There & Back Part 26

She would rather be abused than remain unnoticed. When she found that her standing and staring procured no attention from the bookbinder, she would begin to handle his tools, and ask what this and that was for, giving, like a woman of fas.h.i.+on, no heed to any answer he accorded her.

Learning thus, that is, by experiment, how to annoy him, she did not let opportunity lack. When school was over in the morning, and she could go where she pleased, she went often to the library; and as no one willingly asked where she was, the chief pleasure of her acquaintance lying in the a.s.surance that she was nowhere at hand, Richard had to endure many things from her; and things that do not seem worth enduring, are not unfrequently the hardest to endure.

The behaviour of the child grew worse and worse. She would more than touch everything, and that thing the most persistently which Richard was most anxious to have let alone, causing him no little trouble at times to set right what she had injured. Worst of all was her persecution when she found him using gold-leaf. She would come behind him and blow the film away just as he had got it flat on his cus.h.i.+on, or laid on the spot where his tool was about to fix a portion of it. Her mischief was not even irradiated by childish laughter; there was never any sign of frolic on her monkey face, except the steely glitter of her sharp, black bead-eyes, might be supposed to contain some sprinkle of fun in its malice. Expostulation was not of the slightest use, and sometimes it was all Richard could do to keep his hands off her. Now she would look as stolid as if she did not understand a word he said; now pucker up her face into a most unpleasant grin of derision and contemptuous defiance.

One day when he happened to be using the polis.h.i.+ng-iron, Vixen, as her brothers called her, came in, and began to play with the paste. Richard turned with the iron in his hand, which he had just taken from the brasier. He was rubbing it bright and clean, and she noted this, but had not seen him take it from the fire: she caught at it, to spoil it with her pasty fingers. As quickly she let it go, but did not cry, though her eyes filled. Richard saw, and his heart gave way. He caught the little hand so swift to do evil, and would have soothed its pain. She pulled it from him, crying, "You nasty man! How dare you!" and ran to the door, where she turned and made a hideous face at him. The same moment, by a neighbouring door that opened from another pa.s.sage, in came Barbara, and before Vixen was well aware of her presence, had dealt her such a box on the ear that she burst into a storm of wrathful weeping.

"You're a brute, Bab," she cried. "I'll tell mamma!"

"Do, you little wretch!" returned Barbara, whose flushed face looked lovely childlike in its indignation beside the furious phiz of the tormenting imp.

The monkey-creature left the room, sobbing; and Barbara turned and was gone before Richard could thank her.

He heard no more of the matter, and for some time had no farther trouble with Victoria.

Barbara had the kindest of hearts, but there was nothing _soft_ about her She held it a sin to spoil any animal, not to say a child. For she had a strong feeling, initiated possibly by her black nurse, that the animals went on living after death, whence she counted it a shame not to teach them; and held that, if a sharp cut would make child or dog behave properly, the woman was no lover of either who would spare it.

CHAPTER XXIV. _RICHARD AND WINGFOLD_.

Barbara had more than once or twice heard Mr. Wingfold preach, but had not once listened, or oven waked to the fact that she had not listened.

Unaccustomed in childhood to any special regard of the Sunday, she had neither pleasant nor unpleasant a.s.sociations with church-going; but she liked a good many things better, and as she always did as she liked except she saw reason to the contrary, she had hitherto gone to church rather seldom. She might perhaps have sooner learned to go regularly but for her mother's extraordinary behaviour there: certainly she could not sit in the same pew with her reading her novel. Since Mr. Wingfold had taken the part of the prophet Nathan, and rebuked her, she had indeed ceased to go to church, but Barbara, as I have said, was as yet only now and then drawn thitherward.

Mr. Wingfold was almost as different from the clergyman of Richard's idea, as was Richard's imagined G.o.d from any believable idea of G.o.d. The two men had never yet met, for what should bring a working-man and the clergyman of the next parish together? But one morning--he often went for a walk in the early morning--Richard saw before him, in the middle of a field-path, seated on a stile and stopping his way, the back of a man in a gray suit, evidently enjoying, like himself, the hour before sunrise. He knew somehow that he was not a working-man, but he did not suspect him one of the obnoxious cla.s.s which lives by fooling itself and others. Wingfold heard Richard's step, looked round, knew him at once an artisan of some sort, and saw in him signs of purpose and character strong for his years.

"Jolly morning!" he said.

"It is indeed, sir!" answered Richard.

"I like a walk in the morning better than at any other time of the day!"

said Wingfold.

"Well, sir, I do so too, though I can't tell why. I've often tried, but I haven't yet found out what makes the morning so different."

"Come!" thought the clergyman; "here's something I haven't met with too much of!"

Richard remarked to himself that, whoever the gentleman was, he was certainly not stuck-up. They might have parted late the night before, instead of meeting now for the first time!

"Are you a married man?" asked Wingfold.

"No, sir," answered Richard, surprised that a stranger should put the question.

"If you had been," Wingfold went on, "I should have been surer of your seeing what I mean when I say, that to be out before sunrise is like looking at your best friend asleep--that is, before her sun, her thought, namely, is up. Watching her face then, you see it come to life, grow radiant with sunrise."

"But," rejoined Richard, "I have seen a person asleep whose face made it quite evident that thought was awake! It was s.h.i.+ning through!"

"s.h.i.+ning through, certainly," said Wingfold, "not up. I doubt indeed if during any sleep, thought is quite in abeyance."

"Not when we are dead asleep, sir?--so dead that when we wake we don't remember anything?"

"If thought in such a case must be _proved,_ it will have to go for non-existent. Yet, when you reflect that sometimes you discover that you must, a few minutes before, wide awake, have done something which you have no recollection of having done, and which, but for the fact remaining evident to your sight, you would not believe you had done, you must feel doubtful as to the loss of consciousness in sleep."

"Yes; that must give us pause!"

"Hamlet!" said the clergyman to himself. "That's good! You may have read from top to bottom of a page, perhaps," he went on, "without being able to recall a word: would you say no thought had pa.s.sed through your mind in the process?--that the words had suggested nothing as you read them?"

"No, sir; I should be inclined to say that I forgot as fast as I read; that, as I read, I seemed to know the thing I read, but the process of forgetting kept pace for pace alongside the process of reading."

"I quite agree with you.--Now I wonder whether you will agree with me in what I am going to suggest next!"

"I can't tell that, sir," said Richard--somewhat unnecessarily; but Wingfold was pleased to find him cautious.

"I think," the parson continued, "that what I want in order to be able afterward to recollect a thing, is to be not merely conscious of the thing when it comes, but at the same moment conscious of myself. To remember, I must be self-conscious as well as thing-conscious."

"There I cannot quite follow you."

"When I learn the meaning of a word, I know the word; but when I say to myself, 'I know the word,' there comes a reflection of the word back from the mirror of my mind, making a second impression, and after that I am at least not so likely to forget it."

"I think I can follow you so far," said Richard.

"When, then," pursued the parson, "I think about the impression that the word makes upon me, how it is affecting me with the knowledge of itself, then I am what I should call self-conscious of the word--conscious not only that I know the word, but that I know the phenomena of knowing the word--conscious of what I am as regards my knowing of the word."

"I understand so far, sir--at least I think I do."

"Then you will allow that a word with its reflection and mental impact thus operated upon by the mind is not so likely to be forgotten as one understood only in the first immediate way?"

"Certainly, sir."

"Well, then--mind I am only suggesting; I am not proclaiming a fact, still less laying down a law; I am not half sure enough about it for that--so it is with our dreams. We see, or hear, and are conscious that we do, in our dreams; our consciousness s.h.i.+nes through our sleeping features to the eyes that love us; but when we wake we have forgotten everything. There was thought there, but not thought that could be remembered. When, however, you have once said to yourself in a dream, 'I think I am dreaming;' you always, I venture to suspect, remember that experience when you wake from it!"

"I daresay you do, sir. But there are many dreams we never suspect to be dreams while we are dreaming them, which yet we remember all the same when we come awake!"

"Yes, surely; and many people have such memories as hold every word and every fact presented to them. But I was not meaning to discuss the phenomena of sleep; I only meant to support my simile that to see the world before the sun is up, is like looking on the sleeping face of a friend. There is thought in the sleeping face of your friend, and thought in the twilight face of nature; but the face awake with thought, is the world awake with sunlight."

"There I cannot go with you, sir," said Richard, who, for all the impression Barbara had made upon him, had not yet thought of the world as in any sense alive; it was to him but an aggregate of laws and results, the great dissecting-room of creation, the happy hunting ground of the G.o.ddess who calls herself Science, though she can claim to understand as yet no single fact.

"Why?" asked Wingfold.

"Because I cannot receive the simile at all. I cannot allow expression of thought where no thought is."

Here a certain look on the face of the young workman helped the parson toward understanding the position he meant to take, "Ah!" he answered, "I see I mistook you! I understand now! Sleep she or wake she, you will not allow thought on the face of Nature! Am I right?"

"That is what I would say, sir," answered Richard.

"We must look at that!" returned Wingfold. "That would be scanned!--You would conceive the world as a sort of machine that goes for certain purposes--like a clock, for instance, whose duty it is to tell the time of the day?--Do I represent you truly?"

"So far, sir. Only one machine may have many uses!"