There & Back Part 37

The dissension between husband and wife about the twins, had its origin mainly with the mother, but sprang from the generosity of her nature: the twin she favoured was sickly from infancy. A woman such as Mrs.

Wylder might have been expected to shrink from the puny, suffering creature, and give her affection and approbation to the other, as did her husband; but it was just here that the true in her, the pure womanly, came to the surface and then to the front: the child had an appealing look, which, when first she saw him, went straight to the heart of the strong mother, and afterward roused, if not enough of the protective, yet all the defensive in her. From herself she did not, and from death she could not save him. He died rather suddenly, and now the strong one seemed slowly sinking. The mother did not heed him, and the father, for very misery, could scarcely look at him: he was to him like one dead already, only not dead enough to be buried.

CHAPTER x.x.xI. _WINGFOLD AND BARBARA_.

The bickerings between her father and mother had had not a little to do with the peculiar features of Barbara's life in the colony. As soon as she saw a cloud rising, having learned by frequent experience what it was sure to result in, she would creep away, mount one of the many horses at her choice, and race from the house like a dog in terror, till she was miles from the spot where her father and mother would by that time be writhing in fiercest wordy warfare. What the object of their wrangling might be, she never inquired. It was plain to her almost from the first that nothing was gained by it beyond the silence of fatigue; and as that silence was always fruitful of new strife, it brought a comfort known to be but temporary. Had she not been accustomed to it from earliest childhood, it would have been terrible to her to see human lives going off in such a foul smoke of h.e.l.l! Not a sentence was uttered by the one but was furiously felt as a wrong by the other--to be remorselessly met by wrong as flagrant, rousing in its turn the indignation of injury to a pain unendurable. It is strange that the man who most keenly feels the wrong done him, should so often be the most insensible to the wrong he does. So dominant is the unreason of the moment, that the injury he inflicts appears absolute justice, and the injury he suffers absolute injustice. Yet such disputes turn seldom upon the main point at issue between the parties; it may not even once be mentioned, while some new trifle is fought over with all the bitterness of the alienation that lies gnawing and biting and burning beneath.

War is raging between kingdoms for the possession of a hovel, which possessed, the quarrel were no nearer settlement than before!

Hence it came that Barbara paid so little regard to her mother's challenge of the clergyman. Single combat of the sort she seemed to seek was an experience of Barbara's life too often recurrent to be interesting; the thunders of its artillery, near or afar, pa.s.sed over her almost unheeded. She had indeed sufficient respect for the forms of religion to regret that her mother should make her behaviour in church the talk of the parish, and to be rather pleased that the clergyman should have had the best of it in his joust of arms with her, but further interest in the matter she scarcely took.

On a certain day, Miss Brown wanting at least one pair of new shoes, and her mistress cheris.h.i.+ng the idea of a lesson in shoeing her, for which lesson arrangement had not even yet been made, Barbara, having been all the afternoon in the house, went out toward sunset, to have a walk with a book.

She was sauntering along a gra.s.sy road which, though within their own park, belonged to the public, when she almost ran against a man similarly occupied with herself, for he also was absorbed in the book he carried. I should like to know what two books brought them thus together! Each started back with an apology, then both burst into a modest laugh, which renewed itself with merrier ring, when the first and then the second attempt to pa.s.s, with all s.p.a.ce for elbow-room, failed, and they stood opposite each other in a hopeless mental paralysis.

"Fate is opposed to our unneighbourliness!" said Mr. Wingfold. "She will not allow us to pa.s.s, and depart in peace! What do you say, Miss Wylder?--shall we yield or shall we resist?" As he spoke, he held out his hand.

Now Barbara was the last person in the world to refuse, without a painfully good reason, any offered hand. She had never seen cause to desire the acquaintance of a man because he was a clergyman; but neither had she any unwillingness, because he was a clergyman, to make his acquaintance; while to Thomas Wingfold she already felt some attraction: the strong little hand was in his immediately, and felt comfortable in the great honest clasp, which it returned heartily.

"I never saw you on your own feet before, Miss Wylder!" said the clergyman.

"Nor on anybody else's, I hope!" she returned.

"Oh, yes, indeed!--on Miss Brown's many a time!"

"You know Miss Brown then? She is my most intimate friend!"

"I am well aware of that! Everything worth knowing in the parish, and a good deal that is not, comes to my ears."

"May I hope you count Miss Brown's affairs worth hearing about, then?"

"Of course I do! Does not a lady call her friend, whose acquaintance I have long wished to make! and do I not know that Miss Brown loves her in return! I cannot help sometimes regretting for a moment that four-footed friends in general are so short-lived."

"Why only for a moment?" said Barbara.

"Because I remind myself that it must be best for them and us--best for the friends.h.i.+p between us, best for us every way. But indeed I have more to be thankful for in the relation than most people of my acquaintance, for I sometimes drive a pony yet that is over forty!"

"Forty years of age!"

"Yes."

"I should like to see that pony!"

"You shall see her, any day you will come to the parsonage. I will gladly introduce her to you, but it is getting rather late to desire her acquaintance: she does not see very well, and is not so good-tempered as she once was. But she will soon be better."

"How do you mean?"

"She has a process to go through out of which she will come ever so much the better."

"Good gracious! you're not going to have an operation performed on her--at _her_ age?"

"She is going to have her body stript off her!"

"Good gracious!" cried Barbara again, but with yet greater energy--then seeing what he meant, laughed at her mistake.

"But then," she said, with eager resumption, "you must believe there is something to strip her body off? _I_ do! I have always thought so!"

"So have I, and so I do indeed!" answered Wingfold. "I can't prove it. I can't prove anything--to my own satisfaction, that is, though I dare say I might to the satisfaction of one who did not love the creatures enough to be anxious about them. I don't think you can prove anything that is worth being anxious about."

"Then why do you believe it?" asked Barbara, influenced by the talk of the century.

"Because I _can_," answered Wingfold. "To believe and to be able to prove, have little or nothing to do with each other. To believe and to convince have much to do with each other."

"But," persisted Barbara, with Richard in her mind, "how are you to be sure of a thing you can't prove?"

"That's a good question, and this is my answer," said Wingfold:--"What you love, you already believe enough to put it to the proof of trial. My life is such a proving; and the proof is so promising that it fills me with the happiest hope. To prove with your brains the thing you love, would be to deck the garments of salvation with a useless fringe. Shall I search heaven and earth for proof that my wife is a good and lovely woman? The signs of it are everywhere; the proofs of it nowhere."

They walked along for a while, side by side, in silence. Which had turned and gone with the other neither knew. Barbara was beginning already to feel that safety which almost everybody sooner or later came to feel in Wingfold's company--a safety born of the sense that, in the closest talk, he never lay in wait for a victory, but took his companion, as one of his own people, into the end after which he was striving.

"Then," said Barbara at length, still thinking of Richard, "if you believe that even the beasts are saved, you must think it very bad of a man not to believe in a G.o.d!"

"I should think anyhow that he didn't care much about the beasts--that he hadn't a heart big enough to take the beasts in!"

"But he couldn't, you know, if he didn't believe in G.o.d!"

"I understand; only, if he loved the poor beasts very much, and thought what a bad time they have of it in the world, I don't know how he could help _hoping_ at least, that there was a G.o.d somewhere who would somehow make up to them for it all! For my own part I don't know how to be content except the beasts themselves, when it is all over and the good time come, are able to say, 'After all, it is well worth it, bad as it was!'"

"But what if it was just that suffering that made the man think there could not be a G.o.d, or he would put a stop to it?"

"That looks to me very close to believing in G.o.d."

"How do you make that out?"

"If a man believed in a G.o.d that did not heed the suffering of the creation, one who made men and women and beasts knowing that they must suffer, and suffer only--and went on believing so however you set him thinking about it, I should say to him, 'You believe in a devil, and so are in the way to become a devil yourself.' A thousand times rather would I believe that there was no G.o.d, and that the misery came by chance from which there was no escape. What I do believe is, that there is a G.o.d who is even now doing his best to take all men and all beasts out of the misery in which they find themselves."

"But why did he let them come into it?"

"That the G.o.d will tell them, to their satisfaction, so soon as ever they shall have become capable of understanding it. There must be things so entirely beyond our capacity, that we cannot now see enough of them to be able even to say that they are incomprehensible. There must be millions of truths that have not yet risen above the horizon of what we call the finite."

"Then you would not think a person so very, very wicked, for not believing in a G.o.d?"

"That depends on the sort of G.o.d he fancied himself asked to believe in.

Would you call a Greek philosopher wicked for not believing in Mercury or Venus? If a man had the same notion of G.o.d that I have, or anything like it, and did not at least desire that there might be such a G.o.d, then I confess I should have difficulty in understanding how he could be good. But the G.o.d offered him might not be worth believing in, might even be such that it was a virtuous act to refuse to believe in him."

"One thing more, Mr. Wingfold--and you must not think I am arguing against you or against G.o.d, for if I thought there was no G.o.d, I should just take poison:--tell me, mightn't a man think the idea of such a G.o.d as you believe in, too good to be true?"

"I should need to know something of his history, rightly to understand that. Why should he be able to think anything too good to be true? Why should a thing not be true because it was good? It seems to me, if a thing be bad, it cannot possibly be true. If you say the thing is, I answer it exists because of something under the badness. Badness by itself can have no life in it. But if the man really thought as you suggest, I would say to him, 'You cannot _know_ such a being does not exist: is it possible you should be content that such a being should not exist? If such a being did exist, would you be content never to find him, but to go on for ever and ever saying, _He can't be! He can't be!

He's so good he can't be!_ Supposing you find one day that there he is, will your defence before him be satisfactory to yourself: "There he is after all, but he was too good to believe in, therefore I did not try to find him"? Will you say to him--"_If you had not been so good, if you had been a little less good, a little worse, just a trifle bad, I could and would have believed in you?"_'"