The Seaboard Parish, Complete - George MacDonald

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of it, and there, slow and stiff as he had risen, he lay down again. Once more I was astride of a long narrow stone. And now I found that it was an ancient gravestone which I knew well in a certain Sussex churchyard, the top of it carved into the rough resemblance of a human skeleton—that of a man, tradition said, who had been killed by a serpent that came out of a bottomless pool in the next field. How long I sat there I do not know; but at last I saw the faint gray light of morning begin to appear in front of me. The horse of death had carried me eastward. The dawn grew over the top of a hill that here rose against the horizon. But it was a wild dreary dawn—a blot of gray first, which then stretched into long lines of dreary yellow and gray, looking more like a blasted and withered sunset than a fresh sunrise. And well it suited that waste, wide, deserted churchyard, if churchyard I ought to call it where no church was to be seen—only a vast hideous square of graves. Before me I noticed especially one old grave, the flat stone of which had broken in two and sunk in the middle. While I sat with my eyes fixed on this stone, it began to move; the crack in the middle closed, then widened again as the two halves of the stone were lifted up, and flung outward, like the two halves of a folding door. From the grave rose a little child, smiling such perfect contentment as if he had just come from kissing his mother. His little arms had flung the stones apart, and as he stood on the edge of the grave next to me, they remained outspread from the action for a moment, as if blessing the sleeping people. Then he came towards me with the same smile, and took my hand. I rose, and he led me away over another broken wall towards the hill that lay before us. And as we went the sun came nearer, the pale yellow bars flushed into orange and rosy red, till at length the edges of the clouds were swept with an agony of golden light, which even my dreamy eyes could not endure, and I awoke weeping for joy.

      This waking woke my wife, who said in some alarm:

      “What is the matter, husband?”

      So I told her my dream, and how in my sleep my gladness had overcome me.

      “It was this little darling that set you dreaming so,” she said, and turning, put the baby in my arms.

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      I will not attempt to describe the astonishment of the members of our household, each in succession, as the news of the child spread. Charlie was heard shouting across the stable-yard to his brother:

      “Harry, Harry! Mamma has got a new baby. Isn’t it jolly?”

      “Where did she get it?” cried Harry in return.

      “In the parsley-bed, I suppose,” answered Charlie, and was nearer right than usual, for the information on which his conclusion was founded had no doubt been imparted as belonging to the history of the human race.

      But my reader can easily imagine the utter bewilderment of those of the family whose knowledge of human affairs would not allow of their curiosity being so easily satisfied as that of the boys. In them was exemplified that confusion of the intellectual being which is produced by the witness of incontestable truth to a thing incredible—in which case the probability always is, that the incredibility results from something in the mind of the hearer falsely associated with and disturbing the true perception of the thing to which witness is borne.

      Nor was the astonishment confined to the family, for it spread over the parish that Mrs. Walton had got another baby. And so, indeed, she had. And seldom has baby met with a more hearty welcome than this baby met with from everyone of our family. They hugged it first, and then asked questions. And that, I say, is the right way of receiving every good gift of God. Ask what questions you will, but when you see that the gift is a good one, make sure that you take it. There is plenty of time for you to ask questions afterwards. Then the better you love the gift, the more ready you will be to ask, and the more fearless in asking.

      The truth, however, soon became known. And then, strange to relate, we began to receive visits of condolence. O, that poor baby! how it was frowned upon, and how it had heads shaken over it, just because it was not Ethelwyn’s baby! It could not help that, poor darling!

      “Of course, you’ll give information to the police,” said, I am sorry to say, one of my brethren in the neighbourhood, who had the misfortune to be a magistrate as well.

      “Why?” I asked.

      “Why! That they may discover the parents, to be sure.”

      “Wouldn’t it be as hard a matter to prove the parentage, as it would be easy to suspect it?” I asked. “And just think what it would be to give the baby to a woman who not only did not want her, but who was not her mother. But if her own mother came to claim her now, I don’t say I would refuse her, but I should think twice about giving her up after she had once abandoned her for a whole night in the open air. In fact I don’t want the parents.”

      “But you don’t want the child.”

      “How do you know that?” I returned—rather rudely, I am afraid, for I am easily annoyed at anything that seems to me heartless—about children especially.

      “O! of course, if you want to have an orphan asylum of your own, no one has a right to interfere. But you ought to consider other people.”

      “That is just what I thought I was doing,” I answered; but he went on without heeding my reply—

      “We shall all be having babies left at our doors, and some of us are not so fond of them as you are. Remember, you are your brother’s keeper.”

      “And my sister’s too,” I answered. “And if the question lies between keeping a big, burly brother like you, and a tiny, wee sister like that, I venture to choose for myself.”

      “She ought to go to the workhouse,” said the magistrate—a friendly, good-natured man enough in ordinary—and rising, he took his hat and departed.

      This man had no children. So he was—or was not, so much to blame. Which? I say the latter.

      Some of Ethelwyn’s friends were no less positive about her duty in the affair. I happened to go into the drawing-room during the visit of one of them—Miss Bowdler.

      “But, my dear Mrs. Walton,” she was saying, “you’ll be having all the tramps in England leaving their babies at your door.”

      “The better for the babies,” interposed I, laughing.

      “But you don’t think of your wife, Mr. Walton.”

      “Don’t I? I thought I did,” I returned dryly.

      “Depend upon it, you’ll repent it.”

      “I hope I shall never repent of anything but what is bad.”

      “Ah! but, really! it’s not a thing to be made game of.”

      “Certainly not. The baby shall be treated with all due respect in this house.”

      “What a provoking man you are! You know what I mean well enough.”

      “As well as I choose to know—certainly,” I answered.

      This lady was one of my oldest parishioners, and took liberties for which she had no other justification, except indeed an unhesitating belief in the superior rectitude of whatever came into her own head can be counted as one. When she was gone, my wife turned to me with a half-comic, half-anxious look, and said:

      “But it would be rather alarming, Harry, if this were to get abroad, and we couldn’t go out at the door in the morning without being in danger of stepping on a baby on the door-step.”

      “You might as well have said, when you were going to be married, ‘If God should send me twenty children, whatever should I do?’ He who sent us this one can surely prevent any more from coming than he wants to come. All that we have to think of is

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