THERE & BACK
BY
GEORGE MACDONALD
_NOTE.
Some of the readers of this tale will be glad to know that
the passage with which it ends is a real dream; and that,
with but three or four changes almost too slight to require
acknowledging, I have given it word for word as the friend
to whom it came set it down for me._
CHAPTER I.
_FATHER, CHILD, AND NURSE._
It would be but stirring a muddy pool to inquire--not what motives
induced, but what forces compelled sir Wilton Lestrange to marry a woman
nobody knew. It is enough to say that these forces were mainly ignoble,
as manifested by their intermittent character and final cessation. The
_mésalliance_ occasioned not a little surprise, and quite as much
annoyance, among the county families,--failing, however, to remind any
that certain of their own grandmothers had been no better known to the
small world than lady Lestrange. It caused yet more surprise, though less
annoyance, in the clubs to which sir Wilton had hitherto been indebted
for help to forget his duties: they set him down as a greater idiot than
his friends had hitherto imagined him. For had he not been dragged to the
altar by a woman whose manners and breeding were hardly on the level of a
villa in St. John's Wood? Did any one know whence she sprang, or even the
name which sir Wilton had displaced with his own? But sir Wilton himself
was not proud of his lady; and if the thing had been any business of
theirs, it would have made no difference to him; he would none the less
have let them pine in their ignorance. Did not his mother, a lady less
dignified than eccentric, out of pure curiosity beg enlightenment
concerning her origin, and receive for answer from the high-minded
baronet, "Madam, the woman is my wife!"--after which the prudent dowager
asked no more questions, but treated her daughter-in-law with neither
better nor worse than civility. Sir Wilton, in fact, soon came to owe his
wife a grudge that he had married her, and none the less that at the time
he felt himself of a generosity more than human in bestowing upon her his
name. Creation itself, had he ever thought of it, would have seemed to
him a small thing beside such a gift!
That Robina Armour, after experience of his first advances, should have
at last consented to marry sir Wilton Lestrange, was in no sense in her
favour, although after a fashion she was in love with him--in love, that
is, with the gentleman of her own imagining whom she saw in the baronet;
while the baronet, on his part, was what he called in love with what he
called _the woman_. As he was overcome by her beauty, so was she by his
rank--an idol at whose clay feet is cast many a spiritual birthright--and
as mean a deity as any of man's device. But the blacksmith's daughter was
in many respects, notwithstanding, a woman of good sense, with much real
refinement, and a genuine regard for rectitude. Although sir Wilton had
never loved her with what was best in him, it was not in spite of what
was best in him that he fell in love with her. Had his better nature been
awake, it would have justified the bond, and been strengthened by it.
Lady Lestrange's father was a good blacksmith, occasionally drunk in his
youth, but persistently sober now in his middle age; a long-headed
fellow, with reach and quality in the prudence which had long ceased to
appear to him the highest of virtues. At one period he had accounted it
the prime duty of existence to take care of oneself; and so much of this
belief had he communicated to his younger daughter, that she deported
herself so that sir Wilton married her--with the result that, when Death
knocked at her door, she welcomed him to her heart. The first cry of her
child, it is true, made her recall the welcome, but she had to go with
him, notwithstanding, when the child was but an hour old.
Not one of her husband's family was in the house when she died. Sir
Wilton himself was in town, and had been for the last six months,
preferring London and his club to Mortgrange and his wife. When a
telegram informed him that she was in danger, he did go home, but when he
arrived, she had been an hour gone, and he congratulated himself that he
had taken the second train.
There had been betwixt them no approach to union. When what sir Wilton
called love had evaporated, he returned to his mire, with a resentful
feeling that the handsome woman--his superior in everything that belongs
to humanity--had bewitched him to his undoing. The truth was, she had
ceased to charm him. The fault was not in her; it lay in the dulled eye
of the swiftly deteriorating man, which grew less and less capable of
seeing things as they were, and transmitted falser and falser impressions
of them. The light that was in him was darkness. The woman that might
have made a man of him, had there been the stuff, passed from him an
unprized gift, a thing to which he made Hades welcome.
It was decent, however, not to parade his relief. He retired to the
library, lit a cigar, and sat down to wish the unpleasant fuss of the
funeral over, and the house rid of a disagreeable presence. Had the woman
died of a disease to which he might himself one day have to succumb, her
death might, as he sat there, have chanced to raise for an instant the
watery ghost of an emotion; but, coming as it did, he had no sympathetic
interest in her death any more than in herself. Lolling in the easiest of
chairs, he revolved the turns of last night's play, until it occurred to
him that he might soon by a second marriage take amends of his neighbours
for their disapprobation of his first. So pleasant was the thought that,
brooding upon it, he fell asleep.
He woke, looked, rubbed his eyes, stared, rubbed them again, and stared.
A woman stood in front of him--one he had surely seen!--no, he had never
seen her anywhere! What an odd, inquiring, searching expression in her
two hideous black eyes! And what was that in her arms--something wrapt in
a blanket?
The message in the telegram recurred to him: there must have been a
child! The bundle must be the child! Confound the creature! What did it
want?
"Go away," he said; "this is not the nursery!"
"I thought you might like to look at the baby, sir!" the woman replied.
Sir Wilton stared at the blanket.
"It might comfort you, I thought!" she went on, with a look he felt to be
strange. Her eyes were hard and dry, red with recent tears, and glowing
with suppressed fire.
Sir Wilton was courteous to most women, especially such as had no claim
upon him, but cherished respect for none. It was odd therefore that he
should now feel embarrassed. From some cause the machinery of his
self-content had possibly got out of gear; anyhow no answer came ready.
He had not the smallest wish to see the child, but was yet, perhaps,
unwilling to appear brutal. In the meantime, the woman, with gentle,
moth-like touch, was parting and turning back the folds of the blanket,
until from behind it dawned a tiny human face, whose angel was suppliant,
it may be, for the baptism of a father's first gaze.
The woman held out the child to sir Wilton, as if expecting him to take
it. He started to his feet, driving the chair a yard behind him, stuck
his hands in his pockets, and, with a face of disgust, cried--
"Great God! take the creature away."
But he could not lift his eyes from the face nested in the blanket. It
seemed to fascinate him. The woman's eyes flared, but she did not speak.
"Uglier than sin!" he half hissed, half growled. "--I suppose the animal
is mine, but you needn't bring it so close to me! Take it away--and keep
it away. I will send for it when I want it--which won't be in a hurry! My
God! How hideous a thing may be, and yet human!"
"He is as God made him!" remarked the nurse, quietly for very wrath.
"Or the devil!" suggested his father.
Then the woman looked like a tigress. She opened her mouth, but closed it
again with a snap.
"I may say what I like of my own!" said the father. "Tell me the goblin
is none of mine, and I will be as respectful to him as you please. Prove
it, and I will give you fifty pounds. He's hideous! He's damnably ugly!
Deny it if you can."
The woman held her peace. She could not, even to herself, call him a
child pleasant to look at. She gazed on him for a moment with pitiful,
protective eyes, then covered his face as if he were dead, but she did
not move.
"Why don't you go?" said the baronet.
Instead of replying, she began, as by a suddenly confirmed resolve, to
remove the coverings at the other end of the bundle, and presently
disclosed the baby's feet. The baronet gazed wondering. To what might
not assurance be about to subject him? She took one of the little feet
in a hard but gentle hand, and spreading out "the pink, five-beaded
baby-toes," displayed what even the inexperience of the baronet could not
but recognize as remarkable: between every pair of toes was stretched a
thin delicate membrane. She laid the foot down, took up the other, and
showed the same peculiarity. The child was web-footed, as distinctly as
any properly constituted duckling! Then she lifted, one after the other,
the tiny hands, beautiful to any eye that understood, and showed between
the middle and third finger of each, the same sort of membrane rising
half-way to the points of them.
"I see!" said the baronet, with a laugh that was not nice, having in it
no merriment, "the creature is a monster!--Well, if you think I am to
blame, I can only protest you are mistaken. _I_ am not web-footed! The
duckness must come from the other side."
"I hope you will remember, sir Wilton!"
"Remember? What do you mean? Take the monster away."
The woman rearranged the coverings of the little crooked legs.
"Won't you look at your lady before they put her in her coffin?" she said
when she had done.
"What good would that do her? She's past caring!--No, I won't: why should
I? Such sights are not pleasant."
"The coffin's a lonely chamber, sir Wilton; lonely to lie all day and all
night in!"
"No lonelier for one than for another!" he replied, with an involuntary
recoil from his own words. For the one thing a man must believe--yet
hardly believes--is, that he shall one day die. "She'll be better without
me, anyhow!"
"You are heartless, sir Wilton!"
"Mind your own business. If I choose to be heartless, I may have my
reasons. Take the child away."
Still she did not move. The baby, young as he was, had thrown the blanket
from his face, and the father's eyes were fixed on it: while he gazed the
nurse would not stir. He seemed fascinated by its ugliness. Without
absolute deformity, the child was indeed as unsightly as infant well
could be.
"My God!" he said again--for he had a trick of crying out as if he had a
God--"the little brute hates me! Take it away, woman. Take it away before
I strangle it! I can't answer for myself if it keeps on looking at me!"
With a glance whose mingled anger and scorn the father did not see, the
nurse turned and went.
He kept staring after her till the door shut, then fell back into his
chair, exclaiming once more, "My God!"--What or whom he meant by the
word, it were hard to say.
"Is it possible," he said to himself, "that the fine woman I married--for
she _was_ a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!--should have died to present
the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human! It's an affront
to the family! Ah! the strain _will_ show! They say your sins will find
you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I was! But she
bewitched me! I _was_ bewitched!--Curse the little monster! I shan't
breathe again till I'm out of the house! Where was the doctor? He ought
to have seen to it! Hang it all, I'll go abroad!"
Ugly as the child was, however, to many an eye the first thing evident in
him would have been his strong likeness to his father--whose features
were perfect, though at the moment, and at many a moment, their
expression was other than attractive. Sir Wilton disliked children, and
the dislike was mutual. Never did child run to him; never was child
unwilling to leave him. Escaping from his grasp, he would turn and look
back, like Christian emerging from the Valley of the Shadow, as if to
weigh the peril he had been in.
As tenderly as if he had been the loveliest of God's children, the woman
bore her charge up staircases, and through corridors and passages, to the
remote nursery, where, in a cradle whose gay furniture contrasted sadly
with the countenance of the child and the fierceness of her own eyes, she
gently laid him down. But long after he was asleep, she continued to bend
over him, as if with difficulty restraining herself from clasping him
again to her bosom.
Jane Tuke had been married four or five years, but had no children, and
the lack seemed to have intensified her maternity. Elder sister to lady
Lestrange, she had gone gladly to receive her child in her arms, and had
watched and waited for it with an expectation far stronger than that of
the mother; for so thorough was lady Lestrange's disappointment in her
husband, that she regarded the advent of his child almost with
indifference. Jane had an absolute passion for children. She had married
a quarter for faith, a quarter for love, and a whole half for hope. This
divinely inexplicable child-passion is as unintelligible to those devoid
of it, as its absence is marvellous to those possessed by it. Its
presence is its justification, its being its sole explanation, itself
its highest reason. Surely on those who cherish it, the shadow of the
love-creative God must rest more than on some other women! Unpleasing as
was the infant, to know him her own would have made the world a paradise
to Jane. Her heart burned with divine indignation at the wrongs already
heaped upon him. Hardly born, he was persecuted! Ugly! he was _not_ ugly!
Was he not come straight from the fountain of life, from the Father of
children? That such a father as she had left in the library should
repudiate him was well! She loved to think of his rejection. She brooded
with delight, in the midst of her wrath, on every word of disgust that
had fallen from his unfatherly lips. The more her baby was rejected, the
more he was hers! He belonged to her, and her only, for she only loved
him! She could say with _France_ in _King Lear_, "Be it lawful I take up
what's cast away!" To her the despised one was the essence of all riches.
The joy of a miser is less than the joy of a mother, as gold is less than
a live soul, as greed is less than love. No vision of jewels ever gave
such a longing as this woman longed with after the child of her dead
sister.
The body that bore was laid in the earth, the thing born was left upon
it. The mother had but come, exposed her infant on the rough shore of
time, and forsaken him in his nakedness. There he lay, not knowing whence
he came, or whither he was going, urged to live by a hunger and thirst he
had not invented, and did not understand. His mother had helplessly
forsaken him, but the God in another woman had taken him up: there was a
soul to love him, two arms to carry him, and a strong heart to shelter
him.
Sir Wilton returned to London, and there enjoyed himself--not much, but a
little the more that no woman sat at Mortgrange with a right to complain
that he took his pleasure without her. He lived the life of the human
animals frequenting the society of their kind from a gregarious instinct,
and for common yet opposing self-ends. He had begun to assume the
staidness, if not dullness, of the animal whose first youth has departed,
but he was only less frolicsome, not more human. He was settling down to
what he had made himself; no virtue could claim a share in the diminished
rampancy of his vices. What a society is that which will regard as
reformed the man whom assuaging fires have left an exhausted slag--a
thing for which as yet no use is known, who suggests no promise of change
or growth, gives no poorest hint of hope concerning his fate!
With the first unrecognized sense of approaching age, a certain habit of
his race began to affect him, and the idea of a quieter life, with a
woman whose possession would make him envied, grew mildly attractive. A
brilliant marriage in another county would, besides, avenge him on the
narrow-minded of his own, who had despised his first choice! With
judicial family-eye he surveyed the eligible women of his acquaintance.
It was, no doubt, to his disadvantage that already an heir lay "mewling
and puking in the nurse's arms;" for a woman who might willingly be
mother to the inheritor of such a property as his, might not find
attractive the notion of her first being her husband's second son. But
slips between cups and lips were not always on the wrong side! Such a
moon-calf as Robina's son could not with justice represent the handsomest
man and one of the handsomest women of their time. The heir that fate had
palmed upon him might very well be doomed to go the way so many infants
went!
He spread the report that the boy was sickly. A notion that he was not
likely to live prevailed about Mortgrange, which, however originated, was
nourished doubtless by the fact that he was so seldom seen. In reality,
however, there was not a healthier child in all England than Richard
Lestrange.
Sir Wilton's relations took as little interest in the heir as himself,
and there was no inducement for any of them to visit Mortgrange; the
aunt-mother, therefore, had her own way with him. She was not liked in
the house. The servants said she cared only for the little toad of a
baronet, and would do nothing for her comfort. They had, however, just a
shadow of respect for her: if she encouraged no familiarity, she did not
meddle, and was independent of their aid. Even the milking of the cow
which had been, through her persistence, set apart for the child, she did
herself. She sought no influence in the house, and was nothing loved and
little heeded.
Sir Wilton had not again seen his heir, who was now almost a year old,
when the rumour reached Mortgrange that the baronet was about to be
married.
Naturally, the news was disquieting to Jane. The hope, however, was left
her, that the stepmother might care as little for the child as did the
father, and that so, for some years at least, he might be left to her. It
was a terrible thought to the loving woman that they might be parted; a
more terrible thought that her baby might become a man like his father.
Of all horrors to a decent woman, a bad man must be the worst! If by her
death she could have left the child her hatred of evil, Jane would have
willingly died: she loved her husband, but her sister's boy was in
danger!
