There & Back. George MacDonald
believer in the lord of religion, might have to say. Nothing he did hear would, without the reflex of his mother’s unhappiness, have waked in him interest enough for hate: what was there about the heap of ashes he heard called the means of grace, to set him searching in it for seeds of truth! If we consider, then, the dullness of the prophecy, the evident suffering of his mother, and the equally evident though silent contempt of his father, we need not wonder that Richard grew up in what seemed to him a conviction that religion was worse than a thing of nought, was an evil phantom, with a terrible power to blight; a miasm that had steamed up from the foul marshes of the world, before man was at home in it, or yet acquainted with the beneficent laws of Nature. It was not merely a hopeless task to pray to a power which could not be entreated, because it did not exist; to believe in what was not, must be ruinous to the nature that so believed! He would give the lie no quarter! The best thing to do for his fellow, the first thing to be done before anything else could be done, was to deliver him from this dragon called Faith—the more fearful that it had no life, but owed its being and strength to the falsehood of cowards! Had he known more of the working of what is falsely called religion, he would have been yet more eager to destroy it. But he knew something of the tares only; he knew nothing of the wheat among the tares; knew nothing of the wintry gleams of comfort shed on thousands of hearts by the most poverty-stricken belief in the merest and faultiest silhouette of a God. What a mission it would be, he thought, to deliver human hearts from the vampyre that, sucking away the very essence of life, kept fanning its unconscious victims with the promise of a dreary existence beyond the grave, secured by self-immolation on the desolate altar of an unlovable God, who yet called himself Love! Was it not a high emprise to rescue men from the incubus of such a misimagined divinity?
From the first dawn of consciousness, the young Lestrange had loved his kind. He gathered the chief joy of his life from a true relation to the life around him. Perhaps the cause of the early manifestation of this bent in him, was the longing of his mother in her loneliness after a love that grew the move precious as it seemed farther away. She had parted with those who always loved her, for the love of a man who never loved her! But left to think and think, she had come at last to see that her loss was her best gain. For, with the loss of their presence, she began to know and prize the simplicities of human affection; from lack of love began to lift up her heart to Love himself, the father of all our loves.
Richard’s love was not such as makes of another the mirror wherein to realize self; he loved his kind objectively, and was ready to suffer for it. At school he was the champion of the oppressed. Almost always one or other of the little boys would be under his protection; and more than once, for the sake of a weaker he had got severely beaten. But having set himself to learn the art of self-defence, his favour alone became shelter; and successful coverture aroused in him yet more the natural passion of protection. It became his pride as well as delight to be a saviour to his kind. His championship now sought extension to his mother, and to all sufferers from usurping creeds.
His grandfather found him, as he said, a chip of the old block; and rejoiced that Nature had granted his humble blood so potent a part in this compound of gentle and plebeian; for Richard showed himself a worthy workman! Simon Armour declared there was nothing the fellow could not do; and said to himself there never was such a baronet in the old Hall as his boy Dick would make. If only, he said, all the breeds worn out with breeding-in, would revert to the old blood of Tubal Cain, they might recover his lease of life. The day was coming, he said to himself, when there would be a sight to see at Mortgrange—a baronet that could shoe a horse better than any smith in the land! If his people then would not stand up for a landlord able to thrash every man-jack of them, and win his bread with his own hands, they deserved to become the tenants of a London grocer or American money-dealer! For his part, the French might have another try! He would not lift hammer against them!
By right of inheritance, Richard’s muscles grew sinewy and hard, and speedily was he capable of handling a hammer and persuading iron to the full satisfaction of his teacher. When it came to such heavy work as required power and skill at once, the difference between the two men was very evident: where the whole strength is tasked, skill finds itself in the lurch; but Simon understood what could not be at once, as well as what would be at length. Neither was he disappointed, for, in far less than half the time an ordinary apprentice would have taken, Richard could hold alternate swing with the blacksmith or his man, as, blow for blow, they pierced a block of metal to form the nave of a wheel. In ringing a wheel, he soon excelled; and his grandfather’s smithy being the place for all kinds of blacksmith-work, Richard had learned the trade before he left. For, as his fortnight’s holiday drew to an end, he heard from his parents that, as he was doing so well, they would like him to stay longer.
One reason for this their wish was, that he might become thoroughly attached to his grandfather: they desired to secure the prejudice of the future baronet for his own people. At the same time, by developing in him the workman, they thought to give him a better chance against further dishonouring and degrading his race, than his wretched father had ever had: the breed of Lestranges must, they said, be searched back for generations to find an honest man in it. A landlord above the selfishness, and free from the prejudices of his class, would be a new thing in the county-histories!
At the end of six weeks, Richard could shoe a sound horse as well as his grandfather himself. The old man had taken pains he would not have spent on an ordinary apprentice: it was worth doing, he said; and the return was great. Richard had made, not merely wonderful, but wonderfully steady progress. Not once had he touched the quick in driving those perfect nails through the rind of the marvellous hoof. From the first he disapproved of the mode of shoeing in use, and was certain a better must one day be discovered—one, namely, that would leave the natural motions of hoof and leg unimpeded; but in the meantime he shod as did other blacksmiths, and gave thorough satisfaction.
CHAPTER VIII. A LOST SHOE
It was now late in the autumn. Several houses in the neighbourhood were full of visitors, and parties on horseback frequently passed the door of the smithy—well known to not a few of the horses.
One evening, as the sun was going down red and large, with a gorgeous attendance of clouds, for the day had been wet but cleared in the afternoon, a small mounted company came pretty fast along the lane, which was deep in mud. They were no sooner upon the hard road by the smithy, than one of the ladies discovered her mare had lost a hind shoe.
“She couldn’t have pulled it off in a more convenient spot!” said a handsome young fellow, as he dismounted and gave his horse to a groom. “I’ll take you down, Bab! Old Simon will have a shoe on Miss Brown in no time!”
Richard followed his grandfather to the door. A little girl, as she seemed to him, was sliding, with her hand on the young man’s shoulder, from the back of the huge mare. She was the daintiest little thing, as lovely as she was tiny, with clear, pale, regular features, under a quantity of dark-brown hair. But that she was not a child, he saw the moment she was down; and he soon discovered that, not her beauty, but her heavenly vivacity, was the more captivating thing in her. At once her very soul seemed to go out to meet whatever object claimed her attention. She must know all about everything, and come into relations with every live thing! As she stood by the side of the great brown creature from which she had dismounted—huge indeed, but carrying its bulk with a grand grace—her head reaching but half-way up the slope of its shoulder, she laid her cheek against it caressingly. So small and so bright, the little lady looked a very diamond of life.
A new shoe had to be forged; those already half-made were for work-horses. Partly from pride in his skill, Simon left the task to his grandson, and stood talking to the young man. Little thought Richard, as he turned the shoe on the anvil’s beak, that he was his half-brother! He was a handsome youth, not so tall as Richard, and with more delicate features. His face was pale, and wore a rather serious, but self-satisfied look. He talked to the old blacksmith, however, without the slightest assumption: like others in the neighbourhood, he regarded him as odd and privileged. There were more ladies and gentlemen, but Richard, absorbed in his shoe, heeded none of the company.
He was not more absorbed, however, than the girl who stood beside him: she watched every point in the making of it. Heedless of the flying sparks, she gazed as if she meant to make the next shoe herself. Had Richard not been