GEOFFREY LECTURES
Meanwhile Beatrice was walking homewards with an uneasy mind. The
trouble was upon her. She had, it is true, succeeded in postponing it a
little, but she knew very well that it was only a postponement. Owen
Davies was not a man to be easily shaken off. She almost wished now
that she had crushed the idea once and for all. But then he would have
gone to her father, and there must have been a scene, and she was weak
enough to shrink from that, especially while Mr. Bingham was in the
house. She could well imagine the dismay, not to say the fury, of her
money-loving old father if he were to hear that she had
refused—actually refused—Owen Davies of Bryngelly Castle, and all his
wealth.
Then there was Elizabeth to be reckoned with. Elizabeth would assuredly
make her life a burden to her. Beatrice little guessed that nothing
would suit her sister’s book better. Oh, if only she could shake the
dust of Bryngelly off her feet! But that, too, was impossible. She was
quite without money. She might, it was true, succeed in getting another
place as mistress to a school in some distant part of England, were it
not for an insurmountable obstacle. Here she received a salary of
seventy-five pounds a year; of this she kept fifteen pounds, out of
which slender sum she contrived to dress herself; the rest she gave to
her father. Now, as she well knew, he could not keep his head above
water without this assistance, which, small as it was, made all the
difference to their household between poverty and actual want. If she
went away, supposing even that she found an equally well-paid post, she
would require every farthing of the money to support herself, there
would be nothing left to send home. It was a pitiable position; here
was she, who had just refused a man worth thousands a year, quite
unable to get out of the way of his importunity for the want of
seventy-five pounds, paid quarterly. Well, the only thing to do was to
face it out and take her chance. On one point she was, however, quite
clear; she would _not_ marry Owen Davies. She might be a fool for her
pains, but she would not do it. She respected herself too much to marry
a man she did not love; a man whom she positively disliked. “No,
never!” she exclaimed aloud, stamping her foot upon the shingle.
“Never what?” said a voice, within two yards of her.
She started violently, and looked round. There, his back resting
against a rock, a pipe in his mouth, an open letter on his knee, and
his hat drawn down almost over his eyes, sat Geoffrey. He had left
Effie to go home with Mr. Granger, and climbing down a sloping place in
the cliff, had strolled along the beach. The letter on his knee was one
from his wife. It was short, and there was nothing particular in it.
Effie’s name was not even mentioned. It was to see if he had not
overlooked it that he was reading the note through again. No, it merely
related to Lady Honoria’s safe arrival, gave a list of the people
staying at the Hall—a fast lot, Geoffrey noticed, a certain Mr.
Dunstan, whom he particularly disliked, among them—and the number of
brace of partridges which had been killed on the previous day. Then
came an assurance that Honoria was enjoying herself immensely, and that
the new French cook was “simply perfect;” the letter ending “with
love.”
“Never what, Miss Granger?” he said again, as he lazily folded up the
sheet.
“Never mind, of course,” she answered, recovering herself. “How you
startled me, Mr. Bingham! I had no idea there was anybody on the
beach.”
“It is quite free, is it not?” he answered, getting up. “I thought you
were going to trample me into the pebbles. It’s almost alarming when
one is thinking about a Sunday nap to see a young lady striding along,
then suddenly stop, stamp her foot, and say, ‘No, never!’ Luckily I
knew that you were about or I should really have been frightened.”
“How did you know that I was about?” Beatrice asked a little defiantly.
It was no business of his to observe her movements.
“In two ways. Look!” he said, pointing to a patch of white sand. “That,
I think, is your footprint.”
“Well, what of it?” said Beatrice, with a little laugh.
“Nothing in particular, except that it is your footprint,” he answered.
“Then I happened to meet old Edward, who was loafing along, and he
informed me that you and Mr. Davies had gone up the beach; there is his
footprint—Mr. Davies’s, I mean—but you don’t seem to have been very
sociable, because here is yours right in the middle of it. Therefore
you must have been walking in Indian file, and a little way back in
parallel lines, with quite thirty yards between you.”
“Why do you take the trouble to observe things so closely?” she asked
in a half amused and half angry tone.
“I don’t know—a habit of the legal mind, I suppose. One might make
quite a romance out of those footprints on the sand, and the little
subsequent events. But you have not heard all my thrilling tale. Old
Edward also informed me that he saw your sister, Miss Elizabeth, going
along the cliff almost level with you, from which he concluded that you
had argued as to the shortest way to the Red Rocks and were putting the
matter to the proof.”
“Elizabeth,” said Beatrice, turning a shade paler; “what can she have
been doing, I wonder.”
“Taking exercise, probably, like yourself. Well, I seat myself with my
pipe in the shadow of that rock, when suddenly I see Mr. Davies coming
along towards Bryngelly as though he were walking for a wager, his hat
fixed upon the back of his head. Literally he walked over my legs and
never saw me. Then you follow and ejaculate, ‘No, never!’—and that is
the end of my story. Have I your permission to walk with you, or shall
I interfere with the development of the plot?”
“There is no plot, and as you said just now the beach is free,”
Beatrice answered petulantly.
They walked on a few yards and then he spoke in another tone—the
meaning of the assignation he had overheard in the churchyard grew
clear to him now.
“I believe that I have to congratulate you, Miss Granger,” he said,
“and I do so very heartily. It is not everybody who is so fortunate as
to——”
Beatrice stopped, and half turning faced him.
“What _do_ you mean, Mr. Bingham?” she said. “I do not understand your
dark sayings.”
“Mean! oh, nothing particular, except that I wished to congratulate you
on your engagement.”
“My engagement! what engagement?”
“It seems that there is some mistake,” he said, and struggle as he
might to suppress it his tone was one of relief. “I understood that you
had become engaged to be married to Mr. Owen Davies. If I am wrong I am
sure I apologise.”
“You are quite wrong, Mr. Bingham; I don’t know who put such a notion
into your head, but there is no truth in it.”
“Then allow me to congratulate you on there being no truth in it. You
see that is the beauty of nine affairs matrimonial out of ten—there are
two or more sides of them. If they come off the amiable and
disinterested observer can look at the bright side—as in this case,
lots of money, romantic castle by the sea, gentleman of unexceptional
antecedents, &c., &c., &c. If, on the other hand, they don’t, cause can
still be found for thankfulness—lady might do better after all, castle
by the sea rather draughty and cold in spring, gentlemen most estimable
but perhaps a little dull, and so on, you see.”
There was a note of mockery about his talk which irritated Beatrice
exceedingly. It was not like Mr. Bingham to speak so. It was not even
the way that a gentleman out of his teens should speak to a lady on
such a subject. He knew this as well as she did and was secretly
ashamed of himself. But the truth must out: though Geoffrey did not
admit it even to himself he was bitterly and profoundly jealous, and
jealous people have no manners. Beatrice could not, however, be
expected to know this, and naturally grew angry.
“I do not quite understand what you are talking about, Mr. Bingham,”
she said, putting on her most dignified air, and Beatrice could look
rather alarming. “You have picked up a piece of unfounded gossip and
now you take advantage of it to laugh at me, and to say rude things of
Mr. Davies. It is not kind.”
“Oh, no; it was the footsteps, Miss Granger, _and_ the gossip, _and_
the appointment you made in the churchyard, that I unwillingly
overheard, not the gossip alone which led me into my mistake. Of course
I have now to apologise.”
Again Beatrice stamped her foot. She saw that he was still mocking her,
and felt that he did not believe her.
“There,” he went on, stung into unkindness by his biting but
unacknowledged jealousy, for she was right—on reflection he did not
quite believe what she said as to her not being engaged. “How
unfortunate I am—I have said something to make you angry again. Why did
you not walk with Mr. Davies? I should then have remained guiltless of
offence, and you would have had a more agreeable companion. You want to
quarrel with me; what shall we quarrel about? There are many things on
which we are diametrically opposed; let us start one.”
It was too much, for though his words were nothing the tone in which he
spoke gave them a sting. Beatrice, already disturbed in mind by the
scene through which she had passed, her breast already throbbing with a
vague trouble of which she did not know the meaning, for once in her
life lost control of herself and grew hysterical. Her grey eyes filled
with tears, the corners of her sweet mouth dropped, and she looked very
much as though she were going to burst out weeping.
“It is most unkind of you,” she said, with a half sob. “If you knew how
much I have to put up with, you would not speak to me like that. I know
that you do not believe me; very well, I will tell you the truth. Yes,
though I have no business to do it, and you have no right—none at
all—to make me do it, I will tell you the truth, because I cannot bear
that you should not believe me. Mr. Davies did want me to marry him and
I refused him. I put him off for a while; I did this because I knew
that if I did not he would go to my father. It was cowardly, but my
father would make my life wretched——” and again she gave a half-choked
sob.
Much has been said and written about the effect produced upon men by
the sight of a lady in, or on the border line of tears, and there is no
doubt that this effect is considerable. Man being in his right mind is
deeply moved by such a spectacle, also he is frightened because he
dreads a scene. Now most people would rather walk ten miles in their
dress shoes than have to deal with a young lady in hysterics, however
modified. Putting the peculiar circumstances of the case aside,
Geoffrey was no exception to this rule. It was all very well to cross
spears with Beatrice, who had quite an equal wit, and was very capable
of retaliation, but to see her surrender at discretion was altogether
another thing. Indeed he felt much ashamed of himself.
“Please don’t—don’t—be put out,” he said. He did not like to use the
word “cry.” “I was only laughing at you, but I ought not to have spoken
as I did. I did not wish to force your confidence, indeed I did not. I
never thought of such a thing. I am so sorry.”
His remorse was evidently genuine, and Beatrice felt somewhat appeased.
Perhaps it did not altogether grieve her to learn that she could make
him feel sorry.
“You did not force my confidence,” she said defiantly, quite forgetting
that a moment before she had reproached him for making her speak. “I
told you because I did not choose that you should think I was not
speaking the truth—and now let us change the subject.” She imposed no
reserve on him as to what she had revealed; she knew that there was no
necessity to do so. The secret would be between them—another dangerous
link.
Beatrice recovered her composure and they walked slowly on.
“Tell me, Mr. Bingham,” she said presently, “how can a woman earn her
living—I mean a girl like myself without any special qualifications?
Some of them get on.”
“Well,” he answered, “that depends upon the girl. What sort of a living
do you mean? You are earning a living now, of a kind.”
“Yes, but sometimes, if only I could manage it, I think that I should
like to get away from here, and take another line, something bigger. I
do not suppose that I ever shall, but I like to think of it sometimes.”
“I only know of two things which a woman can turn to,” he said, “the
stage and literature. Of course,” he added hastily, “the first is out
of the question in your case.”
“And so is the other, I am afraid,” she answered shaking her head,
“that is if by literature you mean imaginative writing, and I suppose
that is the only way to get into notice. As I told you I lost my
imagination—well, to be frank, when I lost my faith. At one time I used
to have plenty, as I used to have plenty of faith, but the one went
with the other, I do not understand why.”
“Don’t you? I think I do. A mind without religious sentiment is like a
star without atmosphere, brighter than other stars but not so soft to
see. Religion, poetry, music, imagination, and even some of the more
exalted forms of passion, flourish in the same soil, and are, I
sometimes think, different manifestations of the same thing. Do you
know it is ridiculous to hear you talk of having lost your faith,
because I don’t believe it. At the worst it has gone to sleep, and will
wake up again one day. Possibly you may not accept some particular form
of faith, but I tell you frankly that to reject all religion simply
because you cannot understand it, is nothing but a form of atrocious
spiritual vanity. Your mind is too big for you, Miss Granger: it has
run away with you, but you know it is tied by a string—it cannot go
far. And now perhaps you will be angry again.”
“No, indeed, why should I be angry? I daresay that you are quite right,
and I only hope that I may be able to believe again. I will tell you
how I lost belief. I had a little brother whom I loved more than
anything else in the world, indeed after my mother died he was the only
thing I really had to love, for I think that my father cares more for
Elizabeth than he does for me, she is so much the better at business
matters, and Elizabeth and I never quite got on. I daresay that the
fault is mine, but the fact remains—we are sisters but we are not
intimate. Well, my brother fell ill of a fever, and for a long time he
lay between life and death, and I prayed for him as I never prayed for
anybody or anything before—yes, I prayed that I might die instead of
him. Then he passed through the crisis and got better, and I thanked
God, thinking that my prayers had been answered; oh, how happy I was
for those ten days! And then this happened:—My brother got a chill, a
relapse followed, and in three days he was dead. The last words that he
spoke to me were, ‘Oh, don’t let me die, Bee!’—he used to call me
Bee—‘Please don’t let me die, dear Bee!’ But he died, died in my arms,
and when it was over I rose from his side feeling as though my heart
was dead also. I prayed no more after that. It seemed to me as though
my prayers had been mocked at, as though he had been given back to me
for a little while in order that the blow might be more crushing when
it fell.”
“Don’t you think that you were a little foolish in taking such a view?”
said Geoffrey. “Have you not been amused, sometimes, to read about the
early Christians?—how the lead would not boil the martyr, or the lion
would not eat him, or the rain from a blue sky put out the fire, and
how the pagan king at once was converted and accepted a great many
difficult doctrines without further delay. The Athanasian Creed was not
necessarily true because the fire would not light or the sword would
not cut, nor, excuse me, were all your old beliefs wrong because your
prayer was unanswered. It is an ancient story, that we cannot tell
whether the answering of our petitions will be good or ill for us. Of
course I do not know anything about such things, but it seems to me
rash to suppose that Providence is going to alter the working of its
eternal laws merely to suit the passing wishes of individuals—wishes,
too, that in many cases would bring unforeseen sorrows if fulfilled.
Besides I daresay that the poor child is happier dead than he would
have been had he lived. It is not an altogether pleasant world for most
of us.”
“Yes, Mr. Bingham, I know, and I daresay that I should have got over
the shock in time, only after that I began to read. I read the
histories of the religions and compared them, and I read the works of
those writers who have risen up to attack them. I found, or I thought
that I found, the same springs of superstition in them
all—superstitions arising from elementary natural causes, and handed on
with variations from race to race, and time to time. In some I found
the same story, only with a slightly altered face, and I learned,
moreover, that each faith denied the other, and claimed truth for
itself alone.
“After that, too, I went to the college and there I fell in with a
lady, one of the mistresses, who was the cleverest woman that I ever
knew, and in her way a good woman, but one who believed that religion
was the curse of the world, and who spent all her spare time in
attacking it in some form or other. Poor thing, she is dead now. And
so, you see, what between these causes and the continual spectacle of
human misery which to my mind negatives the idea of a merciful and
watching Power, at last it came to pass that the only altar left in my
temple is an altar to the ‘Unknown God.’”
Geoffrey, like most men who have had to think on these matters, did not
care to talk about them much, especially to women. For one thing, he
was conscious of a tendency to speech less reverent than his thought.
But he had not entered Beatrice’s church of Darkness, indeed he had
turned his back on it for ever, though, like most people, he had at
different periods of his past life tarried an hour in its porch. So he
ventured on an objection.
“I am no theologian,” he said, “and I am not fond of discussion on such
matters. But there are just one or two things I should like to say. It
is no argument, to my mind at least, to point to the existence of evil
and unhappiness among men as a proof of the absence of a superior
Mercy; for what are men that such things should not be with them? Man,
too, must own some master. If he has doubts let him look up at the
marshalling of the starry heaven, and they will vanish.”
“No,” said Beatrice, “I fear not. Kant said so, but before that Molière
had put the argument in the mouth of a fool. The starry heavens no more
prove anything than does the running of the raindrops down the
window-pane. It is not a question of size and quantity.”
“I might accept the illustration,” answered Geoffrey; “one example of
law is as good as another for my purpose. I see in it all the working
of a living Will, but of course that is only my way of looking at it,
not yours.”
“No; I am afraid,” said Beatrice, “all this reasoning drawn from
material things does not touch me. That is how the Pagans made _their_
religions, and it is how Paley strives to prove his. They argued from
the Out to the In, from the material to the spiritual. It cannot be; if
Christianity is true it must stand upon spiritual feet and speak with a
spiritual voice, to be heard, not in the thunderstorm, but only in the
hearts of men. The existence of Creative Force does not demonstrate the
existence of a Redeemer; if anything, it tends to negative it, for the
power that creates is also the power which destroys. What does touch
me, however, is the thought of the multitude of the Dead. _That_ is
what we care for, not for an Eternal Force, ever creating and
destroying. Think of them all—all the souls of unheard-of races, almost
animal, who passed away so long ago. Can ours endure more than theirs,
and do you think that the spirit of an Ethiopian who died in the time
of Moses is anywhere now?”
“There was room for them all on earth,” answered Geoffrey. “The
universe is wide. It does not dismay me. There are mysteries in our
nature, the nature we think we know—shall there be none in that which
we know not? Worlds die, to live again when, after millions of ages,
the conditions become once more favourable to life, and why should not
a man? We are creatures of the world, we reflect its every light and
shadow, we rejoice in its rejoicing, its every feature has a tiny
parallel in us. Why should not our fate be as its fate, and its fate is
so far as we know eternal. It may change from gas to chaos, from chaos
to active life, from active life to seeming death. Then it may once
more pass into its elements, and from those elements back again to
concrete being, and so on for ever, always changing, but always the
same. So much for nature’s allegory. It is not a perfect analogy, for
Man is a thing apart from all things else; it may be only a hint or a
type, but it is something.
“Now to come to the question of our religion. I confess I draw quite a
different conclusion from your facts. You say that you trace the same
superstitions in all religions, and that the same spiritual myths are
in some shape present in almost all. Well, does not this suggest that
the same great _truth_ underlies them all, taking from time to time the
shape which is best suited to the spiritual development of those
professing each. Every great new religion is better than the last. You
cannot compare Osirianism with Buddhism, or Buddhism with Christianity,
or Mahomedanism with the Arabian idol worship. Take the old
illustration—take a cut crystal and hold it in the sun, and you will
see many different coloured rays come from its facets. They look
different, but they are all born of the same great light; they are all
the same light. May it not be so with religion? Let your altar be to
the ‘Unknown God,’ if you like—for who can give an unaltering likeness
to the Power above us?—but do not knock your altar down.
“Depend upon it, Miss Granger, all indications to the contrary
notwithstanding, there is a watching Providence without the will of
which we cannot live, and if we deliberately reject that Providence,
setting up our intelligence in its place, sorrow will come of it, even
here; for it is wiser than we. I wish that you would try and look at
the question from another point of view—from a higher point of view. I
think you will find that it will bear a great deal of examination, and
that you will come to the conclusion that the dictum of the wise-acre
who says there is nothing because he can see nothing, is not
necessarily a true one. There, that is all I have to say, and I wish
that I could say it better.”
“Thank you,” said Beatrice, “I will. Why here we are at home; I must go
and put Effie to bed.”
And here it may be stated that Geoffrey’s advice was not altogether
thrown away. Beatrice did try looking at the question again, and if
Faith did not altogether come back to her at least Hope did, and “the
greatest of these, which is Charity,” had never deserted her. Hope came
slowly back, not by argument probably, but rather by example. In the
sea of Doubt she saw another buoyed up, if it were but on broken pieces
of the ship. This encouraged her. Geoffrey believed, and she—believed
in Geoffrey. Indeed, is not this the secret of woman’s philosophy—even,
to some extent, of that of such a woman as Beatrice? “Let the faith or
unfaith of This, That, or the other Rabbi answer for me,” she says—it
is her last argument. She believes in This, or That, or some other
philosopher: that is her creed. And Geoffrey was the person in whom
Beatrice began to believe, all the more wholly because she had never
believed in any one before. Whatever else she was to lose, this at
least she won when she saved his life.