There & Back Part 18

_"I know I should."_

"I don't believe you. And I won't wors.h.i.+p him."

"Why, who wants you to wors.h.i.+p him? You must be a very different person before he will care much for your wors.h.i.+p! You _can't_ wors.h.i.+p him while you think him what you do. He is something quite different. You don't know him to love, and you don't know him to wors.h.i.+p."

"Why, bless my soul! ain't it your business--ain't you always making people say their prayers?"

"It is my business to help my brothers and sisters to know G.o.d, and wors.h.i.+p him in spirit and in truth--because he is altogether and perfectly true and loving and fair. Do you think he would have you wors.h.i.+p a being such as you take him to be. If your son is in good company in the other world, he must be greatly troubled at the way you treat G.o.d--at your unfairness to him. But your bad example may, for anything I know, have sent him where he has not yet begun to learn anything!"

"G.o.d have mercy!--will the man tell me to my face that my boy is in h.e.l.l?"

"What would you have? Would you have him with the being you think so unjust that you hate him all the week, and openly insult him on Sunday?"

"You are a bad man, a hard-hearted brute, a devil, to say such things about my blessed boy! Oh my G.o.d! to think that the very day he was taken ill, I struck him! Why did he let me do it? To think that that very day he killed him, when he ought to have killed me!--killed him that I might never be able to tell him I was sorry!"

"If he had not taken him then, would you ever have been sorry you struck him!"

She burst into outcry and weeping, mingled with such imprecation, that Wingfold thought it one of those cases of possession in which nothing but prayer is of use. But the soul and the demon were so united, so entirely of one mind, that there was no room for prayer to get between them. He sat quiet, lifted up his heart, and waited. By and by there came a lull, and the redeemable woman appeared, emerging from the smoke of the fury.

"Oh my Harry! my Harry!" she cried. "To take him from my very bosom! He will never love me again! G.o.d _shall_ know what I think of it! No mother could but hate him if he served her so!"

"Apparently you don't want the boy back in your bosom again!"

"None of your fooling of me now!" she answered, drawing herself up, and drying her eyes. "I can stand a good deal, but I won't stand that!

What's gone is gone! He's dead, and the dead lie in no bosom but that of the grave! They go, and return never more!"

"But you will die too!"

"What do you mean by that? You _will_ be talking! As if I didn't know I'd got to die, one day or another! What's that to me and Harry!"

"Then you think we're all going to cease and go out, like the clouds that are carried away and broken up by the wind?"

"I know nothing about it, and I don't care. Nothing's anything to me but Harry, and I shall never see my Harry again!--Heaven! Bah! What's heaven without Harry!"

"Nothing, of course! But don't you ever think of seeing him again?"

"What's the use! It's all a mockery! Where's the good of meeting when we shan't be human beings any more? If we're nothing but ghosts--if he's never to know me--if I'm never to feel him in my arms--ugh! it's all humbug! If he ever meant to give me back my Harry, why did he take him from me? If he didn't mean me to rage at losing him, why did he give him to me?"

"He gave you his brother at the same time, and you refused to love him: what if he took the one away until you should have learned to love the other?"

"I can't love him; I won't love him! He has his father to love him! He don't want my love! I haven't got it to give him! Harry took it with him! I hate Peter!--What are you doing there--laughing in your sleeve?

Did you never see a woman cry?"

"I've seen many a woman cry, but never without my heart crying with her.

You come to my church, and behave so badly I can scarce keep from crying for you. It half choked me last Sunday, to see you lying there with that horrid book in your hand, and the words of Christ in your ears!"

"I didn't heed them. It wasn't a horrid book!"

"It _was_ a horrid book. You left it behind you, and I took it with me.

I laid it on my study-table, and went out again. When I came home to dinner, my wife brought it to me and said, 'Oh, Tom, how can you read such books?' 'My dear,' I answered, 'I don't know what is in the book; I haven't read a word of it.'"

"And then you told her where you found it?"

"I did not."

"What did you do with it?"

"I said to her, 'If it's a bad book, here goes!' and threw it in the fire."

"Then I'm not to know the end of the story! But I can send to London for another copy! I'm much obliged to you, Mr. Wingfold, for destroying my property!--But you didn't tell her where you found it?"

"I did not. She never asked me."

Mrs. Wylder was silent. She seemed a little ashamed, perhaps a little softened. Wingfold bade her good-morning. She did not answer him.

CHAPTER XIX. _MRS. WYLDER AND BARBARA._

To make all this quite credible to a doubting reader, it would be necessary to tell Mrs. Wylder's history from girlhood. She had had a very defective education, and what there was of it was all for show.

Then she was married far too young, and to a man unworthy of any good woman. She indeed was not a good woman, but she was capable of being made worse; and in the bush, where she pa.s.sed years not a few, and in cities afterward, she met women and men more lawless yet than herself or her husband. Overbearing where her likings were concerned, and full of a certain generosity where but her interests were in question, the slackness of the social bonds in the colonies had favoured her abnormal development. It is difficult to say how much man or woman is the worse for doing, when freed from restraint, what he or she would have been glad to do before, but for the restraint. Many who go to the colonies, and there to the dogs, only show themselves such as they dared not appear at home: they step on a steeper slope, and arrive, not at the pit, for they were in that already, but at the bottom of it, so much the faster. There were, however, in Mrs. Wylder, lovely rudimentary remnants of a good breed. She inherited feelings which gave her a certain intermittent and fugitive dignity, of some service to others in her wilder times, and to herself when she came into contact with an older civilisation. She would occasionally do a right generous thing--not seldom give with a freedom and judge with a liberality which were mainly rooted in carelessness.

She had much confidence in her daughter; and it said well for the mother that, with all her experience, she yet had this confidence--and none the less that she had never taken pains to instruct her in what was becoming. The most she had done in this way was once to s.n.a.t.c.h from her hand and throw in the fire a novel she had herself, a moment before, finished with unquestioning acceptance. If she had found her behaving like some of her acquaintance to whose conduct she did not give a second thought, for her friends might do as they pleased so long as they did not offend _her_, she would certainly, in some of her moods at least, have killed her.

While compelled, from lack of service, to employ herself in house affairs, she neither ate nor drank more than seemed good for her; but as soon as she had but to live and be served, she began to counterbalance _ennui_ with self-indulgence, and continued to do so until the death of her boy, ever after which she had sought refuge from grief in narcotics.

Possibly she would not have behaved as she did in church, but that her nervous being was a very sponge for morphia. Born to be a strong woman, she was a slave to her impulses, and, one of the weakest of her kind, went into a rage at the least show of opposition.

Scarcely had Mr. Wingfold left the room, when in came Barbara in her riding-habit, with the glow of joyous motion upon her face, for she had just ridden from Mortgrange.

"How do you do, mamma?" she said, but did not come within a couple of yards of her. "I've had such a ride--as straight as any crow could fly, between the two stations! I never could hit the line before. But I got a country-fellow to point me out a landmark or two, and here I am in just half the time I should have taken by the road! Such jumps!"

"You're a madcap!" said her mother. "You'll be brought home on a shutter some day! Mark my words, Bab! You'll see!--or at least I shall; you'll be past seeing! But it don't matter; it's what we're made for! Die or be killed, it's all one! I don't care!"

"I do though, mamma! I don't want to be killed just yet--and I don't mean to be! But I must have a second horse! I begin to suspect Miss Brown of treating me like a child. She takes care of me! I mean to let her see what _I_ can do if _she's_ up to it!"

"You'll do nothing of the kind! I'll have her shot if you go after any of your old pranks! And, while I think of it, Bab--your father has set his heart on your marrying Mr. Lestrange: I can see it perfectly, and I won't have it! If I hear of anything of that sort between you, I'll set a heavy foot on it.--How long have you been there this time?"

"A week.--But why shouldn't I marry Mr. Lestrange if I like?"

"Because your father has set his heart on it, I tell you! Isn't that enough, you tiresome little wretch? I _will not_ have it--not if you break your heart over it!--There!"

Barbara burst out in a laugh that rang like a bronze bell.

"Break my heart for Mr. Lestrange! There's not a man in the world I would break my little finger for! But my heart! that is too funny! You needn't be uneasy, mamma; I don't like Arthur Lestrange one bit, and I wouldn't marry him if you and papa too wanted me. Oh, such a proper young man! He doesn't think me fit company for his sister!"

"He said so! and you didn't give him a cut over the eyes with your whip?

My G.o.d!"