Part 10 (2/2)
”I really don't want that sort of thing,” persisted Ishmael a little outraged he should not be thought to know best.
”However that may be,” said the Parson, rather sharply, ”different by nature or grace, you should never let your difference make you feel superior. A person who despises or fails to sympathise with all the sorrow and the sin in the lives of others is the worst of sinners. There are even times when chast.i.ty can be very chill and bare, though purity is always lovely.”
”But you were saying----” began Ishmael, then stopped. ”I think I do know what you mean,” he said more humbly. The Parson made no reply, but, stopping in his walk, looked over a low wall of loose granite and laid his arms along it. ”Come and look here a minute,” he said.
The sun had died away, but the mist had not returned, and a still greyness held the world in the low-lying part of the moor which they had reached.
Fields lay on one side and stretched in a parti-coloured patterning over the slope before them as they leant upon the wall. The breeze, too, seemed not to stir there, as though the pearly greyness that seemed to tinge the very air were a blight that lay on sound and motion as well as sight. No breath stirred strong enough to lift the petals of the gorse-blossoms by the wall, or rustle the wayside plants. The only movement came from a field of long gra.s.s on the slope--one of the pattern of fields, newly-ploughed, short-turfed, or misted with green from the three-weeks-old corn springing a few inches high, a pattern that lay like a coverlet drawn over the rounded flank of the hill. And over that one field movement was busy--the rank gra.s.s was exactly the length, density, texture, to respond to what imperceptible breath there was, and that gra.s.s only. Over and over it pa.s.sed the silvery waves made by the bending of the blades, over and over, always rippling up the slope till it looked as though a film of smoke were perpetually being blown from below to vanish over the crest. Ripple after ripple, ripple after ripple, s.h.i.+vered up the slope and was gone--the field shuddered and breathed with it; there was something uncanny about this silent unceasing movement in the dead landscape--this visible effect of an invisible thing.
”We're most of us too full of effort,” said the Parson abruptly; ”we think too much of trying to be good, of whether what we are going to do is right or wrong. Whereas if we only got our minds into the right att.i.tude the rest would follow naturally and be worth all the striving.
If we could only be more flower-like--let ourselves grow and blossom.
Look at that field, the only thing moving; d'you see it? Well, it's rippling like that all by itself because it's the only thing able to answer to the little breath that's abroad. If you get yourself sound and right and don't worry about yourself, then you respond to the breath of the Spirit, like that gra.s.s. For the wind bloweth where it listeth....”
He fell into a silence, and Ishmael, stirred out of the crust of depression which had held him so many days, felt all his heart and high hopes, his eagerness for life and its possibilities, stirring within him again. He drew a deep breath and stretched widely, sloughing off mental sloth in the physical act as young things can. He felt more alive because more conscious of himself and his surroundings than ever before, eager and ready to take up the remainder of his time at St. Renny. He stirred a little by the Parson's side.
Boase brought his thought to an ending with the rest of the quotation: ”So is everyone that is born of the Spirit....”
BOOK II
GROWTH
CHAPTER I
A FAMILY ALb.u.m
Va.s.silissa Beggoe stooped to take a final look at herself in the small mirror, for she was so tall that, in her flowery bonnet that swooped upwards from her piled chignon, she nearly touched the sloping roof of her bedroom. She stooped and gave a glow--half smile, half a quickening of light, over her whole face--at what she saw in the cloudy gla.s.s, which could not materially dim her white and gold splendour. A slight thickness of modelling here and there, notably in the short nose and too-rounded chin, blurred the fineness of her beauty and might make for hardness later on, but now, at twenty-one, Va.s.sie's wonderful skin and her splendid a.s.surance were too dazzling for criticism to look at her and live. She gave a pat, more approbation than correction, to a rose on the bonnet, smoothed the lapels of her Alexandra jacket--so-called after the newly-made Princess of Wales--and pulled up her gloves under its pegtop sleeves. Then she turned with a swoop and a swish of her wide blue taffeta skirts.
”There!” she exclaimed in the studiously clear notes she had not been able to free from a slight metallic quality; ”that's not so bad a sight to go and meet a little brother, I believe?”
The younger, softer, slighter bit of femininity on the bed gave a gentle little sound that meant admiration, and clasped a pair of dimpled, not very clean, little hands together.
”You're beautiful, Va.s.sie, just beautiful. And just like a lady....”
”I am a lady,” said Va.s.sie sharply. ”How am I not a lady, I should like to know? Haven't I been four years in a boarding-school, and don't I go and stay with a clergyman's family in Plymouth? A lady.... When I was at Plymouth last month for the Prince's wedding celebrations one of the officers of a battles.h.i.+p asked who I was!”
”I know, you've told me. Va.s.sie--”
”Well?”
”Nothing. Only I sometimes wonder why you've never got wed up there to Plymouth. One of those officers, or perhaps a clergyman...?”
Va.s.sie rather wondered herself, but all she said was: ”I'm not going to give up my freedom for the first man who lifts his little finger, I can tell you. I haven't such a great opinion of the menfolk. Conceited creatures, the most of them. I mean to pick and choose. And I mean Ishmael to help me.”
”Oh, Va.s.sie, how?” came from the wide-eyed listener on the bed.
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