a long table strewed with roses and covered with gold plate, and the
_débris_ of a fashionable breakfast, chocolate-pots, champagne-glasses,
carbonadoed hams, chickens and salads, jellies and junkets and creams.
"Her ladyship has been entertaining company," he said, with a sense of
displeasure of which he felt ashamed, knowing how unreasonable it was.
Had she not a right to live her own life, she who had never professed
Christianity, least of all his kind of Christianity, which meant total
renunciation of all self-indulgence, purple and fine linen, banquets
and dances, splendid furniture and rich food?
"Yes, sir, her ladyship has been giving a breakfast-party to the Duke
of Cumberland," replied the footman, swelling with pride. "Eight and
twenty sat down--mostly dukes and duchesses--and Mr. Handel played on
the 'arpsikon for an hour after breakfast. His royal 'ighness loves
music," added the lackey, condescendingly, as he ushered Mr. Stobart
into the library.
"Was Lord Dunkeld among the company?" Stobart asked.
"Yes, sir."
Stobart had come there charged with a mission, a self-imposed
duty, which had been in his mind--paramount over all other
considerations--ever since that night at Ranelagh, when he had seen
Antonia and Lord Dunkeld together. Again and again he went over the
same chain of reasoning, with always the same result. He saw her in
the flower of youth, beautiful and impulsive, with a wild courage that
scorned consequences, ready to break the law if her heart prompted;
and he told himself that for such a woman marriage with a good man was
the only safeguard from the innumerable perils of a woman's life. In
her case marriage was inevitable. The worldlings would not cease from
striving for so rich a prize. If she did not marry Dunkeld, she would
marry some one else, his inferior, perhaps, in every virtue. It was his
duty--his, as her friend, her earnest well-wisher--to persuade her to
so suitable an alliance.
Having marked out this duty to be done, he was in a fever of anxiety
to get his task accomplished. He was like a martyr, who knows death
inevitable, and is eager for the faggot and the stake. That poignant
eagerness was so strange a feeling--a fire of enthusiasm that was
almost agony.
He walked up and down the library, agitated and impatient, his hands
clasped above his head. He was wondering how she would receive his
advice. She would be angry, perhaps; and would resent the impertinence
of unsought counsel.
The windows were open, and the room was full of flowers and soft vernal
air. A Kirkman harpsichord stood near the fireplace, scattered with
loose sheets of music from the newest opera and oratorio. A guitar hung
by a broad blue ribbon across an armchair. Light and trivial romances
and modish magazines lay about the table; and another table was covered
with baskets of shells and a half-finished picture-frame in shell-work.
A white cockatoo cackled and screamed on his perch by a window. Nothing
was wanting to mark the lady of fashion.
She came in, beaming with smiles, in the splendour of gala clothes, a
sky-blue poplin sacque, covered with Irish lace, over a primrose satin
petticoat powdered with silver shamrocks. Her hair was rolled back
from her forehead, a little cap like a gauze butterfly was perched on
the top of her head, and gauze lappets were crossed under her chin,
and pinned with a single brilliant. The little cap gave a piquancy
to her beauty, a dainty touch of the _soubrette_, which Boucher has
immortalized in his portrait of the Pompadour.
"Well, sir," she cried gaily, making him a low curtsey, "we have broken
the law between us, and I thank you heartily for your share in the
offence against its majesty. Would to God that Admiral Byng could have
been saved as easily!"
"You have a generous heart, madam--a heart too easily moved, perhaps,
by human miseries, and I tremble for its impulses, while I admire its
warmth and courage. You have never been absent from my thoughts since
that morning in Sally's garret. Indeed, what man living could forget a
scene so incongruous--yet--so beautiful?"
His voice faltered towards the end, and he leant against the late
lord's tall armchair.
"You have not been kind in keeping away from me so long, when I was
dying to give expression to my gratitude."
"Be sure my recompense was having obliged you. 'Twas superfluous to
thank me. I have been very busy. I had arrears of work, and I knew all
_your_ hours were engaged."
"Sure there must always be something to do in a town full of people."
She was playing with the great white bird, smoothing his fluffy
topknot, ruffling the soft saffron feathers round his neck, tempting
him with the pink tips of taper fingers, flashing rose-coloured light
from her diamond rings, whose splendour covered the slender hoop of
gold with which Kilrush married her.
"You have been entertaining the Duke of Cumberland, I hear."
"Billy the Butcher! That's what my father and I used to call him, when
we concocted Jacobite paragraphs for _Lloyd's Evening Post_. Yes, Mr.
Stobart, I have been entertaining royalty for the first time in my
life. The honour was not my own seeking either, for his royal highness
challenged me to invite him."
"He would not be so much out of the fashion as not to be among your
adorers."
"That is too prettily said for an Oxford Methodist. 'Tis a reminiscence
of the soldier's manners. When the duke led me out for the second
dance at the Duchess of Norfolk's ball he was pleased to compliment
my housekeeping. 'I hear your ladyship's is the pleasantest house in
town,' he said, 'but am I never to know more of it than hearsay?' On
which I dropped my best curtsey, and told him that my house with all
it contained was at his feet, and I had not finished my chocolate next
morning before his royal highness's aide-de-camp was announced, who
came to tell me his master would accept any invitation I was civil
enough to send him."
"And this trivial conquest made you happy?"
"Sure it pleased me as any other toy would have done. 'Twas something
to think about--whom I should invite--how I should dress my table. I
strewed it from end to end with cut roses, brought up from Essex this
morning, with the dew on their petals. Their perfume had a flavour of
the East--some valley in Cashmere--till a succession of smoking roasts
polluted the atmosphere. I had a mind to imitate mediæval feasts, and
give the prince a pie full of live singing birds, but one hardly knows
how the birds might behave when the pie was cut."
"You had one sensible man among your guests, I doubt."
"_Merci du compliment--pour les autres_. Pray who was this paragon?"
"Lord Dunkeld."
"You know Lord Dunkeld?"
"He was my intimate friend some years ago."
"Before you left off having any friends but Methodists?"
"Before I knew that life was too serious a thing for trifling
friendships."
"I am glad you approve of Dunkeld. Of all my modish friends he is the
one I like best."
"Is it not something better than liking? Dear Lady Kilrush, accept the
counsel of a friend whose heart is tortured by the consciousness of
your unprotected position, the infinite perils that surround youth and
beauty in a world given over to folly--a world which the most appalling
convulsion of nature and the sudden death of thousands of unprepared
sinners could not awaken from its dream of pleasure. I see you in your
grace and loveliness, of a character too generous to suspect evil,
hemmed round with profligates, the companion of unfaithful wives and
damaged misses. And since I cannot win you for Christ, since you are
deaf and cold to the Saviour's voice, I would at least see you guarded
by a man of honour--a man who knows the world he lives in, and would
know how to protect an adored wife from its worst dangers."
"I hardly follow the drift of this harangue, sir."
"Marry Dunkeld. You could not choose a better man, and I know that he
adores you."
"You are vastly kind, sir, to interest yourself in my matrimonial
projects. But there is more of the old woman--the spinster aunt--in
this unasked advice than I expected from so serious a person as Mr.
Stobart."
"I fear you are offended."
He had grown pale to the lips as he talked to her. His whole
countenance, and the thrilling note in his voice betrayed the intensity
of his feeling.
"No, I am only amused. But I regret that you should have wasted trouble
on my affairs. It is true that Lord Dunkeld has honoured me with the
offer of his hand on more than one occasion, but he has had his answer;
and he is so sensible a man that in rejecting him as a lover I have not
lost him as a friend."
"He will offer again, and you will accept him."
"Never!" she exclaimed with sudden energy, dropping her light,
half-mocking tone, and looking at him with flashing eyes. "I shall
never take a second husband, sir. You may be sure of that."
A crimson fire flashed across his pallid face, and slowly faded. He
drew a deep breath, and there was a silence of moments that seemed long.
"You--you--must have some reason for such a strange resolve."
"Yes, I have my reason."
"May I know it?" he asked, trembling with emotion.
"No, sir, neither you nor any one else. 'Tis my own secret. And now
let us talk of other matters. It was on your conscience to give me a
spinster aunt's advice. You have done your duty very prettily, and your
conscience can be at rest."
He stood looking at her in a strange silence. The beautiful face
which had fired with a transient passion was now only pensive. She
seated herself in her favourite chair by the open window, took up
a tapestry-frame, and began to work in minute stitches that needed
exquisite precision of eye and hand.
How much of his future life or earthly happiness he would have given
to fathom her thoughts! He had come there to persuade her to marry; he
had convinced himself that she ought to marry; and yet his heart was
beating with a wild gladness. He felt like a wretch who had escaped the
gallows. The rope had been round his neck when the reprieve came.
"Tell me about your night-school," she said, without looking up from
her work. "Do the numbers go on increasing?"
"I--I--can't talk of the school to-day," he said. "I have a world of
business on my hands. Good-bye."
He left her on the instant without offering his hand, hurried through
the hall, and opened the great door before the porter, somnolent after
the morning's bustle, could struggle out of his leathern chair.
"Never, never, never more must I cross that threshold," he told himself
as he walked away.
He stopped on the other side of the road, and looked back at the great
handsome house, so dull externally, with its long rows of uniform
windows, its massive pediment and heavy iron railings, with the tall
extinguishers on each side of the door in a flourish of hammered iron.
"If I ever enter that house again I shall deserve to perish
everlastingly," he thought.
'Twas four o'clock, and the sun was blazing, a midsummer afternoon in
early May. He walked to his house in Lambeth like a man in a dream,
from which he seemed to wake with a startled air when his wife ran out
into the passage to welcome him.
"How pale you look," she said. "Is it one of your old headaches?"
"No, no; 'tis nothing but the sudden heat. You are pale enough
yourself, poor little woman! Come, Lucy, give me an early tea, and I'll
take you and the boy for a jaunt up the river."
"Oh, George, how good you are! 'Tis near a year since you gave us a
treat, or yourself a holiday."
"I have worked too hard, perhaps, and might have given you more
pleasure. 'Tis difficult not to be selfish, even in trying to do good."
"I'll have tea ready in a jiffy, and Georgie dressed. I've been sitting
at the window watching the boats, and wishing ever so to be on the
river."
"Thou shalt have thy wish for this once, love," he said gently.
He was silent all through the simple meal, eating hardly anything,
though 'twas the first food he had tasted since a seven-o'clock
breakfast. He found himself wondering at the sunshine and the
brightness of things, like a man who has come away from a newly filled
grave--a grave where all his hopes and affections lie buried.
Lucy and her boy sat opposite him, and in the gaiety of their own
prattle were unaware of his silence. The boy was three years old, and
of an inexhaustible loquacity, having been encouraged to babble in
Lucy's lonely hours. The sweet little voice ran on like a ripple of
music, his mother hushing him every now and then, while Stobart sat
with his head leaning on his hand, thinking, thinking, thinking.
They went up the river to Putney in a skiff, Stobart rowing, and it was
one of the happiest evenings in Lucy's life. She had occupation enough
for all the way in pointing out the houses and churches and gardens to
Georgie, who asked incessant questions. She did not see the rower's
pallid brow, with its look of infinite pain.
They landed at Fulham, moored the boat at the bottom of some wooden
steps, and sat on a green bank, while Georgie picked the flowers off
the blossoming sedges. Stobart sat with his elbows on his knees, gazing
at the opposite shore, the rustic street climbing up the hill, and
white cottages scattered far apart against a background of meadowland
golden with marsh marigolds.
"Has rowing made your head worse, George?" his wife asked timidly.
"No, dear, no! There is nothing the matter"--holding out his hand to
her. "Only I have been thinking--thinking of you and the boy, and of
your lives in that dull house by the river. It is dull, I'm afraid."
"Never, when you are at home," she answered quickly. "You are very
studious, and you don't talk much; but I am happy, quite happy, when
you are sitting there. To have your company is all I desire."
"I have been a neglectful husband of late, Lucy. Those poor wretches in
the Marsh have taken too much of my time and thought. Whatever a man's
work in the world may be, he ought to remember his home."
"It is only when you are away--quite away, on those long journeys with
Mr. Wesley."
"I will give up those journeys. Let the men who have neither wives nor
children carry on _that_ work. Would you like me to take Orders, Lucy?"
"Take Orders?"
"Enter the Church of England as an ordained priest. I might settle down
then, get a London living. I have friends who could help me. It would
not be to break with Wesley; he is a staunch Churchman."
"Yes, yes, I should love to see you in a real pulpit in a handsome
black gown. I should love you to be a clergyman. All the town would
flock to hear you, and people would talk of you as they do of Mr.
Whitefield."
"No, no. I have not the metal to forge his thunderbolts. But we can
think about it. I mean to be a kinder husband, Lucy. Yes, my poor girl,
a kinder husband. Sure ours was a love match, was it not?"
"I loved you from the moment I heard your voice, that night at the
Foundery Chapel, when I woke out of a swoon and heard you speaking to
me. And in all those happy days at Clapham, when I used to tremble at
the sound of your footstep, and when you taught me to read good books,
an ignorant girl like me, and to behave like a lady. Oh, George, you
have always, always been good to me."
The sun set, and the stars shone out of the deep serene as they went
home, and a profound peace fell upon George Stobart's melancholy soul.
To do his duty! That was the only thing that remained to be done. He
understood John Wesley's warning better now. His soul had been in peril
unspeakable. He loved her, he loved her, that queen among women--loved
her with a passion measured by her own perfections. As she outshone
every woman he had ever seen in loveliness, mental and physical, so his
love for her surpassed any love he had ever imagined.
And to-day, when she had looked at him with so glorious a light in her
eyes, when she had declared she would never marry, and confessed that
she had a secret--a secret she would tell to none--he had trembled with
an exquisite joy, an overpowering fear, as the conviction that she
loved him flashed into his mind.
Why not? 'Twas hardly strange that the flame which had kindled in
his breast had found a responsive warmth in hers. They had been so
much to each other, had lived in such harmony of desires and hopes,
each equally earnest in the endeavour to redress some of the manifold
wrongs of the world. She had flung herself heart and soul into his
philanthropic work, and here they had ever been at one. Her presence,
her voice, her sweetness and grace had become the first necessity
of his life, the one thing without which life was worthless. Was it
strange if he had become more to her than a common friend? Was it
strange if, after giving him her friendship, she had given him her
heart?
But, oh, how deep a fall for the man who had set his hopes on high
things, who had put on the whole armour of faith, had called himself
a soldier and servant of Christ, who had looked back with loathing
at the folly and the impiety of his boyhood and youth, and had set
his face towards the City of the Saints, scorning earthly things! How
deep a fall for the man who had cried with St. Paul, "For me to live
is Christ, to die is gain"! How deep a fall to know himself the slave
of a forbidden love, possessed heart and brain and in every fibre of
his being by a passion stronger than any feeling of his unregenerate
youth! Well, he had to fight the good fight, and to conquer man's most
implacable enemy, sin. A year ago he had thought himself so safe,
so far advanced on the narrow path, having only to reproach himself
sometimes for a certain coldness in private prayer; successful in his
mission work; happy in a humble marriage; having surrendered all things
that worldlings care for in order to lead the Christian life, and
having found a passionless peace as his reward.
Never more, of his free will, would he see this daughter of Babylon,
this enchanting heathen, who had cast her fatal spell around his life.
It might not be possible to avoid chance meetings in those miserable
abodes where it was her whim to play the angel of pity; but doubtless
that caprice of a fine lady would pass, and Lambeth Marsh would know
her no more.
She wrote to him about a week after his last visit to St. James's
Square.
"Why do you not come to take a dish of tea with me? My friends are
leaving for their country seats, and I have been alone several
afternoons, expecting you. Were you affronted with me for calling you a
spinster aunt? Sure our friendship, and my esteem for your goodness,
should excuse that careless impertinence. I enclose a bank bill which
I pray you to spend as quickly as possible in buying clothing and
shoes for the little ragged wretches I met coming out of your school
yesterday. Ah, when will there be such schools all over England, in
every city, in every village? Sure some day the country will take a
lesson from such men as you and Mr. Wesley, and the poor will be better
cared for than they are now."
The easy assurance of her letter surprised him. Every line indicated
the woman of the world, the finished coquette. He replied coldly,
thanking her for her bounty, and giving his absorbing occupations as a
reason for not waiting upon her.
They met a week later in Sally Dormer's garret; but Antonia was leaving
as he entered, and he did nothing to detain her. He had a brief vision
of her beauty, more simply dressed than usual, in a black silk mantle
and hood over a grey tabinet gown. He came upon her some days after in
a shed at the back of the Vauxhall Pottery, entertaining a large party
of pottery girls at supper, herself the merriest of the band. She had
her woman Sophy to help her, and Mrs. Patty Granger, and he had never
seen a more jovial feast. There was a long table upon trestles, loaded
with joints and poultry, pies and puddings, and great copper tankards
of small beer; at which feast two reluctant footmen, with disgusted
countenances, assisted in undress livery, while an old blind fiddler
sat in a corner playing the gayest tunes in his _répertoire_.
Antonia begged Mr. Stobart to stay and keep them company, but he
declined. It was his class night, he told her, and he had his adult
scholars waiting for him hard by. He carried away the vision of her
radiant countenance, supremely happy in the happiness she had made for
others. Was it possible better to realize the lessons of the Divine
Altruist? And yet she was no more a Christian than the profligate
Bolingbroke or the cynic Voltaire.
He was consistent and conscientious in his determination to avoid her,
so far as possible without incivility. The town was beginning to thin,
and he heard with relief that she was going on a visit to the Duchess
of Portland at Bulstrode, near Maidenhead. In the autumn she was to be
at Tunbridge Wells, to drink the waters, a business of six weeks.
"My physician orders it, though I swear I have nothing the matter with
me," she told him, at one of their chance meetings in the Marsh. "'Tis
good for my nerves to waste six weeks in a place where there is a dance
every night, and where I shall spend every day in a crowd."
In another of these casual meetings she upbraided him for having
deserted her.
"I have been more than usually busy," he said. "My schools are growing,
and the dispensary is daily becoming a more serious business."
"Everything with you is serious; but you cannot be so seriously busy as
not to have leisure for a dish of tea in St. James's Square once in a
fortnight. Sure you know my heart is with you in all your good works,
and that I like to hear about them."
"Indeed, madam, I am eternally grateful for your sympathy and your
help; but of late I have had no leisure. My wife's spirits were
suffering from a close London house, and I devote every hour I can
steal from my work to giving her change of air."
"I am glad to hear it. Yes, Mrs. Stobart must miss your pretty garden
at Sheen."
* * * * *
That month of May seemed to George Stobart to contain the longest
and weariest days and hours he had ever known. The weather was
close and oppressive, the rank odours of the Marsh were at their
worst; jail fever, small-pox, putrid throats, all the most dreaded
forms of infectious sickness hung heavy over the dwellers in that
poverty-stricken settlement--the pottery hands, the glass-polishers,
the lace-workers, the industrious and the idle, the honest and the
criminal classes whom fate had herded together, unwilling neighbours in
an equality of poverty.
He worked among the sick and the dying with unflagging zeal; he gave
them the best of himself, all that he had of faith in God and Christ,
sustaining their spirits in the last awful hours of consciousness
by his own exaltation. He gave them inexhaustible pity and love,
the compassion that is only possible to a man of keen imagination
and quick sympathies. He understood their inarticulate sorrows, and
was able to lift their minds above the actual to the unseen, and to
convince them of an eternity of bliss that should pay them for a life
of misery--promise more easy to believe now that all life's miseries
belonged to the past, and the long agony of living was dwarfed by the
nearness of death.
He followed Sally Dormer to her last resting-place in an obscure
graveyard, and he provided for her brother's maintenance in the family
of a hard-working carpenter, to whom the boy was to be apprenticed
in due time. He had a more personal interest in this little lad than
in his other scholars, remembering Antonia's interest in the dead
woman, her almost sisterly affection for that fallen sister. The boy
was intelligent, and took kindly to the simple tasks set him at Mr.
Stobart's school, where the teaching went no further than reading,
writing, and cyphering, and where the founder's sole ambition was to
rear a generation of believing Christians, steeped, from the very
dawn of intelligence, in the knowledge of Christ's life and example.
He relied on those gospel lessons of universal charity and brotherly
love, as an enduring influence over the minds and actions of his
pupils, and hoped that from his school-rooms--some of them no better
than an outhouse or a roomy garret, the humble predecessors of those
ragged schools which were to begin their blessed work half a century
later--the gospel light would radiate far and wide across the gloom of
outcast lives and homes now ruled by Satan.
In his devotion to his mission work Mr. Stobart had not forgotten
his promise to make his wife's life happier. He spent all the finest
afternoons in rural airings with Lucy and little George; sometimes on
the river, sometimes taking a little journey by coach as far as Sutton,
or Ewell, or to Hampton Court; sometimes walking to Clapham Common, or
as far as Dulwich, through lanes where the hedgerow oaks and elms hung
a canopy of translucent green over the grassy path, and where they came
every now and then on a patch of copse or a little wood, in which it
was pleasant to sit and rest while the boy played about among the young
fern in a rapture of delight.
He lavished kindness upon his wife and child. Never had there been
a more indulgent father or a more attentive husband. Lucy, whose
flower-like prettiness had faded a little in the smoke from the
potteries and the Vauxhall glass-works, recovered her rose-and-lily
tints in these excursions, and was full of grateful affection which
touched her husband's heart. There was something pathetic in her
accepting kindness as a favour which another woman would have claimed
by the divine right of a wife. It pleased him to see her happy; and his
conscience, which had been cruelly disturbed of late, was now at rest.
But even that inward peace could not cure the dull aching of his heart,
which ached he scarce knew why; or it might be that he stubbornly
refused to know. He would have told himself, if he could, that the pain
was physical, and that the weariness of life which followed him through
every scene, and most of all in this sweet summer _idlesse_, was a
question of bodily health, a lassitude for which a modish physician
would have ordered "the Bath" or "the Wells."
Oh, the mental oppression of those May afternoons, the dull misery,
vague, undefined, but intolerable, in which every sound jarred, even
the silver-sweet of his child's joyous voice, in which every sight was
steeped in gloom, even the lovely river, rose-flushed and smiling in
the evening light!
He was miserable, and he tried to find the cause of his misery in
things which lay remote from the one image he dared not contemplate.
He told himself that the burden under which he ached was only the
monotonous quiet of his days--the want of strong interests and active
efforts such as kept John Wesley's mind in the freshness of a perpetual
youth. _That_ was the true fountain of Jouvence--action, progress,
the consciousness of struggle and victory. He had tasted the joy of
successful effort in his itinerant preaching--the uncouth mob crowding
as to a show at a fair, the insulting assaults of semi-savages, the
triumph when he had subjugated those rough natures, when by the mere
force of his eloquence, by the magnetism of his own strong faith, he
compelled the railers to listen, and saw ribald jokes change to eager
interest, scorn give place to awe, and tears roll down the faces that
sin had stained and blemished. All this had been to him as the wine of
life; and this he had promised to renounce in order that he might do
his duty as that commonplace domestic animal, a kind husband.
Sitting on the river bank in the summer quiet, in the rosy afterglow,
amidst tall sedges and wild flowers that love the river, with his child
prattling at his knee, playing with his watch-ribbon, asking questions
that were never answered, and his wife seated at his side supremely
content in having won him to give her so much of his company, George
Stobart meditated upon the great mistake of his life--his marriage!
He remembered how lovely a creature the printer's daughter had seemed
to him in her ecstasy of faith, how divine a thing the soul newly
awakened to a sense of sin, and a desire for saving grace. His heart
had gone out to her in an overwhelming wave of enthusiasm, a feeling
so exalted, so different from any passion of his unregenerate years,
that he had welcomed it as the one pure and perfect love of his life.
He thought God had given him this friendless, ill-used girl to be his
helpmeet, the sharer of all his aspirations, his lifelong labours in
the service of Christ, as of that impassioned hour in Wesley's Chapel.
Soon, too soon, he had discovered the shallow nature behind that
hysterical emotion, the tepid piety which alone remained after the
fervour of newly awakened feelings. Too soon he had found that petty
interests and trivial domestic cares and joys filled the measure of his
wife's mind; that she thought more of her tea-trays and her sofa-covers
than of thousands of Kingswood miners won from Satan to Christ; that
he must never look to her for sympathy with his highest aspirations,
hardly for interest in his everyday work among the poor.
When he suggested that she should help in his day nurseries or his
infant schools, she refused with a shudder, lest she should bring home
small-pox or scarlet fever to little Georgie. That fear of pestilence
hung like a funeral pall over Lambeth Marsh; and all his efforts to
popularize inoculation could do very little against dense ignorance,
and terror of a preventive measure that seemed as bad as the disease.
"If I've got to have the small-pox anyhow, I'd sooner leave it to
Providence," was the usual argument.
His marriage, so gravely resolved, with such generous disdain of
worldly advantage, had not brought him happiness. The fellowship in
thought and feeling, which is the soul of marriage, was wanting in a
union that had yet every appearance of domestic affection, and which
sufficed for the wife's content. She was happy, looking no deeper than
the surface of things, and finding content in the calm prosperity of
her life, the absence of poverty and ill-usage. His marriage was a
mistake, and to the man who had taken upon himself, as he had done,
the service of Christ's poor, any marriage must needs be a mistake.
For the itinerant preacher, for the man with a suffering populace
depending on his care, home ties were fetters that needs must gall. He
could not serve two masters. He must be a half-hearted philanthropist
or a neglectful husband; only an occasional preacher or a deserter of
his home. He remembered the priests he had met and conversed with in
France, men who had no claims, no interests outside their Church and
their parish; and it seemed to him that he had bound himself with a
servitude that made his service of Christ a dead letter.
His mission work must end if he was to do his duty at home. His career
as John Wesley's helper had been the most absorbing episode in his
life--a source of unbounded satisfaction to mind and conscience. He
had gloried in the result of his labours, never questioning, in his
own fervid faith, whether conversions so sudden would stand the test
of time. He had counted every convert as a gain for ever, every flood
of tears as a cleansing stream. But, precious though this work had
been to him, conscience urged him to renounce it. His first duty was
to make a home for the woman he had sworn to love and cherish. To this
end he would try to become a priest of the Established Church, strive
to obtain a London living, however small, and confine his service of
Christ within a narrow radius, till fortune should widen his area
of work. He had loved his freedom hitherto, the power to work for
his own hand; but for Lucy's sake he would bend his shoulders to the
Episcopal yoke, and enter on a phase of humble obedience to authority,
prepared at any hour to be called to account for his opinions, and to
be hampered and constrained in his gospel teaching. He would have
to suffer, as others of the Oxford Methodists and their disciples
had suffered, from the tyranny of ecclesiastical intolerance; but he
would face all difficulties, submit to many restrictions, to make a
home for his wife. And then there was always the hope that the Church
of England would be swept from the great dismal swamp of formalism on
the strong tide of the Great Revival, which ran higher and wider with
every year of Wesley's and Whitefield's life. The teaching begun by
Whitefield among the prisoners in Gloucester jail, by Wesley in the
humble meeting-house in Fetter Lane, had spread over England, Scotland,
and Ireland with an irresistible force, and must finally make its power
felt in the Established Church.
From the market cross and the country side, from the colliers of
Bristol and the miners of Cornwall, from the wild fervour of services
and sermons under starlit skies, from congregations numbered by
thousands, George Stobart was prepared to restrict the scope of his
work to an obscure London pulpit or a poverty-stricken parish, content
if in so doing his conscience could be at rest. But the outlook was
dreary, and he began to measure the length of his earthly pilgrimage,
and foresaw the long progress of eventless years, some little good
done, perhaps, some souls gained for Christ, many small sorrows
alleviated, but all his work shut within a narrow space, controlled by
other people's opinions.
One agony which other men of deep religious feeling have suffered
was spared to John Wesley's helper. His faith knew no shadow of
change. His absolute belief in his God and his Saviour remained to
him in the lowest depth of mental depression. He might feel himself
a creature of sinful impulses, an outcast from God, but he never
doubted the existence of that God, or the reality of that hereafter
the hope of which lies at the root of all religion. The paradise of
saints, the infinite joys of eternity, hung on the balance of good and
evil, a stupendous stake, which most men played for with such wild
recklessness, till the lights of this life began to fade, and the awful
possibilities of that other life beyond the veil flashed on their
troubled souls.
He was startled from the automatic monotony of his life by a letter
whose superscription so agitated him that his shaking hand could
scarcely break the seal. Indeed, he did not break it for some
moments, but sat with the letter in his hand, staring at the familiar
writing--Antonia's writing, a strong and firm penmanship, every letter
definite and upright, somewhat resembling Joseph Addison's. Oh, how
embued with sin, how trapped and entangled in Satan's net, must his
soul be when only the sight of Antonia's writing could so move him!
He was alone. The letter had been brought him by the little
maid-servant. His wife was upstairs, busy with her son, whose footsteps
might be heard running across the floor above.
He broke the seal at last, and unfolded her letter.
* * * * *
"St. James's Square, Monday night.
"DEAR SIR,
"I believe it is near a month since you have honoured me
with a visit, nor was I so fortunate as to meet you on
Saturday afternoon, when I spent some hours among our poor
friends in the Marsh, and went to look at Sally's grave in
the Baptist burial-ground. I must impose on your goodness
to order a neat headstone, with the dear creature's name
and age, and one of those Scripture texts which so consoled
her last hours. I doubt, since the afternoon was so fine,
you were treating yourself to a rustic holiday with Mrs.
Stobart, to whom I beg you to present my affectionate
compliments.
"Well, sir, since you are too busy to visit me, I must needs
thrust my company upon you, at the risk of being thought
troublesome. In one of my conversations with Sally Dormer
the poor soul entreated me, with tearful urgency, to hear
the famous preacher who converted her, believing that even
my stubborn mind must yield to his invincible arguments,
must be touched and melted by his heavenly eloquence.
To soothe her agitated spirits I promised to hear Mr.
Whitefield preach, a promise which I gave the more readily
as my curiosity had been aroused by the reports I had heard
of his genius.
"I am told that he is to preach at Kennington Common
to-morrow night, to a vaster audience than his new
Tabernacle, large as it is, could contain, and I should like
better to hear him under the starry vault of a June evening
than in the sultry fustiness of a crowded meeting-house.
I have ever been interested in your description of those
open-air meetings where you yourself have been the preacher.
There is something romantic and heart-stirring in your
picture of the rugged heath, the throng of humanity huddled
together under a wild night sky, seeing not each other's
faces, but hearing the beating of each other's hearts, the
quickened breath of agitated feeling, and in the midst of
that listening silence the shrill cry of some overwrought
creature falling to the ground in a transport of agitation,
which you and Mr. Wesley take to be the visitation of a
Divine Power.
"I have not courage to go alone to such a meeting, and I
do not care to ask any of my modish friends to go with me,
though there are several among my acquaintance who are
admirers of Mr. Whitefield, and occasional attendants at
Lady Huntingdon's pious assemblies. To them, did I express
this desire, I might seem a hypocrite. You who have sounded
the depths of my mind, and who know that although I am an
unbeliever I have never been a scoffer, will think more
indulgently of me.
"The service is to begin at ten o'clock. I shall call at
your door at nine, and ask you to accompany me to Kennington
in my coach.
"I remain, dear sir, with heartfelt respect,
"Your very sincere and humble servant,
"ANTONIA KILRUSH."
"What has happened, George?" asked his wife, who had come into the room
unheard by him, while he was reading his letter. "You look as pleased
as if you had come into a fortune."
He looked up at her with a bewildered air, and for the moment could not
answer.
"What does she say, George? 'Tis from Lady Kilrush, I know, for her
footman is waiting in the passage."
"Yes, 'tis from Lady Kilrush. She desires to hear Whitefield preach
to-morrow night, and asks me to accompany her."
"What, is she coming round, after all? I doubt you will be monstrous
proud if you convert her."
"I should be monstrous happy--but it will be God's work, not mine.
My words have been like the idle wind. Whitefield's influence might
do something; but, alas! I fear even he will fail to touch that proud
heart, that resolute mind, so strong in the sense of intellectual
power. Will you go with us to-morrow?"
"Mr. Whitefield's sermons are so long, and the heat at the Tabernacle
always makes my head ache."
"'Tis not at the Tabernacle, but at Kennington, in the open air."
"And we may have to stand all the time. I think I'd rather stay at home
with Georgie."
"Her ladyship will call for me at nine. The boy will be in bed and
asleep hours before."
"I love to sit by his bed sewing. He wakes sometimes, and likes to find
me there; and sometimes he has bad dreams, and wakes in a fright."
"And wants his mother's hand and voice to soothe his spirits. Happy
child, who knows not the burden of sin, and has but shadowy fears that
vanish at a word of comfort! Well, you must do as you please, Lucy; but
there will be room for you in her ladyship's coach."
"Oh, she is always kind, and I should love the ride; but Mr.
Whitefield's sermons are so long."
Stobart wrote briefly to assure Lady Kilrush of his pleasure in being
her escort to Kennington, with the customary formal conclusion,
protesting himself her ladyship's "most obliged and most devoted humble
servant."
When his letter was despatched he went out to the Marsh, and walked
for an hour in that waste region outside the streets and alleys where
his work lay. His wife's parlour had grown too small for him. He felt
stifled within those four walls.
He would see her again, spend some hours in her company, her trusted
friend and protector, permitted to guard her amidst that rabble throng
which was likely to assemble on the common. His heart beat with a
fierce rapture at the thought of those coming hours. Only to stand by
her side under the summer stars, hemmed round, half suffocated by the
crowd; only to see her, and to hear the adored music of her voice, the
voice which had so haunted him of late, that he had started up out
of sleep sometimes, hearing her call his name. Vain delusion, that
betrayed the drift of his dreams!
Her coach was at his door five minutes before the hour. The night
was sultry, and the two parlour windows were wide open. He had been
leaning with folded arms upon the window-sill watching for her, while
Lucy sat at the table sewing by the light of two candles in tall brass
candlesticks. She had thought the pair of tallow candles a mark of
gentility in the beginning of her married life, when the remembrance
of the slum near Moorfields was fresh; but she knew better now, having
seen the splendours of St. James's Square, and wax candles reckoned by
the hundred.
Her ladyship had four horses to her chariot, and a couple of
postillions. The lamps flamed through the summer darkness.
"I may be late," Stobart said hurriedly. "Don't sit up for me, Lucy."
He saw Antonia's face at the coach door, and the sight of it so moved
him that he could scarcely speak.
His wife ran to bid him good-bye, with her customary childlike kiss,
standing on tip-toe to offer him her fresh young lips, but he waved her
aside.
"We shall be late. Good-night."
His heart was beating furiously. On the threshold of his door he had
half a mind to excuse himself to Antonia, and to go back. He felt as
if the devil was tugging him into some dark labyrinth of doom. This
man believed in the devil as firmly as he believed in God--believed in
an actual omnipresent Satan, ubiquitous, ever on the watch to decoy
sinners, ever eager to people hell with renegades from Christ. And
he felt, with a thrill of agony, that he was in the devil's clutch
to-night. Satan was spreading his choicest lure to catch the sinner's
soul--a woman's ineffable beauty.
She was alone, and welcomed him with her sweetest smile.
"I am turning my back on Handel's new oratorio to hear your Mr.
Whitefield," she said, as they shook hands; "but now the hour is
approaching I feel as eager as if I were going to see a new Romeo as
seducing as Spranger Barry."
"Ah, madam, dared I hope that Whitefield's eloquence could change this
frivolous humour to a beginning of belief! Could your stubborn mind
once bend itself to understand the mysteries of God's redeeming grace
you would not long remain in darkness. Could but one ray of Divine
truth stream in upon your soul, like the shaft of sunshine through
Newton's shutter, you would soon be drowned in light, dazzled by the
prismatic glory of the Heavenly Sun."
"And blinded, as I doubt you are, sir. I will not impose upon you. I do
not go to Kennington to be assured of free grace, or to be convinced
of sin; but first to keep a promise to the dead, and next to follow
the fashion, which is to hear and criticize Mr. Whitefield. Some of my
friends swear he is a finer orator than Mr. Pitt."
After this they remained silent for the greater part of the way,
Antonia watching the road, where the houses were set back behind long
gardens, and where the countrified inns had ample space in front for a
horse-trough and rustic tables and benches, with here and there a row
of fine elms. That sense of space and air which is so sadly wanting
now in the mighty wilderness of brick and stone gave a rural charm to
the suburbs when George II. was king. Ten minutes' walk took a man
from town to country, from streets and alleys to meadow and cornfield,
hedgerow and thicket. The perfume of summer flowers was in the air
through which they drove, and the village that hemmed the fatal common,
so recently a scene of ignominious death, was as rustic as a hamlet in
Buckinghamshire.
The crowd had gathered thickly, and had spread itself over the greater
part of the common when Lady Kilrush's chariot drew up on the outskirts
of the assembly. Stobart alighted and went to reconnoitre. A platform
had been erected about six feet from the ground, and on this there had
been placed a row of chairs, and a table for the preacher, with a brass
lantern standing on each side of the large quarto Bible. Whitefield was
there, with one of his helpers, a member of Parliament, his devoted
adherent, and two ladies, one of whom was the Countess of Yarmouth's
daughter, Lady Chesterfield, dowered with the blood of the Guelfs, and
a fine fortune from the royal coffers, Whitefield's most illustrious
convert, and a shining light in Lady Huntingdon's saintly circle.
Stobart was on terms of friendship with the orator, and had no
difficulty in obtaining a seat for Lady Kilrush. Indeed, her ladyship's
name would have obtained the favour as easily had she sent it by her
footman, for George Whitefield loved to melt patrician hearts, and draw
tears from proud eyes. Enthusiast as he was, there is a something in
his familiar letters which suggests that aristocratic converts counted
double. They were the _écarté_ kings, the trump-aces in the game he
played against Satan.
Stobart brought Antonia through the crowd, and placed her in a chair at
the end of the platform, farthest from the preacher, lest the thunder
of his tremendous voice should sound too close to her ear.
There was a chair to spare for himself, and he took his seat at her
side, in the silence of that vast audience, waiting for the giving out
of the hymn with which these open-air services usually began.
Never before had Antonia seen so vast an assemblage hushed in a serious
expectancy, with faces all turned to one point, that central spot above
the heads of the crowd where the lanterns made an atmosphere of faint
yellow light around George Whitefield's black figure standing beside
the table, with one hand resting upon an open Bible, and the other
uplifted to command silence and attention.
From the preacher's platform, almost to the edge of the common the
crowd extended, black and dense, a company gathered from all over
London, and compounded of classes so various that almost every
Metropolitan type might be found there, from the Churchman of highest
dignity, come to criticize and condemn, to the street-hawker, the
professional mendicant, come to taste an excitement scarcely inferior
to gin.
Whitefield's helper gave out the number of the hymn, and recited the
first two lines in slow and distinct tones. Then, with a burst of sound
loud as the stormy breakers rolling over a rock-bound beach, there rose
the voices of a multitude that none could number, harsh and sweet,
loud and low, soprano and contralto, bass and tenor, mingled in one
vast chorus of praise. The effect was stupendous, and Antonia felt a
catching of her breath, that was almost a sob. Did those words mean
nothing, after all? Was that cry of a believing throng only empty air?
A short extempore prayer followed from the helper. George Whitefield's
voice had not yet been heard. The influence of his presence was enough,
and it may have been that his dramatic instinct led him to keep
himself in reserve till that moment of hush and expectancy in which he
pronounced the first words of his text.
He stood there, supreme in a force that is rare in the history of
mankind, the force that rules multitudes. 'Twas no commanding grace of
person that impressed this prodigious assembly. He stood there, the
central point in that tremendous throng, a very common figure, short,
fat, in a black gown with huge sleeves, and a ridiculous white wig,
features without beauty or grandeur, eyes with a decided squint; and
that vast concourse thrilled at his presence, as at a messenger from
the throne of God. This was the heaven-born orator, the man who at
two-and-twenty years of age had held assembled thousands spell-bound
by his eloquence, the man gifted with a voice of surpassing beauty,
and with a dramatic genius which enabled him to clothe abstract ideas
with flesh and blood, and make them live and move before his awestruck
hearers.
It was this dramatic genius that made Whitefield supreme over the
masses. Those of his admirers who had leisure to read and weigh his
published sermons might discover that he had no message to deliver,
that those trumpet tones were but reverberations in the air, that of
all who flocked to hear the famous preacher, none ever carried home a
convincing and practicable scheme of religious life; yet none could
doubt the power of the man to stir the feelings, to excite, awaken and
alarm the ignorant and unenlightened, to melt and to startle even his
superiors in education and refinement. None could deny that the man
who began life as a pot-boy in a Gloucester tavern was the greatest
preacher of his time.
Antonia watched and listened with a keen interest, enduring the heated
atmosphere of the crowd as best she might. She had thrown off her
mantle, and the starlight shone upon the marble of her throat and the
diamond heart that fastened her gauze kerchief. One large ruby set in
the midst of the diamonds enhanced their whiteness; and it seemed to
Stobart as he looked at her that the vivid crimson spot symbolized his
own heart's blood, always bleeding for her, drop by drop. Absorbed by
her interest in the preacher, she was unconscious of those eyes that
gazed at her with an unspeakable love, knew not that for this man it
was happiness only to sit by her side, to watch every change in the
lovely face, every grace of the perfect form, oblivious of the crowd,
the orator, of everything upon earth except her.
To-night Whitefield was in one of his gloomy moods, the preacher
of unmitigated Calvinism. It may be that his late quarrel with the
Bishop of Bangor, and the persecution he had suffered at his West End
chapel had soured him, and that he was unconsciously influenced by the
hardness of a world in which a mighty hunter of souls was the mark for
narrow-minded opposition and vulgar ridicule. His purpose to-night
seemed rather to appal than to convince, to instil despair rather than
hope.
His text from the Epistle of St. Jude was pronounced in solemn tones
that reached wide across that closely packed mass of humanity--
"For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old
ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our
God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord
Jesus Christ.... Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds;
trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up
by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame;
wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for
ever."
In an oration that lasted nearly two hours the preacher rang the
changes on these tremendous words. Through every phase of sin, through
every stage of the downward journey, his imagination followed the
sinner, "of old ordained" to perish everlastingly. His vivid words
described a soul inevitably lost; and again and again the melancholy
music of those phrases, "raging waves of the sea, foaming out their
own shame; wandering stars; clouds without water," rang out over the
awe-stricken throng, moved by this picture of an imagined doom, with
an emotion scarcely less intense than the thrill of agony that ran
through the crowd at Tyburn when the doomed sinner swung into Eternity.
It was with the picture of Judas, his final example of sin and death,
that the preacher closed his discourse.
"Let those who tell you there is no such thing as predestination turn
their eyes upon Judas," he said, his voice falling to that grave note
which preluded terror. "Let them consider the arch-apostate, the son
of perdition. Oh, my brethren, had ever mortal man such opportunities
of salvation as Judas had? Have the angels who stand about the throne
of God, His worshippers and subordinates, half such privileges as
Judas had? To be the friend and companion of his Saviour, in daily
and familiar association with the Redeemer of souls; to walk by His
side through the fields of Palestine; to sit at meat with Him; to be
with Him in sadness and in joy, in prayer and praise; to journey over
the wild sea with Him, and behold His power to still the tempest; to
be His bosom friend; to live on an equality with God! Think of him,
oh, you sinners who have never seen your Saviour's face, think of
Judas! Think of those three years of sweet converse! Think of that
Divine condescension which received sinful man in the brotherhood of
friendship! Think of those journeys by the Lake of Gennesaret, those
pilgrimages of prayer and praise, the daily, the hourly companionship
with Divinity, the affectionate familiarity with Ineffable Wisdom!
"And, O God, great God of sinners, to think what came of such
unutterable privileges! The disciple, the companion, bartered all that
glory and delight, flung away those inestimable joys for a handful of
silver. Which of you dare disbelieve in predestined damnation when
he contemplates this hideous fall, when he sees the chosen brother
of Jesus sink to the base huckstering of a Jonathan Wild, one of the
sacred twelve reduced to the level of informers and thief-catchers,
trucking his soul's salvation against thirty pieces of silver?
"'Twas the inexorable destiny of the foredoomed sinner, the appointed
end to which those footsteps beside the lake, those footsteps
across the mountain, those footsteps through the temple, and in the
market-place, fast or slow, were always moving. God had sentenced this
man to the most awful doom the mind can conceive, created to betray,
the foredoomed destroyer of his Saviour. Who can question that he was
marked for hell? How else account for such a fall? I despise that
shallow reasoner who will tell you that the fall of Judas was a gradual
descent, beginning in avarice, ending in murder. I laugh at that fond
theorizer who will tell you that Judas was an ambitious dreamer,
longing to behold the Kingdom of Christ triumphant on earth, and
thinking to realize that dazzling dream by bringing about the conflict
between his Master and earthly authority. I laugh at him who tells me
that Judas expected to see the power of the Synagogue and the Forum
shrivel like a burning scroll before the face of the Messiah; and that
it was on the failure of that hope he rushed to the Field of Blood.
"No, dear sinners, a thousand and a thousand times no! Over that guilty
head the fiat of the Eternal had gone forth, 'This is the son of
perdition, this is he who shall betray the Son of God.'"
Then, after a long pause, sinking his mighty voice almost to a whisper,
the preacher asked--
"Is there any son of perdition here to-night? Is there one among you
whose stubborn heart answers not to his Saviour's call--a wretch in
love with vice, who would rather have sensual pleasures on earth than
everlasting bliss in heaven--a modern Judas who sells his Redeemer's
love for thirty pieces of the devil's money, thirty profligate
raptures, thirty vicious indulgences, thirty debauches in filthy
taverns, thirty nights of riot and wantonness among gamesters and loose
women?
"If there be any such, cast him from you. However near, however
dear--father, brother, husband, son, flesh of your flesh and bone of
your bone. Cast him out; oh, you who value your eternal happiness!
You cannot mistake the mark of the lost soul. The son of perdition
bears a brand of sin that no eye can fail to recognize. 'Tis Satan's
broad-arrow, and stamps the wretch foredoomed to hell. You who would
taste the joys of heaven, hold no fellowship with such on earth."
The great throng heard those concluding phrases in a profound silence.
The heavy stillness of a sultry night, the muffled roll of distant
thunder, the fitful lightning, now faint, now vivid, that flashed
across the scene, intensified the dramatic effect of the sermon, and
the crowds that had gathered noisily with much talk and some jeering,
dwindled and melted away subdued and thoughtful.
Like many other of Whitefield's sermons which moved multitudes, there
was little left after the last resonance of the mighty voice had sunk
into silence. But the immediate effect of his oration was tremendous.
Garrick had said that he would give a hundred pounds if he could say
"Oh!" like Whitefield; and what Garrick could not do must have been
something of exceptional power.
Antonia had given her whole mind to the preacher; yet for her his
sermon was but a dramatic effort, and she went back to her coach full
of wonder at that vast influence which a fine voice and a cultivated
elocution had exercised over the multitude in England and America.
Upon George Stobart the preacher's influence was stronger.
"The man makes me believe against my own reason," he said, "which has
ever striven against the idea of a fatal necessity. Come, Lady Kilrush,
confess that his eloquence moved you."
"I confess as much with all my heart; and I am very glad to have
heard him. He is a finer actor--an unconscious actor, of course--than
Garrick; at least, he has a greater power to appal an ignorant crowd."
"I see you are as stubborn as ever."
"My mind is not a weather-cock, to be driven by changing winds. I
doubt Mr. Whitefield may do good by such a discourse as we have heard
to-night. He may scare feeble sinners, and teach them to believe that,
weak and wicked as they are, God has marked them for salvation. But
what of the sinner deeply sunk in guilt--will not he see only the
hopelessness of any struggle to escape from Satan? 'So be it,' he will
cry; 'if I am the son of perdition, let me drown my soul in sin, and
forget the injustice of God.'"
George Stobart's only answer was a despairing sigh. "Let me drown my
soul in sin, and forget God." Those awful words too well depicted the
condition of his own mind to-night, sitting by her side in the roomy
chariot, apart from her, with his face turned to the open window, his
eyes looking into the summer stillness, unseeing, his heart beating
with the fierce throb of passion held in check.
Was not Whitefield right, after all? Were there not men whose names
were written in the Book of Doom, wretches not born to be judged, but
judged before they were born? To-night that religion of despair seemed
to him the only possible creed. He had looked back and remembered the
sins of his youth--his life at Eton--his life in the Army. And he had
believed the stain of those sins washed away in one ineffable hour of
spiritual anguish and spiritual joy, the conviction of sin followed by
the assurance of free grace. He had believed his past life annihilated,
and himself made a new creature, pure as Adam before the fall. And in
the years that had followed that day of grace he had walked with head
erect, and eyes looking up to heaven, strong in his belief in Christ,
but strongest in his reliance upon his own good works.
O God, what availed his labour in the service of humanity, his
sacrifice of worldly gain, his preaching, his prayers, his faithful
study of God's word? A wave of passion surged across his soul, and all
of good that there had been in him was swept away. The original man,
foredoomed to evil, appeared again. A soul drowned in sin! Her words,
so carelessly spoken, had denounced him.
The silence lasted long, and they were nearing the lights of London
when Antonia spoke.
"You are very silent, Mr. Stobart," she said; "I hope you have not any
trouble on your mind to-night."
"No, no."
"Then 'tis that hideous doctrine troubles you."
"Perhaps. What if it be the only true key to God's mysteries? Yes, I
believe there are souls given over to Satan."
"Oh, if you believe in Satan you can believe anything."
"Can you look round the world you live in and doubt the Power of Evil?"
"Of the evil within us, no. 'Tis in ourselves, in our own hearts and
minds the devil lives. We have to fight him there. Oh, I believe in
that devil, the devil of many names. Envy, hatred, malice, jealousy,
vanity, self-love, discontent. I know the fiend under most of his
aliases. But our part is to be stronger than our own evil inclinations.
I am not afraid of the devil."
"He speaks for you in that arrogant speech, and his name is pride."
"Well, perhaps I spoke with too much assurance; but I believe pride is
a virtue in women, as courage is in men. Or, perhaps, pride in women is
only courage by another name."
He did not reply for some moments; and then an irrepressible impulse
made him touch on a perilous subject.
"Have you changed your mind about Lord Dunkeld?"
"As how, sir?" she asked, with a chilling air.
"Have you resolved to accept him as a husband? Surely you could not be
for ever adamant against so noble a suitor."
"You are vastly impertinent, to repeat a question that I answered some
time ago. No, sir, I shall never accept Lord Dunkeld, nor any other
suitor--had he the highest rank in the kingdom."
"You must have some strong reason."
"I have my reason, an all-sufficient reason; and now, sir, no more, I
beg you. Indeed, I wonder that you can distress me by renewing this
argument."
"Oh, madam, if you but knew the motive of my impertinence, the anguish
of heart that speaks in those words! I would have you happily mated,
Antonia. I--_I_--who adore you. Yes, though my jealous soul could
scarce contemplate the image of your husband without the murderer's
impulse--though to think of you belonging to another would be a torment
worse than hell-fire. Could you know how I have wrestled with Satan;
how when I urged you to marry Dunkeld every word I spoke was like a
knife driven through my heart; how I longed to fling myself at your
feet, to tell you, as I tell you now, at the peril of my salvation,
that I love you, with all the strength of my soul, my soul drowned in
sin, the unpardonable sin of loving you, the sin for which I must lose
heaven and reckon with Satan, my darling sin, the sin unto death, never
to be repented of."
He was on his knees, and his arms were about her, drawing her averted
face towards his own with a wild violence, till her brow touched his,
and his lips were pressed against her burning cheek. She felt the
passion of his kiss, and his tears upon her face, before she wrenched
herself from his arms, and dashed down the glass in front of her.
"Stop!" she called out to the postillions.
Startled at her authoritative cry, they pulled up their horses
suddenly, with a loud clattering on the stones, a hundred yards from
the bridge.
"You devil!" she said to Stobart, between her set teeth. "You that I
took for a saint! I will not breathe the same air with you."
The carriage had hardly stopped when she opened the door and sprang
out, not waiting for her footman to let down the steps. He had been
asleep in the rumble, and only alighted a moment before his mistress.
She walked towards the bridge in a tumult of agitation, Stobart at
her side, while her carriage and horses stood still, and her servants
waited for orders, wondering at this strange caprice of their lady's.
"Hypocrite! hypocrite!" she repeated. "You--the Christian, the preacher
who calls sinners to repentance; the man who sacrificed fortune to
marry the girl he loved."
"I knew not what love meant."
"You chose a simple girl for your wife, and tired of her; pretended
friendship for me, and under that mask of friendship nursed your
profligate dreams; and now you dare insult me with your unholy love."
"I should not have so dared, madam--indeed, I believe I might have
conquered my passion--so far as to remain for ever silent--if--if your
own words----"
"My words? When have I ever spoken a word that could warrant such an
affront?"
"When I advised you to accept Dunkeld--you refused with such
impassioned vehemence--you confessed you had a reason."
"And you thought 'twas because I loved another woman's husband--that
'twas your saintly self I cared for? No, sir, 'twas because I swore to
Kilrush on his death-bed that I would never belong to another, that
our union, of but one tragical hour, should be all I would ever know
of wedlock. I belong to him now as I belonged to him then. I love his
memory now as I loved him then. That, sir, was my reason. Are you not
ashamed of your fatuous self-esteem, which took it for a confession of
love? Love for you, the Methodist preacher, the man of God!"
"Yes, I am ashamed--I am drinking the cup of shame."
"You have tricked me, sir. You have deceived me very cruelly. I trusted
you--I thought that I had a friend--one man in the world who treated
me like a woman of sense--who dared to disapprove, where all the world
basely flattered me. And you are the worst of all--the snake in the
grass. But do you think I fear you? I had a better man than you at my
feet--the man I loved--my first love--a man with sovereign power over
the hearts of women. Do you think I fear you? No, sir, 'twas then the
tempter tried me. If there is a devil who assails women, I met him
then, and vanquished him."
She trembled from head to foot in the excess of her feeling. She was
leaning against the balustrade in one of the semicircular recesses on
the bridge. He was sitting at the furthest end of the stone bench, his
elbows on his knees, his face hidden.
"You have made me hate myself," he said. "'Tis useless to ask you to
forgive me; but you can forget that so base a worm crawls upon this
earth. _That_ will cost you but a slight effort."
"Yes, I will try to forget you; and to forget how much I valued your
friendship, or the friendship of the honourable man I took you for."
"I was that man, madam. Our friendship did not begin in treachery. I
was your true and honourable friend--till--till the devil saw me in my
foolish pride, my arrogant confidence in good works."
"Well, sir, 'tis a dream ended," she said, in those grave contralto
tones that had ever been like music in his ear--the lower key to which
her voice dropped when she was deeply moved; "and from to-night be good
enough to remember that we are strangers."
"I shall not forget, madam, nor shall my presence make the future
troublesome to you."
Something in his words scared her.
"You will do nothing violent--nothing desperately wicked?"
"No, madam, whatever the tempter whispers, however sweetly the river
murmurs of rest and oblivion, I shall not kill myself. For me there is
the 'something after death'!"
"Will you tell them to bring my coach?"
He rose and obeyed without a word, and stood by bareheaded till she
drove away, not even offering to assist her as she stepped into the
carriage, attended by her footman. Stobart stood watching till the
chariot vanished in the darkness of the street beyond the bridge, then
flung himself on the bench in the recess, and sat with his arms folded
on the stone parapet, and his forehead leaning upon them, lost in
despairing thoughts.
Judas, Judas, the companion of Christ, foredoomed to everlasting
misery--Judas, the son of perdition! And what of him who six years
ago gave himself to God--convinced of sin, sincerely repenting of the
errors of his youth, resolved to lead a new life, to live in Christ and
for Christ? How confident he had been, how happy in the assurance of
grace--all his thoughts, all his desires in subjection to the Divine
will, living not by the strict letter of Christ's law, but by every
counsel of perfection, deeming no sacrifice of self too severe, no
labour too exacting, in that heavenly service. And now, after that holy
apprenticeship, after all those years of duty and obedience, after
mounting so high upon the ladder of life, to find himself lying in the
mire at the foot of it, caught in the toils of Satan, and again the
slave of sin!
The slave of sin--yes--for though he hated the sin, he went on sinning.
He loved her--he loved her with a passion that the Water of Life
could not quench. How vain were those supplications for grace, those
confessions of guilt which broke from his convulsed lips, while her
image filled his heart. How vain his cry to Christ for help, while
_her_ voice sounded in his ears, and the thought of her indignation,
her scorn, her icy indifference, reigned supreme in the fiery tumult of
his brain.
Oh, how he loathed himself for his folly; how he writhed under a
proud man's agony of humiliation at the thought of his fatuous
self-delusion! Something in her look, something in her tone when
she protested against a second marriage, had thrilled him with the
conviction that his love had found its answer in her heart. When did
that fatal love begin? He knew not how the insidious poison stole
into his senses; but he could recall his first consciousness of that
blissful slavery, his first lapse from honour. He could remember the
hour and the moment, they two walking through the squalid street in the
winter twilight, her gloved hand resting lightly on his arm, her eyes
looking up at him, sapphire-blue under the long dark lashes, her low
voice murmuring words of pity for the dying child that she had nursed
in her lap, for the broken-hearted mother they had just left, and in
his heart a wild rapture that was new and sweet.
"I love her, I love her," he had told himself in that moment. "But she
will never know. It is as if I loved an angel. She is as far from me.
My conscience can suffer no stain from so pure, so distant a love."
Self-deluded sinner! Hypocrite to himself! He knew now that this moment
marked the beginning of apostasy, the law of sin warring against the
inward light. He knew now that this woman--noble-minded, chaste,
charitable, a creature of kindly impulses and generous acts, for him
represented Antichrist, and that from the hour in which he proved her
stubborn in unbelief, he should have renounced her friendship. He had
paltered with truth, had tried to reconcile the kingdom of darkness
with the kingdom of light, had been satisfied with the vague hope of
a deferred conversion, and had made his bosom friend of the woman who
denied his Master.
He loved her--with a love not to be repented of--a love that ran in his
veins and moved his heart, and seemed as much a part of his being as
the nerves and bones and flesh and blood that made him a man. He might
lie in dust and ashes at the foot of the cross, scourge himself to
death with the penitent's whip; but while the heart beat and the brain
could think the wicked love would be there; and he would die adoring
her, die and perish everlastingly, lost to salvation, cut off from
Christ's compassion, by that unhallowed love.
There was the agony for him, the believer. To abhor sin, to believe
in everlasting punishment, and to feel the impossibility of a saving
repentance, to know himself a son of perdition; since what could avail
the pangs of remorse for the man who went on sinning, whose whole life
was coloured by a guilty passion?
The Divine Teacher's stern denunciation of such sin rang in his ears,
as he crouched with folded arms on the stone parapet, alone in the
summer darkness, an outcast from God.
"He that looketh upon a woman!" On his adulterous heart that sentence
burnt like vitriol upon tender flesh. Only by ceasing to love her could
he cease to sin; and, looking forward through the long vista of the
coming years, he saw no possibility of change in his guilty heart, no
hope of respite from yearning and regret. Six years of repentance for
the sins and follies of his youth; six years of faithful service; six
years of peace and self-approval; and now behold him thrust outside
the gate, a soul more lost than in those unregenerate days when the
consciousness of sin was first awakened in his mind, when remorse for a
youthful intrigue, in which he had been the victim and sport of a vile
woman, and for a duel that had ended fatally, first became intolerable.
For him, the earnest believer, to whom religion was a terrible reality,
the fall from a state of grace meant the loss of that great hope
which alone can make life worth living, that "hope of eternal life,
which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began." For him
sin unrepented of meant everlasting despair, the pains of hell, the
companionship of devils.
He left the bridge, and wandered along the river bank, past his own
house, past the Archbishop's Palace, to the dreary marshes between
Lambeth and Battersea--wandered like a man hunted by evil spirits; and
it was not till daylight that he turned his steps slowly homeward,
dejected and forlorn.