Frederick Trevor Hill - "On the Trail of Grant and Lee"

T. Sturge Moore - "Albert Durer"

Charlotte Mary Yonge - "The Chosen People"

George MacDonald - "A Dish Of Orts"

A  /  B  /  C  /  D  /  E  /   F  /  G  /  H  /  I  /  J  /   K  /  L  /  M  /  N  /  O   P  /  R  /  S  /  T  /  U  /  V  /  W  /  X  /  Y  /  Z

Wilfrid Cumbermede by George MacDonald

G >> George MacDonald >> Wilfrid Cumbermede




I lingered for a while utterly exhausted. I was trembling in every
limb. The moon rose and began to shed her low yellow light over the
hazel copse, filling the lane with brightness and shadow. Lilith,
seeming-in her whiteness to gather a tenfold share of the light upon
herself, was now feeding as gently as if she had known nothing of the
strife, and I congratulated myself that the fall had not injured her.
But as she took a step forward in her feeding, I discovered to my
dismay that she was quite lame. For my own part I was now feeling the
ache of numerous and severe bruises. When I took Lilith by the bridle
to lead her away, I found that neither of us could manage more than two
miles an hour. I was very uneasy about her. There was nothing for it,
however, but make the best of our way to Gastford. It was no little
satisfaction to think, as we hobbled along, that the accident had
happened through no carelessness of mine, beyond that of cantering in
the dark, for I was on my own side of the road. Had Geoffrey been on
his, narrow as the lane was, we might have passed without injury.

It was so late when we reached Gastford, that we had to rouse the
ostler before I could get Lilith attended to. I bathed the injured leg,
of which the shoulder seemed wrenched; and having fed her, but less
plentifully than usual, I left her to her repose. In the morning she
was considerably better, but I resolved to leave her where she was,
and, sending a messenger for Styles to come and attend to her, I hired
a gig, and went to call on my new friend the rector of Umberden.

I told him all that had happened, and where I had left the volume. He
said he would have a chest made in which to secure the whole register,
and, meanwhile, would himself go to the church and bring that volume
home with him. It is safe enough now, as any one may find who wishes to
see it--though the old man has long passed away.

Lilith remained at Gastford a week before I judged it safe for her to
come home. The injury, however, turned out to be a not very serious
one.

Why should I write of my poor mare--but that she was once hers all for
whose hoped perusal I am writing this? No, there is even a better
reason: I shall never, to all my eternity, forget, even if I should
never see her again, which I do not for a moment believe, what she did
for me that evening. Surely she deserves to appear in her own place in
my story!

Of course I was exercised in my mind as to who had sent me the warning.
There could be no more doubt that I had hit what it intended, and had
possibly preserved the register from being once more tampered with. I
could think only of one. I have never had an opportunity of inquiring,
and for her sake I should never have asked the question, but I have
little doubt it was Clara. Who else could have had a chance of making
the discovery, and at the same time would have cared to let me know it?
Also she would have cogent reason for keeping such a part in the affair
a secret. Probably she had heard her father informing Geoffrey; but he
might have done so with no worse intention than had informed his
previous policy.




CHAPTER LXIV.


YET ONCE.

I am drawing my story to a close. Almost all that followed bears so
exclusively upon my internal history, that I will write but one
incident more of it. I have roamed the world, and reaped many harvests.
In the deepest agony I have never refused the consolations of Nature or
of Truth. I have never knowingly accepted any founded in falsehood, in
forgetfulness, or in distraction. Let such as have no hope in God drink
of what Lethe they can find; to me it is a river of Hell and altogether
abominable. I could not be content even to forget my sins. There can be
but one deliverance from them, namely, that God and they should come
together in my soul. In his presence I shall serenely face them.
Without him I dare not think of them. With God a man can confront
anything; without God, he is but the withered straw which the sickle of
the reaper has left standing on a wintry field. But to forget them
would be to cease and begin anew, which to one aware of his immortality
is a horror.

If comfort profound as the ocean has not yet overtaken and infolded me,
I see how such may come--perhaps will come. It must be by the enlarging
of my whole being in truth, in God, so as to give room for the storm to
rage, yet not destroy; for the sorrow to brood, yet not kill; for the
sunshine of love to return after the east wind and black frost of
bitterest disappointment; for the heart to feel the uttermost
tenderness while the arms go not forth to embrace; for a mighty heaven
of the unknown, crowded with the stars of endless possibilities, to
dawn when the sun of love has vanished, and the moon of its memory is
too ghastly to give any light: it is comfort such and thence that I
think will one day possess me. Already has not its aurora brightened
the tops of my snow-covered mountains? And if yet my valleys lie gloomy
and forlorn, is not light on the loneliest peak a sure promise of the
coming day?

Only once again have I looked in Mary's face. I will record the
occasion, and then drop my pen.

About five years after I left home, I happened in my wanderings to be
in one of my favourite Swiss valleys--high and yet sheltered. I
rejoiced to be far up in the mountains, yet behold the inaccessible
peaks above me--mine, though not to be trodden by foot of mine--my
heart's own, though never to yield me a moment's outlook from their
lofty brows; for I was never strong enough to reach one mighty summit.
It was enough for me that they sent me down the glad streams from the
cold bosoms of their glaciers--the offspring of the sun and the snow;
that I too beheld the stars to which they were nearer than I.

One lovely morning I had wandered a good way from the village--a place
little frequented by visitors, where I had a lodging in the house of
the syndic--when I was overtaken by one of the sudden fogs which so
frequently render those upper regions dangerous. There was no path to
guide me back to my temporary home, but, a hundred yards or so beneath
where I had been sitting, lay that which led down to one of the best
known villages of the canton, where I could easily find shelter. I made
haste to descend.

After a couple of hours' walking, during which the fog kept following
me, as if hunting me from its lair, I at length arrived at the level of
the valley, and was soon in one of those large hotels which in Summer
are crowded as bee-hives, and in Winter forsaken as a ruin. The season
for travellers was drawing to a close, and the house was full of
homeward-bound guests.

For the mountains will endure but a season of intrusion. If travellers
linger too long within their hospitable gates, their humour changes,
and, with fierce winds and snow and bitter sleet, they will drive them
forth, preserving their Winter privacy for the bosom friends of their
mistress, Nature. Many is the Winter since those of my boyhood which I
have spent amongst the Alps; and in such solitude I have ever found the
negation of all solitude, the one absolute Presence. David communed
with his own heart on his bed and was still--there finding God:
communing with my own heart in the Winter-valleys of Switzerland I
found at least what made me cry out: 'Surely this is the house of God;
this is the gate of heaven!' I would not be supposed to fancy that God
is in mountains, and not in plains--that God is in the solitude, and
not in the city: in any region harmonious with its condition and
necessities, it is easier, for the heart to be still, and in its
stillness to hear the still small voice.

Dinner was going on at the _table-d'hote_. It was full, but a place was
found for me in a bay-window. Turning to the one side, I belonged to
the great world, represented by the Germans, Americans, and English,
with a Frenchman and Italian here and there, filling the long table;
turning to the other, I knew myself in a temple of the Most High, so
huge that it seemed empty of men. The great altar of a mighty mountain
rose, massy as a world, and ethereal as a thought, into the upturned
gulf of the twilight air--its snowy peak, ever as I turned to look,
mounting up and up to its repose. I had been playing with my own soul,
spinning it between the sun and the moon, as it were, and watching now
the golden and now the silvery side, as I glanced from the mountain to
the table, and again from the table to the mountain, when all at once I
discovered that I was searching the mountain for something--I did not
know what. Whether any tones had reached me, I cannot tell;--a man's
mind may, even through his senses, be marvellously moved without
knowing whence the influence comes;--but there I was searching the face
of the mountain for something, with a want which had not begun to
explain itself. From base to peak my eyes went flitting and resting and
wandering again upwards. At last they reached the snowy crown, from
which they fell into the infinite blue beyond. Then, suddenly, the
unknown something I wanted was clear. The same moment I turned to the
table. Almost opposite was a face--pallid, with parted lips and fixed
eyes--gazing at me. Then I knew those eyes had been gazing at me all
the time I had been searching the face of the mountain. For one moment
they met mine and rested; for one moment, I felt as if I must throw
myself at her feet, and clasp them to my heart; but she turned her eyes
away, and I rose and left the house.

The mist was gone, and the moon was rising. I walked up the mountain
path towards my village. But long ere I reached it the sun was rising.
With his first arrow of slenderest light, the tossing waves of my
spirit began to lose their white tops, and sink again towards a distant
calm; and ere I saw the village from the first point of vision, I had
made the following verses. They are the last I will set down.

I know that I cannot move thee
To an echo of my pain,
Or a thrill of the storming trouble
That racks my soul and brain;

That our hearts through all the ages
Shall never sound in tune;
That they meet no more in their cycles
Than the parted sun and moon.

But if ever a spirit flashes
Itself on another soul,
One day, in thy stillness, a vapour
Shall round about thee roll;

And the lifting of the vapour
Shall reveal a world of pain,
Of frosted suns, and moons that wander
Through misty mountains of rain.

Thou shalt know me for one live instant--
Thou halt know me--and yet not love:
I would not have thee troubled,
My cold, white-feathered dove!

I would only once come near thee--Myself,
and not my form;
Then away in the distance wander,
A slow-dissolving storm.

The vision should pass in vapour,
That melts in aether again;
Only a something linger-Not
pain, but the shadow of pain.

And I should know that thy spirit
On mine one look had sent;
And glide away from thy knowledge,
And try to be half-content.




CHAPTER LXV.


CONCLUSION.

The ebbing tide that leaves bare the shore swells the heaps of the
central sea. The tide of life ebbs from this body of mine, soon to lie
on the shore of life like a stranded wreck; but the murmur of the
waters that break upon no strand is in my ears; to join the waters of
the infinite life, mine is ebbing away.

Whatever has been his will is well--grandly well--well even for that in
me which feared, and in those very respects in which it feared that it
might not be well. The whole being of me past and present shall say: It
is infinitely well, and I would not have it otherwise. Rather than it
should not be as it is, I would go back to the world and this body of
which I grew weary, and encounter yet again all that met me on my
journey. Yes--final submission of my will to the All-will--I would meet
it _knowing what was coming_. Lord of me, Father of Jesus Christ, will
this suffice? Is my faith enough yet? I say it, not having beheld what
thou hast in store--not knowing what I shall be--not even absolutely
certain that thou art--confident only that, if thou be, such thou must
be.

The last struggle is before me. But I have passed already through so
many valleys of death itself, where the darkness was not only palpable,
but choking and stinging, that I cannot greatly fear that which holds
but the shadow of death. For what men call death, is but its shadow.
Death never comes near us; it lies behind the back of God; he is
between it and us. If he were to turn his back upon us, the death which
no imagination can shadow forth, would lap itself around us, and we
should be--we should not know what.

At night I lie wondering how it will feel; and, but that God will be
with me, I would rather be slain suddenly, than lie still and await the
change. The growing weakness, ushered in, it may be, by long agony; the
alienation from things about me, while I am yet amidst them; the slow
rending of the bonds which make this body a home, so that it turns half
alien, while yet some bonds unsevered hold the live thing fluttering in
its worm-eaten cage--but God knows me and my house, and I need not
speculate or forebode. When it comes, death will prove as natural as
birth. Bethink thee, Lord--nay, thou never forgettest. It is because
thou thinkest and feelest that I think and feel; it is on thy deeper
consciousness that mine ever floats; thou knowest my frame, and
rememberest that I am dust: do with me as thou wilt. Let me take
centuries to die if so thou willest, for thou wilt be with me. Only if
an hour should come when thou must seem to forsake me, watch me all the
time, lest self-pity should awake, and I should cry that thou wast
dealing hardly with me. For when thou hidest thy face, the world is a
corpse, and I am a live soul fainting within it.

* * * * *

Thus far had I written, and was about to close with certain words of
Job, which are to me like the trumpet of the resurrection, when the
news reached me that Sir Geoffrey Brotherton was dead. He leaves no
children, and the property is expected to pass to a distant branch of
the family. Mary will have to leave Moldwarp Hall.

* * * * *

I have been up to London to my friend Marston--for it is years since Mr
Coningham died. I have laid everything before him, and left the affair
in his hands. He is so confident in my cause, that he offers, in case
my means should fail me, to find what is necessary himself; but he is
almost as confident of a speedy settlement.

And now, for the first time in my life, I am about--shall I say, to
court society? At least I am going to London, about to give and receive
invitations, and cultivate the acquaintance of those whose appearance
and conversation attract me.

I have not a single relative, to my knowledge, in the world, and I am
free, beyond question, to leave whatever property I have, or may have,
to whomsoever I please.

My design is this: if I succeed in my suit, I will offer Moldwarp to
Mary for her lifetime. She is greatly beloved in the county, and has
done much for the labourers, nor upon her own lands only. If she had
the full power she would do yet better. But of course it is very
doubtful whether she will accept it. Should she decline it, I shall try
to manage it myself--leaving it to her, with reversion to the man,
whoever he may be, whom I shall choose to succeed her.

What sort of man I shall endeavour to find, I think my reader will
understand. I will not describe him, beyond saying that he must above
all things be just, generous, and free from the petty prejudices of the
country gentleman. He must understand that property involves service to
every human soul that lives or labours upon it--the service of the
elder brother to his less burdened yet more enduring and more helpless
brothers and sisters; that for the lives of all such he has in his
degree to render account. For surely God never meant to uplift any man
_at the expense_ of his fellows; but to uplift him that he might be
strong to minister, as a wise friend and ruler, to their highest and
best needs--first of all by giving them the justice which will be
recognized as such by him before whom a man _is_ his brother's keeper,
and becomes a Cain in denying it.

Lest Lady Brotherton, however, should like to have something to give
away, I leave my former will as it was. It is in Marston's hands.

* * * * *

Would I marry her now, if I might? I cannot tell. The thought rouses no
passionate flood within me. Mighty spaces of endless possibility and
endless result open before me. Death is knocking at my door.--

No--no; I will be honest, and lay it to no half reasons, however
wise.--I would rather meet her then first, when she is clothed in that
new garment called by St Paul the spiritual body. That, Geoffrey has
never touched; over that he has no claim.

But if the loveliness of her character should have purified his, and
drawn and bound his soul to hers?

Father, fold me in thyself. The storm, so long still, awakes; once more
it flutters its fierce pinions. Let it not swing itself aloft in the
air of my spirit. I dare not think, not merely lest thought should
kindle into agony, but lest I should fail to rejoice over the lost and
found. But my heart is in thy hand. Need I school myself to bow to an
imagined decree of thine? Is it not enough that, when I shall know a
thing for thy will, I shall then be able to say: Thy will be done? It
is not enough; I need more. School thou my heart so to love thy will
that in all calmness I leave to think what may or may not be its
choice, and rest in its holy self.

* * * * *

She has sent for me. I go to her. I will not think beforehand what I
shall say.

Something within tells me that a word from her would explain all that
sometimes even now seems so inexplicable as hers. Will she speak that
word? Shall I pray her for that word? I know nothing. The pure Will be
done!


THE END.

Scottish book of the year goes to Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman

The barrister Constance Briscoe has won the libel case brought against her by her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, over her bestselling misery memoir Ugly, in which she accused Briscoe-Mitchell of childhood cruelty and neglect.

Briscoe-Mitchell claimed the allegations were "a piece of fiction", and sued Briscoe and her publishers Hodder & Stoughton for libel.

A 10-day hearing at the high court in London concluded earlier today with a unanimous verdict from the jury after more than a day's deliberation. Speaking outside the court, Briscoe, a part-time judge, said she was "very happy" with the verdict.

"It is sad that my mother still feels the need to pursue me. Now I just want to get on with my career," she said. "I can quite understand why my family went into collective denial, but whilst child abuse may be committed behind closed doors, it should never be swept under the carpet."

The hearing saw Briscoe tell Mr Justice Tugendhat and a jury how her mother beat her with a stick for wetting the bed, called her a "dirty little whore" and drove her to attempt suicide by drinking bleach.

Briscoe's account of her upbringing was published in 2006 and has sold more than 400,000 copies in the UK.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Would you have your ashes scattered in Jane Austen's garden?
American film producer to publish version of the Bible in which God says it is better to be gay than straight

The royal family doesn't need a poet

The power of Jane Austen never ceases to amaze: the myriad film and TV adaptations, the biopics, the spin-off self-help books, the novels about Austen book clubs and Austen obsessives and even, next spring, the publication of a book about "how Jane Austen conquered the world" (Jane's Fame, by Clare Harman). And now comes the just-too-weird story that deceased fans of Jane Austen have been banned from having their ashes scattered in her garden. In a letter to the Jane Austen Society, Louise West, the collections manager of Jane Austen's House Museum, wrote: "While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow. It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!" (Or is it? Surely a small quantity of fresh ashes judiciously placed beneath a hydrangea bush is just the ticket?)

Anyway, leaving aside the Gardeners' Question Time minutiae, what on earth is going on here? I like an Austen novel as much as the next person – I probably reread my way through the complete works every couple of years – but I am baffled as to why one would want to be laid to rest among the flowerbeds of Chawton. The only explanation is the currently unstoppable power of the Austen cult, fuelled by Colin Firth in a wet blouse, by Andrew Davies's adaptations, and by Hollywood. I'm all for enjoying books, but the cult of Austen has reached ridiculous proportions. In a post-feminist world that should know better, she seems to be adored as the comforting provider of romantic, happy-endings nonsense instead of the sharp and acerbic social satirist she deserves to be seen as.

(Does anyone actually believe her, by the way, when she foretells a happy marriage for Darcey and Elizabeth? I fear a woman as interesting as Elizabeth would be sorely disappointed with this standard-issue British Repressed Public-school Man - hopeless emotionally, and probably hopeless in bed.)

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds