
  XLVIII. DEATH THE DELIVERER
    XLIX. THE CAVE IN THE FIRE
       L. DUCK-FISTS
      LI. BARONET AND BLACKSMITH
     LII. UNCLE-FATHER AND AUNT-MOTHER
    LIII. MORNING
     LIV. BARBARA AT HOME
      LV. MISS BROWN
     LVI. WINGFOLD AND BARBARA
    LVII. THE BARONET'S WILL
   LVIII. THE HEIR
     LIX. WINGFOLD AND ARTHUR MANSON
      LX. RICHARD AND HIS FAMILY
     LXI. HEART TO HEART
    LXII. THE QUARREL
   LXIII. BARONET AND BLACKSMITH
    LXIV. THE BARONET'S FUNERAL
     LXV. THE PACKET
    LXVI. BARBARA'S DREAM




_NOTE.

Some of the readers of this tale will be glad to know that
the passage with which it ends is a real dream; and that,
with but three or four changes almost too slight to require
acknowledging, I have given it word for word as the friend
to whom it came set it down for me._




CHAPTER I.


_FATHER, CHILD, AND NURSE._

It would be but stirring a muddy pool to inquire--not what motives
induced, but what forces compelled sir Wilton Lestrange to marry a woman
nobody knew. It is enough to say that these forces were mainly ignoble,
as manifested by their intermittent character and final cessation. The
_mesalliance_ occasioned not a little surprise, and quite as much
annoyance, among the county families,--failing, however, to remind any
that certain of their own grandmothers had been no better known to the
small world than lady Lestrange. It caused yet more surprise, though less
annoyance, in the clubs to which sir Wilton had hitherto been indebted
for help to forget his duties: they set him down as a greater idiot than
his friends had hitherto imagined him. For had he not been dragged to the
altar by a woman whose manners and breeding were hardly on the level of a
villa in St. John's Wood? Did any one know whence she sprang, or even the
name which sir Wilton had displaced with his own? But sir Wilton himself
was not proud of his lady; and if the thing had been any business of
theirs, it would have made no difference to him; he would none the less
have let them pine in their ignorance. Did not his mother, a lady less
dignified than eccentric, out of pure curiosity beg enlightenment
concerning her origin, and receive for answer from the high-minded
baronet, "Madam, the woman is my wife!"--after which the prudent dowager
asked no more questions, but treated her daughter-in-law with neither
better nor worse than civility. Sir Wilton, in fact, soon came to owe his
wife a grudge that he had married her, and none the less that at the time
he felt himself of a generosity more than human in bestowing upon her his
name. Creation itself, had he ever thought of it, would have seemed to
him a small thing beside such a gift!

That Robina Armour, after experience of his first advances, should have
at last consented to marry sir Wilton Lestrange, was in no sense in her
favour, although after a fashion she was in love with him--in love, that
is, with the gentleman of her own imagining whom she saw in the baronet;
while the baronet, on his part, was what he called in love with what he
called _the woman_. As he was overcome by her beauty, so was she by his
rank--an idol at whose clay feet is cast many a spiritual birthright--and
as mean a deity as any of man's device. But the blacksmith's daughter was
in many respects, notwithstanding, a woman of good sense, with much real
refinement, and a genuine regard for rectitude. Although sir Wilton had
never loved her with what was best in him, it was not in spite of what
was best in him that he fell in love with her. Had his better nature been
awake, it would have justified the bond, and been strengthened by it.

Lady Lestrange's father was a good blacksmith, occasionally drunk in his
youth, but persistently sober now in his middle age; a long-headed
fellow, with reach and quality in the prudence which had long ceased to
appear to him the highest of virtues. At one period he had accounted it
the prime duty of existence to take care of oneself; and so much of this
belief had he communicated to his younger daughter, that she deported
herself so that sir Wilton married her--with the result that, when Death
knocked at her door, she welcomed him to her heart. The first cry of her
child, it is true, made her recall the welcome, but she had to go with
him, notwithstanding, when the child was but an hour old.

Not one of her husband's family was in the house when she died. Sir
Wilton himself was in town, and had been for the last six months,
preferring London and his club to Mortgrange and his wife. When a
telegram informed him that she was in danger, he did go home, but when he
arrived, she had been an hour gone, and he congratulated himself that he
had taken the second train.

There had been betwixt them no approach to union. When what sir Wilton
called love had evaporated, he returned to his mire, with a resentful
feeling that the handsome woman--his superior in everything that belongs
to humanity--had bewitched him to his undoing. The truth was, she had
ceased to charm him. The fault was not in her; it lay in the dulled eye
of the swiftly deteriorating man, which grew less and less capable of
seeing things as they were, and transmitted falser and falser impressions
of them. The light that was in him was darkness. The woman that might
have made a man of him, had there been the stuff, passed from him an
unprized gift, a thing to which he made Hades welcome.

It was decent, however, not to parade his relief. He retired to the
library, lit a cigar, and sat down to wish the unpleasant fuss of the
funeral over, and the house rid of a disagreeable presence. Had the woman
died of a disease to which he might himself one day have to succumb, her
death might, as he sat there, have chanced to raise for an instant the
watery ghost of an emotion; but, coming as it did, he had no sympathetic
interest in her death any more than in herself. Lolling in the easiest of
chairs, he revolved the turns of last night's play, until it occurred to
him that he might soon by a second marriage take amends of his neighbours
for their disapprobation of his first. So pleasant was the thought that,
brooding upon it, he fell asleep.

He woke, looked, rubbed his eyes, stared, rubbed them again, and stared.
A woman stood in front of him--one he had surely seen!--no, he had never
seen her anywhere! What an odd, inquiring, searching expression in her
two hideous black eyes! And what was that in her arms--something wrapt in
a blanket?

The message in the telegram recurred to him: there must have been a
child! The bundle must be the child! Confound the creature! What did it
want?

"Go away," he said; "this is not the nursery!"

"I thought you might like to look at the baby, sir!" the woman replied.

Sir Wilton stared at the blanket.

"It might comfort you, I thought!" she went on, with a look he felt to be
strange. Her eyes were hard and dry, red with recent tears, and glowing
with suppressed fire.

Sir Wilton was courteous to most women, especially such as had no claim
upon him, but cherished respect for none. It was odd therefore that he
should now feel embarrassed. From some cause the machinery of his
self-content had possibly got out of gear; anyhow no answer came ready.
He had not the smallest wish to see the child, but was yet, perhaps,
unwilling to appear brutal. In the meantime, the woman, with gentle,
moth-like touch, was parting and turning back the folds of the blanket,
until from behind it dawned a tiny human face, whose angel was suppliant,
it may be, for the baptism of a father's first gaze.

The woman held out the child to sir Wilton, as if expecting him to take
it. He started to his feet, driving the chair a yard behind him, stuck
his hands in his pockets, and, with a face of disgust, cried--

"Great God! take the creature away."

But he could not lift his eyes from the face nested in the blanket. It
seemed to fascinate him. The woman's eyes flared, but she did not speak.

"Uglier than sin!" he half hissed, half growled. "--I suppose the animal
is mine, but you needn't bring it so close to me! Take it away--and keep
it away. I will send for it when I want it--which won't be in a hurry! My
God! How hideous a thing may be, and yet human!"

"He is as God made him!" remarked the nurse, quietly for very wrath.

"Or the devil!" suggested his father.

Then the woman looked like a tigress. She opened her mouth, but closed it
again with a snap.

"I may say what I like of my own!" said the father. "Tell me the goblin
is none of mine, and I will be as respectful to him as you please. Prove
it, and I will give you fifty pounds. He's hideous! He's damnably ugly!
Deny it if you can."

The woman held her peace. She could not, even to herself, call him a
child pleasant to look at. She gazed on him for a moment with pitiful,
protective eyes, then covered his face as if he were dead, but she did
not move.

"Why don't you go?" said the baronet.

Instead of replying, she began, as by a suddenly confirmed resolve, to
remove the coverings at the other end of the bundle, and presently
disclosed the baby's feet. The baronet gazed wondering. To what might
not assurance be about to subject him? She took one of the little feet
in a hard but gentle hand, and spreading out "the pink, five-beaded
baby-toes," displayed what even the inexperience of the baronet could not
but recognize as remarkable: between every pair of toes was stretched a
thin delicate membrane. She laid the foot down, took up the other, and
showed the same peculiarity. The child was web-footed, as distinctly as
any properly constituted duckling! Then she lifted, one after the other,
the tiny hands, beautiful to any eye that understood, and showed between
the middle and third finger of each, the same sort of membrane rising
half-way to the points of them.

"I see!" said the baronet, with a laugh that was not nice, having in it
no merriment, "the creature is a monster!--Well, if you think I am to
blame, I can only protest you are mistaken. _I_ am not web-footed! The
duckness must come from the other side."

"I hope you will remember, sir Wilton!"

"Remember? What do you mean? Take the monster away."

The woman rearranged the coverings of the little crooked legs.

"Won't you look at your lady before they put her in her coffin?" she said
when she had done.

"What good would that do her? She's past caring!--No, I won't: why should
I? Such sights are not pleasant."

"The coffin's a lonely chamber, sir Wilton; lonely to lie all day and all
night in!"

"No lonelier for one than for another!" he replied, with an involuntary
recoil from his own words. For the one thing a man must believe--yet
hardly believes--is, that he shall one day die. "She'll be better without
me, anyhow!"

"You are heartless, sir Wilton!"

"Mind your own business. If I choose to be heartless, I may have my
reasons. Take the child away."

Still she did not move. The baby, young as he was, had thrown the blanket
from his face, and the father's eyes were fixed on it: while he gazed the
nurse would not stir. He seemed fascinated by its ugliness. Without
absolute deformity, the child was indeed as unsightly as infant well
could be.

"My God!" he said again--for he had a trick of crying out as if he had a
God--"the little brute hates me! Take it away, woman. Take it away before
I strangle it! I can't answer for myself if it keeps on looking at me!"

With a glance whose mingled anger and scorn the father did not see, the
nurse turned and went.

He kept staring after her till the door shut, then fell back into his
chair, exclaiming once more, "My God!"--What or whom he meant by the
word, it were hard to say.

"Is it possible," he said to himself, "that the fine woman I married--for
she _was_ a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!--should have died to present
the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human! It's an affront
to the family! Ah! the strain _will_ show! They say your sins will find
you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I was! But she
bewitched me! I _was_ bewitched!--Curse the little monster! I shan't
breathe again till I'm out of the house! Where was the doctor? He ought
to have seen to it! Hang it all, I'll go abroad!"

Ugly as the child was, however, to many an eye the first thing evident in
him would have been his strong likeness to his father--whose features
were perfect, though at the moment, and at many a moment, their
expression was other than attractive. Sir Wilton disliked children, and
the dislike was mutual. Never did child run to him; never was child
unwilling to leave him. Escaping from his grasp, he would turn and look
back, like Christian emerging from the Valley of the Shadow, as if to
weigh the peril he had been in.

As tenderly as if he had been the loveliest of God's children, the woman
bore her charge up staircases, and through corridors and passages, to the
remote nursery, where, in a cradle whose gay furniture contrasted sadly
with the countenance of the child and the fierceness of her own eyes, she
gently laid him down. But long after he was asleep, she continued to bend
over him, as if with difficulty restraining herself from clasping him
again to her bosom.

Jane Tuke had been married four or five years, but had no children, and
the lack seemed to have intensified her maternity. Elder sister to lady
Lestrange, she had gone gladly to receive her child in her arms, and had
watched and waited for it with an expectation far stronger than that of
the mother; for so thorough was lady Lestrange's disappointment in her
husband, that she regarded the advent of his child almost with
indifference. Jane had an absolute passion for children. She had married
a quarter for faith, a quarter for love, and a whole half for hope. This
divinely inexplicable child-passion is as unintelligible to those devoid
of it, as its absence is marvellous to those possessed by it. Its
presence is its justification, its being its sole explanation, itself
its highest reason. Surely on those who cherish it, the shadow of the
love-creative God must rest more than on some other women! Unpleasing as
was the infant, to know him her own would have made the world a paradise
to Jane. Her heart burned with divine indignation at the wrongs already
heaped upon him. Hardly born, he was persecuted! Ugly! he was _not_ ugly!
Was he not come straight from the fountain of life, from the Father of
children? That such a father as she had left in the library should
repudiate him was well! She loved to think of his rejection. She brooded
with delight, in the midst of her wrath, on every word of disgust that
had fallen from his unfatherly lips. The more her baby was rejected, the
more he was hers! He belonged to her, and her only, for she only loved
him! She could say with _France_ in _King Lear_, "Be it lawful I take up
what's cast away!" To her the despised one was the essence of all riches.
The joy of a miser is less than the joy of a mother, as gold is less than
a live soul, as greed is less than love. No vision of jewels ever gave
such a longing as this woman longed with after the child of her dead
sister.

The body that bore was laid in the earth, the thing born was left upon
it. The mother had but come, exposed her infant on the rough shore of
time, and forsaken him in his nakedness. There he lay, not knowing whence
he came, or whither he was going, urged to live by a hunger and thirst he
had not invented, and did not understand. His mother had helplessly
forsaken him, but the God in another woman had taken him up: there was a
soul to love him, two arms to carry him, and a strong heart to shelter
him.

Sir Wilton returned to London, and there enjoyed himself--not much, but a
little the more that no woman sat at Mortgrange with a right to complain
that he took his pleasure without her. He lived the life of the human
animals frequenting the society of their kind from a gregarious instinct,
and for common yet opposing self-ends. He had begun to assume the
staidness, if not dullness, of the animal whose first youth has departed,
but he was only less frolicsome, not more human. He was settling down to
what he had made himself; no virtue could claim a share in the diminished
rampancy of his vices. What a society is that which will regard as
reformed the man whom assuaging fires have left an exhausted slag--a
thing for which as yet no use is known, who suggests no promise of change
or growth, gives no poorest hint of hope concerning his fate!

With the first unrecognized sense of approaching age, a certain habit of
his race began to affect him, and the idea of a quieter life, with a
woman whose possession would make him envied, grew mildly attractive. A
brilliant marriage in another county would, besides, avenge him on the
narrow-minded of his own, who had despised his first choice! With
judicial family-eye he surveyed the eligible women of his acquaintance.
It was, no doubt, to his disadvantage that already an heir lay "mewling
and puking in the nurse's arms;" for a woman who might willingly be
mother to the inheritor of such a property as his, might not find
attractive the notion of her first being her husband's second son. But
slips between cups and lips were not always on the wrong side! Such a
moon-calf as Robina's son could not with justice represent the handsomest
man and one of the handsomest women of their time. The heir that fate had
palmed upon him might very well be doomed to go the way so many infants
went!

He spread the report that the boy was sickly. A notion that he was not
likely to live prevailed about Mortgrange, which, however originated, was
nourished doubtless by the fact that he was so seldom seen. In reality,
however, there was not a healthier child in all England than Richard
Lestrange.

Sir Wilton's relations took as little interest in the heir as himself,
and there was no inducement for any of them to visit Mortgrange; the
aunt-mother, therefore, had her own way with him. She was not liked in
the house. The servants said she cared only for the little toad of a
baronet, and would do nothing for her comfort. They had, however, just a
shadow of respect for her: if she encouraged no familiarity, she did not
meddle, and was independent of their aid. Even the milking of the cow
which had been, through her persistence, set apart for the child, she did
herself. She sought no influence in the house, and was nothing loved and
little heeded.

Sir Wilton had not again seen his heir, who was now almost a year old,
when the rumour reached Mortgrange that the baronet was about to be
married.

Naturally, the news was disquieting to Jane. The hope, however, was left
her, that the stepmother might care as little for the child as did the
father, and that so, for some years at least, he might be left to her. It
was a terrible thought to the loving woman that they might be parted; a
more terrible thought that her baby might become a man like his father.
Of all horrors to a decent woman, a bad man must be the worst! If by her
death she could have left the child her hatred of evil, Jane would have
willingly died: she loved her husband, but her sister's boy was in
danger!




CHAPTER II.


_STEPMOTHER AND NURSE._

The rumour of sir Wilton's marriage was, as rumour seldom is, correct.
Before the year was out, lady Ann Hardy, sister to the earl of Torpavy,
representing an old family with a drop or two of very bad blood in it,
became lady Ann Lestrange How much love there may have been in the
affair, it is unnecessary to inquire, seeing the baronet was what he was,
and the lady understood the _what_ pretty well. She might have preferred
a husband not so much what sir Wilton was, but she was nine-and-twenty,
and her brother was poor. She said to herself, I suppose, that she might
as well as another undertake his reform: some one must! and married him.
She had not much of a trousseau, but was gorgeously attired for the
wedding. It is true she had to return to the earl three-fourths of the
jewels she wore; but they were family jewels, and why should she not have
some good of them? She started with fifty pounds of her own in her
pocket, and a demeanour in her person equal to fifty millions. When they
arrived at Mortgrange, the moon was indeed still in the sky, but the
honey-pot, to judge by the appearance of the twain, was empty: twain they
were, and twain would be. The man wore a look of careless all-rightness,
tinged with an expression of indifferent triumph: he had what he wanted;
what his lady might think of her side of the bargain, he neither thought
nor cared. As to the woman, let her reflections be what they might, not a
soul would come to the knowledge of them. Whatever it was to others, her
pale, handsome face was never false to herself, never betrayed what she
was thinking, never broke the shallow surface of its frozen dignity. Will
any man ever know how a woman of ordinary decency feels after selling
herself? I find the thing hardly safe to ponder. No trace, no shadow of
disappointment clouded the countenance of lady Ann that sultry summer
afternoon as she drove up the treeless avenue. The education she had
received--and education in the worst sense it was! for it had brought out
the worst in her--had rendered her less than human. The form of her
earthly presence had been trained to a fashionable perfection; her nature
had not been left unaided in its reversion toward the vague animal type
from which it was developed: in the curve of her thin lips as they
prepared to smile, one could discern the veiled snarl and bite. Her eyes
were grey, her eyebrows dark; her complexion was a clear fair, her nose
perfect, except for a sharp pinch at the end of the bone; her nostrils
were thin but motionless; her chin was defective, and her throat as
slender as her horrible waist; her hands and feet were large even for
"her tall personage."

After his lady had had a cup of tea, sir Wilton, for something to do,
proposed taking her over the house, which was old, and worthy of
inspection. In their progress they came to a door at the end of a long
and rather tortuous passage. Sir Wilton did not know how the room was
occupied, or he would doubtless have passed it by; but as its windows
gave a fine view of the park, he opened the door, and lady Ann entered.
Sudden displeasure shortened her first step; pride or something worse
lengthened the next, as she bore down on a woman too much occupied with a
child on her knee to look up at the sound of her entrance. When, a moment
after, she did look up, the dreaded stepmother was looking straight down
on her baby. Their eyes encountered. Jane met an icy stare, and lady Ann
a gaze of defiance--an expression by this time almost fixed on the face
of the nurse, for in her spirit she heard every unspoken remark on her
child. Not a word did the lady utter, but to Jane, her eyes, her very
breath seemed to say with scorn, "Is _that_ the heir?" Sir Wilton did not
venture a single look: he was ashamed of his son, and already a little
afraid of his wife, whom he had once seen close her rather large teeth
in a notable way. As she turned toward the window, however, he stole
a glance at his offspring: the creature was not quite so ugly as
before--not quite so repulsive as he had pictured him! But, good heavens!
he was on the lap of the same woman whose fierceness had upset him almost
as much as his child's ugliness! He walked to the window after his wife.
She gazed for a moment, turned with indifference, and left the room. Her
husband followed her. A glance of fear, dislike, and defiance, went after
them from Jane.

Stronger contrast than those two women it would be hard to find. Jane's
countenance was almost coarse, but its rugged outline was almost grand.
Her hair grew low down on her forehead, and she had deep-set eyes. Her
complexion was rough, her nose large and thick. Her mouth was large also,
but, when unaffected by her now almost habitual antagonism, the curve of
her lip was sweet, and occasionally humorous. Her chin was strong, and
the total of her face what we call masculine; but when she silently
regarded her child, it grew beautiful with the radiant tenderness of
protection.

Her visitors left the door open behind them; Jane rose and shut it, sat
down again, and gazed motionless at the infant. Perhaps he vaguely
understood the sorrow and dread of her countenance, for he pulled a long
face of his own, and was about to cry. Jane clasped him to her bosom in
an agony: she felt certain she would not long be permitted to hold him
there. In the silent speech of my lady's mouth, her jealous love saw the
doom of her darling. What precise doom she dared not ask herself; it was
more than enough that she, indubitably his guardian as if sent from
heaven to shield him, must abandon him to his natural enemy, one who
looked upon him as the adversary of her own children. It was a thought
not to be thought, an idea for which there should be no place in her
bosom! Unfathomable as the love between man and woman is the love of
woman to child.

She spent a wakeful night. From the decree of banishment sure to go forth
against her, there was no appeal! Go she must! Yet her heart cried out
that he was her own. In the same lap his mother had lain before him! She
had carried her by day, and at night folded her in the same arms, herself
but six years old--old enough to remember yet the richness unspeakable of
her new possession. Never had come difference betwixt them until Robina
began to give ear to sir Wilton, whom Jane could not endure. When she
responded, as she did at once, to her sister's cry for her help, she made
her promise that no one should understand who she was, but that she
should in the house be taken for and treated as a hired nurse. Why Jane
stipulated thus, it were hard to say, but so careful were they both, that
no one at Mortgrange suspected the nurse as personally interested in the
ugly heir left in her charge! No one dreamed that the child's aunt had
forsaken her husband to nurse him, and was living _for_ him day and
night. She, in her turn, had promised her sister never to leave him, and
this pledge strengthened the bond of her passion. The only question was
_how_ she was to be faithful to her pledge, _how_ to carry matters when
she was turned away. With those thin, close-pressed lips in her mind's
eye, she could not count on remaining where she was beyond a few days.

She was not only a woman capable of making up her mind, but a woman of
resource, with the advantage of having foreseen and often pondered the
possibility of that which was now imminent. The same night, silent above
the sleep of her darling, she sat at work with needle and scissors far
into the morning, remodelling an old print dress. For nights after, she
was similarly occupied, though not a scrap or sign of the labour was
visible in the morning.

The crisis anticipated came within a fortnight. Lady Ann did not show
herself a second time in the nursery, but sending for Jane, informed her
that an experienced nurse was on her way from London to take charge of
the child, and her services would not be required after the next morning.

"For, of course," concluded her ladyship, "I could not expect a woman of
your years to take an under-nurse's place!"

"Please your ladyship, I will gladly," said Jane, eager to avoid or at
least postpone the necessity forcing itself upon her.

"I intend you to go--and _at once_," replied her ladyship; "--that is,
the moment Mrs. Thornycroft arrives. The housekeeper will take care that
you have your month's wages in lieu of warning."

"Very well, my lady!--Please, your ladyship, when may I come and see the
child?"

"Not at all. There is no necessity."

"Never, my lady?"

"Decidedly."

"Then at least I may ask why you send me away so suddenly!"

"I told you that I want a properly qualified nurse to take your place. My
wish is to have the child more immediately under my own eye than would be
agreeable if you kept your place. I hope I speak plainly!"

"Quite, my lady."

"And let me, for your own sake, recommend you to behave more respectfully
when you find another place."

What she was doing lady Ann was incapable of knowing. A woman
love-brooding over a child is at the gate of heaven; to take her child
from her is to turn her away from more than paradise.

Jane went in silence, seeming to accept the inevitable, too proud to wipe
away the tear whose rising she could not help--a tear not for herself,
nor yet for the child, but for the dead mother in whose place she left
such a woman. She walked slowly back to the nursery, where her charge was
asleep, closed the door, sat down by the cot, and sat for a while without
moving. Then her countenance began to change, and slowly went on
changing, until at last, as through a mist of troubled emotion, out upon
the strong, rugged face broke, with strange suggestion of a sunset, the
glow of resolve and justified desire. A maid more friendly than the rest
brought her some tea, but Jane said nothing of what had occurred. When
the child awoke, she fed him, and played with him a long time--till he
was thoroughly tired, when she undressed him, and laying him down, set
about preparing his evening meal. No one could have perceived in her any
difference, except indeed it were a subdued excitement in her glowing
eyes. When it was ready, she went to her box, took from it a small
bottle, and poured a few dark-coloured drops into the food.

"God forgive me! it's but this once!" she murmured.

The child seemed not quite to relish his supper, but did not refuse it,
and was presently asleep in her arms. She laid him down, took a book, and
began to read.




CHAPTER III.


_THE FLIGHT._

She read until every sound had died in the house, every sound from garret
to cellar, except the ticking of clock, and the tinkling cracks of
sinking fires and cooling grates. In the regnant silence she rose, laid
aside her book, softly opened the door, and stepped as softly into the
narrow passage. A moment or two she listened, then stole on tiptoe to the
main corridor, and again listened. She went next to the head of the great
stair, and once more stood and listened. Then she crept down to the
drawing-room, saw that there was no light in the library, billiard-room,
or smoking-room, and with stealthy feet returned to the nursery. There
she closed the door she had left open, and took the child. He lay in her
arms like one dead. She removed everything he wore, and dressed him in
the garments which for the last fortnight she had been making for him
from clothes of her own. When she had done, he looked like any cottager's
child; there was nothing in his face to contradict his attire. She
regarded the result for a moment with a triumph of satisfaction, laid him
down, and proceeded to put away the clothes he had worn.

Over the top of the door was a small cupboard in the wall, into which she
had never looked until the day before, when she opened it and found it
empty. She placed a table under it, and a chair on the table, climbed up,
laid in it everything she had taken off the child, locked the door of it,
put the key in her pocket, and got down. Then she took the cloak and hood
he had hitherto worn out of doors, laid them down beside the wardrobe,
and lifting the end of it with a strength worthy of the blacksmith's
daughter, pushed them with her foot into the hollow between the bottom of
the wardrobe and the floor of the room. This done, she looked at the
timepiece on the mantelshelf, saw it was one o'clock, and sat down to
recover her breath. But the next moment she was on her knees, sobbing. By
and by she rose, wiped the hot tears from her eyes, and went carefully
about the room, gathering up this and that, and putting it into her box.
Then having locked it, she stuffed a number of small pieces of paper into
the lock, using a crochet-needle to get them well among the wards.
Lastly, she put on a dress she had never worn at Mortgrange, took up the
child, who was still in a dead sleep, wrapped him in an old shawl, and
stole with him from the room.

Like those of a thief--or murderess rather, her scared eyes looked on
this side and that, as she crept to a narrow stair that led to the
kitchen. She knew every turn and every opening in this part of the house:
for weeks she had been occupied, both intellect and imagination, with the
daring idea she was now carrying into effect.

She reached the one door that might yield a safe exit, unlocked it
noiselessly, and stood in a little paved yard with a pump, whence another
door in an ivy-covered wall opened into the kitchen-garden. The moon
shone large and clear, but the shadow of the house protected her. It was
the month of August, warm and still. If only it had been dark! Outside
the door she was still in the shadow. For the first time in her life she
loved the darkness. Along the wall she stole as if clinging to it. Yet
another door led into a shrubbery surrounding the cottage of the
head-gardener, whence a back-road led to a gate, over which she could
climb, so to reach the highway, along whose honest, unshadowed spaces she
must walk miles and miles before she could even hope herself safe.

She stood at length in the broad moonlight, on the white, far-reaching
road. Her heart beat so fast as almost to stifle her. She dared not look
down at the child, lest some one should see her and look also! The moon
herself had an aspect of suspicion! Why did she keep staring so? For an
instant she wished herself back in the nursery. But she knew it would
only be to do it all over again: it _had_ to be done! Leave the child of
her sister where he was counted in the way! with those who hated him!
where his helpless life was in danger! She could not!

But, while she thought, she did not stand. Softly, with great strides she
went stalking along the road. She knew the country: she was not many
miles from her father's forge, whence at moments she seemed to hear the
ring of his hammer through the still night.

She kept to the road for three or four miles, then turned aside on a
great moor stretching far to the south: daybreak was coming fast; she
must find some cottage or natural shelter, lest the light should betray
her. When the sun had made his round, and yielded his place to the
friendly night, she would start afresh! In her bundle she had enough for
the baby; for herself, she could hold out many hours unfed. A few more
miles from Mortgrange, and no one would know her, neither from any
possible description could they be suspected in the garments they wore!
Her object in hiding their usual attire had been, that it might be taken
for granted they had gone away in it.

She did not slacken her pace till she had walked five miles more. Then
she stood a moment, and gazed about her. The great heath was all around,
solitary as the heaven out of which the solitary moon, with no child to
comfort her, was enviously watching them. But she would not stop to rest,
save for the briefest breathing space! On and on she went until moorland
miles five more, as near as she could judge, were behind her. Then at
length she sat down upon a stone, and a timid flutter of safety stirred
in her bosom, followed by a gush of love victorious. Her treasure! her
treasure! Not once on the long way had she looked at him. Now she folded
back the shawl, and gazed as not even a lover could have gazed on the
sleeping countenance of his rescued bride. The passion of no other
possession could have equalled the intensity of her conscious _having_.
Not one created being had a right to the child but herself!--yet any
moment he might be taken from her by a cold-hearted, cruel stepmother,
and given to a hired woman! She started to her feet, and hurried on. The
boy was no light weight, and she had things to carry besides, which her
love said he could not do without; yet before seven o'clock she had
cleared some sixteen miles, in a line from Mortgrange as straight as she
could keep.

She thought she must now be near a village whose name she knew; but she
dared not show herself lest some advertisement might reach it after she
was gone, and lead to the discovery of the route she had taken. She
turned aside therefore into an old quarry, there to spend the day,
unvisited of human soul. The child was now awake, but still drowsy. She
gave him a little food, and ate the crust she had saved from her tea the
night before. During the long hours she slept a good deal by fits, and
when the evening came, was quite fit to resume her tramp. To her joy it
came cloudy, giving her courage to enter a little shop she saw on the
outskirts of the village, and buy some milk and some bread. From this
point she kept the road: she might now avail herself of help from cart or
wagon. She was not without money, but feared the railway.

It is needless to follow her wanderings, always toward London, where was
her husband, and her home. A weary, but happy, and almost no longer an
anxious woman, she reached at length a certain populous suburb, and was
soon in the arms of her husband.




CHAPTER IV.


_THE BOOKBINDER AND HIS PUPIL._

It was the middle of the day before they were missed. Their absence
caused for a time no commotion; the servants said nurse must have taken
the child for his usual walk. But when the nurse from London came, and,
after renewed search and inquiry, nothing was heard of them, their
disappearance could no longer be kept from lady Ann. She sent to inform
her husband.

Sir Wilton asked a question or two of her messenger, said the thing must
be seen to, finished his cigar, threw the stump in the fire, and went to
his wife; when at once they began to discuss, not the steps to be taken
for the recovery of the child, but the woman's motive for stealing him.
The lady insisted it was revenge for having been turned away, and that
she would, as soon as she reached a suitable place, put an end to his
life: she had seen murder in her eyes! The father opined there was no
such danger: he remembered, though he did not mention it, the peculiarity
of the woman's behaviour when first he saw her. There was no limit, he
said, to the unnatural fancies of women; some were disgustingly fond of
children, even other women's children. Plain as the infant was, he did
not doubt she had taken a fancy to him, and therefore declined to part
with him. The element of revenge might, he allowed, have a share in the
deed; but that would be satisfied with leaving them in doubt of his fate.
For his part, he made her welcome to him! To this lady Ann gave no
answer: she was not easily shocked, and could, without consternation,
have regarded his disappearance as final. But something must at least
appear to be done! Unpleasant things might be said, and uncertainty was
full of annoyance!

"You must be careful, sir Wilton," she remarked. "Nobody thinks you
believe the child your own."

Sir Wilton laughed.

"I never had a doubt on the subject. I wish I had: he's not to my credit.
If we never hear of him again, the better for the next!"

"That is true!" rejoined lady Ann. "But what if, after we had forgotten
all about him, he were to turn up again?"

"That would be unpleasant--and is indeed a reason why we should
look for him. Better find him than live in doubt! Besides, the world
would be uncharitable enough to hint that you had made away with him:
it's what ought to have been done when first he appeared. I give
you my word, Ann, he was a positive monster! The object was actually
web-footed!--web-footed like any frog!"

"You must let the police know," said the lady.

"That the child is web-footed? No, I think not!" yawned sir Wilton.

He got up, went out, and ordered a groom to ride hard to the village--as
hard as he could go--and let the police understand what had occurred.
Within the hour a constable appeared, come to inquire when last the
fugitives were seen, and what they wore--the answer to which latter
question set the police looking for persons very different in appearance
from Jane and her nursling. Nothing was heard of them, and the inquiry,
never prosecuted with any vigour, was by degrees dropped entirely.

John Tuke had grumbled greatly at his wife's desertion of him for
grandees who would never thank her; but he gave in to the prolongation of
her absence with a better grace, when he learned how the motherless baby
was regarded by his own people. The humanity of the man rose in defence
of the injured. He felt also that, in espousing the cause of his wife's
nephew, scorned by his baronet father, he was taking the part of his own
down-trodden class. He was greatly perplexed, however, as to what end the
thing was to have. Must he live without his wife till the boy was sent to
school?

He was in bed and fast asleep, when suddenly opening his eyes, he saw
beside him the wife he had not seen for twelve months, with the stolen
child in her arms. When he heard how the stepmother had treated her, and
how the babe was likely to fare among its gentle kin, he was filled with
fresh indignation; but, while thoroughly appreciating and approving his
wife's decision and energy, he saw to what the deed exposed them, and
augured frightful consequences to the discovery that seemed almost
certain. But when he understood the precautions she had taken, and
bethought himself how often the police fail, he had better hopes of
escape. One thing he never dreamed of--and that was, restoring the child.
Often at night he would lie wondering how far, in case of their being
tried for kidnapping, the defence would reach, that his wife was the
child's aunt; and whether the fact that she was none the less a poor
woman standing up against the rich, would not render that or any plea
unavailing. Jane was, and long remained, serenely hopeful.

When she left for Mortgrange, they had agreed that her husband should say
she was gone to her father's; and as nobody where they lived knew who or
where her father was, nobody had the end of any clue. For some time after
her return she did not show herself, leaving it to her husband to say she
had come back with her baby. Then she began to appear with the child, and
so managed her references to her absence, that no one dreamed of his not
being her own, or imagined that she had left her husband for other reason
than to be tended at her old home in her confinement. After a few years,
even the fact of his not having been born in that house was forgotten;
and Richard Lestrange grew up as the son of John Tuke, the bookbinder.
Not in any mind was there a doubt as to his parentage.

They lived on the very bank of the Thames, in a poor part of a populous,
busy, thriving suburb, far from fashionable, yet not without inhabitants
of refinement. Had not art and literature sent out a few suckers into it,
there would have been no place in it for John Tuke. For, more than liking
his trade, being indeed fond of it, he would not work for the
booksellers, but used his talent to the satisfaction of known customers,
of whom he had now not a few, for his reputation had spread beyond the
near neighbourhood. But while he worked cheaper, quality considered, than
many binders, even carefully superintending that most important yet most
neglected part of the handicraft, the sewing, he never undertook cheap
work. Never, indeed, without persuasion on the part of his employer and
expostulation on his own, did he consent to _half-bind_ a book. Hence it
comes to be confessed, that, when _carte blanche_ was given him, he would
not infrequently expend upon a book an amount of labour and a value of
material quite out of proportion to the importance of the book. Still,
being a thoroughly conscientious workman, who never hurried the
forwarding, never cut from a margin a hair's breadth more than was
necessary, and hated finger-marks on the whiteness of a page, he was well
known as such, and had plenty of work--had often, indeed, to refuse what
was offered him, hence was able to decline all such jobs as would give
him no pleasure, and grew more fastidious as he grew older in regard to
the quality of the work he would undertake. He had never employed a
journeyman, and would never take more than two apprentices at a time.

As Richard Lestrange grew, his chief pleasure was to be in the shop with
his uncle, and watch him at his varying work. I think his knowledge of
books as things led him the sooner to desire them as realities, for to
read he learned with avidity. When he was old enough to go to school, his
adopted father spared nothing he could spend to make him fit for his
future; wisely resolved, however, that he should know nothing of his
rights until he was of an age to understand them--except, indeed, sir
Wilton should die before that age arrived, when his cause would be too
much prejudiced by farther postponement of claim. Heartily they hoped
that their secret might remain a secret until their nephew should be
capable of protecting them from any untoward consequence of their well
intended crime.

Happily there was in the place, and near enough for the boy to attend it
easily, a good day-school upon an old foundation, whose fees were within
his father's means. Richard proved a fair student and became a great
reader. But he took such an intelligent and practical interest in the
work he saw going on at home, that he began, while yet a mere child, to
use paste and paper of his own accord. First he made manuscript-books for
his work at school, and for the copying of such verses as he took a fancy
to in his reading. Then inside the covers of some of these he would make
pockets for papers; and so advanced to small portfolios and pocket-books,
of which he would make presents to his companions, and sometimes, when
more ambitiously successful, to a master. In their construction he used
bits of coloured paper and scraps of leather, chiefly morocco, which his
father willingly made over to him, watching his progress with an interest
quite paternal, and showing a workman's wisdom in this, that only when he
saw him in a real difficulty would he come to his aid--as, for instance,
when first he struggled with a piece of leather too thick for the bonds
of paste, and must be taught how to pare it to the necessary flexibility
and compliance.

To become able to _make_ something is, I think, necessary to thorough
development. I would rather have son of mine a carpenter, a watchmaker, a
wood-carver, a shoemaker, a jeweller, a blacksmith, a bookbinder, than I
would have him earn his bread as a clerk in a counting-house. Not merely
is the cultivation of operant faculty a better education in faculty, but
it brings the man nearer to every thing operant; humanity unfolds itself
to him the readier; its ways and thoughts and modes of being grow the
clearer to both intellect and heart. The poetry of life, the inner side
of that nature which comes from him who, on the Sabbath-days even,
"worketh hitherto," rises nearer the surface to meet the eyes of the man
who _makes._ What advantage the carpenter of Nazareth gathered from his
bench, is the inheritance of every workman, in proportion as he does
divine, that is, honest work.

Perceiving the faculty of the boy, his father--so let us call John Tuke
for the present--naturally thought it well to make him a gift of his
trade: it would always be a possession! "Whatever turn things may take,"
he would remark to his wife, "the boy will have his bread in his hands.
And say what they will, the man who can gather his food off his own
bench, or screw it out of his own press, must be a freer man than he who
but for his inheritance would have to beg, steal, or die of hunger. And
who knows how long the world may permit idlers to fare of its best!"

For, after a fashion of his own, Tuke was a philosopher and a politician.
But his politics were those of the philosopher, not of the politician.

Richard, with his great love of reading, and therefore of books, was
delighted to learn the craft which is their attendant and servitor. When
too young yet to wield the hammer without danger both to himself and the
book under it, he began to sew, and in a few weeks was able to bring the
sheets together entirely to the satisfaction of his father. From the
first he set him to do that essential part of the work in the best way,
that is, to sew every sheet round every cord: it is only when one can
perfectly work after the perfect rule, that he may be trusted with
variations and exceptions.

He went on teaching him until the boy could, he confessed, do almost
everything better than himself--went on until he had taught him every
delicacy, every secret of the craft. Richard developed a positive genius
for the work, seeming almost to learn it by intuition. A pocket-book,
with which he presented his father on his fiftieth birthday, brought out
his unqualified praise.

In the process he gradually revealed a predilection for a rarer use of
his faculty--a use more nice, while less distinguished, and not much
favoured by his father. It had its prime source deeper than the art of
book-binding--in the love of books themselves, not as leaves to be bound,
but as utterances to be heard. Certain dealers in old books have loved
some of them so as to refuse to part with them on any terms; Richard,
unable to possess more than a very few, manifested his veneration for
them in another and nearer fashion, running, as was natural and healthy,
in the lines of his calling.

For many months in diligent attendance at certain of the evening-classes
at King's College, he had developed a true insight into and sympathy with
what is best in our literature--chiefly in that of the sixteenth century:
from this grew an almost peculiar regard for old books. With three or
four shillings weekly at his disposal, he laid himself out to discover
and buy such volumes as, in themselves of value, were in so bad a
condition as to be of little worth from the mere bookseller's point of
view: with these for his first patients he opened a hospital, or
angel-asylum, for the lodging, restorative treatment, and systematic
invigoration of decayed volumes. Love and power combined made him look on
the dilapidated, slow-wasting abodes of human thought and delight with a
healing compassion--almost with a passion of healing. The worse gnawed of
the tooth of insect-time, the farther down any choice book in the steep
decline of years, the more intent was Richard on having it. More and more
skillful he grew, not only in rebinding such whose clothing was past
repair, but in restoring the tone of their very constitution; and in so
mending the ancient and beggarly garments of others that they reassumed a
venerable respectability. Through love, he passed from an artisan to an
artist. His reverence for the inner reality, the book itself, in itself
beyond time and decay, had roused in him a child-like regard for its
body, for its broken inclosure and default of manifestation. He would
espy the beauty of an old binding through any amount of abrasion and
laceration. To his eyes almost any old binding was better for its book
than any new one.

His father came to regard with wonder and admiration the redeeming
faculty of his son, whereby he would reinstate in strength and ripe
dignity a volume which he would have taken to pieces, and redressed like
an age-worn woman in a fashionable gown. So far did his son's superior
taste work upon his, that at length, if he opened a new binding, however
sombre, and saw a time-browned paper and old type within, the sight would
give him the shock of a discord.

But Tuke was in many things no other than a man of this world, and sorely
he doubted if such labour would ever have its counterpoise in money. It
paid better, because it was much easier, to reclothe than to restore! to
destroy and replace than to renew! When he had watched many times for
minutes together his son's delicate manipulation--in which he patched
without pauperizing, and subaided without humiliating--and at last
contemplating the finished result, he concluded him possessed of a quite
original faculty for book-healing.--"But alas," he thought, "genius
seldom gets beyond board-wages!" It did not occur to him that genius
least requires more than board-wages. He encouraged him, nevertheless,
though mildly, in the pursuit of this neglected branch of the
binding-art.

As the days went on, and their love for their nephew grew with his
deserts, the uncle and aunt shrank more and more from the thought, which
every year compelled them to think the oftener, that the day was drawing
nigh when they must volunteer the confession that he was not their child.

When he was about seventeen, Richard settled down to work with his
father, occasionally assisting him, but in general occupied with his own
special branch, in which Tuke, through his long connection with
book-lovers possessing small cherished libraries, was able to bring him
almost as many jobs as he could undertake. The fact that a volume could
be so repaired, stimulated the purchase of shabby books; and part of what
was saved on the price of a good copy was laid out on the amendment of
the poor one. But however much the youth delighted in it, he could not
but find the work fidgety and tiring; whence ensued the advantage that he
left it the oftener for a ramble, or a solitary hour on the river. He had
but few companions, his guardians, wisely or not, being more fastidious
about his associates than if he had been their very son. His uncle, of
strong socialistic opinions, and wont to dilate on human equality--as if
the thing that ought to be, and must one day come, could be furthered by
the assertion of its present existence--was, like the holders of even
higher theories, not a little apt to forget the practice necessarily
involved: this son of a baronet, seeing that he was the son also of his
wife's sister, was not to be brought up like one of the many!

Ugliness in infancy is a promise, though perhaps a doubtful one, of
beauty in manhood; and in Richard's case the promise was fulfilled:
hardly a hint was left of the baby-face which had repelled his father. He
was now a handsome well-grown youth, with dark-brown hair, dark-green
eyes, broad shoulders, and a little stoop which made his aunt uneasy: she
would have had him join a volunteer corps, but he declared he had not the
time. He accepted her encouragement, however, to forsake his work as
often as he felt inclined. He had good health; what was better, a good
temper; and what was better still, a willing heart toward his neighbour.
A certain over-hanging of his brows was--especially when he contracted
them, as, in perplexity or endeavour, he not infrequently did--called a
scowl by such as did not love him; but it was of shallow insignificance,
and probably the trick of some ancestor.

Before long, his thinking began to take form in verse-making. It matters
little to my narrative whether he produced anything of original value or
not; utterance aids growth, which is the prime necessity of human as of
all other life. Not seldom, bent over his work, he would be evolving some
musical fashion of words--with no relaxation, however, of the sharp
attention and delicate handling required by the nature of that work. It
is the privilege of some kinds of labour, that they are compatible with
thoughts of higher things. At the book-keeper's desk, the clerk must
think of nothing but his work; he is chained to it as the galley-slave to
his oar; the shoemaker may be poet or mystic, or both; the ploughman may
turn a good furrow and a good verse together; Richard could at once use
hands and thoughts. It troubled his protectors that they could not send
him to college, but they comforted themselves that it would not be too
late when he returned to his natural position in society. They had no
plan in their minds, no date settled at which to initiate his
restoration. All they had determined was, that he must at least be a
grown man, capable of looking after his own affairs, when the first step
for it was taken.

John Tuke was one of those who acknowledge in some measure the claims of
their neighbour, but assert ignorance of any one who must be worshipped.
And in truth, the God presented to him by his teachers was one with
little claim on human devotion. The religious system brought to bear on
his youth had operated but feebly on his conscience, and not at all on
his affections. It had, however, so wrought upon his apprehensions, that,
when afterward persuaded there was no ground for agonizing anticipation,
he welcomed the conviction as in itself a redemption for all men; "for,
surely," he argued, "fear is the worst of evils!" The very approach of
such a relief predisposed him to receive whatever teaching might
follow from the same source; and soon he believed himself satisfied that
the notion of religion--of duty toward an unseen maker--was but an
old-wives'-fable; and that, as to the hereafter, a mere cessation of
consciousness was the only reasonable expectation. The testimony of his
senses, although negative, he accepted as stronger on that side than any
amount of what could, he said, be but the purest assertion on the other.
Why should he heed an old book? why one more than another? The world was
around him: some things he must believe; other things no man could! One
thing was clear: every man was bound to give his neighbour fair-play! He
would press nothing upon Richard as to God or no God! he would not be
dogmatic! he only wanted to make a man of him! And was he not so far
successful? argued John. Was not Richard growing up a diligent, honest
fellow, loving books, and leading a good life; whereas, had he been left
to his father, he could not have escaped being arrogant and unjust,
despising the poor of his own flesh, and caring only to please himself!
In the midst of such superior causes of satisfaction, it also pleased
Tuke to reflect that the trade he had taught his nephew was a clean one,
which, while it rendered him superior to any shrewd trick fortune might
play him, would not make his hands unlike those of a gentleman.

His aunt, however, kept wishing that Richard were better "set up," and
looked more like his grandfather the blacksmith, whose trade she could
not help regarding as manlier than that of her husband. Hence she had
long cherished the desire that he should spend some time with her father.
But John would not hear of it. He would get working at the forge, he
said, and ruin his hands for the delicate art in which he was now
unapproachable.

For in certain less socialistic moods, John would insist on regarding
bookbinding, in all and any of its branches, not as a trade, but an art.




CHAPTER V.


_THE MANSONS._

At school, Richard had been friendly with a boy of gentle nature, not
many years older than himself. The boy had stood his friend in more than
one difficulty, and Richard heartily loved him. But he had suddenly
disappeared from the school, and so from Richard's ken: for years he had
not seen him. One evening, as he was carrying home a book, he met this
Arthur Manson, looking worn and sad. He would have avoided Richard, but
he stopped him, and presently the old friendship was dominant. Arthur
told him his story. He had had to leave school because of the sudden
cessation, from what cause he did not know, of a certain annuity his
mother had till then enjoyed--rendering it imperative that he should earn
his own living, and contribute to her support, for although she still had
a little money, it was not nearly enough. His sister was at work with a
dressmaker, but as yet earning next to nothing. His mother was a lady, he
said, and had never done any work. He was himself in a counting-house in
the City, with a salary of forty pounds. He told him where they lived,
and Richard promised to go and see him, which he did the next Sunday.

His friend's mother lived in a little house of two floors, one of a long
row lately built. The furniture was much too large, and it was difficult
to move in the tiny drawing-room. It showed a feeble attempt at
decoration, which made it look the poorer. Accustomed to his mother's
care of her things, Richard perceived a difference: these were much finer
but neglected, and looked as if they felt it. At their evening meal,
however, the tea was good, and the bread and butter were of the best.

The mother was a handsome middle-aged woman--not so old, Richard somehow
imagined, as she looked. She was stout and florid, with plenty of black,
rather coarse hair, and seemed to Richard to have the carriage of a lady,
but not speech equal to her manners. She was polite to him, but not
apparently interested in her son's friend. Yet several times he found
her gazing at him with an expression that puzzled him. He had, however,
too clear a conscience to be troubled by any scrutiny. All the evening
Arthur's face wore the same look of depression, and Richard wondered
what could be amiss. He learned afterward that the mother was so
self-indulgent, and took so little care to make the money go as far as it
could, that he had not merely to toil from morning to night at
uncongenial labour, but could never have the least recreation, and was
always too tired when he came home to understand any book he attempted to
read. Richard learned also that he had no greatcoat, and went to the City
in the winter with only a shabby comforter in addition to the clothes he
had worn all the summer. But it was not Arthur who told him this.

The girl was a graceful little creature, with the same sad look her
brother had, but not the same depression. She seemed more delicate, and
less capable of labour; yet her hours were longer than his, and her
confinement greater. Alice had to sit the whole day plying her needle,
while Arthur was occasionally sent out to collect money. But her mistress
was a kind-hearted woman, and not having a fashionable _clientele_, had
not yet become indifferent to the well-being of her work-women. She even
paid a crippled girl a trifle for reading to them, stipulating only that
she should read fast, for she found the rate of their working greatly
influenced by the rate of the reading. Life, if harder, was therefore not
quite so uninteresting to Alice as to Arthur, and that might be why she
seemed to have more vitality. Like her mother she had a quantity of hair,
as dark as hers, but finer; dark eyes, not without meaning; irregular but
very pleasing and delicate features; and an unusually white rather than
pale complexion, with a sort of sallow glow under the diaphanous skin.
There was not a little piquancy in the expression of her countenance, and
Richard felt it strangely attractive.

The youths found they had still tastes in common, although Arthur had
neither time nor strength to follow them. Richard spoke of some book he
had been reading. Arthur was interested, but Alice so much that Richard
offered to lend it her: it was the first time she had heard a book spoken
of in such a tone--one of suppressed feeling, almost veneration.

The mother did not join in their talk, and left them soon--her daughter
said to go to church.

"She always goes by herself," Alice added. "She sees we are too tired to
go."

They sat a long time with no light but that of the fire. Arthur seemed to
gather courage, and confessed the hopeless monotony of his life. He
complained of no privation, only of want of interest in his work.

"Do _you_ like your work?" he asked Richard.

"Indeed I do!" Richard answered. "I would sooner handle an old book than
a bunch of bank-notes!"

"I don't doubt it," returned Arthur. "To me your workshop seems a
paradise."

"Why don't you take up the trade, then? Come to us and I will teach you.
I do not think my father would object."

"I learn nothing where I am!" continued Arthur.

"Our boat is not over-manned," resumed Richard. "Say you will come, and I
will speak to my father."

"I wish I could! But how are we to live while I am learning?--No; I must
grind away till--"

He stopped short, and gave a sigh.

"Till when, Arty?" asked his sister.

"Till death set me free," he answered.

"You wouldn't leave me behind, Arty!" said Alice; and rising, she put her
arm round his neck.

"I wouldn't if I could help it," he replied.

"It's a cowardly thing to want to die," said Richard.

"I think so sometimes."

"There's your mother!"

"Yes," responded Arthur, but without emotion.

"And how should I get on without you, Arty?" said his sister.

"Not very well, Ally. But it wouldn't be for long. We should soon meet."

"Who told you that?" said Richard almost rudely.

"Don't you think we shall know each other afterwards?" asked Arthur, with
an expression of weary rather than sad surprise.

"I would be a little surer of it before I talked so coolly of leaving a
sister like that! I only wish _I_ had one to care for!"

A faint flush rose on the pale face of the girl, and as swiftly faded.

"Do you think, then, that this life is only a dream?" she said, looking
up at Richard with something in her great eyes that he did not
understand.

"Anyhow," he answered, "I would bear a good deal rather than run the risk
of going so fast asleep as to stop dreaming it. A man can die any time,"
he continued, "but he can't dream when he pleases! I would wait! One
can't tell when things may take a turn! There are many chances on the
cards!"

"That's true," replied Arthur; but plainly the very chances were a
weariness to him.

"If Arthur had enough to eat, and time to read, and a little amusement,
he would be as brave as you are, Mr. Tuke!" said Alice. "--But you can't
mean to say there will be no more of anything for us after this world! To
think I should never see Arty again, would make me die before my time! I
should be so miserable I would hardly care to keep him as long as I
might. We must die some day, and what odds whether it be a few days
sooner, or a few days later, if we're never going to meet again?"

"The best way is not to think about it," returned Richard. "Why should
you? Look at the butterflies! They take what comes, and don't grumble at
their sunshine because there's only one day of it."

"But when there's no sunshine that day?" suggested Alice.

"Well, when they lie crumpled in the rain, they're none the worse that
they didn't think about it beforehand! We must make the best of what we
have!"

"It's not worth making the best of," cried Alice indignantly, "if that's
all!"

My reader may well wonder at Richard: how could he be a lover of our best
literature and talk as he did? or rather, talking as he did, how could he
love it? But he had come to love it while yet under the influence of what
his aunt taught him, poor as was her teaching. Then his heart and
imagination were more in the ascendency. Now he had begun to admire the
intellectual qualities of that literature more, and its imaginative less;
for he had begun to think truth attainable through the forces of the
brain, sole and supreme.

In matters of conduct, John Tuke and his wife were well agreed; in
matters of opinion, they differed greatly. Jane went to church regularly,
listened without interest, and accepted without question; had her husband
gone, he would have listened with the interest of utter dissent. When
Jane learned that her husband no longer "believed in the Bible," she was
seized with terror lest he should die without repentance and be lost.
Thereupon followed fear for herself: was not an atheist a horribly wicked
man?--and she could not feel that John was horribly wicked! She tried her
hardest, but could not; and concluded therefore that his unbelief must be
affecting her. She prayed him to say nothing against the Bible to
Richard--at least before he arrived at years of discretion. This John
promised; but subtle effluences are subtle influences.

John Tuke did right so far as he knew--at least he thought he did--and
refused to believe in any kind of God; Jane did right, she thought, as
far as she knew--and never imagined God cared about her: let him who has
a mind to it, show the value of the difference!

Tuke was a thinking man;--that is, set a going in any direction that
interested him, he could take a few steps forward without assistance. But
he could start in no direction of himself. At a small club to which he
belonged, he had been brought in contact with certain ideas new to him,
and finding himself able to grasp them, felt at once as if they must be
true. Certain other ideas, new to him, coming self-suggested in their
train, he began immediately to imagine himself a thinker, able to
generate notions to which the people around him were unequal. He began to
grow self-confident, and so to despise. Taking courage then to deny
things he had never believed, had only not thought about, and finding he
thereby gave offence, he chose to imagine himself a martyr for the truth.
He did not see that a denial involving no assertion, cannot witness to
any truth; nor did he perceive that denial in his case meant nothing more
than non-acceptance of things asserted. Had he put his position
logically, it would have been this: I never knew such things; I do not
like the notion of them; therefore I deny them: they do not exist. But no
man really denies a thing which he knows only by the words that stand for
it. When John Tuke denied the God in his notion, he denied only a God
that could have no existence.

A man will be judged, however, by his truth toward what he professes to
believe; and John was far truer to his perception of the duty of man to
man than are ninety-nine out of the hundred of so-called Christians to
the things they profess to believe. How many men would be immeasurably
better, if they would but truly believe, that is, act upon, the smallest
part of what they untruly profess to believe, even if they cast aside all
the rest. John cast aside an allegiance to God which had never been more
than a mockery, and set about delivering his race from the fear of a
person who did not exist. For, true enough, there was no God of the kind
John denied; only, what if, in delivering his kind from the tyranny of a
false God, he aided in hiding from them the love of a true God--of a God
that did and ought to exist? There are other passions besides fear, and
precious as fear is hateful. If there be a God and one has never sought
him, it will be small consolation to remember that he could not get proof
of his existence. Is a child not to seek his father, because he cannot
prove he is alive?

The aunt continued to take the boy to church, and expose him, for it was
little more she did, to a teaching she could not herself either supply or
supplement. It was the business of the church to teach Christianity! her
part was to accept it, and bring the child where he also might listen and
accept! But what she accepted as Christianity, is another question; and
whether the acceptance of anything makes a Christian, is another still.

How much of Christianity a child may or may not learn by going to church,
it is impossible to say; but certainly Richard did not learn anything
that drew his heart to Jesus of Nazareth, or caught him in any heavenly
breeze, or even the smallest of celestial whirlwinds! He learned nothing
even that made unwelcome such remarks as his father would now and then
let fall concerning the clergy and the way they followed their trade;
while the grin, full of conscious superiority, with which he
unconsciously accompanied them, found its reflection in the honourable
but not yet humble mind, beginning to be aware of its own faculty, and
not aware that the religion presented in his aunt's church, a religion
neither honourable nor elevating, was but the dullest travesty of the
religion of St. Paul. Richard had, besides, read several books which, had
his uncle been _careful_ of the promise he had given his wife, he would
have intentionally removed instead of unintentionally leaving about.

In the position Richard had just taken toward his new friends, he was not
a little influenced by the desire to show himself untrammelled by
prevailing notions, and capable of thinking for himself; but this was far
from all that made him speak as he did. Many young fellows are as ready
to deny as Richard, but not many feel as strongly that life rests upon
what we know, that knowledge must pass into action. The denial of every
falsehood under the sun would not generate one throb of life.

Richard told his adoptive parents where he had been, and asked if he
might invite his new friends for the next Sunday. They made no objection,
and when Arthur and Alice came, received them kindly. Richard took Arthur
to the shop, and showed him the job he was engaged upon at the time,
lauding his department as affording more satisfaction than mere binding.

"For," he said, "the thing that is not, may continue not to be; but the
thing that is, should be as it was meant to be. Where it is not such,
there is an evil that wants remedy. It may be that the sole remedy is
binding, but that involves destruction, therefore is a poor thing beside
renovation."

The argument came from a well of human pity in himself, deeper than
Richard knew. But both the pity he felt and the _truth_ in what he said
came from a source eternal of which he yet knew nothing.

"It would be much easier," continued Richard, "to make that volume look
new, but how much more delightful to send it out with a revived assertion
of its ancient self!"

Some natures have a better chance of disclosing the original in them,
that they have not been to college, and set to think in other people's
grooves, instead of those grooves that were scored in themselves long
before the glacial era.

"For my part," said Arthur, "I feel like a book that needs to be fresh
printed, not to say fresh bound! I don't feel why I am what I am. I would
part with it all, except just being the same man!"

While the youths were having their talk, Alice was in Jane's bedroom,
undergoing an examination, the end and object of which it was impossible
she should suspect. Caught by a certain look in her sweet face, reminding
her of a look that was anything but sweet, Jane had set herself to learn
from her what she might as to her people and history.

"Is your father alive, my dear?" she asked, with her keen black eyes on
Alice's face.

That grew red, and for a moment the girl did not answer. Jane pursued her
catechizing.

"What was his trade or profession?" she inquired.

The girl said nothing, and the merciless questioner went on.

"Tell me something about him, dear. Do you remember him? Or did he die
when you were quite a child?"

"I do not remember him," answered Alice. "I do not know if I ever saw
him."

"Did your mother never tell you what he was like?"

"She told me once he was very handsome--the handsomest man she ever
saw--but cruel--so cruel! she said.--I don't want to talk about him,
please, ma'am!" concluded Alice, the tears running down her cheeks.

"I'm sorry, my dear, to hurt you, but I'm not doing it from curiosity.
You have a look so like a man I once knew,--and your brother has
something of the same!--that in fact I am bound to learn what I can about
you."

"What sort was the man we put you in mind of?" asked Alice, with a feeble
attempt at a smile. "Not a _very_ bad man, I hope!"

"Well, not very good--as you ask me.--He was what people call a
gentleman!"

"Was that all?"

"What do you mean?"

"I thought he was a nobleman!"

"Oh!--well, he wasn't that; he was a baronet."

Alice gave a little cry.

"Do tell me something about him," she said. "What do you know about him?"

"More than I choose to tell. We will forget him now, if you please!"

There was in her voice a tone of displeasure, which Alice took to be with
herself. She was in consequence both troubled and perplexed. Neither made
any more inquiries. Jane took her guest back to the sitting-room.

The moment her brother came from the workshop, Alice said to him--

"Are you ready, Arthur? We had better be moving!"

Arthur was a gentle creature, and seldom opposed her; he seemed only
surprised a little, and asked if she was ill. But Richard, who had all
the week been looking forward to a talk with Alice, and wanted to show
her his little library, was much disappointed, and begged her to change
her mind. She insisted, however, and he put on his hat to walk with them.

But his aunt called him, and whispered that she would be particularly
obliged to him if he would go to church with her that evening. He
expostulated, saying he did not care to go to church; but as she
insisted, he yielded, though not with the best grace.

Before another Sunday, there came, doubtless by his aunt's management, an
invitation to spend a few weeks with his grandfather, the blacksmith.

Richard was not altogether pleased, for he did not like leaving his work;
but his aunt again prevailed with him, and he agreed to go. In this, as
in most things, he showed her a deference such as few young men show
their mothers. Her influence came, I presume, through the strong
impression of purpose she had made on him.

His uncle objected to his going, and grumbled a good deal. As the brewer
looks down on the baker, so the bookbinder looked down on the blacksmith.

He said the people Richard would see about his grandfather, were not fit
company for the heir of Mortgrange! But he knew the necessity of his
going somewhere for a while, and gave in.




CHAPTER VI.


_SIMON ARMOUR_.

Simon Armour was past only the agility, not the strength of his youth,
and in his feats of might and skill he cherished pride. Without being
offensively conceited, he regarded himself--and well might--as the
superior of any baronet such as his daughter's husband, and desired of
him no recognition of the relationship. All he looked for from any man,
whether he stood above or beneath his own plane, was proper pay for good
work, and natural human respect. Some of the surrounding gentry, possibly
not uninfluenced, in sentiment at least, by the growing radicalism of the
age, enjoyed the free, jolly, but unpresuming carriage of the stalwart
old man, to whom, if indeed on his head the almond-tree was already in
blossom, the grasshopper was certainly not yet a burden: he could still
ply a sledge-hammer in each hand. "My lord," came from his lips in a
clear, ringing tone of good-fellowship, which the nobleman who
occasionally stopped at his forge to give him some direction about the
shoeing of this or that horse, liked well to hear, and felt the
friendlier for--though I doubt if he would have welcomed it from a
younger man.

Besides his daughter Jane and her husband, he alone was aware of the real
parentage of the lad who passed as their son; and he knew that, if he
lived long enough, an hour would call him to stand up for the rights of
his grandson. Perhaps it was partly in view of this, that he had for
years been an abstainer from strong drink; but I am inclined to attribute
the fact chiefly to his having found the love of it gaining upon him.
"Damn the drink!" he had been more than once overheard to say, "it shall
know which of us is master!" And when Simon had made up his mind to a
thing, the thing was--not indeed as good, but almost as sure as done. The
smallest of small beer was now his strongest drink.

He was a hard-featured, good-looking, white-haired man of sixty, with
piercing eyes of quite cerulean blue, and a rough voice with an undertone
of music in it. There was music, indeed, all through him. In the roughest
part of his history it was his habit to go to church--mainly, I may say
entirely, for the organ, but his behaviour was never other than reverent.
How much he understood, may be left a question somewhat dependent on how
much there may have been to understand; but he had a few ideas in
religion which were very much his own, and which, especially some with
regard to certain of the lessons from the Old Testament, would have
considerably astonished some parsons, and considerably pleased others. He
was a big, broad-shouldered man, with the brawniest arms, and eyes so
bright and scintillant that one might fancy they caught and kept for
their own use the sparks that flew from his hammer. His face was red,
with a great but short white beard, suggesting the sun in a clean
morning-fog.

A rickety omnibus carried Richard from the railway-station some five
miles to the smithy. When the old man heard it stop, he threw down his
hammer, strode hastily to the door, met his grandson with a gripe that
left a black mark and an ache, and catching up his portmanteau, set it
down inside.

"I'll go with you in a moment, lad!" he said, and seizing with a long
pair of pincers the horse-shoe that lay in process on the anvil, he
thrust it into the fire, blew a great roaring blast from the bellows,
plucked out the shoe glowing white, and fell upon it as if it were a
devil. Having thus cowed it a bit, he grew calm, and more deliberately
shaped it to an invisible idea. His grandson was delighted with the
mingling of determination, intent, and power, with certainty of result,
manifest in every blow. In two minutes he had the shoe on the end of a
long hooked rod, and was hanging it beside others on a row of nails in a
beam. Then he turned and said--

"There, lad! that's off the anvil--and off my mind! Now I'm for you!"

"Grandfather," said Richard, "I shouldn't like to have you for an enemy!"

"Why not, you rascal! Do you think I would take unfair advantage of you?"

"No, that I don't! But you've got awful arms and hands!"

"They've done a job or two in their day, lad!" he answered; "but I'm
getting old now! I can't do what I thought nothing of once. Well, no man
was made to last for ever--no more than a horse-shoe! There'd be no work
for the Maker if he did!"

"I'm glad to see we're of one mind, grandfather!" said Richard.

"Well, why shouldn't we--if so be we're in the right mind!--Yes; we must
be o' one mind if we're o' the right mind! The year or two I may be ahead
o' you in gettin' at it, goes for nothing: I started sooner!--But what
may be the mind you speak of, sonny?"

The look of keen question the old man threw on him, woke
a doubt in Richard whether he might not have misunderstood
his grandfather.

"I think," he answered, "if a man was made to last for
ever, the world would get tired of him. When a horse or a
dog has done his work, he's content--and so is his master."

"Nay, but I bean't! I bean't content to lose the old horse
as I've shod mayhap for twenty years--no, not if I bean't his
master!"

"There's no help for it, though!"

"None as I knows on. I'd be main glad to hear any news
on the subjec' as you can supply!--No, I ain't content; I'm
sorry!"

"Why don't the parsons say the old horse'll rise again?"

"'Cause the parsons knows nought about it. How should
they?"

"They say we're going to rise again."

"Why shouldn't they? I guess I'll be up as soon as I may!
I don't want no night to lie longer than rest my bones!"

"I mistook what you meant, grandfather. I thought, when
you said you weren't made to last for ever, that you meant
there was an end of you!"

"Well, so you might, and small blame to you! It's a wrong
way of speaking we all have. But you've set me thinking--whether
by mistake or not, where's the matter! I never thought what come o' the
old horse, a'ter all his four shoes takes to shinin' at oncet! For the
old smith when he drops his hammer--I have thought about _him_. Lord!--to
think o' that anvil never ringin' no more to this here fist o' mine!"

While they talked, the blacksmith had put off his thick
apron of hide; and now, catching up Richard's portmanteau
as if it had been a hand-basket, he led the way to a cottage
not far from the forge, in a lane that here turned out of the
high road. It was a humble place enough--one story and a
wide attic. The front was almost covered with jasmine, rising
from a little garden filled with cottage flowers. Behind was
a larger garden, full of cabbages and gooseberry-bushes.

A girl came to the door, with a kind, blushing face, and
hands as red as her cheeks--a great-niece of the old smith.
He passed her and led the way into a room half kitchen, half
parlour.

"Here you are, lad--_at_ home, I hope! Sech as it is, an' as
much as it's mine, it's yours, an' I hope you'll make it so."

He deposited the portmanteau, glanced quickly round, saw
that Jessie had not followed them, and said--

"You'll keep your good news till I've turned it over!"

"What good news, grandfather?"

"The good news that them as is close pared, has no call to look out for
the hoof to grow. I'm not saying you're wrong, lad--not _yet_; but
everybody mightn't think your news so good as to be worth a special
messenger! So till you're quite sure of it--"

"I _am_ quite sure of it, grandfather!"

"I'm not; and having charge of the girl there, I'll ha' no dish served i'
my house as I don't think wholesome!"

"You're right there, grandfather! You may trust me!" answered Richard
respectfully.

The blacksmith had spoken with a decision that was imperative. His red
face shone out of his white beard, and his eyes sparkled out of his red
face; his head gave a nod, and his jaws a snap.

They had tea, with bread and butter and marmalade, and much talk about
John and Jane Tuke, in which the old man said oftener, "your aunt," and
"your uncle," than "your father" or "your mother;" but Richard put it
down to the confusion that often accompanies age. When the bookbinding
came up, Richard was surprised to discover that the blacksmith was far
from looking upon their trade as superior to his own. It was plain indeed
that he regarded bookbinding as a quite inferior and scarce manly
employment. To the blacksmith, bookbinding and tailoring were much the
same--fit only for women. Richard did not relish this. He endeavoured to
make his grandfather see the dignity of the work, insisting that its
difficulty was the greater because of the less strength required in it:
the strength itself had, he said, in certain of its operations, to be
pared to the requisite fineness, to be modified with extreme accuracy;
while in others, all the strength a man had was necessary, and especially
in a shop like theirs, where everything was done by hand. But the fine
work, he said, tired one much the most.

"Fine work!" echoed the smith with contempt. "There came a gentleman here
to be shod t'other day from the Hall, who was a great traveller; and he
told me he seen in Japan a blacksmith with a sprig of may on the anvil
before him, an' him a-copyin' to the life them blossoms in hard iron with
his one hammer! What say you to that, lad?"

"Wonderful! But that same man couldn't do the heavy work you think
nothing of, grandfather!"

"Nay, for that I don't know. I know I couldn't do his!"

"Then we'll allow that fine work may be a manly thing as well as hard
work. But I do wish I could shoe a horse!"

"What's to hinder you?"

"Will you let me learn, grandfather?"

"Learn! I'll learn you myself. _You'll_ soon learn. It's not as if you
was a bumpkin to teach! The man as can do anything, can do everything."

"Come along then, grandfather! I want to let you see that though my hands
may catch a blister or two, they're not the less fit for hard work that
they can do fine. I'll be safe to shoe a horse before many days are over.
Only you must have a little patience with me."

"Nay, lad, I'll have a great patience with you. Before many days are
over, make the shoe you may, and make it well; but to shoe a horse as the
horse ought to be shod, that comes by God's grace."

They went back to the smithy, and there, the very day of his arrival,
more to Simon's delight than he cared to show, the soft-handed bookbinder
began to wield a hammer, and compel the stubborn iron. So deft and
persevering was he, that, ere they went from the forge that same night,
he could not only bend the iron to a proper curve round the beak of the
anvil, but had punched the holes in half a dozen shoes. At last he
confessed himself weary; and when his grandfather saw the state of his
hands, blistered and swollen so that he could not close them, he was able
no longer to restrain his satisfaction.

"Come!" he cried; "you're a man after all, bookbinder! In six months I
should have you a thorough blacksmith."

"I wouldn't undertake to make a bookbinder of you, grandfather, in the
time!" returned Richard.

"Tit for tat, sonny, and it's fair!" said Simon. "I should leave the
devil his mark on your white pages.--How much of them do you rend now, as
you stick them together?"

"Not a word as I stick them together. But many are brought me to be
doctored and mended up, and from some of them I take part of my pay in
reading them--books, I mean, that I wouldn't otherwise find it easy to
lay my hands upon--scarce books, you know."

"You would like to go to Oxford, wouldn't ye, lad--and lay in a stock to
last your life out?"

"You might as well think to lay victuals into you for a lifetime,
grandfather! But I should like to lay in a stock of the tools to be got
at Oxford! It would be grand to be able to pick the lock of any door I
wanted to see the other side of."

"I'll put you up to pick any lock you ever saw, or are likely to see,"
returned Armour. "I served my time to a locksmith. We didn't hit it off
always, and so hit one another--as often almost as the anvil. So when I
was out of my time, and couldn't get locksmith's work except in a large
forge, I knew better than take it: for I couldn't help getting into rows,
and was afraid of doing somebody a mischief when my blood was up. So I
started for myself as a general blacksmith-in a small way, of course. But
my right hand 'ain't forgot its cunning in locks! I'll teach you to pick
the cunningest lock in the world--whether made in Italy or in China."

"The lock I was thinking of," said Richard, "was that of the tree of
knowledge."

"I've heerd," returned Simon, with more humour than accuracy, "as that
was a raither pecooliar lock. How it was kep' red hot all the time
without coal and bellows, I don't seem to see!"

"Ah!" said Richard, "you mean the flaming sword that turned every way?"

"I reckon I do!"

"You don't say you believe that story, grandfather?"

"I don't say what I believe or what I don't believe. The flamin' iron as
I've had to do with, has both kep' me out o' knowledge, an' led me into
knowledge! I'll turn the tale over again! You see, lad, when I was a boy,
I thought everything my mother said and my father did, old-fashioned,
and a bit ignorant-like; but when I was a man, I saw that, if I had
started right off from where they set me down, I would ha' been farther
ahead. To honour your father an' mother don't mean to stick by their
chimbley-corner all your life, but to start from their front door and go
foret. I went by the back door, like the fool I was, to get into the
front road, and had a long round to make."

"I shan't do so with my father. He don't read much, but he thinks. He's
got a head, my father!"

"There was fathers afore yours, lad! You needn't scorn yer gran'ther for
your father!"

"Scorn you, grandfather! God forbid!--or, at least,--"

"You don't see what I'm drivin' at, sonny!--When an old tale comes to me
from the far-away time, I don't pitch it into the road, any more'n I
would an old key or an old shoe--a horse-shoe, I mean: it was something
once, and it may be something again! I hang the one up, and turn the
other over. An' if you be strong set on throwin' either away, lad, I
misdoubt me you an' me won't blaze together like _one_ flamin' sword!"

Richard held his peace. The old man had already somehow impressed him. If
he had not, like his father, bid good-bye to superstition, there was in
him a power that was not in his father--a power like that he found in his
favourite books.

"Mind what he says, and do what he tells you, and you'll get on
splendid!" his mother had said as he came away.

"Don't be afraid of him, but speak up: he'll like you the better for it,"
his father had counselled. "I should never have married your mother if
I'd been afraid of him."

Richard, trying to follow both counsels, got on with his grandfather
better than fairly.




CHAPTER VII.


_COMPARISONS._

All things belong to every man who yields his selfishness, which is his
one impoverishment, and draws near to his wealth, which is humanity--not
humanity in the abstract, but the humanity of friends and neighbours and
all men. Selfishness, I repeat, whether in the form of vanity or greed,
is our poverty. John Tuke, being a clever man without a spark of genius,
worshipped _faculty_ as he called it--worshipped it where he was most
familiar with it--that is, in his own mind and its operations, in his own
hands and their handiwork. His natural atmosphere, however, was, happily,
goodwill and kindliness: else the scorn of helplessness which sprang from
his worship, would have supplied the other pole to his selfishness.

He even cherished unconsciously the feeling that his faculty was a merit.
He took the credit of his individual humanity, as if the good working of
his brain, the thing he most admired, was attributable to his own will
and forethought. The idea had never arisen in that brain, that he was in
the world by no creative intent of his own. Nothing had as yet suggested
to him that, after all, if he was clever, he could not help it. It had
not occurred to him that there was a stage in his history antecedent to
his consciousness--a stage in which his pleasure with regard to the next
could not have been appealed to, or his consent asked--a stage, for any
satisfaction concerning which, his resultant consciousness must repose on
a creative will, answerable to itself for his existence. A man's patent
of manhood is, that he can call upon God--not the God of any theology,
right or wrong, but the God out of whose heart he came, and in whose
heart he is. This is his highest power--that which constitutes his
original likeness to God. Had any one tried to wake this idea in Tuke, he
would have mocked at the sound of it, never seeing it. The words which
represented it he would have thought he understood, but he would never
have laid hold of the idea. He found himself what he found himself, and
was content with the find; therefore asked no questions as to whence he
came--was to himself consequently as if he had come from nowhere--which
made it easy for him to imagine that he was going nowhither. He had never
reflected that he had not made himself, and that therefore there might be
a power somewhere that had called him into being, and had a word to say
to him on the matter. The region where he began to be, had never, in
speculation or mirage any more than in direct vision, lifted itself above
the horizon-line of his consciousness. An ordinarily well-behaved man,
with a vague narrow regard for his moral nature, and an admiration of
intellectual humanity in the abstract, he thought of himself as
exceptionally worthy, and as having neighbours mostly inferior. In
relation to Richard, he was specially pleased with himself: had he not,
for the sake of the youth, put himself in the danger of the law!

With not much more introspection than his uncle, but with a keener
conscience and quicker observation, Richard had early remarked that,
notwithstanding her assiduity in church-going, his mother did not seem
the happier for her religion: there was a cloud, or seeming cloud, on her
forehead--a something that implied the lack of clear weather within. Had
he known more he might have attributed it to anxiety about his own
future, and the bearing her deed might have upon it. He might have argued
that she dreaded the opposition she foresaw to the claim of her nephew;
and felt that if her act should have despoiled him of his inheritance,
life would be worthless to her. But in truth the cause of her habitual
gloom was much deeper. She had from her mother inherited a heavy sense of
responsibility, but not the confidence in whose strength her mother had
borne it. She had, that is, an oppressive sense of the claims of a
supernal power, but no feeling of the relationship which gives those
claims, no knowledge of the loving help offered with the presentation of
the claims. Where she might have rejoiced in the correlative claims
bestowed upon her, she nourished only complaint. That God had made her,
she could not sometimes help feeling a liberty he had taken. How could
she help it, not knowing him, or the love that gave him both the power
and the right to create! She had no window to let in the perpendicular
light of heaven; all the light she had was the horizontal light of
duty--invaluable, but, ever accompanied by its own shadow of failure,
giving neither joy nor hope nor strength. Her husband's sense of duty was
neither so strong nor so uneasy.

She had not attempted to teach Richard more, in the way of religion, than
the saying of certain prayers, a ceremony of questionable character; but
the boy, dearly loving his mother, and saddened by her lack of spirits,
had put things together--amongst the rest, that she was always gloomiest
on a Sunday--and concluded that religion was the cause of her misery.
This made him ready to welcome the merest hint of its falsehood. Well
might the doctrine be false that made such a good woman miserable! He had
no opportunity of learning what any vital, that is, _obedient_ believer
in the lord of religion, might have to say. Nothing he did hear would,
without the reflex of his mother's unhappiness, have waked in him
interest enough for hate: what was there about the heap of ashes he heard
called the means of grace, to set him searching in it for seeds of truth!
If we consider, then, the dullness of the prophecy, the evident suffering
of his mother, and the equally evident though silent contempt of his
father, we need not wonder that Richard grew up in what seemed to him a
conviction that religion was worse than a thing of nought, was an evil
phantom, with a terrible power to blight; a miasm that had steamed up
from the foul marshes of the world, before man was at home in it, or yet
acquainted with the beneficent laws of Nature. It was not merely a
hopeless task to pray to a power which could not be entreated, because it
did not exist; to believe in what was not, must be ruinous to the nature
that so believed! He would give the lie no quarter! The best thing to do
for his fellow, the first thing to be done before anything else could be
done, was to deliver him from this dragon called Faith--the more fearful
that it had no life, but owed its being and strength to the falsehood of
cowards! Had he known more of the working of what is falsely called
religion, he would have been yet more eager to destroy it. But he knew
something of the tares only; he knew nothing of the wheat among the
tares; knew nothing of the wintry gleams of comfort shed on thousands of
hearts by the most poverty-stricken belief in the merest and faultiest
silhouette of a God. What a mission it would be, he thought, to deliver
human hearts from the vampyre that, sucking away the very essence of
life, kept fanning its unconscious victims with the promise of a dreary
existence beyond the grave, secured by self-immolation on the desolate
altar of an unlovable God, who yet called himself _Love_! Was it not a
high emprise to rescue men from the incubus of such a misimagined
divinity?

From the first dawn of consciousness, the young Lestrange had loved his
kind. He gathered the chief joy of his life from a true relation to the
life around him. Perhaps the cause of the early manifestation of this
bent in him, was the longing of his mother in her loneliness after a love
that grew the move precious as it seemed farther away. She had parted
with those who always loved her, for the love of a man who never loved
her! But left to think and think, she had come at last to see that her
loss was her best gain. For, with the loss of their presence, she began
to know and prize the simplicities of human affection; from lack of love
began to lift up her heart to Love himself, the father of all our loves.

Richard's love was not such as makes of another the mirror wherein to
realize self; he loved his kind objectively, and was ready to suffer for
it. At school he was the champion of the oppressed. Almost always one or
other of the little boys would be under his protection; and more than
once, for the sake of a weaker he had got severely beaten. But having set
himself to learn the art of self-defence, his favour alone became
shelter; and successful coverture aroused in him yet more the natural
passion of protection. It became his pride as well as delight to be a
saviour to his kind. His championship now sought extension to his mother,
and to all sufferers from usurping creeds.

His grandfather found him, as he said, a chip of the old block; and
rejoiced that Nature had granted his humble blood so potent a part in
this compound of gentle and plebeian; for Richard showed himself a worthy
workman! Simon Armour declared there was nothing the fellow could not do;
and said to himself there never was such a baronet in the old Hall as his
boy Dick would make. If only, he said, all the breeds worn out with
breeding-in, would revert to the old blood of Tubal Cain, they might
recover his lease of life. The day was coming, he said to himself, when
there would be a sight to see at Mortgrange--a baronet that could shoe a
horse better than any smith in the land! If his people then would not
stand up for a landlord able to thrash every man-jack of them, and win
his bread with his own hands, they deserved to become the tenants of a
London grocer or American money-dealer! For his part, the French might
have another try! _He_ would not lift hammer against them!

By right of inheritance, Richard's muscles grew sinewy and hard, and
speedily was he capable of handling a hammer and persuading iron to the
full satisfaction of his teacher. When it came to such heavy work as
required power and skill at once, the difference between the two men was
very evident: where the whole strength is tasked, skill finds itself in
the lurch; but Simon understood what could not be at once, as well as
what would be at length. Neither was he disappointed, for, in far less
than half the time an ordinary apprentice would have taken, Richard could
hold alternate swing with the blacksmith or his man, as, blow for blow,
they pierced a block of metal to form the nave of a wheel. In ringing a
wheel, he soon excelled; and his grandfather's smithy being the place for
all kinds of blacksmith-work, Richard had learned the trade before he
left. For, as his fortnight's holiday drew to an end, he heard from his
parents that, as he was doing so well, they would like him to stay
longer.

One reason for this their wish was, that he might become thoroughly
attached to his grandfather: they desired to secure the prejudice of the
future baronet for his own people. At the same time, by developing in him
the workman, they thought to give him a better chance against further
dishonouring and degrading his race, than his wretched father had ever
had: the breed of Lestranges must, they said, be searched back for
generations to find an honest man in it. A landlord above the
selfishness, and free from the prejudices of his class, would be a new
thing in the county-histories!

At the end of six weeks, Richard could shoe a sound horse as well as his
grandfather himself. The old man had taken pains he would not have spent
on an ordinary apprentice: it was worth doing, he said; and the return
was great. Richard had made, not merely wonderful, but wonderfully steady
progress. Not once had he touched the quick in driving those perfect
nails through the rind of the marvellous hoof. From the first he
disapproved of the mode of shoeing in use, and was certain a better must
one day be discovered--one, namely, that would leave the natural motions
of hoof and leg unimpeded; but in the meantime he shod as did other
blacksmiths, and gave thorough satisfaction.




CHAPTER VIII.


_A LOST SHOE._

It was now late in the autumn. Several houses in the neighbourhood were
full of visitors, and parties on horseback frequently passed the door of
the smithy--well known to not a few of the horses.

One evening, as the sun was going down red and large, with a gorgeous
attendance of clouds, for the day had been wet but cleared in the
afternoon, a small mounted company came pretty fast along the lane, which
was deep in mud. They were no sooner upon the hard road by the smithy,
than one of the ladies discovered her mare had lost a hind shoe.

"She couldn't have pulled it off in a more convenient spot!" said a
handsome young fellow, as he dismounted and gave his horse to a groom.
"I'll take you down, Bab! Old Simon will have a shoe on Miss Brown in no
time!"

Richard followed his grandfather to the door. A little girl, as she
seemed to him, was sliding, with her hand on the young man's shoulder,
from the back of the huge mare. She was the daintiest little thing, as
lovely as she was tiny, with clear, pale, regular features, under a
quantity of dark-brown hair. But that she was not a child, he saw the
moment she was down; and he soon discovered that, not her beauty, but her
heavenly vivacity, was the more captivating thing in her. At once her
very soul seemed to go out to meet whatever object claimed her attention.
She must know all about everything, and come into relations with every
live thing! As she stood by the side of the great brown creature from
which she had dismounted--huge indeed, but carrying its bulk with a grand
grace--her head reaching but half-way up the slope of its shoulder, she
laid her cheek against it caressingly. So small and so bright, the little
lady looked a very diamond of life.

A new shoe had to be forged; those already half-made were for
work-horses. Partly from pride in his skill, Simon left the task to his
grandson, and stood talking to the young man. Little thought Richard,
as he turned the shoe on the anvil's beak, that he was his half-brother!
He was a handsome youth, not so tall as Richard, and with more
delicate features. His face was pale, and wore a rather serious, but
self-satisfied look. He talked to the old blacksmith, however, without
the slightest assumption: like others in the neighbourhood, he regarded
him as odd and privileged. There were more ladies and gentlemen, but
Richard, absorbed in his shoe, heeded none of the company.

He was not more absorbed, however, than the girl who stood beside him:
she watched every point in the making of it. Heedless of the flying
sparks, she gazed as if she meant to make the next shoe herself. Had
Richard not been too busy even to glance at her, he might have noticed,
now and then, an involuntary sympathetic motion, imitatively responsive
to one of his, invariably recurrent when he changed the position of the
glowing iron. Her mind seemed working in company with his hands; she was
all the time doing the thing herself; Richard's activity was not merely
reflected, but lived in her. When he carried the half-forged iron, to
apply it for one tentative instant to the mare's hoof, Barbara followed
him. The mare fidgeted. But her little mistress, who, noiseless and swift
as a moth, was already at her head, spoke to her, breathed in her
nostril, and in a moment made her forget what was happening in such a
far-off province of her being as a hind foot. When Richard, back at the
forge, was placing the shoe again in the fire, to his surprise her little
gloved hand alighted beside his own on the lever of the bellows,
powerfully helping him to blow. When once again the shoe was on the
anvil, there again she stood watching--and watched until he had shaped
the shoe to his intent.

Old Simon did not move to interfere: the hoof required no special
attention. Almost every horse-hoof in a large circuit of miles was known
to him--as well, he would remark, as the nail of his own thumb.

When Richard took up the foot, in order to prepare it for the reception
of its new armour, again the mare was fidgety; and again the lady
distracted her attention, comforting and soothing her while Richard
trimmed the hoof a little.

"I say, my man," cried Mr. Lestrange, "mind what you're about there with
your paring! I don't want that mare lamed.--She's much too good for
'prentice hands to learn upon, Simon!"

"Keep your mind easy, sir," answered the blacksmith. "That lad's ain't
'prentice hands. He knows what he's about as well as I do myself!"

"He's young!"

"Younger, perhaps, than you think, sir!--but he knows his work."

It was a pretty picture--the girl peeping round under the neck of the
great creature she was caressing, to see how the smith was getting on,
whose back, alas! hid his hands from her. Just as he finished driving his
second nail, the nervous animal gave her foot a jerk, and the point of
the nail, through the hoof and projecting a little, tore his hand, so
that the blood ran to the ground in a sudden rivulet.

"Hey! that don't look much like proper shoeing!" cried the young man. "I
hope to goodness that's not the mare!"

"She's all right," answered Richard, rearranging the animal's foot.

But Simon saw the blood, and sprang to his side.

"What the devil are you about, making a fool of me, Dick!" he cried. "Get
out of the way."

"It was my fault," said the sweetest voice from under the neck of the
mare, to the top of which a tiny hand was trying to reach. "My feather
must have tickled her nose!"

She caught a glimpse of the blood, and turned white.

"I am so sorry!" she said, almost tearfully. "I hope you're not much
hurt, Richard!"

Nothing seemed to escape her; she had already learned his name!

"It's not worth being sorry about, miss!" returned Richard, with a laugh.
"The mare meant no harm!"

"That I'm sure she didn't--poor Miss Brown!" answered the girl, patting
the mare's neck. "But I wish it had been _my_ hand instead!"

"God forbid!" cried Richard. "That _would_ have been a calamity!"

"It wouldn't have been half so great a one. My hand is--well, not of
_much_ use. Yours can shoe a horse!"

"Yours would have been spoiled; mine will shoe as well as before!" said
Richard.

It did not occur to the lady that the youth spoke better than might have
been expected of a country smith. She was one of the elect few that meet
every one on the common human ground, that never fear and never hurt. Her
childish size and look harmonized with the childlike in her style, but
she affected nothing. She would have spoken in the same way to prince or
poet-laureate, and would have pleased either as much as the blacksmith.
At the same time she did have pleasure in knowing that her frankness
pleased. She could not help being aware that she was a favourite, and she
wanted to be; but she wanted nothing more than to be a favourite. She
desired it with old Betty, sir Wilton's dairymaid, just as much as with
Mr. Lestrange, sir Wilton's heir; and everybody showed her favour, for
she showed everybody grace.

The old smith was finishing the shoeing, and the mare, well used to him,
and with more faith in him, stood perfectly quiet. Richard, a little
annoyed, had withdrawn, and scarce thinking what he did, had taken a rod
of iron, thrust it into the fire, and begun to blow. The little lady
approached him softly.

"I'm _so_ sorry!" she said.

"I shall be sorry too, if you think of it any more, miss!" answered
Richard. "Then there will be two sorry where there needn't be one!"

She looked up at him with a curious, interested, puzzled look, which
seemed to say, "What a nice smith you are!"

The youth's manners had a certain--what shall I call it?--not polish, but
rhythm, which came of, or at least was nourished by his love of the finer
elements in literature. His friendly converse with books, and through
them with certain of the dead who still speak, fell in with yet deeper
influences, helping to set him in right atomic position toward other
human atoms. His breed also contributed something. Happily for Richard, a
man is not born only of his father or his grandfather; mothers have a
share in the form of his being; ancestors innumerable, men and women,
leave their traces in him. But what I have ventured to call the rhythm of
his manner came of his love of verse, and of the true material of verse.

His hand kept on bleeding, and for a moment he was tempted, by bravado as
well as kindness, to use the cautery so nigh, and prove to the girl how
little he set by what troubled her; but he saw at once it would shock
her, and took, instead, a handkerchief from his pocket to bind it with.
Instantly the little lady was at his service, and he yielded to her
ministration with a pleasure hitherto unknown to him. She took the
handkerchief from his hand, but immediately gave it him again, saying,
"It is too black!" and drawing her own from her pocket, deftly bound up
his wound with it. Speech abandoned Richard. All present looked on in
silence. Certain of the company had seen her the day before tie up the
leg of a wounded dog, and had admired her for it; but this was different!
She was handling the hand of a human being--man--a workman!--black and
hard with labour! There was no necessity: the man was not in the least
danger! It was nothing but a scratch! She was forgetting what was due to
herself--and to them! Thus they thought, but thus they dared not speak.
They knew her, and feared what she might say in reply. The mare was shod
ere the handkerchief was tied to the lady's mind, and Simon stood, hammer
in hand, looking on like the rest in silence, but with a curious smile.

As she took her hands from his, the young blacksmith looked thankfulness
into her eyes--which sparkled and shone with the pleasure of human
fellowship, and without the least shyness returned his gaze.

"There! Good-bye! I am so sorry! I hope your hand will be well soon!" she
said, and at once followed her mare, which the smith's man was leading
with caution through the door of the smithy, rather too low for Miss
Brown.

Lestrange helped her to the saddle in silence, and before Richard
realized that she was gone, he heard the merriment of the party mingling
with the clang of their horses' hoofs, as they went swinging down the
road. The fairy had set them all laughing already!

The instant they were gone, Simon showed a strange concern over the
insignificant wound: he had been hasty with Richard, and unfair to him!
Had he driven his nail one hair's-breadth too near the quick, Miss
Brown would have made the smithy tight for them! He seemed anxious to
show, without actual confession, that he knew he had spoken angrily, and
was sorry for it. He could not have shod the mare better himself, he
said--but why the deuce did he let her tear his hand! It was not likely
to gather, though, seeing Richard drank water! He must do nothing for a
day or two! To-morrow being Saturday, they would have a holiday together,
and leave the work to George!




CHAPTER IX.


_A HOLIDAY._

Richard was willing enough, and it only remained to settle what they
would do with their holiday. Suppressing a chuckle, Simon proposed that
they should have a walk, and a look at Mortgrange: it was a place well
worth seeing! "And then," he added, giving his grandson a poke, "we can
ask after the mare, and learn how her new shoe fits." They had known him
there, he said, the last thirty years, and would let them have the run of
the place, for sir Wilton and his lady were from home. Richard had
never--to his knowledge--heard of Mortgrange, for Simon had hitherto
avoided even mentioning the place; but he was ready to go wherever his
grandfather pleased. Jessie would have company of her own, Simon said,
with a nod and a wink: they need not trouble themselves about her!

So the next day, as soon us they had had their breakfast, they set out to
walk the four or five miles that, by the road, lay between them and
Mortgrange. It was a fine frosty morning. Not a few yellow leaves were
still hanging, and the sun was warm and bright. It was one of those days
near the death of the year, that make us wonder why the heart of man
should revive and feel strong, while nature is falling into her dreary
trance. Richard was dressed in a tradesman's Sunday clothes, but
tradesman as he was, and was proud to be, he did not altogether look one.
He was in high spirits--for no reason but that his spirits were high. He
was happy because he was happy--"like any other body!" he would have
said: where was the wonder such a fine day, with a pleasant walk before
him, and his jolly grandfather for company! That he could not make one
hair white or black, one hour blessed or miserable, did not occur to him.
Yet he believed that joy or sorrow determined whether life was or was not
worth living! He had never said to himself, "Here I am, and cannot help
being, and yet can order nothing! Even to-day I am happy only because I
cannot help it!" He had indeed begun to learn that a man has his duty to
mind before his happiness, and that was much; but he had not yet been
tried in the matter of doing his duty when unhappy. How would he feel
then? Would he think duty without happiness worth living for? He was
happy now, and that was enough! The putting forth of their strength and
skill doubtless makes many men feel happy--so long as they are in health;
but how when they come to feel that that health is nowise in their power?
While they have it, it seems a part of their being inalienable; when they
have lost it, a thing irrecoverable. Richard took the thing that came,
asked no questions, returned no thanks. He found himself here:--whence he
came he did not care; whither he went he did not inquire. The present was
enough, for the present was good; when the present was no longer good,
why, then,--!

There are those to whom the present cannot be good save as a mode of the
infinite. In such their divine origin asserts itself. Once known for what
it is, the poorest present is a phial holding the elixir of life.

On their way Simon talked about the place they were going to see, and
said its present owner was an elderly man, not very robust, with a second
wife, who looked as if she had not a drop of warm blood, and yet as if
she might live for ever.

"That was their son that came with the little lady," he said.

"And the little lady was their daughter, I suppose!" rejoined Richard,
with an odd quiver somewhere near his heart.

"She's an Australian, they say," answered his grandfather; "--no
relation, I fancy."

"Is Mortgrange a grand place?" asked Richard.

"It's a fine house and a great estate," answered Simon. "More might be
made of it, no doubt; and I hope one day more will be made of it."

"What do you mean by that, grandfather?"

"That I hope the son will make a better landlord than the father."

They came to a great iron gate, standing open, without any lodge.

"We're in luck!" said the blacksmith. "This will save us a long round!
Somebody must have rode out, and been too lazy to shut it! We'd better
leave it as we find it, though! Or say we bring the two halves together
without snapping the locks! I know the locks; I put 'em both on
myself.--See now what a piece of work that gate is! All done with the
hand! None o' your beastly casting there! Up to _your_ work, that, I'm
thinking, lad!"

"Indeed it is! Those gates are worth reducing, for plates to stamp the
covers of a right precious volume with!"

Simon misunderstood, and was on the point of flaring up, but what Richard
followed with quieted him.

"I could almost give up bookbinding to work a pair of gates like those!"
he said.

"I believe you, my boy!" returned his grandfather. "Come and live with
me, and you shall!"

"But who would buy them when I had worked them?"

"If nobody had the sense, we'd put 'em up before the cottage!"

"Like a door-lock on a prayer-book!"

"No matter! They would be worth the worth of themselves!"

"You would have to make the wall so high, there would be no light in the
house!" persisted Richard.

"Tut, man! did you never hear of a joke? All I say is, that if you'll
come and work with me--I don't need to slave more than I like; I've got a
few pounds in the bank!--if you'll work, I'll teach you. Leave me to find
a fit place for what comes of it! They do most things at the foundries
now, but there's a market yet for hammer-work--if it be good enough, and
not too dear; for them as knows a good thing when they sees it, ain't
generally got much money to buy things. It's my opinion the only way to
learn the worth of a thing, is to have to go without it."

"Few people fancy iron gates, I fear."

"More might fancy them if they were to be had good," returned the old
man.

The gate had admitted them to a long winding road, with clumps of trees
here and there on the borders of it. The road was apparently not much
used, for it was more than sprinkled with grass all over. A ploughed
field was on one side, and a wild heathy expanse, dotted with fir-trees,
on the other. Suddenly on the side of the field, gradually on that of the
heath, the ground changed to the green sward of a park.

"A grand place for thinking!" said Richard to himself.

But in truth Richard had hardly yet begun to think. He only followed the
things that came to him; he never said to things, _Come;_ neither, when
they came, did he keep them, and make them walk up and down before him
till he saw what they were; he did not search out their pedigree, get
them to give an account of themselves, show what they could do, or, in
short, be themselves to him. He had written a few verses--not bad verses,
but with feeling only, not thought in them. For instance, he had
addressed an ode to the allegorical personage called Liberty, in which he
bepraised her until, had she been indeed a woman, she must have been
ashamed: she was the one essential of life! the one glory of existence!
he was no man who would not die for her! But what was the thing he thus
glorified? Liberty to go where you pleased, do what you liked, say what
you chose!--that was all. Of inward liberty, of freedom from mental or
spiritual oppression, from passion, from prejudice, from envy, from
jealousy, from selfishness, from unfairness, from ambition, from false
admiration, from the power of public opinion, from any motive energy save
that of love and truth--a freedom of which outward freedom is scarce the
shadow--of such liberty, for all the good books he had read, for all the
good poems he had admired, Richard had not yet begun to dream, not to say
_think_. Then again, he would write about love, and he had never been in
love in his life! All he knew of love was the pleasure of imagining
himself the object of a tall, dark-eyed, long-haired, devoted woman's
admiration. He had never even thought whether he was worthy of being
loved. He was indeed more worthy of love than many to whom it is freely
given; but he knew no more about it, I say, than a chicken in the shell
knows of the blue sky. The shabby spinster, living with her cousin the
baker in the house opposite, knew a hundred times better than he what the
word _love_ meant: she had a history, he had none.

I will not describe the house of Mortgrange. It seemed to Richard the
oldest house he had ever seen, and it moved him strangely. He said to
himself the man must be happy who called such a house his own, lived in
it, and did what he liked with it. The road they had taken brought them
to the back of the Hall, as the people on the estate called the house.
The blacksmith went to a side-door, and asked if he and his grandson
might have a look at the place: he had heard the baronet was from home!
The man said he would see; and returning presently, invited them to walk
in.

Knowing his grandson's passion, Simon's main thought in taking him was to
see him in the library, with its ten thousand volumes: it would be such a
joke to watch him pondering, admiring, coveting his own! As soon,
therefore, as they were in the great hall, he asked the servant whether
they might not see the library. The man left them again, once more to
make inquiry.

It was a grand old hall where they stood, fitter for the house of
a great noble than a mere baronet; but then the family was older than
any noble family in the county, and the poor baronetcy, granted to a
foolish ancestor, on carpet considerations, by the needy hand of the
dominie-king, was no great feather in the cap of the Lestranges. The
house itself was older than any baronetcy, for no part of it was later
than the time of Elizabeth. It was of fine stone, and of great size. The
hall was nearly sixty feet in height, with three windows on one side, and
a great one at the end. They were thirty feet from the floor, had round
heads, and looked like church-windows. The other side was blank.
Mid-height along the end opposite the great window ran a gallery.

To the sudden terror of Richard, who stood absorbed in the stateliness of
the place, an organ in the gallery burst out playing. He looked up
trembling, but could see only the tops of the pipes. As the sounds rolled
along the roof, reverberated from the solid walls, and crept about the
corners, it seemed to him that the soul of the place was throbbing in his
ears the words of a poem centuries old, which he had read a day or two
before leaving London:--

"Erthe owte of erthe es wondirly wroghte,
Erthe hase getyn one erthe a dignyte of noghte,
Erthe appone erthe hase sett alle his thoghte,
How that erthe appone erthe may be heghe broghte."

As he listened, his eyes settled upon a suit of armour in position: it
became to him a man benighted, lost, forgotten in the cold; the bones
were all dusted ou