There & Back by George MacDonald (acx book reading .txt) 📕

help. He was noted among his farmers for his common sense, as they called it, and among the gentry for a certain frankness of speech, which most of them liked.

He rang the door-bell of the Hall, and asked if Mrs. Wylder was at home. The man hesitated, looked in the clergyman's face, and smiling oddly, answered, "Yes, sir."

"Only you don't think she will care to see me!"

"Well, you know, sir,-"

"I do. Go up, and announce me."

The man led the way, and Mr. Wingfold followed. He opened the door of a room on the first floor, and announced him. Mr. Wingfold entered immediately, that there might be no time for words with the man and a message of refusal.

Discouragement encountered him on the threshold. The lady sat by a blazing fire, with her back to a window through which the frosty sun of February was sending lovely prophecies of the summer. She was in a gorgeous dressing-gown, her plentiful black hair twisted carelessly, but with a show of defiance, round her head. She was almost a young woman still, with a hardness of expression that belonged neither to youth nor age. She sat sideways to the door, so that without turning her head she must have seen the parson enter, but she did not move a visible hair's-breadth. Her feet, in silk stockings and shabby slippers, continued perched on the fender. She made no sign of greeting when the parson came in front of her, but a scowl dark as night settled on her low forehead and black eyebrows, and her face shortened and spread out. Wingfold approached her with the air of a man who knew himself unwelcome but did not much mind-for he had not to care about himself.

"Good morning, Mrs. Wylder!" he said. "What a lovely morning it is!"

"Is it? I know nothing about it. You have a brutal climate!"

He knew she regarded him as the objectionable agent of a more objectionable Heaven.

"You would not dislike it so much if you met it out of doors. A walk on a day like this, now,-"

"Pray who authorized you to come and offer me advice I Have I concealed from you, Mr. Wingfold, that your presence gives me no pleasure?"

"You certainly have not! You have been quite honest with me. I did not come in the hope of pleasing you-though I wish I could."

"Then perhaps you will explain why you are here!"

"There are visits that must be made, even with the certainty of giving annoyance!" answered Wingfold, rather cheerfully.

"That means you consider yourself justified in forcing your way into my room, before I am dressed, with the simple intention of making yourself disagreeable!"

"If I were here on my own business, you might well blame me! But what would you say to one of your men who told you he dared not go your message for fear of the lightning?"

"I would tell him he was a coward, and to go about his business."

"That, then, is what I don't want to be told!"

"And for fear of being told it, you dare me!"

"Well-you may put it so;-yes."

"I don't like you the worse for your courage. There's more than one man would face half a dozen bush-rangers rather than a woman I know!"

"I believe it. But it makes no extravagant demand on my courage. I am not afraid of you . I owe you nothing-except any service worth doing for you!"

"Let that blind down: the sun's putting the fire out."

"It's a pity to put the sun out in such a brutal climate. He does the fire no harm."

"Don't tell me !"

"Science says he does not."

"He puts the fire out, I tell you!"

"I do not think so."

"I've seen it with my own eyes. God knows which is the greater humbug-Science or Religion!-Are you going to pull that blind down?" Wingfold lowered the blind.

"Now look here!" said Mrs. Wylder. "You're not afraid of me, and I'm not afraid of you!-It's a low trade, is yours."

"What is my trade?"

"What is your trade?-Why, to talk goody! and read goody! and pray goody! and be goody, goody!-Ugh!"

"I'm not doing much of that sort at this moment, any way!" rejoined Wingfold with a laugh.

"You know this is not the place for it!"

"Would you mind telling me which is the place to read a French novel in?"

"Church: there!"

"What would you do if I were to insist on reading a chapter of the Bible here?"

"Look!" she answered, and rising, snatched a saloon-pistol from the chimney-piece, and took deliberate aim at him.

Wingfold looked straight down the throat of the thick barrel, and did not budge.

"-I would shoot you with that," she went on, holding the weapon as I have said. "It would kill you, for I can shoot, and should hit you in the eye, not on the head. I shouldn't mind being hanged for it. Nothing matters now!"

She flung the heavy weapon from her, gave a great cry, not like an hysterical woman, but an enraged animal, stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth, pulled it out again, and began tearing at it with her teeth. The pistol fell in the middle of the room. Wingfold went and picked it up.

"I should deserve it if I did," he said quietly, as he laid the pistol on the table. "-But you don't fight fair, Mrs. Wylder; for you know I can't take a pistol with me into the pulpit and shoot you. It is cowardly of you to take advantage of that."

"Well! I like the assurance of you! Do I read so as to annoy any one?"

"Yes, you do. You daren't read aloud, because you would be put out of the church if you did; but you annoy as many of the congregation as can see you, and you annoy me. Why should you behave in that house as if it were your own, and yet shoot me if I behaved so in yours? Is it fair? Is it polite? Is it acting like a lady?"

"It is my house-at least it is my pew, and I will do in it what I please.-Look here, Mr. Wingfold: I don't want to lose my temper with you, but I tell you that pew is mine, as much as the chair you're not ashamed to sit upon at this moment! And let me tell you, after the way
I 've been treated, my behaviour don't splash much. When he's brought a woman to my pass, I don't see God Almighty can complain of her manners!"

"Well, thinking of him as you do, I don't wonder you are rude!"

"What! You won't curry favour with him?-You hold by fair play? Come now! I call that downright pluck!"

"I fear you mistake me a little."

"Of course I do! I might have known that! When you think a parson begins to speak like a man, you may be sure you mistake him!"

"You wouldn't behave to a friend of your own according to what another person thought of him, would you?"

"No, by Jove, I wouldn't!"

"Then you won't expect me to do so!"

"I should think not! Of course you stick by the church!"

"Never mind the church. She's not my mistress, though I am her servant. God is my master, and I tell you he is as good and fair as goodness and fairness can be goodness and fairness!"

"What! Will you drive me mad! I wish he would serve you as he's done me-then we should hear another tune-rather! You call it good-you call it fair, to take from a poor creature he made himself, the one only thing she cared for?"

"Which was the cause of a strife that made of a family in which he wanted to live, a very hell upon earth!"

"You dare!" she cried, starting to her feet.

Wingfold did not move.

"Mrs. Wylder," he said, " dare is a word that needn't be used again between you and me. If you dare tell God that he is a devil, I may well dare tell you that you know nothing about him, and that I do!"

"Say on your honour, then, if he had treated you as he has done me-taken from you the light of your eyes, would you count it fair? Speak like the man you are."

"I know I should."

"I don't believe you. And I won't worship him."

"Why, who wants you to worship him? You must be a very different person before he will care much for your worship! You can't worship him while you think him what you do. He is something quite different. You don't know him to love, and you don't know him to worship."

"Why, bless my soul! ain't it your business-ain't you always making people say their prayers?"

"It is my business to help my brothers and sisters to know God, and worship him in spirit and in truth-because he is altogether and perfectly true and loving and fair. Do you think he would have you worship a being such as you take him to be. If your son is in good company in the other world, he must be greatly troubled at the way you treat God-at your unfairness to him. But your bad example may, for anything I know, have sent him where he has not yet begun to learn anything!"

"God have mercy!-will the man tell me to my face that my boy is in hell?"

"What would you have? Would you have him with the being you think so unjust that you hate him all the week, and openly insult him on Sunday?"

"You are a bad man, a hard-hearted brute, a devil, to say such things about my blessed boy! Oh my God! to think that the very day he was taken ill, I struck him! Why did he let me do it? To think that that very day he killed him, when he ought to have killed me!-killed him that I might never be able to tell him I was sorry!"

"If he had not taken him then, would you ever have been sorry you struck him!"

She burst into outcry and weeping, mingled with such imprecation, that Wingfold thought it one of those cases of possession in which nothing but prayer is of use. But the soul and the demon were so united, so entirely of one mind, that there was no room for prayer to get between them. He sat quiet, lifted up his heart, and waited. By and by there came a lull, and the redeemable woman appeared, emerging from the smoke of the fury.

"Oh my Harry! my Harry!" she cried. "To take him from my very bosom! He will never love me again! God shall know what I think of it! No mother could but hate him if he served her so!"

"Apparently you don't want the boy back in your bosom again!"

"None of your fooling of me now!" she answered, drawing herself up, and drying her eyes. "I can stand a good deal, but I won't stand that! What's gone is gone! He's dead, and the dead lie in no bosom but that of the grave! They go, and return never more!"

"But you will die too!"