The Seaboard Parish, Complete. George MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ do you really mean, papa,” she said “that you will take me to the Atlantic?”

      “If you will only oblige me by getting Well enough to go as soon as possible.”

      The poor child half rose on her elbow, but sank back again with a moan, which I took for a cry of pain. I was beside her in a moment.

      “My darling! You have hurt yourself!”

      “O no, papa. I felt for the moment as if I could get up if I liked. But I soon found that I hadn’t any back or legs. O! what a plague I am to you!”

      “On the contrary, you are the nicest plaything in the world, Connie. One always knows where to find you.”

      She half laughed and half cried, and the two halves made a very bewitching whole.

      “But,” I went on, “I mean to try whether my dolly won’t bear moving. One thing is clear, I can’t go without it. Do you think you could be got on the sofa to-day without hurting you?”

      “I am sure I could, papa. I feel better today than I have felt yet. Mamma, do send for Susan, and get me up before dinner.”

      When I went in after a couple of hours or so, I found her lying on the conch, propped up with pillows. She lay looking out of the window on the lawn at the back of the house. A smile hovered about her bloodless lips, and the blue of her eyes, though very gray, looked sunny. Her white face showed the whiter because her dark brown hair was all about it. We had had to cut her hair, but it had grown to her neck again.

      “I have been trying to count the daisies on the lawn,” she said.

      “What a sharp sight you must have, child!”

      “I see them all as clear as if they were enamelled on that table before me.”

      I was not so anxious to get rid of the daisies as some people are. Neither did I keep the grass quite so close shaved.

      “But,” she went on, “I could not count them, for it gave me the fidgets in my feet.”

      “You don’t say so!” I exclaimed.

      She looked at me with some surprise, but concluding that I was only making a little of my mild fun at her expense, she laughed.

      “Yes. Isn’t it a wonderful fact?” she said.

      “It is a fact, my dear, that I feel ready to go on my knees and thank God for. I may be wrong, but I take it as a sign that you are beginning to recover a little. But we mustn’t make too much of it, lest I should be mistaken,” I added, checking myself, for I feared exciting her too much.

      But she lay very still; only the tears rose slowly and lay shimmering in her eyes. After about five minutes, during which we were both silent—

      “O papa!” she said, “to think of ever walking out with you again, and feeling the wind on my face! I can hardly believe it possible.”

      “It is so mild, I think you might have half that pleasure at once,” I answered..

      And I opened the window, let the spring air gently move her hair for one moment, and then shut it again. Connie breathed deep, and said after a little pause—

      “I had no idea how delightful it was. To think that I have been in the way of breathing that every moment for so many years and never thought about it!”

      “It is not always just like that in this climate. But I ought not to have made that remark when I wanted to make this other: that I suspect we shall find some day that the loss of the human paradise consists chiefly in the closing of the human eyes; that at least far more of it than people think remains about us still, only we are so filled with foolish desires and evil cares, that we cannot see or hear, cannot even smell or taste the pleasant things round about us. We have need to pray in regard to the right receiving of the things of the senses even, ‘Lord, open thou our hearts to understand thy word;’ for each of these things is as certainly a word of God as Jesus is the Word of God. He has made nothing in vain. All is for our teaching. Shall I tell you what such a breath of fresh air makes me think of?”

      “It comes to me,” said Connie, “like forgiveness when I was a little girl and was naughty. I used to feel just like that.”

      “It is the same kind of thing I feel,” I said—“as if life from the Spirit of God were coming into my soul: I think of the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Wind and spirit are the same word in the Greek; and the Latin word spirit comes even nearer to what we are saying, for it is the wind as breathed. And now, Connie, I will tell you—and you will see how I am growing able to talk to you like quite an old friend—what put me in such a delight with Mr. Shepherd’s letter and so exposed me to be teased by mamma and you. As I read it, there rose up before me a vision of one sight of the sea which I had when I was a young man, long before I saw your mamma. I had gone out for a walk along some high downs. But I ought to tell you that I had been working rather hard at Cambridge, and the life seemed to be all gone out of me. Though my holidays had come, they did not feel quite like holidays—not as holidays used to feel when I was a boy. Even when walking along those downs with the scents of sixteen grasses or so in my brain, like a melody with the odour of the earth for the accompaniment upon which it floated, and with just enough of wind to stir them up and set them in motion, I could not feel at all. I remembered something of what I had used to feel in such places, but instead of believing in that, I doubted now whether it had not been all a trick that I played myself—a fancied pleasure only. I was walking along, then, with the sea behind me. It was a warm, cloudy day—I had had no sunshine since I came out. All at once I turned—I don’t know why. There lay the gray sea, but not as I had seen it last, not all gray. It was dotted, spotted, and splashed all over with drops, pools, and lakes of light, of all shades of depth, from a light shimmer of tremulous gray, through a half light that turned the prevailing lead colour into translucent green that seemed to grow out of its depths—through this, I say, to brilliant light, deepening and deepening till my very soul was stung by the triumph of the intensity of its molten silver. There was no sun upon me. But there were breaks in the clouds over the sea, through which, the air being filled with vapour, I could see the long lines of the sun-rays descending on the waters like rain—so like a rain of light that the water seemed to plash up in light under their fall. I questioned the past no more; the present seized upon me, and I knew that the past was true, and that nature was more lovely, more awful in her loveliness than I could grasp. It was a lonely place: I fell on my knees, and worshipped the God that made the glory and my soul.”

      While I spoke Connie’s tears had been flowing quietly.

      “And mamma and I were making fun while you were seeing such things as those!” she said pitifully.

      “You didn’t hurt them one bit, my darling—neither mamma nor you. If I had been the least cross about it, as I should have been when I was as young as at the time of which I was thinking, that would have ruined the vision entirely. But your merriment only made me enjoy it more. And, my Connie, I hope you will see the Atlantic before long; and if one vision should come as brilliant as that, we shall be fortunate indeed, if we went all the way to the west to see that only.”

      “O papa! I dare hardly think of it—it is too delightful. But do you think we shall really go?”

      “I do. Here comes your mamma—I am going to say to Shepherd, my dear, that I will take his parish СКАЧАТЬ