THE FLOW OF THE TIDE.
Captain Saltren returned at night to sleep at Chillacot, but he wandered
during the day in the woods, with his Bible in his pocket or in his
hand, now reading how Gideon was raised up to deliver Israel from
Midian, and Samson was set apart from his mother’s womb to smite the
Philistines, then sitting at the edge of the quarry brooding over his
thoughts.
He was not able to fix his mind for long on anything, and he found that
the Scripture only interested and arrested his attention so far as it
touched on analogous trains of ideas. For the first time in his life a
chilling sense of doubt, a cold suspicion of error stole over his heart.
When this was the case he was for a moment in agony, his nerves tingled,
his throat contracted, and a clammy sweat broke out over his face. The
fit passed, and he was again confident, and in his confidence strong. He
raised his voice and intoned a hymn, then became frightened at the
sound, and stopped in the midst of a stanza.
Presently he recalled his wife’s deceptions and how his heart had foamed
and leaped at the thought of the wrong done her and himself, and how he
had nourished a deadly hatred against Lord Lamerton on that account. Now
he knew that there had been no occasion for this hatred. What had he
done to his lordship? Had he really with his hand thrust him over the
precipice, or had the nobleman fallen in stepping back to avoid the
blow. Either way the guilt, if guilt there were, rested on Saltren’s
head; but the captain would not listen to the ever welling-up suggestion
that there was guilt. It was not he who had killed his lordship, it was
the hand of God that had slain him, because the hand of human justice
had failed to reach him. The captain entertained little or no personal
fear—he was ready, if it were the will of heaven, to appear before
magistrates and juries; before them he would testify as the apostles had
testified. If it were the will of heaven that he should die on the
gallows, he was ready to ascend the scaffold, sure of receiving the
crown of glory; perhaps the world was not ripe to receive his mission.
When that wave of horror swept over him, no fear of the consequences of
his act helped to chill the wave; his only horrible apprehension was
lest he should have made a mistake. This it was that lowered his
pulsation, turned his lips blue, and made a cloud come between him and
the landscape. He fought against the doubt, battled with it as against a
temptation of the Evil One, but as often as he overcame it, it returned.
The discovery that he had been deceived by Marianne into believing that
Lord Lamerton had injured him, was the little rift in his hitherto
unbroken all-enveloping faith; but even now he had no doubt about the
vision, but only as to its purport. That he had seen and heard all that
he professed to have seen and heard—that he believed still, but he
feared and quaked with apprehension lest he should have misread his
revelation.
It is not easy, rather is it impossible, for a man of education,
surrounded as he has been from infancy by ten thousand influences to
which the inferior classes are not subjected, to understand the
self-delusion of such a man.
The critical, sceptical spirit is developed in this century among the
cultured classes at an early age, and the child of the present day
begins with a _Dubito_ not with a _Credo_. Where there is no conviction
there can be no enthusiasm, for enthusiasm is the flame that dances
about the glowing coals of belief; and where no fire is, there can be no
flame. We allow of any amount of professions, but not of conviction.
Zeal is as much a mark of bad breeding as a hoarse guffaw.
Enthusiasms are only endurable when affectations, to be put on and put
off at pleasure; to be trifled with, not to be possessed by. This is an
age of toleration; we tolerate everything but what is earnest, and we
lavish our adulation on the pretence, not the reality of sincerity. For
we know that a genuine enthusiasm is unsuitable for social intercourse;
he who is carried away by it is carried beyond the limits of that
toleration which allows a little of everything, but exclusiveness to
none. He who harbours a belief is not suffered to obtrude it; if he be a
teetotaller he must hide his blue ribbon; if a Home Ruler, must joke
over his shamrock; if a Quaker; must dress in colours; if a Catholic,
eat meat on Good Friday. The apostle expressed his desire to be all
things to all men; we have made universal what was then a possibility
only to one, we are all things to all men, only sincere neither to
ourselves nor to any one. We are like children’s penny watches that mark
any hour the wearers desire, not chronometers that fix the time for all.
How can we be chronometers when we have no main springs, or if we had
them, wilfully break them.
We regard all enthusiasms as forms of fever, and quarantine those
infected by them; we watch ourselves against them, we are uneasy when
the symptoms appear among our children. At the least quickening of the
pulse and kindling of the eye we fly to our medicine chests for a
spiritual narcotic or a sceptical lowering draught.
The new method of dealing with fevers is to plunge the patient in cold
water, the reverse of the old method, which was to bring out the heat;
and we apply this improved system to our spiritual fevers, to all these
mental attacks bred of convictions. We subdue them with the douche and
ice, and the wet blanket. When the priests of Baal invoked their god on
Mount Carmel, they leaped upon the altar, and cut themselves with
knives; but Elijah looked on with a supercilious smile, and invited
those who followed him to pour buckets of water over his sacrifice; and
with what pity, what contempt we regard all such as are possessed with
the divine fury, and are ready to suffer and make themselves ridiculous
for their god; how we water our oblations, and make sure that the sticks
on our altar are green and incombustible; how, if a little spark
appears, or a spiral of smoke arises, we turn on hydrants, and our
friends rush to our aid with the buckets, and we do not breathe freely
till spark and smoke are subdued.
But then, because altars are erected for burnt sacrifices, and a burnt
sacrifice is unsavoury, expensive, and unfashionable, we thrust a little
coloured tin-foil in among the wet sticks, and protest how natural, how
like real fire it looks, and we prostrate ourselves before it in mock
homage.
No dread of enthusiasm, no shrinking from conviction, is found among the
uneducated, and the semi-educated. Among them enthusiasm is the token of
the divine afflatus, as madness is regarded among savages. They respect
it, they bring fuel to feed it, they allow it to burst into
extravagance, to riot over reason, and to consume every particle of
common sense. The corrective, judicial faculty, the balance wheel is
deficient; the strength, not the quality of a conviction gives it its
command to the respect and adhesion of the many. If I were to break out
of Bedlam with the one fixed idea in me that I had eyes at the ends of
my ten toes, wherewith I saw everything that went on in the world, and
with my big toes saw what was to be in the future; and if I went up and
down England preaching this and declaring what I saw with my toes, and
continued preaching it with the fire of perfect sincerity for a
twelvemonth, I would shake the hold of the Established Church on the
hearts of the people, and make the work of the Liberation Society easy.
Half England would form the Church of the seeing toes, but in that
Church I would not number any of the cultured.
As for us, we get over our enthusiasms early, as we cut our teeth, and
we lose them as rapidly. Primeval man wore his teeth till he died, so do
savages of the present day; but the very milk teeth of our infants
decay. We are so familiar with the fact that we assume that all good
sets of teeth are false, that if we keep here and there a fang in our
jaws, it is carious, and only preserved as a peg to which to wire our
sham molars and front teeth. It is so unusual to find any one with a
real set, that we look on such a person with suspicion as having in him
a stain of barbarous blood.
It is obvious that this defect of real teeth in our jaws has its
advantages. It allows us to change our teeth when we find those we have
hitherto worn inconvenient or out of fashion.
It is the same with our convictions, we lose them early, all the inside
disappears, leaving but the exterior enamel, and that breaks away
finally.
But then, we do not open our mouths to our friends and in society,
exposing our deficiencies. We replace what is lost by what looks well,
and hold them in position by the fragments of early belief that still
project; and when these artificial articles prove irksome we change
them. This is how it is that, for instance, in politics, a man may
profess to day one thing, and something quite different to-morrow. No
one is shocked, every one understands that this exhibition to-day is
unreal, and that to-morrow also unreal.
But, together with the advantage afforded by this power of altering our
sets, there is a disadvantage which must not be left unnoticed, which is
that the biting and holding power in them is not equal to that possessed
by the natural articles.
Patience Kite came upon the captain as he stood in a dream, Bible in
hand, but not reading, meditating, and looking far away, yet seeing
nothing. She roused him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Do you know what they are about?”
“They! Who?”
“All the parish—the men; the miners out of work, the day-labourers, the
tradesmen, all.”
Saltren shook his head; he desired to be left alone to his thoughts, his
prayers, his Bible reading.
“They are destroying your house,” said Patience, shaking him, to rouse
him, as she would have shaken a sleeper.
“My house? Chillacot?”
“Yes, they are; they are breaking up the rock on the Cleave; and
throwing it down on your roof, and smashing it in.”
“My house! Chillacot?” He was still absent in mind. He could not at once
withdraw his thoughts from where they had strayed to matters so closely
concerning himself.
“It is true; Tamsine came running to me to tell me about it. Your son
managed to get into the house and bring his mother out, and Marianne is
like one in a fit, she cannot speak—_that_, if you wish it, is a
miracle. The men have set picks and crowbars to work to tumble the
stones down on your house and garden, and bury them. Slates and windows
are smashed already, and the shrubs broken down in your garden.”
“My house!—why?”
“Why? Because you won’t let the railway come along there, and the parish
is angry, and thinks the station will be set further from the village.
The fellows say you, with your obstinacy, are standing in the way of
improvement, and driving trade and money out of the place.”
Stephen Saltren looked at Mrs. Kite with dazed eyes. He could not
receive all she said, but he allowed her to lead him through the woods
in the direction of Chillacot. He came out with her at the spot where he
had stood before and looked on whilst the body of Lord Lamerton was
removed from the place where it had fallen.
He stood there now, and looked again, and saw the destruction of the
house he loved. A crowd of men and boys were on the down, shouting,
laughing, some working, others encouraging them. Those who had crowbars
drove them into the turf, and worked through to the rock that came up
close to the surface; then they levered the stones through clefts and
faults, out of place, and sent them plunging over the edge of the
precipice, accompanied by clouds of dust, and avalanches of rubble. As
each piece went leaping and rolling down it was saluted with a cheer,
and the men leaned over the edge of the cliff to see where it fell, and
what amount of damage was done by it.
The roof of Chillacot was broken through in several places; the slates
at the top of the chimney, set on edge to divert the draught from
blowing down it, were knocked off. One huge block had overleaped the
house, torn a track through the flower-bed in front, had beat down the
entrance gate and there halted, seated on the shattered gate.
Saltren stood looking on with apparent indifference, because he was
still unable to realise what was being done; but the full importance of
the fact that his home was being wrecked came on him with a sudden rush,
the blood flew into his face, he uttered a shout of rage, plunged
through the bushes, down the hill-side, dashed through the stream below
in the valley, ran up to his cottage, and for a moment stood shaking his
fist in inarticulate wrath at the men who looked down on him, laughing
and jeering from the cliff.
He had forgotten everything now except what was before him, and his
anger made him blind and speechless. This was his house, built by his
father; this his garden, tilled by his own hands. Who had a right to
touch his property?
The blacksmith from above shouted to him to stand off, another mass of
rock was dislodged and would fall. Saltren could see what menaced. On
the piece of rock grew a thorn-tree, and the thorn was swaying against
the sky with the exertions of the men leaning on their levers, snapping
the ligatures of root-fibre, and opening the joints in the stone. But
Saltren had no fear for himself in his fury at the outrage being done
him. Regardless of the warning cries addressed to him, he strode over
the broken gate, and entered his partially ruined house.
The blacksmith, alarmed, shouted to the miners engaged on the levers to
desist from their work, as Saltren was in the house below; but they
replied that the stone was moving, the crack widening between it and the
rock, and that to arrest it was now impossible.
The men held their breath, and were for the moment afraid of the
consequence of what they had done. But they breathed freely a moment
later, as they saw the captain emerge from his house and cross the
garden, and take up a place out of the reach of danger. What they did
not notice, or disregarded, was that he had brought out his gun with
him. Stephen stood where he could command those on the cliff, and
levelled and cocked his gun. His strong jaws were set; his dark eyebrows
drawn over his flashing eyes; there was not a tremor in his muscles. He
watched the swaying thorn; he saw that in another moment it would come
down along with the mass of rock on which it stood, and which it
grappled with its claw-like roots.
“What are you about, cap’n?” asked Mrs. Kite, coming up hastily.
He turned his head, smiled bitterly, and touched the barrel of his gun.
“When that rock comes down,” he said, “one of those above shall follow
it.”
At that moment the block parted from the parent rock, and whirled
beneath, followed by a train of dust. It struck the corner of the
chimney, sent the stones of which it was built flying in all directions,
and crashed through the roof, but left the thorn-bush athwart the gap it
had torn.
Before Saltren could discharge his gun, Mrs. Kite struck it up, and he
fired it into the air.
“You fool!” she said, and then burst into a harsh laugh. “You find fault
with others for doing that you approve yourself. You would undermine
Orleigh, and object to Chillacot being overthrown.”