What Will He Do with It? — Complete

CHAPTER X.

   In every life, go it fast, go it slow, there are critical pausing-
   places. When the journey is renewed the face of the country is
   changed.

How well she suited that simple room; herself so simply dressed, her marvellous beauty so exquisitely subdued! She looked at home there, as if all of home that the house could give were there collected.

She had finished and sealed the momentous letters, and had come, with a sense of relief, from the table at the farther end of the room, on which those letters, ceremonious and conventional, had been written,—come to the window, which, though mid-winter, was open, and the redbreast, with whom she had made friends, hopped boldly almost within reach, looking at her with bright eyes and head curiously aslant. By the window a single chair, and a small reading-desk, with the book lying open. The short day was not far from its close, but there was ample light still in the skies, and a serene if chilly stillness in the air without.

Though expecting the relation she had just summoned to her presence, I fear she had half forgotten him. She was standing by the window deep in revery as he entered, so deep that she started when his voice struck her ear and he stood before her. She recovered herself quickly, however, and said with even more than her ordinary kindliness of tone and manner towards the scholar, “I am so glad to see and congratulate you.”

“And I so glad to receive your congratulations,” answered the scholar in smooth, slow voice, without a stutter.

“But, George, how is this?” asked Lady Montfort. “Bring that chair, sit down here, and tell me all about it. You wrote me word you were cured,—at least sufficiently to re move your noble scruples. You did not say how. Your uncle tells me, by patient will and resolute practice.”

“Under good guidance. But I am going to confide to you a secret, if you will promise to keep it.”

“Oh, you may trust me: I have no female friends.”

The clergyman smiled, and spoke at once of the lessons he had received from the basketmaker.

“I have his permission,” he said in conclusion, “to confide the service he rendered me, the intimacy that has sprung up between us, but to you alone,—not a word to your guests. When you have once seen him, you will understand why an eccentric man, who has known better days, would shrink from the impertinent curiosity of idle customers. Contented with his humble livelihood, he asks but liberty and repose.”

“That I already comprehend,” said Lady Montfort, half sighing, half smiling. “But my curiosity shall not molest him, and when I visit the village, I will pass by his cottage.”

“Nay, my dear Lady Montfort, that would be to refuse the favour I am about to ask, which is that you would come with me to that very cottage. It would so please him.”

“Please him! why?”

“Because this poor man has a young female grandchild, and he is so anxious that you should see and be kind to her, and because, too, he seems most anxious to remain in his present residence. The cottage, of course, belongs to Lord Montfort, and is let to him by the bailiff, and if you deign to feel interest in him, his tenure is safe.”

Lady Montfort looked down, and coloured. She thought, perhaps, how false a security her protection, and how slight an influence her interest would be; but she did not say so. George went on; and so eloquently, and so touchingly did he describe both grandsire and grandchild, so skilfully did he intimate the mystery which hung over them, that Lady Montfort became much moved by his narrative; and willingly promised to accompany him across the park to the basketmaker’s cottage the first opportunity. But when one has sixty guests in one’s house, one has to wait for an opportunity to escape from them unremarked. And the opportunity, in fact, did not come for many days; not till the party broke up, save one or two dowager she-cousins who “gave no trouble,” and one or two bachelor he-cousins whom my lord retained to consummate the slaughter of pheasants, and play at billiards in the dreary intervals between sunset and dinner, dinner and bedtime.

Then one cheerful frosty noon George Morley and his fair cousin walked boldly en evidence, before the prying ghostly windows, across the broad gravel walks; gained the secluded shrubbery, the solitary deeps of park-land; skirted the wide sheet of water, and, passing through a private wicket in the paling, suddenly came upon the patch of osier-ground and humble garden, which were backed by the basketmaker’s cottage.

As they entered those lowly precincts a child’s laugh was borne to their ears,—a child’s silvery, musical, mirthful laugh; it was long since the great lady had heard a laugh like that,—a happy child’s natural laugh. She paused and listened with a strange pleasure. “Yes,” whispered George Morley, “stop—and hush! there they are.”

Waife was seated on the stump of a tree, materials for his handicraft lying beside neglected. Sophy was standing before him,—he raising his finger as if in reproof, and striving hard to frown. As the intruders listened, they overheard that he was striving to teach her the rudiments of French dialogue, and she was laughing merrily at her own blunders, and at the solemn affectation of the shocked schoolmaster. Lady Montfort noted with no unnatural surprise the purity of idiom and of accent with which this singular basketmaker was unconsciously displaying his perfect knowledge of a language which the best-educated English gentleman of that generation, nay, even of this, rarely speaks with accuracy and elegance. But her attention was diverted immediately from the teacher to the face of the sweet pupil. Women have a quick appreciation of beauty in their own sex; and women who are themselves beautiful, not the least. Irresistibly Lady Montfort felt attracted towards that innocent countenance so lively in its mirth, and yet so softly gay. Sir Isaac, who had hitherto lain perdu, watching the movements of a thrush amidst a holly-bush, now started up with a bark. Waife rose; Sophy turned half in flight. The visitors approached.

Here slowly, lingeringly, let fall the curtain. In the frank license of narrative, years will have rolled away ere the curtain rise again. Events that may influence a life often date from moments the most serene, from things that appear as trivial and unnoticeable as the great lady’s visit to the basketmaker’s cottage. Which of those lives will that visit influence hereafter,—the woman’s, the child’s, the vagrant’s? Whose? Probably little that passes now would aid conjecture, or be a visible link in the chain of destiny. A few desultory questions; a few guarded answers; a look or so, a musical syllable or two, exchanged between the lady and the child; a basket bought, or a promise to call again. Nothing worth the telling. Be it then untold. View only the scene itself as the curtain drops reluctantly. The rustic cottage, its garden-door open, and open its old-fashioned lattice casements. You can see how neat and cleanly, how eloquent of healthful poverty, how remote from squalid penury, the whitewashed walls, the homely furniture within. Creepers lately trained around the doorway; Christmas holly, with berries red against the window-panes; the bee-hive yonder; a starling, too, outside the threshold, in its wicker cage; in the background (all the rest of the neighbouring hamlet out of sight), the church spire tapering away into the clear blue wintry sky. All has an air of repose, of safety. Close beside you is the Presence of HOME; that ineffable, sheltering, loving Presence, which amidst solitude murmurs “not solitary,”—a Presence unvouchsafed to the great lady in the palace she has left. And the lady herself? She is resting on the rude gnarled root-stump from which the vagrant had risen; she has drawn Sophy towards her; she has taken the child’s hand; she is speaking now, now listening; and on her face kindness looks like happiness. Perhaps she is happy that moment. And Waife? he is turning aside his weatherbeaten mobile countenance with his hand anxiously trembling upon the young scholar’s arm. The scholar whispers, “Are you satisfied with me?” and Waife answers in a voice as low but more broken, “God reward you! Oh, joy! if my pretty one has found at last a woman friend!” Poor vagabond, he has now a calm asylum, a fixed humble livelihood; more than that, he has just achieved an object fondly cherished. His past life,—alas! what has he done with it? His actual life, broken fragment though it be, is at rest now. But still the everlasting question,—mocking terrible question, with its phrasing of farce and its enigmas of tragical sense,—“WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?” Do with what? The all that remains to him, the all he holds! the all which man himself, betwixt Free-will and Pre-decree, is permitted to do. Ask not the vagrant alone: ask each of the four there assembled on that flying bridge called the Moment. Time before thee,—what wilt thou do with it? Ask thyself! ask the wisest! Out of effort to answer that question, what dream-schools have risen, never wholly to perish,—the science of seers on the Chaldee’s Pur-Tor, or in the rock-caves of Delphi, gasped after and grasped at by horn-handed mechanics to-day in their lanes and alleys. To the heart of the populace sink down the blurred relics of what once was the law of the secretest sages, hieroglyphical tatters which the credulous vulgar attempt to interpret. “WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?” Ask Merle and his Crystal! But the curtain descends! Yet a moment, there they are,—age and childhood,—poverty, wealth, station, vagabondage; the preacher’s sacred learning and august ambition; fancies of dawning reason; hopes of intellect matured; memories of existence wrecked; household sorrows; untold regrets; elegy and epic in low, close, human sighs, to which Poetry never yet gave voice: all for the moment personified there before you,—a glimpse for the guess, no more. Lower and lower falls the curtain! All is blank!