Lying Prophets Part 20

"G.o.d! you say that! You can look at those eyes and say that?"

"I admire the painting, but _cui bono_? Who is the better, the wiser?

There is nothing under the paint."

"You are one of those who turn shadows into crosses, clouds into angels. Is it not so?" asked Barron smiling; and the other fired at this allusion to his best known picture.

"I am one of those who know that Art is the handmaid of G.o.d," he answered hotly. "I happen to believe in Jesus Christ, and I conceive that no picture is worthy to be called great or worthy of any Christian's painting unless it possess some qualities calculated to enn.o.ble the mind of those who see.

Art is the n.o.blest labor man can employ time upon. The thing comes from G.o.d; it is a talent only to be employed in the highest sense when devoted to His glory."

"Then what of heathen art? You let your religion distort your view of Nature. You sacrifice truth to a dogma. Nature has no ethics. You profess to paint facts and paint them wrong. You are not a mystic; that we could understand and criticise accordingly. You try to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. You talk about truth and paint things not true."

"From your standpoint possibly. Yours is the truth of naturalism; mine is the truth of Faith."

"If you are going to entrench yourself behind Faith, I have done, of course. Only, don't go about saying, as you did just now, that Art is the n.o.blest labor man can employ time upon. That's bosh, pure and simple. There are some occupations not so n.o.ble, that is all. Art is a heathen and always will be, and you missionary-men, with a paint-brush in one hand and a Bible in the other, are even worse than certain objectionable literary celebrities, whose novels reek of the 'new journalism' and the Sermon on the Mount--the ridiculous and sublime in tasteless combination. You missionaries, I say, sap the primitive strength of Art; you demoralize her.

To dare to make Art pander to a pa.s.sing creed is vile--worse than the spectacle of the Salvation Army trying to convert Buddhists. That I saw in India, and laughed. But we won't quarrel. You paint Faith's jewelry; I'll amuse myself with Truth's drabs and duns. The point of view is all. I depict pretty Joan Tregenza looking over the sea to catch a glimpse of her sweetheart's outward-bound ship. I paint her just as I saw her. There was no occasion to leave out or put in. I reveled in a mere brutal transcript of Nature. You would have set her down by one of the old Cornish crosses praying to Christ to guard her man. And round her you would have wrought a world of idle significance. You would have twisted dogma into the flowers and gra.s.s-blades. The fact that the girl happened to be practically brainless and a Luke Gospeler would not have weighed with you a moment."

"I'm weary of the old cant about Nature," said Tarrant. "You're a naturalist and a materialist. That ends it. There is no possibility of argument between us."

"Would the man who painted that gorse cant?" burst out Brady. "d.a.m.n it all, Tarrant, if a chap can teach us to paint, perhaps he can teach us something else as well. Look at that gorse, I tell you. That's the truth, won with many a wrestle and heartache, I'll swear. You know as well as I do what went to get that, and yet you say there's nothing behind the paint. That's cant, if you like. And as to your religious spirit, what's the good of preaching sermons in paint if the paint's false? We're on it now and I'll say what I believe, which is that your 'Good Shepherd' is all wrong, apart from any question of sentiment at all. Your own party will probably say it's blasphemous, and I say it's ridiculous. You've painted a grand sky and then ruined it with the subject. Did you ever see a man's head bang between you and a clear setting sun? Any way, that figure of yours was never painted with a sunset behind him, I'll swear."

"You can't paint truth as you find it and preach truth as you believe it on the same canvas if you belong to any creed but mine," said Barron calmly.

"You build on the foundations of Art a series of temples to your religious convictions. You blaze Christianity on every canvas. I suppose that is natural in a man of your opinions, but to me it is as painful as the spectacle of advertis.e.m.e.nts of quack nostrums planted, as you shall see them, beside railway lines--here in a golden field of b.u.t.tercups, there rising above young barley. Of course, I don't presume to a.s.sert that your faith is a quack nostrum; only real Art and Religion won't run in double harness for you or anybody. They did once, but the world has pa.s.sed beyond that point."

"Never," answered Tarrant. "We have proof of it. Souls have been saved by pictures. That is as certain as that G.o.d made the earth and everything on it."

"There again! Every word you speak only shows how difficult it is for us to exchange ideas. Why is it so positively certain that G.o.d made the earth and everything on it? To attribute man's origin direct to G.o.d is always, in my mind, the supreme proposition of human conceit. Did it need a G.o.d to manufacture you or me or Brady? I don't think so. Consider creation. I suppose if an ant could gauge the ingenuity of a steam engine, he would attribute it without hesitation to G.o.d, but it happens that the steam engine is the work of a creature--a being standing somewhere between G.o.d and the ant, but much nearer the latter than the former. You follow me?

Even Tarrant will admit, for it is an article of his creed, that there exist many beings nearer to G.o.d than man. They have wings, he would tell us, and are eternal, immortal, everlasting."

"I see," said Brady, "you're going to say next that faulty concerns like this particular world are the work of minor intelligences. What rot you can talk at times, old man!"

"Yet is it an honor to G.o.d Almighty that we attribute the contents of this poor pill of a planet to Him? I think it would be an insult if you ask me.

Out of respect to the Everlasting, I would rather suppose that the earth, being by chance a concern too small for His present purposes, He tosses it, as we toss a dog a bone, to some ingenious archangel with a theory. Then you enjoy the spectacle of that seraph about as busy over this notable world as a child with a mud pie. The winged one sets to work with a will. A little pinch of life; develops under his skillful manipulation; evolution takes its remorseless course through the wastes of Time until--behold! the apotheosis of the ape at last. Picture that well-meaning but muddle-headed archangel's dismay at such a conclusion! All his theories and conceits--his splendid scheme of evolution and the rest--end in a mean but obstinate creature with conscious intelligence and an absolute contempt and disregard for Nature. This poor Frankenstein of a cherub watches the worm he has produced defy him and refuse absolutely to obey his most fundamental postulates or accept his axioms. The fittest survive no more; these gregarious, new-born things presently form themselves into a pestilential society, they breed rubbish, they--"

"By G.o.d! stop it, John," said Murdoch. "Now you're going too far. Look at Tarrant. He'd burn you over a slow fire for this if he could. Speak for yourself at any rate, not for us."

"I do," answered the other bitterly. "I speak for myself. I know what a poor, rotten cur I am physically and mentally--not worth the bread I eat to keep me alive. And shall I dare say that G.o.d made me?"

"But what's the end of this philosophy of despair, old chap?" asked Brady; "what becomes of your worst of all possible planets?"

"The end? Dust and ashes. My unfortunate workman, having blundered on for certain millions of years tinkering and patching and improving his dismal colony, will give the thing up; and G.o.d will laugh and show him the mistakes and then blot the essay out, as a master runs his pen through the errors in a pupil's exercise. The earth grows cold at last, and the herds of humanity die, and the countless ages of agony and misery are over. Yes, the poor vermin perish to the last one; then their black tomb goes whirling on until it shall be allowed to meet another like itself, when a new sun shines in heaven and s.p.a.ce is the richer by one more star."

"May G.o.d forgive you for your profanity, John Barren," said Tarrant. "That He places in your hand such power and suffers your brain to breed the devil's dung that fills it, is to me a mystery. May you live to learn your errors and regret them."

He turned away and two men followed him. Conversation among those who remained reverted to the picture; and presently all were gone, excepting only Barren, who had to wait and see his work packed.

Remorse will take strange shapes. His bitter tirade against his environment and himself was the direct result of this man's recent experiences. He knew himself for a mean knave in his dealings with an innocent girl and the thought turned the aspect of all things into gall.

Solitude brought back a measure of peace. The picture was packed and started to Penzance railway-station, while Barron's tools also went, by pony-cart, back to his rooms in Newlyn. He was to leave upon the following morning with Murdoch and others who were taking their work to the Exhibitions.

Now he looked round the cow-byre before locking it for the last time and returning the key to Farmer Ford's boy, who waited outside to receive it.

"The chapter is ended," he said to himself. "The chapter which contains the best thing that ever I did, and, I suppose, the worst, as morals have it.

Yet Art happily rises above those misty abstractions which we call right and wrong. She resembles Nature herself there. Both demand their sacrifices. 'The white martyrdom of self-denial, the red martyrdom of blood--each is a thousand times recorded in the history of painting and will be a thousand times again."

CHAPTER THREE

THE ACT OF FAITH

So John Barren set forth, well content to believe that he would never again visit Cornwall, and Joan called at the Penzance post-office on the morning which followed his departure. Her geographical knowledge was scanty. Truro and Plymouth, in her belief, lay somewhere upon the edge of the world; and she scarcely imagined that London could be much more remote.

But no letter awaited her, and life grew to be terribly empty. For a week she struggled with herself to keep from the post-office, and then, nothing doubting that her patience would now be well rewarded, Joan marched off with confidence for the treasure. But only a greater disappointment than the last resulted; and she went home very sorrowful, building up explanations of the silence, finding excuses for "Mister Jan." The prefix to his name, which had dropped during their latter intimacy, returned to her mind now the man was gone: as "Mister Jan" it was that she thought about him and prayed for him.

The days pa.s.sed quickly, and when a fortnight stood between herself and the last glimpse of her lover, Joan began to grow very anxious. She wept through long nights now, and her father, finding the girl changed, guessed she had a secret and told his wife to find it out. But it was some time before Thomasin made any discovery, for Joan lied stoutly by day and prayed to G.o.d to pardon by night. She strove hard to follow the teaching of the artist, to find joy in flowers and leaves, in the spring music of birds, in the color of the sea. But now she dimly guessed that it was love of him which went so far to make all things beautiful, that it was the magic and wisdom of his words which had gilded the world with gold and thrown new light upon the old familiar objects of life. Nature's organ was dumb now that the hands which played upon it so skillfully had pa.s.sed far away. But she was loyal to her teacher; she remembered many things which he had said and tried hard to feel as he felt, to put her hand in beautiful Mother Nature's and walk with her and be at peace. Mister Jan would soon return; the fortnight was already past; each day as she rose she felt he might come to claim her before the evening.

And, meanwhile, other concerns occupied her thoughts. The voice which spoke to her after she bid John Barren "good-by," had since then similarly sounded on the ear of her heart. Alike at high noon and in the silence of the night watches it addressed her; and the mystery of it, taken with her other sorrows, began to affect her physically. For the first time in her life the girl felt ill in body. Her appet.i.te failed, dawn found her sick and weary; her gla.s.s told her of a white, unhappy face, of eyes that were lighted from within and shone with strange thoughts. She was always listening now--listening for the new voice, that she might hear the word it uttered. Her physical illness she hid with some cunning and put a bright face upon life as far as she could do so before those of her home; but the task grew daily more difficult. Then, with a period of greatly increased discomfort, Joan grew alarmed and turned to the kind G.o.d of "Mister Jan,"

and made great, tearful praying for a return of strength. Her pet.i.tion was apparently granted, for the girl enjoyed some improvement of health and spirit. Whereupon she became fired with a notable thought, and determined to seek her patron saint where still she suspected his power held sway: at the little brook which tinkles along beside the ruins of St. Madron's chapel in a fair coomb below the Cornish moorlands. The precious water, as Joan remembered, had brought strength and health to her when a baby; and now the girl longed to try its virtues again, and a great conviction grew upon her that the ancient saint never forgot his own little ones.

Opportunity presently offered, and through the first misty gray of a morning in early April, she set out upon her long tramp from Newlyn through Madron to the ruined baptistery.

St. Madron, or Padern, lived in the sixth century, somewhat earlier than Augustine. A Breton by birth, he labored chiefly in Wales, established a monastery on Brito-Celtic lines in Cardiganshire, and became its bishop when a see was established in that district. He traveled far, visited Mount's Bay and established the church of Madron, still sacred to his name, while doubtless the brook and chapel hard by were a.s.sociated with him from the same period. In Scawen's time folk were wont to take their hurts thither on Corpus Christi evening, drink of the water, deposit an offering, and repose upon the chapel floor till dawn. Then, drinking again, they departed whole, if faith sufficiently mighty had supported them. Norden remarks of the water that "its fame was great for the supposed vertue of healinge, which St. Maderne had thereunto infused; and maine votaries made anuale pilgrimages unto it...." In connection with the custom of immersion here indicated, we find there obtained the equally venerable practice of hanging votive rags upon the thorn bushes round about the chapel. This conceit is ancient as j.a.pan, and one not only in usage to this day among the Shintoists of that land, but likewise common throughout Northern Asia and, nearer home, in the Orkneys, in Scotland, in Ireland. Older far than Christianity are these customs; the megalithic monuments of the pagan witness similar practices in remote corners of the earth; rag-trees, burdened with the tattered offerings of the devout, yet stud the desert of Suez, and those who seek shall surely find some holy well or grave hard at hand in every case. To mark and examine the junction of these venerable fancies with Christian superst.i.tion is no part of our present purpose, but that ideas, pagan in their birth, have lent themselves with sufficient readiness to successive creeds and been knit into the dogmas of each in turn, is certain enough. Thus, through Cornwall, the imaginings of wizard and wonder-worker in h.o.a.ry time come, centuries later, to be the glory and special power of a saint. Such fantastic lore was definitely interdicted in King Edgar's reign, when "stone worshipings, divinations, well worshipings and necromances" were proclaimed things heathen, and unhallowed; but with the advent of the Saint-Bishops from Wales, from Ireland, from Brittany, primitive superst.i.tions were patched upon the new creed, and, to suit private purposes, the old giants of the Christian faith sanctified holy well and holy stone, posing by right divine as sure dispensers of the hidden virtue in stream and granite. But the roots of these fables burrow back to paganism. Hundreds of weakly infants were pa.s.sed through Men-an-tol--the stone with a hole or the "crick-stone"--in the names of saints; and hundreds had already been handed through it centuries before under like appeal to pagan deities.

Of Madron baptistery, now a picturesque ruin, it seems clear that until the Reformation regular worship and the service of baptism were therein celebrated. The place has mercifully escaped all restoration or renovation and stands at this moment open to the sky in the slow hand of Time. A brook runs babbling outside, but the holy well or colymbethra is now dry, though it might easily be filled again. This interesting portion of the chapel remains intact, and the entrance to it lies upon the level of the floor according to ancient custom, being so ordered that the adult to undergo baptism might step down into the water, and that not without dignity.

Hither came Joan. Her patchwork of faith and Nature-worship was a live thing to her now, and she found no difficulty in reconciling the sweet saint-stories heard in childhood from her dead mother's lips, with the beautiful and fair exposition of truth which "Mister Jan" found written large upon the world by Nature in spring-time.

It was half-past four o'clock when she trudged through Madron to see the gray church and the little gray houses all sleeping under the gray sky. She plodded on up the hill past the gaunt workhouse which stands at the top of it; and what had seemed soft, sweet repose among the cottage homes, felt like cold death beneath these ashy walls. To Joan, the workhouse was a word of shame unutterable. Those among whom she lived would hurl the word against enemies as a prophecy of the utmost degradation. She shivered as she pa.s.sed, and was sad, knowing that a whole world of poverty, failure, sorrow, regret, was hidden away in that cold, still pile. But the hand of sleep lay softly there; only a sick soul or two stirred, the paupers were the equal of princes till a hoa.r.s.e bell brought them back out of blessed unconsciousness.

Bars of light streaked the east, and Joan, only stopping at the hill crest to see dawn open silver eyes on the sea, hastened inland through silent, dewy fields. Presently a fence and wall cut civilization from the wild land of the coomb, and the girl proceeded where gra.s.s-grown cart-ruts wound among furze and heather and the silver coils of new-born bracken just beginning to peep up above the dead fern of last year. This hollow ran between undulations of fallow and meadow; no harrow clinked as yet; only the cows stood here and there above the dry patches on the dewy fields where their bodies had lain in sleep. She saw their soft eyes and smelled the savor of them. Presently the cart-ruts disappeared in fine gra.s.s all bediamonded, k.n.o.bbed with heather, sprouting rusty-red, and sprinkled with tussocks of coa.r.s.er gra.s.s, whereon green blades sprang up above the dead ones, where they struggled, matted and bleached and sere. Rabbits flashed here and there, the white under-side of their little scuts twinkling through the gorse; and then the birds woke up; a thrush sang low, sleepy notes from the heart of a whitethorn; yellowhammers piped their mournful calls from the furze. On Joan's left hand there now rose a clump of wind-worn beech-trees, their brown spikes breaking to green, even where dead red leaves still clung to the parent branches. Beneath them ran a hedge of earth above a deep pool or two, very clear and fringed with young rushes, upright and triumphant above the old dead ones. Everywhere Joan saw Life trampling and leaping, growing and laughing over the ruins of things that had lived and died. It saddened her a little. Did Nature forget so soon? Then she told herself that kind Nature had loved them and gloried in them too; and now she would presently bury all her dead children in beautiful graves of new green. The mosses and marsh were lovely and the clear pools full of living creatures. But these things were not saint-blessed and eternal. No spring fed these silent wells, no holy man of old had ever smiled upon them.

A stepping-stone by a wall lay before her now; this she crossed, heard the stream murmuring peace, and hastened, and presently stood beside it. Here were holy ground and water; here were peace and a place to pray in. Blue forget-me-nots looked wondering up, seeing eyes as blue as their own, and she smiled at them and drank of the ripples that ran at their roots. Gray through the growing haze of green, a ruined wall showed close to the girl.

The blackthorns' blooms were faded around her, the hawthorn was not yet powdered with white. She cast one look to right and left before entering the chapel. A distant view of the moorland rose to the sky, and the ragged edge of the hills was marked by a gaunt engine-stack noting past enterprise, triumphs long gone by, ruined hopes but recently dead. Snug fox-covers of rhododendron swept up toward the head of the coomb; and below, distant half a mile or more, cottages already showed a glimmer of gold on their thatches where the increasing splendor of day brightened them, and morning mists were raising jeweled arms. Then Joan pa.s.sed into the ruin through that narrow opening which marks the door of it. The granite walls now stand about the height of a man's shoulder and the chamber itself is small. Stone seats still run round two sides of it; ivy and stone-worts and gra.s.ses have picked the mortar from the walls and clothed them, even as emerald moss and gray lichens and black and gold glorify each piece of granite; a may-bush, tangled about a great shiny ivy-tod, surmounts the western walls above the dried well; furzes and heather and tall gra.s.ses soften the jagged outlines of the ruin, and above a stone altar, at the east end of it, rises another white-thorn. At this season of the year the subsequent floral glories of the little chapel were only indicated: young briers already thrust their soft points over the stone of the altar and the first leaves of foxgloves were unfolding, with dandelions and docks, biting-stone-crop and ferns, ragged-robins and wild geraniums. These infant things softened no outline yet. The flat paving of the floor, where it yet remained, was bedded in gra.s.s; a little square incision upon the stone of the altar glimmered full of water and reflected the light from fleecy clouds which now climbed into heaven, bearing sunrise fires upward over a pale blue sky.

Here, under the circ.u.mambient, sparkling clearness, coolness and silence, Joan stood with strange medley of thoughts upon her soul. The saints and the fairies mingled there with visions of Nature, always smiling, with a vague shadow of one great G.o.d above the blue, but dim and very far away; and a nearer picture which quickened her heart-beat: the picture of "Mister Jan." Here she felt herself at one with the world spread round her. The mother eyes of a blackbird, sitting upon her eggs in the ivy-tod, kept their bright gold on Joan, but showed no fear; the young rabbits frisked at hand; a mole poked his snout and little paddle-paws out of the gra.s.s; all was peace and happiness, it seemed, with the voice of good St. Madron murmuring love in his brooklet at hand.

Joan knelt down by the old altar and bowed her head there and prayed to Nature and to G.o.d. At first merely wordless prayers full of pa.s.sionate entreaty rose to the Throne; then utterance came in a wild simple throng of pet.i.tions; and all her various knowledge, won from her mother and John Barren, found a place. Pan and Christ might each have heard and listened, for she called on the G.o.ds of earth and heaven from a heart that was full.

"Kind Mother o' the flowers, doan't 'e forget a poor maiden what loves 'e so dear. I be sad an' sore-hearted 'cause things is bad wi' me now Mister Jan's gone; an' I knaws as I've lied an' bin wicked 'bout Joe, but, kind Mother, I awnly done what Mister Jan, as was wise an' loved me, bid. Oh, G.o.d A'mighty, doan't 'E let en forget me, 'cause I've gived up all--all the lil I had for en, an' Nature made me as I be. Oh, kind G.o.d, make me happy an' light-hearted an' strong agin, same as the lil birds an' sich like is happy an' strong; an' forgive me for all my sins an' make me well for Mister Jan, an' clever for Mister Jan, so's I'll be a fine an' good wife to en. An' forgive me for lyin', 'cause what I done was Nature, 'cordin' to Mister Jan; an' Nature's kind to young things, 'cordin' to Mister Jan; an'

I be young yet. An' make me a better la.s.s, for I caan't abear to feel as I do; an' make me think o' the next world arter this wan. But, oh, dear G.o.d, make me well an' braave agin, for 'tis awful wisht for me wi'out Mister Jan; an' make Mister Jan strong too. I be all in a miz-maze and doan't knaw wheer to turn 'cept to Nature, dear Lard. Oh, kind G.o.d A'mighty, lemme have my angel watchin' over me close, same as what mother used to say he did allus. An' bring Mister Jan back long very quick, 'cause I'm nothin' but sadness wi'out en. An', dear St. Madern, I ax 'e to bless me same as you done when--when I was a lil baaby, 'cause I be gwaine to bathe in your brook, bein' a St. Madern cheel. Oh, dear, good G.o.d o' all things, please to help me an' look to me, 'cause I be very sad, an' I never done no harm to none, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen."

Then she said the Lord's Prayer, because her mother had taught her that no human pet.i.tion was ever heard unless accompanied by it. And it seemed as though the lark, winding upward with wide spiral to his song-throne in the sky and tinkling thin music on the morning wind, was her messenger: which thought was beautiful to Joan and made her heart glad.

Never had she looked fairer. Her blue eyes were misty, but the magic of prayer, the glory of speaking straight to the Father of all, call Him what she might, had n.o.bly fortified her sinking spirit. Peace brooded in her soul then, and faith warmed her blood. She was sure her prayer would be answered; she was certain that her health and her loved one would both come back to her. And she stood by the altar and smiled at the golden morning, herself the fairest thing the sun shone upon.

Having peeped shyly about her, Joan took off her clothes, placed them on the altar-stones, shook down her hair, and glided softly to the stream. At one point its waters caught the sunshine and babbled over white sand between many budding spikes of wild parsley and young fronds of fern. Naked and beautiful the girl stood, her bright hair glinting to her waist, all rippled with the first red gold of the morning, her body very white save where the sun and western wind had browned both arms and neck; her form innocent as yet of the mystery hid for her in Time. Joan's fair limbs spoke of blood not Cornish, of days far past when a race of giants swept up from behind the North Sea to tread a new earth and take wives of the little dark women of the land, abating the still prevalent nigrescence of the Celt with Saxon eyes and hair, adding their stature and their strength to races unborn. A sweet embodiment of all that was lovely and pure and fresh, she looked--a human incarnation of youth and springtime.

There was a pool deeper than the general shallowness of the stream which served for Joan's bath, and she entered there, where soft white sand made pleasant footing for her toes, where more forget-me-nots twinkled their turquoise about the margin, where shining gorse towered like a sentinel above.