Produced by David Garcia, Jonathan Ingram and Distributed Proofreaders [Illustration: Hester at her piano.] WEIGHED AND WANTING BY GEORGE MACDONALD CONTENTS. I. Bad Weather II. Father, Mother and Son III. The Magic Lantern IV. Hester alone V. Truly the Light is sweet VI. The Aquarium VII. Amy Amber VIII. Cornelius and Vavasor IX. Songs and Singers X. Hester and Amy XI. At Home XII. A Beginning XIII. A private Exhibition XIV. Vavasor and Hester XV. A small Failure XVI. The Concert Room XVII. An uninvited Guest XVIII. Catastrophe XIX. Light and Shade XX. The Journey XXI. Mother and Daughter XXII. Gladness XXIII. Down the Hill XXIV. Out of the Frying pan XXV. Was it into the Fire? XXVI. Waiting a Purpose XXVII. Major H. G. Marvel XXVIII. The Major and Vavasor XXIX. A brave Act XXX. In another Light XXXI. The Major and Cousin Helen's Boys XXXII. A distinguished Guest XXXIII. Courtship in earnest XXXIV. Calamity XXXV. In London XXXVI. A Talk with the Major XXXVII. Rencontres XXXVIII. In the House XXXIX. The Major and the Small-pox XL. Down and down XLI. Difference XLII. Deep calleth unto Deep XLIII. Deliverance XLIV. On the Way up XLV. More yet XLVI. Amy and Corney XLVII. Miss Vavasor XLVIII. Mr. Christopher XLIX. An Arrangement L. Things at Home LI. The Return LII. A heavenly Vision LIII. A sad Beginning LIV. Mother and Son LV. Miss Dasomma and Amy LVI. The sick Room LVII. Vengeance is Mine LVIII. Father and Daughter-in-law LIX. The Message LX. A birthday Gift CHAPTER I. BAD WEATHER. It was a gray, windy noon in the beginning of autumn. The sky and the sea were almost of the same color, and that not a beautiful one. The edge of the horizon where they met was an edge no more, but a bar thick and blurred, across which from the unseen came troops of waves that broke into white crests, the flying manes of speed, as they rushed at, rather than ran towards the shore: in their eagerness came out once more the old enmity between moist and dry. The trees and the smoke were greatly troubled, the former because they would fain stand still, the latter because it would fain ascend, while the wind kept tossing the former and beating down the latter. Not one of the hundreds of fishing boats belonging to the coast was to be seen; not a sail even was visible; not the smoke of a solitary steamer ploughing its own miserable path through the rain-fog to London or Aberdeen. It was sad weather and depressing to not a few of the thousands come to Burcliff to enjoy a holiday which, whether of days or of weeks, had looked short to the labor weary when first they came, and was growing shorter and shorter, while the days that composed it grew longer and longer by the frightful vitality of dreariness. Especially to those of them who hated work, a day like this, wrapping them in a blanket of fog, whence the water was every now and then squeezed down upon them in the wettest of all rains, seemed a huge bite snatched by that vague enemy against whom the grumbling of the world is continually directed out of the cake that by every right and reason belonged to them. For were they not born to be happy, and how was human being to fulfill his destiny in such circumstances? There are men and women who can be happy in any--even in such circumstances and worse, but they are rare, and not a little better worth knowing than the common class of mortals--alas that they _will_ be common! _content_ to be common they are not and cannot be. Among these exceptional mortals I do not count such as, having secured the corner of a couch within the radius of a good fire, forget the world around them by help of the magic lantern of a novel that interests them: such may not be in the least worth knowing for their disposition or moral attainment--not even although the noise of the waves on the sands, or the storm in the chimney, or the rain on the windows but serves to deepen the calm of their spirits. Take the novel away, give the fire a black heart; let the smells born in a lodging-house kitchen invade the sitting-room, and the person, man or woman, who can then, on such a day, be patient with a patience pleasant to other people, is, I repeat, one worth knowing--and such there are, though not many. Mrs. Raymount, half the head and more than half the heart of a certain family in a certain lodging house in the forefront of Burcliff, was one of such. It was not a large family, yet contained perhaps as many varieties of character and temper as some larger ones, with as many several ways of fronting such a misfortune--for that is what poor creatures, the slaves of the elements, count it--as rainy weather in a season concerning which all men agree that it ought to be fine, and that something is out of order, giving ground of complaint, if it be not fine. The father met it with tolerably good humor; but he was so busy writing a paper for one of the monthly reviews, that he would have kept the house had the day been as fine as both the church going visitors, and the mammon-worshipping residents with income depending on the reputation of their weather, would have made it if they could, nor once said _by your leave_; therefore he had no credit, and his temper must pass as not proven. But if you had taken from the mother her piece of work--she was busy embroidering a lady's pinafore in a design for which she had taken colors and arrangement from a peacock's feather, but was disposing them in the form of a sun which with its rays covered the stomacher, the deeper tints making the shadow between the golden arrows--had you taken from her this piece of work, I say, and given her nothing to do instead, she would yet have looked and been as peaceful as she now looked, for she was not like Doctor Doddridge's dog that did not know who made him. A longish lad stood in the bow window, leaning his head on the shutter, in a mood of smouldering rebellion against the order of things. He was such a mere creature of moods, that individual judgments of his character might well have proved irreconcilable. He had not yet begun by the use of his will--constantly indeed mistaking impulse for will--to blend the conflicting elements of his nature into one. He was therefore a man much as the mass of flour and raisins, etc., when first put into the bag, is a plum-pudding; and had to pass through something analogous to boiling to give him a chance of becoming worthy of the name he would have arrogated. But in his own estimate of himself he claimed always the virtues of whose presence he was conscious in his good moods letting the bad ones slide, nor taking any account of what was in them. He substituted forgetfulness for repudiation, a return of good humor for repentance, and at best a joke for apology. Mark, a pale, handsome boy of ten, and Josephine, a rosy girl of seven, sat on the opposite side of the fire, amusing themselves with a puzzle. The gusts of wind, and the great splashes of rain on the glass, only made them feel the cosier and more satisfied. "Beastly weather!" remarked Cornelius, as with an effort half wriggle, half spring, he raised himself perpendicular, and turned towards the room rather than the persons in it. "I'm sorry you don't like it, Cornie," said his elder sister, who sat beside her mother trimming what promised to be a pretty bonnet. A concentrated effort to draw her needle through an accumulation of silken folds seemed to take something off the bloom of the smile with which she spoke. "Oh, it's all very well for girls!" returned Cornelius. "You don't do anything worth doing; and besides you've got so many things you like doing, and so much time to do them in, that it's all one to you whether you go out or stay at home. But when a fellow has but a miserable three weeks and then back to a rot of work he cares no more for than a felon for the treadmill, then it is rather hard to have such a hole made in it! Day after day, as sure as the sun rises--if he does rise--of weather as abominable as rain and wind can make it!" "My dear boy!" said his mother without looking up. "Oh, yes, mother! I know! You're so good you would have had Job himself take it coolly. But I'm not like you. Only you needn't think me so very--what you call it! It's only a breach in the laws of nature I'm grumbling at. I don't mean anything to offend you." "Perhaps you mean more than you think," answered his mother with a deep-drawn breath, which, if not a sigh, was very nearly one. "I should be far more miserable than any weather could make me, not to be able to join in the song of the three holy children." "I've heard you say that before, mother," said the youth, in a tone that roused his sister's anger; for much that the mother let pass was by the daughter for her sake resented. "But you see," he went on, "the three holy children, as you call them, hadn't much weather of any sort where they sung their song. Precious tired one gets of it before the choir's through with it!" "They would have been glad enough of some of the weather you call beastly," said Hester, again pulling through a stiff needle, this time without any smile, for sometimes that brother was more than she could bear. "Oh, I dare say! But then, you see, they knew, when they got out, they wouldn't have to go back to a beastly bank, where notes and gold all day went flying about like bats--nothing but the sight and the figures of it coming their way!" The mother's face grew very sad as it bent over her work. The youth saw her trouble. "Mother, don't be vexed with a fellow," he said more gently. "I wasn't made good like you." "I think you were right about the holy children," she said quietly. "What!" exclaimed Cornelius. "Mother, I never once before heard you say I was right about any mortal thing! Come, this is pleasant! I begin to think strong ale of myself! I don't understand it, though." "Shall I tell you? Would you care to know what I mean?" "Oh, yes, mother! if you want to tell me." "I think you were right when you implied it was the furnace that made them sing about the world outside of it: one can fancy the idea of the frost and the snow and the ice being particularly pleasant to them. And I am afraid, Cornelius, my dear son, you need the furnace to teach you that the will of God, even in weather, is a thing for rejoicing in, not for abusing. But I dread the fire for your sake, my boy!" "I should have thought this weather and the bank behind it furnace enough, mother!" he answered, trying to laugh off her words. "It does not seem to be," she said, with some displeasure. "But then," she added with a sigh, "you have not the same companion that the three holy children had." "Who was that?" rejoined Cornelius, for he had partly forgotten the story he knew well enough in childhood. "We will not talk about him now," answered his mother. "He has been knocking at your chamber-door for some time: when he comes to the furnace-door, perhaps you will open that to him." Cornelius returned no answer; he felt his mother's seriousness awkward, and said to himself she was unkind; why couldn't she make some allowance for a fellow? He meant no harm! He was still less patient with his mother's not very frequent admonitions, since going into the bank, for, much as he disliked it, he considered himself quite a man of the world in consequence. But he was almost as little capable of slipping like a pebble among other pebbles, the peculiar faculty of the man of the world, as he was of perceiving the kind of thing his mother cared about--and that not from moral lack alone, but from dullness and want of imagination as well. He was like the child so sure he can run alone that he snatches his hand from his mother's and sets off through dirt and puddles, so to act the part of the great personage he would consider himself. With all her peace of soul, the heart of the mother was very anxious about her son, but she said no more to him now: she knew that the shower bath is not the readiest mode of making a child friendly with cold water. Just then broke out the sun. The wind had at last blown a hole in the clouds, and through that at once, as is his wont, and the wont of a greater light than the sun, he shone. "Come! there's something almost like sunshine!" said Cornelius, having for a few moments watched the light on the sands. "Before it goes in again, as it's sure to do in five minutes at the farthest, get on your bonnet, Hester, and let's have an attempt at a walk." Before Hester could answer came a sudden spatter of rain on the window. "There! I told you so! That's always the way! Just my luck! For me to set my heart on a thing is all one with being disappointed of it." "But if the thing was not worth setting your heart on?" said Hester, speaking with forced gentleness. "What does that signify? The thing is that your heart is set on it. What you think nothing other people may yet be bold enough to take for something." "Well, at least, if I had to be disappointed, I should like it to be in something that would be worth having." "Would you now?" returned Cornelius spitefully. "I hope you may have what you want. For my part I don't desire to be better than my neighbor. I think it downright selfish." "Do you want to be as good as your neighbor, Cornie?" said his mother, looking up through a film of tears. "But there is a more important question than that," she went on, having waited a moment in vain for an answer, "and that is, whether you are content with being as good as yourself, or want to be better." "To tell you the truth, mother, I don't trouble my head about such things. Philosophers are agreed that self consciousness is the bane of the present age: I mean to avoid it. If you had let me go into the army, I might have had some leisure for what you call thought, but that horrible bank takes everything out of a fellow. The only thing it leaves is a burning desire to forget it at any cost till the time comes when you must endure it again. If I hadn't some amusement in between, I should cut my throat, or take to opium or brandy. I wonder how the governor would like to be in my place!" Hester rose and left the room, indignant with him for speaking so of his father. "If your father were in your place, Cornelius," said his mother with dignity, "he would perform the duties of it without grumbling, however irksome they might be." "How do you know that, mother? He was never tried." "I know it because I know him," she answered. Cornelius gave a grunt. "If you think it hard," his mother resumed, "that you have to follow a way of life not of your own choosing, you must remember that you never could be got to express a preference for one way over another, and that your father had to strain every nerve to send you to college--to the disadvantage, for a time at least, of others of the family. I am sorry to have to remind you also that you did not make it any easier for him by your mode of living while there." "I didn't run up a single bill!" cried Cornelius with indignation; "and my father knows it!" "He does; but he knows also that your cousin Robert did not spend above two-thirds of what you did, and made more of his time too." "He was in _rather_ a different set," sneered the youth. "And you know," his mother went on, "that his main design in placing you in your uncle's bank was that you might gain such a knowledge of business as will be necessary to the proper management of the money he will leave behind him. When you have gained that knowledge, there will be time to look farther, for you are young yet." Now his father's money was the continuous occasion of annoyance to Cornelius, for it was no secret from his family how he meant to dispose of it. He intended, namely, to leave it under trustees, of whom he wished his son to be one until he married, when it was to be divided equally among his children. This arrangement was not agreeable to Cornelius, who could not see, he said, what advantage in that case he had from being the eldest of the family. He broke out in a tone of expostulation, ready to swell into indignant complaint. "Now, mother," he said "do you think it fair that I should have to look after the whole family as if they were my own?" This was by no means his real cause of complaint, but he chose to use it as his grievance for the present. "You will have the other trustees to advise with," said his mother. "It need not weigh on you very heavily." "Well, of course, I could do better with it than anybody out of the family." "If you have your father's love of fair play, Cornelius, you will. What you can do to that end now is to make yourself thoroughly acquainted with business." "A bank's not the place to get the knowledge of business necessary for that sort of thing." "Your father has reasons for preferring a general to any special knowledge. The fitness resulting will depend upon yourself. And when you marry you will, as you know, be rid of the responsibility. So far your father and you are of one mind; he does not think it fair that a married man should be burdened with any family but his own." "What if I should marry before my father's death?" "I hope, indeed, you will, Cornelius. The arrangements your father has made is one of provision against the unlikely. When you are married, I don't doubt he will make another, to meet the new circumstances." "Now," said Cornelius to himself, "I do believe if I was to marry money--as why shouldn't I?--my father would divide my share amongst the rest, and not give me a farthing!" Full of the injury of the idea, he rose and left the room. His mother, poor woman, wept as he vanished. She dared not allow herself to ask why she wept--dared not allow to herself that her first-born was not a lovely thought to her--dared not ask where he could have got such a mean nature--so mean that he did not know he was mean. Although the ill-humor in which he had been ever since he came was by himself attributed to the weather, and had been expended on the cooking, on the couches, on the beds, and twenty different things that displeased him, he had nevertheless brought it with him; and her experience gave her the sad doubt that the cause of it might lie in his own conduct--for the consciousness may be rendered uneasy without much rousing of the conscience proper. He had always been fitful and wayward, but had never before behaved so unpleasantly. Certainly his world had not improved him for his home. Yet amongst his companions he bore the character of the best-natured fellow in the world. To them he never showed any of the peevishness arising from mental discomfort, but kept it for those who loved him a thousand times better, and would have cheerfully parted with their own happiness for his. He was but one of a large herd of youths, possessing no will of their own, yet enjoying the reputation of a strong one; for moved by liking or any foolish notion, his pettiness made a principle of, he would be obstinate; and the common philosophy always takes obstinacy for strength of will, even when it springs from utter inability to will against liking. Mr. Raymount knew little of the real nature of his son. The youth was afraid of his father--none the less that he spoke of him with so little respect. Before him he dared not show his true nature. He knew and dreaded the scorn which the least disclosure of his feeling about the intended division of his father's money would rouse in him. He knew also that his mother would not betray him--he would have counted it betrayal--to his father; nor would any one who had ever heard Mr. Raymount give vent to his judgment of any conduct he despised, have wondered at the reticence of either of them. Whether in his youth he would have done as well in a position like his son's as his worshipping wife believed, may be doubtful; but that he would have done better than his son must seem more than probable. CHAPTER II. FATHER, MOTHER, AND SON. Gerald Raymount was a man of an unusual combination of qualities. There were such contradictions in his character as to give ground for the suspicion, in which he certainly himself indulged, that there must be in him at least one strain not far removed from the savage, while on the other hand there were mental conditions apparently presupposing ages of culture. At the university he had indulged in large reading outside the hedge of his required studies, and gained thus an acquaintance with and developed a faculty in literature destined to stand him in good stead. Inheriting earthly life and a history--nothing more--from a long line of ancestors, and a few thousand pounds--less than twenty--from his father, who was a country attorney, a gentle, quarrelsome man, who yet never, except upon absolute necessity, carried a case into court, he had found, as his family increased, that his income was not sufficient for their maintenance in accustomed ease. With not one expensive personal taste between them, they had neither of them the faculty for saving money--often but another phrase for doing mean things. Neither husband nor wife was capable of _screwing_. Had the latter been, certainly the free-handedness of the former would have driven her to it; but while Mrs. Raymount would go without a new bonnet till an outcry arose in the family that its respectability was in danger, she could not offer two shillings a day to a sempstress who thought herself worth half-a-crown; she could not allow a dish to be set on her table which was not as likely to encourage hunger as allay it; neither because some richer neighbors gave so little, would she take to herself the spiritual fare provided in church without making a liberal acknowledgment in carnal things. The result of this way of life was the deplorable one that Mr. Raymount was compelled to rouse himself, and, from the chair of a somewhat self-indulgent reader of many books, betake himself to his study-table, to prove whether it were not possible for him to become the writer of such as might add to an income showing scantier every quarter. Here we may see the natural punishment of liberal habits; for this man indulging in them, and, instead of checking them in his wife, loving her the more that she indulged in them also, was for this reason condemned to labor--the worst evil of life in the judgment of both the man about Mayfair and the tramp of the casual ward. But there are others who dare not count that labor an evil which helps to bring out the best elements of human nature, not even when the necessity for it outlasts any impulse towards it, and who remember the words of the Lord: "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." For Gerald Raymount, it made a man of him--which he is not who is of no service to his generation. Doubtless he was driven thereto by necessity; but the question is not whether a man works upon more or less compulsion, but whether the work he is thus taught to do he makes good honest work for which the world is so much the better. In this matter of work there are many first that shall be last. The work of a baker for instance must stand higher in the judgment of the universe than that of a brewer, let his ale be ever so good. Because the one trade brings more money than the other the judgment of this world counts it more honorable, but there is the other judgment at hand. In the exercise of his calling Raymount was compelled to think more carefully than before, and thus not only his mind took a fresh start, but his moral and spiritual nature as well. He slid more and more into writing out the necessities and experiences of his own heart and history, and so by degrees gained power of the only true kind--that, namely, of rousing the will, not merely the passions, or even the aspirations of men. The poetry in which he had disported himself at college now came to the service of his prose, and the deeper poetic nature, which is the prophetic in every man, awoke in him. Till after they had lived together a good many years the wife did not know the worth of the man she had married, nor indeed was he half the worth when she married him that he had now grown to be. The longer they lived the prouder she grew of him and of his work; nor was she the less the practical wisdom of the house that she looked upon her husband as a great man. He was not a great man--only a growing man; yet was she nothing the worse for thinking so highly of him; the object of it was not such that her admiration caused her to deteriorate. The daughter of a London barrister, of what is called a good family, she had opportunity of knowing something of what is called life before she married, and from mere dissatisfaction had early begun to withdraw from the show and self-assertion of social life, and seek within herself the door of that quiet chamber whose existence is unknown to most. For a time she found thus a measure of quiet--not worthy of the name of rest; she had not heeded a certain low knocking as of one who would enter and share it with her; but now for a long time he who thus knocked had been her companion in the chamber whose walls are the infinite. Why is it that men and women will welcome any tale of love, devotion, and sacrifice from one to another of themselves, but turn from the least hint at the existence of a perfect love at the root of it all? With such a message to them, a man is a maundering prophet. Is it not that their natures are yet so far from the ideal, the natural, the true, that the words of the prophet rouse in them no vision, no poorest perception of spiritual fact? Helen Raymount was now a little woman of fifty, clothed in a sweet dignity, from which the contrast she disliked between her plentiful gray hair, and her great, clear, dark eyes, took nothing; it was an opposition without discord. She had but the two daughters and two sons already introduced, of whom Hester was the eldest. Wise as was the mother, and far-seeing as was the father, they had made the mistake common to all but the wisest parents, of putting off to a period more or less too late the moment of beginning to teach their children obedience. If this be not commenced at the first possible moment, there is no better reason why it should be begun at any other, except that it will be the harder every hour it is postponed. The spiritual loss and injury caused to the child by their waiting till they fancy him fit to reason with, is immense; yet there is nothing in which parents are more stupid and cowardly, if not stiff-necked, than this. I do not speak of those mere animal parents, whose lasting influence over their progeny is not a thing to be greatly desired, but of those who, having a conscience, yet avoid this part of their duty in a manner of which a good motherly cat would be ashamed. To one who has learned of all things to desire deliverance from himself, a nursery in which the children are humored and scolded and punished instead of being taught obedience, looks like a moral slaughter-house. The dawn of reason will doubtless help to develop obedience; but obedience is yet more necessary to the development of reason. To require of a child only what he can understand the reason of, is simply to help him to make himself his own God--that is a devil. That some seem so little injured by their bad training is no argument in presence of the many in whom one can read as in a book the consequences of their parents' foolishness. Cornelius was a youth of good abilities, and with a few good qualities. Naturally kind-hearted, yet full of self and its poor importance, he had an admiration of certain easy and showy virtues. He was himself not incapable of an unthinking generosity; felt pity for picturesque suffering; was tempted to kindness by the prospect of a responsive devotion. Unable to bear the sight of suffering, he was yet careless of causing it where he would not see it; incapable of thwarting himself, he was full of weak indignation at being thwarted; supremely conceited, he had yet a regard for the habits and judgments of men of a certain stamp which towards a great man would have been veneration, and would have elevated his being. But the sole essentials of life as yet discovered by Cornelius were a good carriage, good manners, self-confidence, and seeming carelessness in spending. That the spender was greedy after the money he yet scorned to work for, made no important difference in Cornelius's estimate of him. In a word, he fashioned a fine gentleman-god in his foolish brain, and then fell down and worshipped him with what worship was possible between them. To all home-excellence he was so far blind that he looked down upon it; the opinion of father or mother, though they had reared such a son as himself, was not to be compared in authority with that of Reginald Vavasor, who, though so poor as to be one of his fellow-clerks, was heir apparent to an earldom. CHAPTER III. THE MAGIC LANTERN. Cornelius, leaving his mother, took refuge with his anger in his own room. Although he had occupied it but a fortnight the top of its chest of drawers was covered with yellow novels--the sole kind of literature for which Cornelius cared. Of this he read largely, if indeed his mode of swallowing could be called reading; his father would have got more pleasure out of the poorest of them than Cornelius could from a dozen. And now in this day's dreariness, he had not one left unread, and was too lazy or effeminate or prudent to encounter the wind and rain that beset the path betwixt him and the nearest bookshop. None of his father's books had any attraction for him. Neither science, philosophy, history, nor poetry held for him any interest. A drearier soul in a drearier setting could hardly be imagined than the soul of this youth in that day's weather at Burcliff. Does a reader remark, "Well, wherein was the poor fellow to blame? No man can make himself like this or like that! The thing that is a passion to one is a bore to another! Some with both ear and voice have no love for music. Most exquisite of sonatas would not to them make up for a game of billiards! They cannot help it: they are made so"?--I answer, It is true no one can by an effort of the will care for this or that; but where a man cares for nothing that is worth caring for, the fault must lie, not in the nature God made, but in the character the man himself has made and is making. There is a moral reason why he does not and cannot care. If Cornelius had begun at any time, without other compulsion than the urging within him, to do something he knew he ought to do, he would not now have been the poor slave of circumstances he was--at the call and beck of the weather--such, in fact, as the weather willed. When men face a duty, not merely will that duty become at once less unpleasant to them, but life itself will _immediately_ begin to gather interest; for in duty, and in duty only, does the individual begin to come into real contact with life; therein only can he see what life is, and grow fit for it. He threw himself on his bed--for he dared not smoke where his father was--and dozed away the hours till lunch, then returned and dozed again, with more success, till tea time. This was his only resource against the unpleasantness of the day. The others were nowise particularly weighed down by it, and the less that Cornelius was so little in the room, haunting the window with his hands in his pockets. When tea was over, he rose and sauntered once more to the window, the only outlook he ever frequented. "Hullo!" he cried, turning from it quickly. "I say, Hester! here's a lark! the sun's shining as if his grandmother had but just taught him how! The rain's over, I declare--at least for a quarter of an hour! Come, let's have a walk. We'll go and hear the band in the castle-gardens. I don't think there's any thing going on at the theatre, else I would take you there." The sight of the sun revives both men and midges. "I would rather walk," said Hester. "It is seldom one sees good acting in the provinces. At best there is but one star. I prefer a jewel to a gem, and a decent play to a fine part." "Hester," said Cornelius with reproof, "I believe you think it a fine thing to be hard to please! I know a fellow that calls it a kind of suicide. To allow a spot to spoil your pleasure in a beauty is to be too fond of perfection." "No, Corney," answered his sister, "that is hardly my position. What I would say is rather, that one point of excellence is not enough to make a whole beautiful--a face, or a play--or a character." Hester had a rather severe mode of speaking, especially to this brother, which, if it had an end, failed of it. She was the only person in the house who could ever have done any thing with him, and she lost her advantage--let me use a figure--by shouting to him from a distance, instead of coming close up to him and speaking in a whisper. But for that she did not love him enough, neither was she yet calm enough in herself to be able for it. I doubt much, however, if he would have been in any degree permanently the better for the best she could have done for him. He was too self-satisfied for any redemption. He was afraid of his father, resented the interference of his mother, was as cross as he pleased with his sister, and cared little whether she was vexed with him or not. And he regarded the opinion of any girl, just because she was a girl, too little to imagine any reflection on himself in the remark she had just made. While they talked he had been watching the clouds. "Do go, Hester," he said. "I give you my word it will be a fine evening." She went to put on her hat and cloak, and presently they were in the street. It was one of those misty clearings in which sometimes the day seems to gather up his careless skirts, that have been sweeping the patient, half-drowned world, as he draws nigh the threshold of the waiting night. There was a great lump of orange color half melted up in the watery clouds of the west, but all was dreary and scarce consolable, up to the clear spaces above, stung with the steely stars that began to peep out of the blue hope of heaven. Thither Hester kept casting up her eyes as they walked, or rather somehow her eyes kept travelling thitherward of themselves, as if indeed they had to do with things up there. And the child that cries for the moon is wiser than the man who looks upon the heavens as a mere accident of the earth, with which none but _unpractical_ men concern themselves. But as she walked gazing at "an azure disc, shield of tranquility," over her head, she set her foot down unevenly, and gave her ankle a wrench. She could not help uttering a little cry. "There now, Hester!" said Cornelius, pulling her up like a horse that stumbled, "that's what you get by your star-gazing! You are always coming to grief by looking higher than your head!" "Oh, please, stop a minute, Corney," returned Hester, for the fellow would have walked on as if nothing had happened. "My ankle hurts so!" "I didn't know it was so bad as that!" he answered stopping. "There! take my arm." "Now I can go on again," she said, after a few moments of silent endurance. "How stupid of me!--on a plain asphalt pavement!" He might have excused her with the remark that just on such was an accidental inequality the more dangerous. "What bright, particular star were you worshipping now?" he asked scoffingly. "What do you mean by that?" she rejoined in a tone affected by her suffering, which thence, from his lack of sympathy, he took for one of crossness. "You know quite well," he answered roughly, "that you are always worshipping some paragon or other--for a while, till you get tired of her, and then throw her away for another!" Hester was hurt and made no answer. There was some apparent ground for the accusation. She was ready to think extravagantly of any new acquaintances that pleased her. Frank and true and generous, it was but natural she should read others by herself; just as those in whom is meanness or guile cannot help attributing the same to the simplest. Nor was the result unnatural either, namely, that, when a brief intercourse had sufficed to reveal a nature on the common level, it sufficed also to chill the feeling that had rushed to the surface to welcome a friend, and send the new-found floating far away on the swift ebb of disappointment. Any whom she treats thus, called her, of course, fitful and changeable, whereas it was in truth the unchangeableness of her ideal and her faithfulness to it that exposed her to blame. She was so true, so much in earnest, and, although gentle, had so little softness to drape the sterner outlines of her character that she was looked upon with dislike by not a few of her acquaintance. "That again comes of looking too high, and judging with precipitation," resumed Cornelius, urged from within to be unpleasant--and the rather that she did not reply. He was always ready to criticise, and it was so much the easier for him that he had not the least bent towards self-criticism. For the latter supposes some degree of truth in the inward parts, and that is obstructive to the indulgence of the former tendency. As to himself, he would be hand and glove at a moment's notice with any man who looked a gentleman, and made himself agreeable; nor whatever he might find him to be, was he, so long as the man was not looked down upon by others, the least inclined to avoid his company because of moral shadiness. "A man can take care of himself!" he would say. Hester stopped again. "Corney," she said, "my ankle feels so weak! I am walking in terror of twisting it again. You must let me stand a bit. I shall be all right in a minute." "I'm very sorry," rejoined her brother disagreeably. "We must take the first fly we meet, and go home again. It's just my luck! I thought we were going to have some fun!" They stood silent, she looking nowhere, and he staring now in this direction, now in that. "Hullo! what's this?" he cried, his gaze fixing on a large building opposite. "The Pilgrim's Progress! The Rake's Progress! Ha! ha! As edifying as amusing, no doubt! I suppose the Pilgrim and the Rake are contrasted with each other. But how, I wonder! Is it a lecture or a magic lantern? Both, I dare say! Let's go in and see! I can't read any more of the bill. We may at least sit there till your ankle is better. 'Admission--front seats sixpence.' Come along. We may get a good laugh, who knows?--a thing cheap at any price--for our sixpence!" "I don't mind," said Hester, and they crossed the road. It was a large, dingy, dirty, water-stained and somewhat dilapidated hall to which the stone stair, ascending immediately from the door, led them; and it would have looked considerably worse but for the obscurity belonging to the nature of the entertainment, through which it took some pains to discover the twenty-five or thirty people that formed the company present. It was indeed a dim, but not therefore, a very religious light that pervaded rather than overcame the gloom, issuing chiefly from the crude and discordant colors of a luminous picture on a great screen at the farther end of the hall. There an ill-proportioned figure, presenting, although his burden was of course gone some time, a still very humpy Christian, was shown extended on the ground, with his sword a yard beyond his reach, and Apollyon straddling across the whole breadth of the way, and taking him in the stride. But that huge stride was the fiend's sole expression of vigor; for, although he held a flaming dart ready to strike the poor man dead, his own dragon countenance was so feebly demoniacal that it seemed unlikely he would have the heart to drive it home. The lantern from which proceeded the picture, was managed by a hidden operator, evidently from his voice, occasionally overheard, a mere boy; and an old man, like a broken-down clergyman, whose dirty white neckcloth seemed adjusted on a secret understanding of moral obliquity, its knot suggesting a gradual approach to the last position a knot on the neck can assume, kept walking up and down the parti-colored gloom, flaunting a pretense of lecture on the scenes presented. Whether he was a little drunk or greatly in his dotage, it was impossible to determine without a nearer acquaintance. If I venture to give a specimen of his mode of lecturing, it will be seen that a few lingering rags of scholastic acquirement, yet fluttered about the poor fellow. "Here you behold the terrible battle between Christian--or was it Faithful?--I used to know, but trouble has played old Hookey with my memory. It's all here, you know"--and he tapped the bald table-land of his head--"but somehow it ain't handy as it used! In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up: in the evening it is cut down and withereth. Man that is in honor and abideth not, is like the beast that perisheth--but there's Christian and Apollyon, right afore you, and better him than me. When I was a young one, and that wasn't yesterday, I used to think, but that was before I could read, that Apollyon was one and the same with Bonaparty--Nappoleon, you know. And I wasn't just so far wrong neither, as I shall readily prove to those of my distinguished audience who have been to college like myself, and learned to read Greek like their mother tongue. For what is the very name Apollyon, but an occult prophecy concerning the great conqueror of Europe! nothing can be plainer! Of course the first letter, N, stands for nothing--a mere veil to cover the prophecy till the time of revealing. In all languages it is the sign of negation--_no_, and _none_, and _never_, and _nothing_; therefore cast it away as the nothing it is. Then what have you left but _apoleon_! Throw away another letter, and what have you but _poleon_! Throw away letter after letter, and what do you get but words--_Napoleon, apoleon, poleon, oleon, leon, eon_, or, if you like, _on_! Now these are all Greek words--and what, pray, do they mean? I will give you a literal translation, and I challenge any Greek scholar who may be here present to set me right, that is, to show me wrong: Napoleon the destroyer of cities, being a destroying lion! Now I should like to know a more sure word of prophecy than that! Would any one in the company oblige me? I take that now for an incontrovertible"--he stammered over this word--"proof of the truth of the Bible. But I am wandering from my subject, which error, I pray you, ladies and gentlemen, to excuse, for I am no longer what I was in the prime of youth's rosy morn--come, I must get on! Change the slide, boy; I'm sick of it. I'm sick of it all. I want to get home and go to bed." He maundered on in this way, uttering even worse nonsense than I have set down, and mingling with it soiled and dusty commonplaces of religion, every now and then dwelling for a moment or two upon his own mental and physical declension from the admirable being he once was. He reached the height of his absurdity in describing the resistance of the two pilgrims to the manifold temptations of Vanity Fair, which he so set forth as to take from Christian and Faithful the smallest possible appearance of merit in turning their backs upon them. Cornelius was in fits of laughter, which he scarcely tried to choke. When the dreary old soul drew near where he sat, smelling abominably of strong drink, the only thing that kept his merriment within bounds was the dread that the man might address him personally, and so draw upon him the attention of the audience. Very different was the mood of Hester. To the astonishment of Cornelius, when at last they rose to go, there were tears in her eyes. The misery of the whole thing was too dreadful to her! The lantern itself must, she thought, have been made when the invention was in its infancy, and its pictured slides seemed the remnants of various outworn series. Those of the Rake's Progress were something too hideous and lamentable to be dwelt upon. And the ruinous, wretched old man did not merely seem to have taken to this as a last effort, but to have in his dotage turned back upon his life course, and resumed a half-forgotten trade--or perhaps only an accomplishment of which he had made use for the benefit of his people when he was a clergyman--to find that the faculty for it he once had, and on which he had reckoned to carry him through, had abandoned him. Worst of all to the heart of Hester was the fact that so few people were present, many of them children at half-price, some of whom seemed far from satisfied with the amusement offered them. When the hall and the gas--but that would not be much--and the advertising were paid for, what would the poor old scrag-end of humanity, with his yellow-white neckcloth knotted hard under his left ear, have over
{'title': 'Weighed and Wanting by George MacDonald', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}