Margret Howth, a Story of To-day Part 11

"Ah, child, that is old-time philosophy. Put your hand here, on her dead face. Is your loss like hers?" he said lower, looking into the dull pain in her eyes. Selfish pain he called it.

"Let me go," she said. "I am tired."

He took her out into the cool, open road, leading her tenderly enough,--for the girl suffered, he saw.

"What will you do?" he asked her then. "It is not too late,--will you help me save these people?"

She wrung her hands helplessly.

"What do you want with me?" she cried. "I have enough to bear."

The burly black figure before her seemed to tower and strengthen; the man's face in the wall light showed a terrible life-purpose coming out bare.

"I want you to do your work. It is hard, it will wear out your strength and brain and heart. Give yourself to these people. G.o.d calls you to it. There is none to help them. Give up love, and the petty hopes of women. Help me. G.o.d calls you to the work."

She went, on blindly: he followed her. For years he had set apart this girl to help him in his scheme: he would not be balked now. He had great hopes from his plan: he meant to give all he had: it was the n.o.blest of aims. He thought some day it would work like leaven through the festering ma.s.s under the country he loved so well, and raise it to a new life. If it failed,--if it failed, and saved one life, his work was not lost. But it could not fail.

"Home!" he said, stopping her as she reached the stile,--"oh, Margret, what is home? There is a cry going up night and day from homes like that den yonder, for help,--and no man listens."

She was weak; her brain faltered.

"Does G.o.d call me to this work? Does He call me?" she moaned.

He watched her eagerly.

"He calls you. He waits for your answer. Swear to me that you will help His people. Give up father and mother and love, and go down as Christ did. Help me to give liberty and truth and Jesus' love to these wretches on the brink of h.e.l.l. Live with them, raise them with you."

She looked up, white; she was a weak, weak woman, sick for her natural food of love.

"Is it my work?"

"It is your work. Listen to me, Margret," softly. "Who cares for you?

You stand alone to-night. There is not a single human heart that calls you nearest and best. Shiver, if you will,--it is true. The man you wasted your soul on left you in the night and cold to go to his bride,--is sitting by her now, holding her hand in his."

He waited a moment, looking down at her, until she should understand.

"Do you think you deserved this of G.o.d? I know that yonder on the muddy road you looked up to Him, and knew it was not just; that you had done right, and this was your reward. I know that for these two years you have trusted in the Christ you worship to make it right, to give you your heart's desire. Did He do it? Did He hear your prayer? Does He care for your weak love, when the nations of the earth are going down?

What is your poor hope to Him, when the very land you live in is a wine-press that will be trodden some day by the fierceness and wrath of Almighty G.o.d? O Christ!--if there be a Christ,--help me to save it!"

He looked up,--his face white with pain. After a time he said to her,--

"Help me, Margret! Your prayer was selfish; it was not heard. Give up your idle hope that Christ will aid you. Swear to me, this night when you have lost all, to give yourself to this work."

The storm had been dark and windy: it cleared now slowly, the warm summer rain falling softly, the fresh blue stealing broadly from behind the gray. It seemed to Margret like a blessing; for her brain rose up stronger, more healthful.

"I will not swear," she said, weakly. "I think He heard my prayer. I think He will answer it. He was a man, and loved as we do. My love is not selfish; it is the best gift G.o.d has given me."

Knowles went slowly with her to the house. He was not baffled. He knew that the struggle was yet to come; that, when she was alone, her faith in the far-off Christ would falter; that she would grasp at this work, to fill her empty hands and starved heart, if for no other reason,--to stifle by a sense of duty her unutterable feeling of loss. He was keenly read in woman's heart, this Knowles. He left her silently, and she pa.s.sed through the dark pa.s.sage to her own room.

Putting her damp shawl off, she sat down on the floor, leaning her head on a low chair,--one her father had given her for a Christmas gift when she was little. How fond Holmes and her father used to be of each other! Every Christmas he spent with them. She remembered them all now. "He was sitting by her now, holding her hand in his." She said that over to herself, though it was not hard to understand.

After a long time, her mother came with a candle to the door.

"Good-night, Margret. Why, your hair is wet, child!"

For Margret, kissing her good-night, had laid her head down a minute on her breast. She stroked the hair a moment, and then turned away.

"Mother, could you stay with me to-night?"

"Why, no, Maggie,--your father wants me to read to him."

"Oh, I know. Did he miss me to-night,--father?"

"Not much; we were talking old times over,--in Virginia, you know."

"I know; good-night."

She went back to the chair. Tige was there,--for he used to spend half of his time on the farm. She put her arm about his head. G.o.d knows how lonely the poor child was when she drew the dog so warmly to her heart: not for his master's sake alone; but it was all she had. He grew tired at last, and whined, trying to get out.

"Will you go, Tige?" she said, and opened the window.

He jumped out, and she watched him going towards town. Such a little thing, it was! But not even a dog "called her nearest and best."

Let us be silent; the story of the night is not for us to read. Do you think that He, who in the far, dim Life holds the worlds in His hand, knew or cared how alone the child was? What if she wrung her thin hands, grew sick with the slow, mad, solitary tears?--was not the world to save, as Knowles said?

He, too, had been alone; He had come unto His own, and His own received him not: so, while the struggling world rested, unconscious, in infinite calm of right, He came close to her with human eyes that had loved, and not been loved, and had suffered with that pain. And, trusting Him, she only said, "Show me my work! Thou that takest away the pain of the world, have mercy upon me!"

CHAPTER VII.

For that night, at least, Holmes swept his soul clean of doubt and indecision; one of his natures was conquered,--finally, he thought.

Polston, if he had seen his face as he paced the street slowly home to the mill, would have remembered his mother's the day she died. How the stern old woman met death half-way! why should she fear? she was as strong as he. Wherein had she failed of duty? her hands were clean: she was going to meet her just reward.

It was different with Holmes, of course, with his self-existent soul.

It was life he accepted to-night, he thought,--a life of growth, labour, achievement,--eternal.

"Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast,"--favourite words with him. He liked to study the nature of the man who spoke them; because, I think, it was like his own,--a t.i.tan strength of endurance, an infinite capability of love, and hate, and suffering, and over all, (the peculiar ident.i.ty of the man,) a cold, speculative eye of reason, that looked down into the pa.s.sion and depths of his growing self, and calmly noted them, a lesson for all time.

"Ohne Hast." Going slowly through the night, he strengthened himself by marking how all things in Nature accomplish a perfected life through slow, narrow fixedness of purpose,--each life complete in itself: why not his own, then? The windless gray, the stars, the stone under his feet, stood alone in the universe, each working out its own soul into deed. If there were any all-embracing harmony, one soul through all, he did not see it. Knowles--that old sceptic--believed in it, and called it Love. Even Goethe himself, what was it he said? "Der Allumfa.s.ser, der Allerhalter, fa.s.st und erhalt er nicht, dich, mich, sich selbst?"

There was a curious power in the words, as he lingered over them, like half-comprehended music,--as simple and tender as if they had come from the depths of a woman's heart: it touched him deeper than his power of control. Pah! it was a dream of Faust's; he, too, had his Margaret; he fell, through that love.

He went on slowly to the mill. If the name or the words woke a subtile remorse or longing, he buried them under restful composure. Whether they should ever rise like angry ghosts of what might have been, to taunt the man, only the future could tell.

Going through the gas-lit streets, Holmes met some cordial greeting at every turn. What a just, clever fellow he was! people said: one of those men improved by success: just to the defrauding of himself: saw the true worth of everybody, the very lowest: hadn't one spark of self-esteem: despised all humbug and show, one could see, though he never said it: when he was a boy, he was moody, with pa.s.sionate likes and dislikes; but success had improved him, vastly. So Holmes was popular, though the beggars shunned him, and the lazy Italian organ-grinders never held their tambourines up to him.

The mill street was dark; the building threw its great shadow over the square. It was empty, he supposed; only one hand generally remained to keep in the furnace-fires. Going through one of the lower pa.s.sages, he heard voices, and turned aside to examine. The management was not strict, and in case of a fire the mill was not insured: like Knowles's carelessness.