Beside Still Waters by Arthur Christopher Benson (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖

under the stars, wondering what sweet unfamiliar place might stand revealed, when the day climbed slowly in the east, and the dew globed itself upon the fresh grass, in the invigorating sweetness, the cool fragrance of the dawn.


XXXVII

A Garden Scene--The Wine of the Soul

One hot cloudless day of summer, Hugh took a train, and, descending at a quiet wayside station, walked to a little place deep in the country, to see the remains of an ancient house which he was told had a great beauty. He found the place with some difficulty. The church, to which he first directed his steps, was very ancient and almost ruinous. It was evidently far too big for the needs of the little hamlet, and it was so poorly endowed that it was difficult to find any one who would take the living. A great avenue of chestnuts, with a grass-grown walk beneath, led up to the porch. He entered by a curious iron-bound door, under a Norman arch of very quaint workmanship. The church was of different dates, and the very neglect which it suffered gave it an extreme picturesqueness. One of its fine features was a brick chapel, built at the east end of one of the aisles, where an old baron lay in state, in black armour, his eyes closed quietly, his pointed beard on his breast, his hands folded, as though he lay praying to himself. The heavy marble pillars of the shrine were carved with a stiff ornament of vine-leaves and grape-clusters, and the canopy rose pompously to the roof, with its cognisances and devices. There were many monuments in the church, on which Hugh read the history of the ancient family, now engulphed in a family more wealthy and ancient still; the latest of the memorials was that of a lady, whose head, sculptured by Chantrey, with its odd puffs of hair, had a discreet and smiling mien, as of one who had known enough sorrow to purge prosperity of its grossness. From the churchyard there led a little path, which skirted a wide moat of dark water, full of innumerable fish, basking in the warmth; in the centre of the moat stood a dark grove of trees, with a thick undergrowth. Suddenly, through an opening, Hugh saw the turrets of an ancient gatehouse, built of mellow brick, rising into the sunlight, with an astonishing sweetness and nobleness of air; below was a lawn, bordered by yew-hedges, where a party of people, ladies in bright dresses and leisurely men, were sitting talking with a look of smiling content. It was more like a scene in a romance than a thing in real life. Hugh stood unobserved beneath a tree, and looked long at the delightful picture; and then presently wandered further by a grassy lane, with high hedges full of wild roses and elder-blooms, where the air had a hot, honied perfume. He came in a moment to a great clear stream running silently between banks full of meadow-sweet and loosestrife. The turrets of the gatehouse looked pleasantly over the trees of the little park that lay on the other side of the stream. The air was still but fresh. The trees stood silent, with the metallic look of high summer upon their stiff leaves, as though seen in a picture. The whole landscape seemed to have a consecration of quiet joy and peace over it. It seemed a place made for the walks of rustic lovers, on summer evenings, under a low-hung moon. The whole scene, the homely bridge, the murmur of the water in the pool, the blossoming hedges, had a sense of delicate romance about it. It seemed to stand for so much happiness, and to draw Hugh into the charmed circle.

The difficulty was somehow to believe that the place was in reality a centre of real and ordinary life; it seemed almost impossibly beautiful and delicious to Hugh, like a play enacted for his sole benefit, a sweet tale told. Those gracious persons in the garden seemed like people in a scene out of Boccaccio, whose past and whose future are alike veiled and unknown, and who just emerge, in the light of art, as a sweet company seen for an instant, and yet somehow eternally there. But the thought that they were persons like himself, with cares, schemes, anxieties, appeared inconceivable; that was one of the curious illusions of life, that the world through which one moved seemed to group itself for one's delight into a pleasant vision, which had no concern for oneself except to brighten and enhance the warm sunlit day with an indescribable grace and beauty. How hard to think that it was all changing and shifting, even while one gazed! that the clear water, lapsing through the sluice, was passing onwards, and could never again be at that one sweet point of its seaward course; that the roses were fading and dying beside him; that the pleasant group on the lawn must soon break up, never perhaps to reassemble. If one could but arrest the quiet flow of things for a moment, suspend it for a period, however brief! That was after all the joy of art, that it caught such a moment as that, while the smiling faces turned to each other, while the sun lay warm on the brickwork, and made it immortal!

There came into Hugh's mind the thought that this deep thirst for peace might somehow yet be satisfied. How could he otherwise conceive of it, how could he dream so clearly of it, if it were not actually there? He thought that there must be a region where the pulse of time should cease to beat, where there should be no restless looking backwards and forwards, but where the spirit should brood in an unending joy; but now, the world thrust one forward, impatient, unsatisfied; even as he gazed, the shadows had shifted and lengthened, and the thought of the world, that called him back to care and anxiety, began to overshadow him. Was it a phantom that mocked him? or was it not rather a type, an allegory of something unchanged and unchangeable, that waited for him beyond? And then, in that still afternoon, there came to him a sense that occasionally visited him, and that seemed, when it came, the truest and best thing in the world, the vision of an unseen Friend, to Whom he was infinitely dear, closer to Him even than to himself, Who surrounded and enveloped him with care and concern and love; Who brought him tenderly into the fair green places of the earth, such as he had visited to-day, whispered him the secret of it all, and only did not reveal it in its fulness, because the time for him to know it was not yet, and because the very delay arose from some depth of unimaginable love. In such a mood as this, Hugh felt that he could wait in utter confidence; that he could drink in with glad eyes and ears the beautiful and delicate things that were shown to him, the rich, luxuriant foliage, the dim sun-warmed stream, the silent trees, the old towers. There seemed to him nothing that he could not bear, nothing that he could not gladly do, when so tender a hand was leading him. He knew indeed that he would again be impatient, restless, wilful; but for the moment it was as though he had tasted of some mysterious sacrament; that the wine of some holy cup had been put to his lips; that he knew that he was not alone, but in the very heart of a wise and patient God.


XXXVIII

The Lakes--On the Fell--Peace

It was in the later weeks of a hot, still midsummer that Hugh escaped from Cambridge to the Lakes. He did not realise, until he found himself driving in the cool of the evening beside Windermere, how parched and dry his very mind had become in the long heats of the sun-dried flats. Sometimes the road wound down to the very edge of the water, lapping deliciously among the stones; sometimes it skirted the pleasaunces of a cool sheltered villa which lay embowered in trees, blinking contentedly across the lake. The sight of the great green hills with their skirts clothed with wood, with trees straggling upwards along the water-courses, the miniature crags escaping from oak-coppices, the black heads of bleak mountains, filled him with an exquisite and speechless delight.

It was sunset before he reached his destination, which was a large house of rough stone, much festooned with creepers, which crowned a little height at the base of the fells, in the centre of a wild wood. The house was that of a very old man, hard on his ninetieth year, a relative of Hugh's, and an old friend of his family. There was a short cut to the house among the woods, and Hugh left the carriage to go round by the drive, while he himself walked up. The path was a little track among copses, roofed over by interlacing boughs, and giving an abundance of pretty glimpses to right and left of the unvisited places of the wood; old brown boulders covered with moss, with ash-suckers shooting out among the stones, little streams rippling downwards, small green lawns fringed with low trees. The western valley was full of a rich golden light, and the wooded ridges rose quietly one after another, with the dark solemn forms of mountains on the horizon. A few dappled clouds, fringed with fire, floated high in the green sky. It all seemed to him to be screening some sacred and mysterious pageant, which was, as it were, being celebrated out in the west, where the orange sunset lay dying. He thought of the lonely valleys among the hills, slowly filling with twilight gloom, the high ridges from which one could discern the sun sinking in glory over the far-spread flashing sea with its misty rim. The house loomed up suddenly over the thickets, with a light or two burning in the windows which pierced the thick wall.

Within, all was as it had been for many a year; it was a house in which everything seemed to stand still, the day passing smoothly in a simple and pleasant routine. He received a very kindly and gentle welcome from his host, and was pleased to find that the party was of the quietest--an old friend or two, a widowed daughter of the house, one or two youthful cousins. Hugh slipped into his place in the household as if he had never been absent; he established his books in a corner of the dark library full of old volumes. It was always a pleasure to him to see his host, a courtly, silent old man, with snow-white hair and beard, who sate smiling, eating so little that Hugh wondered how he sustained life, reading for an hour or two, walking a little about the garden, sitting long in contented meditation, never seeming to be weary or melancholy. Hugh remembered that, some years before, he had wondered that any one could live so, neither looking backwards nor forwards, with no designs or cares or purposes, simply taking each day as it came with a perfect tranquillity, not overshadowed by the thought of how few years of life were left him. But now he seemed to understand it better; it was just the soft close of a kindly and innocent life, dying like a tree or a flower.