Once, expressing to Margaret her regret that she should be such a trouble to her, she said:

"You have to do so much for me, that I am ashamed."

"Do let me wash the feet of one of his disciples;" Margaret replied, gently expostulating; after which, Euphra never grumbled at her own demands upon her.

Again, one day, she said:

"I am not right at all to-day, Margaret. G.o.d can't love me, I am so hateful."

"Don't measure G.o.d's mind by your own, Euphra. It would be a poor love that depended not on itself, but on the feelings of the person loved. A crying baby turns away from its mother's breast, but she does not put it away till it stops crying. She holds it closer.

For my part, in the worst mood I am ever in, when I don't feel I love G.o.d at all, I just look up to his love. I say to him: 'Look at me. See what state I am in. Help me!' Ah! you would wonder how that makes peace. And the love comes of itself; sometimes so strong, it nearly breaks my heart."

"But there is a text I don't like."

"Take another, then."

"But it will keep coming."

"Give it back to G.o.d, and never mind it."

"But would that be right?"

"One day, when I was a little girl, so high, I couldn't eat my porridge, and sat looking at it. 'Eat your porridge,' said my mother. 'I don't want it,' I answered. 'There's nothing else for you,' said my mother--for she had not learned so much from my father then, as she did before he died. 'Hoots!' said my father--I cannot, dear Euphra, make his words into English."

"No, no, don't," said Euphra; "I shall understand them perfectly."

"'Hoots! Janet, my woman!' said my father. 'Gie the bairn a dish o'

tay. Wadna ye like some tay, Maggy, my doo?' 'Ay wad I,' said I.

'The parritch is guid eneuch,' said my mother. 'Nae doot aboot the parritch, woman; it's the bairn's stamack, it's no the parritch.'

My mother said no more, but made me a cup of such nice tea; for whenever she gave in, she gave in quite. I drank it; and, half from anxiety to please my mother, half from reviving hunger, attacked the porridge next, and ate it up. 'Leuk at that!' said my father.

'Janet, my woman, gie a body the guid that they can tak', an'

they'll sune tak' the guid that they canna. Ye're better noo, Maggy, my doo?' I never told him that I had taken the porridge too soon after all, and had to creep into the wood, and be sick. But it is all the same for the story."

Euphra laughed a feeble but delighted laugh, and applied the story for herself.

So the winter days pa.s.sed on.

"I wish I could live till the spring," said Euphra. "I should like to see a snowdrop and a primrose again."

"Perhaps you will, dear; but you are going into a better spring. I could almost envy you, Euphra."

"But shall we have spring there?"

"I think so."

"And spring-flowers?"

"I think we shall--better than here."

"But they will not mean so much."

"Then they won't be so good. But I should think they would mean ever so much more, and be ever so much more spring-like. They will be the spring-flowers to all winters in one, I think."

Folded in the love of this woman, anointed for her death by her wisdom, baptized for the new life by her sympathy and its tears, Euphra died in the arms of Margaret.

Margaret wept, fell on her knees, and gave G.o.d thanks. Mrs. Elton was so distressed, that, as soon as the funeral was over, she broke up her London household, sending some of the servants home to the country, and taking some to her favourite watering place, to which Harry also accompanied her.

She hoped that, now the affair of the ring was cleared up, she might, as soon as Hugh returned, succeed in persuading him to follow them to Devonshire, and resume his tutorship. This would satisfy her anxiety about Hugh and Harry both.

Hugh's mother died too, and was buried. When he returned from the grave which now held both father and mother, he found a short note from Margaret, telling him that Euphra was gone. Sorrow is easier to bear when it comes upon sorrow; but he could not help feeling a keen additional pang, when he learned that she was dead whom he had loved once, and now loved better. Margaret's note informed him likewise that Euphra had left a written request, that her diamond ring should be given to him to wear for her sake.

He prepared to leave the home whence all the homeness had now vanished, except what indeed lingered in the presence of an old nurse, who had remained faithful to his mother to the last. The body itself is of little value after the spirit, the love, is out of it: so the house and all the old things are little enough, after the loved ones are gone who kept it alive and made it home.

All that Hugh could do for this old nurse was to furnish a cottage for her out of his mother's furniture, giving her everything she liked best. Then he gathered the little household treasures, the few books, the few portraits and ornaments, his father's sword, and his mother's wedding-ring; destroyed with sacred fire all written papers; sold the remainder of the furniture, which he would gladly have burnt too, and so proceeded to take his last departure from the home of his childhood.

CHAPTER XXIII.

NATURE AND HER LADY.

Die Frauen sind ein liebliches Geheimniss, nur verhullt, nicht verschlossen.--NOVALIS.-Moralische Ansichten.

Women are a lovely mystery--veiled, however, not shut up.

Her twilights were more clear than our mid-day; She dreamt devoutlier than most used to pray.

DR. DONNE.

Perhaps the greatest benefit that resulted to Hugh from being thus made a pilgrim and a stranger in the earth, was, that Nature herself saw him, and took him in, Hitherto, as I have already said, Hugh's acquaintance with Nature had been chiefly a second-hand one--he knew friends of hers. Nature in poetry--not in the form of Thomsonian or Cowperian descriptions, good as they are, but closely interwoven with and expository of human thought and feeling--had long been dear to him. In this form he had believed that he knew her so well, as to be able to reproduce the lineaments of her beloved face. But now she herself appeared to him--the grand, pure, tender mother, ancient in years, yet ever young; appeared to him, not in the mirror of a man's words, but bending over him from the fathomless bosom of the sky, from the outspread arms of the forest-trees, from the silent judgment of the everlasting hills. She spoke to him from the depths of air, from the winds that harp upon the boughs, and trumpet upon the great caverns, and from the streams that sing as they go to be lost in rest. She would have shone upon him out of the eyes of her infants, the flowers, but they had their faces turned to her breast now, hiding from the pale blue eyes and the freezing breath of old Winter, who was looking for them with his face bent close to their refuge. And he felt that she had a power to heal and to instruct; yea, that she was a power of life, and could speak to the heart and conscience mighty words about G.o.d and Truth and Love.

For he did not forsake his dead home in haste. He lingered over it, and roamed about its neighbourhood. Regarding all about him with quiet, almost pa.s.sive spirit, he was astonished to find how his eyes opened to see nature in the ma.s.s. Before, he had beheld only portions and beauties. When or how the change pa.s.sed upon him he could not tell. But he no longer looked for a pretty eyebrow or a lovely lip on the face of nature: the soul of nature looked out upon him from the harmony of all, guiding him unsought to the discovery of a thousand separate delights; while from the expanded vision new meanings flashed upon him every day. He beheld in the great All the expression of the thoughts and feelings of the maker of the heavens and the earth and the sea and the fountains of water. The powers of the world to come, that is, the world of unseen truth and ideal reality, were upon him in the presence of the world that now is.

For the first time in his life, he felt at home with nature; and while he could moan with the wintry wind, he no longer sighed in the wintry sunshine, that foretold, like the far-off flutter of a herald's banner, the approach of victorious lady-spring.

With the sorrow and loneliness of loss within him, and Nature around him seeming to sigh for a fuller expression of the thought that throbbed within her, it is no wonder that the form of Margaret, the gathering of the thousand forms of nature into one intensity and harmony of loveliness, should rise again upon the world of his imagination, to set no more. Father and mother were gone. Margaret remained behind. Nature lay around him like a shining disk, that needed a visible centre of intensest light--a shield of silver, that needed but a diamond boss: Margaret alone could be that centre--that diamond light-giver; for she alone, of all the women he knew, seemed so to drink of the sun-rays of G.o.d, as to radiate them forth, for very fulness, upon the clouded world.

She had dawned on him like a sweet crescent moon, hanging far-off in a cold and low horizon: now, lifting his eyes, he saw that same moon nearly at the full, and high overhead, yet leaning down towards him through the deep blue air, that overflowed with her calm triumph of light. He knew that he loved her now. He knew that every place he went through, caught a glimmer of romance the moment he thought of her; that every most trifling event that happened to himself, looked like a piece of a story-book the moment he thought of telling it to her. But the growth of these feelings had been gradual--so slow and gradual, that when he recognized them, it seemed to him as if he had felt them from the first. The fact was, that as soon as he began to be capable of loving Margaret, he had begun to love her. He had never been able to understand her till he was driven into the desert. But now that Nature revealed herself to him full of Life, yea, of the Life of Life, namely, of G.o.d himself, it was natural that he should honour and love that 'lady of her own'; that he should recognize Margaret as greater than himself, as nearer to the heart of Nature--yea, of G.o.d the father of all. She had been one with Nature from childhood, and when he began to be one with nature too, he must become one with her.

And now, in absence, he began to study the character of her whom, in presence, he had thought he knew perfectly. He soon found that it was a Manoa, a golden city in a land of Paradise--too good to be believed in, except by him who was blessed with the beholding of it.

He knew now that she had always understood what he was only just waking to recognize. And he felt that the scholar had been very patient with the stupidity of the master, and had drawn from his lessons a nourishment of which he had known nothing himself.

But dared he think of marrying her, a creature inspired with a presence of the Spirit of G.o.d which none but the saints enjoy, and thence clothed with a garment of beauty, which her spirit wove out of its own loveliness? She was a being to glorify any man merely by granting him her habitual presence: what, then, if she gave her love! She would bring with her the presence of G.o.d himself, for she walked ever in his light, and that light clung to her and radiated from her. True, many young maidens must be walking in the sunshine of G.o.d, else whence the light and loveliness and bloom, the smile and the laugh of their youth? But Margaret not only walked in this light: she knew it and whence it came. She looked up to its source, and it illuminated her face.

The silent girl of old days, whose countenance wore the stillness of an unsunned pool, as she listened with reverence to his lessons, had blossomed into the calm, stately woman, before whose presence he felt rebuked he knew not why, upon whose face lay slumbering thought, ever ready to wake into life and motion. Dared he love her? Dared he tell her that he loved her? Dared he, so poor, so worthless, seek for himself such a world's treasure?--He might have known that worth does not need honour; that its lowliness is content with ascribing it.

Some of my readers may be inclined to think that I hide, for the sake of my hero--poor little hero, one of G.o.d's children, learning to walk--an inevitable struggle between his love and his pride; inasmuch as, being but a tutor, he might be expected to think the more of his good family, and the possibility of his one day coming to honour without the drawback of having done anything to merit it, a t.i.tle being almost within his grasp; while Margaret was a ploughman's daughter, and a lady's maid. But, although I know more of Hugh's faults than I have thought it at all necessary to bring out in my story, I protest that, had he been capable of giving the name of love to a feeling in whose presence pride dared to speak, I should have considered him unworthy of my poor pen. In plain language, I doubt if I should have cared to write his story at all.