THE OUTCAST.
"Quite true, my dear," said Mr. Anerley, gently. "If I had risen at six,
gone and dipped myself in the river, and then taken a walk, I should
have been in a sufficiently self-satisfied and virtuous frame of mind to
have accompanied you to church. But I try to avoid carnal pride.
Indeed, I don't know how Satan managed to develop so much intolerable
vanity, unless he was in the habit of rising at a prodigiously early
hour and taking a cold bath."
"Oh, papa, how dare you say such a thing?" said a soft voice just beside
him; and he turned to the open breakfast-room window to see Dove's
pretty face, under a bright little summer bonnet, looking in at him
reproachfully.
"Come, get away to church, both of you," he said. "There goes the
cracked bell."
So Mrs. Anerley and Dove went alone to church; the former very silent
and sad. The tender little woman could do nothing for this husband of
hers--nothing but pray for him, in an inaudible way, during those
moments of solemn silence which occur between divisions of the service.
A quarter of an hour afterwards Mr. Anerley rose, and also walked along
to the little grey building. All the people by this time were inside;
and as he entered the churchyard the choir was singing. He sate down on
one of the gravestones that were placed among the long, green, rank
grass; and having pulled his straw hat over his forehead, to shelter his
eyes and face from the strong sunlight, he listened, in a dreamy way, to
the sweet singing of the children and the solemn and soft intoning of
the organ.
It was his favourite method of going to church.
"You get all the emotional exaltation of the service," he used to say,
"without having your intellect ruffled. And when the children have done
their singing, instead of listening to a feeble sermon, you sit out in
the clear sunlight and look down on the quiet valley, and the river, and
the trees."
So he sate, and listened and dreamed, while the softened music played
upon his fancies, and produced a moving panorama of pious scenes--of the
old Jew-life, the early Christian wanderings, the mediaeval mysteries,
and superstitions, and heroisms.
"How fortunate religion has been," he thought, "to secure the exclusive
aid of music and architecture! Philosophy and science have had to fight
their way single-handed; but she has come armed with weapons of
emotional coercion to over-awe and convince the intellectually
unimpressionable. In a great cathedral, with slow, sonorous chanting
reverberating through the long stone galleries, and tapers lit in the
mysterious twilight, every man thinks it is religion, not art, which
almost forces him down upon his knees."
Here the music ceased abruptly, and presently there was a confused
murmur of syllables--the clergyman either preaching or reading.
"Sermons are like Scotch bagpipes," said Mr. Anerley to himself, as he
rose and left the churchyard to wander down to the riverside. "They
sound very well when one doesn't hear them."
That very day there was a conspiracy formed against the carnal peace of
mind of this aimlessly speculating philosopher. Mr. Bexley's sermon had
been specially touching to the few ladies who attended the little
church; and the tender, conjugal soul of Mrs. Anerley was grieved beyond
measure as she thought of the outcast whom she had left behind.
Rhetorical threats of damnation passed lightly over her; indeed, you
cannot easily persuade a woman that the lover of her youth has any cause
to fear eternal punishment; but a far less sensitive woman than Mrs.
Anerley might well have been saddened by that incomprehensible barrier
which existed between her and her husband.
"And it is only on this one point," she thought to herself, bitterly.
"Was there ever such a husband as he is--so forbearing, and kind, and
generous? Was there ever such a father as he has shown himself to be,
both to Will and to this poor Dove? And yet they talk of him as if he
were a great sinner; and I know that Mrs. Bexley said she feared he was
among the lost."
Be sure Mrs. Bexley did not gain in Mrs. Anerley's esteem by that
unhappy conjecture. From the moment of its utterance, the two women,
though they outwardly met with cold courtesy, were sworn enemies; and a
feud which owed its origin to the question of the eternal destiny of a
human soul, condescended to exhibit itself in a bitter rivalry as to
which of the two disputants should be able to wear the most stylish
bonnet. Was it the righteousness of her cause, or her husband's longer
purse, which generally gave Mrs. Anerley the victory over the chagrined
and mortified wife of the pastor?
But with Mr. Bexley, Mrs. Anerley continued on the most friendly terms;
and on this day, so anxious was she, poor soul, to see her husband
united to her in the bonds of faith, that she talked to Mr. Bexley for a
few minutes, and begged him to call round in the evening and try the
effect of spiritual counsel on this sheep who had wandered from the
fold.
Mr. Bexley was precisely the man to undertake such a responsibility with
gladness--nay, with eagerness. Many a time had he dined at Mr.
Anerley's house; but, being a gentleman as well as a clergyman, he did
not seek to take advantage of his position, and turn the kindly
after-dinner talk of the household into a professional _seance_. But
when he was appealed to by the wife of the mentally sick man he
responded joyously. He was a very shy and nervously sensitive man--as
you might have seen by his fine, lank, yellow hair, the singular purity
of his complexion, the weakness of his eyes, and a certain spasmodic
affection of the corner of his lips--but he had no fear of ridicule when
he was on his Master's service. Mr. Anerley and he, indeed, were great
friends; and the former, though he used to laugh at the clergyman's
ignorance of guns and rods, and at his almost childish optimism,
respected him as one honest man respects another. The rationalist
looked upon the supernaturalisms of this neighbour of his with much
curiosity, some wonder, and a little admiration. Yet he never could
quite account for these phenomena. He could not understand, for
instance, why one of the most subtle and dispassionate minds of our day
should sadly address an old friend as from the other side of the grave,
simply because the latter was removed from him by a few (to Mr. Anerley)
unimportant and merely technical doctrinal points. Mr. Bexley was a
constant puzzle to him. Indeed, the firmest facts in Mr. Bexley's
theory of life were what a Sensationalist would at once put down as
delusions or mere hypotheses. He was full of the most exalted ideas of
duty, of moral responsibility, of the value of fine shades of opinion
and psychical experience. He worshipped Dr. Newman, whose verses he
regarded as a new light thrown upon the history of the soul. He had a
passionate admiration for the _Spectator_; and shed, at least, a good
deal of political enlightenment upon his parish by insisting on the
farmers around reading each number as it was sent down from London. Mr.
Bexley ought never to have been in the service of a State church. He
had the "prophetic" instinct. Proselytism came as natural to him as the
act of walking. He abhorred and detested leaving things alone, and
letting them right themselves. This Kentish Jonah found a Nineveh
wherever he went; he was never afraid to attack it single-handed; and
most of all, he raised his voice against the materialists and
sensationalists--the destroyers of the beautiful idealisms of the soul.
When one's wife and her favourite clergyman enter into league against
one's convictions, the chances are that the convictions will suffer.
Such combinations are unfair. There are some men, for example, who
would refuse to be attended by a doctor who was on very friendly terms
with an undertaker; they fear the chance of collusion.
It was almost dusk when Mr. Bexley went round to Chesnut Bank, and then
he found Mr. Anerley seated outside, on a carved oaken bench, under some
lime-trees fronting the lawn. He was alone, and on the rude table
before him were some decanters and bottles, one or two fruit-plates, and
a box of cigars.
"Oh, good evening, Mr. Bexley," said the lost one; "will you have a
cigar?"
"Thank you."
"Sit down. That's claret next you, and there's still some sparkling
Burgundy in the bottle. The children are very fond of it--I suppose
because it looks like currant-jelly in hysterics."
Cigars and claret don't seem quite the avenue by which to approach an
inquiry into the condition of a man's soul; but Mr. Bexley was too
excited to heed what he did. He had the proselytising ecstasy upon him.
He was like one of the old crusaders about to ride up to the gate of a
godless Saracen city and demand its surrender. Did not Greatheart, when
about to engage with the giant, refresh himself with the wine which
Christiana carried?
"You were not at church this morning," he said, carelessly.
But his assumed carelessness was too evident; his _forte_ was not
diplomacy.
"Well, no," said Mr. Anerley, quietly: he did not take the trouble to
reflect on the object of the question, for he had been considering
graver matters when Mr. Bexley arrived.
"You have not been to church for a long time," continued the
yellow-haired, soft-voiced preacher, insidiously but nervously.
"Indeed, you don't seem to think church-going of any importance."
Mr. Anerley made no answer. Then the other, driven out of the
diplomatic method of approach into his natural manner, immediately
said--
"Mr. Anerley, do you never think that it is a man's duty to think about
things which are not of this world? Do you expect always to be
satisfied with worldly good? You and I have had long conversations
together; and I have found you so reasonable, so unprejudiced, so free
to conviction, that I am amazed you do not recognise the necessity of
thinking of something beyond this life that we lead just now."
"Cannot people think of these things outside a church, Mr. Bexley?" he
said; but his face was quite grave, if not sad. "As you came into the
garden just now, I was perplexing myself with that very question. I was
sitting wondering if I should die and become nothing without having
discovered how it was I came to live. It seems so singular that one
should pass out of consciousness into the inorganic earth without having
discovered what the earth is, and without having the least notion of how
he himself came to be. Geology only presents you with a notion of
tremendous time and change--it gives no clue to the beginning. And if
there was no beginning, how is it that my brief consciousness only
flickers up for a short time, and dies down again into darkness and
night? How did there come to be a beginning to my consciousness?"
Mr. Bexley was astounded and grieved. He was accustomed, even in that
little parish, to find people who had painful doubts about the Mosaic
record of creation, who seemed perplexed about the sun, moon, and stars
having all been created in order to light up the earth, and who accepted
with joy and gladness any possible theory of reconciliation which gave
them a more rational view of the world and their belief in the Bible at
the same time. But he had not met a man who had passed to one side, as
quite unworthy of attention, all theologic solutions of the difficulty
whatever.
The very novelty of the obstacle, however, only excited his evangelical
fervour. He avowed his object in having visited Chesnut Bank that
evening (without, however, revealing at whose suggestion he had
undertaken the task), and boldly endeavoured to grapple with the demon
of unbelief which had possession of his friend's mind. He insisted on
the fallibility of human reason. He pointed out that, without religion,
morality was unable to make its way among the uneducated. He
demonstrated that every age had its own proper religion, and that an age
without a religion was on the brink of suicide. All these things, and
many more, he urged with much eloquence and undoubted sincerity, and at
the end he was surprised to learn that his auditor quite coincided with
everything he had uttered.
"I know," he said, "that the present attitude of the majority of
intellectual men in this country is a dangerous and impossible one. Men
cannot live in an atmosphere of criticism. What we want just now is a
new gospel fitted for the times; we want a crusade of some sort--a
powerful belief that will develop all sorts of sympathetic emotions and
idealisms, instead of leaving one a prey to cold analysis. But we
haven't got it; and those who have gone beyond this tidal flow of the
last great religious flood, find themselves stranded on dry land,
without a blade of grass or a drop of water in sight. Give me a gospel,
and I'll take it with pleasure. Whether it be a new series of religious
symbolisms, or a splendid system of ethics, demanding action, or even a
belief in humanity as a supreme and beautiful power--anything that can
convince me and compel me to admire, I will take. But I don't want to
deal in old symbols, and old beliefs, and old theories, that fit me no
more than the monkey-jacket in which my mother sent me to school."
"You say you have got beyond us, and yet you acknowledge that you have
been disappointed," urged Mr. Bexley. "Why not return to the Church, if
only for personal satisfaction? You cannot be happy in your present
position. You must be tormented by the most fearful doubts and
anticipations. Are you not afflicted by moments of utter darkness, in
which you long for the kindly hand of some spiritual authority to assist
you and comfort you? In such perilous moments I believe I should go mad
if I were to assure myself, for a single passing instant, that I was
alone and unaided--that I had been teaching lies and superstitions all
my life--that the world was a big machine, and we the accidental dust
thrown out by its great chemic motions--that all the aspirations of our
soul, and the voice of conscience, and the standards of right at which
we aim, were all delusions and mockeries. I would not have life on such
terms. I should know that I only existed through the brute ignorance
and superstition of my stronger-made fellow-men not permitting them to
kill me and all such as I, and then to seize our means of living. I
should look forward to the time when these superstitions should be
cleared away, and the world become a general scramble, handed over to
those who had the longest claws and the fiercest teeth."
"Then," said Mr. Anerley, with a smile, "if the first glimpse of change
is likely to derange your intellect in that fashion, and force you to so
many absurd conclusions, you are better where you are. And about those
moments of spiritual darkness, and torture, and longing of which you
speak--I do not understand what they are. I am never visited by them.
I thank God I have a tolerable digestion."
"Digestion!" repeated the other, bitterly. "It all comes to that. Eat,
drink, and be merry, for to-morrow ye die; and the only resurrection you
hope for is to breathe the sunlight again as a buttercup or a dandelion.
What is it, may I ask, entices you to remain in the position you
occupy--that of being an honest man, credited with constant generous
actions, kindly to your inferiors, and what not? Why should you be
moral at all? Why should you not, if it pleased you, go into any depths
of dissipation and debauchery? There is nothing to restrain you."
"Pardon me, there is. If it were worth the trouble, I dare say I could
convince you that my code of morality is not only more comprehensive and
more strict than yours, but that it rests on more explicable and more
permanent foundations. But it is not worth the trouble to convince a
single man at a time in which we are waiting for some great and general
renovation."
So they went on, in the faint darkness, under the black branches and the
grey sky. Mr. Bexley was not going to relinquish hope at the very
outset; and he proceeded from point to point, adducing all the
considerations which made it very much more advantageous to be orthodox
than to be not orthodox. He might have persuaded a man who was hovering
between the two states to go over to the bosom of the Church; but his
entreaties, and representations, and arguments had little effect upon a
man who was separated from him by the great chasm of a dawning era.
"Perhaps I may lament my present negative, critical attitude," said Mr.
Anerley, quite frankly, "but I prefer it to yours. The successive tides
of faith which pass over the world leave little circling eddies, and I
have been caught in one of these; I cannot tell in what direction the
next great movement will be--I only know I shall not see it."
The end of it was, just then, that Mr. Anerley begged of his neighbour
and counsellor to go in-doors and have some supper with them. Mr.
Bexley, a little disheartened, but still confident in his spiritual
power to overcome, some time or other, the strong resistance of the
unconverted man's heart, agreed; and so they both went into the house
and entered the dining-room, where the supper-table had just been
prepared. Mrs. Anerley started up, with her face red as fire, when she
saw her husband and the clergyman enter together; and this obvious
departure from her usual self-possessed and easy manner at once struck
Mr. Anerley as being very peculiar. Nay, the poor little woman, feeling
herself very guilty--harbouring a secret notion that she had tried to
entrap her generous and open-minded husband--was more than ordinarily
attentive and courteous to him. She was far more civil, and obliging,
and formal towards him than towards her stranger-guest; and she never by
any chance lifted her eyes to his.
Mr. Anerley saw it all, understood it all, and thought of it with an
inward, pitying smile that was scarcely visible upon his lips. "There
is a creature," he said to himself, "who might convert any man to
anything, if she had the least logical chance on her side."
He saw also, or perhaps feared, that this embarrassment and restraint
would only make her uncomfortable for the evening; and so, in his kindly
way, he called Dove to him. The young girl went over to him, and he put
his arm round her waist, and said:
"Do you see that small woman over there, who looks so guilty? She is
guilty; and that gentleman there, whom you have been accustomed to
regard as the very pattern of all the virtues in the parish, is her
accomplice."
Mrs. Anerley started again, and glanced in a nervous way towards Mr.
Bexley. Even her desire for her husband's salvation was lost in the
inward vow that never, never again would she seek for aid out of the
domestic circle.
"Their secret having been found out, Dove, it remains to award them
their punishment. In my royal clemency, however, I leave the sentence
in your hands."
"What have they been doing, papa?"
"Ask them. Call upon the female prisoner to stand forward and say why
sentence should not be pronounced against her."
"It is not a subject for merriment, Hubert," said his wife, blushing
hotly, "and if I did ask Mr. Bexley to speak to you as a friend----"
"You hear, Dove, she confesses to the conspiracy, and also criminates
her fellow-prisoner. If I had a black cowl, and some sherry at 12s. a
dozen, I should sentence them to drink half a bottle each, having first
bade them a final and affectionate farewell."
"As it is, papa," said Dove, maliciously, "you had better give them some
of that white Italian wine you are so fond of, and if they survive----"
"Mamma, order this girl to bed."
"That is what poor papa says whenever any one beats him in an argument,
or says his wine isn't good," said Dove to Mr. Bexley.
But she went, nevertheless. For it was nearly ten o'clock, and although
there was only a faint sickle of the moon now visible, that was still
big enough to bear the thin thread of thought which so subtly connected
her and her lover. She took out of her bosom a letter which she had
received that morning, and she kissed it and held it in her hand, and
said, looking up to the pale starlight and the clear white crescent--
"Moon, moon, will you tell him that I've got his letter, and that I've
read it twenty times--a hundred times over, and yet he doesn't say a
word about coming home? Will you ask him when he is coming back to
me--and tell him to come quick, quick, for the days are getting wearier
and wearier? Couldn't you come down for a little minute, and whisper to
me, and tell me what he has been doing all this time, and what he is
looking like, and what he is saying to you just now? Couldn't you give
me a little glimpse of him, instead of keeping him to yourself, and
staring down as if you didn't see anything at all? And you might as
well tell him that I shall begin and hate Miss Brunel if he doesn't come
back soon--and I'll play the 'Coulin' all day to myself when I'm alone,
and be as miserable and wretched as ever I please. But here is a kiss
for him anyway: and you wouldn't be so cruel as not to give him that!"
And Dove, having completed her orisons, went downstairs, with a smile on
her sweet face--perhaps not thinking that the nightly staring at the
moon, as the reader may perhaps suspect, had somewhat affected her
brain. And she found Mr. Bexley more brilliant and eloquent than ever
in his exposition of certain spiritual experiences; and she was in such
a mood of half-hysteric delight and happiness that she could have put
her arm round Mr. Anerley's neck, and begged him, for her sake, to be a
little, just a little, more orthodox. As it was, he had promised to go
inside the church next Sunday; and his wife was very happy.