Alice stopped in the middle of her supper, laid down
her knife and fork, and burst out crying.
“What is the matter?” said Richard,
alarmed.
“I can’t bear to think of that money!
I must go and look for it!” sobbed Alice.
Richard laughed, the first time for days.
“Alice,” he said, “the money was
well spent: I got my own way with it!”
As she ate and drank, a little colour rose in her
face, and on Richard fell a shadow of the joy of his
creator, beholding his work, and seeing it good.
A DOOR OPENED IN HEAVEN.
Some men hunt their fellows to prey upon them, and
fill their own greedy maws; Richard hunted and caught
his brother and sister that he might feed them with
the labour of his hands. I fear there was therefore
a little more for the mother to guzzle, but it is
of small consequence whether those that go down the
hill arrive at the foot a week sooner or later.
To Arthur and Alice, their new-found brother, strong
and loving, was as an angel from high heaven.
It was no fault in Richard that he did not find a
correspondent comfort in them. It did in truth
comfort him to see them improve in looks and in strength;
but they had not many thoughts to share with him—had
little coin for spiritual commerce. Even their
religion, like that of most who claim any, had little
shape or colour. What there was of it was genuine,
which made it infinitely precious, but it was much
too weak to pass over to the help of another.
Divine aid, however, of a different sort, was waiting
for him.
Hitherto he had heard little or no music. The
little was from the church-organ, and his not unjustifiable
prejudice against its surroundings, had disinclined
him to listen when it spoke. The intellect of
the youth had come to the front, and the higher powers
to which art is ministrant, had remained much undeveloped,
shut in darkened palace-rooms, where a ray of genial
impulse not often entered. For the highest of
those powers, the imagination, without which no discovery
of any grandeur is made even in the realms of science,
dwells in the halls of aspiration, outlook, desire,
and hope, and round the windows and filling the air
of these, hung the dry dust-cloud of Richard’s
negation. But when Love, with her attendant Sorrow,
came, they opened wide all the doors and windows of
them to what might enter. Hitherto all his poetry,
even what he produced, had come to Richard at second-hand,
that is, from the inspiration of books; its flowers
were of the moon, not of the sun; they sprang under
the pale reflex light of other souls: for genuine
life of any and every sort, the immediate inspiration
of the Almighty is the one essential, and for that,
Sorrow and Love now made a way.
First of all, the lower winds and sidelong rays of
art, all from the father of lights, crept in, able
now to work for his perfect will. For when a
man has once begun to live, then have the thoughts
and feelings of other men, and every art in which
those thoughts or feelings are embodied by them, a
sevenfold power for the strengthening and rousing of
the divine nature in him. And as the divine nature
is roused, the diviner nature, the immediate God,
enters to possess it.
