The Vicar's Daughter by George MacDonald (classic novels TXT) 📖

were luxurious and lovely both, two often dissociated qualities. She could have nothing to desire of this world's gifts, I thought. But the moment she entered the room into which I had been shown, I was shocked at the change I saw in her. Almost to my horror, she was in a widow's cap; and disease and coming death were plain on every feature. Such was the contrast, that the face in my memory appeared that of health.

"My dear Mrs. Cromwell!" I gasped out.

"You see," she said, and sitting down, on a straight-backed chair, looked at me with lustreless eyes.

Death had been hovering about her windows before, but had entered at last; not to take the sickly young woman longing to die, but the hale man, who would have clung to the last edge of life.

"He is taken, and I am left," she said abruptly, after a long pause.

Her drawl had vanished: pain and grief had made her simple. "Then," I thought with myself, "she did love him!" But I could say nothing. She took my silence for the sympathy it was, and smiled a heart-rending smile, so different from that little sad smile she used to have; really pathetic now, and with hardly a glimmer in it of the old self-pity. I rose, put my arms about her, and kissed her on the forehead; she laid her head on my shoulder, and wept.

"Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth," I faltered out, for her sorrow filled me with a respect that was new.

"Yes," she returned, as gently as hopelessly; "and whom he does not love as well."

"You have no ground for saying so," I answered. "The apostle does not."

"My lamp is gone out," she said; "gone out in darkness, utter darkness. You warned me, and I did not heed the warning. I thought I knew better, but I was full of self-conceit. And now I am wandering where there is no way and no light. My iniquities have found me out."

I did not say what I thought I saw plain enough,-that her lamp was just beginning to burn. Neither did I try to persuade her that her iniquities were small.

"But the Bridegroom," I said, "is not yet come. There is time to go and get some oil."

"Where am I to get it?" she returned, in a tone of despair.

"From the Bridegroom himself," I said.

"No," she answered. "I have talked and talked and talked, and you know he says he abhors talkers. I am one of those to whom he will say 'I know you not.'"

"And you will answer him that you have eaten and drunk in his presence, and cast out devils, and-?"

"No, no: I will say he is right; that it is all my own fault; that I thought I was something when I was nothing, but that I know better now."

A dreadful fit of coughing interrupted her. As soon as it was over, I said,-

"And what will the Lord say to you, do you think, when you have said so to him?"

"Depart from me," she answered in a hollow, forced voice.

"No," I returned. "He will say, 'I know you well. You have told me the truth. Come in.'"

"Do you think so?" she cried. "You never used to think well of me."

"Those who were turned away," I said, avoiding her last words, "were trying to make themselves out better than they were: they trusted, not in the love of Christ, but in what they thought their worth and social standing. Perhaps, if their deeds had been as good as they thought them, they would have known better than to trust in them. If they had told him the truth; if they had said, 'Lord, we are workers of iniquity; Lord, we used to be hypocrites, but we speak the truth now: forgive us,'-do you think he would then have turned them away? No, surely. If your lamp has gone out, make haste and tell him how careless you have been; tell him all, and pray him for oil and light; and see whether your lamp will not straightway glimmer,-glimmer first and then glow."

"Ah, Mrs. Percivale!" she cried: "I would do something for His sake now if I might, but I cannot. If I had but resisted the disease in me for the sake of serving him, I might have been able now: but my chance is over; I cannot now; I have too much pain. And death looks such a different thing now! I used to think of it only as a kind of going to sleep, easy though sad-sad, I mean, in the eyes of mourning friends. But, alas! I have no friends, now that my husband is gone. I never dreamed of him going first. He loved me: indeed he did, though you will hardly believe it; but I always took it as a matter of course. I never saw how beautiful and unselfish he was till he was gone. I have been selfish and stupid and dull, and my sins have found me out. A great darkness has fallen upon me; and although weary of life, instead of longing for death, I shrink from it with horror. My cough will not let me sleep: there is nothing but weariness in my body, and despair in my heart. Oh how black and dreary the nights are! I think of the time in your house as of an earthly paradise. But where is the heavenly paradise I used to dream of then?" "Would it content you," I asked, "to be able to dream of it again?"

"No, no. I want something very different now. Those fancies look so uninteresting and stupid now! All I want now is to hear God say, 'I forgive you.' And my husband-I must have troubled him sorely. You don't know how good he was, Mrs. Percivale. He made no pretences like silly me. Do you know," she went on, lowering her voice, and speaking with something like horror in its tone, "Do you know, I cannot bear hymns!"

As she said it, she looked up in my face half-terrified with the anticipation of the horror she expected to see manifested there. I could not help smiling. The case was not one for argument of any kind: I thought for a moment, then merely repeated the verse,-

"When the law threatens endless death,
Upon the awful hill,
Straightway, from her consuming breath,
My soul goes higher still,-
Goeth to Jesus, wounded, slain,
And maketh him her home,
Whence she will not go out again,
And where Death cannot come."

"Ah! that is good," she said: "if only I could get to him! But I cannot get to him. He is so far off! He seems to be-nowhere."

I think she was going to say nobody, but changed the word.

"If you felt for a moment how helpless and wretched I feel, especially in the early morning," she went on; "how there seems nothing to look for, and no help to be had,-you would pity rather than blame me, though I know I deserve blame. I feel as if all the heart and soul and strength and mind, with which we are told to love God, had gone out of me; or, rather, as if I had never had any. I doubt if I ever had. I tried very hard for a long time to get a sight of Jesus, to feel myself in his presence; but it was of no use, and I have quite given it up now."

I made her lie on the sofa, and sat down beside her.

"Do you think," I said, "that any one, before he came, could have imagined such a visitor to the world as Jesus Christ?"

"I suppose not," she answered listlessly.

"Then, no more can you come near him now by trying to imagine him. You cannot represent to yourself the reality, the Being who can comfort you. In other words, you cannot take him into your heart. He only knows himself, and he only can reveal himself to you. And not until he does so, can you find any certainty or any peace."

"But he doesn't-he won't reveal himself to me."

"Suppose you had forgotten what some friend of your childhood was like-say, if it were possible, your own mother; suppose you could not recall a feature of her face, or the color of her eyes; and suppose, that, while you were very miserable about it, you remembered all at once that you had a portrait of her in an old desk you had not opened for years: what would you do?"

"Go and get it," she answered like a child at the Sunday school.

"Then why shouldn't you do so now? You have such a portrait of Jesus, far truer and more complete than any other kind of portrait can be,-the portrait his own deeds and words give us of him."

"I see what you mean; but that is all about long ago, and I want him now. That is in a book, and I want him in my heart."

"How are you to get him into your heart? How could you have him there, except by knowing him? But perhaps you think you do know him?"

"I am certain I do not know him; at least, as I want to know him," she said.

"No doubt," I went on, "he can speak to your heart without the record, and, I think, is speaking to you now in this very want of him you feel. But how could he show himself to you otherwise than by helping you to understand the revelation of himself which it cost him such labor to afford? If the story were millions of years old, so long as it was true, it would be all the same as if it had been ended only yesterday; for, being what he represented himself, he never can change. To know what he was then, is to know what he is now."

"But, if I knew him so, that wouldn't be to have him with me."

"No; but in that knowledge he might come to you. It is by the door of that knowledge that his Spirit, which is himself, comes into the soul. You would at least be more able to pray to him: you would know what kind of a being you had to cry to. You would thus come nearer to him; and no one ever drew nigh to him to whom he did not also draw nigh. If you would but read the story as if you had never read it before, as if you were reading the history of a man you heard of for the first time"-

"Surely you're not a Unitarian, Mrs. Percivale!" she said, half lifting her head, and looking at me with a dim terror in her pale eyes.

"God forbid!" I answered. "But I would that many who think they know better believed in him half as much as many Unitarians do. It is only by understanding and believing in that humanity of his, which in such pain and labor manifested his Godhead, that we can come to know it,-know that Godhead, I mean, in virtue of which alone he was a true and perfect man; that Godhead which alone can satisfy with peace and hope the poorest human soul, for it also is the offspring of God."

I ceased, and for some moments she sat silent.