They came at length to Mr. Bentley's door, flung open in its usual wide
hospitality by Sam. Whatever theist fortunes, they would always be
welcome here . . . . But it turned out, in answer to their question,
that their friend was not at home.
"No, sah," said Sam, bowing and smiling benignantly, "but he done tole
me to say, when you and Miss Alison come, hit was to make no diffunce,
dat you bofe was to have supper heah. And I'se done cooked it--yassah.
Will you kindly step into the liba'y, suh, and Miss Alison? Dar was a
lady 'crost de city, Marse Ho'ace said--yassah."
"John," said Alison with a questioning smile, when they were alone before
the fire, "I believe he went out on purpose,--don't you?--just that we
might be here alone."
"He knew we were coming?"
"I wrote him."
"I think he might be convicted on the evidence," Hodder agreed. "But--?"
His question remained unasked.
Alison went up to him. He had watched her, absorbed and fascinated, as
with her round arms gracefully lifted in front of the old mirror she had
taken off her hat and veil; smoothing, by a few deft touches, the dark
crown of her hair. The unwonted intimacy of the moment, invoking as it
did an endless reflection of other similar moments in their future life
together, was in its effect overwhelming, bringing with it at last a
conviction not to be denied. Her colour rose as she faced him, her
lashes fell.
"Did you seriously think, dear, that we could have deceived Mr. Bentley?
Then you are not as clever as I thought you. As soon as it happened I
sent him a note? that very night. For I felt that he ought to be told
first of all."
"And as usual," Hodder answered, "you were right."
Supper was but a continuation of that delicious sense of intimacy. And
Sam, beaming in his starched shirt and swallow-tail, had an air of
presiding over a banquet of state. And for that matter, none had ever
gone away hungry from this table, either for meat or love. It was,
indeed, a consecrated meal,--consecrated for being just there. Such
was the tact which the old darky had acquired from his master that he
left the dishes on the shining mahogany board, and bowed himself out.
"When you wants me, Miss Alison, des ring de bell."
She was seated upright yet charmingly graceful, behind the old English
coffee service which had been Mr. Bentley's mother's. And it was she
who, by her wonderful self-possession, by the reassuring smile she gave
him as she handed him his cup, endowed it all with reality.
"It's strange," she said, "but it seems as though I had been doing it all
my life, instead of just beginning."
"And you do it as though you had," he declared.
"Which is a proof," she replied, "of the superior adaptability of women."
He did not deny it. He would not then, in truth, have disputed her
wildest statement. . . But presently, after they had gone back into
the library and were seated side by side before the coals, they spoke
again of serious things, marvelling once more at a happiness which could
be tinged and yet unmarred by vicarious sorrow. Theirs was the soberer,
profounder happiness of gratitude and wonder, too wise to exult, but
which of itself is exalted; the happiness which praises, and passes
understanding.
"There are many things I want to say to you, John," she told him, once,
"and they trouble me a little. It is only because I am so utterly
devoted to you that I wish you to know me as I am. I have always had
queer views, and although much has happened to change me since I have
known and loved you, I am not quite sure how much those views have
changed. Love," she added, "plays such havoc with one's opinions."
She returned his smile, but with knitted brows.
"It's really serious--you needn't laugh. And it's only fair to you to
let you know the kind of a wife you are getting, before it is too late.
For instance, I believe in divorce, although I can't imagine it for us.
One never can, I suppose, in this condition--that's the trouble. I have
seen so many immoral marriages that I can't think God intends people
to live degraded. And I'm sick and tired of the argument that an
indissoluble marriage under all conditions is good for society. That
a man or woman, the units of society, should violate the divine in
themselves for the sake of society is absurd. They are merely setting an
example to their children to do the same thing, which means that society
in that respect will never get any better. In this love that has come
to us we have achieved an ideal which I have never thought to reach.
Oh, John, I'm sure you won't misunderstand me when I say that I would
rather die than have to lower it."
"No," he answered, "I shall not misunderstand you."
"Even though it is so difficult to put into words what I mean. I don't
feel that we really need the marriage service, since God has already
joined us together. And it is not through our own wills, somehow, but
through his. Divorce would not only be a crime against the spirit, it
would be an impossibility while we feel as we do. But if love should
cease, then God himself would have divorced us, punished us by taking
away a priceless gift of which we were not worthy. He would have shut
the gates of Eden in our faces because we had sinned against the Spirit.
It would be quite as true to say 'whom God has put asunder no man may
join together.' Am I hurting you?"
Her hand was on the arm of his chair, and the act of laying his own on it
was an assurance stronger than words. Alison sighed.
"Yes, I believed you would understand, even though I expressed myself
badly,--that you would help me, that you have found a solution. I used
to regard the marriage service as a compromise, as a lowering of the
ideal, as something mechanical and rational put in the place of the
spiritual; that it was making the Church, and therefore God, conform to
the human notion of what the welfare of society ought to be. And it is
absurd to promise to love. We have no control over our affections. They
are in God's hands, to grant or withdraw.
"And yet I am sure--this is new since I have known you--that if such a
great love as ours be withdrawn it would be an unpardonable wrong for
either of us to marry again. That is what puzzles me--confounds the
wisdom I used to have, and which in my littleness and pride I thought so
sufficient. I didn't believe in God, but now I feel him, through you,
though I cannot define him. And one of many reasons why I could not
believe in Christ was because I took it for granted that he taught, among
other things, a continuation of the marriage relation after love had
ceased to justify it."
Hodder did not immediately reply. Nor did Alison interrupt his silence,
but sat with the stillness which at times so marked her personality, her
eyes trustfully fixed on him. The current pulsing between them was
unbroken. Hodder's own look, as he gazed into the grate, was that of a
seer.
"Yes," he said at length, "it is by the spirit and not the letter of our
Lord's teaching that we are guided. The Spirit which we draw from the
Gospels. And everything written down there that does not harmonize with
it is the mistaken interpretation of men. Once the Spirit possesses us
truly, we are no longer troubled and confused by texts.
"The alpha and omega of Christ's message is rebirth into the knowledge of
that Spirit, and hence submission to its guidance. And that is what Paul
meant when he said that it freed us from the law. You are right, Alison,
when you declare it to be a violation of the Spirit for a man and woman
to live together when love does not exist. Christ shows us that laws
were made for those who are not reborn. Laws are the rules of society,
to be followed by those who have not found the inner guidance, who live
and die in the flesh. But the path which those who live under the
control of the Spirit are to take is opened up to them as they journey.
If all men and women were reborn we should have the paradox, which only
the reborn can understand, of what is best for the individual being best
for society, because under the will of the Spirit none can transgress
upon the rights and happiness of others. The Spirit would make the laws
and rules superfluous.
"And the great crime of the Church, for which she is paying so heavy an
expiation, is that her faith wavered, and she forsook the Spirit and
resumed the law her Master had condemned. She no longer insisted on that
which Christ proclaimed as imperative, rebirth. She became, as you say,
a mechanical organization, substituting, as the Jews had done, hard and
fast rules for inspiration. She abandoned the Communion of Saints, sold
her birthright for a mess of pottage, for worldly, temporal power when
she declared that inspiration had ceased with the Apostles, when she
failed to see that inspiration is personal, and comes through rebirth.
For the sake of increasing her membership, of dominating the affairs of
men, she has permitted millions who lived in the law and the flesh, who
persisted in forcing men to live by the conventions and customs Christ
repudiated, and so stultify themselves, to act in Christ's name. The
unpardonable sin against the Spirit is to doubt its workings, to maintain
that society will be ruined if it be substituted for the rules and
regulations supposed to make for the material comforts of the nations,
but which in reality suppress and enslave the weak.
"Nevertheless in spite of the Church, marvellously through the Church the
germ of our Lord's message has come down to us, and the age in which we
live is beginning to realize its purport, to condemn the Church for her
subservient rationalism.
"Let us apply the rule of the Spirit to marriage. If we examine the
ideal we shall see clearly that the marriage-service is but a symbol.
Like baptism, it is a worthless and meaningless rite unless the man and
the woman have been born again into the Spirit, released from the law.
If they are still, as St. Paul would say, in the flesh, let them have,
if they wish, a civil permit to live together, for the Spirit can have
nothing to do with such an union. True to herself, the Church symbolizes
the union of her members, the reborn. She has nothing to do with laws
and conventions which are supposedly for the good of society, nor is any
union accomplished if those whom she supposedly joins are not reborn.
If they are, the Church can neither make it or dissolve it, but merely
confirm and acknowledge the work of the Spirit. And every work of the
Spirit is a sacrament. Not baptism and communion and marriage only, but
every act of life.
"Oh, John," she exclaimed, her eyes lighting, "I can believe that! How
beautiful a thought! I see now what is meant when it is said that man
shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of
the mouth of God. That is the hourly guidance which is independent
of the law. And how terrible to think that all the spiritual beauty of
such a religion should have been hardened into chapter and verse and
regulation. You have put into language what I think of Mr. Bentley,
--that has acts are sacraments . . . . It is so simple when you explain
it this way. And yet I can see why it was said, too, that we must become
as children to understand it."
"The difficult thing," replied Holder, gravely, "is to retain it, to hold
it after we have understood it--even after we have experienced it. To
continue to live in the Spirit demands all our effort, all our courage
and patience and faith. We cannot, as you say, promise to love for life.
But the marriage service, interpreted, means that we will use all our
human endeavour, with the help of the Spirit, to remain in what may be
called the reborn state, since it is by the Spirit alone that true
marriage is sanctified. When the Spirit is withdrawn, man and woman
are indeed divorced.
"The words 'a sense of duty' belong to moral philosophy and not to
religion. Love annuls them. I do not mean to decry them, but the reborn
are lifted far above them by the subversion of the will by which our will
is submitted to God's. It is so we develop, and become, as it were, God.
And hence those who are not married in the Spirit are not spiritually man
and wife. No consecration has taken place, Church or no Church. If
rebirth occurs later, to either or both, the individual conscience--which
is the Spirit, must decide whether, as regards each other, they are bound
or free, and we must stand or fall by that. Men object that this is
opening the door to individualism. What they fail to see is that the
door is open, wide, to-day and can never again be closed: that the law
of the naturally born is losing its power, that the worn-out authority of
the Church is being set at naught because that authority was devised by
man to keep in check those who were not reborn. The only check to
material individualism is spiritual individualism, and the reborn man
or woman cannot act to the detriment of his fellow-creatures."
In her turn she was silent, still gazing at him, her breath coming
deeply, for she was greatly moved.
"Yes," she said simply, "I can see now why divorce between us would be a
sacrilege. I felt it, John, but I couldn't reason it out. It is the
consecration of the Spirit that justifies the union of the flesh. For
the Spirit, in that sense, does not deny the flesh."
"That would be to deny life," Hodder replied.
"I see. Why was it all so hidden!" The exclamation was not addressed to
him--she was staring pensively into the fire. But presently, with a
swift movement, she turned to him.
"You will preach this, John,--all of it!"
It was not a question, but the cry of a new and wider vision of his task.
Her face was transfigured. And her voice, low and vibrating, expressed
no doubts. "Oh, I am proud of you! And if they put you out and
persecute you I shall always be proud, I shall never know why it was
given me to have this, and to live. Do you remember saying to me once
that faith comes to us in some human form we love? You are my faith.
And faith in you is my faith in humanity, and faith in God."
Ere he could speak of his own faith in her, in mankind, by grace of which
he had been lifted from the abyss, there came a knock at the door. And
even as they answered it a deeper knowledge filtered into their hearts.
Horace Bentley stood before them. And the light from his face, that
shone down upon them, was their benediction.