|When he reached the house he found that his presence was needed at
the bedside of a labourer, who had met with a serious accident a day
or two before, and who was now sinking rapidly. Mr. Santley was a
man who never begrudged time or trouble in the interests of his
parishioners; and, though he had yet another service to attend, and
was already fatigued by the work of the day, he readily signified his
willingness to comply with the request of the dying man, and at once
started for the village.
He felt at the moment that the duty placed before him would be a
relief from the thronging recollections and the wild promptings which
had set his heart and brain in a turmoil. As he went down the road,
however, the face of the dying man who had sent to seek his priestly
aid, and the face of the beautiful wife of the owner of Foxglove
Manor, seemed to be striving for mastery over him; he was unable to
concentrate his attention on any subject. His will was in abeyance,
and he appeared to himself to be in a sort of waking nightmare, in
which the most distorted thoughts of marriage and death, of a lost
love and of a lost God, of the mockery of life, the mockery of youth,
the mockery of religion, presented themselves before him in a hideous
masquerade, till the function he was about to fulfil appeared to him
at one moment a sacrilege and at another a degrading folly.
To understand in some degree the vicars mental condition, it is
necessary to glance back on his past life. In early manhood Charles
Santley had been seriously impressed with the sense of a special
vocation to a religious life. He was the son of a wealthy merchant,
whose entire fortune had perished in one of our great commercial
crises, and whose death had followed close upon his ruin. Up to that
period Charles had been undecided as to his choice of a pursuit;
but the necessity of making an immediate selection resulted in his
devoting himself to the Church. Barely sufficient had been saved from
the wreck of their property to support his widowed mother and his
sister. For himself, he was endowed with a splendid physique, a keen
intellect, and indomitable energy; and he at once flung himself into
his new career. He supported himself by teaching until he was admitted
to orders, when he obtained a curacy, and eventually, through the
interest of some old friends of his father, he was presented with the
living of St. Cuthbert’s. In the course of these years of struggle,
however, there was gradually developing within the man a spirit which
threatened to render his success worse than useless to him. Ardent,
emotional, profoundly convinced of the eternal truths of revelation
and of the glorious mission of the Church, the young clergyman was
at the same time boldly speculative and keenly alive to the grandiose
developments of the modern schools of thought. It was not till he
stood on the extreme verge of science and looked beyond that he fully
realized his position. He then perceived with horror that it was no
longer impossible--that it was even no longer difficult--to regard
the great message of redemption as a dream of the world, the glorious
faith of Christendom as a purely ethnic mythology, morality as a
merely natural growth of a natural instinct of self-preservation.
Indeed, the difficulty consisted in believing otherwise. The
Fatherhood of a personal God was slipping away from his soul; the
Sonship of a Saviour was melting into a fantastic unreality; the
conviction of a personal immortality was dissipating into mental mist
and darkness. The mystery of evil was growing into a fiendish enigma;
virtue passed him, and showed herself to be a hollow mask.
His whole nature rose in revolt against this horrible scientific
travesty of Gods universe. He shrank back alike from the new truths
and from the theories evolved from them. His faith could not stand the
test of the wider knowledge. If God were indeed a myth, immortality
but a dream, virtue an unprofitable delusion, man simply a
beast gifted with speech, better the old faith concerning all
these--accepted though it were in despite of reason and in outrage of
immortal truth--than the hideous simulacra of the new philosophy. He
cast himself back upon the bosom of the Church; he clung to her as
to the garment of God; but he was powerless to exorcise the spirit
of scepticism. It rose before him in sacred places, it scoffed at
his most earnest and impassioned utterances; he seemed to hear within
himself cynical laughter as he stood at the bedside of the dying;
when he knelt to pray it stood at his ear and suggested blasphemy; it
converted the solemn light of the Church into a motley atmosphere
of superstition; it stimulated his strong animal nature to the very
bounds of self-restraint. Still, if he was unable to exorcise it,
he had yet the strength to contend with and to master it. Precisely
because he was sceptical he was rigid in outward doctrine, zealous for
forms, and indefatigable in the discharge of his clerical functions.
In his passionate endeavour to convince himself, he convinced his
hearers and confirmed them in the faith in which he was himself unable
to trust.
To-day the old conflict between the sacerdotal and the sceptical was
complicated by new elements of spiritual discord. After seven years of
hopeless separation, Charles Santley had once more stood face to face
with the embodied dream and inspiration of his early manhood, and had
found her, in the full lustre of her peerless womanhood, another man’s
wife. During those years he had, it was true, reconciled himself
to what then had been forced upon him as the inevitable, and he had
sternly set himself to master the problem of his existence, without
any secret hope that in the coming years his success might bring her
within his reach; but he had never forgotten her. She was to him the
starry poetry of his youth. He looked back to the time when he had
first known and loved her, as a sadder and a wiser world looks back to
the Golden Age. The memory of her was the ghost of an ancient worship,
flitting in a dim rosy twilight about the Elysian fields of memory,
and, it being twilight, the fields were touched with a hallowed
feeling of loss and a divine sentiment of regret. And now--oh, bitter
irony of time and fortune!--now that, he had achieved success, now
that all the old gulfs which had separated them were spanned with
golden bridges, now that he might have claimed her and she might have
been proud to acknowledge the claim, she once more crossed his life--a
vision of beauty, a star of inspiration--and once, more he knew that
she was hopelessly, infinitely more hopelessly than ever, raised
beyond his seeking.
He was detained so long at the bedside of the dying man that, by the
time he had again reached the Vicarage, the bells were ringing for
evening service and the western sky was ablaze with sunset. In
the church the light streamed through the lancets and the painted
casements, filling the air with motley breadths of glowing colour,
and painting pillar and arch and the brown sandstone with glorious
blazonry. Even in the curtained nook near the organ the space was
flooded with enchanted lights, and Edith Dove sat beside the tall
gilded instrument like a picture of St. Cecilia in an illuminated
missal. In the pulpit the vicar stood as if transfigured. He spoke,
too, as though he felt that this was the splendour of a new heaven
opening upon a new earth, and the glad rustle of the trees in the cool
breeze outside was the murmur of paradise.
“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,” were the words
of his text, and throughout the fervid exposition of the apostle’s
faith in the resurrection the sweet, blue eyes and the eager lips of
the organist were turned towards the preacher. He seemed this evening,
however, to be unconscious of her presence. He addressed himself
entirely to the listeners in the pews in front of him, and never cast
even a solitary glance towards the aisle where she sat.
At the close of the service Edith found Miss Santley waiting for her
at the entrance. It had now been customary for several weeks past for
Miss Dove to go over to the Vicarage on Sunday evening and remain to
supper with Mr. Santley and his sister. They went slowly through the
churchyard together, and took the little path which led to the house.
They remained chatting at the wicket for a few moments, expecting
the appearance of the vicar. When Mr. Santley issued from the church,
however, he passed quickly down the gravelled walk to the high-road.
He had thrown a rapid look towards the plantation, and had seen the
young women, but he gave no indication of having observed them.
“Why, Charles is not coming!” exclaimed Miss Santley, with surprise,
as she saw her brother; “he surely cannot be going down to Omberley
again.”
“He is not going to Omberley, dear,” said Edith, who had been watching
for the vicar, and had been keen enough to notice the hasty glance he
had cast in their direction; “he is going up the road.”
“Then wherever can he be going to? And he had not had tea yet, poor
fellow!”
Miss Santley stepped a few paces back into the churchyard, and stood
on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of him over the hedge; but the vicar had
already passed out of sight.
“Never mind, dear,” she said to Edith. “Shall we go in and have a
little chat by ourselves? He may have some sick call or other, and he
is sure to be back soon, or he would have told me where he was
going. Come, you needn’t look so sad,” Miss Santley continued, as she
observed the expression of her companion’s face.
“I didn’t think I was looking sad,” replied Edith, blushing.
“Oh yes, you were; dreadfully,” said Miss Santley, laughing in a
bantering manner.
“You don’t think Mr. Santley is--is not quite well?” asked Edith,
timidly.
“Oh no; Charles is quite well, I am sure.”
“Perhaps he is displeased with something,” said Edith, as if speaking
to herself rather than to Miss Santley.
“What a little fidget you are!” said her companion, taking the girl’s
arm. “I know what you are thinking of. I am sure he has no cause to be
displeased with _you_, at any rate.”
“I hope not,” replied Miss Dove, brightening a little. “Only I felt
a misgiving. You do feel misgivings about all sorts of things, don’t
you, Mary, without knowing why--a sort of presentiment and an uneasy
feeling that something is going to happen?”
“Young people in love, I believe, experience feelings of that kind,”
said Miss Santley, with mock gravity, “Come in, you dear little goose,
and don’t vex your poor wee heart like that. He will be back before we
have got half our talk over.”
The vicar strode rapidly along the road until he reached the summit
of a rising ground, from which he could see two counties spread out
before him in fruitful undulations of field and meadow and woodland.
The sunset was burning down in front of him. Far away in the distant
landscape were soft mists of blue smoke rising from half-hidden
villages, and here and there flashed points of brightness where the
sun struck on the windows of a farmstead. On either hand were great
expanses of yellowing corn swaying in the cool breeze and reddening
in the low crimson light. He left the road, and passed through a gate
into one of the fields. Following a footpath, he went along the hedge
till he reached a stile. Here he was alone and concealed in a vast sea
of rustling corn. He sat down on the top of the stile, and resting
his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, gazed abstractedly
into the glowing west.
A single word which escaped him betrayed the workings of his mind:
“Married!”
Seven years ago, when Charles Santley began his struggle in life, he
obtained through a clerical friend a position as teacher of classics
in a seminary for young ladies in a small sea-side town in a southern
county. He found his new labour especially congenial. A handsome young
professor, whose attention was fixed on the Church, and who purposed
to devote himself to her service, was cordially-welcomed by the devout
ladies who conducted the establishment. They were three sisters who
had been overlooked in the wide yearning crowd of unloved womanhood,
and who had turned for consolation to the mystical passions of
religion. Under their care a bevy of bright young creatures
were brought up as in the chaste seclusion of a convent. Their
impressionable natures were surrounded by a strange artificial
atmosphere of spiritual emotion; life shone in upon them, as it were,
through the lancets of a-mediaeval ecclesiasticism, and their young
hearts, breaking into blossom, were coloured once and for ever with
those deep glowing tints.
It was here that the young man, in the first dawn of the romance of
manhood, met the beautiful girl who was now the wife of the owner of
Foxglove Manor. She was then turned of seventeen, and had become aware
of the first shy longings and sweet impulses of her nature. She was
his favourite pupil, and sat at his right hand at the long table
when he gave his lessons. He used her pen and pencil, referred to her
books, touched her hand with his in the ordinary work of the lesson.
Her clothes touched his clothes beneath the table. At times their
feet met accidentally. She regularly put a flower in a glass of water
before his place. All these trifles were the thrilling incidents of
a delicious romance which the school-girl was making in her flurried
little heart. He, too, was not insensible to the trifles which
affected his passionate pupil. Her great dark eyes sent electric
flashes through him. Her breath reached him sweeter than roses. Her
beautiful dark hair rubbed against his shoulder or his cheek, and he
tried to prevent the hot blood from flushing into his face. When their
hands touched he could have snatched hers and kissed it.
Ellen Derwent was happily not a boarder at the establishment, but
resided with her aunt. Her family were wealthy country people, and
Ellen, who had been ailing for a little while, had been ordered to the
sea-side for change of air. Early in the bright mornings, and after
the day’s schooling was over, Ellen wandered about the sea-shore or
took long walks along the cliffs. Santley met her first by accident,
and after that, though the meetings might still be called accidental,
each knew that to-morrow and to-morrow and yet again to-morrow
the same instinctive feeling--call it a divine chance or love’s
premonition--would bring them together.
Ah! happy, radiant days by that glad sea and in the wild loveliness
of those romantic cliffs! Oh, vision of flushed cheek and shining eyes,
and sweet red lips and throbbing bosom! Oh, dim heavenly summer dawns,
when the sea mists were just brightening, and the little birds were
singing, and the sea-side town was still half asleep, and only two
lovers were walking hand in hand along the green brow of the cliffs!
Oh, sweet autumn twilights which the shining eyes seemed to fill with
dark burning lustre! Oh, kisses, sweeter than ever pressed by woman’s
lips before or since! Oh, thrill of clasped hands and mad palpitations
of loving bosoms!
The swaying corn sounded like the sea as the breeze passed over it,
and the-murmur broke the vicars reverie.
“Married!”
Married? yes, married! The sweet secret could not be kept for ever,
and when Miss Lilburn, Ellen’s aunt, discovered it, she at once spoke
to Mr. Santley. She did not oppose his suit--indeed, she liked him
greatly, but love, after all, was no mere school-girl’s dream. Was
he in a position to make Ellen his wife? In any case, they must know
about it at home. If Mr. Derwent approved, she would be most happy
that Mr. Santley should visit her; but, in the meantime, it was only
prudent that Ellen should discontinue these pleasant rambles.
He had never seen Ellen since, until her face made his heart stand
still in the midst of his sermon.
The vicar rose from the stile with clenched hands and set teeth.
“Bitter, bitter!” he said, raising his face to the sky and shaking his
head as though he saw above him an invisible face, and spoke half in
exquisite pain, half in stoical endurance.