the one valve of the shut-up nature, the obstinate point of
self-reliant volition in a life that had been one long drift of
circumstance. This old stone house, shaggy with vines, its bloody script
of Indian warfare hushed down and covered with modern fruit-trees and
sunflowers,--this fort, and the Gurneys within it, stood out in the bare
swamped stretch of the man's years, their solitary bit of enchantment.
They were bare years,--the forty he had known: Fate had drained them
tolerably dry before she flung them to him to accomplish duty in;--the
duty was done now. McKinstry, a mild, common-faced man, had gone through
it for nearly half a century, pleasantly,--never called it heroism. It
was done. He had time now to stretch his nerves of body and soul with
a great sigh of relief,--to see that Duty was, after all, a lean,
meagre-faced angel, that Christ sends first, but never meant should be
nearest and best. Faith, love, and so, happiness, these were words of
more pregnant meaning in the gospel the Helper left us. So McKinstry
stood straight up, for the first time in his life, and looked about him.
A man, with an adult's blood, muscles, needs; an idle soul which his
cramped creed did not fill, hungry domestic instincts, narrow and
patient habit;--he claimed work and happiness, his right. Of course it
came, and tangibly. Into every life God sends an actual messenger to
widen and lift it above itself: puerile or selfish the messenger often
is, but so straight from Him that the divine radiance clings about it,
and all that it touches. We call that _love_, you remember. A secular
affair, according to McKinstry's education, as much as marketing. So
when he found that the tawny old house and the quiet little girl in
there with the curious voice, which people came for miles to hear,
were gaining an undue weight in his life, held, to be plain, all the
fairy-land of which his childhood had been cheated, all fierce beauty,
aspiration, passionate strength to insult Fate, which his life had never
known, he kept the knowledge to himself. It was boyish weakness. He
choked it out of thought on Sundays as sacrilege: how could he talk
of the Gurney house and Lizzy to that almighty, infinite Vagueness he
worshipped? Stalking to and fro, in the outskirts of the churchyard,
he used to watch the flutter of the little girl's white dress, as she
passed by to "meeting." He could not help it that his great limbs
trembled, if the dress touched them