There & Back

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.