COLIN and his guardian went on their way in a direction opposite to that in which the Mistress travelled sadly alone. They made all the haste possible out of the cold and boisterous weather, to get to sea; which was at once, according to all their hopes, to bring health to the invalid. Lauderdale, who carried his little fortune about him, had been at great pains in dispersing it over his person; so that, in case of falling among thieves—which, to a man venturing into foreign parts for the first time, seemed but too probable—he might, at least, have a chance of saving some portion of his store. But he was not prepared for the dire and dreadful malady which seized him unawares, and made him equally incapable of taking care of his money and of taking care of Colin. He could not even make out how many days he had lain helpless and useless in what was called the second cabin of the steamer—where the arrangements and the provisions were less luxurious than in the more expensive quarters. But Lauderdale, under the circumstances, did not believe in comfort; he gave it up as a thing impossible. He fell into a state of utter scepticism as he lay in agonies of sea-sickness on the shelf which represented a bed. “Say nothing to me about getting there,” he said, with as much indignation as he was capable of. “What do you mean by there, callant? As for land, I’m far from sure that there’s such a thing in existence. If there is, we’ll never get to it. It’s an awful thing for a man in his senses to deliver himself up to this idiot of a sea, to be played with like a bairn’s ball. It’s very easy to laugh; if you had been standing on your head, like me, for twenty days in succession—”
“Only four days,” said Colin, laughing, “and the gale is over. You’ll be better to-morrow.”
“To-morrow!” said Lauderdale, with a contemptuous groan; “I’ve no faith in to-morrow. I’m no equal to reckoning time according to ordinary methods, and I’m no conscious of ever having existed in a more agreeable position. As for the chances of ever coming head uppermost again, I would not give sixpence for them. It’s all very well for the like of you. Let me alone, callant; if this infernal machine of a ship would but go down without more ado, and leave a man in peace—that’s the pleasantest thing I can think of. Don’t speak to me about Italy. It’s all a snare and delusion to get honest folk off firm ground. Let me get to the bottom in peace and quiet. Life’s no worth having at such a price,” sighed the sufferer; to whom his undutiful charge answered only by laughter and jibes, which, under the circumstances, were hard to bear.
“You are better now,” said the heartless youth, “or you could not go into the philosophy of the subject. To-morrow morning you’ll eat a good breakfast, and—”
“Dinna insult my understanding,” said Colin’s victim. “Go away, and look out for your Italy, or whatever you call it. A callant like you believes in everything. Go away and enjoy yourself. If you don’t go peaceably, I’ll put you out,” cried the miserable man, lifting himself up from his pillow, and seizing a book which Colin had laid there, to throw at his tormentor. A sudden lurch, however, made an end of the discomfited philosopher. He fell back, groaning, as Colin escaped out of the little cabin. “It’s quite intolerable, and I’ll no put up with it any longer,” said Lauderdale to himself. And he recalled, with a sense of injury, Colin’s freedom from the overpowering malady under which he was himself suffering. “It’s me that’s ill, and no him,” he thought, with surprise, and the thought prevailed even over sea-sickness. By-and-by it warmed with a delicious glow of hope and consolation the heart of the sufferer. “If it sets the callant right, I’m no heeding for myself,” he said in his own mind, with renewed heroism. Perhaps it was because, as Colin said, Lauderdale was already beginning to be better that he was capable of such generosity. Certainly the ship lurched less and less as the evening went on, and the moonlight stole in at the port-hole and caressed the sufferer, widening his horizon a little before he was aware. He had begun to wonder whether Colin had his great coat on before long, and fell asleep in that thought, and worked out his remaining spell of misery in gigantic efforts—continued all through the night—to get into Colin’s coat, or to get Colin into his coat, he was not quite sure which. Meanwhile, the object of Lauderdale’s cares was on deck, enjoying the moonlight, and the sense of improving health, and all the excitement and novelty of his new life.
They had been four days at sea, and Colin, who had not been ill, had become acquainted with the aspect of all his fellow passengers who were as good sailors as himself. They were going to Leghorn, as the easiest way of reaching Italy; and there were several invalids on board, though none whose means made necessary a passage in the second cabin, of which Colin himself and Lauderdale were the sole occupants. Of the few groups on the quarter-deck who were able to face the gale, Colin had already distinguished one, a young man, a little older than himself, exceedingly pale and worn with illness, accompanied by a girl a year or two younger. The two were so like each other as to leave no doubt that they must be brother and sister, and so unlike as to call forth the compassionate observation of everybody who looked at them. The young lady’s blooming face, delicately round and full, with the perfect outline of health and youth, had been paled at first by the struggle between incipient sea-sickness and the determination not to leave her brother; but by this time—at the cost of whatever private agonies—she had apparently surmounted the common weakness, and was throwing into fuller and fuller certainty, without knowing it, by the contrast of her own bloom, the sentence of death written on his face. When they were on deck, which was the only time that they were visible to Colin, she never left him; holding fast by his arm with an anxious tenacity, not receiving, but giving support; and watching him with incessant, breathless anxiety, as if afraid that he might suddenly drop away from her side. The brother, for his part, had those hollow eyes, set in wide pathetic niches, which are never to be mistaken by those who have once watched beloved eyes widening out into that terrible breadth and calm. He was as pale as if the warm blood of life had already been wrung out of him drop by drop; but, notwithstanding this aspect of death, he was still possessed by a kind of feverish activity, the remains of strength, and seemed less disturbed by the gale than any other passenger. He was on deck at all hours, holding conversations with such of the sailors as he could get at—talking to the captain, who seemed to eschew his society, and to such of his fellow-travellers as were visible there.
What the subject of this sick traveller’s talk might be, Colin from his point of observation could not tell; but there was no mistaking the evidences of natural eloquence and the eagerness of the speaker. “He ought to be a preacher by his looks,” Colin said to himself, as he stood within the limits to which, as a second-class passenger, he was confined, and saw at a little distance from him, the worn figure of the sick man, upon whose face the moonlight was shining. As usual, the sister was clinging to his arm and listening to him with a rapt countenance; not so much concerned about what he said, it seemed, as absorbed in anxious investigation of his looks. It was one of the sailors this time who formed the audience which the invalid addressed—a man whom he had stopped in the midst of something he was doing, and who was listening with great evident embarrassment, anxious to escape, but more anxious still, like a good-hearted fellow as he was, not to disturb or irritate the suffering man. Colin drew a step nearer, feeling that the matter under discussion could be no private one, and the sound of the little advance he made caught the invalid’s nervous ear. He turned round upon Colin before he could go back, and suddenly fixed him with those wonderful dying eyes. “I shall see you again another time, my friend,” he said to the released seaman, who hastened off with an evident sense of having escaped. When the stranger turned round he had to move back his companion, so that in the change of position she came to be exactly in front of Colin, so near that the two could not help seeing, could not help observing each other. The girl withdrew her eyes a moment from her brother to look at the new face thus presented to her. She did not look at Colin as a young woman usually looks at a young man. She was neither indifferent, nor did she attempt to seem so. She looked at him eagerly, with a question in her eyes. The question was a strange one to be addressed, even from the eyes, by one stranger to another. It said as plain as words, “Are you a man to whom I can appeal—are you a man who will understand him? Shall I be able to trust you, and ask your help?” That and nothing else was in the wistful anxious look. If Colin’s face had not been one which said “Yes” to all such questions, she would have turned away, and thought of him no more; as it was, she looked a second time with a touch of interest, a gleam of hope. The brother took no more apparent notice of her than if she had been a cloak on his arm, except that from time to time he put out his thin white hand to make sure that she was still there. He fixed his eyes on Colin with a kind of solemn steadfastness, which had a wonderful effect upon the young man, and said something hasty and brief, a most summary preface, about the beautiful night. “Are you ill?” he added, in the same hasty, breathless way, as if impatient of wasting time on such preliminaries. “Are you going abroad for your health?”
Colin, who was surprised by the question, felt almost disinclined to answer it—for in spite of himself it vexed him to think that anybody could read that necessity in his face. He said, “I think so,” with a smile which was not quite spontaneous; “my friends at least have that meaning,” he added more naturally a moment afterwards, with the intention of returning the question; but that possibility was taken rapidly out of his hands.
“Have you ever thought of death?” said the stranger. “Don’t start—I am dying, or I would not ask you. When a man is dying he has privileges. Do you know that you are standing on the brink of a precipice? Have you ever thought of death?”
“Yes, a great deal,” said Colin. It would be wrong to say that the question did not startle him; but, after the first strange shock of such an address, an impulse of response and sympathy filled his mind. It might have been difficult to get into acquaintance by means of the chit-chat of society, which requires a certain initiation; but such a grand subject was common ground. He answered as very few of the people interrogated by the sick man did answer. He did not show either alarm or horror—he started slightly, it is true, but he answered without much hesitation:
“Yes, I have thought often of death,” said Colin. Though he was only a second-class passenger, this was a question which put all on an equality; and now it was not difficult to understand why the captain eschewed his troublesome questioner, and how the people looked embarrassed to whom he spoke.
“Ah, I am glad to hear such an answer,” said the stranger; “so few people can say so. You have found out, then, the true aim of life. Let us walk about, for it is cold, and I must not shorten my working-days by any devices of my own. My friend, give me a little hope that, at last, I have found a brother in Christ.”
“I hope so,” said Colin, gravely. He was still more startled by the strain in which his new companion proceeded; but a dying man had privileges. “I hope so,” Colin repeated; “one of many here.”
“Ah, no, not of many,” said the invalid; “if you can feel certain of being a child of God, it is what but few are permitted to do. My dear friend, it is not a subject to deceive ourselves upon. It is terribly important for you and me. Are you sure that you are fleeing from the wrath to come? Are you sure that you are prepared to meet your God?”
They had turned into the full moonlight, which streamed upon their faces. The ship was rushing along through a sea still agitated by the heavings of the past storm, and there was nothing moving on deck except some scattered seamen busy in their mysterious occupations. Colin was slow to answer the new question thus addressed to him. He was still very young; delicate, and reticent about all the secrets of his soul; not wearing his heart upon his sleeve even in particulars less intimate and momentous than this. “I am not afraid of my God,” he said, after a minute’s pause; “pardon me, I am not used to speak much on such subjects. I cannot imagine that to meet God can be less than the greatest joy of which the soul is capable. He is our Father. I am not afraid.”
“Oh, my friend!” said the eager stranger; his voice sounded in Colin’s ear like the voice of a desperate man in a lifeboat, calling to somebody who was drowning in a storm,—“don’t deceive yourself; don’t take up a sentimental view of such an important matter. There is no escape except through one way. The great object of our lives is to know how to die—and to die is despair, without Christ.”
“What is it to live without Him?” said Colin. “I think the great object of our lives is to live. Sometimes it is very hard work. And, when one sees what is going on in the world, one does not know how it is possible to keep living without Him,” said the young man, whose mind had taken a profound impression from the events of the last three months. “I don’t see any meaning in the world otherwise. So far we are agreed. Death, which interests you so much, will clear up all the rest.”
“Which interests me?” said his new friend; “if we were indeed rational creatures, would it not interest every one? Beyond every other subject, beyond every kind of ambition and occupation—think what it is to go out of this life, with which we are familiar, to stand alone before God, to answer for the deeds done in the body——”
“Then, if you are so afraid of God,” said Colin, “what account do you make of Christ?”
A gleam of strange light went over the gaunt eager face. He put out his hand with his habitual movement, and laid it upon his sister’s hand, which was clinging to his arm. “Alice, hush!” said the sick man; “don’t interrupt me. He speaks as if he knew what I mean; he speaks as if he too had something to do with it. I may be able to do him good or he me. I have not the pleasure of knowing your name,” he said, suddenly turning again to Colin with the strangest difference of manner. “Mine is Meredith. My sister and I will be glad if you will come to our cabin. I should like to have a little conversation with you. Will you come?”
Colin would have said No; but the word was stayed on his lips by a sudden look from the girl who had been drawn on along with them, without any apparent will of her own. It was only in her eyes that any indication of individual meaning on her part was visible. She did not speak, nor appear to think it necessary that she should second her brother’s invitation; but she gave Colin a hasty look, conveying such an appeal as went to his heart. He did not understand it; if he had been asked to save a man’s life the petition could not have been addressed to him more imploringly. His own wish gave way instantly before the eager supplication of those eyes: not that he was charmed or attracted by her, for she was too much absorbed, and her existence too much wrapt up in that of her brother, to exercise any personal influence. A woman so preoccupied had given up her privileges of woman. Accordingly, there was no embarrassment in the direct appeal she made. The vainest man in existence could not have imagined that she cared for his visit on her own account. Yet it was at her instance that Colin changed his original intention, and followed them down below to the cabin. His mind was sufficiently free to leave him at liberty to be interested in others, and his curiosity was already roused.
The pair did not look less interesting when Colin sat with them at the table below, in the little cabin, which did not seem big enough to hold anything else except the lamp. There, however, the sister exerted herself to make tea, for which she had all the materials. She boiled her little kettle over a spirit-lamp in a corner apart, and set everything before them with a silent rapidity very wonderful to Colin, who perceived at the same time that the sick man was impatient even of those soft and noiseless movements. He called to her to sit down two or three times before she was ready, and visibly fumed over the slight commotion, gentle as it was. He had seated himself in a corner of the hard little sofa which occupied one side of the cabin, and where there already lay a pile of cushions for his comfort. His thoughts were fixed on eternity, as he said and believed; but his body was profoundly sensitive to all the little annoyances of time. The light tread of his sister’s foot on the floor seemed to send a cruel vibration through him, and he glanced round at her with a momentary glance of anger, which called forth an answering sentiment in the mind of Colin, who was looking on.
“Forgive me, Arthur,” said the girl, “I am so clumsy; I can’t help it”—an apology which Arthur answered with a melancholy frown.
“It is not you who are clumsy; it is the evil one who tempts me perpetually, even by your means,” he said. “Tell me what your experience is,” he continued, turning to Colin with more eagerness than ever; “I find some people who are embarrassed when I speak to them about the state of their souls; some who assent to everything I say, by way of getting done with it; some who are shocked and frightened, as if speaking of death would make them die the sooner. You alone have spoken to me like a man who knows something about the matter. Tell me how you have grown familiar with the subject—tell me what your experiences are.”
Perhaps no request that could possibly have been made to Colin would have embarrassed him so much. He was interested and touched by the strange pair in whose company he found himself, and could not but regard with a pity, which had some fellow-feeling in it, the conscious state of life-in-death in which his questioner stood, who was not, at the same time, much older than himself, and still in what ought to be the flower of his youth. Though his own thoughts were of a very different complexion, Colin could not but be impressed by the aspect of the other youth, who was occupying the solemn position from which he himself seemed to have escaped.
“Neither of us can have much experience one way or another,” he said, feeling somehow his own limitations in the person of his new companion; “I have been near dying; that is all.”
“Have been!” said Meredith. “Are you not—are not we all, near dying now? A gale more or less, a spark of fire, a wrong turn of the helm, and we are all in eternity! How can any reasonable creature be indifferent for a moment to such a terrible thought?”
“It would be terrible, indeed, if God had nothing to do with it,” said Colin; “and, no doubt, death is terrible when one looks at it far off. I don’t think, however, that his face carries such terror when he is near. The only thing is the entire ignorance we are in. What it is—where it carries us—what is the extent of the separation it makes; all these questions are so hard to answer.” Colin’s eyes went away as he spoke; and his new friend, like Matty Frankland, was puzzled and irritated by the look which he could not follow. He broke in hastily with a degree of passion totally unlike Colin’s calm.
“You think of it as a speculative question,” he said; “I think of it as a dreadful reality. You seem at leisure to consider when and how; but have you ever considered the dreadful alternative? Have you never imagined yourself one of the lost—in outer darkness—shut out and separated from all good—condemned to sink lower and lower? Have you ever contemplated the possibility—?”
“No,” said Colin, rising; “I have never contemplated that possibility, and I have no wish to do so now. Let us postpone the discussion. Nothing anybody can say,” the young man continued, holding out his hand to meet the feverish, thin fingers which were stretched towards him, “can make me afraid of God.”
“Not if you had to meet Him this night in judgment?” said the solemn voice of the young prophet, who would not lose a last opportunity. The words and the look sent a strange chill through Colin’s veins. His hand was held tight in the feverish hand of the sick man—the dark hollow eyes were looking him through and through. Death himself, could he have taken shape and form, could scarcely have confronted life in a more solemn guise. “Not if you had to meet Him in judgment this night?”
“You put the case very strongly,” said Colin, who grew a little pale in spite of himself. “But I answer, No—no. The Gospel has come for very little purpose if it leaves any of His children in fear of the Heavenly Father. No more to-night. You look tired, as you may well be, with all your exertions, and after this rough weather—”
“The rough weather is nothing to me,” said Meredith; “I must work while it is day—the night cometh in which no man can work.”
“The night has come,” said Colin, doing the best he could to smile; “the human night, in which men do not attempt to work. Don’t you think you should obey the natural ordinances as well as the spiritual? To-morrow we will meet, better qualified to discuss the question.”
“To-morrow we may meet in eternity,” said the dying man.
“Amen; the question will be clear then, and we shall have no need to discuss it,” said Colin. This time he managed better to smile. “But, wherever we meet to-morrow, good-bye for to-night—good-bye. You know what the word means,” he said. He smiled to himself even at the thoughts suggested to him by his own words. He too was pale, and had no great appearance of strength. If he himself felt the current of life flowing back into his veins, the world and even his friends were scarcely of his opinion. He looked but a little way farther off from the solemn verge than his new acquaintance did, as he stood at the door of the little cabin, his face lit up with the vague, sweet, brightening of a smile, which was not called forth by anything external, but came out of the musings and memories of his own heart. Such a smile could not be counterfeit. When he had turned towards the narrow stair which led to the deck, he felt a touch upon his arm, like the touch of a bird, it was so light and momentary. “Come again,” said a voice in his ear, “come again.” He knew it was the sister who spoke; but the voice did not sound in Colin’s ears as the voice of a woman to a man. It was impersonal, disembodied, independent of all common restrictions. She had merged her identity altogether in that of her brother. All the light, all the warmth, all the human influence she had, she was pouring into him, like a lantern, bright only for the bearer, turning a dark side to the world.
Colin’s head throbbed and felt giddy when he emerged into the open air above, into the cold moonlight, to which the heaving of the sea gave a look of disturbance and agitation which almost reached the length of pain. There was nothing akin in that passionless light to the tumult of the great chafing ocean, the element most like humanity. True, it was not real storm, but only the long pantings of the vast bosom, after one of those anger-fits to which the giant is prone; but a fanciful spectator could not but link all kinds of imaginations to the night, and Colin was pre-eminently a fanciful spectator. It looked like the man storming, the woman watching with looks of powerless anguish; or like the world heaving and struggling, and some angel of heaven grieving and looking on. Colin lingered on the deck, though it was cold, and rest was needful. What could there be in the future existence more dark, more hopeless than the terrible enigmas which built up their dead walls around a man in this world, and passed interpretation. Even the darkest hell of poetic invention comprehended itself and knew why it was; but this life, who comprehended, who could explain?
The thought was very different from those with which Arthur Meredith resigned himself reluctantly to rest. He could not consent to sleep till he had written a page or two of the book which he meant to leave as a legacy to the world, and which was to be called “A Voice from the Grave.” This poor young fellow had forgotten that God Himself was likely to take some pains about the world which had cost so much. After the “unspeakable gift” once for all, it appeared to young Meredith that the rest of the work was left on his shoulders, and on the shoulders of such as he; and, accordingly he wore his dying strength out, addressing everybody in season and out of season, and working at “A Voice from the Grave.” A strange voice it was—saying little that was consolatory; yet, in its way, true, as everything is true in a certain limited sense which comes from the heart. The name of the Redeemer was named a great many times therein, but the spirit of it was as if no Redeemer had ever come. A world, dark, confused, and full of judgments and punishments—a world in which men would not believe though one rose from the grave—was the world into which he looked, and for which he was working. His sister Alice, watching by his side, noting with keen anxiety every time the pen slipped from his fingers, every time it went vaguely over the paper in starts which told he had gone half to sleep over his work, sat with her intelligence unawakened, and her whole being slumbering, thinking of nothing but him. After all, Colin was not so fanciful when in his heart it occurred to him to connect these two with the appearance of the moon and the sea. They had opened the book of their life to him fortuitously, without any explanations, and he did not know what to make of it. When he descended to his own cabin and found Lauderdale fast asleep, the young man could not but give a little time to the consideration of this new scene which had opened in his life. It was natural to Colin’s age and temperament to expect that something would come of such a strange, accidental meeting; and so he lay and pondered it, looking out at the troubled moonlight on the water, till that disturbed guardian of the night had left her big troublesome charge to himself. The ship ploughed along its lonely road with tolerable composure and quietness, for the first time since it set out, and permitted to some of its weary passengers unwonted comfort and repose; but, as for Colin, a sense of having set out upon a new voyage came into his mind, he could not tell why.