A POPULAR PREACHER.
What could Isabel Gilbert do? The fabric of all her dreams was shivered
like a cobweb in a sudden wind, and floated away from her for ever.
Everybody had misunderstood her. Even _he_, who should have been a
demi-god in power of penetration as in every other attribute,--even he
had wronged and outraged her, and never again could she look trustfully
upward to the dark beauty of his face; never again could her hand rest,
oh, so lightly, for one brief instant on his arm; never again could she
tell him in childish confidence all the vague yearnings, the
innocently-sentimental aspirations, of her childish soul.
Never any more. The bright ideal of her life had melted away from her
like a spectral cloud of silvery spray hovering above an Alpine
waterfall, and had left behind only a cynical man of the world, who
boldly asked her to run away from her husband, and was angry with her
because she refused to comply with his cruel demand.
Not for one moment did the Doctor's Wife contemplate the possibility of
taking the step which Roland Lansdell had proposed to her. Far off--as
far away from her as some dim half-forgotten picture of
fairy-land--there floated a vision of what her life might have been with
him, if she had been Clotilde, or the glittering Duchess, or Lady
Gwendoline, or some one or other utterly different from herself. But the
possibility of deliberately leaving her husband to follow the footsteps
of this other man, was as far beyond her power of comprehension as the
possibility that she might steal a handful of arsenic out of one of the
earthenware jars in the surgery, and mix it with the sugar that
sweetened George Gilbert's matutinal coffee.
She wandered away from Thurston's Crag, not following the meadow pathway
that would have taken her homeward; but going anywhere,
half-unconscious, wholly indifferent where she went; and thinking with
unutterable sadness of her broken dreams.
She had been so childish, so entirely childish, and had given herself up
so completely to that one dear day-dream. I think her childhood floated
away from her for ever in company with that broken dream; and that the
grey dawn of her womanhood broke upon her, cold and chill, as she walked
slowly away from the spot where Roland Lansdell lay face downwards on
the grass, weeping over the ruin of _his_ dream. It seemed as if in that
hour she crossed Mr. Longfellow's typical rivulet and passed on to the
bleak and sterile country beyond. Well may the maiden linger ere she
steps across that narrow boundary; for the land upon this hither side is
very bare and desolate as compared with the fertile gardens and pleasant
meads she abandons for ever. The sweet age of enchantment is over; the
fairy companions of girlhood, who were loveliest even when most they
deluded, spread their bright wings and flutter away; and the grave
genius of common sense--a dismal-looking person, who dresses in grey
woollen stuff, warranted not to shrink under the ordeal of the wash-tub,
and steadfastly abjures crinoline--stretches out her hand, and offers,
with a friendly but uncompromising abruptness, to be the woman's future
guide and monitress.
Isabel Gilbert was a woman all at once; ten years older by that bleak
afternoon's most bitter discovery. Since there was no one in the world
who understood her, since even he so utterly failed to comprehend her,
it must be that her dreams were foolish and impossible of comprehension
to any one but herself. But those foolish dreams had for ever vanished.
She could never think of Roland Lansdell again as she had thought of
him. All her fancies about him had been so many fond and foolish
delusions. He was not the true and faithful knight who could sit for
ever at the entrance of his hermitage gazing fondly at the distant
convent-casement, which might or might not belong to his lost love's
chamber. No; he was quite another sort of person. He was the fierce
dissolute cavalier, with a cross-handled sword a yard and a half long,
and pointed shoes with long cruel spurs and steel chain-work jingling
and clanking as he strode across his castle-hall. He was the false and
wicked lover who would have scaled the wall of Hildegonde's calm retreat
some fatal night, and would have carried the shrieking nun away, to go
mad and throw herself into the Rhine on the earliest opportunity. He was
a heartless Faust, ready to take counsel of Mephistopheles and betray
poor trusting Gretchen. He was Robert the Devil, about whose accursed
footsteps a whole graveyard of accusing spirits might arise at any
moment. It may be that Isabel did not admire Mr. Lansdell less when she
thought of him thus; but there was an awful shuddering horror mingled
with her admiration. She was totally unable to understand him as he
really was--a benevolently disposed young man, desirous of doing as
little mischief in the world as might be compatible with his being
tolerably happy himself; and fully believing that no great or
irreparable harm need result from his appropriation of another man's
wife.
The tears rolled slowly down Mrs. Gilbert's pale cheeks as she walked
along the Midlandshire lanes that afternoon. She did not weep violently,
or abandon herself to any wild passion of grief. As yet she was quite
powerless to realize the blankness of her future life, now that her
dream was broken for ever. Her grief was not so bitter as it had been on
the day of Roland's sudden departure from Mordred. He had loved her--she
knew that now; and the supreme triumph of that thought supported her in
the midst of her sorrow. He had loved her. His love was not the sort of
thing she had so often read of, and so fondly believed in; it was only
the destroying passion of the false knight, the cruel fancy of the
wicked squire in top-boots, whom she had frequently seen--per favour of
a newspaper-order--from the back boxes of the Surrey Theatre. But he
_did_ love her! He loved her so well as to cast himself on the ground
and weep because she had rejected him; and the wicked squire in
top-boots had never gone so far as that, generally contenting himself
with more practical evidences of his vexation, such as the levying of an
execution on the goods and chattels of the heroine's father, or the
waylaying and carrying off of the heroine herself by hired ruffians. How
oddly it happens that the worthy farmer in the chintz waistcoat is
_always_ in arrear with his rent, and always stands in the relation of
tenant to the dissolute squire!
Would Mr. Lansdell do anything of that kind? Isabel gave a little shiver
as she glanced at the lonely landscape, and thought how a brace of
hireling scoundrels might spring suddenly across the hedge, and bear her
off to a convenient postchaise. Were there any postchaises in the world
now, Isabel wondered. A strange confusion of thoughts filled her mind.
She could not become _quite_ a woman all in a moment; the crossing of
the mystic brook is not so rapid an operation as that. Some remnants of
the old delusions hung about her, and merely took a new form.
She sat down on the lower step of a stile to rest herself by-and-by, and
smoothed back her hair, which had been blown about her face by the March
wind, and re-tied the strings of her bonnet, before she went out on the
high-road, that lay on the other side of the stile. When she did emerge
upon the road, she found herself ever so far from home, and close to the
model village where Mr. Raymond had given his simple entertainment of
tea and pound-cake, and in which George Gilbert had stood by her side
pleading to her with such profound humility. Poor George! The quiet
aspect of the village-green, the tiny cottages, trim and bright in the
fading March sunshine; the low wooden gate opening into the
churchyard,--all these, so strange and yet so familiar, brought back the
memory of a time that seemed unspeakably far away now.
It was Passion-week,--for Easter fell very late in March this year,--and
the model village being a worthy model in the matter of piety as well as
in all other virtues, there was a great deal of church-going among the
simple inhabitants. The bells were ringing for evening service now, as
Mrs. Gilbert lingered in the road between the village and the
churchyard; and little groups of twos and threes, and solitary old women
in black bonnets, passed her by, as she loitered quite at a loss whither
to go, or what to do. They looked at her with solemn curiosity expressed
in their faces. She was a stranger there, though Graybridge was only a
few miles away; she was a stranger, and that alone, in any place so
circumscribed as the model village, was enough to excite curiosity; and
it may be that, over and above this, there was something in the look of
her pale face and heavy eyelids, and a certain absent expression in her
downcast eyes, calculated to arouse suspicion. Even in the midst of her
trouble she could see that people looked at her suspiciously; and all in
a moment there flashed back upon her mind the cruel things that Lady
Gwendoline Pomphrey had said to her. Yes; all at once she remembered
those bitter sentences. She had made herself a subject for slanderous
tongues, and the story of her wicked love for Roland Lansdell was on
every lip. If _he_, who should have known her--if he before whom she had
bared all the secrets of her sentimental soul--if even he thought so
badly of her as to believe that she could abandon her husband and become
the thing that Mr. Dombey believed his wife to be when he struck his
daughter on the stairs--the sort of creature whom grave Judge Brandon
met one night under a lamp-post in a London street--how could she wonder
that other people slandered and despised her? Very suddenly had the
gates of Paradise closed upon her: very swiftly had she been dropped
down from the fairy regions of her fancy to this cold, hard, cruel
workaday world; and being always prone to exaggeration, she fancied it
even colder, harder, and more cruel than it was. She fancied the people
pointing at her in the little street at Graybridge; the stern rector
preaching at her in his Sunday sermon. She pictured to herself
everything that is most bitterly demonstrative in the way of scorn and
contumely. The days were past in which solemn elders of Graybridge could
send her out to wander here and there with bare bleeding feet and a
waxen taper in her hand. There was no scarlet letter with which these
people could brand her as the guilty creature they believed her to be;
but short of this, what could they not do to her? She imagined it all:
her husband would come to know what was thought of her, and to think of
her as others thought, and she would be turned out of doors.
The groups of quiet people--almost all of them were women, and very few
of them were young--melted slowly into the shadowy church-porch, like
the dusky unsubstantial figures in a dioramic picture. The bells were
still ringing in the chill twilight; but the churchyard was very lonely
now; and the big solemn yew-trees looked weird and ghost-like against
the darkening grey sky. Only one long low line of pale yellow light
remained of the day that was gone! the day in which Isabel had said
farewell to Roland Lansdell! It was a real farewell; no lovers' quarrel,
wherefrom should spring that re-renewal of love so dismally associated
with the Eton Latin Grammar. It was an eternal parting: for had he not
told her to go away from him--to leave him for ever? Not being the
wicked thing for which he had mistaken her, she was nothing in the world
for him. He did not require perpetual worship; he did not want her to
retire to a convent, in order that he might enjoy himself for the rest
of his existence by looking up at her window; he did not want her to sit
beside a brazier of charcoal with her hand linked in his--and die. He
was not like that delightful Henry von Kleist, who took his Henriette to
a pleasant inn about a mile from Potsdam, supped gaily with her, and
then shot her and himself beside a lake in the neighbourhood. Mr.
Lansdell wanted nothing that was poetical or romantic, and had not even
mentioned suicide in the course of his passionate talk.
She went into the churchyard, and walked towards the little bridge upon
which she had stood with George Gilbert by her side. The Wayverne flowed
silently under the solid moss-grown arch; the wind had gone down by this
time, and there was only now and then a faint shiver of the long dark
rushes, as if the footsteps of the invisible dead, wandering in the
twilight, had stirred them. She stood on the bridge, looking down at the
quiet water. The opportunity had come now, if she really wanted to drown
herself. Happily for weak mankind, self-destruction is a matter in which
opportunity and inclination very seldom go together. The Doctor's Wife
was very miserable; but she did not feel quite prepared to take that
decisive plunge which might have put an end to her earthly troubles,
Would they hear the splash yonder in the church, if she dropped quietly
in among the rushes from the sloping bank under the shadow of the
bridge? Would they hear the water surging round her as she sank, and
wonder what the sound meant, and then go on with their prayers,
indifferent to the drowning creature, and absorbed by their devotions?
She wondered what these people were like, who kept their houses so
tidily, and went to church twice a day in Passion-week, and never fell
in love with Roland Lansdell. Long ago, in her childhood, when she went
to see a play, she had wondered about the people she met in the street;
the people who were not going to the theatre. Were they very happy? did
they know that she had a free admission to the upper boxes of the
Adelphi, and envy her? How would _they_ spend the evening,--they who
were not going to weep with Mr. Benjamin Webster, or Miss Sarah Woolgar?
Now she wondered about people who were not miserable like
herself--simple commonplace people, who had no yearnings after a life of
poetry and splendour. She thought of them as a racer, who had just run
second for the Derby, might think of a quiet pack-horse plodding along a
dusty road and not wanting to win any race whatsoever.
"Even if they knew him, they wouldn't care about him," she thought. They
did know him, perhaps,--saw him ride by their open windows, on a
summer's afternoon, gorgeous on a two-hundred-guinea hack, and did not
feel the world to be a blank desert when he was gone.
Did she wish to be like these people? No! Amid all her sorrow she could
acknowledge, in the words of the poet, that it was better to have loved
and lost him, than never to have loved him at all. Had she not lived her
life, and was she not entitled to be a heroine for ever and ever by
reason of her love and despair?
For a long time she loitered on the bridge, thinking of all these
things, and thinking very little of how she was to go back to
Graybridge, where her absence must have created some alarm by this time.
She had often kept the surgeon waiting for his dinner before to-day; but
she had never been absent when he ate it. There was a station at the
model village; but there was no rail to Graybridge; there was only a
lumbering old omnibus, that conveyed railway passengers thither. Isabel
left the churchyard, and went to the little inn before which George had
introduced her to his gardener and factotum. A woman standing at the
door of this hostelry gave her all needful information about the
omnibus, which did not leave the station till half-past eight o'clock;
until that time she must remain where she was. So she went slowly back
to the churchyard, and being tired of the cold and darkness without,
crept softly into the church.
The church was very old and very irregular. There were only patches of
yellow light here and there, about the pulpit and reading-desk, up in
the organ-loft, and near the vestry-door. A woman came out of the dense
obscurity as Isabel emerged from the porch, and hustled her into a pew;
scandalized by her advent at so late a stage of the service, and eager
to put her away somewhere as speedily as possible. It was a very big
pew, square and high, and screened by faded curtains, hanging from
old-fashioned brass rods. There were a great many hassocks, and a whole
pile of prayer and hymn books in the darkest corner; and Isabel, sitting
amongst these, felt as completely hidden as if she had been in a tomb.
The prayers were just finished,--the familiar prayers, which had so
often fallen like a drowsy cadence of meaningless words upon her
unheeding ears, while her erring and foolish thoughts were busy with the
master of Mordred Priory.
She heard the footsteps of the clergyman coming slowly along the matted
aisle--the rustling of his gown as he drew it on his shoulders; she
heard the door of the pulpit closed softly, and then a voice, a low
earnest voice, that sounded tender and solemn in the stillness, recited
the preliminary prayer. There are voices which make people cry,--voices
which touch too acutely on some hidden spring within us, and open the
floodgates of our tears; and the voice of the curate of Hurstonleigh was
one of these. He was only a curate; but he was very popular in the model
village, and the rumour of his popularity had already spread to
neighbouring towns and villages. People deserted their parish churches
on a Sunday afternoon and came to hear Mr. Austin Colborne preach one of
his awakening sermons. He was celebrated for awakening sermons. The
stolid country people wept aloud sometimes in the midst of one of his
discourses. He was always in earnest; tenderly earnest, sorrowfully
earnest, terribly earnest sometimes. His life, too, outside the church
was in perfect harmony with the precepts he set forth under the shadow
of the dark oaken sounding-board. There are some men who can believe,
who can look forward to a prize so great and wonderful as to hold the
pain and trouble of the race of very small account when weighed against
the hope of victory. Austin Colborne was one of these men. The priestly
robes he wore had not been loosely shuffled on by him because there was
no other lot in life within his reach. He had assumed his sacred office
with all the enthusiasm of a Loyola or an Irving, and he knew no looking
back. It was such a man as this whom people came to hear at the little
church beside the wandering Wayverne. It was such a man as this whose
deep-toned voice fell with a strange power upon Isabel Gilbert's ears
to-night. Ah, now she could fancy Louise de la Vallière low on her knees
in the black shadow of a gothic pillar, hearkening to the cry of the
priest who called upon her to repent and be saved. For some little time
she only heard the voice of the preacher--the actual words of his
discourse fell blankly on her ear. At first it was only a beautiful
voice, a grand and solemn voice, rising and sinking on its course like
the distant murmur of mighty waves for ever surging towards the shore.
Then, little by little, the murmurs took a palpable form, and Isabel
Gilbert found that the preacher was telling a story. Ah, that story,
that exquisite idyl, that solemn tragedy, that poem so perfect in its
beauty, that a sentimental Frenchman has only to garnish it with a few
flowery periods, and lo, all the world is set reading it on a sudden,
fondly believing that they have found something new. Mr. Austin Colborne
was very fond of dwelling on the loveliness of that sublime history, and
more frequently founded his discourse upon some divine incident in the
records of the four Evangelists than on any obscure saying in St. Paul's
Epistles to the Corinthians or the Hebrews. This is no place in which to
dwell upon Mr. Austin Colborne, or the simple Christian creed it was his
delight to illustrate. He was a Christian, according to the purest and
simplest signification of the word. His sermons were within the
comprehension of a rustic or a child, yet full and deep enough in
meaning to satisfy the strictest of logicians, the sternest of critics.
Heaven knows I write of him and of his teaching in all sincerity, and
yet the subject seems to have so little harmony with the history of a
foolish girl's errors and shortcomings, that I approach it with a kind
of terror. I only know that Isabel Gilbert, weeping silently in the dark
corner of the curtained pew, felt as she had never felt in all her
Graybridge church-going; felt at once distressed and comforted.
Was it strange that, all at once, Isabel Gilbert should open her ears
to the sublime story, which, in one shape or other, she had heard so
often? Surely the history of all popular preachers goes far to
demonstrate that Heaven gives a special power to some voices. When
Whitfield preached the Gospel to the miners at Kingswood,--to rugged
creatures who were little better than so many savages, but who, no
doubt, in some shape or other, had heard that Gospel preached to them
before,--the scalding tears ploughed white channels upon the black
cheeks as the men listened. At last the voice of all others that had
power to move them arose, and melted the stubborn ignorant hearts. Is it
inspiration or animal magnetism which gives this power to some special
persons? or is it not rather the force of faith, out of which is
engendered a will strong enough to take hold of the wills of other
people, and bend them howsoever it pleases? When Danton, rugged and
gigantic, thundered his hideous demands for new hecatombs of victims,
there must have been something in the revolutionary monster strong
enough to trample out the common humanity in those who heard him, and
mould a mighty populace to his own will and purpose as easily as a giant
might fashion a mass of clay. Surely Mirabeau was right. There can be
nothing impossible to the man who believes in himself. The masses of
this world, being altogether incapable of lasting belief in anything,
are always ready to be beaten into any shape by the chosen individual
who _believes_, and is thus of another nature--something so much
stronger than all the rest as to seem either a god or a demon. Cromwell
appears, and all at once a voice is found for the wrongs of a nation.
See how the king and his counsellors go down like corn before the blast
of the tempest, while the man with a dogged will, and a sublime
confidence in his own powers, plants himself at the helm of a disordered
state, and wins for himself the name of Tiger of the Seas. Given Mr.
John Law, with ample confidence in his own commercial schemes, and all
France is rabid with a sudden madness, beating and trampling one another
to death in the Rue Quincampoix. Given a Luther, and all the old
papistical abuses are swept away like so much chaff before the wind.
Given a Wesley, the believer, the man who is able to preach forty
thousand sermons and travel a hundred thousand miles, and, behold, a
million disciples exist in this degenerate day to bear testimony to his
power.
Was it strange, then, that Isabel Gilbert, so dangerously susceptible of
every influence, should be touched and melted by Mr. Colborne's
eloquence? She had not been religiously brought up. In the Camberwell
household Sunday had been a day on which people got up later than usual,
and there were pies or puddings to be made. It had been a day associated
with savoury baked meats, and a beer-stained "Weekly Dispatch" newspaper
borrowed from the nearest tavern. It had been a day on which Mr.
Sleaford slept a good deal on the sofa, excused himself from the trouble
of shaving, and very rarely put on his boots. Raffish-looking men had
come down to Camberwell in the Sunday twilight, to sit late into the
night smoking and drinking, and discoursing in a mysterious jargon known
to the household as "business talk." Sometimes of a summer evening, Mrs.
Sleaford, awakened to a sense of her religious duties, would suddenly
run a raid amongst the junior branches of the family, and hustle off
Isabel and one or two of the boys to evening service at the big bare
church by the canal. But the spasmodic attendance at divine service had
very little effect upon Miss Sleaford, who used to sit staring at the
holes in her gloves; or calculating how many yards of riband, at how
much per yard, would be required for the trimming of any special bonnet
to which her fancy leaned; or thinking how a decent-looking young man up
in the gallery might be a stray nobleman, with a cab and tiger waiting
somewhere outside the church, who would perhaps fall in love with her
before the sermon was finished. She had not been religiously brought up;
and the church-going at Graybridge had been something of a bore to her;
or at best a quiet lull in her life, which left her free to indulge the
foolish vagaries of her vagabond fancy. But now, for the first time, she
was touched and melted; the weak sentimental heart was caught at the
rebound. She was ready to be anything in the world except a commonplace
matron, leading a dull purposeless life at Graybridge. She wanted to
find some shrine, some divinity, who would accept her worship; some
temple lifted high above the sordid workaday earth, in which she might
kneel for ever and ever. If not Roland Lansdell, why then Christianity.
She would have commenced her novitiate that night had she been in a
Roman Catholic land, where convent-doors were open to receive such as
her. As it was, she could only sit quietly in the pew and listen. She
would have liked to go to the vestry when the service came to an end,
and cast herself at the feet of the curate, and make a full confession
of her sins; but she had not sufficient courage for that. The curate
might misunderstand her, as Roland Lansdell had done. He might see in
her only an ordinarily wicked woman, who wanted to run away from her
husband. Vague yearnings towards Christian holiness filled her foolish
breast; but as yet she knew not how to put them into any shape. When the
congregation rose to leave the church, she lingered to the last, and
then crept slowly away, resolved to come again to hear this wonderful
preacher. She went to the little station whence the Graybridge omnibus
was to start at half-past eight; and after waiting a quarter of an hour
took her place in a corner of the vehicle. It was nearly ten when she
rang the bell at her husband's gate, and Mrs. Jeffson came out with a
grave face to admit her.
"Mr. George had his dinner and tea alone, ma'am," she said in tones of
awful reproof, while Isabel stood before the little glass in the
sitting-room taking off her bonnet; "and he's gone out again to see some
sick folks in the lanes on the other side of the church. He was right
down uneasy about you."
"I've been to Hurstonleigh, to hear Mr. Colborne preach," Isabel
answered, with a very feeble effort to appear quite at her ease. "I had
heard so much about his preaching, and I wanted so to hear him."
It was true that she had heard Austin Colborne talked of amongst her
church-going acquaintance at Graybridge; but it was quite untrue that
she had ever felt the faintest desire to hear him preach. Had not her
whole life been bounded by a magic circle, of which Roland Lansdell was
the resplendent centre?