Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely Romance

With none of the conventionalities of society, Lady Joan saw no reason for making a difficulty when, the day after that on which her father died, Cosmo proposed a walk in the snow. He saw her properly provided for what seemed to her an adventure—with short skirts, and stockings over her shoes—and they set out together, in the brilliant light of a sun rapidly declining toward the western horizon, though it had but just passed the low noon. The moment she stepped from the threshold, Joan was invaded by an almost giddy sense of freedom. The keen air and the impeding snow sent the warm blood to her cheeks, and her heart beat as if new-born into a better world. She was annoyed with herself, but in vain she called herself heartless; in vain she accused herself of indifference to the loss of her father, said to herself she was a worthless girl: there was the sun in the sky—not warm, but dazzling-bright and shining straight into her very being! while the air, instinct with life, was filling her lungs like water drunk by a thirsty soul, and making her heart beat like the heart of Eve when first she woke alive, and felt what her Maker had willed! Life indeed was good! it was a blessed thing for the eyes to behold the sun!—Let death do what it can, there is just one thing it cannot destroy, and that is life. Never in itself, only in the unfaith of man, does life recognize any sway of death.—A fresh burst of healthy vigour seemed born to answer each fresh effort. Over the torrent they walked on a bridge of snow, and listening could hear, far down, below the thick white blanket, the noise of its hidden rushing. Away and up the hill they went; the hidden torrent of Joan's blood flowed clearer; her heart sang to her soul; and everything began to look like a thing in a story—herself a princess, and her attendant a younger brother, travelling with her to meet the tide of in-flowing lovely adventure. Such a brother was a luxury she had never had—very different from an older one. He talked so strangely too—now like a child, now like an old man! She felt a charm in both, but understood neither. Capable, through confidence in his father, of receiving wisdom far beyond what he could have thought out for himself, he sometimes said things because he understood them, which seemed to most who heard them beyond his years. Some people only understand enough of a truth to reject it, but Cosmo's reception by faith turned to sight, as all true faith does at last, and formed a soil for thought more immediately his own.

They had been climbing a steep ascent, very difficult in the snow, and had at length reached the top, where they stood for a moment panting, with another ascent beyond them.

"Aren't you always wanting to climb and climb, Lady Joan?" said the boy.

"Call me Joan, and I will answer you."

"Then, Joan,—how kind you are! Don't you always want to be getting up?—up higher than you are?"

"No; I don't think I do."

"I believe you do, only you don't know it. When I get on the top of yon hill there, it always seems to me such a little way up!—and Mr. Simon tells me I should feel much the same, if it were the top of the highest peak in the Himmalays."

Lady Joan did not reply, and Cosmo too was silent for a time.

"Don't you think," he began again, "though life is so very good—to me especially with you here—you would get very tired if you thought you had to live in this world always—for ever and ever and ever, and never, never get out of it?"

"No, I don't," said Joan. "I can't say I find life so nice as you think it, but one keeps hoping it may turn to something better."

She was amused with what she counted childish talk for a boy of his years—so manly too beyond his years!

"That is very curious!" he returned. "Now I am quite happy; but this moment I should feel just in a prison, if I thought I should never get to another world; for what you can never get out of, is your prison—isn't it?"

"Yes—but if you don't want to get out?"

"Ah, that is true! but as soon as that comes to a prisoner, it is a sign that he is worn out, and has not life enough in him to look the world in the face. I was talking about it the other day with Mr. Simon, else I shouldn't have got it so plain. The blue roof so high above us there, is indeed very different from the stone vault of a prison, for there is no stop or end to it. But if you can never get away from under it, never get off the floor at the bottom of it, I feel as if it might almost as well be something solid that held me in. There would be no promise in the stars then: they look now like promises, don't they? I do not believe God would ever show us a thing he did not mean to give us."

"You are a very odd boy, Cosmo. I am almost afraid to listen to you. You say such presumptuous things!"

Cosmo laughed a little gentle laugh.

"How can you love God, Joan, and be afraid to speak before him? I should no more dream of his being angry with me for thinking he made me for great and glad things, and was altogether generous towards me, than I could imagine my father angry with me for wishing to be as wise and as good as he is, when I know it is wise and good he most wants me to be."

"Ah, but he is your father, you know, and that is very different!"

"I know it is very different—God is so much, much more my father than is the laird of Glenwarlock! He is so much more to me, and so much nearer to me, though my father is the best father that ever lived! God, you know, Joan, God is more than anybody knows what to say about. Sometimes, when I am lying in my bed at night, my heart swells and swells in me, that I hardly know how to bear it, with the thought that here I am, come out of God, and yet not OUT of him—close to the very life that said to everything BE, and it was! —you think it strange that I talk so?"

"Rather, I must confess! I don't believe it can be a good thing at your age to think so much about religion. There is a time for everything. You talk like one of those good little children in books that always die—at least I have heard of such books—I never saw any of them."

Cosmo laughed again.

"Which of us is the merrier—you or me? Which of us is the stronger, Joan? The moment I saw you, I thought you looked like one that hadn't enough of something—as if you weren't happy; but if you knew that the great beautiful person we call God, was always near you, it would be impossible for you to go on being sad."

Joan gave a great sigh: her heart knew its own bitterness, and there was little joy in it for a stranger to intermeddle with. But she said to herself the boy would be a gray-haired man before he was twenty, and began to imagine a mission to help him out of these morbid fancies.

"You must surely understand, Cosmo," she said, "that, while we are in this world, we must live as people of this world, not of another."

"But you can't mean that the people of this world are banished from Him who put them in it! He is all the same, in this world and in every other. If anything makes us happy, it must make us much happier to know it for a bit of frozen love—for the love that gives is to the gift as water is to snow. Ah, you should hear our torrent sing in summer, and shout in the spring! The thought of God fills me so full of life that I want to go and do something for everybody. I am never miserable. I don't think I shall be when my father dies."

"Oh, Cosmo!—with such a good father as yours! I am shocked."

Her words struck a pang into her own heart, for she felt as if she had compared his father and hers, over whom she was not miserable. Cosmo turned, and looked at her. The sun was close upon the horizon, and his level rays shone full on the face of the boy.

"Lady Joan," he said slowly, and with a tremble in his voice, "I should just laugh with delight to have to die for my father. But if he were taken from me now, I should be so proud of him, I should have no room to be miserable. As God makes me glad though I cannot see him, so my father would make me glad though I could not see him. I cannot see him now, and yet I am glad because my father IS—away down there in the old castle; and when he is gone from me, I shall be glad still, for he will be SOMEWHERE all the same—with God as he is now. We shall meet again one day, and run at each other."

It was an odd phrase with which he ended, but Lady Joan did not laugh.

The sun was down, and the cold, blue gray twilight came creeping from the east. They turned and walked home, through a luminous dusk. It would not be dark all night, though the moon did not rise till late, for the snow gave out a ghostly radiance. Surely it must be one of those substances that have the power of drinking and hoarding the light of the sun, that with their memories of it they may thin the darkness! I suspect everything does it more or less. Far below were the lights of the castle, and across an unbroken waste of whiteness the gleams of the village. The air was keen as an essence of points and edges, and the thought of the kitchen fire grew pleasant. Cosmo took Joan's hand, and down the hill they ran, swiftly descending what they had toilsomely climbed.

As she ran, the thought that one of those lights was burning by the body of her father, rebuked Joan afresh. She was not glad, and she could not be sorry! If Cosmo's father were to die, Cosmo would be both sorry and glad! But the boy turned his face, ever and again as they ran, up to hers—she was a little taller than he—and his every look comforted her. An attendant boy-angel he seemed, whose business it was to rebuke and console her. If he were her brother, she would be well content never more to leave the savage place! For the strange old man in the red night-cap was such a gentleman! and this odd boy, absolutely unnatural in his goodness, was nevertheless charming! She did not yet know that goodness is the only nature. She regarded it as a noble sort of disease—as something at least which it was possible to have too much of. She had not a suspicion that goodness and nothing else is life and health—that what the universe demands of us is to be good boys and girls.

To judge religion we must have it—not stare at it from the bottom of a seeming interminable ladder. When she reached the door, she felt as if waking out of a dream, in which she had been led along strange paths by a curious angel. But not to himself was Cosmo like an angel! For indeed he was a strong, viguorous, hopeful, trusting boy of God's in this world, and would be just such a boy in the next—one namely who did his work, and was ready for whatever was meant to come.

When, from all that world of snow outside, Joan entered the kitchen with its red heart of fire, she knew for a moment how a little bird feels when creeping under the wing of his mother. Those old Hebrews—what poets they were! Holy and homely and daring, they delighted in the wings of the Almighty; but the Son of the Father made the lovely image more homely still, likening himself to the hen under whose wings the chickens would not creep for all her crying and calling. Then first was Joan aware of simple confidence, of safety and satisfaction and loss of care; for the old man in the red nightcap would see to everything! Nought would go amiss where he was at the head of affairs! And hardly was she seated when she felt a new fold of his protection about her: he told her he had had her room changed, that she might be near his mother and Grizzie, and not have to go out to reach it.

Cosmo heard with delight that his father had given up his room to Lady Joan, and would share his. To sleep with his father was one of the greatest joys the world held for him. Such a sense of safety and comfort—of hen's wings—was nowhere else to be had on the face of the great world! It was the full type of conscious well-being, of softness and warmth and peace in the heart of strength. His father was to him a downy nest inside a stone-castle.

They all sat together round the kitchen fire. The laird fell into a gentle monologue, in which, to Joan's thinking, he talked even more strangely than Cosmo. Things born in the fire and the smoke, like the song of the three holy children, issued from the furnace clothed in softest moonlight. Joan said to herself it was plain where the boy got his oddity; but what she called oddity was but sense from a deeper source than she knew the existence of. He read them also passages of the book then occupying him so much: Joan wondered what attraction such a jumble of good words and no sense could have for a man so capable in ordinary affairs. Then came supper; and after that, for the first time in her life, Joan was present when a man had the presumption to speak to his Maker direct from his own heart, without the mediation of a book. This she found odder than all the rest; she had never even heard of such a thing! So peculiar, so unfathomable were his utterances, that it never occurred to her the man might be meaning something; farther from her still was the thought, that perhaps God liked to hear him, was listening to him and understanding him, and would give him the things he asked. She heard only an extraordinary gibberish, supposed suitable to a religious observance—family prayers, she thought it must be! She felt confused, troubled, ashamed—so grievously out of her element that she never knew until they rose, that the rest were kneeling while she sat staring into the fire. Then she felt guilty and shy, but as nobody took any notice, persuaded herself they had not observed. The unpleasantness of all this, however, did not prevent her from saying to herself as she went to bed, "Oh, how delightful it would be to live in a house where everybody understood, and loved, and thought about everybody else!" She did not know that she was wishing for nothing more, and something a little less, than the kingdom of heaven—the very thing she thought the laird and Cosmo so strange for troubling their heads about. If men's wishes are not always for what the kingdom of heaven would bring them, their miseries at least are all for the lack of that kingdom.

That night Joan dreamed herself in a desert island, where she had to go through great hardships, but where everybody was good to everybody, and never thought of taking care except of each other; and that, when a beautiful ship came to carry her away, she cried, and would not go.

Three weeks of all kinds of weather, except warm, followed, ending with torrents of rain, and a rapid thaw; but before that time Joan had got as careless of the weather as Cosmo, and nothing delighted her more than to encounter any sort of it with him. Nothing kept her in-doors, and as she always attended to Grizzie's injunctions the moment she returned, she took no harm, and grew much stronger. It is not encountering the weather that is dangerous, but encountering it when the strength is not equal to the encounter. These two would come in wet from head to foot, change their clothes, have a good meal, sleep well, and wake in the morning without the least cold. They would spend the hours between breakfast and dinner ascending the bank of a hill-stream, dammed by the snow, swollen by the thaw, and now rushing with a roar to the valley; or fighting their way through wind and sleet to the top of some wild expanse of hill-moorland, houseless for miles and miles—waste bog, and dry stony soil, as far as eye could reach, with here and there a solitary stock or bush, bending low to the ground in the steady bitter wind—a hopeless region, save that it made the hope in their hearts glow the redder; or climbing a gully, deep-worn by the few wheels of a month but the many of centuries, and more by the torrents that rushed always down its trench when it rained heavily, or thawed after snow—hearing the wind sweep across it above their heads, but feeling no breath of its pres—ence, till emerging suddenly upon its plane, they had to struggle with it for very foot-hold upon the round earth. In such contests Lady Joan delighted. It was so nice, she said, to have a downright good fight, and nobody out of temper! She would come home from the windy war with her face glowing, her eyes flashing, her hair challenging storm from every point of the compass, and her heart merry with very peacefulness. Her only thoughts of trouble were, that her father's body lay unburied, and that Borland would come and take her away.

When the thaw came at last, the laird had the coffin brought again into the guest-chamber, and there placed on trestles, to wait the coming of the new Lord Mergwain.

Outstripping the letter that announced his departure, he arrived at length, and with him his man of business. Lady Joan's heart gave a small beat of pleasure at sight of him, then lay quiet, sad, and apprehensive: the cold proper salute he gave her seemed, after the life she had of late been living, to belong rather to some sunless world than the realms of humanity. He uttered one commonplace concerning his father's death, and never alluded to it again; behaved in a dignified, recognizant manner to the laird, as to an inferior to whom he was under more obligation than he saw how to wipe out; and, after the snub with which he met the boy's friendly approach, took no farther notice of Cosmo. Seated three minutes, he began to require the laird's assistance towards the removal of the body; could not be prevailed upon to accept refreshment; had a messenger dispatched instantly to procure the nearest hearse and four horses; and that same afternoon started for England, following the body, and taking his sister with him.

CHAPTER XIX.

AN "INTERLUNAR CAVE."

And so the moon died out of Cosmo's heaven. But it was only the moon. The sun remained to him—his father—visible type of the great sun, whose light is too keen for souls, and heart and spirit only can bear. But when he had received Joan's last smile, when she turned away her face, and the Ungenial, who had spoiled everything at Glenwarlock, carried her away, then indeed for a moment a great cloud came over the light of his life, and he sought where to hide his tears. It was a sickening time, for suddenly she had come, suddenly entered his heart, and suddenly departed. But such things are but clouds, and cannot but pass. Ah, reader! it may be your cloud has not yet passed, and you scorn to hear it called one, priding yourself that your trouble is eternal. But just because you are eternal, your trouble cannot be. You may cling to it, and brood over it, but you cannot keep it from either blossoming into a bliss, or crumbling to dust. Be such while it lasts, that, when it passes, it shall leave you loving more, not less.

There was this difference between Cosmo and most young men of clay finer than ordinary, that, after the first few moments of the seemingly unendurable, he did not wander about moody, nursing his sorrow, and making everybody uncomfortable because he was uncomfortable; but sought the more the company of his father, and of Mr. Simon, from whom he had been much separated while Lady Joan was with them. For such a visit was an opportunity most precious in the eyes of the laird. With the sacred instinct of a father he divined what the society of a lady would do for his boy—for the ripening of his bloom, and the strengthening of his volition. Two days had not passed before he began to be aware of a softening and clearing of his speech; of greater readiness and directness in his replies; of an indescribable sweetening of the address, that had been sweet, with a rose-shadow of gentle apology cast over every approach; of a deepening of the atmosphere of his reverence, which yet as it deepened grew more diaphanous. And when now the episode of angelic visitation was over, with his usual wisdom he understood the wrench her abrupt departure must have given his whole being, and allowed him plenty of time to recover himself from it. Once he came upon him weeping: not with faintest overshadowing did he rebuke him, not with farthest hint suggest weakness in his tears. He went up to him, laid his hand gently on his head, stood thus a moment, then turned without a word, and left him. Nowise because of his sorrow did he regret the freedom he had granted their intercourse. He knew what the sharp things of life are to the human plant; that its frosts are as needful as its sunshine, its great passion-winds as its gentle rains; that a divine result is required, and that his son was being made divinely human; that in aid of this end the hand of man must humbly follow the great lines of Nature, ready to withhold itself, anxious not to interfere. Most people resist the marvellous process; call in the aid of worldly wisdom for low ends; and bring the experience of their own failures to bear for the production of worse. But there is no escaping the mill that grinds slowly and grinds small; and those who refuse to be living stones in the living temple, must be ground into mortar for it.

The next day, of his own choice, Cosmo went to Mr. Simon. He also knew how to treat the growing plant. He set him such work as should in a measure harmonize with his late experience, and so drew him gently from his past: mere labour would have but driven him deeper into it. Yesterday is as much our past as the bygone century, and sheltering in it from an uncongenial present, we are lost to our morrow. Thus things slid gently back with him into their old grooves. An era of blessedness had vanished, but was not lost; it was added to his life, gathered up into his being; it was dissolved into his consciousness, and interpenetrated his activity. Where there is no ground of regret, or shame, or self-reproach, new joy casts not out the old; and now that the new joy was old, the older joys came softly trooping back to their attendance. Nor was this all. The departing woman left behind her a gift that had never been hers—the power of verse: he began to be a poet. The older I grow the more am I filled with marvel at the divine idea of the mutual development of the man and the woman. Many a woman has made of a man, for the time at least, and sometimes for ever, a poet, caring for his verses never a cambric handkerchief or pair of gloves! A wretched man to whom a poem is not worth a sneer, may set a woman singing to the centuries!

Any gift of the nature of poetry, however poor or small, is of value inestimable to the development of the individual, ludicrous even though it may show itself, should conceit clothe it in print. The desire of fame, so vaunted, is the ruin of the small, sometimes of the great poet. The next evil to doing anything for love of money, is doing it for the love of fame. A man may have a wife who is all the world to him, but must he therefore set her on a throne? Cosmo, essentially and peculiarly practical, never thought of the world and his verses together, but gathered life for himself in the making of them.

These children of his, like all real children, strengthened his heart, and upheld his hands. In them Truth took to him shape; in them she submitted herself to his contemplation. He grew faster, and from the days of his mourning emerged more of a man, and abler to look the world in the face.

From that time also he learned and understood more rapidly, though he never came to show any great superiority in the faculties most prized of this world, whose judgment differs from that of God's kingdom in regard to the comparative value of intellectual gifts almost as much as it does in regard to the relative value of the moral and the intellectual. Not the less desirable however did it seem in the eyes of both his father and his tutor, that, if it could anyhow be managed, he should go the next winter to college. As to how it could be managed, the laird took much serious thought, but saw no glimmer of light in the darkness of apparent impossibility. An unsuspected oracle was however at hand.

Old servants of the true sort, have, I fancy, a kind of family instinct. From the air about them almost, from the personal carriage, from words dropped that were never meant for them, from the thoughtful, troubled, or eager look, and the sought or avoided conference, they get possessed by a notion both of how the wind is blowing, and of how the ship wants to sail. But Grizzie was capable of reasoning from what she saw. She marked the increase of care on the brow of her master; noted that it was always greater after he and Mr. Simon had had a talk at which Cosmo, the beloved of both, was not present; and concluded that their talk, and the laird's trouble, must be about Cosmo. She noted also that both were as much pleased with him as ever, and concluded therefore it was his prospects and not his behaviour that caused the uneasiness. Then again she noted how fervently at prayers her master entreated guidance to do neither more nor less than the right thing; and from all put together, and considered in the light of a tolerably accurate idea of the laird's circumstances, Grizzie was able not only to arrive at a final conclusion, but to come to the resolution of offering—not advice—that she would never have presumed upon—but a suggestion.