THE first great apparent change in a life is not always its real beginning. It may be but the beginning of the beginning, as it were, the first grand crash of the ice, the opening of the fountain. There is more noise and more demonstration than when the full tide of waters begins to swell into the broader channel, but it is not the great crisis which it has the look of being. It is the commencement of a process of which it is impossible to predict the end. This had been emphatically the case with John Mitford when he was suddenly swept out of his father’s house and out of all the traditions of his youth. It seemed to him and to everybody that his life had then taken its individual shape. When he returned to Fanshawe Regis, he went about with new eyes, curiously observing everything which before he had accepted without observation. Was it that he felt the new better? Was it that he hankered after the old? These were questions which he could not answer. The only thing he was quite sure of in respect to himself was that he was uncertain about everything, and that life was no longer sweet enough to make up for the darkness and troubles in it. With this feeling in his mind he listened to his father’s sermons, seeing everything in a different light, and went with his mother on her parish work, carrying her basket, gazing wistfully in at the cottage windows, wondering what was the good of it all. He had never questioned for a moment the good of at least his mother’s ministrations until now. When she came smiling out of one of the cottages it cast a gloom upon her to find her boy, who had always been full of faith in her at least, standing unresponsive, waiting for her outside. She looked him in the eyes with her tender smile, and said, “Well, John?” as she gave back the little basket into his hand.
“Well,” he said, with a sigh, “my good little mother! do you think it is worth all the trouble you are taking, and all the trouble you have taken since ever I remember?—that is what I want to know.”
“Yes, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford, “that and a great deal more. Oh, John, if I could feel that but one, only one, was brought back to God by any means!”
“I think they are all very much the same as they used to be,” said John. “I recollect when I was a small boy, there was always something to be set right there.”
“That was the father, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford. “He was very troublesome. He took more than was good for him, you know; and then he used to be very unkind to his poor wife. Ah, John, some of these poor women have a great deal to bear!”
“But the blackguard is dead now, heaven be praised!” said John.
“Oh, hush, my dear, hush, and don’t speak of an immortal soul like that! Yes indeed, John, he has gone where he will be judged with clearer sight than ours. But I wish I could hope things were really mended,” said Mrs Mitford, shaking her head. She went on shaking her head for a whole minute after she had stopped speaking, as if her hope was a very slight one indeed.
“What is the matter now?”
“The boys are very tiresome, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford, with a sigh. “Somehow it seems natural to them to take to bad ways. You can’t think how idle and lazy Jim is, though he used to be such a good boy when he was in the choir, don’t you remember? He looked a perfect little angel in his white surplice, but I fear he has been a very bad boy; and Willie and his mother never do get on together. He is the only one that can be depended upon in the least, and he talks of marrying and going away.”
“You have not much satisfaction out of them,” said John, “though I know you have always kept on doing all sorts of things for them. They ought at least to be grateful to you.”
“Well, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford, with anxious gravity, “I don’t like to blame her—but I am afraid sometimes their mother is not very judicious, poor woman. It sours one sadly to have so much misfortune. She is always contradicting and crossing them for things that don’t matter. I don’t like to blame her, she has had so much to put up with; but still, you know—and of course it is discouraging, whatever one may try to say.”
“And then there are the Littles,” said John, leading his mother on.
“Oh, the Littles, dear! I wish you would not speak of them. Every month or so I think I have just got their mind up to the point of going to church. If you but knew the number of bonnets that woman has had, and shoes for the children, and even your papa’s last old greatcoat which I got the tailor to alter for Robert. But it is never any good. And though I pay myself for the children’s schooling, they never go. It is enough to break one’s heart.”
“And Lizzie’s people are always a trouble to you,” said John.
“Ah, my dear, but then the old woman is a Dissenter,” said Mrs Mitford, with alacrity; “and in such a case what can one do?”
“But, mother dear, with all these things before you, does it sometimes strike you what a hopeless business it is?” cried John. “You have been working in the parish for twenty years——”
“Twenty-five, my dear boy—since before you were born.”
“And what is it the better?” said John; “the same evils reappear just in the same way—the same wickedness, and profanity, and indifference. For all the change one can see, mother dear, all your work and fatigue might never have been.”
“I must say so far as that goes I don’t agree with you at all, John,” cried his mother, with a certain sharp ring in her voice. The colour came to her cheeks and the water to her eyes. If it had been said to her that her life itself had been a mistake and failure, she could not have felt it more. Indeed the one implied the other; and if there was any one thing that she had built upon in all her modest existence, it was the difference in the parish. John’s words gave her such a shock that she gasped after them with a sense of partial suffocation. And then she did her best to restrain the momentary sharp thrill of resentment; for how could she be angry with her boy? “My dear,” she said, humbly, with the tears in her soft eyes, “I don’t suppose I have done half or quarter what I ought to have done; but still if you had seen the parish when we came—— If I had been a woman of more energy, and cleverer than I am——”
“You cannot think it was that I meant,” cried John. “How you mistake me, mother! It is because your work has been so perfect, so unwearied—because it ought to have wrought miracles——”
“Oh, no, no, not that,” she said, recovering her tranquillity, and smiling on her boy. “It has been very humble, my dear; but still, if you had seen the parish when we came—the alehouse was more frequented than the church a great deal—the children were not baptised—there were things going on I could not speak of even to you. That very Robert Little that we were speaking of—his father was the most inveterate poacher in the whole country, always in prison or in trouble; the eldest brother went for a soldier, and one of the girls—— Oh, John, Fanshawe Regis is not Paradise, but things are better now.”
“My dear little mother! but they are not as good as they ought to be after the work of all your life.”
“Don’t speak of me, my dear boy, as if I were everything,” said Mrs Mitford; “think of your papa—and oh, John, think of what is far beyond any of us. Think whose life it was that was given, not for the righteous, but to save sinners; think who it was that said there was joy in heaven over one that repented; and should we grudge a whole lifetime if we could but be sure that one was saved? I hope that is what I shall never, never, do.”
John drew his mother’s hand through his arm as she looked up in his face, with her soft features all quivering with emotion. What more could he say? She was not clever, nor very able to take a philosophical view of the matter. She never stopped to ask herself, as he did, whether this faulty, shifty, mean, unprofitable world was worth the expenditure of that divine life eighteen hundred years ago, and of the many lives since which have been half divine. All that;—and nothing better come of it than the vice, and the hypocrisy, and mercenary pretences at goodness, and brutal indifference to everything pure and true, which were to be found in this very village, in the depth of the rural country, in England that has been called Christian for all these hundreds of years. So much—and so little to result from it. Such were the thoughts that passed through John’s mind, mingled with many another gloomy fancy. Adding up long lines of figures was scarcely more unprofitable—could scarcely be of less use to the world. When he thought of his father’s precise little sermons, his feelings were different; for Dr Mitford spoke as a member of the Archæological Society might be supposed to speak, being compelled to do so, to a handful of bumpkins who could not, as he was well aware, understand a word he said—and was content with having thus performed the “duty” incumbent on him. That might be mended so far as it went; but who could mend the self-devotion, the unconscious gospel of a life which his mother set before the eyes of the village? They knew that her charity never failed, nor her interest in them, nor the tender service which she was ready to give to the poorest, or even to the wickedest. Twenty-five years this woman, who was as pure as the angels, had been their servant, at their call night and day. Heaven and earth could not produce a more perfect ministration, her son said to himself, as he watched her coming and going; and yet what did it all come to? Had Mrs Mitford seen the thoughts that were going on in his mind, she would have shrunk from him with a certain horror. They were hard thoughts both of God and man. What was the good of it? Nobody, it appeared to John, was the better. If Fanshawe Regis, for one place, had been left to itself, would it have made any difference? Such thoughts are hard to bear, when a man has been trained into the habit of thinking that much, almost everything, can be done for his neighbours if he will but sufficiently exert himself. Here was a tender good woman who had exerted herself all her life—and what was the end of it? Meanwhile Mrs Mitford walked on cheerfully, holding her son’s arm, with a little glow of devotion about her heart, thinking, what did it matter how much labour was spent on the work if but the one stray lamb was brought back to the fold? and pondering in the same breath a new argument by which Robert Little, in the Doctor’s greatcoat, and his wife in one of her own bonnets, could be got to come to church, and induced to send their children to school.
Sometimes, however, John’s strange holiday, which nobody could quite understand, was disturbed by immediate questions still more difficult. Mrs Mitford did not say much, having discovered in her son’s eye at the moment of his return that all was not well with him; but she looked wistfully at him from time to time, and surprised him in the midst of his frequent reveries with sudden glances of anxious inquiry which spoke more distinctly than words. She did not mention Kate, which was more significant than if she had spoken volumes; and when the letters came in, in the morning, she would turn her head away not to see whether her son expected anything, or if he was disappointed. A mixture of love and pride was in her self-restraint. He should not be forced to confide in her, she had resolved; she would exercise the last and hardest of all maternal duties towards him, and leave him to himself. But Dr Mitford had no such idea. He was busy at the moment with something for the 'Gentleman’s Magazine,' which kept him in his study for the first few days after John’s arrival; but as soon as his article was off his mind, he began to talk to his son of his prospects, as was natural. This happened in the library, where John was sitting, exactly as he had been sitting that first morning when Kate peeped in at the door and all the world was changed; though I cannot tell whether the young man at first remembered that. Dr Mitford was seated at the other end of the room, as he had been that day. A ray of October sunshine shone in through one light of the great Elizabethan window and fell in a long line upon the polished oak floor, on the library carpet, on Dr Mitford’s white head, and as far as the wall on the other side of him—a great broad arrow of light, with some colour in it from the shield in the centre of the glass. Behind this was the glimmer of a fire, and John, lifting his weary eyes from his book, or his eyes from his weary book, he could scarcely have told which, became suddenly aware of the absolute identity of the outside circumstances, and held his breath and asked himself, had he dreamed it, or had that interruption ever been? Was the door going to open and Kate to peep in breathless, shy, daring, full of fun and temerity? or had she done it, and turned all the world upside down? When he was asking himself this question Dr Mitford laid down his pen; then he coughed his little habitual cough, which was the well-understood sign between him and his domestic world that he might be spoken to; then he was fretted by the sunshine, and got up and drew the blind down; and then, having quite finished his article, and feeling himself in a mood for a little talk, he took a walk towards his son between the pillars that narrowed the library in the middle, and looked like a great doorway. He did not go straight to John, but paused on the way to remark upon some empty corners, and to set right some books which had dropped out of their exact places.
“I wish the doctor would return my Early English books,” he said, approaching his son; “one ought to make a resolution against lending. You might give me a day, John, just to look up what books are missing, and who has them. I think you know them better than I do. But, by the by, you have not told us how long you can stay.”
“I don’t think it matters much,” said John.
“You don’t think it matters much! but that looks as if you were not taking any great trouble to make yourself missed. I don’t like that,” said Dr Mitford, shaking his head: “depend upon it, my boy, you will never secure proper appreciation until you show the people you are among that another cannot fill your place.”
“But the fact is that a dozen others could fill my place, sir,” said John, “quite as well as—very probably much better than I.”
“What! with Mr Crediton? and his daughter?” said Dr Mitford. He thought he had made a joke, and turned away with a mild little laugh to arrange and caress his folios. Then he went on talking with his back to John—“I should be glad to know what you really think of it now that you have had time to make the experiment. I don’t understand the commercial mind myself. I don’t know that I could be brought to understand it; but the opinion of an intelligence capable of judging, and accustomed to trains of thought so different, could not but be interesting. I should like to hear what you think of it frankly. Somebody has made dog’s ears in this Shakespeare, which is unpardonable,” said the Doctor, passing his hand with sudden indignation over the folded edges. “I should like to know what your opinion is.”
“I think I can get it straight, sir,” said John, “if you will trust the book to me.”
“Thanks—and put a label on it, 'Not to be lent,'” said Dr Mitford. “It is not to be expected, you know, that the most good-natured of men should lend one of the earliest editions. What were we talking of? oh, the bank. I hope you are quite satisfied that you can do your duty as well or better in your own way than in the manner we had intended for you. Nothing but that thought would have induced me to yield. It was a disappointment, John,” said his father, turning round with a tall volume in his hand—“I cannot deny that it was a great disappointment. Do you really feel that you are able to do your duty better where you are?”
“What is my duty, father?” said John, with a hoarseness in his voice.
And then it was Dr Mitford’s turn to show consternation. “Your duty,” he faltered—“your duty? It does not say much for my teaching and your mother’s if you have to ask that question at this time of day.”
This, it will be easy to see, was a very unsatisfactory sort of answer. John got up too, feeling very heavy about the heart. “Relative duty is easy enough,” he said; “but absolute duty, what is it? is there such a thing? Is it not just as good both for myself and other people that I should live for myself as I am doing, instead of living for God and my neighbour like my mother? So far as I can see, it comes to exactly the same thing.”
Dr Mitford looked at his son with an absolute astonishment that would have been comical had John been able to see it. But then it was not so much his son’s perplexity the Doctor thought of as that curious, quite inexplicable reference. “Like your mother!” the Rector of Fanshawe Regis said, with utter amazement. It took away his breath. He could not even notice his son’s question in his consternation. “Yes,” said John, not in the least perceiving the point, “what is the good? That is what one asks one’s self; it does not seem to make any difference to the world.”
Dr Mitford turned, and put up the dog’s-eared folio on its shelf. He shook his head in his bewilderment, and gave a sigh of impatience. “You young men have a way of talking and of thinking which I don’t understand,” he said, still shaking his head. “I hope to goodness, John, that you have not been led astray by those ridiculous fallacies of Comtism. You may suppose that as you are not to be a clergyman it does not matter what your opinions are; but it always matters. A private Christian has as much need to be right as if he were an archbishop; and I confess, after your careful training, I little expected——a mere farrago of French sentiment and nonsense. Your mother! what she has to do with the question I can’t understand.”
“And I am sure neither do I, sir,” said John, moved to a laugh, “nor why you should set me down as a Comtist. I am not an anythingist, worse luck—for then, perhaps, one might see a little more plainly what to do.”
“If a young man, with the best education England can give, and friends to consult, who, I flatter myself, are not idiots, cannot see what to do, it does not say much for his sense,” said Dr Mitford, with some indignation. “I suppose by all this I am to understand that you are tired of the office drudgery and beginning to repent——”
“I don’t know that I have anything to repent of,” said John, who under this questioning began to get rebellious, as sons are wont to do.
“I advise you to make up your mind,” said Dr Mitford, not without a half-tone of contempt. “I never thought you were adapted for business. If experience has shown you this, it is best to take steps at once. You might not like, perhaps, to return to your original destination——”
“Father, this discussion is quite unnecessary,” said John, growing red. “I am not tired of office drudgery. No trade, I suppose, is very delightful just at first; and when one begins to think for one’s self, there are many questions that arise in one’s mind. Yes, mother, I am quite ready. I have been waiting for you this half-hour.”
“But not if your papa wants you, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford, in her white shawl, standing smiling upon them at the door.
“I can look after the Shakespeare when I come in,” said John. That was exactly where Kate had stood peeping—Kate, who, when she was old, would be just such another woman. Would she grow so by his side? Could it ever be that she would come, in all the soft confidence of proprietorship, and look in upon him as his mother did? All at once it flashed upon him that such a thing might have been, in this very place, in this very way, had he kept his traditionary place. He might have been the Rector, putting up his folios, and she the Lady Bountiful of the parish, as his mother was. This flashed across his mind at the very moment when he was asking what use it was, and feeling that a life spent in doing good was as much thrown away as a life spent in making money. Strange inconsistency! And then he went and took the basket, with its little vials of wine and carefully-packed dainties, out of his mother’s hand.
Dr Mitford watched them going away with feelings more odd and strange than he recollected to have experienced for years. He waited till the door was closed, and then he turned abruptly to his books; but these were not satisfactory for the moment, and by-and-by he gave them up and walked impatiently to the window, and saw his wife’s white shawl disappear from the garden gate, with her tall boy by her side shadowing over her in the October sunshine. “His mother!” Dr Mitford said to himself, with a certain snort of wonder and offence—and then went back to his writing-table, and wrote a note to accompany his article to Sylvanus Urban, who was a more comprehensible personage on the whole than either wife or son.