He gathered together, as I have said, the few memorials of the old ship gone down in the quiet ocean of time; paid one visit of sorrowful gladness to his parent's grave, over which he raised no futile stone--leaving it, like the forms within it, in the hands of holy decay; and took his road--whither? To Margaret's home--to see old Janet; and to go once to the grave of his second father. Then he would return to the toil and hunger and hope of London.

What made Hugh go to Turriepuffit? His love to Margaret? No. A better motive even than that:--Repentance. Better I mean for Hugh as to the individual occasion; not in itself; for love is deeper than repentance, seeing that without love there can be no repentance. He had repented before; but now that he haunted in silence the regions of the past, the whole of his history in connection with David returned on him clear and vivid, as if pa.s.sing once again before his eyes and through his heart; and he repented more deeply still. Perhaps he was not quite so much to blame as he thought himself. Perhaps only now was it possible for the seeds of truth, which David had sown in his heart, to show themselves above the soil of lower, yet ministering cares. They had needed to lie a winter long in the earth. Now the keen blasts and griding frosts had done their work, and they began to grow in the tearful prime.

Sorrow for loss brought in her train sorrow for wrong--a sister more solemn still, and with a deeper blessing in the voice of her loving farewell.--It is a great mistake to suppose that sorrow is a part of repentance. It is far too good a grace to come so easily.

A man may repent, that is, think better of it, and change his way, and be very much of a Pharisee--I do not say a hypocrite--for a long time after: it needs a saint to be sorrowful. Yet repentance is generally the road to this sorrow.--And now that in the gracious time of grief, his eyesight purified by tears, he entered one after another all the chambers of the past, he humbly renewed once more his friendship with the n.o.ble dead, and with the homely, heartful living. The grey-headed man who walked with G.o.d like a child, and with his fellow-men like an elder brother who was always forgetting his birthright and serving the younger; the woman who believed where she could not see, and loved where she could not understand; and the maiden who was still and l.u.s.treless, because she ever absorbed and seldom reflected the light--all came to him, as if to comfort him once more in his loneliness, when his heart had room for them, and need of them yet again. David now became, after his departure, yet more of a father to him than before, for that spirit, which is the true soul of all this body of things, had begun to recall to his mind the words of David, and so teach him the things that David knew, the everlasting realities of G.o.d. And it seemed to him the while, that he heard David himself uttering, in his homely, kingly voice, whatever truth returned to him from the echo-cave of the past. Even when a quite new thought arose within him, it came to him in the voice of David, or at least with the solemn music of his tones clinging about it as the murmur about the river's course.

Experience had now brought him up to the point where he could begin to profit by David's communion; he needed the things which David could teach him; and David began forthwith to give them to him.

That birth of nature in his soul, which enabled him to understand and love Margaret, helped him likewise to contemplate with admiration and awe, the towering peaks of David's hopes, trusts, and aspirations. He had taught the ploughman mathematics, but that ploughman had possessed in himself all the essential elements of the grandeur of the old prophets, glorified by the faith which the Son of Man did not find in the earth, but left behind him to grow in it, and which had grown to a n.o.ble growth of beauty and strength in this peasant, simple and patriarchal in the midst of a self-conceited age. And, oh! how good he had been to him! He had built a house that he might take him in from the cold, and make life pleasant to him, as in the presence of G.o.d. He had given him his heart every time he gave him his great manly hand. And this man, this friend, this presence of Christ, Hugh had forsaken, neglected, all but forgotten. He could not go, and, like the prodigal, fall down before him, and say, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and thee," for that heaven had taken him up out of his sight. He could only weep instead, and bitterly repent. Yes; there was one thing more he could do. Janet still lived. He would go to her, and confess his sin, and beg her forgiveness. Receiving it, he would be at peace. He knew David forgave him, whether he confessed or not; and that, if he were alive, David would seek his confession only as the casting away of the separation from his heart, as the banishment of the worldly spirit, and as the natural sign by which he might know that Hugh was one with him yet.

Janet was David's representative on earth: he would go to her.

So he returned, rich and great; rich in knowing that he was the child of Him to whom all the gold mines belong; and great in that humility which alone recognizes greatness, and in the beginnings of that meekness which shall inherit the earth. No more would he stunt his spiritual growth by self-satisfaction. No more would he lay aside, in the cellars of his mind, poor withered bulbs of opinions, which, but for the evil ministrations of that self-satisfaction, seeking to preserve them by drying and salting, might have been already bursting into blossoms of truth, of infinite loveliness.

He knew that Margaret thought far too well of him--honoured him greatly beyond his deserts. He would not allow her to be any longer thus deceived. He would tell her what a poor creature he was. But he would say, too, that he hoped one day to be worthy of her praise, that he hoped to grow to what she thought him. If he should fail in convincing her, he would receive all the honour she gave him humbly, as paid, not to him, but to what he ought to be. G.o.d grant it might be as to his future self!

In this mood he went to Janet.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE FIR-WOOD AGAIN.

Er stand vor der himmlischen Jungfrau. Da hob er den leichten, glanzenden Schleir, und--Rosenbluthchen sank in seine Arme.--Novalis.--Die Lehrlinge zu Sais.

He stood before the heavenly Virgin (Isis, the G.o.ddess of Nature).

Then lifted he the light, shining veil, and--Rosebud (his old love) sank into his arms.

So womanly, so benigne, and so meek.

CHAUCER.--Prol. to Leg. of Good Women.

It was with a mingling of strange emotions, that Hugh approached the scene of those not very old, and yet, to his feeling, quite early memories. The dusk was beginning to gather. The h.o.a.r-frost lay thick on the ground. The pine-trees stood up in the cold, looking, in their garment of spikes, as if the frost had made them. The rime on the gate was unfriendly, and chilled his hand. He turned into the footpath. He say the room David had built for him. Its thatch was one ma.s.s of mosses, whose colours were hidden now in the cuckoo-fruit of the frost. Alas! how Death had cast his deeper frost over all; for the man was gone from the hearth! But neither old Winter nor skeleton Death can withhold the feet of the little child Spring. She is stronger than both. Love shall conquer hate; and G.o.d will overcome sin.

He drew night to the door, trembling. It seemed strange to him that his nerves only, and not his mind, should feel.--In moments of unusual excitement, it sometimes happens that the only consciousness a strong man has of emotion, lies in an unwonted physical vibration, the mind itself refusing to be disturbed. It is, however, but a seeming: the emotion is so deep, that consciousness can lay hold of its physical result only.--The cottage looked the same as ever, only the peat-stack outside was smaller. In the shadowiness of the firs, the glimmer of a fire was just discernible on the kitchen window.

He trembled so much that he could not enter. He would go into the fir-wood first, and see Margaret's tree, as he always called it in his thoughts and dreams.

Very poor and stunted and meagre looked the fir-trees of Turriepuffit, after the beeches and elms of Arnstead. The evening wind whistled keen and cold through their dry needles, and made them moan, as if because they were fettered, and must endure the winter in helpless patience. Here and there amongst them, rose the t.i.tans of the little forest--the huge, old, contorted, wizard-like, yet benevolent beings--the Scotch firs. Towards one of these he bent his way. It was the one under which he had seen Margaret, when he met her first in the wood, with her whole soul lost in the waving of its wind-swung, sun-lighted top, floating about in the sea of air like a golden nest for some silvery bird of heaven. To think that the young girl to whom he had given the primrose he had just found, the then first-born of the Spring, should now be the queen of his heart! Her childish dream of the angel haunting the wood had been true, only she was the angel herself. He drew near the place. How well he knew it! He seated himself, cold as it was in the February of Scotland, at the foot of the blessed tree. He did not know that it was cold.

While he sat with his eyes fixed on the ground, a light rustle in the fallen leaves made him raise them suddenly. It was all winter and fallen leaves about him; but he lifted his eyes, and in his soul it was summer: Margaret stood before him. He was not in the least surprised. For how can one wonder to see before his eyes, the form of which his soul is full?--there is no shock. She stood a little way off, looking--as if she wanted to be sure before she moved a step. She was dressed in a grey winsey gown, close to her throat and wrists. She had neither shawl nor bonnet. Her fine health kept her warm, even in a winter wood at sun-down. She looked just the same;--at home everywhere; most at home in Nature's secret chamber.

Like the genius of the place, she made the winter-wood look homely.

What were the oaks and beeches of Arnstead now? Homeliness and glory are Heaven.

She came nearer.

"Margaret!" he murmured, and would have risen.

"No, no; sit still," she rejoined, in a pleading tone. "I thought it was the angel in the picture. Now I know it. Sit still, dear Mr.

Sutherland, one moment more."

Humbled by his sense of unworthiness, and a little distressed that she could so quietly reveal the depth of her feeling towards him, he said:

"Ah, Margaret! I wish you would not praise one so little deserving it."

"Praise?" she repeated, with an accent of wonder. "I praise you!

No, Mr. Sutherland; that I am not guilty of. Next to my father, you made me know and feel. And as I walked here, I was thinking of the old times, and older times still; and all at once I saw the very picture out of the old Bible."

She came close to him now. He rose, trembling, but held out no hand, uttered no greeting.

"Margaret, dare I love you?" he faltered.

She looked at him with wide-open eyes.

"Me?" she said; and her eyes did not move from his. A slight rose-flush bloomed out on her motionless face.

"Will you be my wife?" he said, trembling yet more.

She made no answer, but looked at him still, with parted lips, motionless.

"I am very poor, Margaret. I could not marry now."

It was a stupid speech, but he made it.

"I don't care," she answered, with a voice like thinking, "if you never marry me."

He misunderstood her, and turned cold to the very heart. He misunderstood her stillness. Her heart lay so deep, that it took a long time for its feelings to reach and agitate the surface. He said no more, but turned away with a sigh.

"Come home to my mother," she said.

He obeyed mechanically, and walked in silence by her side. They reached the cottage and entered. Margaret said: "Here he is, mother;" and disappeared.

Janet was seated--in her widow's mutch, with the plain black ribbon down both sides, and round the back--in the arm-chair by the fire, pondering on the past, or gently dreaming of him that was gone. She turned her head. Sorrow had baptized her face with a new gentleness. The tender expression which had been but occasional while her husband lived, was almost constant now. She did not recognize Hugh. He saw it, and it added weight to his despair. He was left outside.

"Mother!" he said, involuntarily.

She started to her feet, cried: "My bairn! my bairn!" threw her arms around him, and laid her head on his bosom. Hugh sobbed as if his heart would break. Janet wept, but her weeping was quiet as a summer rain. He led her to her chair, knelt by her side, and hiding his face in her lap like a child, faltered out, interrupted by convulsive sobs:

"Forgive me; forgive me. I don't deserve it, but forgive me."

"Hoot awa! my bairn! my bonny man! Dinna greet that gait. The Lord preserve's! what are ye greetin' for? Are na ye come hame to yer ain? Didna Dawvid aye say--'Gie the lad time, woman. It's unco chaip, for the Lord's aye makin't. The best things is aye the maist plentifu'. Gie the lad time, my bonny woman!'--didna he say that?

Ay, he ca'd me his bonny woman, ill as I deserved it at his han'.

An' it's no for me to say ae word agen you, Maister Sutherlan', gin ye had been a hantle waur nor a young thochtless lad cudna weel help bein'. An' noo ye're come hame, an' nothing cud glaidden my heart mair, 'cep', maybe, the Maister himsel' was to say to my man: 'Dawvid! come furth.'"

Hugh could make no reply. He got hold of Margaret's creepie, which stood in its usual place, and sat down upon it, at the old woman's feet. She gazed in his face for a while, and then, putting her arm round his neck, drew his head to her bosom, and fondled him as if he had been her own first-born.

"But eh! yer bonnie face is sharp an' sma' to what it used to be, Maister Sutherlan'. I doot ye hae come through a heap o' trouble."