Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers Part 11

He would have broken out into tumultuous barking if she had not silenced him instantly, and he was forced to content himself with leaping up at her and leaving marks of his paws all over her cloak.

Not a soul was to be seen, and she went on undisturbed till she came to her favourite spot where she had first met Mr. Armstrong. She paced about for a little while, and then sat down and once more watched the dawn. It was not a clear sky, but barred towards the east with cloud, the rain-cloud of the night. She watched and watched, and thought after her fas.h.i.+on, mostly with incoherence, but with rapidity and intensity. At last came the first flash of scarlet upon the bars, and the dead storm contributed its own share to the growing beauty. The rooks were now astir, and flew, one after the other, in an irregular line eastwards black against the sky. Still the colour spread, until at last it began to rise into pure light, and in a moment more the first glowing point of the disc was above the horizon. Miriam fell on her knees against the little seat and sobbed, and the dog, wondering, came and sat by her and licked her face with tender pity. Presently she recovered, rose, went home, let herself in softly before her husband was downstairs, and prepared the breakfast. He soon appeared, was in the best of spirits, and laughed at her being able to leave the room without waking him. She looked happy, but was rather quiet at their meal; and after he had caressed the cat for a little while, he pitched her, as he had done before, on Miriam's lap. She was about to get up to cut some bread and b.u.t.ter, and she went behind him and kissed the top of his head. He turned round, his eyes sparkling, and tried to lay hold of her, but she stepped backward and eluded him. He mused a little, and when she sat down he said in a tone which for him was strangely serious--

"Thank you, my dear; that was very, very sweet."

MICHAEL TREVANION.

Michael Trevanion was a well-to-do stonemason in the town of Perran in Cornwall. He was both working-man and master, and he sat at one end of the heavy stone-saw, with David Trevenna, his servant, at the other, each under his little canopy to protect them a trifle from the sun and rain, slowly and in full view of the purple Cornish sea, sawing the stone for hours together: the water dripped slowly on the saw from a little can above to keep the steel cool, and occasionally they interchanged a word or two--always on terms of perfect equality, although David took wages weekly and Michael paid them. Michael was now a man of about five and forty. He had married young and had two children, of whom the eldest was a youth just one and twenty. Michael was called by his enemies Antinomian. He was fervently religious, upright, temperate, but given somewhat to moodiness and pa.s.sion. He was singularly shy of talking about his own troubles, of which he had more than his share at home, but often strange clouds cast shadows upon him, and the reasons he gave for the change observable in him were curiously incompetent to explain such results. David, who had watched him from the other end of the saw for twenty years, knew perfectly what these attacks of melancholy or wrath meant, and that, though their a.s.signed cause lay in the block before them or the weather, the real cause was indoors. His trouble was made worse, because he could not understand why he received no relief, although he had so often laid himself open before the Lord, and wrestled for help in prayer. In his younger days he had been subject to great temptation.

One night he had nearly fallen, but an Invisible Power seized him. "It was no more I," he said, "than if somebody had come and laid hold of me by the scruff of my neck," and he was forced away in terror upstairs to his bedroom, where he went on his knees in agony, and the Devil left him, and he became calm and pure. But no such efficient help was given him in the trial of his life. He knew in his better moments, that the refusal of grace was the Lord's own doing, and he supposed that it was due to His love and desire to try him; but upon this a.s.surance he could not continually rest. It slipped away from under him, and at times he felt himself to be no stronger than the merest man of the world.

His case was very simple and very common--the simplest, commonest case in life. He married, as we have said, when he was young, before he knew what he was doing, and after he had been married twelvemonths, he found he did not care for his wife. When they became engaged, he was in the pride of youth, but curbed by his religion. He mistook pa.s.sion for love; reason was dumb, and had nothing to do with his choice; he made the one, irretrievable false step and was ruined. No strong antipathy developed itself; there were no quarrels, but there was a complete absence of anything like confidence. Michael had never for years really consulted his wife in any difficulty, because he knew he could not get any advice worth a moment's consideration; and he often contrasted his lot with that of David, who had a helpmate like that of the left arm to the right, who knew everything about his affairs, advised him in every perplexity, and cheered him when cast down--a woman on whom he really depended. As David knew well enough, although he never put it in the form of a proposition, there is no joy sweeter than that begotten by the dependence of the man upon the woman for something she can supply but he cannot--not affection only, but a.s.sistance.

Michael, as we have said, had two children, a girl and a boy, the boy being the eldest. Against neither could he ever utter a word of complaint. They were honest and faithful. But the girl, Eliza, although unlike her mother, was still less like her father, and had a plain mind, that is to say, a mind endowed with good average common sense, but unrelieved by any touch of genius or poetry. Her intellect was solid but ordinary--a kind of homely brown intellect, untouched by sunset or sunrise tint. A strain of the mother was in her, modified by the influence of the father, and the result was a product like neither father nor mother, so cunning are the ways of spiritual chemistry. The boy, Robert Trevanion, on the contrary, was his father; not only with no apparent mixture of the mother, but his father intensified. The outside fact was of far less consequence to him than the self-created medium through which it was seen, and his happiness depended much more intimately on himself as he chanced to be at the time than on the world around him. He was apprenticed to his father, and the two were bound together by the tie of companions.h.i.+p and friends.h.i.+p, intertwined with filial and paternal love. What Eliza said, although it was right and proper, never interested the father; but when Robert spoke, Michael invariably looked at him, and often reflected upon his words for hours.

There was in the town of Perran a girl named Susan s.h.i.+pton. Michael knew very little of the family, save that her father was a draper and went to church. Susan was reputed to be one of the beauties of Perran, although opinion was divided. She had--what were not common in Cornwall--light flaxen hair, blue eyes, and a rosy face, somewhat inclined to be plump.

The s.h.i.+ptons lay completely outside Michael's circle. They were mere formalists in religion, fond of pleasure, and Susan especially was much given to gaiety, went to picnics and dances, rowed herself about in the bay with her friends, and sauntered about the town with her father and mother on Sunday afternoon. She was also fond of bathing, and was a good swimmer. Michael hardly knew how to put his objection into words, but he nevertheless had a horror of women who could swim. It seemed to him an unG.o.dly accomplishment. He did not believe for a moment that St. Paul would have sanctioned it, and he sternly forbade Eliza the use of one of the bathing-machines which had lately been introduced into Perran for the benefit of the few visitors who had discovered its charms.

It was a summer's morning in June, and Robert had gone along the sh.o.r.e on business to a house which was being built a little way out of the town.

The tide was running out fast to the eastward. A small river came down into the bay, and the current was sweeping round the rocks to the left in a great curve at a distance of about two hundred yards from the beach.

Inside the curve was smooth water, which lay calmly rippling in the sun, while at its edge the buoys marking the channel were swaying to and fro, and the stream lifted itself against them, swung past them, with bright mult.i.tudinous eddies, and went out to sea. Half-way in the shallows was one of the bathing-machines, and Robert saw that a girl whom he could not recognise was having a bathe. She swam well, and presently she started off straight outwards. Robert watched her for a moment, and saw her go closer and closer to the dangerous line. He knew she could not see it so well as he could, and he knew too that the buoys which were placed to guide small craft into the harbour were well in the channel, and that at least twenty yards this side of them the ebb would be felt, and with such force that no woman could make headway against it. Suddenly he saw that her course was deflected to the left, and he knew that unless some help could arrive she would be lost. In an instant his coat, waistcoat, and boots were off, and he was rus.h.i.+ng over the sandy shallows, which fortunately stretched out a hundred yards before he was out of his depth.

Susan--for it was Miss s.h.i.+pton--had now perceived her peril and had turned round, but she was overpowered, and he heard a shriek for help.

Raising himself out of the water as far as he could, he called out and signalled to her not to go dead against the tide, or even to try and return, but to go on and edge her way to its margin, and so make for the point. This she tried to do, but her strength began to fail--the drift was too much for her. Meanwhile Robert went after her. He was one of the best swimmers in Perran, but when he felt the cooler, deeper water, he was suddenly seized with a kind of fainting and a mist pa.s.sed over his eyes. He looked at the land, and he was in a moment convinced he should never set foot on it again. He was on the point of sinking, when he bethought himself that if he was to die, he might just as well die after having put forth all his strength; and in an instant, as if touched by some divine spell, the agitation ceased, and he was himself again. In three minutes more he was by Susan's side, had gripped her by the bathing-dress at the back of the neck, and had managed to avail himself of a little swirl which turned inwards just before the rocks were reached. They were safe. She nearly swooned, but recovered herself after a fit of sobbing.

"I owe you my life, Mr. Trevanion; you've saved me--you've saved me."

"Nonsense, Miss s.h.i.+pton!" He hardly knew what to say. "I would not go so near the tide again, if I were you. You had better get back to the machine as soon as you can and go home. You are about done up." So saying, he ran away to the place where he had left his coat, and went up into the town, thinking intently as he went. Very earnestly he thought; so earnestly that he saw nothing of Perran, and nothing of his neighbours, who wondered at his dripping trousers; thinking very earnestly, not upon his own brave deed, nor even upon his strange attack of weakness, and equally strange recovery, but upon Miss s.h.i.+pton as she stood by his side at the rock very earnestly picturing to himself her white arms, her white neck, her long hair falling to her waist, and her beautiful white feet, seen on the sand through the clear sun-sparkling water.

Robert Trevanion, although brought up in the same school of philosophy as his father, belonged to another generation. The time of my history is the beginning of the latter half of the present century, and Michael was already considered somewhat of a fossil. Robert was inconsistent, as the old doctrine when it is decaying, or the new at its advent always is; but the main difference between Michael and Robert was not any distinct divergence, but that truths believed by Michael, and admitted by Robert, failed to impress Robert with that depth and sharpness of cut with which they were wrought into his father. Mere a.s.sent is nothing; the question of importance is whether the figuration of the creed is dull or vivid--as vivid as the shadows of a June sun on a white house. Brilliance of impression, is not altogether dependent on mere processes of proof, and a faultless logical demonstration of something which is of eternal import may lie utterly uninfluential and never disturb us.

Robert walked out the next morning to the house he went to visit the day before. n.o.body save Miss s.h.i.+pton and himself knew anything about his adventure. He had made some excuse for his wet clothes. The beach of the little village in the early part of the day was almost always deserted, and the man who attended to the machine had been lying on his back on the s.h.i.+ngle smoking his pipe during the few minutes occupied in Miss s.h.i.+pton's rescue. It was settled weather. The sky was cloudless, and the blue seemed on fire. What little wind there was, was from the south-south-east, and every outline quivered in the heat. The water insh.o.r.e was absolutely still, and of such an azure as n.o.body whose sea is that of the Eastern Coast or the Channel can imagine. A boat lay here and there idle, with its shadow its perfect double in unwavering detail and blackness. Just beyond this cerulean lake the river ebb, as yesterday, rippled swiftly round Deadman's Nose; the buoys, with their heads all eastward, breaking the stream as it impatiently hurried past them on its mysterious errand. Beyond and beyond lay the ocean, unruffled, melting into the white haze which united it with the sky on the horizon. Robert loved the summer, and especially a burning summer.

The sun, of which other persons complained, some perhaps sincerely, but for the most part hypocritically--can anybody really hate the sun?--rejoiced him. He loved to be out in it when the light on the unsheltered Cornish rocks and in the whitewashed street was so "glaring,"

as silly people called it, that they put up parasols and umbrellas, and the warmth which made him withdraw his hand smartly from the old anchor that lay on the gra.s.s just above high-water-mark, exhilarated him like wine. He was not a poet, he knew nothing of Greek mythology; and yet on summer days like these, the landscape and seascape were all changed for him. To say that they were a dream would be untrue--they were the reality; the hideous winter, with its damp fogs and rain, were the dream; and yet upon seascape and landscape rested such a miraculous charm that they seemed visionary rather than actual. As he walked along, he naturally thought of yesterday, and the light, the heat, and the colour naturally also renewed in him the picture which he had been continually repainting for himself since yesterday morning. He went to the house, saw the stonework was going on all right, and as he returned, whom should he meet but Miss s.h.i.+pton, who, undeterred by the fright of the day before, had just had another bathe, and was taking a turn along the cliff to dry her hair, which was hanging over her shoulders. She was not by any means what is called "fast," but she knew how to dress herself. She had a straw hat with a very large brim, a plain brown holland dress, a brown holland parasol, and pretty white shoes; for nothing would ever induce Miss s.h.i.+pton to put her feet into the yellow abominations which most persons wore at Perran in the summer.

Robert took off his cap.

"Oh, Mr. Trevanion, I am so glad to see you. You must have thought me such a queer creature. I have not half thanked you. But what could I do? I couldn't write, and I couldn't call, and I thought you would not like a noise being made about it. Yet you saved me from being drowned."

"It was nothing, Miss s.h.i.+pton," said Robert, smiling. "You were in the ebb there, and I pulled you out of it--just twenty yards, that was all.

I hope you haven't told anybody."

"No; as I have said, I thought you wouldn't like it; but nevertheless, although it is all very well for you to talk in that way, I owe you my life."

"Are you going any farther?"

"Just a few steps till my hair is dry."

He turned and walked by her side.

"You see that the buoys are beyond where the channel really begins. I once tried to swim round two of them, but it was as much as ever I could do to get back. If I were you, I would give them a wide berth again; but if you should be caught, go on and do what we did yesterday--try to turn off into the back-stream just inside the point."

"You may be sure I shall never go near them any more."

"Unless you happen to see me," said Robert, his face flushed with his happy thought, "and then you will give me the pleasure of coming after you."

She looked at him, s.h.i.+fted her parasol, and laughed a little.

"Pleasure! really, Mr. Trevanion, were you not very much frightened?"

"Not for myself, except just for an instant."

"Oh, I was awfully frightened! I thought I must give up. I never, never shall forget that moment when you laid hold of me."

"But you have been in the water again this morning."

"Oh, yes! I do enjoy it so, and of course I did not go far. That stupid bathing-man, by the way, ought to have looked out yesterday. He might have come in the boat and have saved you a wetting. I believe he was asleep."

"He is old, and I am very, very glad he did not see you. Aren't you tired? Would you not like to sit down a moment before we go back?"

They sat down on one of the rocks near the edge of the water.

"You are a very good swimmer, Mr. Trevanion."

"No, not very; and yesterday I was particularly bad, for a kind of faintness came over me just before I reached you, and I thought I was done for."

"Dear me! how dreadful! How did you conquer it?"

"Merely by saying to myself I would not give in, and I struggled with it for a minute and then it disappeared."

"How strong you must be! I am sure I could not do that."

"Ah! there was something else, Miss s.h.i.+pton. You see, I had you ahead of me, and I thought I could be of some service to you."

Miss s.h.i.+pton made no direct reply, but threw some pebbles in the water.

Robert felt himself gradually overcome, or nearly overcome, by what to him was quite new. He could not keep his voice steady, and although what he said was poor and of no importance, it was charged with expressionless heat. For example, Miss s.h.i.+pton's parasol dropped and she stooped to pick it up. "Let me pick it up," he said, and his lips quivered, and the let me pick it up--a poor, little, thin wire of words--was traversed by an electric current raising them to white-hot glow, and as powerful as that which flows through many mightier and more imposing conductors.

What are words? "Good-bye," for example, is said every morning by thousands of creatures in the London suburbs as they run to catch their train, and the present writer has heard it said by a mother to her beloved boy as she stepped on board the tug which was about to leave the big steamer, and she knew she would never see him again. Robert handed her the parasol, and unconsciously, by that curious sympathy by which we are all affected, without any obvious channel of communication, she felt the condition in which his nerves were. She was a little uncomfortable, and, rising, said she thought it was time she was at home. They rose and walked back slowly till their paths parted.

The next day Robert renewed his walk, but there was no Miss s.h.i.+pton. The summer heat had pa.s.sed into thunderstorms, and these were succeeded by miserable grey days with mist, confusing sea, land, and sky, and obliterating every trace of colour. As he went backwards and forwards to the house over the hill, he watched every corner and turned round a hundred times, although his reason would have told him that to expect Miss s.h.i.+pton in the rain was ridiculously absurd.

Michael Trevanion loved his son with a father's love, but with a mother's too. He rejoiced to talk with him as his father and friend, but there was in him also that wild, ferocious pa.s.sion for his child which generally belongs to the woman, a pa.s.sion which in its intense vitality forecasts, apprehends, and truly discerns danger where, to the mere intellect, there is nothing. Michael wondered a little at Robert's unusually frequent visits to his work over the hill, and as he was in the town one morning, he determined to cross the hill himself and see how the house was going on. The mist, which had hung about for a week, had gradually rolled itself into ma.s.ses as the sun rose higher. It was no longer without form and void, but was detaching itself into huge fragments, which let in the sun and were gradually sucked up by him.

Rapidly everything became transformed, and lo! as if by enchantment, the whole sky resumed once more its deepest blue, the perfect semicircle of the horizon sharply revealed itself, and vessels five miles off were visible to their spars. Michael reached the end of his journey and waited, looking out from one of the upper stories. He saw nothing of the splendour of the scene before him. He was restless, he did not quite know why. He could not tell exactly why he was there, but nevertheless he determined to remain. He generally carried a Bible in his pocket, and he turned where he had turned so often before, to the fifteenth chapter of Luke, and read the parable of the prodigal son. He had affixed his own interpretation to that story, and he always held that the point of it was not the love of the father, but the magnificent repentance of the boy who could simply say, "_I have sinned against Heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son; make me as one of thy hired servants_." No wonder the fatted calf was killed for him. No excuses; a n.o.ble confession and a trust in his father's affection for him! His own Robert would never go wrong, but if he did, it would cost nothing to forgive him. Then, as he often did, he fell on his knees, and, in front of the s.p.a.ce where the window was to come, which would open on a little southern balcony looking over the sea, there, amid the lumps of plaster and shavings, he besought his Maker to preserve the child. Michael was sincere in his prayers, nakedly sincere, and yet there were some things he kept to himself even when he was with his G.o.d. He never mentioned his disappointment with his wife, never a word; but he a.s.sumed a right to the perfect enjoyment of Robert by way of compensation. Calvinist as he was to the marrow, he would almost have impeached the Divine justice if Robert had been removed from him.

Robert, walking leisurely, turning to look behind him for the hundredth time, had spied Miss s.h.i.+pton on her road to the town from her accustomed plunge. He intercepted her by going round a meadow to the left at a great rate, and found himself face to face with her as she was about to pa.s.s the corner. The third side of the meadow round which he had raced was an unfinished road, and was a way, though not the usual way, back to Perran.

"Good morning, Miss s.h.i.+pton. Are you going home?"

"Yes! I suppose you are going to your house."