The Marquis of Lossie Part 33

"You mean you would kill yourself but for your belief in G.o.d?"

"By life, I meant being, my lady. If there were no G.o.d, I dared not kill myself, lest worse should be waiting me in the awful voids beyond. If there be a G.o.d, living or dying is all one--so it be what he pleases."

"I have read of saints," said Clementina, with cool dissatisfaction in her tone, "uttering such sentiments--"

"Sentiments!" said Malcolm to himself

"--and I do not doubt such were felt or at least imagined by them; but I fail to understand how, even supposing these things true, a young man like yourself should, in the midst of a busy world, and with an occupation which, to say the least,--"

Here she paused. After a moment Malcolm ventured to help her.

"Is so far from an ideal one--would you say, my lady?"

"Something like that," answered Clementina, and concluded "I wonder how you can have arrived at such ideas."

"There is nothing wonderful in it, my lady," returned Malcolm.

"Why should not a youth, a boy, a child, for as a child I thought about what the kingdom of heaven could mean, desire with all his might that his heart and mind should be clean, his will strong, his thoughts just, his head clear, his soul dwelling in the place of life? Why should I not desire that my life should be a complete thing, and an outgoing of life to my neighbour? Some people are content not to do mean actions: I want to become incapable of a mean thought or feeling; and so I shall be before all is done."

"Still, how did you come to begin so much earlier than others?"

"All I know as to that, my lady, is that I had the best man in the world to teach me."

"And why did not I have such a man to teach me? I could have learned of such a man too."

"If you are able now, my lady, it does not follow that it would have been the best thing for you sooner. Some children learn far better for not being begun early, and will get before others who have been at it for years. As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you--in a book, or a friend, or, best of all in your own thoughts--the eternal thought speaking in your thought."

It flashed through her mind, "Can it be that I have found it now --on the lips of a groom?"

Was it her own spirit or another that laughed strangely within her?

"Well, as you seem to know so much better than other people," she said, "I want you to explain to me how the G.o.d in whom you profess to believe can make use of such cruelties. It seems to me more like the revelling of a demon."

"My lady!" remonstrated Malcolm, "I never pretended to explain. All I say is, that, if I had reason for hoping there was a G.o.d, and if I found, from my own experience and the testimony of others, that suffering led to valued good, I should think, hope, expect to find that he caused suffering for reasons of the highest, purest and kindest import, such as when understood must be absolutely satisfactory to the sufferers themselves. If a man cannot believe that, and if he thinks the pain the worst evil of all, then of course he cannot believe there is a good G.o.d. Still, even then, if he would lay claim to being a lover of truth, he ought to give the idea--the mere idea of G.o.d fair play, lest there should be a good G.o.d after all, and he all his life doing him the injustice of refusing him his trust and obedience."

"And. how are we to give the mere idea of him fair play?" asked Clementina, rather contemptuously. But I think she was fighting emotion, confused and troublesome.

"By looking to the heart of whatever claims to be a revelation of him."

"It would take a lifetime to read the half of such."

"I will correct myself, and say--whatever of the sort has best claims on your regard--whatever any person you look upon as good, believes and would have you believe--at the same time doing diligently what you know to be right; for, if there be a G.o.d, that must be his will, and, if there be not, it remains our duty."

All this time, Florimel was working away at her embroidery, a little smile of satisfaction flickering on her face. She was pleased to hear her clever friend talking so with her strange va.s.sal. As to what they were saying, she had no doubt it was all right, but to her it was not interesting. She was mildly debating with herself whether she should tell her friend about Lenorme.

Clementina's work now lay on her lap and her hands on her work, while her eyes at one time gazed on the gra.s.s at her feet, at another searched Malcolm's face with a troubled look. The light of Malcolm's candle was beginning to penetrate into her dusky room, the power of his faith to tell upon the weakness of her unbelief.

There is no strength in unbelief. Even the unbelief of what is false is no source of might. It is the truth s.h.i.+ning from behind that gives the strength to disbelieve. But into the house where the refusal of the bad is followed by no embracing of the good-- the house empty and swept and garnished--the bad will return, bringing with it seven evils that are worse.

If something of that sacred mystery, holy in the heart of the Father, which draws together the souls of man and woman, was at work between them, let those scoff at the mingling of love and religion who know nothing of either; but man or woman who, loving woman or man, has never in that love lifted the heart to the Father, and everyone whose divine love has not yet cast at least an arm round the human love, must take heed what they think of themselves, for they are yet but paddlers in the tide of the eternal ocean. Love is a lifting no less than a swelling of the heart, What changes, what metamorphoses, transformations, purifications, glorifications, this or that love must undergo ere it take its eternal place in the kingdom of heaven, through all its changes yet remaining, in its one essential root, the same, let the coming redemption reveal.

The hope of all honest lovers will lead them to the vision. Only let them remember that love must dwell in the will as well as in the heart.

But whatever the nature of Malcolm's influence upon Lady Clementina, she resented it, thinking towards and speaking to him repellently.

Something in her did not like him. She knew he did not approve of her, and she did not like being disapproved of. Neither did she approve of him. He was pedantic--and far too good for an honest and brave youth: not that she could say she had seen dishonesty or cowardice in him, or that she could have told which vice she would prefer to season his goodness withal, and bring him to the level of her ideal. And then, for all her theories of equality, he was a groom--therefore to a lady ought to be repulsive--at least when she found him intruding into the chambers of her thoughts --personally intruding--yes, and met there by some traitorous feelings whose behaviour she could not understand. She resented it all, and felt towards Malcolm as if he were guilty of forcing himself into the sacred presence of her bosom's queen--whereas it was his angel that did so, his Idea, over which he had no control.

Clementina would have turned that Idea out, and when she found she could not, her soul started up wrathful, in maidenly disgust with her heart, and cast resentment upon everything in him whereon it would hang. She had not yet, however, come to ask herself any questions; she had only begun to fear that a woman to whom a person from the stables could be interesting, even in the form of an unexplained riddle, must be herself a person of low tastes; and that, for all her pride in coming of honest people, there must be a drop of bad blood in her somewhere.

For a time her eyes had been fixed on her work, and there had been silence in the little group.

"My lady!" said Malcolm, and drew a step nearer to Clementina.

She looked up. How lovely she was with the trouble in her eyes!

Thought Malcolm, "If only she were what she might be! If the form were but filled with the spirit! the body with life!"

"My lady!" he repeated, just a little embarra.s.sed, "I should like to tell you one thing that came to me only lately--came to me when thinking over the hard words you spoke to me that day in the park. But it is something so awful that I dare not speak of it except you will make your heart solemn to hear it."

He stopped, with his eyes questioning hers. Clementina's first thought once more was madness, but as she steadily returned his look, her face grew pale, and she gently bowed her head in consent.

"I will try then," said Malcolm. "--Everybody knows what few think about, that once there lived a man who, in the broad face of prejudiced respectability, truth hating hypocrisy, commonplace religion, and dull book learning, affirmed that he knew the secret of life, and understood the heart and history of men--who wept over their sorrows, yet wors.h.i.+pped the G.o.d of the whole earth, saying that he had known him from eternal days. The same said that he came to do what the Father did, and that he did nothing but what he had learned of the Father. They killed him, you know, my lady, in a terrible way that one is afraid even to think of. But he insisted that he laid down his life; that he allowed them to take it. Now I ask whether that grandest thing, crowning his life, the yielding of it to the hand of violence, he had not learned also from his Father. Was his death the only thing he had not so learned? If I am right, and I do not say if in doubt, then the suffering of those three terrible hours was a type of the suffering of the Father himself in bringing sons and daughters through the cleansing and glorifying fires, without which the created cannot be made the very children of G.o.d, partakers of the divine nature and peace. Then from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering, up to the loftiest pitch, the divinest acme of pain, there is not one pang to which the sensorium of the universe does not respond; never an untuneful vibration of nerve or spirit but thrills beyond the brain or the heart of the sufferer to the brain, the heart of the universe; and G.o.d, in the simplest, most literal, fullest sense, and not by sympathy alone, suffers with his creatures."

"Well, but he is able to bear it; they are not: I cannot bring myself to see the right of it."

"Nor will you, my lady, so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good they get by it.--My lady, when I was trying my best with poor Kelpie, you would not listen to me."

"You are ungenerous," said Clementina, flus.h.i.+ng.

"My lady," persisted Malcolm, "you would not understand me. You denied me a heart because of what seemed in your eyes cruelty. I knew that I was saving her from death at the least, probably from a life of torture: G.o.d may be good, though to you his government may seem to deny it. There is but one way G.o.d cares to govern--the way of the Father King--and that way is at hand.--But I have yet given you only the one half of my theory: If G.o.d feels pain, then he puts forth his will to bear and subject that pain; if the pain comes to him from his creature, living in him, will the endurance of G.o.d be confined to himself, and not, in its turn, pa.s.s beyond the bounds of his individuality, and react upon the sufferer to his sustaining? I do not mean that sustaining which a man feels from knowing his will one with G.o.d's and G.o.d with him, but such sustaining as those his creatures also may have who do not or cannot know whence the sustaining comes. I believe that the endurance of G.o.d goes forth to uphold, that his patience is strength to his creatures, and that, while the whole creation may well groan, its suffering is more bearable therefore than it seems to the repugnance of our regard."

"That is a dangerous doctrine," said Clementina.

"Will it then make the cruel man more cruel to be told that G.o.d is caring for the tortured creature from the citadel of whose life he would force an answer to save his own from the sphinx that must at last devour him, let him answer ever so wisely? Or will it make the tender less pitiful to be consoled a little in the agony of beholding what they cannot alleviate? Many hearts are from sympathy as sorely in need of comfort as those with whom they suffer. And to such I have one word more--to your heart, my lady, if it will consent to be consoled: The animals, I believe, suffer less than we, because they scarcely think of the past, and not at all of the future. It is the same with children, Mr Graham says they suffer less than grown people, and for the same reason. To get back something of this privilege of theirs, we have to be obedient and take no thought for the morrow."

Clementina took up her work. Malcolm walked away.

"Malcolm," cried his mistress, "are you not going on with the book?"

"I hope your ladys.h.i.+p will excuse me," said Malcolm. "I would rather not read more just at present."

It may seem incredible that one so young as Malcolm should have been able to talk thus, and indeed my report may have given words more formal and systematic than his really were. For the matter of them, it must be remembered that he was not young in the effort to do and understand; and that the advantage to such a pupil of such a teacher as Mr Graham is illimitable.

CHAPTER XLIII: A PERPLEXITY

After Malcolm's departure, Clementina attempted to find what Florimel thought of the things her strange groom had been saying: she found only that she neither thought at all about them, nor had a single true notion concerning the matter of their conversation.

Seeking to interest her in it and failing, she found however that she had greatly deepened its impression upon herself.