Part 10

The good old Dame was not disposed to mar her act of genuine charity,--the adoption of an orphan,--by imprisoning his young limbs too early in the bonds of labour. She did not place him on the humble _stall_ to bend over the _last_, till she supposed he had reached the age of fourteen. The ten preceding years of his orphanage passed away in a course of happy quietude. The staid age of his venerated protectress forbade any outbreaks of juvenile buoyancy in her sedate presence; but in Joe's lonely wanderings through the fields and lanes, as well as in his silent readings of the pictured Scriptures, he found pleasures which abundantly repaid the irksomeness of occasional restraint. His simple heart danced with joy at each return of the gladsome Spring, when his beloved acquaintances, the wild flowers, shewed their beautiful faces by brook and hedgerow; and he became familiar with all their localities, and felt a glowing and mysterious rapture in the renewed survey of their glorious tints and delicate pencillings, long before he learnt their names.

The commencement of his apprenticeship was marked by an event of no less importance than his introduction to Toby Lackpenny,--the most learned tailor in the Isle of Axholme,--and a personage of such exalted merit, that we purpose to pluck a sprig of "immortal amaranth," by making the world acquainted with his separate history:--"but let that pass." Toby,--from the rich immensity--for such it seemed to Joe--of his "library,"--furnished the young disciple of St. Crispin with two books which completely fascinated him: they were--the immortal fables of "The Pilgrim's Progress" and "Robinson Crusoe,"--by the immortal toilers, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. Joe was assured by his new friend that Crusoe's adventures were no less veritable true than wonderful,--while the "Pilgrim" had a hidden and all-important meaning, which he must endeavour to discover, and apply to his own spiritual state as he went along.

During the season of his intense and enamoured pursuit of these absorbing studies, an incident occurred which produced some uneasiness both to teacher and disciple. Joe was seated, one evening, on a stool at the tailor's door, fervently engaged in his usual recreation,--the tailor meanwhile plying his needle,--when the clergyman of the village passing by, and observing the boy's studious deportment as something unusual, stepped towards him, and desired to know what he was so intent upon. Joe naturally felt some diffidence in returning an answer, and turned towards his friend on the shop-board with a glance that was meant to entreat his kind offices in the formation of a reply. But the tailor, to Joe's utter confusion, hung down his head doggedly, and struck his needle into a nether garment that lay upon his knees, with singular vehemence. In default of this expected help, Joe gave his two precious volumes, silently and resignedly, into the hands of the vicar,--a reverend gentleman held in deserved respect by his humble flock for the rigid purity of his morals, but of small skill in the waywardness of the human mind.

After a very few minutes' examination of the books, the spiritual overseer crimsoned with apparent displeasure, shook his head very expressively at the boy, and returning the volumes into his hands, assured him he was very sorry to see him so ill employed,--"for one of the books," he said, "contained only a foolish tale,--and the other was as whimsical a dream as ever ran through the brains of a fanatic." So saying, the well-intentioned, but ill-informed, teacher turned away,--leaving the boy to his own reflections, and the hot criticism of the tailor on what they had just heard from the village parson. These by no means led Joe into a coincidence with the vicar's way of thinking; and, whenever opportunity served, he was sure, as before, to be wandering, ideally, with the romantic and intrepid adventurer on the desert island, or to be found absorbed in the effort to penetrate the spiritual mysteries he had been directed to discover in the remaining volume whose enchanting imagery had captivated his young understanding. "A foolish tale,"--he could not conceive the narrative of the shipwrecked and eremite mariner to be: it was too full of sober earnestness, he thought, to be fantastic: it created before him a verisimilitude in which he himself lived all the wild yet truthful adventures of the cast-a-way seaman over again. And if he had not been told that the story of the Pilgrim was a parable, his simple and eager phantasy would have, primarily, set it down for a literal truth,--however after-reflection might have qualified his first conclusion.

But the accident of his evening's occupation having been scrutinised by the clergyman had not yet expended its influence on Joe's thoughts and feelings. On the first ensuing visit made by Dame Deborah to pay her tithes, she was solemnly admonished to forbid her godson's unprofitable studies, and to interdict his future association with the tailor. The good dame's reverence for her spiritual guide inclined her, at once, to yield obedience to his recommendation; more especially as she had for some time noted that the boy did not, as formerly, eagerly resort, at every leisure opportunity, to the old family Bible.

Accordingly, on her return home, she sharply reproved him for his neglect of the sacred book, and insisted that he should discontinue his communings at the tailor's cottage, and read no more of his books. Joe returned not a word in answer to the reproof of his aged mistress, for mingled gratitude, under a sense of her tender kindness, and reverence for her authority, rendered him incapable of disobeying her orders. He returned, dutifully, to the perusal of his first book; but though the rich variety of its histories, and the sublime interest of its matchless poetry, did not fail to keep alive his attention while he bent over its pages, yet, in the long hours of daily labour, his desire strongly thirsted for the more exciting intellectual draught of which he had lately partaken, and a dreary and monotonous feeling of weariness consumed his spirit. Dame Deborah little knew the evil she was doing when she bereaved her foster-child of his innocent pleasures. In the lapse of a few weeks she became sensible that it was not always wise to pursue the counsel even of the village parson too strictly.

Among the visiters to the dame's domicile, there had long been some who professed the tenets of Wesley,--the great heresiarch who drew his first breath in the Isle of Axholme. Of the peculiar doctrines set forth by this celebrated religious teacher, Joe, like Deborah herself, knew nought, save that the parson said they were "heresies." The sturdy intelligence of Dame Deborah led her to turn a deaf ear to all innovations in religion. She had been bred a strict church-woman, and never conceived the slightest idea of the fallibility of the orthodox and established Protestant faith. Her apprentices were not permitted to attend meeting or conventicle; and she steadfastly repelled and discouraged all attempts, on the part of her visiters, to introduce religious novelties in their daily gossip. But the restlessness and disquietude of his mind, now its faculties were once more without a fixed object of attachment, impelled Joe to discard, imperceptibly at first, the rules on religious matters, which had been tacitly observed by every member of the dame's household ever since he had entered it. With those who manifested a disposition to enlarge on the merits of the new religious system, he entered eagerly into discussion; and the result was, a determination to pay a secret attendance on one of the meetings of the sect, and thus form a judgment for himself.

A preacher of considerable rhetorical powers occupied the meeting-house pulpit, during his first stolen visits; and the skill with which passages from the book which had been his first source of instruction were quoted and applied, rivetted his attention and inflamed his fancy. The speaker gave illustrations of some of the patriarchal histories, and founded on them, and upon the sacrifices under the Mosaic law, such hypotheses as were exactly calculated to awe, and yet to lead captive, Joe's active imagination. To tell, in one sentence, the history of numberless hours of mental revolution, Joe brooded over these theories and their consequences while engaged at his daily labour, and repeated his secret visits to the meeting-house, until his young and earnest mind was filled with the one pervading idea that the only true happiness for the human soul was to be found in some sudden and ecstatic change to be received by what his new teachers called "an act of faith in the atonement."

From the period in which this conviction took entire hold of his judgment, the alteration in Joe's conduct was so decided as to become serious cause of alarm, even to the firm common-sense of Dame Deborah. He spurned the thought of any longer concealing his attendance at the sectarian meeting-house; and at every brief cessation from labour, as well as at prolonged hours in the night, and early in the morning, he was overheard in a weeping agony of prayer. His humble bed-room, an out-house, or the corner of a field, served the young devotee alike, for a place of "spiritual wrestling;" and whoever gave him an opportunity was sure to receive from Joe an earnest warning to "flee from the wrath to come!" Days,--weeks rolled on,--and the ardour of the lad's enthusiasm was approaching its meridian,--for he had given up himself so completely to its power, that not only did he consume the night more fully in prolonged acts of ascetic and almost convulsive devotion,--but his mind was so entirely wrapt up in the effort to "pray without ceasing,"--that he was scarcely conscious of what passed in the dame's cottage during the hours of work.

The visit of a "Revivalist" to the new religious community at Haxey thus found Joe fully prepared to hail the event as one fraught with unspeakable benefits. The narrow meeting-house was crammed with villagers attracted by the loud and unusual noises, and affected by the agonised looks and gestures, of their neighbours. Many of these stray visiters, in the language of the initiated, "came to scoff, but remained to pray." The "Revivalist" crept from form to form,--for the humble meeting-house was unhonoured with a pew,--urging the weeping and kneeling penitents to "press into mercy;" and pouring forth successive petitions for their salvation until the perspiration dropped from his brows like rain.

Joe was too intensely absorbed in the burning desire to obtain the immediate purification of his nature to be able to reflect, for a moment, on the question,--whether, in all this boisterous procedure, there was not an appalling violation of every principle of worship. And when the preacher approached the form at which he was kneeling, the workings of his spirit shook his whole frame with expectation. The preacher, at length, addressed him:--

"Believe, my young brother," said he, in a voice naturally musical, and rendered wonderfully influential by enthusiasm,--"believe, for the pardon of your sins!"

"Oh! I would believe in a moment, if I felt they were pardoned!" cried Joe, in all the earnestness of excitement.

"Nay, but you must believe first!" rejoined the preacher; "only believe that your sins are pardoned, and you will feel your burden gone!"

The boy's reason, for a moment, asserted its own majesty, at the broaching of this wild doctrine; and he returned an instant answer to the preacher which would have confounded a less practised casuist.

"That would be pardoning myself," he said: "I want the Lord to pardon me: if believing that my sins were forgiven, while I feel they are not, would produce a real pardon, I need never have asked the Almighty to perform the work."

"Ah, my dear young brother!" quickly replied the preacher,--"I waited, as you have, no doubt, for weeks and weeks, expecting some miracle to be performed for me; but I found, at last, that there was no other refuge but believing. You _must_ believe: _that_ is your only way! All the direction that the word gives you is, '_Believe_, and thou shalt be saved!' You have nothing else to do but to believe; and the moment you do believe--that moment you will be happy! Try it!"--and, so saying, the "Revivalist" hastened on to make proof of the efficacy of his wild notional catholicon upon the comfortless spirit of some less hesitating patient or penitent.

Joe's distress, when the preacher left him, became greater than ever. He felt fearful, on the one hand, of becoming a victim to self-deceit; and was horrified, on the other, with the terrible dread of losing his soul through the sin of unbelief. But the combat between his imagination and his understanding was one in which the former faculty had all the vantage-ground of his youthful age and his tendency to the marvellous,--and was immeasurably assisted by the overwhelming energy of his desire. The attainment of the new spiritual state had become his sole idea; and his reason succumbed beneath the combined strength of his wishes and the prurience of his ideality.

"The preacher says he has _tried_ believing, and it has made him happy; therefore, I will try to believe," said Joe to himself,--becoming mentally desperate with distracting fears.

He _did_ try; and the experiment produced,--as it could not fail to produce in such a mind, surrounded with such excitements,--a thrilling and ecstatic feeling; but yet, he doubted again, a few moments after! Thus, his intellect, all undisciplined and untutored as it had been, still revolted at the indignity of becoming the dupe of its own trickery. But the misery of doubt, and the pangs of spiritual condemnation, were more insupportable than the effort to impose upon himself the delusive assurance that he really possessed what he so ardently sought; and he, therefore, rushed to another act of desperate credence:--"I _will_ believe! I _do_ believe!" he wildly cried, at the full pitch of his voice, while the din and confusion of fifty persons praying aloud, at the same time, rendered his enthusiasm unnoticeable. At every new resurrection of his reason he thus drew afresh on the exorcism of his ideality, and allayed the troublous misgivings of the sterner faculty; so that, by the time the meeting was concluded, his reason had ceased to rebel,--and he went home, persuaded that he had attained the "new birth."

For some days, Joe dwelt in a frame of greater tranquillity than he had experienced since the commencement of his religious "awakenings." But the calm was a deceitful one; and was but the prelude to a more terrific tempest than had ever yet raged in the breast of the young victim to the ideal. Joe heard descriptions from the pulpit of the sectaries, of the unspeakable ecstasy of true believers; and reflected that his own feelings bore scarcely any resemblance to such highly-wrought pictures. Gradually, he felt it utterly impossible to conceal from himself the tormenting conviction that he had never received that amazing change of nature which he had been taught, so energetically and sanguinely, to expect as the fruit of his "act of faith." Instead of the "heavenly joy of assurance," which the preachers described,--Joe could not conceal from himself the fact that his nearest approaches to inward joy and calm,--fitful as they were,--resulted from the effort to _assure himself_; and this seemed too strained a mental state, he thought, to be termed "heavenly joy of assurance." Then, again, he was conscious that he had not the mental purity that he had heard described as one of the certain marks of regeneration. And this, soon, hurried him into a whirlpool of inward distraction;--for, instead of attributing the irritability and peevishness which now frequently agitated him to their real source,--the exhaustion of his nervous system by extreme asceticism,--the poor boy set them down, in his helpless and pitiable ignorance, to the inheritance of a nature that involved him, still, in the awful sentence of divine wrath. The tortures of disappointment thus augmented the distraction of doubt; and, at length, Joe was unable to quell his uneasiness for another moment by resorting to the act of self-delusion recommended by the "Revivalist,"--and called by him "the act of faith." Worn out, and jaded, with his daily, hourly, and almost momentary attempts to palm the fiction, anew, upon his understanding, Joe gave up the practice of "the act of faith" altogether, with a feeling of weariness and disgust and self-degradation too bitter for description!

The prostration of the youth's corporeal strength accompanied this distressing mental conflict. Dame Deborah began to watch the hectic flush on the cheek of her beloved foster-child with an aching heart; and, for the first time, entertained fears, that Time, so far from curing him of his errors, would only serve to mark his early grave. She would have interdicted his future attendance on the meetings of his religious associates; but the drooping state of his health deterred her from crossing his will, lest she should hasten the catastrophe which she began, in sadness and sorrow, to anticipate.

The good old dame finally resolved to try the efficacy of a change of scene and circumstances, as means of aiding the youth's recovery. Joe had never yet crossed the bounds of Haxey parish since he entered it; but the Dame being in the habit of attending the weekly market at Gainsborough, the nearest trading town, she determined that he should become a partner in her future journies. Her project was as sensible as it was benevolent. The new excitements created for the lad by these little expeditions could not fail to produce an issue in some degree salutary to his mind. And yet the relief he experienced might have been but temporary, had not a medicine,--seemingly hazardous,--but yet, signally well adapted for his disordered mental condition,--been opportunely disclosed from the womb of Circumstance,--the great productive source of new thinkings, new resolves, and new courses of action, which, in mockery of ourselves, we so often attribute to our own "will" and "intelligence."

Mounted on a stout grey mare, with his aged mistress behind, on an old-fashioned pillion-seat, Joe set forth on his first journey with emotions of natural curiosity; and, in the course of his progress, began to regain some degree of his constitutional cheerfulness. Eight miles of country, beheld for the first time, though its landscape was only of an ordinary and monotonous character, presented a world of objects for reflection to Joe's impressible spirit. The season was an early spring; and albeit the young equestrian felt some slight alarm when the animal sunk, beneath the superincumbent weight of himself and his companion, well-nigh up to the saddle-skirts, in the miry sloughs that intervened between Haxey and the Trent,--yet the view of the face of nature, smilingly outspread around him, fully compensated, he felt, for these occasional drawbacks on the pleasure of the journey. The few verdant meads which were scattered among the dull fallows looked as lovely, Joe thought, as they could look in any other part of England; while the cottages, in their array of honeysuckles, were attired as blushingly and beautifully, he thought, as if reared in the sunny climes of the South.

Midway in the journey, Joe and his aged mistress dismounted to cross the Trent,--and four more miles brought them to Gainsborough. On arriving at the market-town, the good old dame, somewhat to the lad's surprise, presented him with half-a-crown,--a sum he had never, till then, possessed. After a brief preface of prudence, she informed him that he was at liberty to spend the next three hours in looking at the rarities in the market, in walking about the town, or in any mode that he thought would most highly gratify his curiosity. Joe set forth, anticipating sights which might afford a passing gratification; but in the course of the first hour became immovably attracted by a display of merchandise, from which the rustic traffickers of the market, too generally, turned away with indifference,--a spacious stall of old books.

The image of a homely country lad, clad in a rustic garb, and shod with heavy-laced boots, standing by that old book-stall, presented a very uninteresting spectacle to the market people at Gainsborough. The butter-women brushed rudely past him, grumbling at the awkwardness with which he obstructed their crowded path; and the hucksters roughly cursed him, half-overturning the absorbed youth in their haste to forestall each other in cheapening the produce of the village dairies. Yet Joe was wont to refer to the hour during which he looked over the tattered treasures of the travelling bookseller as the most important in his whole life. He laid out the first half-crown he had ever possessed in purchasing the translated work of a French philosopher, without knowing, for many months after, that the author of the book bore an opprobious designation among theologians. At successive periods of his after-history, Joe attributed this occurrence to the operation of the inevitable laws of necessity, to accident, to permissive Providence: but, without entering into the labyrinth of his progressive trains of thought, or solving the question of the validity of any of his conclusions,--suffice it to say, that the purchase of that book produced a sequel of the most intense interest to the young and undirected inquirer.

Joe had but just paid his half-crown into the hand of the bookseller, and buttoned the volume in the breast of his coat, when his ears were stricken by the boisterous tones of a bawling pedlar. With remarkable elongation of face, the man was proclaiming the wondrous contents of a pamphlet that he held in his hand, copies of which he was offering for sale, "amazingly cheap," as he avowed, to the staring by-standers. The stroller rapidly gleaned coppers among the wonder-stricken butter-women, who forgot their baskets in the serious interest awakened by the pedlar's tale; and Joe could not refrain from noting the comments which the simple people made upon the story.

"Here is a true and faithful account," reiterated the pedlar, with all his power of lungs, "of the awful apparition of a young woman to her sweetheart, three weeks after her death,--warning him, in the most solemn manner, to forsake his evil ways, and not to deceive others, as he had deceived her,--and foretelling to him that he would die that day fortnight,--and then vanishing in a flash of fire, leaving a smell of brimstone behind her! And how the young man took to his bed immediately after, and died at the time his sweetheart had foretold,--making a godly confession of his sins on his death-bed. All which happened," concluded the pedlar, with a look of solemn assurance that went at once to the hearts of his unsuspecting audience,--"but one month ago, in the county of Cornwall;--and here are the names of ten creditable parishioners of the place, who heard the young man's confession, and have set their names as witnesses of the truth of the circumstance, that it might be a warning to young men to repent, and not to deceive their sweet-hearts,--and all this you have for the small charge of one penny!"

"The Lord ha' marcy on us, Moggy," cried a young and blooming butter-woman to her elderly neighbour, as they leant over the handles of their baskets, aghast with wonder:--"what an awful thing it must ha' been to see that young woman come from the deead!"

"It must, indeed, Dolly," replied the older gossip, shaking her head: "it's enough to mak one tremmle to think on't! Some folks say that there's no sich thing as a ghooast,--but I'm sewer I wouldn't be so wicked as to say so."