Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  Maria LaTouche’s ordinarily florid complexion had gone white. She remained mute, and he went on without prompting.

  “It’s all Faith, not Works, as the path to redemption––how far is that from Christ’s own example? But Evangelicalism today is all rather greasy in the finger––with train oil I should say––with Spurgeon though I suppose it’s olive––admixed with the slightest touch of castor.” Ruskin would have laughed if he was not concerned about shocking her overmuch. But her silence seemed sympathetic and he went on.

  “I do not single out Spurgeon,” he told her. “All modern churches are nothing more than idolatry. The Roman Catholic idolizes his saints, the English High-Churchman his family pew, the Scotch Presbyterian idolizes his own obstinacy. Puritan––Brahmin––Turk––are all merely names for different madness. I think I see how one ought to live, now, but my own life is lost––gone by.”

  They had stopped walking. Maria LaTouche scarcely knew how to respond. He was being free in his speech with her, treating her as a trusted equal, but it was a gift she did not want. All she could make was an ardent plea. “You must, must promise, on all that you hold dear, that you will keep private these views of yours,” she answered. She turned fully to him, and saw he registered her alarm.

  “I fear for you,” she went on, “and Rose will fear for you dreadfully––and her father––oh, I cannot be held to account for his reaction should he hear of your doubts.”

  Ruskin saw his folly. Why had he thought he could be truthful? It was all too easy to imagine LaTouche’s response should this get back to him. But Rose? He yearned to tell her these things, in tempered language of course––yearned to keep her from hurtling headlong into the abyss of blind acceptance. It had taken him sorrowful years to arrive at these conclusions, yet sharing them now put his access to the life-quickening Rose in peril.

  He did not answer as they continued walking, tracing the course of the Liffey from the grassy path along its bank.

  He turned to her, and felt the smile playing around his lips. “I feel as Bunyan’s Pilgrim, but older, so much older; and with the great religious Dark Tower before me to assault––or to find myself shut up in––by Giant Despair. And now you and Rosie order me out of pleasant Byepath Meadow.”

  She would not allow him to make light of it. Too much depended on it, and her voice took on a new and meticulous tone. “Mr. Ruskin, you must promise me that you will not tell Rose of this, nor publish anything of it where she or Mr. LaTouche might see it. For ten years. Promise me.”

  He looked across the narrow river before speaking. “I am never punished through my own faults and follies, only through the faults and follies of others.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked.

  He swung his head back and met her eyes.

  “I will promise,” he said.

  The Harristown estate ran to 11,000 acres––such a vast holding, and yet so many poor tenants paying rent, thought Ruskin––and in the fortnight spent there he and the children had covered a representative hundred or two. The afternoons were theirs. He took long and languorous walks through Harristown’s parkland, sometimes with Maria LaTouche joining them, other times alone with the children. To this eager audience he pointed out the varieties of clouds dotting or filling the skies above them, and told them tales of each stone or wild herb they brought before him. There were boating picnics on the slow Liffey, drifting as he taught them about currents and aquatic plants. Emily and Rose were, to his pleasure, not a bit more afraid of wet or dirt than their brother, and the four of them attempted small dams and bridges over streamlets, rolling and positioning river-rock and returning to the great house soaked and with scratched hands but in the best of humours.

  Today I stood for three hours altogether in the shallows of the Liffey with the younger LaTouches, he wrote his father, and though I picture the alarm on your face, can promise you that bodily I felt no ill effect whatsoever from this partial immersion, indeed, its waters are so sweet and warm that I found it far more salubrious than any full immersion within a London tabernacle.

  He wondered to himself if instead it was not the joyous vitality of Rose’s small person which had kept him warm.

  In the evenings he sat alone with Mr. and Mrs. LaTouche at their interminable dining table and attempted, generally without success, to engage his host in some sort of genuine conversation. Even witticisms failed; he found Mr. LaTouche almost entirely humourless. Mrs. LaTouche clamped herself down in her husband’s presence and this stifling self-censure––he had seen it in intelligent women countless times––made him awkward with them both. He respected Maria LaTouche, and found hers to be a penetrating mind, but it was his friendship with the children that kept him on.

  One morning he sat at his desk drawing a map of Mount Blanc. The peak’s sharp aiguilles and ravines were, from years of accumulated observations and measurements, nearly as familiar to him as any boyhood landmark. As the lifting sun struck his window he became aware of children’s calls ringing through the early air. He stood and pushed on the casement, and saw Rose and Emily and Percy out in the dew, playing croquet. Rose had heard the scraping of his window and stopped in her play and smiled. She swung her croquet mallet up at him, beckoning him to come down. She knew he insisted on working a few hours in the morning. Come down he would not. Nor, watching her from above, did he ever finish the map.

  That evening the senior LaTouches absented themselves for a neighbour’s dinner party they felt compelled to attend. Mrs. LaTouche had rather pressed Ruskin to go along, but he had relished the thought of an evening made gay by the children’s company and begged off. The old butler served the four of them, with he and Emily sitting opposite and Rose and Percy quatrefoil. They called each other Lord and Lady and laughed over a delicious pudding with as much cream as they all wished. After dinner they retired to the music room where Emily played and he sang duets with Rose. Then Rose and Percy teamed to play him at chess––he let them win one, but was merciless at the second match––and when the children were called to bed he went up to his own room, unwilling to stay alone downstairs. “Divinest day of intense and cloudless Sun,” he told his diary by lamp-light, “and Rosie a child at dawn and a Lady at dinner, and quiet & harmless joys as I’ve wanted for ever so long...”

  The next morning, unable to work for happiness, he went out walking after breakfast. Behind the stables he passed a row of cottager’s huts, their thatched roofs bristling and doors open to the warm air. He heard a girl’s laughter, joined by that of an old woman’s, and smiled to himself. Then Rose burst from the door of the closest cottage, still laughing, her little red cap jauntily askew on her golden head, a basket clutched in her hand. She pulled herself up short before him.

  “I’m giving out tracts, there, do you want one?” Rose asked. Before he could answer she thrust a yellow pamphlet into his hands. She looked at him, smiling, thinking how bright his blue eyes were, and that his whiskers looked so soft she wanted to pet them. But she wanted him to read her tract first, and so she stood there in front of him, waiting.

  “Let me examine the contents,” he said, in his grown-up, not his playful voice, “before I commit myself.”

  He smoothed the paper and held it before him. It was one of Mr. LaTouche’s distributions, with “Redemption Denied?” in bold heading.

  But Rose had so many in her basket. “Oh, you must be redeemed, St. C––we all must be,” she told him. She turned and ran into the next in the row of huts.

  “Under whose orders?” he inquired of her disappearing blue cloak. She was out again in a moment with a toddling child at her heels, laughing and reaching for her basket. He watched her hand the child the basket and hold her steady with her other hand.

  “Oh––Papa, gave them me, of course, but God will judge us all.”

  “Yours is a decided character, Rose,” he told her.

  She squinted at Ruskin in the bright sun and smiled up at
him.

  “You bear your name beautifully. You are, I would gauge, on your own roots, not grafted.”

  She shrugged her shoulders because she could not think of the right thing to say. She knew what “grafting” was from her mother’s fruit trees, and knew you couldn’t do it to a human.

  Her very perfection had power to hurt him. He studied her, impressing on his brain the tilt of her chin, the delicacy of her thin shoulders. “You should never be grafted, but allowed to grow unspoilt by the hands of clumsy gardeners who attempt to prune or shape you. You would lose your natural coil, and that would be a tragedy.”

  Rose stood staring, still smiling, but nodding her head at him. The toddler grew restless, and she led her to the child’s waiting mother in the doorway. Ruskin crammed the yellow paper into the recesses of his pocket and walked on.

  Near the end of his stay Ruskin looked up the dining table to his hosts and cleared his throat.

  “I should like to make a proposition to you, Mr. and Mrs. LaTouche.” Both heads lifted from the fish consommé and two spoons were arrested in mid-air. “It concerns Rose.”

  LaTouche lowered his spoon; his wife’s still hung suspended as she smiled at her guest. LaTouche made an indeterminate sound and looked back at Ruskin.

  “She is as we all know, a bright child,” Ruskin said, “and I wonder if you might consent to my getting her started in Greek.”

  LaTouche dropped his eyes to his cup and spooned up a mouthful of consommé. Greek. He had spent a woeful 18 months at Christ Church Oxford, wrestling with translations of Euripides and Demosthenes, at first rating only a vix––with difficulty––and after much head-ache inducing labour progressing to a satis.

  Ruskin did not look as if he were expecting an immediate reply, and in fact went on.

  “My reasoning is simply this: knowing Greek, she will be able to read the Bible with complete understanding, untrammelled by the accretions of faulty translators. And in possession of that same skill––facility in Greek––the greatest riches of classic literature will be hers. Failing that, mastering even one Greek verb thoroughly will set her in correct habits of thought for evermore.”

  LaTouche thought again of Euripides. He glanced at his wife, who was leaning forward ever so slightly toward their guest, an infallible sign of her interest and approval.

  Maria LaTouche knew enough Latin to bolster her interest in botany but had never been provided an opportunity for Greek. “Think of it, Mr. LaTouche, Rose reading the Psalms in Greek,” she told him in her quiet, almost hushed voice. She seemed always about to convey a secret. LaTouche forgot Euripides and remembered his other offspring.

  “Percy will be needing some Greek soon,” he counter-offered.

  Ruskin was ready. “Of course I mean to teach Percy and Emily as well, should they be interested.” He could not imagine either one being so.

  The next day after her Bible-reading with her father, Ruskin sat down with Rose in the nursery. She turned to him with an expectant smile, as if ready to receive a gift. Having no text to hand, he wrote out the Greek alphabet in elegant ink. He sounded the letters with her as he wrote, and she in pencil copied them as best she could while saying them aloud after him. His thoughts repeated themselves as he guided her hand. If you will be a Christian, at least you shall know the truth of the Bible. And if you be Pagan, then the jewels in store for you with Homer and Socrates! Bent together over her little school-table he initiated her into the beauties of the Greek script. It felt a sacred act, another bond between them. The love of you is a religion to me.

  He promised to send her Milgrave’s Elementary Greek when he returned to London, and in the meantime asked that she attempt the copying of the letters over again. He was astonished when she sought him out three hours later. She had mastered the entire alphabet.

  When he left Harristown Rose fell ill.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Lamp of Power & The Lamp of Beauty

  My Dear Mr. Ruskin

  Rose, you will be glad to learn, is making some advance. She seems quite her normal self (save for any outdoor exertion of any kind, of course) until about 5 o’clock each day, but then the change comes about her, and she gets so listless and restless and unable to occupy her thoughts, in fact claims when she can speak that even thinking hurts...

  Almost as soon as he arrived home Rose had sent Ruskin her first scrap of writing in Greek, the salutation Peace be to you. He had it daily in his breast pocket. Then came her inexplicable physical collapse, now in its fourth week, reported through anxious yet chatty letters from Maria LaTouche. These, in attempting to quell Ruskin’s fear, served to inflame it. The shortening days of autumn with their constant memento mori did nothing to shore up his frame of mind. He shut himself in his rooms in Denmark Hill or wandered about alone in the dripping garden, stopping long before the peach tree from which he had plucked ripened fruit to feed her.

  His parents, recalling his own break-down at Oxford––would they never stop blaming themselves for it?––offered outspoken assessments that the study of Greek had proved too demanding for a girl of thirteen, which Ruskin vigorously refuted, barely able to stay civil. The Dublin doctors summoned by the LaTouches put an end to all “brain work” for Rose, and Ruskin counselled her by letter to attempt some simple hand crafts to help focus her thoughts. She was not allowed to write back––the exertion being thought too much for her––but his letters to her were encouraged, and he wrote her every day.

  He wrote at first of subjects that he knew would interest and absorb her, the meaning of certain Greek verbs, or his insights into certain favourite passages of the Bible. But soon her mother was imploring him to keep to lighter topics, and he wrote all his way to Switzerland where he fled with his manservant, writing to Rose in detail of the wayside flowers in Alpine valleys, and sending her a trefoil sprig of oxalis, a folk symbol of the Trinity. For his effort he was rewarded by a short note in her own hand, enclosing a shamrock, that Irish symbol of the same, with the direction, “A Dieu, dearest St C, and my shamrock will tell you what you wish to know.”

  This then, the language of flowers, was to be a secret language between them, and Rose the greatest flower of them all.

  By November Rose’s painful head-aches began to stop, and she could more readily eat. As she gained strength she was permitted to walk downstairs, and to sit by her mother as she read aloud. Mrs. LaTouche was fearful of over-stimulation, and only by degrees were Rose’s pet cats allowed, first one and then the second, into the drawing room. The girl responded gratefully to their soft tread in her lap, and would hold them, purring in her arms, for an hour altogether. Rose had asked almost from the start for her dog Bruno, and at last one day her father brought him in on a lead. She was sitting in the music room with her mother when she heard the unmistakable scratching of Bruno’s nails on the parquet floor of the hall. The cats scattered.

  “Bruno!” Rose cried, and reached her arms towards the open doorway. Her mother laid a gently restraining hand on her lap lest she forget herself and try to jump up.

  “Here he is,” answered her grinning father as they entered. Rose laughed aloud as the hound panted and strained at his chain, licked her face, and beat her legs with his bushy tail. She threw her arms around Bruno’s shaggy pied coat, and when she looked up saw both her parents smiling at her. Bruno promptly lay down at her feet in adoration. She felt completely happy.

  Maria LaTouche placed her arm around her daughter’s thin shoulders. “There now,” she said. “You have Bruno and everything. Are you feeling more yourself?”

  When Rose was twenty-six and dying, she would look back on this first collapse and recall her mother asking her that. How funny that is, she recalled thinking; I cannot be anyone else. But she answered, “Yes, Mama, I do.”

  Her prayer-time proved a problem. Maria LaTouche held that during this crisis her daughter’s prayers should be of the briefest and simplest. But Mr. LaTouche insisted
on carrying in the large family Bible and reading aloud from it, stopping to discuss points of Scripture with Rose, questioning and correcting her. The girl’s head hurt again at how angry her mother was with her father; she could see it in her mother’s eyes, as she waited for the Bible lessons to be over.

  Mrs. LaTouche read all the letters, arriving daily, from Ruskin to Rose, first to herself and then aloud to her daughter. Even when the girl was feeling stronger she was permitted to write back only once a week, regardless of her delight in a certain letter, or how much she wanted to say Hello to her St. Crumpet. In late November she was allowed walks outdoors, and in December she could ride her pony again.

  On a December morning when the air was soft Rose found a letter addressed to her from Ruskin in the silver salver by the door as she was heading out. There was one as well for her mother from him, so she didn’t feel naughty in taking the one meant for her and reading it before she did. She opened it on the way to the stable where her pony Swallow was waiting, but when she rounded the corner saw her mother’s mare being saddled too. She poked the letter in her habit pocket and buttoned it up, and though she knew her mother meant to join her, let Michaels help her onto Swallow and trotted off.

  It was fine to have St. C there in her pocket, talking to her, so she thought, right through her waist––she felt him. And Swallow must have known he was there too, because the black pony was in such spirits to have that distinguished personage also upon his back that he danced and skittered under his doubled burden. Rose almost thought she along with St. C too might end up in the new-ploughed stubble, and that only made her laugh the more. Down the lane she could see her mother waving at her, and saw how quickly the long legs of her mother’s hunter were closing the distance between them.