Читать книгу Foxglove Manor, Volume II (of III) - Robert W Buchanan - Страница 2

It was a chill day in early autumn, and as Charles Santley passed along the dark avenue of the Manor his path was strewn here and there with freshly fallen leaves. Dark shadows lay on every side, and the heaven above was full of a sullen, cheerless light. It was just the day for a modern Faust, in the course of his noonday walk, to encounter, in some fancied guise, canine or human, the evil one of old superstition.

Be that as it may, Santley knew at last that the hour of his temptation was over, and that the evil one was not far away. He knew it, by the sullen acquiescence of evil of his own soul; by the deliberate and despairing precision with which he had chosen the easy and downward path; by the sense of darkness which already obliterated the bright moral instincts in his essentially religious mind. He had spoken the truth when he said he would follow Ellen Haldane anywhere, even to the eternal pit itself. Her beauty possessed him and disturbed him with the joy of impure thoughts; and now that he perceived his own power to trouble her peace of mind, he rejoiced at the strength of his passion with a truly diabolic perversity.

As he came out of the lodge gate he saw, far away over the fields, the spire of his own church.

He laughed to himself.

But the man’s faith in spiritual things, so far from being shaken, was as strong as ever. His own sense of moral deterioration, of spiritual backsliding, only made him believe all the more fervently in the heaven from which he had fallen, or might choose to fall. For it is surely a mistake to picture, as so many poets have pictured, the evil spirit as one ignorant of or insensible to good. Far wiser is the theology which describes Satan as the highest of angelic spirits – the spirit which, above all others, had beheld and contemplated the Godhead, and had then, in sheer revolt and negation, deliberately and advisedly decided its own knowledge and rejected its own truthright. Santley was, in his basest moods, essentially a godly man – a man strangely curious of the beauty of goodness, and capable of infinite celestial dreams. If, like many another, he confused the flesh and the spirit, he did no more than many sons of Eve have done.

As he walked slowly along he mused, somewhat to this effect – “I love this woman. In her heart she loves me. Her superior spiritual endowments are mystically alive to those I myself possess. Her husband is a clod, an unbeliever, with no spiritual promptings. In his sardonic presence, her aspirations are chilled, frozen at the very fountain-head; whereas, in mine, all the sweetness and the power of her nature are aroused, though with a certain irritation. If I persist, she must yield to the slow moral mesmerism of my passion, and eventually fall. Is this necessarily evil? Am I of set purpose sinning? Is it not possible that even a breach of the moral law might, under certain conditions, lead us both to a higher religious place – yes, even to a deeper and intenser consciousness of God?”

And again – “What is sin? Surely it is better than moral stagnation, which is death. There are certain deflections from duty which, like the side stroke of a bird’s wing, may waft us higher. In the arms of this woman, I should surely be nearer God than crawling alone on the bare path of duty, loving nothing, hoping nothing, becoming nothing. What is it that Goethe says of the Eternal Feminine which lead us ever upward and onward? Which was the highest, Faust before he loved Marguerite, or Faust after he passed out of the shadow of his sin into the sphere of imperial and daring passion? I believe in God, I love this woman. Out of that belief, and that love, shall I not become a living soul?”

Was this the man’s own musing, or rather the very devil whispering in his ear? From such fragmentary glimpses of his mind as have been given, we can at least guess the extent of his intellectual degradation.

As he walked along the country road, his pale countenance became seraphic; just so may the face of Lucifer have looked when he plumed his wings for deliberate flight from heaven.

He stepped into a roadside farm and had a glass of milk, which the good woman of the place handed to him with a sentiment of adoration; he looked so gentle, so at peace with all living things. His white hand rested for a moment on the head of her little girl, in gentle benediction. He had never felt more tenderly disposed to all creation than at that moment, when he was prepared to dip a pen into his own hearts blood, and sign the little promissory note which Mephistopheles carries, always ready, in his pocket. He had hated his congregation before; now he loved them exceedingly – and all the world.