Wise Saws and Modern Instances Part 8

"The preacher says he has _tried_ believing, and it has made him happy; therefore, I will try to believe," said Joe to himself,--becoming mentally desperate with distracting fears.

He _did_ try; and the experiment produced,--as it could not fail to produce in such a mind, surrounded with such excitements,--a thrilling and ecstatic feeling; but yet, he doubted again, a few moments after!

Thus, his intellect, all undisciplined and untutored as it had been, still revolted at the indignity of becoming the dupe of its own trickery. But the misery of doubt, and the pangs of spiritual condemnation, were more insupportable than the effort to impose upon himself the delusive a.s.surance that he really possessed what he so ardently sought; and he, therefore, rushed to another act of desperate credence:--"I _will_ believe! I _do_ believe!" he wildly cried, at the full pitch of his voice, while the din and confusion of fifty persons praying aloud, at the same time, rendered his enthusiasm unnoticeable.

At every new resurrection of his reason he thus drew afresh on the exorcism of his ideality, and allayed the troublous misgivings of the sterner faculty; so that, by the time the meeting was concluded, his reason had ceased to rebel,--and he went home, persuaded that he had attained the "new birth."

For some days, Joe dwelt in a frame of greater tranquillity than he had experienced since the commencement of his religious "awakenings." But the calm was a deceitful one; and was but the prelude to a more terrific tempest than had ever yet raged in the breast of the young victim to the ideal. Joe heard descriptions from the pulpit of the sectaries, of the unspeakable ecstasy of true believers; and reflected that his own feelings bore scarcely any resemblance to such highly-wrought pictures.

Gradually, he felt it utterly impossible to conceal from himself the tormenting conviction that he had never received that amazing change of nature which he had been taught, so energetically and sanguinely, to expect as the fruit of his "act of faith." Instead of the "heavenly joy of a.s.surance," which the preachers described,--Joe could not conceal from himself the fact that his nearest approaches to inward joy and calm,--fitful as they were,--resulted from the effort to _a.s.sure himself_; and this seemed too strained a mental state, he thought, to be termed "heavenly joy of a.s.surance." Then, again, he was conscious that he had not the mental purity that he had heard described as one of the certain marks of regeneration. And this, soon, hurried him into a whirlpool of inward distraction;--for, instead of attributing the irritability and peevishness which now frequently agitated him to their real source,--the exhaustion of his nervous system by extreme asceticism,--the poor boy set them down, in his helpless and pitiable ignorance, to the inheritance of a nature that involved him, still, in the awful sentence of divine wrath. The tortures of disappointment thus augmented the distraction of doubt; and, at length, Joe was unable to quell his uneasiness for another moment by resorting to the act of self-delusion recommended by the "Revivalist,"--and called by him "the act of faith." Worn out, and jaded, with his daily, hourly, and almost momentary attempts to palm the fiction, anew, upon his understanding, Joe gave up the practice of "the act of faith" altogether, with a feeling of weariness and disgust and self-degradation too bitter for description!

The prostration of the youth's corporeal strength accompanied this distressing mental conflict. Dame Deborah began to watch the hectic flush on the cheek of her beloved foster-child with an aching heart; and, for the first time, entertained fears, that Time, so far from curing him of his errors, would only serve to mark his early grave. She would have interdicted his future attendance on the meetings of his religious a.s.sociates; but the drooping state of his health deterred her from crossing his will, lest she should hasten the catastrophe which she began, in sadness and sorrow, to antic.i.p.ate.

The good old dame finally resolved to try the efficacy of a change of scene and circ.u.mstances, as means of aiding the youth's recovery. Joe had never yet crossed the bounds of Haxey parish since he entered it; but the Dame being in the habit of attending the weekly market at Gainsborough, the nearest trading town, she determined that he should become a partner in her future journies. Her project was as sensible as it was benevolent. The new excitements created for the lad by these little expeditions could not fail to produce an issue in some degree salutary to his mind. And yet the relief he experienced might have been but temporary, had not a medicine,--seemingly hazardous,--but yet, signally well adapted for his disordered mental condition,--been opportunely disclosed from the womb of Circ.u.mstance,--the great productive source of new thinkings, new resolves, and new courses of action, which, in mockery of ourselves, we so often attribute to our own "will" and "intelligence."

Mounted on a stout grey mare, with his aged mistress behind, on an old-fashioned pillion-seat, Joe set forth on his first journey with emotions of natural curiosity; and, in the course of his progress, began to regain some degree of his const.i.tutional cheerfulness. Eight miles of country, beheld for the first time, though its landscape was only of an ordinary and monotonous character, presented a world of objects for reflection to Joe's impressible spirit. The season was an early spring; and albeit the young equestrian felt some slight alarm when the animal sunk, beneath the superinc.u.mbent weight of himself and his companion, well-nigh up to the saddle-skirts, in the miry sloughs that intervened between Haxey and the Trent,--yet the view of the face of nature, smilingly outspread around him, fully compensated, he felt, for these occasional drawbacks on the pleasure of the journey. The few verdant meads which were scattered among the dull fallows looked as lovely, Joe thought, as they could look in any other part of England; while the cottages, in their array of honeysuckles, were attired as blushingly and beautifully, he thought, as if reared in the sunny climes of the South.

Midway in the journey, Joe and his aged mistress dismounted to cross the Trent,--and four more miles brought them to Gainsborough. On arriving at the market-town, the good old dame, somewhat to the lad's surprise, presented him with half-a-crown,--a sum he had never, till then, possessed. After a brief preface of prudence, she informed him that he was at liberty to spend the next three hours in looking at the rarities in the market, in walking about the town, or in any mode that he thought would most highly gratify his curiosity. Joe set forth, antic.i.p.ating sights which might afford a pa.s.sing gratification; but in the course of the first hour became immovably attracted by a display of merchandise, from which the rustic traffickers of the market, too generally, turned away with indifference,--a s.p.a.cious stall of old books.

The image of a homely country lad, clad in a rustic garb, and shod with heavy-laced boots, standing by that old book-stall, presented a very uninteresting spectacle to the market people at Gainsborough. The b.u.t.ter-women brushed rudely past him, grumbling at the awkwardness with which he obstructed their crowded path; and the hucksters roughly cursed him, half-overturning the absorbed youth in their haste to forestall each other in cheapening the produce of the village dairies. Yet Joe was wont to refer to the hour during which he looked over the tattered treasures of the travelling bookseller as the most important in his whole life. He laid out the first half-crown he had ever possessed in purchasing the translated work of a French philosopher, without knowing, for many months after, that the author of the book bore an opprobious designation among theologians. At successive periods of his after-history, Joe attributed this occurrence to the operation of the inevitable laws of necessity, to accident, to permissive Providence: but, without entering into the labyrinth of his progressive trains of thought, or solving the question of the validity of any of his conclusions,--suffice it to say, that the purchase of that book produced a sequel of the most intense interest to the young and undirected inquirer.

Joe had but just paid his half-crown into the hand of the bookseller, and b.u.t.toned the volume in the breast of his coat, when his ears were stricken by the boisterous tones of a bawling pedlar. With remarkable elongation of face, the man was proclaiming the wondrous contents of a pamphlet that he held in his hand, copies of which he was offering for sale, "amazingly cheap," as he avowed, to the staring by-standers. The stroller rapidly gleaned coppers among the wonder-stricken b.u.t.ter-women, who forgot their baskets in the serious interest awakened by the pedlar's tale; and Joe could not refrain from noting the comments which the simple people made upon the story.

"Here is a true and faithful account," reiterated the pedlar, with all his power of lungs, "of the awful apparition of a young woman to her sweetheart, three weeks after her death,--warning him, in the most solemn manner, to forsake his evil ways, and not to deceive others, as he had deceived her,--and foretelling to him that he would die that day fortnight,--and then vanishing in a flash of fire, leaving a smell of brimstone behind her! And how the young man took to his bed immediately after, and died at the time his sweetheart had foretold,--making a G.o.dly confession of his sins on his death-bed. All which happened," concluded the pedlar, with a look of solemn a.s.surance that went at once to the hearts of his unsuspecting audience,--"but one month ago, in the county of Cornwall;--and here are the names of ten creditable parishioners of the place, who heard the young man's confession, and have set their names as witnesses of the truth of the circ.u.mstance, that it might be a warning to young men to repent, and not to deceive their sweet-hearts,--and all this you have for the small charge of one penny!"

"The Lord ha' marcy on us, Moggy," cried a young and blooming b.u.t.ter-woman to her elderly neighbour, as they leant over the handles of their baskets, aghast with wonder:--"what an awful thing it must ha'

been to see that young woman come from the deead!"

"It must, indeed, Dolly," replied the older gossip, shaking her head: "it's enough to mak one tremmle to think on't! Some folks say that there's no sich thing as a ghooast,--but I'm sewer I wouldn't be so wicked as to say so."

"And she vanished in a flash o' fire and brimstone, did she, maister?"

said Dolly to the pedlar, as she tendered her penny.

"That she did, pretty maid!" quickly answered the vender, with a look of roguish seriousness: "take the book home, and let your sweetheart read it to you, if you can't read it yourself; and you'll find that what I have said is all true."

"I hope it is, maister, for they're solemn things to joke about!"

remarked a staid-looking matron, who was taking out her spectacles to read the veracious story.

"True as the Gospel!" exclaimed the ready pedlar: "I was born and brought up in the parish, and know every one of the creditable yeomen who have signed the young man's confession."

"Yo may ha' been born there," interjected a Sheffield huckster, with a satirical grin; "but it's many a moile off!"

The pedlar strode rapidly away to a distant part of the market.

"Why, you dooant doot what th' man says, do you, Roger?" asked a fair Axholmian b.u.t.ter-maiden of the huckster.

"Daht!" replied the Sheffielder, in his own dialect; "I al'ays daht loies, mun! But come, la.s.s! tak t'other hawp'ny a pahnd, and bring t'

basket along wi' thee!"

"Marcy on us!" exclaimed the b.u.t.ter-woman in spectacles, as the rude huckster left the market; "you Sheffield fellow'll hev to see a ghooast before he believes there is one! What an alarming acc.o.o.nt this is, to be sewer!"

"Would you be so kind," said Joe to the elderly dame who uttered this latter exclamation, "as to let me look at the account for a few minutes?

I will return it to you again, very soon."

"Why, yes,--I'll let you look at it," answered the woman, scanning him from head to foot; "and I hope you'll take a lesson from the book, and never act so wickedly as this young man did."

It was not mere curiosity which prompted the lad to ask the loan of the pedlar's tract. He felt certain that he had glanced at a similar tale in a volume of old pamphlets on the bookseller's stall, but a few minutes before. After a short search, he found the volume again, and comparing the stories, saw that they were the same, to a letter, save that the copy on the stall affirmed the apparition to have taken place in Westmoreland, more than half-a-century before. While his thoughts were all in a tumult at this strange discovery, the bookseller, who was attentive to the behaviour of his customers, stept up, and addressed him in a whisper.

"You look surprised, young man," he said, while Joe gazed at the sinister expression in his countenance; "but I knew it was all an old story, though the fellow was making such a noise about it. Say nothing about it, however,--for all trades must live,--and most people would think one tale as good and as true as the other!"

The bookseller was only just in time with his precept of caution; for Joe's gathering indignation at the pedlar's imposture would have impelled him, the next moment, to break through his boyish bashfulness, and proclaim his discovery aloud, in the ears of the surrounding b.u.t.ter-women:--a proceeding which, in lieu of thanks, would have, no doubt, drawn down upon his head a storm of wrath from their disturbed superst.i.tion. Feeling unspeakably confused with his reflections, Joe now hastily returned the volume to its place on the stall; and thanking the kind b.u.t.ter-woman for her loan of the ghost-story, gave it carefully into her hands. He then hasted away towards the little inn where he was to meet Dame Deborah, partly under an impression that his hours of liberty were near their expiry,--but much more with the persuasion that he would be able, as he went along, being no longer surrounded with the market-din, to disentangle the web of conflicting thought into which the slight incidents just narrated had cast him.

The pedlar's falsehood and audacity,--and the whispered caution of the bookseller, whom Joe felt strongly inclined to characterise as an abettor of imposture and knavery,--the credulity of the b.u.t.ter-women,--and the gaping wonder manifested by the listening crowd,--formed a ma.s.s of striking corroborations,--a sort of powerful running commentary on what he had hastily read in the volume he had just purchased. The incidents in the little market, in fact, opened to the lad's inexperienced mind a glimpse of the melancholy truth that man and the mult.i.tude have been p.r.o.ne to superst.i.tion in all ages, and have eagerly received frauds which have been imposed upon them, throughout all time, by the craft of interested and organised parties; or, where these were wanting, that man has forged deceptions for himself, through the strength of his own wondering faculty. The end to which these incipient reasonings would lead him was not, and could not, then, be manifest to him; or Joe, scarcely rid of his fanatical incubus, would have revolted from them with horror. It was merely the dawn of thoughts which were waiting to break in upon his mind with all the power and effulgence of new truth. But, whatever might be the tendency of these commencing reasonings, the progress of them was speedily arrested by the beginning of the journey homewards.

Joe, with the good old dame behind him, rode as far as the Trent ferry, at Stockwith, in company with sundry rustic frequenters of the weekly market. The gossip chiefly consisted of a recapitulation of the prices of corn and flax, and poultry, and pigs, and b.u.t.ter,--until the re-introduction of the ghost-story, at what time Joe and his foster-mother, with the rest, were seated in the ferry-boat, and were recrossing the Trent.

"Well,--it's an awful acc.o.o.nt, Maister Gawky!" exclaimed Diggory Dowlson, the rough old ferryman, after an Axholmian farmer had briefly recounted the pedlar's tale; "but I've heeard many sich i' my time,--thof I nivver seed nowt mysen."

"And the Lord send I nivver may!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Betty Bogglepeep, a tottering old wife of Owston, who had, the day before, as she said, in the course of her gossip, chopped off the head of her best black hen, because she crowed like a c.o.c.k:--"the Lord send I nivver may, for it maks me queer to think a thowt o' sich things; and I'm sewer if I woz to see 'em, it would freeten me oot o' my wits!"

"Hold thy foolish tongue, prithee!" chimed in her loving husband, whose bravery seemed chiefly owing to his late fellowship with Sir John Barleycorn, at the market:--"why does ta talk aboot being freeten'd at shadows?"

"Nay, nay, Davy, it's to no use puttin' it off i' that way," interjected the old ferryman, taking up the cause of the old woman and the ghost, with the fervour of gallantry and faith united;--"depend on't, though deead folks may come like shadows, yet it's a fearful seeght to see 'em!"

"No doot, no doot, Diggory!" replied the farmer, "but seeing 'em's _all_--thoo knaws!"

The farmer meant this for an arch sally, but his companions in the boat were not in the vein to relish his humour.

"What do _you_ think aboot sich solemn things, Dame Thrumpkinson?" asked the old ferryman, turning to the corner of the boat where Deborah seemed buried in reflection;--"you sit and say not a word, all this time. Give us your thowts, dame, for ye've more sense than all of us, put together!"

"I don't give heed to every fool's tale about such things," replied Dame Deborah, in her usual grave tone; "but I've serious reason for believing that the dead often know what the living are doing."

"Why, did ye ivver see owt spirit'al, Dame Thrumpkinson?" instantly asked half-a-dozen voices, while twice as many eyes glared upon the aged Deborah with a gaze as wonder-stricken as that of a nest of owls suddenly awakened by daylight.

"Nay, neighbours, nay!" replied the dame, drooping her head, and speaking in a tone of melancholy tenderness;--"do not ask me further. I think we ought to keep sacred the secrets of the dead that have been near and precious to us!"

The manner of Dame Deborah's reply was so affecting, and its intimate meaning, though only guessed by her rude auditors, seemed to command so deep a respect from their simple feelings, that the subject was immediately dropped; and the whole party remained silent until the boat had touched the western bank of the river.

Some of the company now took a direction for Owston and b.u.t.terwick, and such parts of the country as lay on the banks of the Trent; while the remnant, who were bound for the more central parts of the isle, being more strongly mounted than Joe and his aged mistress, and many of them having a greater distance to reach ere night-fall, sped on before, after bidding their deeply-respected acquaintance, Dame Deborah, a hearty and kindly farewell. The journey home was nearly ended before the dame broke silence, her mind seeming deeply intent on thoughts which the conversation in the boat had awakened within her; and when she addressed her foster-son, it was but briefly, though kindly.

"I hope the ride will do thee no harm, bairn," she said, in a tone of the gentlest affection; "and how did ta spend the half-crown?"

"I bought a book with it, dame," Joe answered.

"A book!" said she, pleasantly:--"well, well, it's like thee: but, may be, thou could not ha' spent it better. And what sort of a book is it, bairn?"

"Quite on a new subject," Joe replied, scarcely knowing how to describe the book to the dame's plain understanding.

"A new subject!" she repeated, with a gentle laugh;--"well, well, I hope it will do thee more good than some of thy old subjects." And then, as if fearful of bringing back distressful thoughts to the heart of one over whom she yearned so tenderly, the good old dame permitted the journey to end without further remark. Joe would fain have entreated an explication of the mysterious conclusion given by his aged protectress to the conversation in the boat; but there was something too sombre in her mood of mind, at that time, he thought, to permit his hazarding any reference to such a subject.

Almost insensibly, to himself, Joe's opinions on religious matters began to undergo an entire change within a short period succeeding his acquaintance with the work of the French philosopher. The arguments of the book were conducted in too covert a mode for one, so little skilled in the arts of disguise, to be able to detect its real tendency in the outset. The blandishments of the writer's style captivated his taste; and the boldness with which he saw the doctrines of natural liberty a.s.serted, took strong possession of his judgment. Degraded as his reason had felt itself to be while enslaved to the teachings of fanaticism, there was no wonder that he felt the awakening of a desire for mental independence, and listened willingly to the voice of an advocate for the native dignity of man's understanding. Appended to the volume, which now began to engross his leisure hours, was a treatise, ent.i.tled "The Law of Nature." Joe perused its precepts and digested its reasonings, until he believed he had committed a lamentable error by wearying his flesh and spirit with acts of ascetic devotion,--and resolved he would address himself to the practice of the elevated moral virtue which the French writer a.s.serted to be easy and natural to man when brought within the influence of instruction.