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Stephen Archer and Other Tales

G >> George MacDonald >> Stephen Archer and Other Tales




"I shall be with you," said Nycteris soothingly. "I will take care of
you till your dreadful sun comes, and then you may leave me, and go
away as fast as you can. Only please put me in a dark place first, if
there is one to be found."

"I will never leave you again, Nycteris," cried Photogen. "Only wait
till the sun comes, and brings me back my strength, and we will go
away together, and never, never part any more."

"No, no," persisted Nycteris; "we must go now. And you must learn to
be strong in the dark as well as in the day, else you will always be
only half brave. I have begun already--not to fight your sun, but to
try to get at peace with him, and understand what he really is, and
what he means with me--whether to hurt me or to make the best of me.
You must do the same with my darkness."

"But you don't know what mad animals there are away there towards the
south," said Photogen. "They have huge green eyes, and they would eat
you up like a bit of celery, you beautiful creature!"

"Come, come! you must," said Nycteris, "or I shall have to pretend to
leave you, to make you come. I have seen the green eyes you speak of,
and I will take care of you from them."

"You! How can you do that? If it were day now, I could take care of
you from the worst of them. But as it is, I can't even see them for
this abominable darkness. I could not see your lovely eyes but for the
light that is in them; that lets me see straight into heaven through
them. They are windows into the very heaven beyond the sky. I believe
they are the very place where the stars are made."

"You come then, or I shall shut them," said Nycteris, "and you shan't
see them any more till you are good. Come. If you can't see the wild
beasts, I can."

"You can! and you ask me to come!" cried Photogen.

"Yes," answered Nycteris. "And more than that, I see them long before
they can see me, so that I am able to take care of you."

"But how?" persisted Photogen. "You can't shoot with bow and arrow, or
stab with a hunting-knife."

"No, but I can keep out of the way of them all. Why, just when I found
you, I was having a game with two or three of them at once. I see, and
scent them too, long before they are near me--long before they can see
or scent me."

"You don't see or scent any now, do you?" said Photogen, uneasily,
rising on his elbow."

"No--none at present. I will look," replied Nycteris, and sprang to
her feet.

"Oh, oh! do not leave me--not for a moment," cried Photogen, straining
his eyes to keep her face in sight through the darkness.

"Be quiet, or they will hear you," she returned. "The wind is from the
south, and they cannot scent us. I have found out all about that. Ever
since the dear dark came, I have been amusing myself with them,
getting every now and then just into the edge of the wind, and letting
one have a sniff of me."

"Oh, horrible!" cried Photogen. "I hope you will not insist on doing
so any more. What was the consequence?"

"Always, the very instant, he turned with flashing eyes, and hounded
towards me--only he could not see me, you must remember. But my eyes
being so much better than his, I could see him perfectly well, and
would run away round him until I scented him, and then I knew he could
not find me anyhow. If the wind were to turn, and run the other way
now, there might be a whole army of them down upon us, leaving no room
to keep out of their way. You had better come."

She took him by the hand. He yielded and rose, and she led him away.
But his steps were feeble, and as the night went on, he seemed more
and more ready to sink.

"Oh dear! I am so tired! and so frightened!" he would say.

"Lean on me," Nycteris would return, putting her arm round him, or
patting his cheek. "Take a few steps more. Every step away from the
castle is clear gain. Lean harder on me. I am quite strong and well
now."

So they went on. The piercing night-eyes of Nycteris descried not a
few pairs of green ones gleaming like holes in the darkness, and many
a round she made to keep far out of their way; but she never said to
Photogen she saw them. Carefully she kept him off the uneven places,
and on the softest and smoothest of the grass, talking to him gently
all the way as they went--of the lovely flowers and the stars--how
comfortable the flowers looked, down in their green beds, and how
happy the stars up in their blue beds!

When the morning began to come, he began to grow better, but was
dreadfully tired with walking instead of sleeping, especially after
being so long ill. Nycteris too, what with supporting him, what with
growing fear of the light which was beginning to ooze out of the east,
was very tired. At length, both equally exhausted, neither was able to
help the other. As if by consent they stopped. Embracing each the
other, they stood in the midst of the wide grassy land, neither of
them able to move a step, each supported only by the leaning weakness
of the other, each ready to fall if the other should move. But while
the one grew weaker still, the other had begun to grow stronger. When
the tide of the night began to ebb, the tide of the day began to How;
and now the sun was rushing to the horizon, borne upon its foaming
billows. And ever as he came, Photogen revived. At last the sun shot
up into the air, like a bird from the hand of the Father of Lights.
Nycteris gave a cry of pain, and hid her face in her hands.

"Oh me!" she sighed; "I am _so_ frightened! The terrible light stings
so!"

But the same instant, through her blindness, she heard Photogen give a
low exultant laugh, and the next wit herself caught up: she who all
night long had tended and protected him like a child, was now in his
arms, borne along like a baby, with her head lying on his shoulder.
But she was the greater, for, suffering more, she feared nothing.




CHAPTER XIX.

THE WEREWOLF.


At the Very moment when Photogen caught up Nycteris, the telescope of
Watho was angrily sweeping the table-land. She swung it from her in
rage, and running to her room, shut herself up. There she anointed
herself from top to toe with a certain ointment; shook down her long
red hair, and tied it round her waist; then began to dance, whirling
round and round faster and faster, growing angrier and angrier, until
she was foaming at the mouth with fury. When Falca went looking for
her, she could not find her anywhere.

As the sun rose, the wind slowly changed and went round, until it blew
straight from the north. Photogen and Nycteris were drawing near the
edge of the forest, Photogen still carrying Nycteris, when she moved a
little on his shoulder uneasily, and murmured in his ear,

"I smell a wild beast--that way, the way the wind is coming."

Photogen turned, looked back towards the castle, and saw a dark speck
on the plain. As he looked, it grew larger: it was coming across the
grass with the speed of the wind. It came nearer and nearer. It looked
long and low, but that might be because it was running at a great
stretch. He set Nycteris down under a tree, in the black shadow of its
bole, strung his bow, and picked out his heaviest, longest, sharpest
arrow. Just as he set the notch on the string, he saw that the
creature was a tremendous wolf, rushing straight at him. He loosened
his knife in its sheath, drew another arrow half-way from the quiver,
lest the first should fail, and took his aim--at a good distance, to
leave time for a second chance. He shot. The arrow rose, flew
straight, descended, struck the beast, and started again into the air,
doubled like a letter V. Quickly Photogen snatched the other, shot,
cast his bow from him, and drew his knife. But the arrow was in the
brute's chest, up to the feather; it tumbled heels over head with a
great thud of its back on the earth, gave a groan, made a struggle or
two, and lay stretched out motionless.

"I've killed it, Nycteris," cried Photogen. "It is a great red wolf."

"Oh, thank you!" answered Nycteris feebly from behind the tree. "I was
sure you would. I was not a bit afraid."

Photogen went up to the wolf. It _was_ a monster! But he was vexed
that his first arrow had behaved so badly, and was the less willing to
lose the one that had done him such good service: with a long and a
strong pull, he drew it from the brute's chest. Could he believe his
eyes? There lay--no wolf, but Watho, with her hair tied round her
waist! The foolish witch had made herself invulnerable, as she
supposed, but had forgotten that, to torment Photogen therewith, she
had handled one of his arrows. He ran back to Nycteris and told her.

She shuddered and wept, and would not look.




CHAPTER XX.

ALL IS WELL.


There was now no occasion to fly a step farther. Neither of them
feared any one but Watho. They left her there, and went back. A great
cloud came over the sun, and rain began to fall heavily, and Nycteris
was much refreshed, grew able to see a little, and with Photogen's
help walked gently over the cool wet grass.

They had not gone far before they met Fargu and the other huntsmen.
Photogen told them he had killed a great red wolf, and it was Madam
Watho. The huntsmen looked grave, but gladness shone through.

"Then," said Fargu, "I will go and bury my mistress."

But when they reached the place, they found she was already buried--in
the maws of sundry birds and beasts which had made their breakfast of
her.

Then Fargu, overtaking them, would, very wisely, have Photogen go to
the king, and tell him the whole story. But Photogen, yet wiser than
Fargu, would not set out until he had married Nycteris; "for then," he
said, "the king himself can't part us; and if ever two people couldn't
do the one without the other, those two are Nycteris and I. She has
got to teach me to be a brave man in the dark, and I have got to look
after her until she can bear the heat of the sun, and he helps her to
see, instead of blinding her."

They were married that very day. And the next day they went together
to the king, and told him the whole story. But whom should they find
at the court but the father and mother of Photogen, both in high
favour with the king and queen. Aurora nearly died for joy, and told
them all how Watho had lied, and made her believe her child was dead.

No one knew anything of the father or mother of Nycteris; but when
Aurora, saw in the lovely girl her own azure eyes shining through
night and its clouds, it made her think strange things, and wonder how
even the wicked themselves may be a link to join together the good.
Through Watho, the mothers, who had never seen each other, had changed
eyes in their children.

The king gave them the castle and lands of Watho, and there they lived
and taught each other for many years that were not long. But hardly
had one of them passed, before Nycteris had come to love the day best,
because it was the clothing and crown of Photogen, and she saw that
the day was greater than the night, and the sun more lordly than the
moon; and Photogen had come to love the night best, because it was the
mother and home of Nycteris.

"But who knows," Nycteris would say to Photogen, "that, when we go
out, we shall not go into a day as much greater than your day as your
day is greater than my night?"




THE BUTCHER'S BILLS.


CHAPTER I.

HUSBAND AND WIFE.


I am going to tell a story of married life. My title will prepare the
reader for something hardly heroic; but I trust it will not be found
lacking in the one genuine and worthy interest a tale ought to
have--namely, that it presents a door through which we may walk into
one region or another of the human heart, and there find ourselves not
altogether unacquainted or from home.

There was a law among the Jews which forbade the yoking together of
certain animals, either because, being unequal in size or strength,
one of them must be oppressed, or for the sake of some lesson thus
embodied to the Eastern mind--possibly for both reasons. Half the
tragedy would be taken out of social life if this law could be applied
to human beings in their various relations. I do not say that this
would be well, or that we could afford to lose the result of the
tragedy thus occasioned. Neither do I believe that there are so many
instances of unequal yoking as the misprising judgments of men by men
and women by women might lead us to imagine. Not every one declared by
the wisdom of acquaintance to have thrown himself or herself away must
therefore be set down as unequally yoked. Or it may even be that the
inequality is there, but the loss on the other side. How some people
could ever have come together must always be a puzzle until one knows
the history of the affair; but not a few whom most of us would judge
quite unsuited to each other do yet get on pretty well from, the
first, and better and better the longer they are together, and that
with mutual advantage, improvement, and development. Essential
humanity is deeper than the accidents of individuality; the common is
more powerful than the peculiar; and the honest heart will always be
learning to act more and more in accordance with the laws of its
being. It must be of much more consequence to any lady that her
husband should be a man on whose word she can depend than that he
should be of a gracious presence. But if instead of coming nearer to a
true understanding of each other, the two should from the first keep
falling asunder, then something tragic may almost be looked for.

Duncan and Lucy Dempster were a couple the very mention of whose
Christian names together would have seemed amusing to the friends who
had long ceased to talk of their unfitness. Indeed, I doubt if in
their innermost privacy they ever addressed each other except as Mr.
and Mrs. Dempster. For the first time to see them together, no one
could help wondering how the conjunction could have been effected.
Dempster was of Scotch descent, but the hereditary high cheek-bone
seemed to have got into his nose, which was too heavy a pendant for
the low forehead from which it hung. About an inch from the end it
took a swift and unexpected curve downwards, and was a curious and
abnormal nose, which could not properly be assorted with any known
class of noses. A long upper lip, a large, firm, and not quite ugly
mouth, with a chin both long and square, completed a face which, with
its low forehead, being yet longer than usual, had a particularly
equine look. He was rather under the middle height, slender, and well
enough made--altogether an ordinary mortal, known on 'Change as an
able, keen, and laborious man of business. What his special business
was I do not know. He went to the city by the eight o'clock omnibus
every morning, dived into a court, entered a little square, rushed up
two flights of stairs to a couple of rooms, and sat down in the back
one before an office table on a hair-seated chair. It was a dingy
place--not so dirty as it looked, I daresay. Even the windows, being
of bad glass, did, I believe, look dirtier than they were. It was a
place where, so far as the eye of an outsider could tell, much or
nothing might be doing. Its occupant always wore his hat in it, and
his hat always looked shabby. Some people said he was rich, others
that he would be one day. Some said he was a responsible man, whatever
the epithet may have been intended to mean. I believe he was quite as
honest as the recognized laws of his trade demanded--and for how many
could I say more? Nobody said he was avaricious--but then he moved
amongst men whose very notion was first to make money, after that to
be religious, or to enjoy themselves, as the case might be. And no one
either ever said of him that he was a good man, or a generous. He was
about forty years of age, looking somehow as if he had never been
younger. He had had a fair education--better than is generally
considered necessary for mercantile purposes--but it would have been
hard to discover any signs of it in the spending of his leisure. On
Sunday mornings he went with his wife to church, and when he came home
had a good dinner, of which now and then a friend took his share. If
no stranger was present he took his wine by himself, and went to sleep
in his easy chair of marone-coloured leather, while his wife sat on
the other side of the fire if it was winter, or a little way off by
the open window if it was summer, gently yawned now and then, and
looked at him with eyes a little troubled. Then he went off again by
the eight o'clock omnibus on Monday morning, and not an idea more or
less had he in his head, not a hair's-breadth of difference was there
in his conduct or pursuits, that he had been to church and had spent
the day out of business. That may, however, for anything I know, have
been as much the clergyman's fault as his. He was the sort of man you
might call machine-made, one in whom humanity, if in no wise
caricatured, was yet in no wise ennobled.

His wife was ten years younger than he--hardly less than
beautiful--only that over her countenance seemed to have gathered a
kind of haze of commonness. At first sight, notwithstanding, one could
not help perceiving that she was china and he was delft. She was
graceful as she sat, long-necked, slope-shouldered, and quite as tall
as her husband, with a marked daintiness about her in the absence of
the extremes of the fashion, in the quality of the lace she wore on
her black silk dress, and in the wide white sleeves of fine cambric
that covered her arms from the shoulder to the wrist. She had a
morally delicate air, a look of scrupulous nicety and lavender-stored
linen. She had long dark lashes; and when they rose, the eyelids
revealed eyes of uncommon beauty. She had good features, good teeth,
and a good complexion. The main feeling she produced and left was of
ladyhood--little more.

Sunday afternoon came fifty-two times in the year. I mention this
because then always, and nearly then only, could one calculate on
seeing them together. It came to them in a surburb of London, and the
look of it was dull. Doubtless Mr. Dempster's dinner and his repose
after it were interesting to him, but I cannot help thinking his wife
found it dreary. She had, however, got used to it. The house was a
good old one, of red brick, much larger than they required, but not
expensive, and had a general look of the refinement of its mistress.
In the summer the windows of the dining-room would generally be open,
for they looked into a really lovely garden behind the house, and the
scent of the jasmine that crept all around them would come in
plentifully. I wonder what the scent of jasmine did in Duncan
Dempster's world. Perhaps it never got farther than the general
ante-chamber of the sensorium. It often made his wife sad--she could
not tell why. To him I daresay it smelt agreeable, but I can hardly
believe it ever woke in him that dreamy sensation it gave her--of
something she had not had enough of, she could not say what. When the
heat was gone off a little he would walk out on the lawn, which was
well kept and well watered, with many flowering shrubs about it. Why
he did so, I cannot tell. He looked at nothing in particular, only
walked about for a few minutes, no doubt derived some pleasure of a
mild nature from something, and walked in again to tea. One might have
expected he would have cultivated the acquaintance of his garden a
little, if it were only for the pleasure the contrast would give him
when he got back to his loved office, for a greater contrast could not
well have been found than between his dingy dreary haunt on
weekdays--a place which nothing but duty could have made other than
repugnant to any free soul--and this nest of greenery and light and
odour. Sweet scents floated in clouds invisible about the place;
flower eyes and stars and bells and bunches shone and glowed and
lurked all around; his very feet might have learned a lesson of that
which is beyond the sense from the turf he trod; but all the time, if
he were not exactly seeing in his mind's eye the walls and tables of
his office in the City square, his thoughts were not the less brooding
over such business as he there transacted. For Mr. Dempster's was not
a free soul. How could it be when all his energies were given to
making money? This he counted his _calling_--and I believe actually
contrived to associate some feeling of duty with the notion of leaving
behind him a plump round sum of money, as if money in accumulation and
following flood, instead of money in peaceful current, were the good
thing for the world! Hence the whole realm of real life, the universe
of thought and growth, was a high-hedged park to him, within which he
never even tried to look--not even knowing that he was shut out from
it, for the hedge was of his own growing. What shall ever wake such a
man to a sense of indwelling poverty, or make him begin to hunger
after any lowliest expansion? Does a reader retort, "The man was
comfortable, and why should he be troubled?" If the end of being, I
answer, is only comfort in self, I yield. But what if there should be
at the heart of the universe a Thought to which the being of such men
is distasteful? What if to that Thought they look blots in light, ugly
things? May there not lie in that direction some possible reason why
they should bethink themselves? Dempster, however, was not yet a
clinker out of which all the life was burned, however much he looked
like one. There was in him that which might yet burn--and give light
and heat.

On the Sunday evenings Mrs. Dempster would have gladly gone to church
again, if only--though to herself she never allowed this for one of
her reasons--to slip from under the weight of her husband's presence.
He seldom spoke to her more than a sentence at a time, but he did like
to have her near him, and I suppose held, through the bare presence,
some kind of dull one-sided communication with her; what did a woman
know about business? and what did he know about except business? It is
true he had a rudimentary pleasure in music--and would sometimes ask
her to play to him, when he would listen, and after his fashion enjoy.
But although here was a gift that might be developed until his soul
could echo the music of the spheres, the embodied souls of Handel or
Mendelssohn were to him but clouds of sound wrapped about kernels--let
me say of stock or bonds.

For a year or so after their marriage it had been the custom that, the
first thing after breakfast on Monday morning, she should bring him
her account-book, that they might together go over her week's
expenses. She must cultivate the business habits in which, he said, he
found her more than deficient. How could he endure in a wife what
would have been preposterous in a clerk, and would have led to his
immediate dismissal? It was in his eyes necessary that the same strict
record of receipt and expenditure should be kept in the household as
in the office; how else was one to know in what direction things were
going? he said. He required of his wife, therefore, that every
individual thing that cost money, even to what she spent upon her own
person, should be entered in her book. She had no money of her own,
neither did he allow her any special sum for her private needs; but he
made her a tolerably liberal weekly allowance, from which she had to
pay everything except house-rent and taxes, an arrangement which I
cannot believe a good one, as it will inevitably lead some
conscientious wives to self-denial severer than necessary, and on the
other hand will tempt the vulgar nature to make a purse for herself by
mean savings off everybody else. It was especially distasteful to Mrs.
Dempster to have to set down every little article of personal
requirement that she bought. It would probably have seemed to her but
a trifle had they both been young when they married, and had there
been that tenderness of love between them which so soon sets
everything more than right; but as it was, she could never get over
the feeling that the man was strange to her. As it was she would have
got over this. But there was in her a certain constitutional lack of
precision, combined with a want of energy and a weakness of will, that
rendered her more than careless where her liking was not interested.
Hence, while she would have been horrified at playing a wrong note or
singing out of tune, she not only had no anxiety, for the thing's own
sake, to have her accounts correct, but shrunk from every effort in
that direction. Now I can perfectly understand her recoil from the
whole affair, with her added dislike to the smallness of the thing
required of her; but seeing she did begin with doing it after a
fashion, it is not so easy to understand why, doing it, she should not
make a consolation of doing it with absolute exactness. Not even her
dread of her husband's dissatisfaction--which was by no means
small--could prevail to make her, instead of still trusting a memory
that constantly played her false, put down a thing at once, nor
postpone it to a far less convenient season. Hence it came that her
accounts, though never much out, never balanced; and the weekly audit,
while it grew more and more irksome to the one, grew more and more
unsatisfactory to the other. For to Mr. Dempster's dusty eyes
exactitude wore the robe of rectitude, and before long, precisely and
merely from the continued unsatisfactory condition of her accounts, he
began, in a hidden corner of his righteous soul, to reflect on the
moral condition of his wife herself as unsatisfactory. Now such it
certainly was, but he was not the man to judge it correctly, or to
perceive the true significance of her failing. In business, while
scrupulous as to the requirements of custom and recognized right, he
nevertheless did things from which her soul would have recoiled like
"the tender horns of cockled snails;" yet it was to him not merely a
strange and inexplicable fact that she should _never_ be able to show
to a penny, nay, often not to a shilling or eighteenpence, how the
week's allowance went, but a painful one as indicating something
beyond perversity. And truly it was no very hard task he required of
her, for, seeing they had no children, only three servants, and saw
little company, her housekeeping could not be a very heavy or involved
affair. Perhaps if it had been more difficult she would have done it
better, but anyhow she hated the whole thing, procrastinated, and
setting down several things together, was _sure_ to forget some
article or mistake some price; yet not one atom more would she
distrust her memory the next time she was tempted. But it was a small
fault at worst, and if her husband had loved her enough to understand
the bearings of it in relation to her mental and moral condition he
would have tried to content himself that at least she did not exceed
her allowance; and would of all things have avoided making such a
matter a burden upon the consciousness of one so differently educated,
if not constituted, from himself. It is but fair to add on the other
side that, if she had loved him after anything like a wifely ideal,
which I confess was not yet possible to her, it would not have been
many weeks before she had a first correct account to show him.
Convinced, at length, that accuracy was not to be had from her, and
satisfying himself with dissatisfaction, he one morning threw from him
the little ruled book, and declared, in a wrath which he sought to
smother into dignified but hopeless rebuke, that he would trouble
himself with her no further. She burst into tears, took up the book,
left the room, cried a little, resolved to astonish him the next
Monday, and never set down another item. When it came, and breakfast
was over, he gave her the usual cheque, and left at once for town. Nor
had the accounts ever again been alluded to between them.

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