>>> YOU ARE VIEWING A 200 LINE SAMPLE OF EBOOK# E05003 <<< TITLE: THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE V2 AUTHOR: GEORGE MACDONALD EBOOK: E05003 (O'Briens Book Cellar) THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE. By George MacDonald, LL.D. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL II. THOMAS WINGFOLD, CURATE. CHAPTER I. RACHEL AND HER UNCLE. It was nearly dark when they arrived again at the lodge. Rachel opened the gate for them. Without even a THANK YOU, they rode out. She stood for a moment gazing after them through the dusk, then turned with a sigh, and went into the kitchen, where her uncle sat by the fire with a book in his hand. "How I should like to be as well made as Miss Lingard!" she said, seating herself by the lamp that stood on the deal-table. "It MUST be a fine thing to be strong and tall, and able to look this way and that without turning all your body along with your head, like the old man that gathers the leeches in Wordsworth's poem. And what it must be to sit on a horse as she does! You should have seen her go flying like the very wind across the park! You would have thought she and her horse were cut out of the same piece. I'm dreadfully envious, uncle." "No, my child; I know you better than you do yourself. There is a great difference between _I_ WISH _I_ WAS and _I_ SHOULD LIKE TO BE--as much as between a grumble and a prayer. To be content is not to be satisfied. No one ought to be satisfied with the imperfect. It is God's will that we should bear, and contentedly--because in hope, looking for the redemption of the body. And we know he has a ready servant who will one day set us free." "Yes, uncle; I understand. You know I enjoy life: how could I help it and you with me? But I don't think I ever go through the churchyard without feeling a sort of triumph. 'There's for you!' I say sometimes to the little crooked shadow that creeps along by my side across the graves. 'You'll soon be caught and put inside!'--But how am I to tell I mayn't be crooked in the next world as well as this? That's what troubles me at times. There might be some necessity for it, you know." "Then will there be patience to bear it there also; that you may be sure of. But I do not fear. It were more likely that those who have not thanked God, but prided themselves that they were beautiful in this world, should be crooked in the next. It would be like Dives and Lazarus, you know. But God does what is best for them as well as for us. We shall find one day that beauty and riches were the best thing for those to whom they were given, as deformity and poverty were the best for us." "I wonder what sort of person I should have been if I had had a straight spine!" said Rachel laughing. "Hardly one so dear to your deformed uncle," said her companion in ugliness. "Then I'm glad I am as I am," rejoined Rachel. "This conscious individuality of ours," said Polwarth, after a thoughtful silence, "is to me an awful thing--the one thing that seems in humanity like the onliness of God. Mine terrifies me sometimes--looking a stranger to me--a limiting of myself--a breaking in upon my existence--like a volcanic outburst into the blue Sicilian air. When it thus manifests itself, I find no refuge but the offering of it back to him who thought it worth making. I say to him: 'Lord, it is thine, not mine;--see to it, Lord. Thou and thy eternity are mine, Father of Jesus Christ.'" He covered his eyes with his hands, and his lips grew white, and trembled. Thought had turned into prayer, and both were silent for a space. Rachel was the first to speak. "I think I understand, uncle," she said. "I don't mind being God's dwarf. But I would rather be made after his own image; this can't be it. I should like to be made over again." "And if the hope we are saved by be no mockery, if St. Paul was not the fool of his own radiant imaginings, you will be, my child.--But now let us forget our miserable bodies. Come up to my room, and I will read you a few lines that came to me this morning in the park." "Won't you wait for Mr. Wingfold, uncle? He will be here yet, I think. It can't be ten o'clock. He always looks in on Saturdays as he goes home from his walk. I should like you to read them to him too. They will do him good, I know." "I would, my dear, willingly, if I thought he would care for them. But I don't think he would. They are not good enough verses. He has been brought up on Horace, and, I fear, counts the best poetry the neatest." "I think you must be mistaken there, uncle; I have heard him talk delightfully about poetry." "You must excuse me if I am shy of reading my poor work to any but yourself, Rachel. My heart was wo much in it, and the subject is so sacred--" "I am sorry you should think your pearls too good to cast before Mr. Wingfold, uncle," said Rachel, with a touch of disappointed temper. "Nay, nay, child," returned Polwarth, "that was not a good thing to say. What gives me concern is, that there is so much of the rough dirty shell sticking about them, that to show them would be to wrong the truth in them." Rachel seldom took long to repent. She came slowly to her uncle, where he stood with the lamp in his hand, looking in his face with a heavenly contrition, and saying nothing. When she reached him, she dropped on her knees, and kissed the hand that hung by his side. Her temper was poor Rachel's one sore-felt trouble. Polwarth stooped and kissed her on the forehead, raised her, and leading her to the stair, stood aside to let her go first. But when she had been naughty Rachel would never go before her uncle, and she drew back. With a smile of intelligence he yielded and led the way. But ere they had climbed to the top, Rachel heard Mr. Wingfold's step, and went down again to receive him. CHAPTER II. A DREAM. Invited to ascend, Wingfold followed Rachel to her uncle's room, and there, whether guided by her or not, the conversation presently took such a turn that at length, of his own motion, Polwarth offered to read his verses. From the drawer of his table he took a scratched and scored halfsheet, and--not in the most melodious of voices, yet in one whose harshness and weakness could not cover a certain refinement of spiritual tenderness--read as follows: Lord, hear my discontent: All blank I stand, A mirror polished by thy hand; Thy sun's beams flash and flame from me-- I cannot help it: here I stand, there he; To one of them I cannot say-- Go, and on yonder water play. Nor one poor ragged daisy can I fashion-- I do not make the words of this my limping passion. If I should say: Now I will think a thought, Lo! I must wait, unknowing, What thought in me is growing, Until the thing to birth is brought; Nor know I then what next will come From out the gulf of silence dumb. I am the door the thing did find To pass into the general mind; I cannot say I think-- I only stand upon the thought-well's brink; From darkness to the sun the water bubbles up-- I lift it in my cup. Thou only thinkest--I am thought; Me and my thought thou thinkest. Nought Am I but as a fountain spout From which thy water welleth out. Thou art the only One, the All in all. --Yet when my soul on thee doth call And thou dost answer out of everywhere, I in thy allness have my perfect share. While he read Rachel crept to his knee, knelt down, and laid her head upon it. If we are but the creatures of a day, yet surely were the shadow-joys of this miserable pair not merely nobler in their essence, but finer to the soul's palate than the shadow-joys of young Hercules Bascombe--Helen and horses and all! Poor Helen I cannot use for comparison, for she had no joy, save indeed the very divine, though at present unblossoming one of sisterly love. Still, and notwithstanding, if the facts of life are those of George Bascombe's endorsing--AND HE CAN PROVE IT--let us by all means learn and accept them, be they the worst possible. Meantime there are truths that ought to be facts, and until he has proved that there is no God, some of us will go feeling after him if haply we may find him, and in him the truths we long to find true. Some of us perhaps think we have seen him from afar, but we only know the better that in the mood wherein such as Bascombe are, they will never find him--which would no doubt be to them a comfort were it not for a laughter. And if he be such as their idea of what we think him, they ARE better without him. If, on the contrary, he be what some of us really think him, their not seeking him will not perhaps prevent him from finding them. From likeness of nature, community of feeling, constant intercourse, and perfect confidence, Rachel understood her uncle's verses with sufficient ease to enjoy them at once in part, and, for the rest, to go on thinking in the direction in which they would carry her; but Wingfold, in whom honesty of disposition had blossomed at last into honesty of action, after fitting pause, during which no word was spoken, said:-- <<< END OF SAMPLE... (THE FULL EBOOK HAS 308275 TOTAL CHARACTERS) >>>