Isa stopped to speak a few words to Lottie after the short service was ended.
“O Miss Isa, I do hope you won’t be away long,” cried the young girl, looking up into the face of her mistress with a pleading expression; “we do miss you so sadly!”
“Is my brother better?” asked Isa.
“Master shuts himself up a deal in his room, and don’t care to be disturbed, and seems worried like—he do,” replied Lottie with rustic simplicity, and in a tone from which Isa too readily gathered that neither Gaspar’s spirits nor his temper had improved since her departure. “O Miss Isa, I wish you’d come back!”
“Tell my brother that, without fail, I’ll come and see him to-morrow.”
“And stay with him?” asked Lottie, anxiously.
Isa hesitated for a moment, but she could not bring herself to say “Yes.” There was to be on the following evening another of those delightful little parties at the Castle, at which Isa anticipated that she would enjoy one of the sweetest and purest of pleasures, that of converse with the intellectual, the refined, and the good—converse that gratifies at once the mind and the heart. Isa was little disposed to exchange such pleasure for a dull, cheerless evening at the Lodge, spent beside a peevish valetudinarian, who would neither appreciate nor thank her for the sacrifice. No; she would make a compromise with conscience; she would give the morning to her brother, and doubly enjoy the evening from the consciousness of having performed an irksome duty. Isa sent by Lottie a message to her brother, and then, only half satisfied with herself, returned with Edith to the Castle.
Lottie walked silently for a little time beside Mrs. Bolder, the grocer’s wife, who was always the young girl’s companion to and from the evening meeting. Lottie broke the silence by a sigh.
“Oh, but the house has grown dull and lonesome!” she murmured. “Half of the pleasure of going to the lecture was to talk it over after, and have the hard things explained.”
“You don’t find old Hannah much of a companion, I suppose.”
“Hannah!” repeated Lottie dolefully; “she never speaks to me but to chide; nor does master, for the matter of that. Oh, how I does miss dear mother and brother! there’s no one near me as cares for me, now that Miss Isa’s away. I’m afeard that the Midianite Discontent is creeping in after all.” Poor Lottie, with her warm, impulsive, affectionate nature, found even the “meat every day, and a sovereign a quarter,” insufficient to brighten her solitary lot.
“We ought to have learned this evening how to get rid of the Midianite,” observed quiet Mrs. Bolder, but in a melancholy tone, for she herself was oppressed with cares, and had by nature little spirit to struggle against them.
“Yes,” said Lottie more cheerfully; “I will be with thee, that is a wonderful word! I will repeat it over and over to myself, when I lie down, and when I get up, and when I’m about my work. We should never feel lonesome or sad when the dear Lord says, I will be with thee: with us all through our lives; and then when the time comes for us to die, we know that we shall be with Him.”
The same promise which strengthened a warrior of old for heroic deeds, cheered and encouraged a little servant maid in her path of humble toil. Lottie trod more lightly on her way when she thought of Gideon and his heavenly Guest.
Mrs. Bolder, after she had parted from Lottie, turned towards the single shop in the hamlet of Wildwaste, which was kept by herself and her husband. The shutters were up, so she saw no light, but the door was upon the latch, and she entered through the shop into the little back-parlour where Tychicus Bolder, seated by the fire, was awaiting his wife’s return from the meeting.
Sadly poor Miriam looked on what she called “the wreck of such a fine man!” Over the hard-featured, smoke-dried looking face of Bolder, wrinkled with many a line traced by care and pain, hung the white hair, streaked here and there with iron gray. His beard had grown long, and lay on his sunken chest; his back was bowed, his knees drawn up, as he sat with his feet on the fender, with a black shawl of his wife’s wrapped round his rheumatic frame. Bolder could not turn his head without pain; but he bade his wife shut the door, come and sit beside him, and tell him all about the parson’s lecture.
“Oh, how different it was in the days when it was you that went, and you that had the telling—you who can talk like a parson yourself!” sighed Mrs. Bolder, as she stirred the fire, which was getting low, as Bolder had no power to stir it himself.
“Wife,” said Bolder solemnly, “you’ve been to a lecture, and I dare say a good one, for I think more of Mr. Eardley now than I did in old times; but I’ve had my sermon too, as I sat here by the fire, and my preacher was one as spoke with more power than Mr. Eardley, or any other parson under the sun!”
MR. AND MRS. BOLDER.
“Why, who can have been here?” exclaimed Mrs. Bolder, glancing towards the door.
“Sit down, wife, and I’ll tell you all,” said Tychicus Bolder. “When you had gone out, and I was left alone with my pain—”
“I’m sure I’d gladly have stayed with you,” interrupted Miriam; “I went because you told me to go.”
“I know it—I know it—I sent you. Well, as I sat here alone with my pain, I began turning over in my mind what you’d told me of the last lecture, of the Midianites in possession. Ay, thinks I, I have them all here, every one of the four. There’s Disappointment; for wasn’t I a thriving man, and looking to get up higher and higher in the world—leave this place and take a larger business in Axe—till this sickness came, and pulled me back, and made it hard enough to struggle on here!”
Mrs. Bolder mournfully shook her head.
“And isn’t there Discontent; for it has often seemed as if the pain, and the weakness, and the helplessness were a’most more than man could bear!”
“I’m sure that no man could bear them more—” Miriam stopped in the midst of her sentence, less from a doubt as to its perfect truth than because she saw that her husband did not wish to be interrupted; so she relapsed into her usual position—that of a listener.
“There’s Dissension, for I feel ready to quarrel with all the world; and Distrust, for I can’t bring myself to think that I’ve not been hardly dealt with. Now if, as the parson said, all these enemies are most like to come, like the Midianites, to a soul where there’s been an idol set up, where was the idol in mine? You see, wife, pain and loneliness set an old man thinking.”
“You never had an idol,” said the wife; “in the midst of such a drunken, disorderly, quarrelsome set as we have here in Wildwaste, you took the pledge, and kept it too—never a drop of the poison wetted your lips; there’s not many a man would have kept steady, standing all alone as you did. And then you didn’t worship Mammon; no man can say of you that your money was not honestly earned—every penny that you took in.”
“Bating a few overcharges,” muttered Bolder; “on the whole, I did keep my hands pretty clean.”
“And you was so religious, too; knew your Bible so well, could have done for a preacher yourself. If a parson made a mistake, or wasn’t quite sound in the doctrine, you was the man who could set him right; you was such a judge of a sermon!”
“I thought myself so,” said Bolder.
“I can’t make out the reason why God sends you all these troubles,” pursued the admiring wife, “unless it be as He let them come to Job, ’cause he was better than any one else, and God wanted to try his patience.”
“Now, wife, it’s all very well that you should think this,” said Bolder, in his peculiar tone of decision, “I was ready enough to think it myself; but when I came this evening to turn the matter over as I sat here alone, I could not look at things just in the same light as before. I found this soul of mine all full of what the parson calls Midianites; I had not noticed one of ’em when I was in health and prosperity, but when troubles came, then came they, like the birds of prey round a sick sheep as it lies in the field. Then I set to thinking what idol I could have set up when all things seemed going well with me;—no, don’t interrupt me, Miriam—I was certain there had been something wrong. And then an old anecdote came into my mind, which I’d heard many years back, but which I’d never really understood—I mean with my heart, not my head. It was about a young parson who was talking on religion to an old pious ploughman as they walked together in a field. Says the parson, ‘The hardest thing is to deny sinful self.’ ‘Nay, sir,’ said the ploughman, ‘the hardest thing, I take it, is to deny righteous self.’ Why, here, thinks I, is the key to the whole matter. Here have I been living in Wildwaste, counting myself an example to all the people around, thanking God, like the Pharisee, that I was a deal better than other men, sitting in judgment even at church, setting up a great idol of self. And so God has let the enemies come in, just to show me that I am not the saint that I took myself for, just to set me crying to Him for help, to bring me to say, what else I had never said, I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
Mrs. Bolder, who had been accustomed to look up to her husband as a kind of infallible pope in his home, one whose wisdom should never be doubted, whose opinions should never be disputed, could not at once alter her long-cherished ideas, but only ventured to express dissent by a little mournful shake of the head.
“I was always ready enough to judge others,” continued Bolder, “but it was a new thing for me to judge myself. I was quick enough to see God’s justice in punishing other men, but when the rod came upon myself, then his dealings seemed hard. I could almost exult when the publican’s house was burned and he ruined, or when the poor guilty wretch was smothered in the bog;—that was righteous vengeance, said I. But when my own comfort was touched, when trouble came to my home, I could neither see mercy nor justice, and fierce, rebellious, unbelieving thoughts swept, like the Midianites, right over my soul.”
“Mr. Bolder,” said the anxious wife (she never ventured to address him by his Christian name), “I shall never like to leave you so long again, for I’m sure and certain that being alone is bad for your spirits.”
“Wife, I was no more alone than Gideon was when the angel came to him under the oak. I told you that a powerful preacher had been here, and I told you nought but the truth. The Lord has been preaching to this proud heart; and if you wish to know the text, it was this, Unless ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven. There be many mansions there, but not one for the self-righteous Pharisee. I had thought myself a long way on the road to heaven, and I found I’d to go back every step of the way, and begin at the beginning. If it had not been for what God has shown me, through sickness and trouble, of the evil lurking in my heart, I might have gone on blind and self-confident to the last, and never have had my eyes opened at all—till the terrible Day of Judgment.”
It is doubtful whether Tychicus Bolder’s words convinced his wife, but at least they silenced her, and she could feel that the change which had passed over the proud, opinionative man was a change for the better; he was more patient and resigned under suffering, and far less disposed to pass a sweeping sentence of condemnation on all his neighbours in Wildwaste. When Bolder began to judge himself, he became less ready to judge others; humility and charity are twin-sisters, and constantly walk hand-in-hand. Tychicus himself regarded that evening of quiet heart-searching as a crisis in his life; the Lord had visited his soul, and had left a blessing and a promise behind.
And is not this the history of many a human heart? The great enemy, ever on the watch to destroy, forms temptations of the very virtues of men, leading them, as it were, to make a raft of their own honesty, temperance, respectability, alms-giving, so that, trusting on that to stem the flood, they may not seek refuge in the only Ark that can bear them to a heavenly shore. The Almighty, on the other hand, making all things to work together for the good of His people, even their very failures and imperfections, shows them the hollowness and rottenness of all on which they rested, that they may not trust their soul’s safety to anything but the merits and mercies of Christ. Praise, even from the lips of his heavenly Master, seems to have led St. Peter into presumption, so that the Blessed art thou had soon to be followed by the Get thee behind me, Satan; while through the guilt of a three-fold denial the apostle was led, by God’s grace, to earnest repentance, distrust of himself, and more fervent love to his pardoning Lord. Thus God still enables a David to slay Goliath with his own sword. But for the visitation of the Midianites, grievous and evil as it was in itself, Gideon would perhaps never have been blessed with the visit of the angel of the Lord.
