CHAPTER XXI.
A THUNDERBOLT.
Sometimes a thunderbolt, as men call it, will shoot from a clear
sky; and sometimes into the midst of a peaceful family, or a yet
quieter individuality, without warning of gathered storm above, or
lightest tremble of earthquake beneath, will fall a terrible fact,
and from the moment everything is changed. That family or that life
is no more what it was--probably never more can be what it was.
Better it ought to be, worse it may be--which, depends upon itself.
But its spiritual weather is altered. The air is thick with cloud,
and cannot weep itself clear. There may come a gorgeous sunset
though.
It were a truism for one who believes in God to say that such
catastrophes, so rending, so frightful, never come but where they
are needed. The Power of Life is not content that they who live in
and by him should live poorly and contemptibly. If the presence of
low thoughts which he repudiates, yet makes a man miserable, how
must it be with him if they who live and move and have their being
in him are mean and repulsive, or alienated through self-sufficiency
and slowness of heart?
I cannot report much progress in Helen during the months of winter
and spring. But if one wakes at last, wakes at all, who shall dare
cast the stone at him--that he ought to have awaked sooner? What man
who is awake will dare to say that he roused himself the first
moment it became possible to him? The main and plain and worst,
perhaps only condemnation is--that when people do wake they do not
get up. At the same time, however, I can hardly doubt that Helen was
keeping the law of a progress slow as the growth of an iron-tree.
Nothing had ever yet troubled her. She had never been in love, could
hardly be said to be in love now. She went regularly to church, and
I believe said her prayers night and morning--yet felt no
indignation at the doctrines and theories propounded by George
Bascombe. She regarded them as "George's ideas," and never cared to
ask whether they were true or not, at the same time that they were
becoming to her by degrees as like truth as falsehood can ever be.
For to the untruthful mind the false CAN seem the true. Meantime she
was not even capable of giving him the credit he deserved, in that,
holding the opinions he held, he yet advocated a life spent for the
community--without, as I presume, deriving much inspiration thereto
from what he himself would represent as the ground of all
conscientious action, the consideration, namely, of its reaction
upon its originator. Still farther was it from entering the field of
her vision that possibly some of the good which distinguished
George's unbelief from that of his brother ephemera of the last
century, was owing to the deeper working of that leaven which he
denounced as the poisonous root whence sprung all the evil diseases
that gnawed at the heart of society.
One night she sat late, making her aunt a cap. The one sign of
originality in her was the character of her millinery, of which kind
of creation she was fond, displaying therein both invention as to
form, and perception as to effect, combined with lightness and
deftness of execution. She was desirous of completing it before the
next morning, which was that of her aunt's birthday. They had had
friends to dine with them who had stayed rather late, and it was now
getting towards one o'clock. But Helen was not easily tired, and was
not given to abandoning what she had undertaken; so she sat working
away, and thinking, not of George Bascombe, but of one whom she
loved better--far better--her brother Leopold. But she was thinking
of him not quite so comfortably as usual. Certain anxieties she had
ground for concerning him had grown stronger, for the time since she
heard from him had grown very long.
All at once her work ceased, her hands were arrested, her posture
grew rigid: she was listening. HAD she heard a noise outside her
window? My reader may remember that it opened on a balcony, which
was at the same time the roof of a veranda that went along the back
of the house, and had a stair at one end to the garden.
Helen was not easily frightened, and had stopped her needle only
that she might listen the better. She heard nothing. Of course it
was but a fancy! Her hands went on again with their work.--But that
was really very like a tap at the window! And now her heart did beat
a little faster, if not with fear, then with something very like it,
in which perhaps some foreboding was mingled. But she was not a
woman to lay down her arms upon the inroad of a vague terror. She
quietly rose, and, saying to herself it must be one of the pigeons
that haunted the balcony, laid her work on the table, and went to
the window. As she drew one of the curtains a little aside to peep,
the tap was plainly and hurriedly though softly repeated, and at
once she swept it back. There was the dim shadow of a man's head
upon the blind, cast there by an old withered moon low in the west!
Perhaps it was something in the shape of the shadow that made her
pull up the blind so hurriedly, and yet with something of the awe
with which we take "the face-cloth from the face." Yes, there was a
face!--frightful, not as that of a corpse, but as that of a spectre
from whose soul the scars of his mortal end have never passed away.
Helen did not scream--her throat seemed to close and her heart to
cease. But her eyes continued movelessly fixed on the face even
after she knew it was the face of her brother, and the eyes of the
face kept staring back into hers through the glass with such a look
of concentrated eagerness that they seemed no more organs of vision,
but caves of hunger, nor was there a movement of the lips towards
speech. The two gazed at each other for a moment of rigid silence.
The glass that separated them might have been the veil that divides
those who call themselves the living from those whom they call the
dead.
It was but a moment by the clock, though to the after-consciousness
it seemed space immeasurable. She came to herself, and slowly,
noiselessly, though with tremulous hand, undid the sash, and opened
the window. Nothing divided them now, yet he stood as before,
staring into her face. Presently his lips began to move, but no
words came from them.
In Helen, horror had already roused the instinct of secrecy. She put
out her two hands, took his face between them, and said in a hurried
whisper, calling him by the pet name she had given him when a child,
"Come in, Poldie, and tell me all about it."
Her voice seemed to wake him. Slowly, with the movements of one half
paralyzed, he shoved and dragged himself over the windowsill,
dropped himself on the floor inside, and lay there, looking up in
her face like a hunted animal, that hoped he had found a refuge, but
doubted. Seeing him so exhausted, she turned from him to go and get
some brandy, but a low cry of agony drew her back. His head was
raised from the floor and his hands were stretched out, while his
face entreated her, as plainly as if he had spoken, not to leave
him. She knelt and would have kissed him, but he turned his face
from her with an expression which seemed of disgust.
"Poldie," she said, "I MUST go and get you something. Don't be
afraid. They are all sound asleep."
The grasp with which he had clutched her dress relaxed, and his hand
fell by his side. She rose at once and went, creeping through the
slumberous house, light and noiseless as a shadow, but with a heart
that seemed not her own lying hard in her bosom. As she went she had
to struggle both to rouse and to compose herself, for she could not
think. An age seemed to have passed since she heard the clock strike
twelve. One thing was clear--her brother had been doing something
wrong, and dreading discovery, had fled to her. The moment this
conviction made itself plain to her, she drew herself up with the
great deep breath of a vow, as strong as it was silent and
undefined, that he should not have come to her in vain.
Silent-footed as a beast of prey, silent-handed as a thief, lithe in
her movements, her eye flashing with the new-kindled instinct of
motherhood to the orphan of her father, it was as if her soul had
been suddenly raised to a white heat, which rendered her body
elastic and responsive.
