DUNMARA

CHAPTER XXXVII

RESURGAM

WINTER was past, and in the early spring there came a day when Ellen had only a few shillings left in her purse. Her copies of Murillo still hung unsold in the picture-dealer's shop. The Rothwells had gone to Paris for a time, and the Spanish lessons were suspended. One other tuition she had obtained, but it had as yet profited her nothing. Her only hope at present was her book of nursery rhymes. She must take her drawings to the publisher.

She accomplished her journey into the city, and arrived safely in the narrow street where her business lay. Going swiftly along, her thoughts busy with the chances of her mission, she slackened her pace a little, because two gentlemen stood conversing on the side-walk, right in her way. As they suffered her to pass, the tone of a voice made her glance up quickly; fortunately without attracting notice. Egbert Auniger was standing there in Paternoster Row, and he had just now made way for her upon the footpath.

'He did not see me ! And now I am safe, if he will only not come into the shop while I am here!"

She vanished into the bookseller's doorway. The publisher received her kindly, and examined her work at once. Oh, how tedious he was. She stood breathless at the counter with her hands locked under her shawl. At last the verdict came. The drawings were satisfactory, but the set was not complete. One or two more would be required.

"Then I shall not be paid to-day," thought Ellen. Leaving the shop she glanced hastily down the street. Those two gentlemen had vanished from Paternoster Row.

Ellen was very weary that day on her journey home. She moaned to herself under her veil as she went along, because her head throbbed and she needed to rest. Passing a church she saw the door open, and went in. There was music, and

she stole into a corner, safe from the eyes of the kneeling few present. The organ poured in her ear, a long wailing chant, like the cry of a soul sick unto death, fallen by the wayside; uttering its dire need; crying forth its sore suffering; demanding help in accents piteous, yet filled with the grandeur of endurance. So the chant rose, quivering, sobbing, riving the holy stillness, and saddening the grave church with the tale of its affliction.

Ellen bowed her head lower. It was like the voice of her own soul. The plaint died away, and out of the stillness there grew the refrain, sweet, solemn, unutterably calm; awing the rebellious spirit with its majesty, melting and easing it with a tender pity. "Why hast thou forsaken me?" cried the passionate chant. And the refrain fell and stilled it: "Wherefore art thou disquieted, O thou of little faith!"

Relieved by this cry that had gone forth for her and been answered, Ellen waited till it complained no longer, and then went once more upon her way. In the street a poor man spoke to her, and she was quickly listening to a tale of bitter distress. The supplicant's face was wan and emaciated, his forehead marked with a scarcely healed scar, caused, he said, by the falling of bricks. He was out of work and ill, his children. in want; his aged mother lay dead at home. Ellen's heart was swelled with its own trouble; it would have taken in all the needy, all the suffering, all the weepers of the earth. She took out her purse; there was but little in it; she gave the man a shilling. The offering was made with a burning cheek and shaking hand. Was it right, just? Oh, hush, there was mercy in heaven!

But this was not all. The man followed her with tears upon his poor, weak face, and with another appeal. Would she, who was generous, lend, not give, him yet a little more money? He should soon be able to work, and on a given day would meet her in youder church and repay the debt.

"He believes," thought Ellen, " that I am rich, since I am so ready with my shillings. Have I a right to play the Lady Bountiful?" But the purse was re-opened and the sum delivered. Again the hot cheek and the trembling hand. “You need not return it," she says; "all I ask is, that you will pray for me."

VOL. XXXIV.-No. 393.

K

"I am clothed, I am fed," she murmured, as she hurried on; "I have no starving infants at home, no unburied dead. Now if I could but give him the little more that this purse contains, and then walk out away somewhere beyond the reach of wants! That sounds like wishing for death. I think it would do me good to look upon the dead."

She turned back again, and met the sickly man. She asked leave to go home with him. She had nothing more to give, but she wished to see the children.

Into a miserable street of Kensington, up a narrow stair, and into a poverty-stricken room, she followed her guide. A few words of sympathy to the wife, and she sat down and gazed at the corpse stretched on a poor bed in the corner. The sunken eyes, the withered mouth, the grey hair, the skeleton hands; on all these death had cast the beautiful reflex of peace. Here was moonlight sleeping where the earthquake had been. A little while and Ellen was gone. She shuddered, hurrying along the streets.

"It is good, it is good for her to lie so, but I am young and quick!"

Then home at last, up to her own quiet bedroom, with its open window admitting the evening twittering of birds. The first soothing note that piped on her ear as she opened the door, overcame in a second all the self-control that, till now, had stood by her throughout the day. A trill of contentment from a bird just settling to sleep, it sounded to the weary girl as sad as the memory of a dead mother's farewell, and as sweet as a dream of her caress in heaven. Then one of Ellen's thundershowers of weeping came down, and she flung herself on the bed and eased her heart with sobs.

She let the floodgates of her heart stand wide open as long as there was one gush of the long-pent current to come forth. And then she pushed the hair from her face, and turned her brow to the gentle evening air that came in through the window close to her bed. Despair will not bide for ever with the young. So long as the sun shines and the buds burst, quick blood will leap. After the deeps of any sorrow had been struggled through, and quiet shores regained, there is ever the watchful angel of trust waiting with the strengthening cup for the lips. Ellen remembered this when she turned her face to the light, only felt that

the time for her return to courage and action had not yet come; that her brain was tired, that it was pain to think, that she had no power for effort within her that she could then reach. That it remained with her and would reappear she knew.

It was a quiet April evening. The trees were all freshly aflush with their new foliage. Some fruit-trees near the window were white with blossoms, and in the distance an orchard, fair with bloom, looked like a very kingdom of May. A soft rain clung in purple mist about the long hedges of vivid green, and a blackbird was shaking out his heart in an ecstasy of song. It was what people in the country call a "growing" evening. Does hope grow with dew and soft airs, like the flowers and young grass? The sky was grey and pure, the clouds lying in level drifts like steps by which heaven might be reached from the green landing of yonder broad tree-top. Ellen closed her eyes and suffered the song and the breeze, and the perfume to sink into her heart. "I could die so," she thought, "not now, not yet; but one day when my work is done, and my hands are skeleton-like as those. Then I will love to close my eyes by such a window as this, and forget all about the world."

By-and-by she got up and refreshed herself with water, and then sat down by her window in a very sensible frame of mind. "What a fool I have been," she said, "to moan so terribly about a little money!"

Next morning the spring sunshine awakened her, as the liberating angel might have wakened Peter, striking off his fetters.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE "PATIENCE"

In spite of the proverb, the ready "will" has often to wait a weary time before the longed-for "way" will appear. Ellen was sorely perplexed just now to know in what direction she might most safely set the current of her energies. Work in the galleries was so slow, and people would not buy copies when they were finished. Ellen thought, "I could love to take in the National Gallery an abiding stand for my easel, if I had months and years before me of undisturbed peace, wherein the

continuance of endeavour would be only as the flow of a serene river over level ground. I could go there and gradually dream myself into the moods of the old masters, creep imperceptibly into the abstraction of their thoughts, learn little by little the alphabet of their dead language, and perhaps in time find myself capable of uttering in their tongue, though with never so bad an accent. But they will not have me coming knocking impatiently at their doors, chafing over the tediousness of their lessons, and then going away again to play truant. The fire that Time burns upon their altar is too subtle to be snatched in hasty handfuls by profane fingers like mine. It refuses to be fed with faggots on my humble hearth. If I, a hurried worshipper, may not dare to borrow a brand, what then can I do but strive to enkindle a feeble rushlight for my own benefit ? That word benefit' is wrong, because most likely my farthing candle will only burn my fingers. Still, I cannot sit in the dark."

"Ellen Wilde, what are you daring to meditate? Are you going to attempt to paint a picture altogether of your own? Witness this madness, ye shades of dead painter-princes!'Now I am sure my impertinent brushes are laughing at me in the corner, and I see Dame Palette's round white face, with burnt sienna eyes and vermilion mouth, grinning at me.

"So you are going to make a fool of yourself again!' they say; ' and it is to be done at the bidding of some commonsense argument, altogether opposed to your own crazy desire. Very good; we shall see.' Well, so we shall; at all events, in spite of warnings, I am going to try."

It happened that it was the middle of the night when Ellen's thoughts got thus far, and then her head began to ache upon the pillow: "An hour's work will tire me and make me sleep,” she said, and got up, and dressed, and lit her candle, and sat down to think about her subject, supplied with paper and chalk for the perpetration of scrawls.

Suggestions arrive. One appears with a radiant countenance, and says: "Behold me! I have come from where you left me two years ago in a cleft of Dun, the mighty rock. I was born of the glory of a sunset, and the rapture of a happy thought. Receive me!"

Another says: "I am here, full of the grandeur of a thunderstorm; my birthday dawn was a flash of lightning. Leaning