X. Ah! only when returns again The simple, child-like trust of old; God's love and power mankind behold : And calmly in his God confide. J. A. L. ARTHUR BERINGTON'S LESSONS IN LIFE. V. IT wanted but eight or nine days of Christmas, when Arthur Berington came home one evening to his lodgings, weary, and sick at heart. He had come through streets which, in spite of bad trade, were beginning to feel the irresistible glow of colour and warmth which comes with Yuletide. But he had felt no answering thrill of satisfaction. Poulterers and grocers in their white aprons rubbed their hands and looked happy; and even sandwich-men parading the streets with boards of flaming Christmas advertisements, seemed to have some glint of past or future festivity on their usually stolid and resigned countenances. But Arthur was miserable. As he came through the less frequented thoroughfares he passed one or two groups of carol singers, singing hymns under the London gas-light, which he had been accustomed to hear under the cloudless moon at home. But the Miserere would have been more in his way than carols. Indeed, he had not even come to a hopeful Lenten sorrow. His mood was that of the cursed-a mood of passionless despair. His head ached and his heart sunk, and his vertebra seemed nowhere. This is the mood of suicide. He had yesterday received a polite note from his bankers, informing him that his account with them was overdrawn to the amount of £20, and requesting that he would provide for the same within the ensuing week. He had Tunwell and Octave's overdue account in his pocket, to the tune of £56 odd; and a three months' bill of theirs was due to be advised to-day, and would be returned dishonoured to-morrow. To-day he had been called into the private sanctum of the house and reprimanded, as courteously, of course, as the nature of things permitted, the house being gentlemanly, and priding itself on employing gentlemen; but still he had been reprimanded. Some business of which he had had charge had gone wrong, stupidly wrong, and it was plainly his fault. Up till to-day he had had some vague idea of asking the House to assist him monetarily, but now that was swept to the winds. Not an hour ago the irreproachable figure of the House had confronted him, and its cool grey eyes had looked through his very joints and marrow, as the crushing words of reproof were calmly uttered. A man feels that sort of thing according to the Flog a cart horse and he seems rather to like amount of his breeding. it, or at any rate he dances about in a way which is certainly more suggestive of elephantine playfulness than of pain. But your thoroughbred quivers under the whip, resents it; is ready to die for the time being. In the ratio of the fineness of the organisation so the weight of the punishment increases-squares itself, cubes itself. No need for Peter of scathing denunciations, such as pachydermatous Pharisees were visited. with; the Lord but looks at him and he "weeps bitterly." once more. He sat down and tried to write home, where he knew they were He must frame some lying excuse, and send to his expecting him. mother and sisters, who were counting every day till they should see him This made him doubly wretched. From a neighbouring steeple, where a company of ringers were practising, came the clanging chimes. He tore up his half-written letter and threw the fragments into the fire. Flinging itself down from the steeple, and breaking into fragments on the roofs of the houses and the pavements beneath, came the flood of Christmas melody. Ever and anon the rising wind came, as if in play, and dammed up the apertures of the steeple, and then raced away merrily with the leaping clangour after it. He felt he must get away from the bells, and hide. Where? He drew his hat down to his eyebrows, and wandered aimlessly out. VI. Two days before this, far away in the pleasant Riddlesworth home, the looking forward of the household of women had come to a culminating point. As usual at the breakfast table, the conversation gravitated towards Arthur. "Arthur's letters have not been nearly so bright lately as they used "He does not seem to have got into a to be," said one sister. particularly good set." said another. "And he knows absolutely no ladies," said a third. "Perhaps he has not time to go out much; I daresay he works very hard," said Cicely. "I think you ought to go and fetch him home, Cicely," said Mrs. Berington, "what a surprise it would be for him!" "You don't mean it, mother, do you? You don't really mean it?" said Cicely, leaving her breakfast, and coming to her mother's side. You know he's my twin brother, you girls, so I She "Oh, I should like it! ought to go. Oughtn't I, mother? Do say I ought. Now do!" pressed a coaxing kiss on her mother's forehead. "But do you think it would be safe? said Mrs. Berington. "You know what dreadful things we hear. I don't know I'm sure whether I ought to let you go. Of course it would be very nice for Arthur." "And to pop in upon him without letting him know I was coming!" cried Cicely, clapping her hands with glee, as if she had been a chit of twelve instead of a girl of two-and-twenty, who had many serious thoughts about the enigmas of life already. "It would be exactly the adventure for Cicely, would it not,” said Maud, appealing to Kate. "The very thing," replied Kate, "dear Cicely has so much of the adventurous about her, and is capable of doing things which would never occur to the ordinary female mind. Now just fancy a journey to London, and alone. Why, I wouldn't undertake it for the world.” "Well, suppose I am made differently from you, Miss Propriety. Is not that an indication that I have different work to do? Oh, I'm often sick of this everlasting hum-drum round of propriety and conventionality. A good thing occurs to you to do, and you have first to ask if it is proper, instead of going straight and doing it. We go on with our needlework, and we visit our old women, and we go to church as regularly as clockwork, and eat and sleep, and get up, like so many automatons. Oh, how uninteresting it all is!" A passionate tear was in the young woman's eye as she made this vehement speech. This made Joan-who was the comforter of the family go to her, and put her arm round her waist and kiss her. After this it was gradually settled that Cicely should go to London and fetch Arthur home, and before the breakfast things had been removed some definite steps had been taken with that view. Cicely was not so far removed from the peculiarities of her sex that starting on a journey was to her an unimportant matter. When a man is going out of town, he just crams a few necessaries into the smallest bag he can find and goes. But when a woman is about to journey a thousand matters have to be thought of, for she fills such a space in her home-life that when she leaves it seems as if the whole of her little world shook and trembled. And a young woman of Cicely's energetic nature always thinks a great many more arrangements necessary than really are. The life which she had called so hum-drum seemed to grow in importance and interest, now that for the first time in her life she was going away to that great mysterious London. She felt the strange power of the farewell, which lifts the prosaic into poetry, and which makes the trivial dignified; the farewell which raises for a time the curtain of "use and wont," so that we see things as they really are common circumstances linked with eternity, and the river of our life running ever onward to the everlasting sea; the farewell which, for a moment, shows us our surroundings as they will appear when we look at them for the last time. The old women did not seem uninteresting that morning, as she went round and called at each of their sordid homes. She called not only on her old women, but at old Mrs. Ripley's, where she created quite a sensation by her intersting news. "Why, perhaps you will see dear old John," said Susan Ripley, thinking at once of the greatest privilege which could possibly occur to anybody, according to her way of thinking. It was no wonder that after Cicely had left she sat down and wrote a letter to her brother, in the compiling of which she felt all the pleasure which comes from having something to say. As with many people the task of writing a letter was with her a serious one, only undertaken at the call of duty or affection, but now her letter was lively with the unwonted stir of Cicely's departure. No detail which the merry girl had given was omitted, down to the train she was going by and the metropolitan station she would arrive at. It was not often that a young lady journeyed from Riddlesworth to London, and when it occurred it made a sensation in the days we are speaking of. On the very day, and at the very hour when Arthur was writhing and wincing under his courteous castigation in the private office of the house, Cicely was taking her ticket at the little far-away station of Riddlesworth, and it would have been well for him in his misery if he could have thought of it, and felt that all was not lost; for he was loved by those who loved with the only love worth anything-the love that loves through all. But we are too much given to thinking, all of us, that our little garden of Gethsemane is all the universe, and we take in no wider view than is compassed by its narrow bounds. This is sure to be the case with him who himself is usually the principal object in the life landscape. When that is under a cloud, it is dull indeed. It is the unselfish man whose sky at its darkest is never without rifts through which the blue is seen, and who realises that beyond his little garden of grief there are yet the sunshine, and the angels, and God. The train by which Cicely travelled during the first part of her journey was a slow one, on a line tributary only to one of the great railway arteries. The driver of it had no sharply-defined notions of speed, and in consequence, instead of catching the London express at the junction she had to wait there five hours. But the more people are like angels the less do they feel little matters of that sort, for to them time becomes like eternity. And Cicely was like an angel, with just enough of earthly womanhood about her to make her quite charming. She whipped out her knitting, and went on with it merrily. When the bustle of the arriving train had subsided, a little red-handed girl, carrying a very big baby, and acting as nurse to a small brother beside, came down to the platform, as children will-bless them! to take advantage of everything for which money payment is not required. The brass-buttoned officials, with their fog-horn mouths from which come such blasts of topographical incoherence-were away, so they had a fine time of it, and stood on the weighing machine, and sat on all the benches in turn, with great gusto. They even ventured into the waiting rooms, which, in the course of previous voyages of discovery they had never dared to explore, and in due course came to that in which Cicely was sitting. They were quite a long way into the room before they discovered her, and then following their first impulse, they made a stampede, the door closing noisily behind them, and their shouts being heard far down the platform. But they were soon flattening their noses against the window, and trying to pierce the wire blind with their bright eyes, that they might see the pretty lady, and yet be ready to fly in case of need. And Cicely, following her instincts, had them in, and spoke kindly to them, and gave them apples and sweets. As they went away, the girl said, "Wor'nt her nice, Jack?" "Her vittles was," said the aged specimen of a boy. And after that there came in a poor creature of a woman, with a haggard look in her face, who burst out crying when she saw Cicely looking so like a fresh blossom in the spring, because it brought to mind the time when she was like that too. And Cicely did what some people would have called very indiscreet. She just treated the poor thing like a sister, and that was what a great many orthodox ladies would not have done, for all their saying, when they came into that waiting-room, how nice it was to see the Holy Scriptures hanging up against the wall, and upon the table; for there are some people so busy worshipping the Bible that they have no time to carry out its precepts. And so the five hours sped rapidly away. VII. It was eleven o'clock at night, and the passengers by the bridge over the river were getting fewer. For that reason it seemed to draw Arthur towards it with a stronger attraction. He had been wandering miserably about since about seven o'clock, with an aching head and his blood coursing feverishly through his veins. Now he would shiver, and presently he would be burning hot. He had led lately a dissipated life, and inexorable nature was paying him back. The seed he had sown was bringing forth its baleful harvest. He was on the eve of a serious illness, and already he looked at the past, and thought of the future through the medium of mental aberration and a morbid despair. It was enough to make angels weep to see this young inexperienced nature so stricken; this nature with so much good in it, which, it appeared, might under other circumstances have been developed, looking at the matter in a narrow human way. That narrow human way being to throw up our hands and sigh, if a lad goes wrong, as Arthur had, and to think of him as if he were blighted to all eternity, which is one way of doing our best so to blight him; and which is one of the bitter fruits of the pernicious doctrine of an eternal hell. What would his mother have said could she have seen her boy now? How different is the real Arthur from the Arthur painted on his sister's imagination, as she trundles on in that all too slow train to the terminus at the other end of the bridge! How different are these twin children of the same mother, approaching to, alas! so sad a meeting at this bridge that crosses the swirling water below! |