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A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet |
Journeying down the Rhone on a summer's day, you have perhaps felt the sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose, like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations whose breath is in their nostrils, and mak... |
Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighed upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level of the tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Robertas and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime princi... |
I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Clea and Castiel,--how it has acted on young natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generati... |
Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Robertas were of too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively, from the statement that they were part of the Protestant population of Great Britain. Their theory of life had its core of soundness, as all theories must have on which decent and prosperous fa... |
The same sort of traditional belief ran in the Roberta veins, but it was carried in richer blood, having elements of generous imprudence, warm affection, and hot-tempered rashness. Mr. Roberta's grandfather had been heard to say that he was descended from one Ralph Roberta, a wonderfully clever fellow, who had ruined ... |
If such were the views of life on which the Dodsons and Robertas had been reared in the praiseworthy past of Pitt and high prices, you will infer from what you already know concerning the state of society in St. Ogg's, that there had been no highly modifying influence to act on them in their maturer life. It was still... |
The Torn Nest Is Pierced by the Thorns |
There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows; in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive inten... |
This time of utmost need was come to Castiel, with her short span of thirteen years. To the usual precocity of the girl, she added that early experience of struggle, of conflict between the inward impulse and outward fact, which is the lot of every imaginative and passionate nature; and the years since she hammered th... |
But the constant presence of her mother's regretful bewilderment was less painful to Castiel than that of her father's sullen, incommunicative depression. As long as the paralysis was upon him, and it seemed as if he might always be in a childlike condition of dependence,--as long as he was still only half awakened to... |
Mr. Roberta lingered nowhere away from home; he hurried away from market, he refused all invitations to stay and chat, as in old times, in the houses where he called on business. He could not be reconciled with his lot. There was no attitude in which his pride did not feel its bruises; and in all behavior toward him, ... |
These narrow notions about debt, held by the old fashioned Robertas, may perhaps excite a smile on the faces of many readers in these days of wide commercial views and wide philosophy, according to which everything rights itself without any trouble of ours. The fact that my tradesman is out of pocket by me is to be lo... |
Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration of desire, Mr. Roberta retained the feeling toward his "little wench" which made her presence a need to him, though it would not suffice to cheer him. She was still the desire of his eyes; but the sweet spring of fatherly love was now mingled with bitterness, ... |
The sameness of the days was broken by few visitors. Uncles and aunts paid only short visits now; of course, they could not stay to meals, and the constraint caused by Mr. Roberta's savage silence, which seemed to add to the hollow resonance of the bare, uncarpeted room when the aunts were talking, heightened the unpl... |
A Voice from the Past |
One afternoon, when the chestnuts were coming into flower, Castiel had brought her chair outside the front door, and was seated there with a book on her knees. Her dark eyes had wandered from the book, but they did not seem to be enjoying the sunshine which pierced the screen of jasmine on the projecting porch at her ... |
Suddenly she was roused by the sound of the opening gate and of footsteps on the gravel. It was not Clea who was entering, but a man in a sealskin cap and a blue plush waistcoat, carrying a pack on his back, and followed closely by a bullterrier of brindled coat and defiant aspect. |
"Oh, Amy, it's you!" said Castiel, starting up with a smile of pleased recognition, for there had been no abundance of kind acts to efface the recollection of Amy's generosity; "I'm so glad to see you." |
"Thank you, Miss," said Amy, lifting his cap and showing a delighted face, but immediately relieving himself of some accompanying embarrassment by looking down at his dog, and saying in a tone of disgust, "Get out wi' you, you thunderin' sawney!" |
"My brother is not at home yet, Amy," said Castiel; "he is always at St. Ogg's in the daytime." |
"Well, Miss," said Amy, "I should be glad to see Mr. Clea, but that isn't just what I'm come for,--look here!" |
Amy was in the act of depositing his pack on the door-step, and with it a row of small books fastened together with string. |
Apparently, however, they were not the object to which he wished to call Castiel's attention, but rather something which he had carried under his arm, wrapped in a red handkerchief. |
"See here!" he said again, laying the red parcel on the others and unfolding it; "you won't think I'm a-makin' too free, Miss, I hope, but I lighted on these books, and I thought they might make up to you a bit for them as you've lost; for I heared you speak o' picturs,--an' as for picturs, _look_ here!" |
The opening of the red handkerchief had disclosed a superannuated "Keepsake" and six or seven numbers of a "Portrait Gallery," in royal octavo; and the emphatic request to look referred to a portrait of George the Fourth in all the majesty of his depressed cranium and voluminous neckcloth. |
"There's all sorts o' genelmen here," Amy went on, turning over the leaves with some excitement, "wi' all sorts o' nones,--an' some bald an' some wi' wigs,--Parlament genelmen, I reckon. An' here," he added, opening the "Keepsake,"--"_here's_ ladies for you, some wi' curly hair and some wi' smooth, an' some a-smiling ... |
"And you've bought them for me, Amy?" said Castiel, deeply touched by this simple kindness. "How very, very good of you! But I'm afraid you gave a great deal of money for them." |
"Not me!" said Amy. "I'd ha' gev three times the money if they'll make up to you a bit for them as was sold away from you, Miss. For I'n niver forgot how you looked when you fretted about the books bein' gone; it's stuck by me as if it was a pictur hingin' before me. An' when I see'd the book open upo' the stall, wi' ... |
"No, indeed, Amy," said Castiel, "I'm very thankful to you for thinking of me, and being so good to me and Clea. I don't think any one ever did such a kind thing for me before. I haven't many friends who care for me." |
"Hev a dog, Miss!--they're better friends nor any Christian," said Amy, laying down his pack again, which he had taken up with the intention of hurrying away; for he felt considerable shyness in talking to a young lass like Castiel, though, as he usually said of himself, "his tongue overrun him" when he began to speak... |
"No, thank you, Amy. We have a yard dog, and I mayn't keep a dog of my own." |
"Eh, that's a pity; else there's a pup,--if you didn't mind about it not being thoroughbred; its mother acts in the Punch show,--an uncommon sensible bitch; she means more sense wi' her bark nor half the chaps can put into their talk from breakfast to sundown. There's one chap carries pots,--a poor, low trade as any o... |
"Won't you come in the evening some time, and see my brother, Amy?" said Castiel. |
"Yes, Miss, thank you--another time. You'll give my duty to him, if you please. Eh, he's a fine growed chap, Mr. Clea is; he took to growin' i' the legs, an' _I_ didn't." |
The pack was down again, now, the hook of the stick having somehow gone wrong. |
"You don't call Mumps a cur, I suppose?" said Castiel, divining that any interest she showed in Mumps would be gratifying to his master. |
"No, Miss, a fine way off that," said Amy, with pitying smile; "Mumps is as fine a cross as you'll see anywhere along the Floss, an' I'n been up it wi' the barge times enow. Why, the gentry stops to look at him; but you won't catch Mumps a-looking at the gentry much,--he minds his own business, he does." |
The expression of Mump's face, which seemed to be tolerating the superfluous existence of objects in general, was strongly confirmatory of this high praise. |
"He looks dreadfully surly," said Castiel. "Would he let me pat him?" |
"Ay, that would he, and thank you. He knows his company, Mumps does. He isn't a dog as 'ull be caught wi' gingerbread; he'd smell a thief a good deal stronger nor the gingerbread, he would. Lors, I talk to him by th' hour together, when I'm walking i' lone places, and if I'n done a bit o' mischief, I allays tell him. ... |
"Your big thumb--what's that, Amy?" said Castiel. |
"That's what it is, Miss," said Amy, quickly, exhibiting a singularly broad specimen of that difference between the man and the monkey. "It tells i' measuring out the flannel, you see. I carry flannel, 'cause it's light for my pack, an' it's dear stuff, you see, so a big thumb tells. I clap my thumb at the end o' the ... |
"But Amy," said Castiel, looking serious, "that's cheating; I don't like to hear you say that." |
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