Part 20 (2/2)
”Oh, Walter, if you had heard Jane tell what a cry he gave when he found his boy on the cold bench, in the gusty dark of the winter morning! Half your father's heart is with your mother, and the other half with you! I did not know how a man could love till I saw his face as he stood over you once when he thought no one was near!”
”Did he find me on the stone bench?” ”Yes, indeed! Oh, Walter, I have known G.o.d better, and loved him more, since I have _seen_ how your father loves you!”
Walter fell a thinking. Ha had indeed, since he came to himself, loved his father as he had never loved him before; but he had not thought how he had been forgetting him. And herewith a gentle repentance began, which had a curing and healing effect on his spirit. Nor did the repentance leave him at his earthly father's door, but led him on to his father in heaven.
The next day he said,
”I know another thing that makes me feel more at home: Aunt Ann never scolds at me now. True, she seldom comes near me, and I can not say I want her to come! But just tell me, do you think she has been converted?”
”Not that I know of. The angels will have a bad time of it before they bring her to her knees--her real knees, I mean, not her church-knees!
For Aunt Ann to say she was wrong, would imply a change I am incapable of imagining. Yet it must come, you know, else how is she to enter the kingdom of heaven?”
”What then makes her so considerate?”
”It's only that I've managed to make her afraid of me.”
CHAPTER x.x.x.
WORKADAY MOLLY.
The days pa.s.sed; week after week went down the hill--or, is it not rather, up the hill?--and out of sight; the moon kept on changelessly changing; and at length Walter was well, though rather thin and white.
Molly saw that he was beginning to brood. She saw also, as clearly as if he had opened his mind to her, what troubled him: it needed no witch to divine that! he must work: what was his work to be?
Whatever he do, if he be not called to it, a man but takes it up ”at his own hand, as the devil did sinning.”
Molly was one of the wise women of the world--and thus: thoughts grew for her first out of things, and not things out of thoughts. G.o.d's things come out of His thoughts; our realities are G.o.d's thoughts made manifest in things; and out of them our thoughts must come; then the things that come out of our thoughts will be real. Neither our own fancies, nor the judgments of the world, must be the ground of our theories or behavior. This, at least, was Molly's working theory of life. She saw plainly that her business, every day, hour, moment, was to order her way as He who had sent her into being would have her order her way; doing G.o.d's things, G.o.d's thoughts would come to her; G.o.d's things were better than man's thoughts; man's best thoughts the discovery of the thoughts hidden in G.o.d's things? Obeying him, perhaps a day would come in which G.o.d would think directly into the mind of His child, without the intervention of things! [Footnote: It may interest some of my readers to be told that I had got thus far in preparation for this volume, when I took a book from the floor, shaken with hundreds beside from my shelves by an earthquake the same morning, and opening it--it was a life of Lavater which I had not known I possessed--found these words written by him on a card, for a friend to read after his death: ”Act according to thy faith in Christ, and thy faith will soon become sight.”]
For Molly had made the one rational, one practical discovery, that life is to be lived, not by helpless a.s.sent or aimless drifting, but by active co-operation with the Life that has said ”Live.” To her everything was part of a whole, which, with its parts, she was learning to know, was finding out, by obedience to what she already knew. There is nothing for developing even the common intellect like obedience, that is, duty done. Those who obey are soon wiser than all their lessons; while from those who do not, will be taken away even what knowledge they started with.
Molly was not prepared to attempt convincing Walter, who was so much more learned and clever than she, that the things that rose in men's minds even in their best moods were not necessarily a valuable commodity, but that their character depended on the soil whence they sprung. She believed, however, that she had it in her power to make him doubt his judgment in regard to the work of other people, and that might lead him to doubt his judgment of himself, and the thoughts he made so much of.
One lovely evening in July, they were sitting together in the twilight, after a burial of the sun that had left great heaps of golden rubbish on the sides of his grave, in which little cherubs were busy dyeing their wings.
”Walter,” said Molly, ”do you remember the little story--quite a little story, and not very clever--that I read when you were ill, called 'Bootless Betty'?”
”I should think I do! I thought it one of the prettiest stories I had ever read, or heard read. Its fearless directness, without the least affectation of boldness, enchanted me. How one--clearly a woman--whose grammar was nowise to be depended upon, should yet get so swiftly and unerringly at what she wanted to say, has remained ever since a wors.h.i.+pful wonder to me. But I have seen something like it before, probably by the same writer!”
”You may have seen the same review of it I saw; it was in your own paper.”
”You don't mean you take in 'The Field Battery'?”
”We did. Your father went for it himself, every week regularly. But we could not _always_ be sure which things you had written!”
Walter gave a sigh of distaste, but said nothing. The idea of that paper representing his mind to his father and Molly was painful to him.
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