"CHOOSE OF TWO LOVES."
Wesley's letter came upon George Stobart like the sudden opening of a
gate into Paradise. It was a year since he had seen Antonia's face.
For a year he had been the martyr of obedience to his spiritual guide,
had surrendered every hope of earthly happiness, and had submitted to
regard his life on earth only as an apprenticeship to the life to come.
And in a moment he was free, free to hope, free to behold the face, to
hear the voice he loved. Free to win her, if he could. There was the
question! He had never yet presumed, in his more thoughtful moods, to
believe his love returned. How coldly she had bidden him adieu when
last they met! Her manner had been without resentment, and without
kindness. It seemed as if, when he offended her by his shameless
addresses, he had ceased to exist. Her goodness to his wife had no
relation to her friendship for him.
How could he approach her? Not in her own house, till he had some
ground for hoping that her door would not be closed against him.
He would steal upon her path unawares, and endeavour to regain her
confidence by gentle means. He hurried to the Foundery to answer
Wesley's letter in person, and found that good man busy with his
preparations for leaving London. From him he heard of Antonia's
progress in good works, and in her attendance at Wesley's services.
"That heart which you thought adamant has melted, George, and the
Redeemer's saving Grace will be exemplified in this ransomed soul. She
is so fine a creature, so generous, charitable, compassionate, that it
wrung my heart to hear her, in this room, less than three months ago,
boldly confess herself an infidel."
He told Stobart all that Antonia had done for his poor, and, at his
request, gave him the addresses of some of the people she visited.
"They have all learnt to love her," he said, "which has not been always
the case when I have sent women of exalted piety upon such missions.
Her high-bred manner has a genial charm that wins them unawares. She
does not attempt to teach, but she reads the Gospel to them; and I may
tell you that she has an exquisite voice, and is a most accomplished
reader. It was but the other day I approved of a female preacher, the
first we have ever had, whose work so far has prospered. Should Lady
Kilrush continue in well-doing, I should like her occasionally to
address a room full of working women. A woman should know best how to
reach women's hearts."
Stobart smiled at the suggestion. Antonia, the Voltairean, the friend
of Lady Bolingbroke, the avowed sceptic, the woman of fashion,
preaching the Gospel to a crowd of tatterdemalions in a Whitechapel
kitchen! If Wesley could bring her to that pass he was indeed a
miracle-worker. Could it be that she had cast a spell around the leader
of the Methodists, and that his belief in her conversion was but the
delusion of a kind heart, willing to think the best of so beautiful and
gracious a creature?
Stobart was not an ardent believer in sudden conversions, though, in
the course of his field preaching, it had been a common thing for
him to see men and women fling themselves on their knees and declare
that they were "saved," convinced of sin, justified, sanctified, on
the instant, by one single operation of the Holy Spirit. He had seen
something of the convulsionists of Bristol. The miracle of Pentecost
had, in a lesser degree, been often repeated before his eyes; and among
these instantaneous conversions he knew of some that had been the
beginning of changed and holy lives. But he could not picture Antonia
amongst Wesley's easily won converts. Had he not wrestled again and
again with that stubborn spirit of unbelief, in the days when they were
friends, and when he never spared hard words? All his arguments, all
his pleadings, had failed to change her.
He did not allow for the influence of time, satiety, _Weltschmerz_, the
aching void of a life without love.
He rode with Wesley as far as Barnet, on the first stage of his
Northern journey, heard him preach there in the evening to a
closely-packed audience, and rode back to London next morning. It was
late in the afternoon, a mild spring afternoon, when, after visiting
several houses in the neighbourhood of Moorfields, he discovered Lady
Kilrush in an underground kitchen, seated by the sick-bed of a cobbler,
a young man with a wife and two children, dying of a consumption. The
wife sat on one side of the bed, her husband's hand clasped in hers,
Antonia on the other side reading the Gospel of St. John, in those
thrilling tones which Wesley had noted. She looked up as Stobart
entered the kitchen, and her cheek crimsoned as she recognized him; but
when she spoke her voice was cold as at their parting.
"I thought it was Mr. Wesley," she said. "Has he sent you to see our
poor Morris? This gentleman is one of Mr. Wesley's helpers, Morris."
The sick man smiled faintly, and held out a wasted hand to the visitor.
"Morris and I are old friends," Stobart said gently. "No, Lady Kilrush,
I was not sent here," and then seeing there was no vacant chair, he
stood with his elbow on the mantelpiece, waiting for Antonia to go on
reading.
"'I am the true Vine,'" she began, and read to the end of the chapter;
then rose quietly, bent over the dying man, murmured a few kind words,
pressed the wife's hand tenderly, and stole from the room, almost as
noiselessly as if she had been indeed the good angel these people
thought her. Stobart's survey of the wretched room had shown him that
her charity had provided the sufferer with every comfort and even
luxury that could be administered in such a home.
He followed her into the squalid street. The sky above the dilapidated
red tile roofs was blue and bright, and the north-west wind blew the
freshness of April flowers from the fields and gardens between Finsbury
and Islington. Antonia had no carriage waiting for her.
"I forget that I am a fine lady when I come here," she said, smiling at
him. "I walk from house to house, and take a hackney-coach when I have
done my day's work."
"Shall I get you a coach now? It is nearly six o'clock. Or will you
walk a little way?"
"I should like to walk. The fresh air is very pleasant after that warm
room; that room which he will only leave for the grave, poor soul. But
it is not of him one thinks most, but of the wife. She so loves him.
Happily she counts on being with him again--in a better world. She has
what Mr. Wesley calls vital religion."
"Mr. Wesley has told me something that has made me very happy," Stobart
said in a low voice that trembled ever so slightly. "He has told me
that your heart is changed, that you do not think as you once thought."
"Oh, I am changed--heart, mind, desires, fancies--yes, all are changed.
But I know not if it is for the better. I have left off caring for
things. I feel ever so old. Nothing in this life interests me, except
sorrow and suffering. I went to Mr. Wesley when my spirits had sunk to
despair, and he has been my good friend. I go home almost happy, after
I have worked all day among his poor."
"And he has taught you to believe in Christ?"
"One does not learn to believe. That must come from within, I think. I
have come to feel the need of God, the need of a world after death; but
I doubt I am no nearer believing in miracles than I was ten years ago
when first I read Voltaire. If to love Jesus is to be a Christian, why
then I am a Christian. But if a Christian must think exactly as you do,
or as Mr. Wesley does, I am outside the pale."
"Oh, but the fuller light will come! 'God is light.' He will not leave
a soul so precious in darkness. I knew long ago, when I saw you among
those wretched creatures at Lambeth, I knew you could not be for ever
lost."
They walked on a little way in silence, facing towards the setting sun.
They were crossing the public garden at Moorfields, where the cits and
their wives and families walked on fine evenings.
"Will you not resume your work in my district? Our people long for you.
Miss Potter is very kind--and your bounty is lavish--but they all want
_you_, all those whom you visited three years ago, and who remember
you with affection. Cannot you spare a little time from these new
pensioners for your old friends?"
"Oh, sir, I doubt they are well cared for, now they have you."
"But will you not help me a little? Ah, madam, could you but understand
what your help means for me! If you avoid the old places, the old
people, can I believe that you have pardoned my sin of the past? Surely
that one passionate hour has been expiated by the remorse of years."
"I have long since pardoned your folly, sir. Pray suffer me to forget
it."
Her cold disdain stung him to the quick. She did not even account his
passion worth her anger. How could he ever hope to break through that
adamant, to melt that ice?
He was persistent in spite of her coldness, and at last she promised to
return occasionally to her old work at Lambeth, and to visit the people
he deemed most in need of her.
"I can but give them my surplus hours," she said, "since the best part
of my life is pledged to Mr. Wesley. And now, sir, be so obliging as to
call a coach, and suffer me to bid you good evening."
There was a stand of coaches close by, and he handed her to her seat in
one. He stood bareheaded, watching her drive away. Her serious manner,
with that touch of hauteur, kept him at an immeasurable distance. The
familiar confidence of her old friendship seemed irrecoverably lost.
* * * * *
Nearly a year had gone since that meeting in the Whitechapel kitchen.
It was spring again, but early spring, and the days were still short,
and the skies still grey and cold, when George Stobart walked home
with Antonia after her visit to another dying bed, the bed of extreme
old age this time, the gradual fading out of the vital flame, feebler,
paler, day by day, the bed of boundless faith and ecstatic anticipation
of a new and fairer life.
She had seen the last sands of another life run down in the autumn of
the past year. She had kept her promise, and had gone back to Bellagio
in September, and had watched by her Italian grandfather's dying bed--a
peaceful end, in the odour of sanctity. She had followed the old man
to his last resting-place, and had stayed at Bellagio long enough to
make all arrangements for Francesca's wedding, and her establishment
as mistress of the old villino. She was married at the New Year,
handsomely dowered by her English cousin, and having chosen a worthy
mate. Antonia's obligations to her humble kinsfolk had been fulfilled.
Mr. Stobart and Lady Kilrush were on friendliest terms now; but no word
of love had been spoken. To be with her, to hear her voice, to know
that she liked his company, was so much; and to declare himself might
be the breaking of a spell. They had been together often among the
homes of the poor, in the library at St. James's Square, and sometimes
in the churches and chapels where Wesley, Romaine, and other lights of
the evangelical school were to be heard. But in all that time Stobart
had obtained no farther profession of faith from Antonia.
"If to love Christ is to be a Christian, I am one," she told him, when
he tried to bring her to his own way of thinking, and that was all.
Final perseverance, sanctification, justification, conviction of sin!
Those phrases seemed to her only the shibboleth of a sect. But all the
strength of her heart and intellect were engaged in those good works to
which the Methodists attached only a secondary merit. Her compassion
for human suffering was the dominating impulse of her life. She could
feel for the thief in Newgate, pity the slut in Bridewell whose life
had been one long disgrace. She had gone with Stobart into the prisons
of London, those dark places as yet unvisited by Howard or Elizabeth
Fry. She shrank from no form of suffering, so long as it was possible
to help or to console.
She had done with the world and its pleasures. The recluse is soon
forgotten in the merry-go-round of society. Her duchesses had long
ceased to trouble themselves about her. The princes and princesses
had forgotten her existence. The new reign had brought with it new
interests, a new set. Women were the top of the fashion who had been
dowdies; men who had been blockheads were wits.
Lord Dunkeld had married a rosy-cheeked damsel of eighteen summers,
daughter and heiress of a Lord of Session, was settled on his Scotch
estate, and had come to think Edinburgh the focus of intelligence
and _ton_. The people who had courted and admired Lady Kilrush had
long ceased to think of her, except as an eccentric, like Lady
Huntingdon, who had caught the fever of piety that had been in the air
for the last twenty years--the contagion of Methodism, Moravianism,
Predestinarianism--some boring and essentially middle-class form of
religion which banished her from polite company.
A woman who neither visits nor gives entertainments is socially dead.
Her female friends spoke of her sometimes with pity, as an unfortunate
who was afraid to let the town see her altered face, and who had
taken to religion as a substitute for beauty. The idea that she was
disfigured having once got abroad, her old rivals were slow to believe
her face unspoilt, though people who had seen her at one of Lady
Huntingdon's Thursdays swore that she was almost as handsome as ever.
"If she had not a cold, proud look that keeps an old friend at
a distance," said one of her admirers, who had suffered one of
Whitefield's sermons in order to meet her.
"She would not have you near enough to discover the ravages of that
horrid malady. I'll wager her countenance is plastered a quarter of an
inch thick with white lead," retorted the rival belle.
The library in St. James's Square was in the half light of a spring
evening, as it had been a year ago when Stobart entered the room with
so agonized an apprehension. He came in now with Antonia, a privileged
guest, coming and going as in the years gone by, taking his rest by
her fireside, after the burden of the day. Her only other visitors
were Lady Margaret Laroche--who was faithful to her in spite of what
she called her "degeneracy," and who came now and then to pour out her
complaints at the foolishness of a world whose follies were necessary
to her existence--and Patty Granger, whose dog-like fidelity made her
ever welcome, and who loved to talk of Antonia's girlhood, and her own
free and easy life in Covent Garden, when the General was a submissive
lover, and not a peevish husband.
Stobart had been unusually silent during the walk from Lambeth, and
Antonia had been full of thought, impressed as she ever was by that
mystery of the passing spirit, that unanswerable question, "Whither
goest thou, oh, departing soul, or is thy journey for ever finished,
and is man's instinctive belief in immortality a vain dream?"
Antonia sank into her fireside chair, weary after a long day in
wretched rooms, hearing and seeing sad things. She was almost too tired
to talk, and was glad of Stobart's silence. Sophy would come presently
and make the tea--it being supposed that no man-servant's hand was
delicate enough to brew that choice infusion--and their spirits would
revive. But in the meantime rest was all they wanted.
It startled her from this reposeful feeling when Stobart rose abruptly
and began to pace the room, for some minutes in silence, broken only by
a sigh, then bursting into impassioned speech.
"Antonia, I can lock up my heart no longer! 'Tis a year since I came
from America to find a desolate home. For a year I have known myself a
widower. Dare I break the spell of silence? Shall I lose all in asking
for all? Will you banish me in anger, as you did when it was so black a
sin to speak of my love?"
He flung himself on his knees beside her chair.
"Say you will be pitiful and kind, you who are all pity; and if you
cannot give me what I ask, promise not to make me an outcast from your
friendship."
"I shall never again cease to be your friend, sir!" she answered
gently. "I think we know each other too well to quarrel. We are neither
of us perfect creatures; but I believe you are a good Christian, and
that your friendship will ever be precious to me."
"Make the bond something nearer than friendship, Antonia. Let it be the
hallowed tie that makes two souls seem as one. Ah, my angelic friend,
seldom has woman been so worshipped as you are by me. The love that
stole upon my mind and heart unawares, in this room, when it was so
foul a sin to love you; the love purified by years of repentance; the
love that haunted me in the wilderness, through long days and nights
of toil and pain, when your following ghost was nearer and more real
to me than the foe that hemmed us round or the storm that beat upon
our heads--that love is with me still, Antonia; time cannot change nor
familiarity lessen it. Will you be for ever cold, for ever deaf to my
prayer?"
She had heard him to the end. Was it for the joy of hearing him, though
she knew what her answer must be? She knew now that she loved him,
and had always loved him, from those days of a so-called friendship.
She knew that he took all the zest out of her life when he left her;
and that the want of his company had been a dull pain, underlying all
varieties of pleasure, a sense of loss coming on her on a sudden amidst
the tempestuous gaiety of a masquerade, haunting her in some melody
at the opera house, saddening her in the midst of a gay throng, where
arrows of wit flashed fast to an accompaniment of joyous laughter.
"Can you forget what I told you years ago?" she said. "A marriage
is impossible for me. I am married to the dead. I gave myself to my
husband for ever. I swore in his dying moments to belong to none but
him."
"'Twere madness to keep so wild a vow."
"What! Do the Methodist Christians think it no sin to break their oath?"
"They would violate no vow made in their rational moments. But your
promise was given in the delirium of grief, and he to whom you gave it
could not be such a self-lover as to fetter youth and beauty to his
coffin."
"'Twas he who claimed the promise, and I gave it in all seriousness. I
loved him, sir. I would have given all the residue of my life for one
year of happiness with him. I loved him; and our lives were severed by
my act, severed for years, to unite in death. If there be that other
world Mr. Wesley believes in, I may see him again, may be with him in
eternity. That, sir, is indeed a great perhaps. I will not hazard such
a chance of everlasting bliss."
"'Tis the pagan's heaven you picture, not the Christian's--the
resumption of human ties, not union with Christ. Oh, can you be so
cruel as to make my life miserable, to deny the lover who adores you,
for the sake of the dead man who lies in the quiet sleep that has no
knowledge of you and me--must lie there unknowing, uncaring, till the
Day of Judgment?"
"If ever that day come he shall not find me forsworn; no, not even for
you; not even to make you happy."
He had watched the exalted look in her face as the firelight shone upon
it. She had looked upward as she spoke, her eyes dilated, her lips
tremulous with emotion, and a fever spot on her cheek. But now on a
sudden her head drooped, and she burst into tears.
"Not even for you," she sobbed.
It was her confession of love. In the next moment she was in his arms,
and their lips had met. She let him hold her there, she let her head
lie upon his shoulder, and suffered his impassioned kisses in the
surprise of his wild vehemence.
"You love me, Antonia, you love me! No dead man shall stand between us.
You must, you shall be mine!"
She released herself from his arms, and sprang to her feet.
"I am not so weak a thing as you fancy me, sir."
"I will not let you go. Shall a profligate's pale spectre stand between
me and the woman I worship? A vow made under such conditions is no vow.
Can it better him that my life should be miserable, that lovers as true
as you and I should pine in solitude, go down to the grave without ever
having known happiness? It shall not be."
"You are very imperious, Mr. Stobart; but I am the mistress of my own
fate."
"I am very resolute. You love me, Antonia. Your tears, your lips have
told me that divine secret."
"Be it so. I love you, sir. But I will not break my promise to one I
loved better, my first dear love, the man who brought sunshine into my
life, and extinguished the sun when he left me. The man who loved me
better than he thought."
"Antonia!"
"Leave me, Mr. Stobart. If we are still to be friends, you had best
leave me."
"It is no longer a question of friendship. I know now that you love me,
and I swear I will not lose you."
"Leave me, sir," she exclaimed. "If you ever wish to see my face again,
leave me this instant."
"At least be merciful. Do not send me from you in despair. Antonia, be
kind! I cannot live without you."
"Go, sir; your vehemence, your boldness, leave me no power to reason or
even to think. Go; and if after a night of thought I can bring myself
to believe that I am not bound, body and soul, by my promise to the
dead----"
"You will be mine," he cried, with outstretched arms, trying to clasp
her again to his heart, but she drew herself away from him indignantly.
He grasped her unwilling hand, covered it with kisses and tears, and
rushed from the room.
* * * * *
The watchmen were calling "Half-past eleven, and a fine night," when
Lady Kilrush left her dressing-room, carrying a lighted candle and a
key, and crossed the gallery to that other side of the spacious house
where the late lord's rooms were situated. The household had retired
soon after ten, and the great well staircase lay like a pit of darkness
below the massive oak banisters. An oppressive silence, an oppressive
gloom, pervaded the house, as Antonia unlocked the door that had seldom
been opened since the coffin was carried out on the first stage of its
long journey, on a summer night that memory recalled as if it had been
yesterday. The atmosphere, the feelings of that night were in her mind
as she crossed the threshold of the room which had never known the uses
of human life since Kilrush occupied it. The wainscot mouse, the spider
on the wall, the moth lurking in the window drapery, had been its only
inhabitants.
The tall silver candlesticks, the portfolio and standish were on the
table in the oak-panelled ante-room where Antonia remembered the lawyer
and the doctor talking beside the empty hearth. The vastness of the
bed-chamber had an appalling air in the glimmer of a single candle.
Antonia's hand trembled as she lighted those other candles, the candles
that had burnt beside the dying man when he spoke the words that made
her a peeress.
How near that night seemed, as she stood beside the bed, funereal under
the dark velvet hangings, a catafalque rather than a bed. She could
hear the Bishop's full-mouthed tones, and that other voice, faltering
and faint, but to her the world's best music.
"Oh, my beloved," she cried, falling on her knees beside the pillow on
which his head had lain. "Oh, my dearest, kindest, best, surely it is
you I love and none other--you, only you, only you!"
Her arms were folded on the coverlet, her head resting on them. She
remained thus on her knees, for a long time, dreaming back the past.
She lived again through those hours in Rupert Buildings, those hours
spent in endless talk with Kilrush. They seemed to her now the most
blissful hours of her life. She looked back and wondered at that
happiness. Perhaps there was some touch of illusion in that dream of
the past, something of the light that never was on sea or land; but
to her there was no shadow of doubt that the joy of those past days
exceeded all she had known of gladness since her husband's death.
She had made her night toilet and put on a loose silken _négligé_,
meaning to spend the long hours in this room. Her first night in a
husband's chamber--her wedding night, she thought, with a melancholy
smile.
She had come here to solve the problem of the future, to determine
whether she should or should not break her promise to the dead. For
her, the free-thinker, it might seem a small thing to break a vow, when
her keeping it would make a good man's life desolate. But despite the
vagueness of her hope in the Hereafter, despite that early teaching
which had bidden her believe in nothing that her human intelligence
could not comprehend, her husband's image was a living presence in that
room, a living influence in her life, and she could not imagine him
lying in the dust, unconscious and indifferent. Somehow, somewhere, by
some mysterious unthinkable means, the dead still lived, still loved
her, still claimed her fidelity.
"My first dear love," she cried, in a burst of hysterical sobs, "I am
yours and yours only. I can never belong to another, never own any
husband but you."
Her tears, her reiterated vow soothed her. She rose from her knees,
by-and-by, and sat on the bed, as she had sat when she held her dying
lover in her arms. Gradually her head sank on the pillow where his head
had lain, and she fell asleep.
"Past two o'clock, and a rainy night," called the watchman in the
square.
Antonia did not wake till after five. The dead man was in her dreams
through those three hours of deepest sleep. It was not George Stobart's
impassioned embrace that haunted her slumber. The arms that encircled
her, the lips that kissed her, were the arms and lips of the lover
irrevocably lost, and there was a poignant joy in that embrace. Her
wedding night! The words were repeated in her dreams. It was a night
of dreams that ratified her promise to the dead. Surely he was near
her! The voice that sounded so close to her ear, that very voice she
knew so well, the lips whose touch thrilled her, gave her the assurance
of immortality; and in some dim land she could not picture, under
conditions beyond the limit of human intelligence, they two would meet
again, husband and wife, spirit or flesh, reunited for ever.
* * * * *
George Stobart was at Kilrush House before nine o'clock. His patience
could endure no longer. He had spent the night as he spent that other
and much more miserable night after Whitefield's sermon, wandering
about the waste places between Lambeth Palace and Vauxhall. Slumber or
rest was out of the question.
The hall porter was more awake than usual, and answered his inquiry
briskly.
"No, sir, not at home. Her ladyship has left London. She will lie at
Devizes to-night, on her way to Ireland."
"Gone! Impossible!"
"It was very sudden, sir, and as much as could be done. 'Twas nearly
six o'clock this morning when the servants had their orders. Her
ladyship takes only Miss Potter, her French waiting woman, and one
footman, in her travelling carriage and a post-chaise."
"What time did they leave?"
"They may have been gone over half an hour, sir. I heard the clock
strike eight after the coaches left the door. I have her ladyship's
letter for you, sir."
Stobart took the letter, speechless with mortification, and left the
house before he broke the seal. It was a miserable morning, and he
stood in the rain, under the low grey sky, while he read her letter,
her letter of one line--
"Farewell for ever."