in which, at the end of a long grace, he prayed
" that the daily bread of our less favored brethren
might be mercifully vouchsafed to them." . . .
My dear readers, would you have me, even if I
could, extricate him from such an Elysium by any
denouement whatsoever ?
Poor dear Luke, again, is said to be painting
lean frescos for the Something-or-other-Kirche at
Munich ; and the vicar, under the name of Father
Stylites, of the order of St. Philumena, is preaching
impassioned sermons to crowded congregations
at St. George's, Bedlam. How can I extricate
them from that? No one has come forth of it
yet, to my knowledge, except by paths whereof
I shall use Lessing's saying, " I may have my
whole hand full of truth, and yet find good to open
only my little finger." But who cares for their
coming out? They are but two more added to
the five hundred, at whose moral suicide, and dive
into the Roman Avernus, a quasi-Protestant pub-
lic looks on with a sort of savage satisfaction, cry-
ing only, " Did n't we tell you so ? " and more
than half hopes that they will not come back again,
lest they should be discovered to have learnt any-
thing while they were there. What are two among
that five hundred? much more among the five
342 Yeast
thousand who seem destined shortly to follow
them?
The banker, thanks to Barnakill's assistance, is
rapidly getting rich again who would wish to
stop him ? However, he is wiser, on some points
at least, than he was of yore. He has taken up
the flax movement violently of late perhaps
owing to some hint of Barnakill's talks of noth-
ing but Chevalier Claussen and Mr. Donellan, and
is very anxious to advance capital to any landlord
who will grow flax on Mr. Warnes's method,
either in England or Ireland. . . . John Bull,
however, has not yet awakened sufficiently to lis-
ten to his overtures, but sits up in bed, dolefully
rubbing his eyes, and bemoaning the evanishment
of his protectionist dream altogether realizing
tolerably, he and his land, Dr. Watts' well-known
moral song concerning the sluggard and his garden.
Lord Minchampstead again prospers. Either
the nuns of Minchampstead have left no Nemesis
behind them, like those of Whitford, or a certain
wisdom and righteousness of his, however dim and
imperfect, averts it for a time. So, as I said, he
prospers, and is hated ; especially by his farmers,
to whom he has just offered long leases, and a
sliding corn-rent. They would have hated him
just the same if he had kept them at rack-rents ;
and he has not forgotten that; but they have.
They looked shy at the leases, because they bind
them to farm high, which they do not know how
to do ; and at the corn-rent, because they think
that he expects wheat to rise again which, being
a sensible man, he very probably does. But for
my story I certainly do not see how to extri-
cate him or any one else from farmers' stupidity,
Epilogue 343
greed, and ill-will. . . . That question must have
seven years' more free-trade to settle it, before I
can say anything thereon. Still less can I fore-
shadow the fate of his eldest son, who has just
been rusticated from Christ Church for riding one
of Simmon's hacks through a china-shop window ;
especially as the youth is reported to be given to
piquette and strong liquors, and, like many noble-
men's eldest sons, is considered " not to have the
talent of his father." As for the old lord himself,
I have no wish to change or develop him in any
way except to cut slips off him, as you do off a
willow, and plant two or three in every county
in England. Let him alone to work out his own
plot ... we have not seen the end of it yet ; but
whatever it will be, England has need of him as
a transition-stage between feudalism and * * * *,
for many a day to come. If he be not the ideal
landlord, he is nearer it than any we are like yet
to see. . . .
Except one ; and that, after all, is Lord Vieux-
bois. Let him go on, like a gallant gentleman
as he is, and prosper. And he will prosper, for
he fears God, and God is with him. He has much
to learn ; and a little to unlearn. He has to learn
that God is a living God now, as well as in the
middle ages; to learn to trust not in antique
precedents, but in eternal laws : to learn that his
tenants, just because they are children of God, are
not to be kept children, but developed and edu-
cated into sons ; to learn that God's grace, like
His love, is free, and that His spirit bloweth where
it listeth, and vindicates its own free-will against
our narrow systems, by revealing, at times, even to
nominal Heretics and Infidels, truths which the
344 Yeast
Catholic Church must humbly receive, as the
message of Him who is wider, deeper, more tol-
erant, than even she can be. ... And he is in the
way to learn all this. Let him go on. At what
conclusions he will attain, he knows not, nor do I.
But this I know, that he is on the path to great and
true conclusions. . . . And he is just about to be
married, too. That surely should teach him some-
thing. The papers inform me that his bride
elect is Lord Minchampstead's youngest daughter.
That should be a noble mixture ; there should be
stalwart offspring, spiritual as well as physical,
born of that intermarriage of the old and the
new. We will hope it: perhaps some of my
readers, who enter into my inner meaning, may
also pray for it.
Whom have I to account for besides? Crawy
though some of my readers may consider the
mention of him superfluous. But to those who do
not, I may impart the news, that last month, in the
union workhouse he died; and may, for aught
we know, have ere this met Squire Lavington. . . .
He is supposed, or at least said, to have had a soul
to be saved ... as I think, a body to be saved
also. But what is one more among so many?
And in an over-peopled country like this, too. . . .
One must learn to look at things and paupers
in the mass.
The poor of Whitford also? My dear readers,
I trust you will not ask me just now to draw the
horoscope of the Whitford poor, or of any others.
Really that depends principally on yourselves. . . .
But for the present, the poor of Whitford, owing,
as it seems to them and me, to quite other causes
than an "overstocked labor-market," or too rapid
Epilogue 345
" multiplication of their species," are growing
more profligate, reckless, pauperized, year by
year. O'Blareaway complained sadly to me the
other day that the poor-rates were becoming
"heavier and heavier" had nearly reached, in-
deed, what they were under the old law. . . .
But there is one who does not complain,
but gives and gives, and stints herself to give,
and weeps in silence and unseen over the evils
which she has yearly less and less power to
stem.
For in a darkened chamber of the fine house at
Steamingbath, lies on a sofa Honoria Lavington
beautiful no more ; the victim of some mysterious
and agonizing disease, about which the physicians
agree on one point only that it is hopeless. The
" curse of the Lavingtons " is on her ; and she
bears it There she lies, and prays, and reads, and
arranges her charities, and writes little books for
children, full of the Beloved Name which is for-
ever on her lips. She suffers none but herself
knows how much, or how strangely yet she is
never heard to sigh. She weeps in secret she
has long ceased to plead for others, not for her-
self; and prays for them too perhaps some day
her prayers will yet be answered. But she greets
all visitors with a smile fresh from heaven ; and all
who enter that room leave it saddened, and yet
happy, like those who have lingered a moment at
the gates of paradise, and seen angels ascending
and descending upon earth. There she lies who
could wish her otherwise ? Even Doctor Autotheus
Maresnest, the celebrated mesmerizer, who, though
he laughs at the Resurrection of the Lord, is con-
fidently reported to have raised more than one
P Vol. V
346 Yeast
corpse to life himself, was heard to say, after
having attended her professionally, that her waking
bliss and peace, although unfortunately unattribu-
table even to autocatalepsy, much less to som-
nambulist exaltation, was, on the whole, however
unscientific, almost as enviable.
There she lies and will lie till she dies the
type of thousands more, " the martyrs by the pang
without the palm," who find no mates in this life
. . . and yet may find them in the life to come.
. . . Poor Paul Tregarva ! Little he fancies how
her days run by! ...
At least, there has been no news since that last
scene in St. Paul's Cathedral, either of him or
Lancelot. How their strange teacher has fulfilled
his promise of guiding their education ; whether
they have yet reached the country of Prester John ;
whether, indeed, that Caucasian Utopia has a local
and bodily existence, or was only used by Barnakill
to shadow out that Ideal which is, as he said of the
Garden of Eden, always near us, underlying the
Actual, as the spirit does its body, exhibiting itself
step by step through all the falsehoods and con-
fusions of history and society, giving life to all in
it which is not falsehood and decay ; on all these
questions I can give my readers no sort of answer ;
perhaps I may as yet have no answer to give;
perhaps I may be afraid of giving one ; perhaps the
times themselves are giving, at once cheerfully and
sadly, in strange destructions and strange births,
a better answer than I can give. I have set forth,
as far as in me lay, the data of my problem: and
surely, if the premises be given, wise men will not
have to look far for the conclusion. In homely
English I have given my readers Yeast ; if they be
Epilogue 347
what I take them for, they will be able to bake
with it themselves.
And yet I have brought Lancelot, at least per-
haps Tregarva too to a conclusion, and an all-
important one, which whoso reads may find fairly
printed in these pages. Henceforth his life must
begin anew. Were I to carry on the thread of his
story continuously, he would still seem to have
overleaped as vast a gulf as if I had re-introduced
him as a gray-haired man. Strange ! that the
death of one of the lovers should seem no complete
termination to their history, when their marriage
would have been accepted by all as the legitimate
denouement, beyond which no information was to
be expected. As if the history of love always
ended at the altar ! Oftener it only begins there ;
and all before it is but a mere longing to love.
Why should readers complain of being refused
the future history of one life, when they are in
most novels cut short by the marriage finale from
the biography of two ?
But if, over and above this, any reader should
be wroth at my having left Lancelot's history
unfinished on questions in his opinion more im-
portant than that of love, let me entreat him to set
manfully about finishing his own history a far
more important one to him than Lancelot's. If he
shall complain that doubts are raised for which no
solution is given, that my hero is brought into con-
tradictory beliefs without present means of bring-
ing them to accord, into passive acquiescence
in vast truths without seeing any possibility of
practically applying them let him consider well
whether such be not his own case ; let him, if he
be as most are, thank God when he finds out
348 Yeast
that such is his case, when he knows at last that
those are most blind who say they see, when he
becomes at last conscious how little he believes,
how little he acts up to that small belief. Let
him try to right somewhat of the doubt, confusion,
custom-worship, inconsistency, idolatry, within him
some of the greed, bigotry, recklessness, respect-
ably superstitious atheism around him? and per-
haps before his new task is finished, Lancelot and
Tregarva may have returned with a message, if
not for him for that depends upon his having
ears to hear it yet possibly for strong Lord Min-
champstead, probably for good Lord Vieuxbois,
and surely for the sinners and the slaves of Whit-
ford Priors. What it will be, I know not altogether ;
but this I know, that if my heroes go on as they
have set forth, looking with single mind for some
one ground of human light and love, some ever-
lasting rock whereon to build, utterly careless what
the building may be, howsoever contrary to pre-
cedent and prejudice, and the idols of the day,
provided God, and nature, and the accumulated
lessons of all the ages, help them in its construction
then they will find in time the thing they seek,
and see how the will of God may at last be done
on earth, even as it is done in heaven. But, alas !
between them and it are waste raging waters, foul
mud banks, thick with dragons and sirens; and
many a bitter day and blinding night, in cold and
hunger, spiritual and perhaps physical, await them.
For it was a true vision which John Bunyan saw,
and one which, as the visions of wise men are wont
to do, meant far more than the seer fancied, when
he beheld in his dream that there was indeed a
land of Beulah, and Arcadian Shepherd Paradise,
Epilogue 349
on whose mountain tops the everlasting sunshine
lay; but that the way to it, as these last three
years are preaching to us, went past the mouth
of Hell, and through the valley of the Shadow of
Death.
THE END
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