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Macpherson's Gully: A Tale of New Zealand Life

Chapter V

page 32

Chapter V.

After a tramp of about seven hours, Alick reached Sheehan's accommodation house—the general store whence they had drawn their supplies during their sojourn in the Gully. Here he hoped to find letters from home. He had had no word from Jeanie since leaving Canvastown, and he was now very anxious for news as to the welfare of her and the children. Only twice since he left home—now over ten months ago—had he been able to send her any money, and as the sum on each occasion was but small, he judged that she could not but be in want of help.

In answer to his enquiries, Sheehan informed him that he had no letters on hand at present, but Sam (the packer who brought his stores from Greymouth), was due that afternoon, and he would most likely bring the mail with him. He decided to put up at Sheehan's for the night. After having some dinner, and exchanging his gold for bank-notes—Sheehan being a buyer on behalf of one of the banks—he was gratified by the arrival of “Sam” with his three wiry pack-horses well laden with the usual supplies, consisting chiefly of flour, tea, sugar, and the inevitable tobacco.

“Got the mail with you, Sam?” asked Sheehan.

“Here you are, all that's of it,” handing him a small parcel containing about half a dozen letters.

On these being sorted out, two of them addressed to Alexander Spencer, were handed over to Alick, and he retired a considerable way into the bush, there to peruse them in undisturbed seclusion.

In the first letter, which, he saw by the post-mark, had arrived in Greymouth four weeks previously, Jeanie minutely detailed her circumstances, and concluded by strongly urging him to come home. He found that she page 33 was making a brave fight for it—earuing a living for herself and the children by sewing for one of the warehouses in town, but the work was poorly paid, and though she toiled early and late, she had the greatest difficulty in making ends meet.

“I don't blame you, Alick,” she wrote, “for not sending home more money, for I know you would be only too glad to do so if you could, but I really think you ought to leave the diggings and come home at once. Your want of success involves no discredit; to stay longer in the face of constant discouragement would, I think, be wrongheaded and foolish. I believe we should have been better off had you stayed here and taken your chance of finding employment; besides, whatever troubles we may have to face, we will bear better together than apart. The children, I am thankful to say, are healthy and strong. Bobbie keeps asking me,—and in such a plaintive tone; it saddens me sometimes,—“When is father coming back? He is naughty to stay away so long, isn't he mother?”

The next letter, dated a tortnight later, he noticed with some concern, was not in his wife's handwriting. It was written, he found, by Mrs.—, a neighbour of hers, Jeanie herself being too ill to perform the duty. The following extract will sufficiently convey its purport:—

“In answer to a loud knock at the front doer, Mrs. Spencer left the wash-tub, and hastened round to see who it was. She found a messenger from the warehouse with a bundle of shirts to be made up. She was detained a few minutes receiving instructions about the work. On returning to the yard, she was horrified to find that little Ethel, whom she had left playing with her doll, had overbalanced herself and fallen into the tub, which was half full of water. Alarmed by her shrieks, I and some others rushed in. We found her in a dreadful state of excitement, with the child in her arms. We did what we could to restore animation; but the poor dear child was dead. Doctor N. arrived shortly after, but could do page 34 nothing but pronounce life to be extinct. Mrs. Spencer is still suffering from the shock of the sad occurrence; and to make matters worse, your little boy, who has been ailing for the last day or two, has developed symptoms of diphtheria, and is, I fear, likely to be seriously ill. The disease has been prevalent in the neighbourhood lately, and I have heard of more than one case resulting fatally.

I am sorry to have to send you such bad knews, but however painful it may be, it is necessary that you should know the worst.”

As before mentioned, Alick was devotely attached to his wife and children. The sad, and altogether unlooked-for news he had just read therefore, pierced him to the heart. He writhed in agony of spirit, until at length, tears came to his relief, and there, in the solitude of the bush, utterly broken down, the strong man wept like a child!

“Oh! if I had only been at home,” he groaned, “this would never have happened. Oh, Jeanie! Jeanie! That I should have left you to bear this cruel blow alone!” In his self-accusing wretchedness, he began to look upon his long-continued absence from home, as nothing less than a base desertion of his reponsibilities. Then, with a sudden revulsion of feeling:—

“God in Heaven!” he cried, “hast Thou forgotten to be merciful? Where is Thy loving kindness? Where Thy tender mercies? Was it not enough that in all worldly matters, my steps should be constantly dogged by disappointment and failure; that all my plans should be thwarted, and my every effort foredoomed to disaster, that Thou hast also laid Thy hand heavily on my love ones? Surely in Thy dealings with me there is no place for compassion! Oh! Thou who seest all men, and knowest all men's motives, what have I done that Thine anger shouldst burn so fiercely against me? In what have I—God forgive me. I know not what I say; but oh! Thou hast made life bitter—bitter!”

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Worn out, at length, by the violence of his emotions, he sank down among the scrub, and gradually fell into a state of semi-consciousness. A strange, trance-like quietude now took possession of his soul. His troubles were all forgotten. He was no longer in the bush, but far away in the land of his nativity, among the scenes of his early boyhood. The cultivated fields and the green lanes he knows so well, lie spread out before him. There, in the hollow, is the hamlet where his playmates dwell, There, too, is the schoolhouse, and the church and the graveyard, every mossy headstone, every grassy mound in which is familiar to him. It is a tranquil Sabbath evening, and the atmosphere of the place is pervaded with a soothing stillness. As he nears his home—the little thatched cottage in the lane—he can hear the familiar sound of his father's voice, as he reads in reverent tones, a portion from the sacred page. He can see, too—for the stone walls offer no impediment to his vision—the family assembled together, can see himself, a little ruddy-faced boy, sitting in the circle. Then as they unite their voices in praise, he hears—and notes with peculiar interest—his own piping treble, as it joins in the prayerful song:—

“Oh, God of Bethel, by whose hand,
Thy people still are fed;
Who through this weary pilgrimage,
Hast all our fathers led:
Our vows, our prayers, we now present
Before Thy throne of grace:
God of our fathers, be the God
Of their succeeding race.”

As the sound of the singing died away, the vision passed, and waking with a start, he found himself lying in the scrub, the red beams of the declining sun, filtered and mellowed in their passage through the tree tops, illuming the surrounding undergrowth with a soft, cool light. To page 36 his intense astonishment, he found that he was not alone! A little way in front of him, under a cluster of tangled vines that hung suspended from the lower limbs of a huge rata, sat a stranger, an aged man, who from his posture, seemed to be sunk in the deepest reverie.

Presently, the old man raised his eyes and, after regarding Alick intently for a moment, said in a voice whose tones were soft, yet peculiarly penetrating:—

“You have been what the world calls unfortunate. You have failed in your undertakings; you have suffered loss. Death and disease have entered your family; and Providence, you think, has dealt hardly with you.”

Oddly enough, this abrupt address, and the stranger's seeming intimacy with his affairs, excited no feeling of surprise in the breast of Alick. He listened with passive receptivity of mind to the old man's words, and was only conscious of a desire to hear what further he had to say. He continued:—

“All things are of God. What men call success, what men deem failures, are equally his gifts. Nor is this an evil, and that a good, save in so far as they affect the health and vigour of the soul. Man's life is twofold; the life of outward seeming by which men judge, often erroneously, their fellow-men, and the true, inner, all-important life, in which the real man waxes or wanes in spiritual stature. I have lived long beneath the sun, and this have I learned in the years of my pilgrimage, that he best endures suffering who believes it for the best. He turns defeat to victory; overcomes tribulation by rejoicing in it, borne up by the conviction that trouble and crosses, disappointment and sorrow, are the tenderest messengers of His love. Think not that worldly successes are special marks of His favour, or misfortune the sign of His wrath. I have seen men striving and scheming through long weary years solely for the things that pertain to the outer life, in the process starving and stunting their spiritual being. I have seen them achieve wealth and social distinction, page 37 but alas! at what expense! Their souls were shrivelled and dwarfed, and their seeming success was, after all, the most dismal failure. No man can devote his energies wholly or mainly to the pursuit of wealth, but at the imminent peril of his eternal well-being. There is that in the pursuit which chills and deadens the nobler instincts, and promotes the growth of a sordid selfishness—the deadliest enemy of the higher life.

“And if the pursuit of wealth be dangerous, its possession is little less so, There is that in the possession of riches which tends to pamper self, which tends to puff man up with an exaggerated idea of his own importance, causing him to view with proud disdain the humble toilers in the ranks of poverty, and by hiding from him his own inherent littleness, intensifies that spiritual decrepitude whose end is death.

“From many of the most insidious temptations which beset the higher life the poor are comparatively free. The discomforts and privations resulting from a state of poverty, have for the quickened soul a wholesome disciplinary influence. They not only tend to safeguard man against excessive pride, but by impressing upon him a sense of his own weakness, and the constant need of Divine succour, contribute towards preventing forgetfulness of Him who is the source of all sustaining strength. They entail suffering, no doubt, but in all ages, the noblest spirits have been made perfect through suffering, and there is a sweetness born of suffering which none but the sufferers know. Tribulation has no terrors for the man who accepts it as coming directly from the hand of Him who cannot err. He endures it hravely; nay more, he welcomes it, rejoices in it as being for him the highest good, and as destined to work out the noblest ends. Shorn of earthly comforts, deprived of all earthly hopes, he falls back on the bed-rock of the Eternal, and on that secure vantage ground, calmly, confidently awaits whatever may betide. And when at last his troubles are over, and the end of his pilgrimage in sight, to him Death comes, not as page 38 the pitiless King of Terrors, but as the lovingest, peacefulest herald of the Most High, come to accomplish his soul's everlasting enfranchisement.”

Here the stranger's voice betrayed an impassioned ring, and his face was lit with rapture. Regarding him attentively, Alick observed that, while his features were plain—having none of that regularity which we usually associate with manly beauty—yet the spirit that was in him lent to his countenance such a nobility of expression, that he appeared as one transfigured. The very scrub surrounding him, as if sharing in his ecstasy, seemed to Alick's eyes, to be lustred with a heavenly glow, borrowed from the benign presence of the strange old man.

“Grieve not,” he continued, “for your child. You have suffered but a temporary bereavement. Death has not injured her; she is safe, and in a purer atmosphere awaits your coming. Among the delights reserved in heaven for those who enter that blest abode, is the joyful smile of recognition—the gladsome welcome which those who have gone before accord to them that follow after.”

The sun had now sunk to the line of the horizon. Through a gap in the bush the great eye of day displayed his glittering disc resting on the edge of the waters. Along the breast of the Pacific lay a broad belt of golden light, so alluring in its grandeur, so apparently substantial in its structure, that it seemed like a solid pathway of celestial glory joining earth to heaven. Moved by the wondrous beauty of the scene, the old man rose, and advancing a few steps towards the opening in the bush, stood for a space with clasped hands and heaven-lit countenance, gazing on the glories of the sunset. As he thus stood like one entranced, Alick could hear him murmur in rapt accents, “How beautiful are Thy works, Lord God Almighty! But even as he spoke there came a change. The sun dipped beneath the waves with startling suddenness; the golden light vanished from the sea; the emerald splendour of the bracken was lost in the gathering gloom.

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Singular to relate, the figure of the stranger faded with the fading day; and, starting to his feet, Alick, to his utter amazement, found himself entirely alone! Whether in the sudden darkness the old man had stolen away unobserved, or whether his appearance and strange language had been altogether the result of Alick's overwrought emotions, giving to the subjective workings of his own mind an apparent objective reality, he knew not—nor did he greatly care to know. Sufficient for him that he left the spot with his faith renewed and his courage fully restored. He is no longer (as he had seemed but lately to be) a mere uncared-for atom, tossed hither and thither on the billows of a blind insensate fate. He feels that in and through all the vicissitudes that make up the sum of human life, there is a great all-knowing Presence. The events of the last few hours have brought him sensibly nearer to that Presence. There is in his soul a vivid realisation of his relationship to Him who upholds the entire created universe by the might of His power. Borne in upon his mind is the feeling—and it is to him inexpressibly sweet—that he, even he, is known to, yea and cared for, by the great Maker and Lord of all. Hence is his strength renewed, and “with a heart for any fate,” he calmly sets his face to the future.