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THE INFIDEL
A Story of the Great Revival
by
M. E. BRADDON
Author of "Lady Audley's Secret," "Vixen,"
"London Pride," etc._
London
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Ltd.
1900
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
GRUB-STREET SCRIBBLERS
CHAPTER II.
MISS LESTER, OF THE PATENT THEATRES
CHAPTER III.
AT MRS. MANDALAY'S ROOMS
CHAPTER IV.
A MORNING CALL
CHAPTER V.
A SERIOUS FAMILY
CHAPTER VI.
A WOMAN WHO COULD SAY NO
CHAPTER VII.
PRIDE CONQUERS LOVE
CHAPTER VIII.
THE LOVE THAT FOLLOWS THE DEAD
CHAPTER IX.
THE SANDS RUN DOWN
CHAPTER X.
A DUTY VISIT
CHAPTER XI.
ANTONIA'S INITIATION
CHAPTER XII.
"SO RUN THAT YE MAY OBTAIN"
CHAPTER XIII.
IN ST. JAMES'S SQUARE
CHAPTER XIV.
"ONE THREAD IN LIFE WORTH SPINNING"
CHAPTER XV.
"MY LADY AND MY LOVE"
CHAPTER XVI.
DEATH AND VICTORY
CHAPTER XVII.
SWORD AND BIBLE
CHAPTER XVIII.
"AS A GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED"
CHAPTER XIX.
"CHOOSE OF TWO LOVERS"
CHAPTER XX.
"AND CLEAVE UNTO THE BEST"
EPILOGUE.
CHAPTER I.
GRUB-STREET SCRIBBLERS.
Father and daughter worked together at the trade of letters in the days
when George the Second was king and Grub Street was a reality. For
them literature was indeed a trade, since William Thornton wrote only
what the booksellers wanted, and adjusted the supply to the demand. No
sudden inspirations, no freaks of a vagabond fancy ever distracted him
from the question of bread and cheese; so many sides of letter-paper
to produce so many pounds. He wrote everything. He contributed verse
as well as prose to the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and had been the
winner of one of those prizes which the liberal Mr. Cave offered for
the best poem sent to him. Nothing came amiss to his facile pen. In
politics he was strong--on either side. He could write for or against
any measure, and had condemned and applauded the same politicians in
fiery articles above different aliases, anticipating by the vehemence
of his phrases the coming guineas. He wrote history or natural history
for the instruction of youth, not so well as Goldsmith, but with a
glib directness that served. He wrote philosophy for the sick-bed of
old age, and romance to feed the dreams of lovers. He stole from the
French, the Spaniards, the Italians, and turned Latin epigrams into
English jests. He burnt incense before any altar, and had written much
that was base and unworthy when the fancy of the town set that way, and
a ribald pen was at a premium. He had written for the theatres with
fair success, and his manuscript sermons at a crown apiece found a
ready market.
Yes, Mr. Thornton wrote sermons--he, the unfrocked priest, the
audacious infidel, who believed in nothing better than this earth upon
which he and his kindred worms were crawling; nothing to come after
the tolling bell, no recompense for sorrows here, no reunion with the
beloved dead--only the sexton and the spade, and the forgotten grave.
It was eighteen years since his young wife had died and left him with
an infant daughter--this very Antonia, his stay and comfort now, his
indefatigable helper, his Mercury, tripping with light foot between his
lodgings and the booksellers or the newspaper offices, to carry his
copy, or to sue for a guinea or two in advance for work to be done.
When his wife died he was curate-in-charge of a remote Lincolnshire
parish, not twenty miles from that watery region at the mouth of the
Humber, that Epworth which John Wesley's renown had glorified. Here in
this lonely place, after two years of widowhood, a great trouble had
fallen upon him. He always recurred to it with the air of a martyr, and
pitied himself profoundly, as one more sinned against than sinning.
A farmer's daughter, a strapping wench of eighteen, had induced him to
elope with her. This Adam ever described Eve as the initiator of his
fall.
They went to London together, meaning to sail for Jersey in a trading
smack, which left the docks for that fertile island twice in a month.
The damsel was of years of discretion, and the elopement was no felony;
but it happened awkwardly for the parson that she carried her father's
cash-box with her, containing some two hundred pounds, upon which Mr.
Thornton was to start a dairy farm. They were hotly pursued by the
infuriated father, and were arrested in London as they were stepping on
board the Jersey smack, and Thornton was caught with the cash on his
person.
He swore he believed it to be the girl's money; and she swore she had
earned it in her father's dairy--that, for saving, 'twas she had saved
every penny of it. This plea lightened the sentence, but did not acquit
either prisoner. The girl was sent to Bridewell for a year, and the
parson was sentenced to five years' imprisonment; but by the advocacy
of powerful friends, and by the help of a fine manner, an unctuous
piety, and general good conduct, was restored to the world at the end
of the second year--a happy escape in an age when the gifted Dr. Dodd
died for a single slip of the pen, and when the pettiest petty larceny
meant hanging.
Having bored himself to death by an assumed sanctimony for two years,
Thornton came out of the house of bondage a rank atheist, a scoffer at
all things holy, a scorner of all men who called themselves Christians.
To him they seemed as contemptible as he had felt himself in his
hypocrisy. Did any of them believe? Yes, the imbeciles and hysterical
women, the ignorant masses who fifty years ago had believed in
witchcraft and the ubiquitous devil as implicitly as they now believed
in Justification by Faith and the New Birth. But that men of brains--an
intellectual giant like Sam Johnson, for instance--could kneel in dusty
city churches Sunday after Sunday and search the Scriptures for the
promise of life immortal! Pah! What could Voltaire, the enlightened,
think of such a time-serving hypocrisy, except that the thing paid?
"It pays, sir," said Thornton, when he and his little knot of friends
discussed the great dictionary-maker in a tavern parlour which they
called "The Portico," and which they fondly hoped to make as famous
as the Scribbler's Club, which Swift founded, and where he and Oxford
and Bolingbroke, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot talked grandly of abstract
things. The talk in "The Portico" was ever of persons, and mostly
scandalous, the gangrene of envy devouring the minds of men whose lives
had been failures.
The wife of Thornton's advocate, who was well off and childless,
had taken compassion on the sinner's three-year-old daughter, and
had carried the little Antonia to her cottage at Windsor, where the
child was well cared for by the old housekeeper who had charge of the
barrister's rural retreat. It was a cottage _orné_ in a spacious garden
adjoining Windsor Forest, and to-day, in her twentieth year, Antonia
looked back upon that lost paradise with a fond longing. She had often
urged her father to take her to see the kind friend whose bright young
face she sometimes saw in her dreams, the very colour of whose gowns
she remembered; but he always put her off with an excuse. The advocate
had risen to distinction; he and his wife were fine people now, and Mr.
Thornton would not exhibit his shabby gentility in any such company.
He had been grateful for so beneficent a service at the time of his
captivity, and had expatiated upon his thankfulness on three sides of
letter-paper, blotted with real tears; but his virtues were impulses
rather than qualities of the mind, and he had soon forgotten how much
he owed the K.C.'s tender-hearted wife. Providence had been good to
her, as to the mother of Samuel, and she had sons and daughters of her
own now.
Antonia knew that her father had been in prison. He was too
self-compassionate to refrain from bewailing past sufferings, and too
lazy-brained to originate and sustain any plausible fiction to account
for those two years in which his child had not seen his face. But he
had been consistently reticent as to the offence which he had expiated,
and Antonia supposed it to be of a political nature--some Jacobite plot
in which he had got himself entangled.
From her sixth year to her seventeenth she had been her father's
companion, at first his charge--and rather an onerous one, as it seemed
to the hack-scribbler--a charge to be shared with, and finally shunted
on to the shoulders of, any good-natured landlady who, in her own
parlance, took to the child.
Thornton was so far considerate of parental duty that, having found
an honest and kindly matron in Rupert Buildings, St. Martin's Lane,
he left off shifting his tent, and established himself for life, as
he told her, on her second floor, and confided the little girl almost
wholly to her charge. She had one daughter five years older than
Antonia, who was at school all day, leaving the basement of the house
silent and empty of youthful company, and Mrs. Potter welcomed the
lovely little face as a sunny presence in her dull parlour. She taught
Antonia--shortened to Tonia--her letters, and taught her to dust the
poor little cups and ornaments of willow-pattern Worcester china, and
to keep the hearth trimly swept, and rub the brass fender--taught her
all manner of little services which the child loved to perform. She
was what people called an old-fashioned child; for, having never lived
with other children, she had no loud boisterous ways, and her voice
was never shrill and ear-piercing. All she had learnt or observed had
been the ways of grown-up people. From the time she was ten years old
she was able to be of use to her father. She had gone on errands in
the immediate neighbourhood for Mrs. Potter. Thornton sent her further
afield to carry copy to a printer, or a letter to a bookseller, with
many instructions as to how to ask her way at every turn, and to be
careful in crossing the street. Mrs. Potter shuddered at these journeys
to Fleet Street or St. Paul's Churchyard, and it seemed a wonder to
her that the child came back alive, but she stood in too much awe of
her lodger's learning and importance to question his conduct; and when
Antonia entered her teens she had all the discretion of a woman, and
was able to take care of her father, and to copy his hurried scrawl in
her own neat penmanship, when he had written against time in a kind of
shorthand of his own, with contractions which Antonia soon mastered.
The education of his daughter was the one duty that Thornton had never
shirked. Hack-scribbler as he was, he loved books for their own sake,
and he loved imparting knowledge to a child whose quick appreciation
lightened the task and made it a relaxation. He gave her of his best,
thinking that he did her a service in teaching her to despise the
beliefs that so many of her fellow-creatures cherished, ranking the
Christian religion with every hideous superstition of the dark ages,
as only a little better than the delusions of man-eating savages in an
unexplored Africa, or the devil-dancers and fakirs of Hindostan.
This man was, perhaps, a natural product of that dark age which went
before the Great Revival--the age when not to be a Deist and a scoffer
was to be out of the fashion. He had been an ordained clergyman of the
Church of England, taking up that trade as he took up the trade of
letters, for bread and cheese. The younger son of a well-born Yorkshire
squire, he had been a profligate and a spendthrift at Oxford, but was
clever enough to get a degree, and to scrape through his ordination.
As he had never troubled himself about spiritual questions, and knew
no more theology than sufficed to satisfy an indulgent bishop, he
had hardly considered the depth of his hypocrisy when he tendered
himself as a shepherd of souls. He had a fluent pen, and could write
a telling sermon, when it was worth his while; but original eloquence
was wasted upon his bovine flock in Lincolnshire, and he generally
read them any old printed sermon that came to hand among the rubbish
heap of his bookshelves. He migrated from one curacy to another, and
from one farmhouse to another, drinking with the farmers, hunting with
the squires; diversified this dull round with a year or two on the
Continent as bear-leader to a wealthy merchant's son and heir; brought
home an Italian wife, and while she lived was tolerably constant and
tolerably sober. That brief span of wedded life, with a woman he fondly
loved, made the one stage in his life-journey to which he might have
looked back without self-reproach.
He was delighted with his daughter's quick intellect and growing love
for books. She began to help him almost as soon as she could write,
and now in her twentieth year father and daughter seemed upon an
intellectual level.
"Nature has been generous to her," he told his chums at "The Portico."
"She has her mother's beauty and my brains."
"Let's hope she'll never have your swallow for gin-punch, Bill," was
the retort, that being the favourite form of refreshment in "The
Portico" room at the Red Lion.
"Nay, she inherits sobriety also from her mother, whose diet was as
temperate as a wood-nymph's."
His eyes grew dim as he thought of the wife long dead--the confiding
girl he had carried from her home among the vineyards and gardens of
the sunny hillside above Bellagio to the dismal Lincolnshire parsonage,
between grey marsh and sluggish river. He had brought her to dreariness
and penury, and to a climate that killed her. Nothing but gin-punch
could ever drown those sorrowful memories; so 'twas no wonder Thornton
took more than his share of the bowl. His companions were his juniors
for the most part, and his inferiors in education. He was the Socrates
of this vulgar Academy, and his disciples looked up to him.
The shabby second floor in Rupert Buildings was Antonia's only idea
of home. Her own eerie was on the floor above--a roomy garret, with a
casement window in the sloping roof, a window that seemed to command
all London, for she could see Westminster Abbey, and the Houses of
Parliament, and across the river to the more rustic-looking streets
and lanes on the southern shore. She loved her garret for the sake of
that window, which had a broad stone sill where she kept her garden of
stocks and pansies, pinks and cowslips, maintained with the help of an
occasional shilling from her father.
The sitting-room was furnished with things that had once been good,
for Mrs. Potter was one of those many hermits in the great city who
had seen better days. She was above the common order of landladies,
and kept her house as clean as a house in Rupert Buildings could be
kept. Tidiness was out of the question in any room inhabited by William
Thornton, whose books and papers accumulated upon every available
table or ledge, and were never to be moved on pain of his severe
displeasure. It was only by much coaxing that his daughter could secure
the privilege of a writing-table to herself. He declared that the
destruction of a single printer's proof might be his ruin, or even the
ruin of the newspaper for which it was intended.
Such as her home was, Antonia was content with it. Such as her life
was, she bore it patiently, unsustained by any hope of a happier life
in a world to come--unsustained by the conviction that by her industry
and cheerfulness she was pleasing God.
She knew that there were homes in which life looked brighter than it
could in Rupert Buildings. She walked with her father in the evening
streets sometimes, when his empty pockets and his score at the Red
Lion forbade the pleasures of "The Portico." She knew the aspect of
houses in Pall Mall and St. James's Square, in Arlington Street and
Piccadilly; heard the sound of fiddles and French horns through open
windows, light music and light laughter; caught glimpses of inner
splendours through hall doors; saw coaches and chairs setting down gay
company, a street crowded with link-boys and running footmen. She knew
that in this London, within a quarter of a mile of her garret, there
was a life to which she must ever remain a stranger--a life of luxury
and pleasure, led by the high-born and the wealthy.
Sometimes when her father was in a sentimental mood he would tell
her of his grandfather's magnificence at the family seat near York;
would paint the glories of a country house with an acre and a half of
roof, the stacks of silver plate, and a perpetual flow of visitors,
gargantuan hunt breakfasts, hunters and coach-horses without number. He
exceeded the limits of actual fact, perhaps, in these reminiscences.
The magnificence had all vanished away, the land was sold, the plate
was melted, not one of the immemorial oaks was left to show where the
park had been; but Tonia was never tired of hearing of those prosperous
years, and was glad to think she came of people who were magnates in
the land.