am sure of his right to command? I just want to know whether I am to
call him Lord or not. No, that won't do either, for he says, Why
even of yourselves judge ye not what is right? And do I not
know--have I ever even doubted that what he said we ought to do was
the right thing to do? Yet here have I, all these years, been
calling myself a Christian, ministering, forsooth, in the temple of
Christ, as if he were a heathen divinity, who cared for songs and
prayers and sacrifices, and cannot honestly say I ever once in my
life did a thing because he said so, although the record is full of
his earnest, even pleading words! I have NOT been an honest man, and
how should a dishonest man be a judge over that man who said he was
the Christ of God? Would it be any wonder if the things he uttered
should be too high and noble to be by such a man recognized as
truth?"

With this, yet another saying dawned upon, him: IF ANY MAN WILL DO
HIS WILL, HE SHALL KNOW OF THE DOCTRINE, WHETHER IT BE OF GOD, OR
WHETHER I SPEAK OF MYSELF.

He went into his closet and shut to the door--came out again, and
went straight to visit a certain grievous old woman.

The next open result was, that, on the following Sunday, a man went
up into the pulpit who, for the first time in his life, believed he
had something to say to his fellow-sinners. It was not now the
sacred spoil of the best of gleaning or catering that he bore
thither with him, but the message given him by a light in his own
inward parts, discovering therein the darkness and the wrong.

He opened no sermon-case, nor read words from any book, save, with
trembling voice, these:

"WHY CALL YE ME LORD, LORD, AND DO NOT THE THINGS WHICH I SAY?"

I pause for a moment in my narrative to request the sympathy of such
readers as may be capable of affording it, for a man whose honesty
makes him appear egotistic. When a man, finding himself in a false
position, is yet anxious to do the duties of that position until
such time as, if he should not in the meantime have verified it, and
become able to fill it with honesty, he may honourably leave it, I
think he may well be pardoned if, of inward necessity, he should
refer to himself in a place where such reference may be either the
greatest impiety, or the outcome of the truest devotion. In him it
was neither: it was honesty--and absorption in the startled gaze of
a love that believed it had caught a glimmer of the passing garment
of the Truth. Thus strengthened--might I not say inspired? for what
is the love of truth and the joy therein, if not a breathing into
the soul of the breath of life from the God of truth?--he looked
round upon his congregation as he had never dared until now--saw
face after face, and knew it--saw amongst the rest that of Helen
Lingard, so sadly yet not pitifully altered, with a doubt if it
could be she; trembled a little with a new excitement, which one
less modest or less wise might have taken--how foolishly!--instead
of the truth perceived, for the inspiration of the spirit; and,
sternly suppressing the emotion, said,

"My hearers, I come before you this morning to utter the first word
of truth it has ever been given to ME to utter."

His hearers stared both mentally and corporeally.

"Is he going to deny the Bible?" said some.

--"It will be the last," said others, "if the rector hear in time
how you have been disgracing yourself and profaning his pulpit."

"And," the curate went on, "it would be as a fire in my bones did I
attempt to keep it back.

"In my room, three days ago, I was reading the strange story of the
man who appeared in Palestine saying that he was the Son of God, and
came upon those words of his which I have now read in your hearing.
At their sound the accuser, Conscience, awoke in my bosom, and
asked, 'Doest thou the things he saith to thee?' And I thought with
myself,--'Have I this day done anything he says to me?--when did I
do anything I had heard of him? Did I ever'--to this it came at
last--'Did I ever, in all my life, do one thing because he said to
me DO THIS?' And the answer was NO, NEVER. Yet there I was, not only
calling myself a Christian, but on the strength of my Christianity,
it was to be presumed, living amongst you, and received by you, as
your helper on the way to the heavenly kingdom--a living falsehood,
walking and talking amongst you!"

"What a wretch!" said one man to himself, who made a large part of
his living by the sale of under-garments whose every stitch was an
untacking of the body from the soul of a seamstress. "Bah!" said
some. "A hypocrite, by his own confession!" said others.
"Exceedingly improper!" said Mrs. Ramshorn. "Unheard-of and most
unclerical behaviour! And actually to confess such paganism!" For
Helen, she waked up a little, began to listen, and wondered what he
had been saying that a wind seemed to have blown rustling among the
heads of the congregation.

"Having made this confession," Wingfold proceeded, "you will
understand that whatever I now say, I say to and of myself as much
as to and of any other to whom it may apply."

He then proceeded to show that faith and obedience are one and the
same spirit, passing as it were from room to room in the same heart:
what in the heart we call faith, in the will we call obedience. He
showed that the Lord refused absolutely the faith that found its
vent at the lips in the worshipping words, and not at the limbs in
obedient action--which some present pronounced bad theology, while
others said to themselves surely that at least was common sense. For
Helen, what she heard might be interesting to clergymen, or people
like her aunt who had to do with such matters, but to her it was
less than nothing and vanity, whose brother lay at home "sick in
heart and sick in head."

But hard thoughts of him could not stay the fountain of Wingfold's
utterance, which filled as it flowed. Eager after a right
presentation of what truth he saw, he dwelt on the mockery it would
be of any man to call him the wisest, the best, the kindest, yea and
the dearest of men, yet never heed either the smallest request or
the most urgent entreaty he made.

"A Socinian!" said Mrs. Ramshorn.

"There's stuff in the fellow!" said the rector's churchwarden, who
had been brought up a Wesleyan.

"He'd make a fellow fancy he did believe all his grandmother told
him!" thought Bascombe.

As he went on, the awakened curate grew almost eloquent. His face
shone with earnestness. Even Helen found her gaze fixed upon him,
though she had not a notion what he was talking about. He closed at
length with these words:

"After the confession I have now made to you, a confession which I
have also entreated everyone to whom it belongs to make to himself
and his God, it follows that I dare not call myself a Christian. How
should such a one as I know anything about that which, if it be true
at all, is the loftiest, the one all-absorbing truth in the
universe? How should such a fellow as I"--he went on, growing
scornful at himself in the presence of the truth--"judge of its
sacred probabilities? or, having led such a life of simony, be heard
when he declares that such a pretended message from God to men seems
too good to be true? The things therein contained I declare good,
yet went not and did them. Therefore am I altogether out of court,
and must not be heard in the matter.

"No, my hearers, I call not myself a Christian, but I call everyone
here who obeys the word of Jesus, who restrains anger, who declines
judgment, who practises generosity, who loves his enemies, who prays
for his slanderers, to witness my vow, that I will henceforth try to
obey him, in the hope that he whom he called God and his Father,
will reveal to him whom you call your Lord Jesus Christ, that into
my darkness I may receive the light of the world!"

"A professed infidel!" said Mrs. Ramshorn. "A clever one too! That
was a fine trap he laid for us, to prove us all atheists as well as
himself! As if any mere mortal COULD obey the instructions of the
Saviour! He was divine; we are but human!"

She might have added, "And but poor creatures as such," but did not
go so far, believing herself more than an average specimen.

But there was one shining face which, like a rising sun of love and
light and truth, "pillowed his chin," not "on an orient wave," but
on the book-board of a free seat. The eyes of it were full of tears,
and the heart behind it was giving that God and Father thanks, for
this was more, far more than he had even hoped for, save in the
indefinite future. The light was no longer present as warmth or
vivification alone, but had begun to shine as light in the heart of
his friend, to whom now, praised be God! the way lay open into all
truth. And when the words came, in a voice that once more trembled
with emotion--"Now to God the Father,"--he bent down his face, and
the poor, stunted, distorted frame and great grey head were
grievously shaken with the sobs of a mighty gladness. Truth in the
inward parts looked out upon him from the face of one who stood
before the people their self-denied teacher! How would they receive
it? It mattered not. Those whom the Father had drawn, would hear.

Polwarth neither sought the curate in the vestry, waited for him at
the church-door, nor followed him to his lodging. He was not of
those who compliment a man on his fine sermon. How grandly careless
are some men of the risk of ruin their praises are to their friends!
"Let God praise him!" said Polwarth; "I will only dare to love him."
He would not toy with his friend's waking Psyche.

CHAPTER XXXII.

HOPES.

It was the first Sunday Helen had gone to church since her brother
came to her. On the previous Sunday he had passed some crisis and
begun to improve, and by the end of the week was so quiet, that
longing for a change of atmosphere, and believing he might be left
with the housekeeper, she had gone to church. On her return she
heard he was no worse, although he had "been a-frettin' after her."
She hurried to him as if he had been her baby.

"What do you go to church for?" he asked, half-petulantly, like a
spoilt child, with languid eyes whence the hard fire had vanished.
"What's the use of it?"

He looked at her, waiting an answer.

"Not much," replied Helen. "I like the quiet and the music. That's
all."

He seemed disappointed, and lay still for a few moments.

"In old times," he said at last, "the churches used to be a refuge:
I suppose that is why one can't help feeling as if some safety were
to be got from them yet.--Was your cousin George there this
morning?"

"Yes, he went with us," answered Helen.

"I should like to see him. I want somebody to talk to."

Helen was silent. She was more occupied however in answering to
herself the question why she shrank so decidedly from bringing
Bascombe into the sick-room, than in thinking what she should say to
Leopold. The truth was the truth, and why should she object to
Leopold's knowing, or at least being told as well as herself, that
he need fear no punishment in the next world, whatever he might have
to encounter in this; that there was no frightful God who hated
wrong-doing to be terrified at; that even the badness of his own
action need not distress him, for he and it would pass away as the
blood he had shed had already vanished from the earth? Ought it not
to encourage the poor fellow?--But to what? To live on and endure
his misery, or to put an end to it and himself at once? Or perhaps
to plunge into vice that he might escape the consciousness of guilt
and the dread of the law?

I will not say that exactly such a train of thought as this passed
through her mind, but of whatever sort it was, it brought her no
nearer to a desire for the light of George Bascombe's presence by
the bedside of her guilty brother. At the same time her partiality
for her cousin made her justify his exclusion thus: "George is so
good himself, he is only fit for the company of good people. He
would not in the least understand my poor Poldie, and would be too
hard upon him."

Since her brother's appearance, in fact, she had seen very little of
her cousin, and this not merely because her presence was so much
required in the sick-chamber, but because she was herself unwilling
to meet him. She had felt, almost without knowing it, that his
character was unsympathetic, and that his loud, cold good-nature
could never recognise or justify such love as she bore to her
brother! Nor was this all; for, remembering how he had upon one
occasion expressed himself with regard to criminals, she feared even
to look in his face, lest his keen, questioning, unsparing eye
should read in her soul that she was the sister of a murderer.

Before this time however a hint of light had appeared in the clouds
that enwrapped her and Leopold: she had begun to doubt whether he
had really committed the crime of which he accused himself. There
had been no inquiry after him, except from his uncle, concerning his
absence from Cambridge, for which his sudden attack of brain fever
served as more than sufficient excuse. That there had been such a
murder, the newspapers left her no room to question--but might not
the relation in which he stood to the victim--the horror of her
death, the insidious approaches of the fever, and the influences of
that hateful drug, have combined to call up an hallucination of
blood-guiltiness? And what at length all but satisfied her of the
truth of her conjecture was that, when he began to recover, Leopold
seemed himself in doubt at times whether his sense of guilt had not
its origin in some one or other of the many dreams which had haunted
him throughout his illness, knowing only too well that it was long
since dreams had become to him more real than the greater part of
what was going on around him. To this blurring and confusing of
consciousness it probably contributed, that, in the first stages of
the fever, he was under the influence of the same drug which had
been working upon his brain up to the very moment when he committed
the crime.

During the week the hope had almost settled into conviction; and one
consequence was that, although she was not a whit more inclined to
introduce George Bascombe to the sick-chamber, she found herself not
only equal, but no longer averse to meeting him; and on the
following Saturday, when he presented himself as usual, come to
spend the Sunday, she listened to her aunt, and consented to go out
with him for a ride--in the evening, however, when Mrs. Rainshorn
herself, who had shown Leopold great and genuine kindness, would be
able to sit with him. They therefore had dinner early, and Helen
went again to her brother's room, unwilling to leave him a moment
until she gave up her charge to her aunt.

They had tea together, and Leopold was very quiet. It is wonderful
with what success the mind will accommodate itself, in its effort
after peace, to the presence of the most torturing thought. But
Helen took this quietness for a sign of innocence, not knowing that
the state of the feelings is neither test nor gauge of guilt. The
nearer perfection a character is, the louder is the cry of
conscience at the appearance of fault; and, on the other hand, the
worst criminals have had the easiest minds.

Helen also was quiet, and fell into a dreamy mood, watching her
brother, who every now and then turned on her a look of love and
gratitude which moved her heart to its very depths. Not until she
heard the horses coming round from the stable, did she rise to go
and change her dress.

"I shall not be long away from you, Poldie," she said.

"Do not forget me, Helen," he returned. "If you forget me, an enemy
will think of me."

His love comforted her, and yet further strengthened her faith in
his innocence; and it was with a kind of half-repose, timid,
wavering, and glad, upon her countenance--how different from the
old, dull, wooden quiescence!--that she joined her cousin in the
hall. A moment, and he had lifted her to the saddle, and was mounted
by her side.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE RIDE.

A soft west wind, issuing as from the heart of a golden vase filled
with roses, met them the instant they turned out of the street,
walking their horses towards the park-gate.

Something--was it in the evening, or was it in his own soul?--had
prevailed to the momentary silencing of George Bascombe:--it may
have been but the influence of the cigar which Helen had begged him
to finish. Helen too was silent: she felt as if the low red sun,
straight into which they seemed to be riding, blotted out her being
in the level torrent of his usurping radiance. Neither of them spoke
a word until they had passed through the gate into the park.

It was a perfect English summer evening--warm, but not sultry. As
they walked their horses up the carriage way, the sun went down, and
as if he had fallen like a live coal into some celestial magazine of
colour and glow, straightway blazed up a slow explosion of crimson
and green in a golden triumph--pure fire, the smoke and fuel gone,
and the radiance alone left. And now Helen received the second
lesson of her initiation into the life of nature: she became aware
that the whole evening was thinking around her, and as the dusk grew
deeper and the night grew closer, the world seemed to have grown
dark with its thinking. Of late Helen had been driven herself to
think--if not deeply, yet intensely--and so knew what it was like,
and felt at home with the twilight.

They turned from the drive on to the turf. Their horses tossed up
their heads, and set off, unchecked, at a good pelting gallop,
across the open park. On Helen's cheek the wind blew cooling,
strong, and kind. As if flowing from some fountain above, in an
unseen unbanked river, down through the stiller ocean of the air, it
seemed to bring to her a vague promise, almost a precognition, of
peace--which, however, only set her longing after something--she
knew not what--something of which she only knew that it would fill
the longing the wind had brought her. The longing grew and
extended--went stretching on and on into an infinite of rest. And as
they still galloped, and the light-maddened colours sank into smoky
peach, and yellow green, and blue gray, the something swelled and
swelled in her soul, and pulled and pulled at her heart, until the
tears were running down her face: for fear Bascombe should see them,
she gave her horse the rein, and fled from him into the friendly
dusk that seemed to grade time into eternity.

Suddenly she found herself close to a clump of trees, which overhung
the deserted house. She had made a great circuit without knowing it.
A pang shot to her heart, and her tears ceased to flow. The night,
silent with thought, held THAT also in its bosom! She drew rein,
turned, and waited for Bascombe.

"What a chase you've given me, Helen!" he cried, while yet pounding
away some score of yards off.

"A wild-goose one you mean, cousin?"

"It would have been if I had thought to catch you on this ancient
cocktail."

"Don't abuse the old horse, George: he has seen better days. I would
gladly have mounted you more to your mind, but you know I could
not--except indeed I had given you my Fanny, and taken the old horse
myself. I have ridden him."

"The lady ought always to be the better mounted," returned George
coolly. "For my part, I much prefer it, because then I need not be
anxious about whether I am boring her or not: if I am, she can run
away."

"You cannot suppose I thought you a bore to-night. A more sweetly
silent gentleman none could wish for squire."

"Then it was my silence bored you.--Shall I tell you what I was
thinking about?"

"If you like. I was thinking how pleasant it would be to ride on and
on into eternity," said Helen.

"That feeling of continuity," returned George, "is a proof of the
painlessness of departure. No one can ever know when he ceases to
be, because then he is not; and that is how some men come to fancy
they feel as if they were going to live for ever. But the worst of
it is that they no sooner fancy it, than it seems to them a probable
as well as delightful thing to go on and on and never cease. This
comes of the man's having no consciousness of ceasing, and when one
is comfortable, it always seems good to go on. A child is never
willing to turn from the dish of which he is eating to another. It
is more he wants, not another."

"That is if he likes it," said Helen.

"Everybody likes it," said George, "--more or less."

"I am not so sure of EVERYbody," replied Helen. "Do you imagine that
twisted little dwarf-woman that opened the gate for us is content
with her lot?"

"No, that is impossible--while she sees you and remains what she is.
But I said nothing of contentment. I was but thinking of the fools
who, whether content or not, yet want to live for ever, and so, very
conveniently, take their longing for immortality, which they call an
idea innate in the human heart, for a proof that immortality is
their rightful inheritance."

"How then do you account for the existence and universality of the
idea?" asked Helen, who had happened lately to come upon some
arguments on the other side.

But while she spoke thus indifferently she felt in her heart like
one who wakes from a delicious swim in the fairest of rivers, to
find that the clothes have slipped from the bed to the floor:--that
was all his river and all his swim!

"I account for its existence as I have just said; and for its
universality by denying it. It is NOT universal, for _I_ haven't
it."

"At least you will not deny that men, even when miserable, shrink
from dying?"

"Anything, everything is unpleasant out of its due time. I will
allow, for the sake of argument, that the thought of dying is always
unpleasant. But wherefore so? Because, in the very act of thinking
it, the idea must always be taken from the time that suits with
it--namely, its own time, when it will at length, and ought at
length to come--and placed in the midst of the lively present, with
which assuredly it does not suit. To life, death must be always
hateful. In the rush and turmoil of effort, how distasteful even the
cave of the hermit--let ever such a splendid view spread abroad
before its mouth! But when it comes it will be pleasant enough, for
then its time will have come also--the man will be prepared for it
by decay and cessation. If one were to tell me that he had that
endless longing for immortality, of which hitherto I have only heard
at second hand, I would explain it to him thus:--Your life, I would
say, not being yet complete, still growing, feels in itself the
onward impulse of growth, and, unable to think of itself as other
than complete, interprets that onward impulse as belonging to the
time around it instead of the nature within it. Or rather let me
say, the man feels in himself the elements of more, and not being
able to grasp the notion of his own completeness, which is so far
from him, transposes the feeling of growth and sets it beyond
himself, translating it at the same time into an instinct of
duration, a longing after what he calls eternal life. But when the
man is complete, then comes decay and brings its own contentment
with it--as will also death, when it arrives in its own proper
season of fulness and ripeness."

Helen said nothing in reply. She thought her cousin very clever, but
could not enjoy what he said--not in the face of that sky, and in
the yet lingering reflection of the feelings it had waked in her. He
might be right, but now at least she wanted no more of it. She even
felt as if she would rather cherish a sweet deception for the
comfort of the moment in which the weaver's shuttle flew, than take
to her bosom a cold killing fact.

Such were indeed an unworthy feeling to follow! Of all things let us
have the truth--even of fact! But to deny what we cannot prove, not
even casts into our ice-house a spadeful of snow. What if the warm
hope denied should be the truth after all? What if it was the truth
in it that drew the soul towards it by its indwelling reality, and
its relations with her being, even while she took blame for
suffering herself to be enticed by a sweet deception? Alas indeed
for men if the life and the truth are not one, but fight against
each other! Surely it says something for the divine nature of him
that denies the divine, when he yet cleaves to what he thinks the
truth, although it denies the life, and blots the way to the better
from every chart!

"And what were you thinking of, George?" said Helen, willing to
change the subject.

"I was thinking," he answered, "let me see!--oh! yes--I was
thinking of that very singular case of murder. You must have seen it
in the newspapers. I have long had a doubt whether I were better
fitted for a barrister or a detective. I can't keep my mind off a
puzzling case.--You must have heard of this one--the girl they found
lying in her ball-dress in the middle of a wood--stabbed to the
heart?"

"I do remember something of it," answered Helen, gathering a little
courage to put into her voice from the fact that her cousin could
hardly see her face. "Then the murderer has not been discovered?"

"That is the point of interest. Not a trace of him! Not a soul
suspected even!"

Helen drew a deep breath.

"Had it been in Rome, now," George went on. "But in a quiet country
place in England! The thing seems incredible! So artistically
done!--no struggle!--just one blow right to the heart, and the
assassin gone as if by magic!--no weapon dropped!--nothing to give a
clue! The whole thing suggests a practised hand.--But why such a one
for the victim? Had it been some false member of a secret society
thus immolated, one could understand it. But a merry girl at a
ball!--it IS strange! I SHOULD like to try the unravelling of it."

"Has nothing then been done?" said Helen with a gasp, to hide which
she moved in her saddle, as if readjusting her habit.

"Oh, everything--of course. There was instant pursuit on the
discovery of the body, but they seem to have got on the track of the
wrong man--or, indeed, for anything certain, of no man at all. A
coast-guardsman says that, on the night or rather morning in
question, he was approaching a little cove on the shore, not above a
mile from the scene of the tragedy, with an eye upon what seemed to
be two fishermen preparing to launch their boat, when he saw a third
man come running down the steep slope from the pastures above, and
jump into the stern of it. Ere he could reach the spot, they were
off, and had hoisted two lugsails. The moon was in the first of her
last quarter, and gave light enough for what he reported. But, when
inquiries founded on this evidence were made, nothing whatever could
be discovered concerning boat or men. The next morning no
fishing-boat was lacking, and no fisherman would confess to having
gone from that cove. The marks of the boat's keel, and of the men's
feet, on the sand, if ever there were any, had been washed out by
the tide. It was concluded that the thing had been pre-arranged and
provided for, and that the murderer had escaped, probably to
Holland. Thereupon telegrams were shot in all directions, but no
news could be gathered of any suspicious landing on the opposite
coast. There the matter rests, or at least has rested for many
weeks. Neither parents, relatives, nor friends appear to have a
suspicion of anyone."

"Are there no conjectures as to motives?" asked Helen, feeling with
joy her power of dissimulation gather strength.

"No end of them. She was a beautiful creature, they say,
sweet-tempered as a dove, and of course fond of admiration--whence
the conjectures all turn on jealousy. The most likely thing seems,
that she had some squire of low degree, of whom neither parents nor
friends knew anything. That they themselves suspect this, appears
likely from their more than apathy with regard to the discovery of
the villain. I am strongly inclined to take the matter in hand
myself."

"We must get him out of the country as soon as possible," thought
Helen.

"I should hardly have thought it worthy of your gifts, George," she
said, "to turn police-man. For my part, I should not relish hunting
down any poor wretch."

"The sacrifice of individual choice is a claim society has upon each
of its members," returned Bascombe. "Every murderer hanged, or
better, imprisoned for life, is a gain to the community."

Helen said no more, and presently turned homewards, on the plea that
she must not be longer absent from her invalid.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.