Wilfrid Cumbermede by George MacDonald
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George MacDonald >> Wilfrid Cumbermede
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She left her implements, led me down a stair close at hand, opened a
door at its foot, and let me out into the high court. I gazed about me.
It was as if I had escaped from a prison-cell into the chamber of
torture: I stood the centre of a multitude of windows--the eyes of the
house all fixed upon me. On one side was the great gate, through which,
from the roof, I had seen the carriages drive the night before; but it
was closed. I remembered, however, that Sir Giles had brought me in by
a wicket in that gate. I hastened to it. There was but a bolt to
withdraw, and I was free.
But all was gloomy within, and genial nature could no longer enter.
Glittering jewels of sunlight and dew were nothing but drops of water
upon blades of grass. Fresh-bursting trees were no more than the
deadest of winter-bitten branches. The great eastern window of the
universe, gorgeous with gold and roses, was but the weary sun making a
fuss about nothing. My sole relief lay in motion. I roamed I knew not
whither, nor how long.
At length I found myself on a height eastward of the Hall, overlooking
its gardens, which lay in deep terraces beneath. Inside a low wall was
the first of them, dark with an avenue of ancient trees, and below was
the large oriel window in the end of the ball-room. I climbed over the
wall, which was built of cunningly fitted stones, with mortar only in
the top row; and drawn by the gloom, strolled up and down the avenue
for a long time. At length I became aware of a voice I had heard
before. I could see no one; but, hearkening about, I found it must come
from the next terrace. Descending by a deep flight of old mossy steps,
I came upon a strip of smooth sward, with yew trees, dark and trim, on
each side of it. At the end of the walk was an arbour, in which I could
see the glimmer of something white. Too miserable to be shy, I advanced
and peeped in. The girl who had shown me the way to the library was
talking to her mother.
'Mamma!' she said, without showing any surprise, 'here is the boy who
came into our room last night.'
'How do you do?' said the lady kindly, making room for me on the bench
beside her.
I answered as politely as I could, and felt a strange comfort glide
from the sweetness of her countenance.
'What an adventure you had last night!' she said. 'It was well you did
not fall.'
'That wouldn't have been much worse than having to stop where we were,'
I answered.
The conversation thus commenced went on until I had told them all my
history, including my last adventure.
'You must have dreamed it,' said the lady.
'So I thought, ma'am,' I answered, 'until I found that my sword was
gone.'
'Are you sure you looked everywhere?' she asked.
'Indeed, I did.'
'It does not follow however that the ghost took it. It is more likely
Mrs Wilson came in to see you after you were asleep, and carried it
off.'
'Oh yes!' I cried, rejoiced at the suggestion; 'that must be it. I
shall ask her.'
'I am sure you will find it so. Are you going home soon?'
'Yes--as soon as I've had my breakfast. It's a good walk from here to
Aldwick.'
'So it is.--We are going that way too?' she added thinkingly.
'Mr. Elder is a great friend of papa's--isn't he, mamma?' said the
girl.
'Yes, my dear. They were friends at college.'
'I have heard Mr Elder speak of Mr Osborne,' I said. 'Do you live near
us?'
'Not very far off--in the next parish, where my husband is rector,' she
answered. 'If you could wait till the afternoon, we should be happy to
take you there. The pony-carriage is coming for us.'
'Thank you, ma'am,' I answered; 'but I ought to go immediately after
breakfast. You won't mention about the roof, will you? I oughtn't to
get Clara into trouble.'
'She is a wild girl,' said Mrs Osborne; 'but I think you are quite
right.'
'How lucky it was I knew the library!' said Mary, who had become quite
friendly, from under her mother's wing.
'That it was! But I dare say you know all about the place,' I answered.
'No, indeed!' she returned. 'I know nothing about it. As we went to our
room, mamma opened the door and showed me the library, else I shouldn't
have been able to help you at all.'
'Then you haven't been here often?'
'No; and I never shall be again.--I'm going away to school,' she added;
and her voice trembled.
'So am I,' I said. 'I'm going to Switzerland in a month or two. But
then I haven't a mamma to leave behind me.' She broke down at that, and
hid her head on her mother's bosom. I had unawares added to her grief,
for her brother Charley was going to Switzerland too.
I found afterwards that Mr Elder, having been consulted by Mr Osborne,
had arranged with my uncle that Charley Osborne and I should go
together.
Mary Osborne--I never called her Polly as Clara did--continued so
overcome by her grief, that her mother turned to me and said,
'I think you had better go, Master Cumbermede.'
I bade her good morning, and made my way to Mrs Wilson's apartment. I
found she had been to my room, and was expecting me with some anxiety,
fearing I had set off without my breakfast. Alas! she knew nothing
about the sword, looked annoyed, and, I thought, rather mysterious;
said she would have a search, make inquiries, do what she could, and
such like, but begged I would say nothing about it in the house. I left
her with a suspicion that she believed the ghost had carried it away,
and that it was of no use to go searching for it.
Two days after, a parcel arrived for me. I concluded it was my sword;
but, to my grievous disappointment, found it was only a large hamper of
apples and cakes, very acceptable in themselves, but too plainly
indicating Mrs Wilson's desire to console me for what could not be
helped. Mr Elder never missed the sword. I rose high in the estimation
of my schoolfellows because of the adventure, especially in that of
Moberly, who did not believe in the ghost, but ineffectually tasked his
poor brains to account for the disappearance of the weapon. The best
light was thrown upon it by a merry boy of the name of Fisher, who
declared his conviction that the steward had carried it off to add to
his collection.
CHAPTER XV.
AWAY.
Will not linger longer over this part of my history--already, I fear,
much too extended for the patience of my readers. My excuse is that, in
looking back, the events I have recorded appear large and prominent,
and that certainly they have a close relation with my after-history.
The time arrived when I had to leave England for Switzerland. I will
say nothing of my leave-taking. It was not a bitter one. Hope was
strong, and rooted in present pleasure. I was capable of much
happiness--keenly responsive to the smallest agreeable impulse from
without or from within. I had good health, and life was happiness in
itself. The blowing of the wind, the shining of the sun, or the glitter
of water, was sufficient to make me glad; and I had self-consciousness
enough to increase the delight by the knowledge that I was glad.
The fact is I was coming in for my share in the spiritual influences of
Nature, so largely poured on the heart and mind of my generation. The
prophets of the new blessing, Wordsworth and Coleridge, I knew nothing
of. Keats was only beginning to write. I had read a little of Cowper,
but did not care for him. Yet I was under the same spell as they all.
Nature was a power upon me. I was filled with the vague recognition of
a present soul in Nature--with a sense of the humanity everywhere
diffused through her and operating upon ours. I was but fourteen, and
had only feelings, but something lay at the heart of the feelings,
which would one day blossom into thoughts.
At the coach-office in the county-town, I first met my future
companion, with his father, who was to see us to our destination.
My uncle accompanied me no further, and I soon found myself on the
top of a coach, with only one thing to do--make the acquaintance
of Charles Osborne. His father was on the box-seat, and we two sat
behind; but we were both shy, and for some time neither spoke.
Charles was about my own age, rather like his sister, only that his
eyes were blue, and his hair a lightish brown. A tremulousness about
the mouth betrayed a nervous temperament. His skin was very fair and
thin, showing the blue veins. As he did not speak, I sat for a little
while watching him, without, however, the least speculation concerning
him, or any effort to discover his character. I had not even yet
reached the point of trying to find people out. I take what time and
acquaintance disclose, but never attempt to forestall, which may come
partly from trust, partly from want of curiosity, partly from a
disinclination to unnecessary mental effort. But as I watched his face,
half-unconsciously, I could not help observing that now and then it
would light up suddenly and darken again almost instantly. At last his
father turned round, and with some severity, said:
'You do not seem to be making any approaches to mutual acquaintance.
Charles, why don't you address your companion?'
The words were uttered in the slow tone of one used to matters too
serious for common speech. The boy cast a hurried glance at me, smiled
uncertainly, and moved uneasily on his seat. His father turned away and
made a remark to the coachman.
Mr Osborne was a very tall, thin, yet square-shouldered man, with a
pale face, and large features of delicate form. He looked severe, pure,
and irritable. The tone of his voice, although the words were measured
and rather stilted, led me to this last conclusion quite as much as the
expression of his face; for it was thin and a little acrid. I soon
observed that Charley started slightly, as often as his father
addressed him; but this might be because his father always did so with
more or less of abruptness. At times there was great kindness in his
manner, seeming, however, less the outcome of natural tenderness than a
sense of duty. His being was evidently a weight upon his son's, and
kept down the natural movements of his spirit. A number of small
circumstances only led me to these conclusions; for nothing remarkable
occurred to set in any strong light their mutual relation. For his side
Charles was always attentive and ready, although with a promptitude
that had more in it of the mechanical impulse of habit than of pleased
obedience. Mr Osborne spoke kindly to me--I think the more kindly that
I was not his son, and he was therefore not so responsible for me. But
he looked as if the care of the whole world lay on his shoulders; as if
an awful destruction were the most likely thing to happen to every one,
and to him were committed the toilsome chance of saving some. Doubtless
he would not have trusted his boy so far from home, but that the
clergyman to whom he was about to hand him over was an old friend, of
the same religious opinions as himself.
I could well, but must not, linger over the details of our journey,
full to me of most varied pleasure. The constant change, not so rapid
as to prevent the mind from reposing a little upon the scenes which
presented themselves; the passing vision of countries and peoples,
manners and modes of life, so different from our own, did much to
arouse and develop my nature. Those flashes of pleasure came upon
Charles's pale face more and more frequently; and ere the close of the
first day we had begun to talk with some degree of friendliness. But it
became clear to me that with his father ever blocking up our horizon,
whether he sat with his broad back in front of us on the coach-box, or
paced the deck of a vessel, or perched with us under the hood on the
top of a diligence, we should never arrive at any freedom of speech. I
sometimes wondered, long after, whether Mr Osborne had begun to
discover that he was overlaying and smothering the young life of his
boy, and had therefore adopted the plan, so little to have been
expected from him, of sending his son to foreign parts to continue his
education.
I have no distinct recollection of dates, or even of the exact season
of the year. I believe it was the early Summer, but in my memory the
whole journey is now a mass of confused loveliness and pleasure. Not
that we had the best of weather all the way. I well recollect pouring
rains, and from the fact that I distinctly remember my first view of an
Alpine height, I am certain we must have had days of mist and rain
immediately before. That sight, however, to me more like an individual
revelation or vision than the impact of an object upon the brain,
stands in my mind altogether isolated from preceding and following
impressions--alone, a thing to praise God for, if there be a God to
praise. If there be not, then was the whole thing a grand and lovely
illusion, worthy, for grandeur and loveliness, of a world with a God at
the heart of it. But the grandeur and the loveliness spring from the
operation of natural laws; the laws themselves are real and true--how
could the false result from them? I hope yet, and will hope, that I am
not a bubble filled with the mocking breath of a Mephistopheles, but a
child whom his infinite Father will not hardly judge because he could
not believe in him so much as he would. I will tell how the vision
came.
Although comparatively few people visited Switzerland in those days, Mr
Osborne had been there before, and for some reason or other had
determined on going round by Interlachen. At Thun we found a sail-boat,
which we hired to take us and our luggage. At starting, an incident
happened which would not be worth mentioning, but for the impression it
made upon me. A French lady accompanied by a young girl approached Mr
Osborne--doubtless perceiving he was a clergyman, for, being an
_Evangelical_ of the most pure, honest, and narrow type, he was in
every point and line of his countenance marked a priest and apart from
his fellow-men--and asked him to allow her and her daughter to go in
the boat with us to Interlachen. A glow of pleasure awoke in me at
sight of his courtly behaviour, with lifted hat and bowed head; for I
had never been in the company of such a gentleman before. But the wish
instantly followed that his son might have shared in his courtesy. We
partook freely of his justice and benevolence, but he showed us no such
grace as he showed the lady. I have since observed that sons are
endlessly grateful for courtesy from their fathers.
The lady and her daughter sat down in the stern of the boat; and
therefore Charley and I, not certainly to our discomfiture, had to go
before the mast. The men rowed out into the lake, and then hoisted the
sail. Away we went careering before a pleasant breeze. As yet it blew
fog and mist, but the hope was that it would soon blow it away.
An unspoken friendship by this time bound Charley and me together,
silent in its beginnings and slow in its growth--not the worst pledges
of endurance. And now for the first time in our journey, Charley was
hidden from his father: the sail came between them. He glanced at me
with a slight sigh, which even then I took for an involuntary sigh of
relief. We lay leaning over the bows, now looking up at the mist blown
in never-ending volumed sheets, now at the sail swelling in the wind
before which it fled, and again down at the water through which our
boat was ploughing its evanescent furrow. We could see very little.
Portions of the shore would now and then appear, dim like reflections
from a tarnished mirror, and then fade back into the depths of cloudy
dissolution. Still it was growing lighter, and the man who was on the
outlook became less anxious in his forward gaze, and less frequent in
his calls to the helmsman. I was lying half over the gunwale, looking
into the strange-coloured water, blue dimmed with undissolved white,
when a cry from Charles made me start and look up. It was indeed a
God-like vision. The mist yet rolled thick below, but away up, far away
and far up, yet as if close at hand, the clouds were broken into a
mighty window, through which looked in upon us a huge mountain peak
swathed in snow. One great level band of darker cloud crossed its
breast, above which rose the peak, triumphant in calmness, and stood
unutterably solemn and grand, in clouds as white as its 0wn whiteness.
It had been there all the time! I sunk on my knees in the boat and
gazed up. With a sudden sweep the clouds curtained the mighty window,
and the Jungfrau withdrew into its Holy of Holies. I am painfully
conscious of the helplessness of my speech. The vision vanishes from
the words as it vanished from the bewildered eyes. But from the mind it
glorified it has never vanished. I have _been_ more ever since that
sight. To have beheld a truth is an apotheosis. What the truth was I
could not tell; but I had seen something which raised me above my
former self and made me long to rise higher yet. It awoke worship, and
a belief in the incomprehensible divine; but admitted of being analysed
no more than, in that transient vision, my intellect could--ere dawning
it vanished--analyse it into the deserts of rock, the gulfs of green
ice and flowing water, the savage solitudes of snow, the mysterious
miles of draperied mist, that went to make up the vision, each and all
essential thereto.
I had been too much given to the attempted production in myself of
effects to justify the vague theories towards which my inborn
prepossessions carried me. I had felt enough to believe there was more
to be felt; and such stray scraps of verse of the new order as,
floating about, had reached me, had set me questioning and testing my
own life and perceptions and sympathies by what these awoke in me at
second-hand. I had often doubted, oppressed by the power of these,
whether I could myself see, or whether my sympathy with Nature was not
merely inspired by the vision of others. Ever after this, if such a
doubt returned, with it arose the Jungfrau, looking into my very soul.
'Oh Charley!' was all I could say. Our hands met blindly, and clasped
each other. I burst into silent tears.
When I looked up, Charley was staring into the mist again. His eyes,
too, were full of tears, but some troubling contradiction prevented
their flowing: I saw it by the expression of that mobile but now
firmly-closed mouth.
Often ere we left Switzerland I saw similar glories: this vision
remains alone, for it was the first.
I will not linger over the tempting delight of the village near which
we landed, its houses covered with quaintly-notched wooden scales like
those of a fish, and its river full to the brim of white-blue water,
rushing from the far-off bosom of the glaciers. I had never had such a
sense of exuberance and plenty as this river gave me--especially where
it filled the planks and piles of wood that hemmed it in like a trough.
I might agonize in words for a day and I should not express the
delight. And, lest my readers should apprehend a diary of a tour, I
shall say nothing more of our journey, remarking only that if
Switzerland were to become as common to the mere tourist mind as
Cheapside is to a Londoner, the meanest of its glories would be no whit
impaired thereby. Sometimes, I confess, in these days of overcrowded
cities, when, in periodical floods, the lonely places of the earth are
from them inundated, I do look up to the heavens and say to myself that
there at least, between the stars, even in thickest of nebulous
constellations, there is yet plenty of pure, unadulterated room--not
even a vapour to hang a colour upon; but presently I return to my
better mind and say that any man who loves his fellow will yet find he
has room enough and to spare.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE ICE-CAVE.
During our journey, Mr Osborne had seldom talked to us, and far more
seldom in speech sympathetic. If by chance I came out with anything I
thought or felt, even if he did not disapprove altogether, he would yet
first lay hold of something to which he could object, coming round only
by degrees, and with differences, to express consent. Evidently with
him objection was the first step in instruction. It was better in his
eyes to say you were wrong than to say you were right, even if you
should be much more right than wrong. He had not the smallest idea of
siding with the truth in you, of digging about it and watering it until
it grew a great tree in which all your thought-birds might nestle and
sing their songs; but he must be ever against the error--forgetting
that the only antagonist of the false is the true. 'What,' I used to
think in after-years, 'is the use of battering the walls to get at the
error, when the kindly truth is holding the postern open for you to
enter, and pitch it out of window.'
The evening before we parted, he gave us a solemn admonishment on the
danger of being led astray by what men called the beauties of
Nature--for the heart was so desperately wicked that, even of the
things God had made _to show his power_, it would make snares for our
destruction. I will not go on with his homily, out of respect for the
man; for there was much earnestness in him, and it would utterly shame
me if I were supposed to hold that up to the contempt which the forms
it took must bring upon it. Besides, he made such a free use of the
most sacred of names, that I shrink from representing his utterance. A
good man I do not doubt he was; but he did the hard parts of his duty
to the neglect of the genial parts, and therefore was not a man to help
others to be good. His own son revived the moment he took his leave of
us--began to open up as the little red flower called the Shepherd's
Hour-Glass opens when the cloud withdraws. It is a terrible thing when
the father is the cloud, and not the sun, of his child's life. If
Charley had been like the greater number of boys I have known, all this
would only have hardened his mental and moral skin by the natural
process of accommodation. But his skin would not harden, and the evil
wrought the deeper. From his father he had inherited a conscience of
abnormal sensibility; but he could not inherit the religious dogmas by
means of which his father had partly deadened, partly distorted his;
and constant pressure and irritation had already generated a great
soreness of surface.
When he began to open up, it was after a sad fashion at first. To
resume my simile of the pimpernel--it was to disclose a heart in which
the glowing purple was blanched to a sickly violet. What happiness he
had, came in fits and bursts, and passed as quickly, leaving him
depressed and miserable. He was always either wishing to be happy, or
trying to be sure of the grounds of the brief happiness he had. He
allowed the natural blessedness of his years hardly a chance: the
moment its lobes appeared above ground, he was handling them, examining
them, and trying to pull them open. No wonder they crept underground
again! It may seem hardly credible that such should be the case with a
boy of fifteen, but I am not mistaken in my diagnosis. I will go a
little further. Gifted with the keenest perceptions, and a nature
unusually responsive to the feelings of others, he was born to be an
artist. But he was content neither with his own suggestions, nor with
understanding those of another; he must, by the force of his own will,
generate his friend's feeling in himself, not perceiving the thing
impossible. This was one point at which we touched, and which went far
to enable me to understand him. The original in him was thus constantly
repressed, and he suffered from the natural consequences of repression.
He suffered also on the physical side from a tendency to disease of the
lungs inherited from his mother.
Mr Forest's house stood high on the Grindelwald side of the Wengern
Alp, under a bare grassy height full of pasture both Summer and Winter.
In front was a great space, half meadow, half common, rather poorly
covered with hill-grasses. The rock was near the surface, and in places
came through, when the grass was changed for lichens and mosses.
Through this rocky meadow now roamed, now rushed, now tumbled one of
those Alpine streams the very thought of whose ice-born plenitude makes
me happy yet. Its banks were not abrupt, but rounded gently in, and
grassy down to the water's brink. The larger torrents of Winter wore
the channel wide, and the sinking of the water in Summer let the grass
grow within it. But peaceful as the place was, and merry with the
constant rush of this busy stream, it had, even in the hottest Summer
day, a memory of the Winter about it, a look of suppressed desolation;
for the only trees upon it were a score of straggling pines--all dead,
as if blasted by lightning, or smothered by snow. Perhaps they were the
last of the forest in that part, and their roots had reached a stratum
where they could not live. All I know is that there they stood, blasted
and dead every one of them.
Charley could never bear them, and even disliked the place because of
them. His father was one whom a mote in his brother's eye repelled. The
son suffered for this in twenty ways--one of which was that a single
spot in the landscape was to him enough to destroy the loveliness of
exquisite surroundings.
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