FAR ABOVE RUBIES
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
Hector Macintosh was a young man about five-and-twenty, who, with the
proclivities of the Celt, inherited also some of the consequent
disabilities, as well as some that were accidental. Among the rest was
a strong tendency to regard only the ideal, and turn away from any
authority derived from an inferior source. His chief delight lay in the
attempt to embody, in what seemed to him the natural form of verse, the
thoughts in him constantly moving at least in the direction of the
ideal, even when he was most conscious of his inability to attain to the
utterance of them. But it was only in the retirement of his own chamber
that he attempted their embodiment; of all things, he shrank from any
communion whatever concerning these cherished matters. Nor, indeed, had
he any friends who could tempt him to share with them what seemed to him
his best; so that, in truth, he was intimate with none. His mind would
dwell much upon love and friendship in the imaginary abstract, but of
neither had he had the smallest immediate experience. He had cherished
only the ideals of the purest and highest sort of either passion, and
seemed to find satisfaction enough in the endeavor to embody such in
his verse, without even imagining himself in communication with any
visionary public. The era had not yet dawned when every scribbler is
consumed with the vain ambition of being recognized, not, indeed, as
what he is, but as what he pictures himself in his secret sessions of
thought. That disease could hardly attack him while yet his very
imaginations recoiled from the thought of the inimical presence of a
stranger consciousness. Whether this was modesty, or had its hidden base
in conceit, I am, with the few insights I have had into his mind, unable
to determine.
That he had leisure for the indulgence of his bent was the result of his
peculiar position. He lived in the house of his father, and was in his
father's employment, so that he was able both to accommodate himself to
his father's requirements and at the same time fully indulge his own
especial taste. The elder Macintosh was a banker in one of the larger
county towns of Scotland--at least, such is the profession and position
there accorded by popular consent to one who is, in fact, only a
bank-agent, for it is a post involving a good deal of influence and a
yet greater responsibility. Of this responsibility, however, he had
allowed his son to feel nothing, merely using him as a clerk, and
leaving him, as soon as the stated hour for his office-work expired,
free in mind as well as body, until the new day should make a fresh
claim upon his time and attention. His mother seldom saw him except at
meals, and, indeed, although he always behaved dutifully to her, there
was literally no intercommunion of thought or feeling between them--a
fact which probably had a good deal to do with the undeveloped condition
in which Hector found, or rather, did not find himself. Occasionally his
mother wanted him to accompany her for a call, but he avoided yielding
as much as possible, and generally with success; for this was one of the
claims of social convention against which he steadily rebelled--the more
determinedly that in none of his mother's friends could he take the
smallest interest; for she was essentially a commonplace because
ambitious woman, without a spark of aspiration, and her friends were of
the same sort, without regard for anything but what was--or, at least,
they supposed to be--the fashion. Indeed, it was hard to understand how
Hector came ever to be born of such a woman, although in truth she was
of as pure Celtic origin as her husband--only blood is not spirit, and
that is often clearly manifest. His father, on the other hand, was not
without some signs of an imagination--quite undeveloped, indeed, and,
I believe, suppressed by the requirements of his business relations.
At the same time, Hector knew that he cherished not a little indignation
against the insolence of the good Dr. Johnson in regard to both Ossian
and his humble translator, Macpherson, upholding the genuineness of
both, although unable to enter into and set forth the points of the
argument on either side. As to Hector, he reveled in the ancient
traditions of his family, and not unfrequently in his earlier youth had
made an attempt to re-embody some of its legends into English, vain as
regarded the retention of the special airiness and suggestiveness of
their vaguely showing symbolism, for often he dropped his pen with a
sigh of despair at the illusiveness of the special aroma of the Celtic
imagination. For the rest, he had had as good an education as Scotland
could in those days afford him, one of whose best features was the
negative one that it did not at all interfere with the natural course of
his inborn tendencies, and merely developed the power of expressing
himself in what manner he might think fit. Let me add that he had a good
conscience--I mean, a conscience ready to give him warning of the least
tendency to overstep any line of prohibition; and that, as yet, he had
never consciously refused to attend to such warning.
Another thing I must mention is that, although his mind was constantly
haunted by imaginary forms of loveliness, he had never yet been what is
called _in love_. For he had never yet seen anyone who even
approached his idea of spiritual at once and physical attraction. He was
content to live and wait, without even the notion that he was waiting
for anything. He went on writing his verses, and receiving the reward,
such as it was, of having placed on record the thoughts which had come
to him, so that he might at will recall them. Neither had he any thought
of the mental soil which was thus slowly gathering for the possible
growth of an unknown seed, fit for growing and developing in that same
unknown soil.
One day there arrived in that cold Northern city a certain cold,
sunshiny morning, gay and sparkling, and with it the beginning of what,
for want of a better word, we may call his fate. He knew nothing of its
approach, had not the slightest prevision that the divinity had that
moment put his hand to the shaping of his rough-hewn ends. It was early
October by the calendar, but leaves brown and spotted and dry lay
already in little heaps on the pavement--heaps made and unmade
continually, as if for the sport of the keen wind that now scattered
them with a rush, and again, extemporizing a little evanescent
whirlpool, gathered a fresh heap upon the flags, again to rush asunder,
as in direst terror of the fresh-invading wind, determined yet again to
scatter them, a broken rout of escaping fugitives. Along the pavement,
seemingly in furtherance of the careless design of the wind, a girl went
heedlessly scushling along among the unresting and unresisting leaves,
making with her rather short skirt a mimic whirlwind of her own. Her
eyes were fixed on the ground, and she seemed absorbed in anxious
thought, which thought had its origin in one of the commonest causes of
human perplexity--the need of money, and the impossibility of devising a
scheme by which to procure any. It was but a few weeks since her father
had died, leaving behind him such a scanty provision for his widow and
child that only by the utmost care and coaxing were they able from the
first to make it meet their necessities. Nor, indeed, would it have been
possible for them to subsist had not a brother of the widow supplemented
their poor resources with an uncertain contingent, whose continuance he
was not able to secure, or even dared to promise.
At the present moment, however, it was not anxiety as to their own
affairs that occupied the mind of Annie Melville, near enough as that
might have lain; it was the unhappy condition in which the imprudence of
a school-friend--almost her only friend--had involved herself by her
hasty marriage with a man who, up to the present moment, had shown no
faculty for helping himself or the wife he had involved in his fate, and
who did not know where or by what means to procure even the bread of
which they were in immediate want.
Now Annie had never had to suffer hunger, and the idea that her
companion from childhood should be exposed to such a fate was what she
could not bear. Yet, for any way out of it she could see, it would have
to be borne. She might possibly, by herself going without, have given
her a good piece of bread; but then she would certainly share it with
her foolish husband, and there would be little satisfaction in that!
They had already arrived at a stage in their downward progress when not
gold, or even silver, but bare copper, was lacking as the equivalent for
the bread that could but keep them alive until the next rousing of the
hunger that even now lay across their threshold. And how could she, in
her all but absolute poverty, do anything? Her mother was but one pace
or so from the same goal, and would, as a mother must, interfere to
prevent her useless postponement of the inevitable. It was clear she
could do nothing--and yet she could ill consent that it should be so.
When her father almost suddenly left them alone, Annie was already
acting as assistant in the Girls' High School--but, alas! without any
recognition of her services by even a promise of coming payment. She
lived only in the hope of a small salary, dependent on her definite
appointment to the office. To attempt to draw upon this hope would be to
imperil the appointment itself. She could not, even for her friend, risk
her mother's prospects, already poor enough; and she could not help
perceiving the hopelessness of her friend's case, because of the utter
characterlessness of the husband to whom she was enslaved. Why interfere
with the hunger he would do nothing to forestall? How could she even
give such a man the sixpence which had been her father's last gift to
her?
But Annie was one to whom, in the course of her life, something strange
had not unfrequently happened, chiefly in the shape of what the common
mind would set aside as mere coincidence. I do not say _many_ such
things had occurred in her life; but, together, their strangeness and
their recurrence had caused her to remember every one of them, so that,
when she reviewed them, they seemed to her many. And now, with a shadowy
prevision, as it seemed, that something was going to happen, and with a
shadowy recollection that she had known beforehand it was coming,
something strange did take place. Of such things she used, in after
days, always to employ the old, stately Bible-phrase, "It came to pass";
she never said, "It happened."
As she walked along with her eyes on the ground, the withered leaves
caught up every now and then in a wild dance by the frolicsome wind, she
was suddenly aware of something among them which she could not identify,
whirling in the aerial vortex about her feet. Scarcely caring what it
was, she yet, all but mechanically, looked at it a little closer, lost
it from sight, caught it again, as a fresh blast sent it once more
gyrating about her feet, and now regarded it more steadfastly. Even then
it looked like nothing but another withered leaf, brown and wrinkled,
given over to the wind, and rustling along at its mercy. Yet it made an
impression upon her so far unlike that of a leaf that for a moment more
she fixed on it a still keener look of unconsciously expectant eyes, and
saw only that it looked--perhaps a little larger than most of the other
leaves, but as brown and dead as they. Almost the same instant, however,
she turned and pounced upon it, and, the moment she handled it, became
aware that it felt less crumbly and brittle than the others looked, and
then saw clearly that it was not a leaf, but perhaps a rag, or possibly
a piece of soiled and rumpled paper. With a curiosity growing to
expectation, and in a moment to wondering recognition, she proceeded to
uncrumple it carefully and smooth it out tenderly; nor was the process
quite completed when she fell upon her knees on the cold flags, her
little cloak flowing wide from the clasp at her neck in a yet wilder
puff of the bitter wind; but suddenly remembering that she must not be
praying in the sight of men, started again to her feet, and, wrapping
her closed hand tight in the scanty border of her cloak, hurried, with
the pound-note she had rescued, to the friend whose need was sorer than
her own--not without an undefined anxiety in her heart whether she was
doing right. How much good the note did, or whether it merely fell into
the bottomless gulf of irremediable loss, I cannot tell. Annie's friend
and her shiftless mate at once changed their dirty piece of paper for
silver, bought food and railway tickets, left the town, and disappeared
entirely from her horizon.
But consequences were not over with Annie; and the next day she became
acquainted with the fact that proved of great significance to her,
namely, that the same evening she found the money, Mr. Macintosh's
kitchen-chimney had been on fire; and it wanted but the knowledge of how
this had taken place to change the girl's consciousness from that of one
specially aided by the ministry of an angel to that of a young woman,
honest hitherto, suddenly changed into a thief!
For, in the course of a certain friendly gossip's narrative, it came out
that that night the banker had been using the kitchen fire for the
destruction of an accumulation of bank-notes, the common currency of
Scotland, which had been judged altogether too dirty, or too much
dilapidated, to be reissued. The knowledge of this fact was the slam of
the closing door, whereby Annie found her soul shut out to wander in a
night of dismay. The woman who told the fact saw nothing of consequence
in it; Mrs. Melville, to whom she was telling it, saw nothing but
perhaps a lesson on the duty of having chimneys regularly swept, because
of the danger to neighboring thatch. But had not Annie been seated in
the shadow, her ghastly countenance would, even to the most casual
glance, have betrayed a certain guilty horror, for now she _knew_
that she had found and given away what she ought at once to have handed
back to its rightful owner. It was true he did not even know that he had
lost it, and could have no suspicion that she had found it; but what
difference did or could that make? It was true also that she had neither
taken nor bestowed it to her own advantage; but again, what difference
could that make in her duty to restore it? Did she not well remember how
eloquently and precisely Mr. Kennedy had, the very last Sunday,
expounded the passage, "Thou shalt not respect the person of the poor."
Right was right, whatever soft-hearted people might say or think. Anyone
might give what was his own, but who could be right in giving away what
was another's? It was time she had done it without thinking; but she had
known, or might have known, well enough that to whomsoever it might
belong, it was not hers. And now what possibility was there of setting
right what she had set wrong? It was just possible a day might come when
she should be able to restore what she had unjustly taken, but at the
present moment it was as impossible for her to lay her hand upon a
pound-note as upon a million. And, terrible thought!--she might have to
enter the presence of her father--dead, men called him, but alive she
knew him--with the consciousness that she had not brought him back the
honor he had left with her.
It will, of course, suggest itself to every reader that herein she was
driving her sense of obligation to the verge of foolishness; and,
indeed, the thought did not fail to occur even to herself; but the
answer of the self-accusing spirit was that had she been thoroughly
upright in heart, she would at once have gone to the nearest house and
made such inquiry as must instantly have resulted in the discovery of
what had happened. This she had omitted--without thought, it is true,
but not, therefore, without blame; and now, so far as she could tell,
she would never be able to make restitution! Had she even told her
mother what befallen her, her mother might have thought of the way in
which it had come to pass, and set her feet in the path of her duty! But
she had made evil haste, and had compassed too much.
She found herself, in truth, in a sore predicament, and was on the point
of starting to her feet to run and confess to Mr. Macintosh what she had
done, that he might at once pronounce the penalty on what she never
doubted he must regard as a case of simple theft; but she bethought
herself that she would remain incapable of offering the least
satisfaction, and must therefore be regarded merely as one who sought by
confession to secure forgiveness and remission. What proof had she to
offer even that she had given the money away? To mention the name of her
friend would be to bring her into discredit, and transfer to her the
blame of her own act. There was nothing she could do--and yet, however
was she to go about with such a load upon her conscience? Confessing,
she might at least be regarded as one who desired and meant to be
honest. Confession would, anyhow, ease the weight of her load. Passively
at last, from very weariness of thought, her mind was but going backward
and forward over its own traces, heedlessly obliterating them, when
suddenly a new and horrid consciousness emerged from the trodden slime--
that she was glad that at least Sophy _had_ the money! For one
passing moment she was glad with the joy of Lady Macbeth, that what was
done was done, and could not be altered. Then once more the storm within
her awoke and would not again be stilled.
