LIONEL.
The Rector became a very frequent visitor during the few following weeks
at Bellevue. Louis had gone to see him, as he desired, and Mr Rivers
anxiously endeavoured to persuade the youth to suffer himself to be
“assisted.” Louis as strenuously resisted every proposal of the kind; he
was toiling on in pursuit of himself, through his memoir of Lord
Winterbourne--still eager, and full of expectation--still proud, and
refusing to be indebted to any one. The Rector argued with him like an
elder brother. “Let us grant that you are successful,” said Mr Rivers;
“let us suppose that you make an unquestionable discovery, what position
are you in to pursue it? Your sister, even--recollect your sister--you
cannot provide for her.”
His sister was Louis’s grand difficulty; he bit his lip, and the fiery
glow of shame came to his face. “I cannot provide for her, it is true.
I am bitterly ashamed of it; but, at least, she is among friends.”
“You do me small credit,” said the Rector; “but I will not ask, on any
terms, for a friendship which is refused to me. You are not even in the
way of advancement; and to lose your time after this fashion is madness.
Let me see you articled to these people whom you are with now; that is,
at least, a chance, though not a great one. If I can accomplish it, will
you consent to this?”
Louis paused a little, grateful in his heart, though his tongue was slow
to utter his sentiments. “You are trying to do me a great service,” said
the young man; “you think me a churl, and ungrateful, but you endeavour
to benefit me against my will--is it not true? I am just in such a
position that no miracle in the world would seem wonderful to me; it is
possible, in the chances of the future, that we two may be set up
against each other. I cannot accept this service from you--from you, or
from any other. I must wait.”
The Rector turned away almost with impatience. “Do you suppose you can
spend your life in this fashion--your life?” he exclaimed, with some
heat.
“My life!” said Louis. He was a little startled with this conclusion. “I
thank you,” he added abruptly, “for your help, for your advice, for your
reproof--I thank you heartily, but I have no more to say.”
That was how the conversation ended. Lionel, grieved for the folly of
the boy, smiling to himself at Louis’s strange delusion that he, who was
the very beau-ideal of the race of Rivers, belonged to another house,
went to his rest, with a mind disturbed, full of difficulties, and of
ambition, working out one solemn problem, and touched with tender
dreams; yet always remembering, with a pleasure which he could not
restrain, the great change in his position, and that he was now, not
merely the Rector, but the heir of Winterbourne. Louis, on his part,
went home to his dark little lodging, with the swell and tumult of
excitement in his mind, and could not sleep. He seemed to be dizzied
with the rushing shadows of a crowd of coming events. He was not well;
his abstinence, his studiousness, his change of place and life, had
weakened his young frame; these rushing wings seemed to tingle in his
ears, and his temples throbbed as if they kept time. He rose in the
middle of the night, in the deep wintry silence and moonlight, to open
his window, and feel the cold air upon his brow. There he saw the
moonbeams falling softly, not on any imposing scene, but on the humble
roof underneath whose shelter sweet voices and young hearts, devout and
guileless, prayed for him every night; the thought calmed him into
sudden humility and quietness; and, in his poverty, and hope, and youth,
he returned to his humble bed, and slept. Lionel was waking too; but he
did not know of any one who prayed for _him_ in all this cold-hearted
world.
But the Rector became a very frequent visitor in Bellevue. He had read
the little book--read it with a kind of startled consciousness, the
first time, that it looked like a true story, and seemed somehow
familiar to himself. But by-and-by he began to keep it by him, and, not
for the sake of the story, to take it up idly when he was doing nothing
else, and refer to it as a kind of companion. It was not, in any degree
whatever, an intellectual display; he by no means felt himself pitted
against the author of it, or entering into any kind of rivalship with
her. The stream sparkled and flashed to the sunshine as it ran; but it
flowed with a sweet spontaneous readiness, and bore no trace of
artificial force and effort. It wanted a great many of the qualities
which critics praise. There was no great visible strain of power, no
forcible evidence of difficulties overcome. The reader knew very well
that _he_ could not have done this, nor anything like it, yet his
intellectual pride was not roused. It was genius solacing itself with
its own romaunt, singing by the way; it was not talent getting up an
exhibition for the astonishment, or the enlightenment, or the
instruction of others. Agnes defeated her own purpose by the very means
she had taken to procure it. The Rector forgot all about the story,
thinking of the writer of it; he became indifferent to what she had to
tell, but dwelt and lingered--not like a critic--like something very
different--upon the cadence of her voice.
To tell the truth, between his visits to Bellevue, and his musings
thereafter--his study of this little fable of Agnes’s, and his vague
mental excursions into the future, Lionel Rivers, had he yielded to the
fascination, would have found very near enough to do. But he was manful
enough to resist this trance of fairyland. He was beginning to be “in
love;” nobody could dispute it; it was visible enough to wake the most
entire sympathy in the breasts of Marian and Rachel, and to make for the
mother of the family wakeful nights, and a most uneasy pillow; but he
was far from being at ease or in peace. His friends in London were of a
class as different as possible from these humble people who were rapidly
growing nearer than friends. They were all men of great intelligence, of
great powers, scholars, philosophers, authorities--men who belonged, and
professed to belong, to the ruling class of intellect, prophets and
apostles of a new generation. They were not much given to believing
anything, though some among them had a weakness for mesmerism or
spiritual manifestations. They investigated all beliefs and faculties of
believing, and received all marvellous stories, from the Catholic
legends of the saints to the miracles of the New Testament, on one
general ground of indulgence, charitable and tender, as mythical stories
which meant something in their day. Most of them wrote an admirable
style--most of them occasionally said very profound things which nobody
could understand; all of them were scholars and gentlemen, as blameless
in their lives as they were superior in their powers; and all of them
lived upon a kind of intellectual platform, philosophical demigods,
sufficient for themselves, and looking down with a good deal of
curiosity, a little contempt, and a little pity, upon the crowds who
thronged below of common men.
These were the people to whom Lionel Rivers, in the first flush of his
emancipation, had hastened from his high-churchism, and his country
pulpit--some of them had been his companions at College--some had
inspired him by their books, or pleased him by their eloquence. They
were a brotherhood of men of great cultivation--his equals, and
sometimes his superiors. He had yearned for their society when he was
quite removed from it; but he was of a perverse and unconforming mind.
What did he do now?
He took the strange fancy suddenly, and telling no man, of wandering
through those frightful regions of crime and darkness, which we hide
behind our great London streets. He went about through the miserable
thoroughfares, looking at the miserable creatures there. What was the
benefit to them of these polluted lives of theirs? They had their
enjoyments, people said--their enjoyments! Their sorrows, like the
sorrows of all humanity, were worthy human tears, consolation, and
sympathy,--their hardships and endurances were things to move the
universal heart; but their enjoyments--Heaven save us!--the pleasures of
St Giles’s, the delights and amusements of those squalid groups at the
street corners! If they were to have nothing more than that, what a
frightful fate was theirs!
And there came upon the spectator, as he went among them in silence, a
sudden eagerness to try that talisman which Agnes Atheling had bidden
him use. It was vain to try philosophy there, where no one knew what it
meant--vain to offer the rites of the Church to those who were fatally
beyond its pale. Was it possible, after all, that the one word in the
world, which could stir something human--something of heaven--in these
degraded breasts, was that one sole unrivalled _Name_?
He could not withdraw himself from the wretched scene before him. He
went on from street to street with something of the consciousness of a
man who carries a hidden remedy through a plague-stricken city, but
hides his knowledge in his own mind, and does not apply it. A strange
sense of guilt--a strange oppression by reason of this grand secret--an
overpowering passionate impulse to try the solemn experiment, and
withal a fascinated watchfulness which kept him silent--possessed the
mind of the young man.
He walked about the streets like a man doing penance; then he began to
notice other passengers not so idle as himself. There were people here
who were trying to break into the mass of misery, and make a footing for
purity and light among it. They were not like his people;--sometimes
they were poor city missionaries, men of very bad taste, not perfect in
their grammar, and with no great amount of discretion. Even the people
of higher class were very limited people often to the perception of Mr
Rivers; but they were at work, while the demigods slept upon their
platform. It would be very hard to make philosophers of the wretched
population here. Philosophy did not break its heart over the
impossibility, but calmly left the untasteful city missionaries, the
clergymen, High Church and Low Church, who happened to be in earnest,
and some few dissenting ministers of the neighbourhood, labouring upon a
forlorn hope to make them _men_.
All this moved in the young man’s heart as he pursued his way among
these squalid streets. Every one of these little stirrings in this
frightful pool of stagnant life was made in the name of Him whom Lionel
Rivers once named with cold irreverence, and whom Agnes Atheling, with
a tender awe and appropriation, called “Our Lord.” This was the problem
he was busy with while he remained in London. It was not one much
discussed, either in libraries or drawing-rooms, among his friends; he
discussed it by himself as he wandered through St
Giles’s--silent--watching--with the great Name which he himself did not
know, but began to cling to as a talisman, burning at his heart.