Read Ebook: The Galaxy June 1877 Vol. XXIII.—June 1877.—No. 6. by Various

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ied head whose arms are the instruments of the Passion--and how well off one's body was!"

And I've been--no, I've been bidden to the Dialectical Society. You don't know what that is, my barbaric New Zealander? And I didn't know either when Mr. Malise sent me tickets for one evening, specially urging my attendance, as there would be something well worth hearing--a paper on "Celibacy" read by its author, a gifted young girl of only twenty-two!

I took my tickets to my liege. "Ronayne, fount of wisdom and light, whatever may the Dialectical Society be?"

"Oh, Adam! And why not? Because I'm, unluckily, married, am I to stop trying to improve myself, and not care to know what grand heights happier, unhampered women are scaling? And, Adam, only see, here's to be a paper read by a young lady only twenty-two, Mr. Malise says, and there couldn't be anything so very dreadful to hear in the little composition of an innocent young creature like that!"

FRAULEIN LILIAN MACFARLANE.

I don't like, for the family's sake, to imagine. When Ronayne gave him the picture on his birthday, our joint offering, my work set in the loveliest frame Ronayne could find, he couldn't help being pleased, and he couldn't help knowing it was baby's very self; but if the picture had been the work of a paid artist, I know he would have been wonderfully soothed. The picture was on exhibition for some days in the morning room, and being one day in the conservatory with Ronayne, I heard his father expatiating upon the striking likeness that had been happily caught, to a lady visitor. Presently I heard her read the signature, "Lil. De Vere, del., 1873." "Why, it is your daughter-in-law's work! How charming for a mother to be able to paint such an admirable portrait of her child. That must double the picture's value to you!"

"Aw, yes, yes--of course! A nice and amateur talent has Mrs. De Vere."

"Nice amateur talent!" I was fit to fly at him, and only the brutal--yes, the brutal--grasp of my husband kept me from rushing into the room and proclaiming "Mrs. De Vere's" antecedents--her artistic career sketched in a few bold touches.

The world would have ended then and there. But how delightful to have seen, first, his looks of blank horror at the idea of a daughter-in-law who had been used to rough it, and to make her little money go a fabulously long way.

And if I portray my baby in every week of her life, her father turns her to account no less. She is beginning to chatter like a wren, and Ronayne has a notebook devoted to her earliest attempts at speech--the sounds, as she is progressively able to make them--the easily-conquered ones, the impregnable rock-fortresses, the turns, substituted letters. Sometimes I get quite furious over this anatomical process. My darling says something with the dearest, sweetest, small voice:

"Oh, Ronayne!" I cry. "Did you hear? Three words together--'Pease, papa, tugar!'" And I smother her in ecstasy.

"They called loudly upon Dr. Thunder to speak; but he refused to rise, preferring, I suppose, to hear how well his disciples could acquit themselves; for he is the author of a work upon physiology which is nick-named the 'Social Science Bible'--a book I believe to be one of the most mischievous that has appeared within recent years--materialistic to the last degree, degrading man, disorganizing society.

"He told the girl he loved her, but that she knew he could not marry her; that the fetters of marriage would kill love in him; and he would rather assume them for any woman in the world than herself. The girl would have married him at a word; on her part there was the utter surrender of an adoring affection; but what would it be to have Herbert without his love?

What do you think of all this, Susie? Would you exchange love in the bush for love among these "leaders of thought" in London? How, after these wicked, cynic, dreary histories and encounters, I nestle into my home and am so humbly grateful for its every little self-abnegation, every straitness of bond, no less than for the unspeakable riches it holds--that of being loved and beloving to one's heart's highest-heaped and deepest-down-pressed measure.

Love from Ronayne and self to my dearest woman. All kindest regards to the head of the house, and tender wishes that the new home in that topsy-turvy region of the world may be as happy and, some day, as noisy as that whence this journeys to you from

Lil.

And do I never, in these days, see anything of my co?perative friends? Yes, something, but less since Miss Hedges went to D?sseldorf. Mrs. Stainton came to us a good deal early in the winter, but a month ago she was ordered off to Bournemouth for an obstinate cough, and the long letters I get from her are fuller of personal and spiritual matters than of references to her late co-associates. For she's done at last what we had all been looking for--gone over to Rome--and one hears from her now nothing but the Church: the Church's wisdom and peace, allusions to the saints, speculations upon states of prayer, enthusiasm for the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and fervent wishes that all puzzled wayfarers may find what she has found--absolute conviction and rest--though she owns that the new religion is fuller, far, of struggles and crosses than the old. "What does our father, the Dean, say?" I asked lately. "That this 'is at least a respectable vagary,'" she wrote back, "'which one could hardly say for most of my dreams and experiments!' Fancy papa's feeling himself authorized to speak of the spiritual life of anything above a crayfish!--a dear old country gentleman who is too entirely well satisfied with this world and his lot in it ever to think of heaven except in an official way, and whose strongest vocations are matrimony, and the writing mildly learned antiquarian papers for the West of England Archaeological Society.

"But you like stories. Here is papa's latest: One of his High Church confreres had been diligently expounding to a navvy the doctrine of the Trinity, and was boasting to papa of the intelligence of his neophyte. Papa, who holds very old-fashioned, inhumanitarian ideas as to the good or possibility of education for the masses, was scornfully incredulous as to the navvy's getting even an idea of the mystery upon which his friend had been instructing him. 'Will you go with me to see him, and convince yourself?' asked the clergyman. 'Delighted,' said papa, and off they set to find the navvy. After a little talk papa said to the man, 'This gentleman here tells me he has been talking to you about the Holy Trinity. Can you give me the names of the Three Persons?' 'Why, sir,' answered the navvy, 'there's God the Father and God the Son, but, to tell the truth, sir, I disremember the name of the other gentleman entirely!' Now I maintain that papa's in the wrong about the navvy, and that the ritualist clergyman had no reason to be so utterly disconcerted, as papa declares he was, at this na?ve answer. Am I wicked, I wonder, to be repeating these stories? But you know I don't mean the least irreverence, and I can't help seeing they're droll! Somebody has said nobody is so irreverent as religious people, but I always reckoned that a sour-tempered saying, judging after the sense and not after the spirit. We have some distant Quaker connections where I visit sometimes, and in that household if one mentions our Lord in familiar conversation, as if He had a connection with the humble little events of the daily life, there is always a shocked hush, as if possibly it might not be unsacrilegious to speak of our Creator save on meeting days, and with formal removal of all lay business and speech. I am sure they never heard of St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds. What would they have said to it?

"You hope that Mr. Feldwick's experience will not be mine, and intimate that if the Church fails me, nothing remains for me but the unbelief of our friends in the co?perative house. Yes, I've long felt that between Rome and rationalism there's no logical ground on which to rest. But I have no fears.

"Mr. Feldwick told me once that having, while a Catholic, read somewhere that St. Philip of Neri was so distressed at ecstasies that befell him in public that he tried the reading, before saying mass, of books on other than spiritual subjects, to divert the usual current of his thoughts and love, he, Mr. Feldwick, conceived this to be an authorization for him to read romances, speculative books, what not, by way of preparing himself to receive Holy Communion--after which history I never wondered that he had wandered out of the Father's House after the husks of spiritism. But it is very difficult to conceive him responsible. If reading qualified for heaven, how high up would he not be! But he seems rather born to accumulate all manner of heterogeneous information, and to echo the last 'Times' leader, the last clever paper in the 'Contemporary' or 'Fortnightly,' than to live a man's life of independent impression, expression, and will. I always hope that invincible ignorance and invincible prejudice may cover so much!"

And no wonder. What do you suppose my Mabel will say, grown tall and wise like her father, to a mother who knows more about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table than about the real kings and bygone personages of her own or any other country--a mother puzzled always as to whether it was Alfred the Great or Sir Humphrey Davy who burnt the cakes; a mother loving Glastonbury better than almost any spot of English ground, and believing devoutly that there Joseph of Arimathea planted his staff that became the winter thorn, blossoming at Christmas, "mindful of our Lord"; that there in the church-yard of the first hurdle-built church he and King Arthur and Queen Guinevere all mouldered away to dust; a mother who knew no more than sufficed to wield crayon and brush indifferently, and to love what she loves with her whole heart?

And I'd sooner Mabel should laugh even unkindly at her mother's ignorance than ever see her turning over the leaves of a set of books wherein her mother's hand had carefully cut away every allusion to Christian belief, every repetition of God's name--such a set as I saw Mrs. Malise scissoring when I called upon her last.

"These are books that are accumulating for Mill," she explained--"presents from one and another--and I'm cutting out every word that can suggest to him the idea of any life or any world than the only one of which he can gain a certainty through his senses; childish impressions are so tenacious, and I mean him to be utterly free from influence or superstition; open to believe or disbelieve in immortality when his faculties are trained, and he can judge evidence fairly. The Christian scheme seems to me to rest on a mass of unworthy fables; but he is not to be taught in the sense of my conclusion. I shall guard him from my atheism as carefully as from accepted forms of faith. Surely no more can be exacted from a mother than to rear a child unbiassed, and let him make his own experiences, shape his own belief. I believe there are text-books in which no reference to any possible personal Creator of the universe is to be found, and we hope such are in use at the Genevan kindergarten, and Mr. Malise means, in some of his leisure time, to write a series of stories for children in which there shall be no hint of the supernatural; stories that shall deal only with this living, breathing world we know; with no pretty fiction concerning a life and personages generations of men have invented details for"--and I--

I seemed to move among a world of ghosts, And feel myself the shadow of a dream.

But Geneva and these dreary story-books are two or three years off, let us hope. Meanwhile baby and I are grown very fond of the patient, lonely little man, and I have him here as often as Johanna is pleased to bring him. Great comfort, I see and hear, he has in Mabel's large, sunny day nursery, gay with birds and pictures, well stocked with playthings, and possessing an extraordinary wooden construction which our little guest beholds with the eye of faith, naming it rapturously gee-gee, and worshipping it as the king of beasts. When we are alone at dinner I have the mites down for a few minutes at dessert, and it is really pathetic to watch little Malaise's shy delight at getting a little fruit and an innocent sweet or two.

THE LABURNUMS, } HENLEY-ON-THAMES, } July 16, 1876. }

Changed quarters, you see, my Susie. It was so cold all June I thought we should be able to hold out until the end of the session at No. 18; but July came in flaming; so more for Mabel's sake than our own we've taken a pretty villa here at pretty Henley, for six weeks, and then we're off for Biarritz, where we mean to settle ourselves comfortably, and thence explore, at our leisure, all the lovely yet almost unknown near-by country. The grandpapa paternal has written begging that we'll leave Mabel, whom he calls "Tramp No. 3, and too small for the work," at Castle Starched-stiff-O; but Tramps 1 and 2 think they couldn't possibly fare on comfortably without that small golden head bobbing along beside them, up the hills and down the dales. Nurse is even more gypsyish than her master and mistress, and Mabel has spent the greater part of all her waking hours since she was two months old out of doors; so I think we shall always have in her the hardiest of small comrades.

Miss Hedges goes with us, and we mean, she and I, to bring back between us the entire Basque country in our portfolios.

"I'm thankful we're going to a region of picturesque men," says Ronayne, "for I think my lot in life likely to be a little less afflictive than it was last year. I don't much mind leading contrary minded horses up and down by the hour, coaxing suspicious or aggressive goats; I might even put another bull as savage as that fellow at Twickenham through his paces; but as to posing myself, in any possible fashion, even as a snoring shepherd, please to consider, ladies, that it's not down in our summer programme.

"Talk of the miseries of a man with a literary wife! What are they, I should like to be told, beside those of the unlucky mortal who's married a 'fair artist,' and can never so much as yawn in peace again, without being perpetuated in the act?"

"I had an eye to business when I married you, sir!" I retort. "You see you're a fine, tall, well-made animal, and since I own you, why should I go pay away my money for some other model who wouldn't be half so good-looking, and whom I couldn't frighten so well into minding me? Not pose indeed! Perhaps you would even choose to be bow-legged if so you could escape doing your duty? And I think you're maliciously trying to get stout. In our rides lately, I notice you puff a good deal if we have a bit of a race, and you're really getting a quite perceptible little bulge!"

Last summer when she was with us I fainted at some horrible tale or other. She came into the room where I lay stretched flat upon the floor, too miserable to speak, but conscious again. I must do her the justice to say she had heard there was no serious cause for my condition; but her first exclamation was,

"Oh, Lilian, what a color you are! Blue-white, ghastly, your face all drawn, pinched--magnificent! Let me see your hands and nails. Ah, capital! Capital! Poor little Lilian! But if you must faint, what a chance for me! I couldn't think how I was to get the right tint for my dying soldier. I never saw any one dead or wounded, and I am much too stolid ever to faint myself. Crossing the channel I took my hand-mirror and studied my face when I was desperately sick--but it was all green and pathos--no good! But your color's the very thing--only you get pink so fast! Oh, Lilian, if ever you faint again, have me called the very instant you feel yourself going off!"

This may be called devotion to one's work? But grand work she's going to do. She's full of genius, and has only to get over the niminy-piminy-izing of the South Kensington School, and work abroad a few years, to have a far more justly grounded fame than Rosa Bonheur's.

The food-reforming trio are gone from the associate household. "The Food-Regenerator" has not the circulation it deserves. Its editor threw up a secretaryship that was profitable, but cramping to a soaring, unmercenary spirit. So the emoluments of the journal were insufficient for the club life, and they've retired to a poor lodging where that weary white cat, I suppose, is trying to keep the heroic little man and all her hungry progeny--ravens, I of course meant to say, only I'd called their mother a cat!--on broad beans and porridge and next to nothing a week, and do the work of an office-boy besides!

The third member of the trio, the young girl who told me she was to be a "healer," has had a sad fate. She had, it seems, some liabilities to lung disease which she determined to starve out; so the great rations of bran bread and prunes, which distressed Ronayne at the dinner-party, dwindled, months ago, to two or three ounces of bread daily, and a little fruit--the quantity becoming so small that her mother piteously declared they could not understand how she lived at all.

Reducing her food day by day, she went, in June, to Aberystwith for some weeks. While there, she fell asleep while reading one afternoon in a cave on the coast, and when she wakened it was night, the rain falling heavily, the tide risen so that all egress from the cave was cut off, and she a prisoner. At that season of the year there was no danger beyond that of fright and exposure to damp and chill so many hours; for the water only rises high in the cave during great storms; but even if she had been told this, who remembers or reasons clearly in such sudden, awful moments? But she came out so soon as morning and the ebbing water released her, walked the two or three miles back to her lodging, told her story with apparent calmness, and before night was a raving maniac, so wild and uncontrollable that her family were obliged to place her in a lunatic asylum, and as yet there is nothing favorable to report in her case.

Mrs. Stainton still at Bournemouth, but writing often either to Miss Hedges or to me. In one of her last notes she says, "Do you remember that little story I told you of Ste. Colette, the Saint who was walled up? I think of her so often, so anxiously; I think, I almost think, it will come to that--walling up, I'm afraid not the sanctity?--with me. What a harbor it looks--the cloistered life! And there never seemed to be any place for me in the world. Everything has turned to ashes in my grasp and on my lips. Perhaps it was that the religious life was always calling me. I repeat P?re La Cordaire's saying over and over to myself, 'When we Frenchmen become religious, we do it meaning to be religious up to the neck.'

"I should not enter an active order. I have not the strength. But the contemplative ones draw me, draw me. Pray for me!"

Mrs. Stainton, Sybarite of Sybarites, a Carmelite, a poor Clare sleeping on a plank, washing herself with cold water and sand, living on begged bits, bad herrings, and limp cabbages! Shall we indeed see that?

Susie! Susie! what an ending I must give my letter. Little Malaise is dead!

"Have you read the papers to-day, Lil?" Ronayne asked me as he was dressing for dinner two days ago.

"No, they're so stupid these days; nothing but Wimbledon and padding. Why? Is there anything to-day?"

"No, no; nothing," he answered, and though I thought his manner a little odd, I had forgotten all about it later when Archdeacon Ryder, who was dining with us, suddenly asked:

"Did you notice the account of that painful accident in Westbourne Grove in this morning's 'News'? Those terrible perambulators! I wish they could be abolished. Maid servants' arms were stouter in my day. This stupid German nurse seems to have got dazed, or was staring everywhere but where her business lay. An only child, the paper stated, an editor's, but I don't remember the name. It was not one familiar to me. Did you know it?"

"I've heard it," Ronayne answered, and would have changed the subject, but I broke in:

"Oh, Ronayne, a German nurse! Can anything have happened to Mrs. Malise's baby? You needn't be silent. Oh, I'm sure it's he!"

And then it all came out--the fact that the child was killed while his nurse was trying to wheel him across the road in Westbourne Grove--but Ronayne wouldn't have any details told me.

The poor little man! My own baby's age, and such a sweet-tempered, patient little fellow! What a life! To come where he had but grudging welcome, to have no real mother, no warm little places of fond sunshine, and to go away from all this world's possibilities in that sudden cruelty! It wrung my heart, the hardness of it all. But could I really grieve, remembering how chill was the brief life, and remembering, above all, the scheme that was to make of him, so helpless and undefended, a spiritual outcast and foundling?

And since I saw his mother--I went yesterday, having first sacked Henley of white flowers, heliotrope, and fragrant leaves--and found her unshaken in composure, untouched by any sense of duty missed--since then I think I have been only glad that the little soul has taken flight.

Very white and peaceful he looked lying in his crib, and I heaped my flowers all about him.

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