CHAPTER IX.
“THE ETYMOLOGY OF GRACE.”
“It is rather a confused note,” said Mr. Clare, “and I fear I can’t show it to any one, as it was intended for my eye alone; but I gather from it that Fritz expects to be married in New York, and to return in a day or two.”
“The letter she left on her bureau,” said the pastor, whose eyes were red with weeping, “said much the same, except that she spoke not of so soon returning. I doubted it not to be Fritz with whom she had fled, though she spoke of riches and jewels, and of taking care of her old father. But ach! that a child of mine should so act!”
“Well, young folks will be young folks,” observed the Emperor, who sat looking intensely amused, on the side of the table; “and I suppose they just got tired of waiting.”
“It was that there pass to New York that was burning a hole in Fritz’s pocketbook,” said Miss Sally sagely, “that’s what it was. Well, it’s a foolish business altogether, and I thought better of both of them, but I guess we’ll have to make the best of it.”
“Laugh it off,” advised Father McClosky. “Av coorse, ’twas foolish, as ye say, Miss Sally; but maybe after all ’twas motives of economy injeuced ‘em. Sure, New York’s a mighty aisy place to get married in, annyway; no fuss about a license or that. The wurrust of it is, a felly never knows whin he ain’t married. I never was there but wance, and thin I shook in me shoes till I was safe out again; but whin a man wants to be married”—he paused expressively.
The plan thus outlined being adopted, it came to pass that when Mr. and Mrs. Fritz Rolf returned to Micklegard, as they did in the course of a week, they were greeted with a roar of good-natured ridicule, but found their escapade considered otherwise a matter of slight importance.
But every one wondered at the change that had come over the erstwhile calm and self-reliant Gretchen. She was prettier than ever, with that new softness in her eyes, that shrinking timidity in her manner; and it was beautiful to see how she clung to her young husband, watching every look and gesture as though her life hung upon the issue, while his manner to her was tenderly authoritative; and he seemed altogether older and more sedate,—sobered, as every one said, by his new responsibilities.
Both retained their former positions at “Prices,” though, “for the sake of the example,” as they were sternly assured, they ought, in strict justice, to have been discharged. It was an evening or two after their return that the young bridegroom sought opportunity for a confidential talk with Mr. Clare.
“You’ve stood by me, sir,” he said, “like a man and a brother; and I want to tell you all about it.”
“Whatever you like, Fritz. You know I’m not inquisitive.”
“That you ain’t, Mr. Clare; but you know so much already, I’m afraid you might blame her more than she deserves. Did you suspicion anything that day on the hill?”
“Why, I saw you were troubled; and I knew that your wife—as she is now—had—well, since you ask—had given occasion for complaints of non-attention to business, and had been seen in company you would have disapproved.”
“Is that so? I didn’t know it. Who saw her?”
“Louis Metzerott; but he thinks they met only once, by accident.”
Fritz swore a huge oath under his breath, then begged Mr. Clare’s pardon. “And after all,” he said, “it was a pretty neat job; for I suppose no one else suspects anything.”
“Why, your friend, the porter, upon hearing of your marriage, carried his perplexities to Father McClosky,” said Mr. Clare, laughing, “as to how a young man should have overslept himself on the morning of his projected elopement. I don’t know how he was convinced it was all right and perfectly natural, for there aren’t many matrimonial precedents in the Acta Sanctorum or Alban Butler. But Father McClosky is equal to most things.”
“Then, I suppose he mentioned that she and Frank Randolph left together? It would be better for you to tell the Father, then, Mr. Clare, that when she got to that d—— confounded city, and found he did not mean to marry her, she just slapped his face and left him,” said Fritz proudly. “In a fair, stand-up fight, Gretchen could lick that puppy any day. She’s got twice his muscle; but she had a pretty bad fright, poor girl, wandering about the streets of New York; and so had I for her. I traced ‘em at the depot, by the pastor’s old carpet-bag; but, when I got to the hotel, where they had a suite of rooms, and found both of ‘em gone, I was just ready to give up. However, I started off again, wild enough, you bet; and, just at the corner, who should run into my arms but Gretchen herself! So, as Frank Randolph had registered under a false name at that hotel, and paid a week in advance, we went back there, till I got her a little cheered up; then, we found a clergyman, got married, and stayed the week out at the hotel”—
“You did?” with much surprise.
“You bet your sweet life we did! Why not? Randolph had had enough of it; he wasn’t going to show his face there again in a hurry, and, if he had, I was ready for him. Yes, sir; we lived like princes, and it didn’t cost us a red cent!”
Mr. Clare repressed a smile. “It was a great danger, and a wonderful escape,” he said gravely. “Hundreds of poor girls are less fortunate, Fritz, than your Gretchen.”
“That’s what I tell her,” said the young man coolly. “Oh! I think she’s all right now; she’s found her master, and knows it. And I’ll never forget the way you’ve stood by me in this, Mr. Clare; you and Jesus Christ,” he added, not irreverently. “I’m solid on the religious question from now on, and don’t you forget it.”
Mr. Clare knew his business too well to ‘thuse over his new convert. “I am glad to hear it, my boy,” he said, with a manner that did not belie his words, yet quietly. “You will find the dear Lord a true friend always; but not, perhaps, always as visibly as in the present instance. Sometimes He requires us to say with Job, ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’ When you have children of your own, Fritz, you will understand fatherly correction.”
“I see,” said Fritz, smiling, and coloring at the allusion. “Well, I won’t go back on Him, whatever happens; and that’s all there is about it.”
As he went his way to the parsonage, where he and his bride were lodged for the present, there was a quiet smile upon the young bridegroom’s lips. “She’s found her master,” he said within himself; “but that ain’t the best of it. She’s found her heart, too, Gretchen has. She never loved that puppy; she hadn’t a heart then to love him or anybody but herself; but she loves me. She has her faults yet, I know; though any girl will tell lies about a sweetheart and keeping company; but I love her, and she loves me, and what more a fellow ought to want I don’t know.”
And indeed he had the air of being perfectly contented.
Meanwhile Frank Randolph was too well aware of the sorry figure he had cut in the matter, to be otherwise than silent.
And Henry Randolph came home, having deposited his young charges at their convent, and also kept an eye on Dare, with evident success, as the latter returned with him to America; and both were in such jubilant spirits that it seemed as though all things had gone with them exceeding well.
Louis Metzerott felt, quite illogically, that the return of her father had broken the last bond that connected him with Pinkie. He was too young for all the hope and courage to die forever out of his life, but also too young to believe in their resurrection; and, just for the present, life was very bitter to him; and only his inherited share of his father’s dogged resolution brought him safely through the summer and winter to a somewhat eventful spring, whereunto we are hurrying as fast as our pen will take us, with due attention to necessary business matters.
Upon one of these, the disposal of the sum which Mr. Randolph had transferred to her credit, Alice obtained her husband’s permission to consult Mr. Clare.
“So long as your husband’s counsel is not enough for you,” said the doctor, with some bitterness. “But all women are influenced by a straight-cut black coat, even though they may know it covers a fool.”
“Mr. Clare is not a fool, Fred.”
“He’s an enigma, to be as clear-headed as he is, and yet no hypocrite. Go on, ask him whatever you like; I sha’n’t, mind having his views on the subject, that is, if you care to tell me, for they are sure to be original at all events, and you need not bind yourself to carry them out.”
“I shall consult him in your presence and nowhere else,” said Alice, more wounded than she cared to show.
Mr. Clare listened to her statement of the facts in the case, with a calm exterior but some inward perplexity.
“I suppose something must be done with the money,” he said, after a little consideration; “but your husband is probably better able to advise you what, than I am.”
Dr. Richards smiled grimly. “It might be given back to Randolph, or transferred to Pinkie,” he said grimly; “or even Frank would not turn up his nose at it.”
“The last I should by no means advise,” said the clergyman quickly; “indeed, I am not sure that I can advise at all,” he added.
“Well, it is usually a thankless task, I admit,” said the doctor; “but when you find us at a total deadlock in a question of conscience, eh?”
“I can not see the harm there would be in taking this money and making a proper use of it,” said Alice emphatically.
Mr. Clare smiled. “I begin to understand,” he said. “Two people are never at a total deadlock, Dr. Richards, upon any question that requires immediate action, and which both of them thoroughly understand. Truth being what it is, the thing is impossible.”
“I book for a future discussion, ‘What is Truth?’ meanwhile, the previous question is of more immediate interest.”
“Now, it seems to me,” returned the clergyman, “that the cause of the present deadlock is that both parties miss altogether the full import of that previous question. Can you make a proper use, Mrs. Richards, of anything not lawfully yours? Wait a minute, doctor,” with a glance of mirthful menace, as that personage drew a long breath of satisfaction, “I want to ask you whether you can rightfully make over to another who has no better claim to it than yourself, money which he will certainly make a bad use of, begging your forgiveness, Mrs. Richards, but I know whereof I speak.”
“I dare say,” she replied sadly.
“Again we wander,” said the doctor. “The question is not of Frank’s peccadilloes, but of his father’s money.”
“Is it his father’s?”
“Morally? no, by all the gods!”
“And not legally, for it stands in your wife’s name.”
“To whom, then, does it morally belong?” asked Alice.
“Ask your husband!” said Mr. Clare.
“Why, I suppose Mr. Bellamy would say to the nation,” returned the doctor, “but I certainly don’t propose to hand it over to Congress. Besides, I don’t care a hang for the nation, as such. I’m an individualist; and every coin of that accursed hoard is stained with the blood of individuals.”
“Again you miss the point, my dear sir. If the money be not yours, you have no concern with it further than to hand it over to its lawful owners.”
“Who are either dead or wish they were, and could not possibly be traced in either case.”
“That certainly complicates matters,” said Mr. Clare, laughing; “but, as some of them were negroes, as I understand it, you might donate a part at least to the Commission”—
“I’ll be hanged if I do! Besides, they never owned a penny in their lives, poor devils! The money was made at their expense, but was not theirs.”
“Dr. Richards, I fear you’re a humbug. Don’t you see that you have the feeling of property in this money? You speak of it as not yours, yet you’ll give it to this one, and be hanged if you give it to that”—
“I know!” cried Alice suddenly, her perceptions quickened, perhaps, by the feeling that her husband was coming off second best from the encounter of wits; “I know. They are going to sell more stock at ‘Prices’ next month; we could invest this money in Freddy’s name, and the income from it would give him a support if anything happened to us, Fred.”
Mr. Clare waited for Dr. Richards to express his approval. “Well, I don’t know that you could do better,” he said somewhat reluctantly. “It would be as near to returning the principal to its lawful owners as we are at all likely to come, and Freddy’s due proportion of the national wealth would amount to considerably more than the interest at five per cent, I suppose.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mr. Clare, who seemed pleased to pass to a less personal subject. “They want to start a job-printing office at ‘Prices.’ There are a couple of printers among the small shareholders who would rather be employed by the community than to work as Hal o’ the Wynd fought, for their own hand; and they think by joining forces they could get together a pretty good trade. I could get them some little ecclesiastical printing, you know; and they are looking for some one who can design crosses, crowns, Greek letters and symbols generally for that department, and also heads for checks, notes, and so on for the banks and business houses. I believe, though, it was Louis who undertook to sound Freddy on the subject. I don’t know whether he draws on wood or not.”
“I had him taught that branch especially and particularly, though I can’t say it is his favorite,” said the doctor. “He’d like to paint the Landing of Columbus, and Edith searching for the body of Harold, I dare say, if he could stand up to it.”
“He has not disdained to paint slippers,” said Alice; “but that craze is dying out, and I should be very glad for him to have a more permanent position. He is so much happier to feel himself earning money, and his earnings have been very useful,” she added quietly. Truly, Alice’s trials had been also useful.
“Ah! by the way, I begin to realize why our friend Clare never argues,” said the doctor. “It is because, as Father McClosky says, ‘he only convinces.’”
“In this country,” observed Mr. Clare gravely, “we don’t say, ‘I am convinced,’ but ‘I am satisfied;’ and we are right. Argument may convince, that is, bind a man so that he cannot reply; satisfaction gives him enough light to see the matter as it is for himself. Therefore, while I never argue, I do sometimes try to satisfy.”
“I’m not so sure about your etymology,” replied the doctor, “but we won’t split hairs. I want room for a good knockdown blow. When you say ‘light enough to see the matter as it is,’ do you mean as I see it is, or as you see it is, or as it is in itself?”
“The ‘Thing-in-itself’?” Mr. Clare hesitated for a moment, then his lurking smile became a broad laugh. “I was awfully tempted,” he said; “it was on the end of my tongue to say that ‘you Kant do it, you know,’ but I won’t. I resist the temptation, and stand firm in the pride of virtue.”
“But you don’t answer my question,” said the doctor, trying hard not to smile.
“I will, though, in the Irish fashion, by asking another. Why do you want to see?”
“That depends on what I want to see.”
“Well, take, for instance, the question lately under discussion. Why did you wish to see the rights of that?”
“Because it was a bone of contention, a thorn in the flesh, the very devil himself buffeting me in person, and I wanted to stop the whole business.”
“That is, it was a personal matter, requiring immediate action! Exactly so. Now, tell me, are you convinced as to the ownership of that money?”
“Not quite.”
“Are you satisfied about it?”
The doctor laughed. “I see,” he said; “the correct rendering of ‘Ding-an-sich’ is ‘The thing as it appears to your wife.’ Oh, yes! I’m satisfied!”
“Then you have found the only answer that can be given to the question you booked for future discussion, What is Truth?”
“Found it, eh? well, I certainly don’t recognize it,” said the doctor. “Your ideas of truth are rather limited, my friend.”
“They are; limited by my human nature, and the peculiarities of my mental and moral constitution.”
“Good! we agree perfectly. The most bigoted Materialist could ask no more.”
“Tarry a little,” said Ernest Clare; “I have more to say. Though truth to me be relative, in Itself it is Absolute, Unconditioned”—
“Unknowable,” said the doctor.
“In Its entirety and for the present, yes; though, for the future, we have the promise that we shall know even as we are known.”
“Known! by the Truth? Lord, deliver us! here has this man been palming off religion on us, while I thought he was talking metaphysics.”
“A perfectly meaningless term, with which I decline to concern myself,” said Mr. Clare; “and you can’t escape religion, Dr. Richards, whether you talk physics or metaphysics. For my part, I don’t know what people mean by metaphysics and supernatural, when God clothes the grass of the field and notes the fall of the sparrow.”
“Oh! mount the table yonder and preach,” said the doctor. “You’re bursting with it. I can see it in your eye.”
“Thanks! but I can get a better grasp of the subject just here,” said Mr. Clare, taking the doctor gently but firmly by the collar. “I say, doctor, did you ever experiment upon the blind spot on the eye?”
“You mean where the optic nerve enters it? well, yes, I have a little; but what has that to do with it? and what are you up to now?”
“I was remembering a rather striking analogy that occurred to me the other day; whether, in the spiritual eye, there may not be the converse of that blind spot—that is, a seeing spot?”
“And the rest of the spiritual eye, whatever and wherever it may be, insensible to light? Rather inconvenient, if it were not spiritual light, which is unimportant.”
“But suppose this seeing spot widens with use? suppose the more light one sees the more one becomes capable of seeing, until, as St. Paul says, the whole body is full of light?”
“But that is when one’s eye is single,” said Dr. Richards, “whereas you are supposing a double set of optics.”
“Now you quibble,” retorted the other good-humoredly. “One might have as many eyes as a fly, yet the vision would be single, as you very well know.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” returned the doctor; “vision, indeed! why, people tell me I see things upside down, but I’m not conscious of it. Besides, how could one see the same things, even on your own showing, with the physical and spiritual eye? whatever you mean by that!”
“Do you remember the Erd Geist in ‘Faust’ Dr. Richards? That was a product of the single vision, I fancy.
“‘Im Lebensfluthen, im Thatensturm,
Wall’ ich auf und ab,
Webe hin und her!
Geburt und Grab,
Ein ewiges Meer,
Ein wechselnd Weben,
Ein glühend Leben,
So schaff’ ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit,
Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid.”[1]
1. A rather free translation is subjoined. As indicated in the text, the last line is a quotation:—
“In the restless stream of living,
’Mid the storm of deeds,
Move I hither, thither,
Weave I to and fro!
Birth and the Grave
—One limitless ocean!—
A changeful Creation
Glowing with Life,
Thus my task at Time’s tremulous loom I ply,
And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by.”
I forget who paraphrased that last line,—
“‘And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by.’”
said Mr. Clare. “It isn’t bad, but ‘living garment’ is even better, perhaps. The two together make up Goethe’s meaning.”
“Oh! so you give Goethe credit for using his spiritual optics?”
“In right of his poet or prophet-hood. A false prophet—not that Goethe was that, except partially like the rest, and much less so than many who are called the truest of the true,—but a false prophet is a prophet still, you know, and woe is unto him according to the falseness of his prophecy.”
“Because?”
“Because his falsehood is a moral fault. He could have seen truly had he purified his heart and life, and used his spiritual eyes.”
“Thank fortune! I really feared you were going to say ‘and used the grace of God.’ I do detest that expression! It is such a mean, cowardly state of mind for a man to be always asking for grace to do this, and rejoicing that he had grace given him to do that. Grace indeed! Has he no backbone of his own?”
“Why, you wouldn’t expect a man to breathe without air,” said the clergyman, “and why should he see without sunshine? And you’ll find that etymology quite correct,” he added, as he rose to say good-night.
“Etymology? I don’t understand.”
“Grace—the graces—the Charites—charity—love, as the Revised Version has it. And don’t you remember Max Müller’s identification of the Charites with the bright Harits, the far-reaching sun-rays? Love and life, the life and love of God; not so very detestable after all, eh? Good-night.”