The Seaboard Parish, Complete

We were now walking along the edge of the still retreating waves towards the group upon the sands, Mr. Percivale and I foremost, and Wynnie lingering behind.

“O, do look here papa!” she cried, from some little distance.

We turned and saw her gazing at something on the sand at her feet. Hastening back, we found it to be a little narrow line of foam-bubbles, which the water had left behind it on the sand, slowly breaking and passing out of sight. Why there should be foam-bubbles there then, and not always, I do not know. But there they were—and such colours! deep rose and grassy green and ultramarine blue; and, above all, one dark, yet brilliant and intensely-burnished, metallic gold. All of them were of a solid-looking burnished colour, like opaque body-colour laid on behind translucent crystal. Those little ocean bubbles were well worth turning to see; and so I said to Wynnie. But, as we gazed, they went on vanishing, one by one. Every moment a heavenly glory of hue burst, and was nowhere.

We walked away again towards the rest of our party.

“Don’t you think those bubbles more beautiful than any precious stones you ever saw, papa?”

“Yes, my love, I think they are, except it be the opal. In the opal, God seems to have fixed the evanescent and made the vanishing eternal.”

“And flowers are more beautiful things than jewels?’ she said interrogatively.

“Many—perhaps most flowers are,” I granted. “And did you ever see such curves and delicate textures anywhere else as in the clouds, papa?”

“I think not—in the cirrhous clouds at least—the frozen ones. But what are you putting me to my catechism for in this way, my child?”

“O, papa, I could go on a long time with that catechism; but I will end with one question more, which you will perhaps find a little harder to answer. Only I daresay you have had an answer ready for years lest one of us should ask you some day.”

“No, my love. I never got an answer ready for anything lest one of my children should ask me. But it is not surprising either that children should be puzzled about the things that have puzzled their father, or that by the time they are able to put the questions, he should have found out some sort of an answer to most of them. Go on with your catechism, Wynnie. Now for your puzzle!”

“It’s not a funny question, papa; it’s a very serious one. I can’t think why the unchanging God should have made all the most beautiful things wither and grow ugly, or burst and vanish, or die somehow and be no more. Mamma is not so beautiful as she once was, is she?”

“In one way, no; but in another and better way, much more so. But we will not talk about her kind of beauty just now; we will keep to the more material loveliness of which you have been speaking—though, in truth, no loveliness can be only material. Well, then, for my answer; it is, I think, because God loves the beauty so much that he makes all beautiful things vanish quickly.”

“I do not understand you, papa.”

“I daresay not, my dear. But I will explain to you a little, if Mr. Percivale will excuse me.”

“On the contrary, I am greatly interested, both in the question and the answer.”

“Well, then, Wynnie; everything has a soul and a body, or something like them. By the body we know the soul. But we are always ready to love the body instead of the soul. Therefore, God makes the body die continually, that we may learn to love the soul indeed. The world is full of beautiful things, but God has saved many men from loving the mere bodies of them, by making them poor; and more still by reminding them that if they be as rich as Croesus all their lives, they will be as poor as Diogenes—poorer, without even a tub—when this world, with all its pictures, scenery, books, and—alas for some Christians!—bibles even, shall have vanished away.”

“Why do you say alas, papa—if they are Christians especially?”

“I say alas only from their point of view, not from mine. I mean such as are always talking and arguing from the Bible, and never giving themselves any trouble to do what it tells them. They insist on the anise and cummin, and forget the judgment, mercy, and faith. These worship the body of the truth, and forget the soul of it. If the flowers were not perishable, we should cease to contemplate their beauty, either blinded by the passion for hoarding the bodies of them, or dulled by the hebetude of commonplaceness that the constant presence of them would occasion. To compare great things with small, the flowers wither, the bubbles break, the clouds and sunsets pass, for the very same holy reason, in the degree of its application to them, for which the Lord withdrew from his disciples and ascended again to his Father—that the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the Soul of things, might come to them and abide with them, and so the Son return, and the Father be revealed. The flower is not its loveliness, and its loveliness we must love, else we shall only treat them as flower-greedy children, who gather and gather, and fill hands and baskets, from a mere desire of acquisition, excusable enough in them, but the same in kind, however harmless in mode, and degree, and object, as the avarice of the miser. Therefore God, that we may always have them, and ever learn to love their beauty, and yet more their truth, sends the beneficent winter that we may think about what we have lost, and welcome them when they come again with greater tenderness and love, with clearer eyes to see, and purer hearts to understand, the spirit that dwells in them. We cannot do without the ‘winter of our discontent.’ Shakspere surely saw that when he makes Titania say, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

  ‘The human mortals want their winter here’—

namely, to set things right; and none of those editors who would alter the line seem to have been capable of understanding its import.”

“I think I understand you a little,” answered Wynnie. Then, changing her tone, “I told you, papa, you would have an answer ready; didn’t I?”

“Yes, my child; but with this difference—I found the answer to meet my own necessities, not yours.”

“And so you had it ready for me when I wanted it.”

“Just so. That is the only certainty you have in regard to what you give away. No one who has not tasted it and found it good has a right to offer any spiritual dish to his neighbour.”

Mr. Percivale took no part in our conversation. The moment I had presented him to Mrs. Walton and Connie, and he had paid his respects by a somewhat stately old-world obeisance, he merged the salutation into a farewell, and, either forgetting my offer of coffee, or having changed his mind, withdrew, a little to my disappointment, for, notwithstanding his lack of response where some things he said would have led me to expect it, I had begun to feel much interested in him.

He was scarcely beyond hearing, when Dora came up to me from her digging, with an eager look on her sunny face.

“Hasn’t he got nice boots, papa?”

“Indeed, my dear, I am unable to support you in that assertion, for I never saw his boots.”

“I did, then,” returned the child; “and I never saw such nice boots.”

“I accept the statement willingly,” I replied; and we heard no more of the boots, for his name was now substituted for his nickname. Nor did I see himself again for some days—not in fact till next Sunday—though why he should come to church at all was something of a puzzle to me, especially when I knew him better.

CHAPTER III. THE BLACKSMITH

The next day I set out after breakfast to inquire about a blacksmith. It was not every or any blacksmith that would do. I must not fix on the first to do my work because he was the first. There was one in the village, I soon learned; but I found him an ordinary man, who, I have no doubt, could shoe a horse and avoid the quick, but from whom any greater delicacy of touch was not to be expected. Inquiring further, I heard of a young smith who had lately settled in a hamlet a couple of miles distant, but still within the parish. In the afternoon I set out to find him. To my surprise, he was a pale-faced, thoughtful-looking man, with a huge frame, which appeared worn rather than naturally thin, and large eyes that looked at the anvil as if it was the horizon of the world. He had got a horse-shoe in his tongs when I entered. Notwithstanding the fire that glowed on the hearth, and the sparks that flew like a nimbus in eruption from about his person, the place looked very dark to me entering from the glorious blaze of the almost noontide sun, and felt cool after the deep lane through which I had come, and which had seemed a very reservoir of sunbeams. I could see the smith by the glow of his horse-shoe; but all between me and the shoe was dark.

“Good-morning,” I said. “It is a good thing to find a man by his work. I heard you half a mile off or so, and now I see you, but only by the glow of your work. It is a grand thing to work in fire.”

He lifted his hammered hand to his forehead courteously, and as lightly as if the hammer had been the butt-end of a whip.

“I don’t know if you would say the same if you had to work at it in weather like this,” he answered.

“If I did not,” I returned, “that would be the fault of my weakness, and would not affect the assertion I have just made, that it is a fine thing to work in fire.”

“Well, you may be right,” he rejoined with a sigh, as, throwing the horse-shoe he had been fashioning from the tongs on the ground, he next let the hammer drop beside the anvil, and leaning against it held his head for a moment between his hands, and regarded the floor. “It does not much matter to me,” he went on, “if I only get through my work and have done with it. No man shall say I shirked what I’d got to do. And then when it’s over there won’t be a word to say agen me, or—”

He did not finish the sentence. And now I could see the sunlight lying in a somewhat dreary patch, if the word dreary can be truly used with respect to any manifestation of sunlight, on the dark clay floor.

“I hope you are not ill,” I said.

He made no answer, but taking up his tongs caught with it from a beam one of a number of roughly-finished horse-shoes which hung there, and put it on the fire to be fashioned to a certain fit. While he turned it in the fire, and blew the bellows, I stood regarding him. “This man will do for my work,” I said to myself; “though I should not wonder from the look of him if it was the last piece of work he ever did under the New Jerusalem.” The smith’s words broke in on my meditations.

“When I was a little boy,” he said, “I once wanted to stay at home from school. I had, I believe, a little headache, but nothing worth minding. I told my mother that I had a headache, and she kept me, and I helped her at her spinning, which was what I liked best of anything. But in the afternoon the Methodist preacher came in to see my mother, and he asked me what was the matter with me, and my mother answered for me that I had a bad head, and he looked at me; and as my head was quite well by this time, I could not help feeling guilty. And he saw my look, I suppose, sir, for I can’t account for what he said any other way; and he turned to me, and he said to me, solemn-like, ‘Is your head bad enough to send you to the Lord Jesus to make you whole?’ I could not speak a word, partly from bashfulness, I suppose, for I was but ten years old. So he followed it up, as they say: ‘Then you ought to be at school,’ says he. I said nothing, because I couldn’t. But never since then have I given in as long as I could stand. And I can stand now, and lift my hammer, too,” he said, as he took the horse-shoe from the forge, laid it on the anvil, and again made a nimbus of coruscating iron.

“You are just the man I want,” I said. “I’ve got a job for you, down to Kilkhaven, as you say in these parts.”

“What is it, sir? Something about the church? I should ha’ thought the church was all spick and span by this time.”

“I see you know who I am,” I said.

“Of course I do,” he answered. “I don’t go to church myself, being brought up a Methodist; but anything that happens in the parish is known the next day all over it.”

“You won’t mind doing my job though you are a Methodist, will you?” I asked.

“Not I, sir. If I’ve read right, it’s the fault of the Church that we don’t pull all alongside. You turned us out, sir; we didn’t go out of ourselves. At least, if all they say is true, which I can’t be sure of, you know, in this world.”

“You are quite right there though,” I answered. “And in doing so, the Church had the worst of it—as all that judge and punish their neighbours have. But you have been the worse for it, too: all of which is to be laid to the charge of the Church. For there is not one clergyman I know—mind, I say, that I know—who would have made such a cruel speech to a boy as that the Methodist parson made to you.”

“But it did me good, sir?”

“Are you sure of that? I am not. Are you sure, first of all, it did not make you proud? Are you sure it has not made you work beyond your strength—I don’t mean your strength of arm, for clearly that is all that could be wished, but of your chest, your lungs? Is there not some danger of your leaving someone who is dependent on you too soon unprovided for? Is there not some danger of your having worked as if God were a hard master?—of your having worked fiercely, indignantly, as if he wronged you by not caring for you, not understanding you?”

He returned me no answer, but hammered momently on his anvil. Whether he felt what I meant, or was offended at my remark, I could not then tell. I thought it best to conclude the interview with business.

“I have a delicate little job that wants nice handling, and I fancy you are just the man to do it to my mind,” I said.

“What is it, sir?” he asked, in a friendly manner enough.

“If you will excuse me, I would rather show it to you than talk about it,” I returned.

“As you please, sir. When do you want me?”

“The first hour you can come.”

“To-morrow morning?”

“If you feel inclined.”

“For that matter, I’d rather go to bed.”

“Come to me instead: it’s light work.”

“I will, sir—at ten o’clock.”

“If you please.”

And so it was arranged.

CHAPTER IV. THE LIFE-BOAT

The next day rose glorious. Indeed, early as the sun rose, I saw him rise—saw him, from the down above the house, over the land to the east and north, ascend triumphant into his own light, which had prepared the way for him; while the clouds that hung over the sea glowed out with a faint flush, as anticipating the hour when the west should clasp the declining glory in a richer though less dazzling splendour, and shine out the bride of the bridegroom east, which behold each other from afar across the intervening world, and never mingle but in the sight of the eyes. The clear pure light of the morning made me long for the truth in my heart, which alone could make me pure and clear as the morning, tune me up to the concert-pitch of the nature around me. And the wind that blew from the sunrise made me hope in the God who had first breathed into my nostrils the breath of life, that he would at length so fill me with his breath, his wind, his spirit, that I should think only his thoughts and live his life, finding therein my own life, only glorified infinitely.

After breakfast and prayers, I would go to the church to await the arrival of my new acquaintance the smith. In order to obtain entrance, I had, however, to go to the cottage of the sexton. This was not my first visit there, so that I may now venture to take my reader with me. To reach the door, I had to cross a hollow by a bridge, built, for the sake of the road, over what had once been the course of a rivulet from the heights above. Now it was a kind of little glen, or what would in Scotland be called a den, I think, grown with grass and wild flowers and ferns, some of them, rare and fine. The roof of the cottage came down to the road, and, until you came quite near, you could not but wonder where the body that supported this head could be. But you soon saw that the ground fell suddenly away, leaving a bank against which the cottage was built. Crossing a garden of the smallest, the principal flowers of which were the stonecrop on its walls, by a flag-paved path, you entered the building, and, to your surprise, found yourself, not in a little cottage kitchen, as you expected, but in a waste-looking space, that seemed to have forgotten the use for which it had been built. There was a sort of loft along one side of it, and it was heaped with indescribable lumber-looking stuff with here and there a hint at possible machinery. The place had been a mill for grinding corn, and its wheel had been driven by the stream which had run for ages in the hollow of which I have already spoken. But when the canal came to be constructed, the stream had to be turned aside from its former course, and indeed was now employed upon occasion to feed the canal; so that the mill of necessity had fallen into disuse and decay. Crossing this floor, you entered another door, and turning sharp to the left, went down a few steps of a ladder-sort of stair, and after knocking your hat against a beam, emerged in the comfortable quaint little cottage kitchen you had expected earlier. A cheerful though small fire burns in the grate—for even here the hearth-fire has vanished from the records of cottage-life—and is pleasant here even in the height of summer, though it is counted needful only for cooking purposes. The ceiling, which consists only of the joists and the boards that floor the bedroom above, is so low, that necessity, if not politeness, would compel you to take off your already-bruised hat. Some of these joists, you will find, are made further useful by supporting each a shelf, before which hangs a little curtain of printed cotton, concealing the few stores and postponed eatables of the house—forming, in fact, both store-room and larder of the family. On the walls hang several coloured prints, and within a deep glazed frame the figure of a ship in full dress, carved in rather high relief in sycamore.

As I now entered, Mrs. Coombes rose from a high-backed settle near the fire, and bade me good-morning with a courtesy.

“What a lovely day it is, Mrs. Coombes! It is so bright over the sea,” I said, going to the one little window which looked out on the great Atlantic, “that one almost expects a great merchant navy to come sailing into Kilkhaven—sunk to the water’s edge with silks, and ivory, and spices, and apes, and peacocks, like the ships of Solomon that we read about—just as the sun gets up to the noonstead.”

Before I record her answer, I turn to my reader, who in the spirit accompanies me, and have a little talk with him. I always make it a rule to speak freely with the less as with the more educated of my friends. I never talk down to them, except I be expressly explaining something to them. The law of the world is as the law of the family. Those children grow much the faster who hear all that is going on in the house. Reaching ever above themselves, they arrive at an understanding at fifteen, which, in the usual way of things, they would not reach before five-and-twenty or thirty; and this in a natural way, and without any necessary priggishness, except such as may belong to their parents. Therefore I always spoke to the poor and uneducated as to my own people,—freely, not much caring whether I should be quite understood or not; for I believed in influences not to be measured by the measure of the understanding.

But what was the old woman’s answer? It was this:

“I know, sir. And when I was as young as you”—I was not so very young, my reader may well think—“I thought like that about the sea myself. Everything come from the sea. For my boy Willie he du bring me home the beautifullest parrot and the talkingest you ever see, and the red shawl all worked over with flowers: I’ll show it to you some day, sir, when you have time. He made that ship you see in the frame there, sir, all with his own knife, out on a bit o’ wood that he got at the Marishes, as they calls it, sir—a bit of an island somewheres in the great sea. But the parrot’s gone dead like the rest of them, sir.—Where am I? and what am I talking about?” she added, looking down at her knitting as if she had dropped a stitch, or rather as if she had forgotten what she was making, and therefore what was to come next.

“You were telling me how you used to think of the sea—”

“When I was as young as you. I remember, sir. Well, that lasted a long time—lasted till my third boy fell asleep in the wide water; for it du call it falling asleep, don’t it, sir?”

“The Bible certainly does,” I answered.

“It’s the Bible I be meaning, of course,” she returned. “Well, after that, but I don’t know what began it, only I did begin to think about the sea as something that took away things and didn’t bring them no more. And somehow or other she never look so blue after that, and she give me the shivers. But now, sir, she always looks to me like one o’ the shining ones that come to fetch the pilgrims. You’ve heard tell of the Pilgrim’s Progress, I daresay, sir, among the poor people; for they du say it was written by a tinker, though there be a power o’ good things in it that I think the gentlefolk would like if they knowed it.”

“I do know the book—nearly as well as I know the Bible,” I answered; “and the shining ones are very beautiful in it. I am glad you can think of the sea that way.”

“It’s looking in at the window all day as I go about the house,” she answered, “and all night too when I’m asleep; and if I hadn’t learned to think of it that way, it would have driven me mad, I du believe. I was forced to think that way about it, or not think at all. And that wouldn’t be easy, with the sound of it in your ears the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning.”

“The truth of things is indeed the only refuge from the look of things,” I replied. “But now I want the key of the church, if you will trust me with it, for I have something to do there this morning; and the key of the tower as well, if you please.”

With her old smile, ripened only by age, she reached the ponderous keys from the nail where they hung, and gave them into my hand. I left her in the shadow of her dwelling, and stepped forth into the sunlight. The first thing I observed was the blacksmith waiting for me at the church door.

Now that I saw him in the full light of day, and now that he wore his morning face upon which the blackness of labour had not yet gathered, I could see more plainly how far he was from well. There was a flush on his thin cheek by which the less used exercise of walking revealed his inward weakness, and the light in his eyes had something of the far-country in them—“the light that never was on sea or shore.” But his speech was cheerful, for he had been walking in the light of this world, and that had done something to make the light within him shine a little more freely.

“How do you find yourself to-day?” I asked.

“Quite well, sir, I thank you,” he answered. “A day like this does a man good. But,” he added, and his countenance fell, “the heart knoweth its own bitterness.”

“It may know it too much,” I returned, “just because it refuses to let a stranger intermeddle therewith.”

He made no reply. I turned the key in the great lock, and the iron-studded oak opened and let us into the solemn gloom.

It did not require many minutes to make the man understand what I wanted of him.

“We must begin at the bells and work down,” he said.

So we went up into the tower, where, with the help of a candle I fetched for him from the cottage, he made a good many minute measurements; found that carpenter’s work was necessary for the adjustment of the hammers and cranks and the leading of the rods, undertook the management of the whole, and in the course of an hour and a half went home to do what had to be done before any fixing could be commenced, assuring me that he had no doubt of bringing the job to a satisfactory conclusion, although the force of the blow on the bell would doubtless have to be regulated afterwards by repeated trials.

“In a fortnight, I hope you will be able to play a tune to the parish, sir,” he added, as he took his leave.

I resolved, if possible, to know more of the man, and find out his trouble, if haply I might be able to give him any comfort, for I was all but certain that there was a deeper cause for his gloom than the state of his health.