CONSCIENCE-STRICKEN.
For two or three days after that startling revelation, Mr. Chillingworth
remained almost entirely shut up in his own study. He had truly, as he
said, "many things to think of"--past, present and future. Miss
Blanchard's few and simple words had been enough to reveal to him, with
a lightning flash, the whole situation. The child's name, the likeness
that had always vaguely troubled him, the associations and memories it
suggested, her uncommon delight in music, all pointed too distinctly in
one direction. Yet he had never even heard that he had a child! And he
had been so sure that the "Celia Chillingworth," whose name he had
himself seen among the "lost" in that great steamship disaster which had
caused such a widespread sensation, must have been his unfortunate wife,
that he had had no more doubt on the subject than if he had seen her
laid in her coffin. He had written to his English agent, and had
ascertained through his inquiries, that she had taken passage with her
cousin, in the ill-fated steamer. What further certainty could he need?
Undoubtedly the intelligence of her death had been, in some sense, a
relief to him. Yet another curious result had followed. This tragic
event seemed to have obliterated the impatient disgust which had led to
his harsh decision. For Mr. Chillingworth's character possessed none of
the passionate impulse to _save_--the tender sympathy with the
wrong-doer--the infinite patience and compassion that mark the human
saviour of his fellows, as they do the Divine One, and that are most
frequently found in the feminine nature; though Mr. Alden was a
conspicuous proof that they are by no means exclusively found there. But
death seemed to have passed a softening and idealizing touch over the
harsh lines of the past, and his early romance, by degrees, lost its
painful aspect, and retained only the romantic one. He had not been
conscious of being harsh, and the sorrow he felt was only the natural
ruth that any mind of sensibility must feel at the tragic severance of a
life, the premature fate that had overtaken one so young and so
beautiful. And he had gradually begun to think only of his
"bereavement," not of what had gone before. He had never thought of
remarriage till he had met Nora Blanchard.
But now, in the light of the peculiar Nemesis that had overtaken him, he
could not feel so sure that he had done right! His own moral
perceptions, at least, had grown within the last ten years. Originally,
they had been very limited. He had been brought up, a much indulged only
child, by a widowed mother, who plumed herself on her "evangelical
views" and attached infinite importance to what she called the "saving
of the soul," meaning by that much abused term, however, little more
than a claim to a fair prospect of safety and happiness in another life.
She was especially strong on the "deadliness of doing," the
worthlessness of "good works." Accordingly, Cecil Chillingworth, though
brought up, of course, to avoid open transgression and hate vice, had
never in those early days that do so much to mould a man's mind, taken
in the idea of the gospel as a great moral cure and spiritual power, the
very essence of which must be love to God and man. He bad never been
taught that salvation meant becoming Christ-like, and that to follow
Christ was to care for others, to deny himself for his brother's good.
He had no gross impulses to resist, and, having a natural devotional
tendency, he had drifted on in a refined self-indulgence, of which he
was quite unconscious. Notwithstanding his evident musical talent, his
mother discouraged his becoming a professional musician, from a vague
idea that it was "worldly"--a reason quite sufficient to deter himself.
The clerical profession was the next most congenial, and he went through
his preparation for it in due course, being, however, much more deeply
interested in music than in theology, and never having passed through
any crisis that could wake him up to spiritual reality. Soon after his
taking orders and settling down in a curacy, he had met Celia Travers,
and had fallen passionately in love. His mother had died two or three
years before, and, as he had only himself to please, and as Miss
Travers' employer encouraged a speedy marriage, it had taken place while
the spell of her beauty still blinded him to all other considerations.
After a time came disillusion to a great extent, a sense of lack of
congenial companionship, and then the shock of the last discovery, the
shame, and dread, and final separation, which he justified to himself as
the "cutting off of the right hand;" although the consequences it was to
avert were temporal, not spiritual.
After he came to America, a gradual change and widening of intellectual
and spiritual horizon grew with maturing years. He at least learned to
_see_ Christianity differently. He caught up the current note of
self-sacrifice, self-surrender. He was fascinated with an ideal
spiritual beauty which called forth all his natural eloquence, and made
him a popular preacher. But he had lived so completely in his ideals,
that he had learned to worship _these_, instead of the realities that
inspired them. And his own failure to grasp the practical side of
Christianity reacted on his teaching. The beauty of the Christian
religion, as he saw it, enchanted his idealistic nature, much as the
glory of a distant mountain-top might fascinate the wayfarer, who as yet
had but little conception of the long and toilsome journey that lies
between. He could, therefore, discourse glowingly on the divine ideal of
Christian love, without saying one word which could penetrate the
conscience of the most consistently selfish hearer--who will stand
calmly a vast amount of generalities, provided, only, that you do not
"condescend upon particulars." Moreover, Mr. Chillingworth had lived so
completely in a world of his own, so apart from the ordinary human life
about him, that he himself did not know the needs of his own people, the
points at which their selfishness was strongest, the absolute blank that
lay between what they professed to believe and its natural development
in the practice of daily life,--a gap, that, as we have seen, unhappily
existed in his own life.
In these days of solitary self-communing, conscience, however, began to
assert its claims. The fact that other hands had cared for and tended
the woman whose chief claim was on _him_, and the knowledge, from all he
had seen of Miss Blanchard, in what light the whole affair and his
action in it must appear to her who of late had been so much in his
thoughts and hopes--all tended to open his eyes. In looking over some
old sermons, in order to select a substitute for the one he could not
write, he happened to come upon the one he had been writing on the day
when Roland Graeme first made his acquaintance, and his eye chanced to
fall on the paragraph in which he had been interrupted. Conscience,
newly awakened, drove the shaft home. That "battle" he spoke of--how had
he fought it? He could see, though dimly as yet, that the "battle with
self" had never been fought at all--and, if so, what of the others?
Heartsick and depressed, he felt, for the first time in his life, that
he was a moral failure. The consciousness almost drowned the other
pang--of a cherished hope shattered forever!
What he should do, he could not yet see. The future seemed all dark
before him. To do anything, and to do nothing, seemed to him equally
impossible. He could not even bring himself to ask questions, to put
into tangible shape the nightmare that haunted him. While still in this
miserable state of indecision, a stronger hand solved the question for
him.
On the evening on which he heard the startling tidings, his trim maid,
when she brought in his tea, asked if she might go to spend the night at
her own home, on account of the illness of one of her little brothers.
He assented,--mechanically--and she did not think it necessary to tell
him that it was a case of diphtheria. Two or three days later, he felt
sufficiently indisposed to send for Dr. Blanchard; when he found, to his
surprise, that what he had thought an ordinary though severe sore throat
was an incipient attack of that dreaded malady.
Dr. Blanchard urgently recommended the hospital, as the only place where
he could be properly and safely treated; and he passively assented.
Nothing seemed to matter much to him, just then. A cab was called, and
the move was made without delay. And so, without any prearrangement, the
husband and wife, so long and strangely separated, were once more
brought together beneath the same roof.