Salem Chapel by Margaret Oliphant

The next morning Vincent awoke with a sense of personal occupation and business, which perhaps is only possible to a man engaged with the actual occurrences of individual life. Professional duties and the general necessities of existing, do not give that thrill of sensible importance and use which a man feels who is busy with affairs which concern his own or other people's very heart and being. The young Nonconformist was no longer the sentimentalist who had made the gaping assembly at Salem Chapel uneasy over their tea-drinking. That dark and secret ocean of life which he had apostrophised, opened up to him immediately thereafter one of its most mysterious scenes. This had shaken Vincent rudely out of his own youthful vagaries. Perhaps the most true of philosophers, contemplating, however profoundly, the secrets of nature or thought, would come to a sudden standstill over a visible abyss of human guilt, wretchedness, heroic self-restraint, and courage, yawning apparent in the meditative way. What, then, were the poor dialectics of Church and State controversy, or the fluctuations of an uncertain young mind feeling itself superior to its work, to such a spectacle of passionate life, full of evil and of noble qualities -- of guilt and suffering more intense than anything philosophy dreams of? The thin veil which youthful ignorance, believing in the supremacy of thought and superior charm of intellectual concerns, lays over the world, shrivelled up under the fiery lurid light of that passionate scene. Two people clearly, who had once loved each other, hating each other to the death, struggling desperately over a lesser thread of life proceeding from them both -- the mother, driven to the lowest extremities of existence, standing up like a wild creature to defend her offspring -- what could philosophy say to such phenomena? A wild circle of passion sprang into conscious being under the young man's half-frightened eyes -- wild figures that filled the world, leaving small space for the calm suggestions of thought, and even to truth itself so little vantage-ground. Love, Hatred, Anger, Jealousy, Revenge -- how many more? Vincent, who was no longer the lofty reasoning Vincent of Homerton, found life look different under the light of those torchbearers. But he had no leisure on this particular morning to survey the subject. He had to carry his report and explanation to the strange woman who had so seized upon and involved him in her concerns.

Mrs. Hilyard was seated in her room, just as he had seen her before, working with flying needle and nervous fingers at her coarsest needlework. She said, "Come in," and did not rise when he entered. She gave him an eager, inquiring look, more importunate and commanding than any words, but never stopped working, moving her thin fingers as if there was some spell in the continuance of her labour. She was impatient of his silence before he had closed the door -- desperate when he said the usual greeting. She opened her pale lips and spoke, but Vincent heard nothing. She was beyond speech.