Читать книгу The New Abelard (Vol. 1-3) - Robert Williams Buchanan - Страница 14

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A pebble, not a pearl!—worn smooth and round

With lying in the currents of the world

Where they run swiftliest—polished if you please,

As such things may and must be, yet indeed

No shining agate and no precious stone;

Nay, pebble, merely pebble, one of many

Thrown in the busy shallows of the stream

To break its flow and make it garrulous.

The City Dame; or, a Match for Mammon.

I am not at all surprised at what you have told me,’ said Cholmondeley, sipping his coffee and smoking his cigar. ‘I knew that it must come sooner or later. Your position in the Church has always been an anomalous one, and, egad! if you have been going on as you tell me, I don’t wonder they want to get rid of you. Well, what do you intend to do?’

‘That is just the point I came to consult you upon,’ returned the clergyman.

‘I know what I should do in your place. I should stand to my colours, and give them a last broadside. The ‘Chronicle’ is open to you, you know. The old ship of the Church is no longer seaworthy, and if you helped to sink it you would be doing a service to humanity.’

‘God forbid!’ cried Bradley, fervently. ‘I would rather cut off my right hand than do anything to injure the Establishment. After all, it is the only refuge in times of doubt and fear.’

‘It strikes me you are rather inconsistent,’ said Cholmondeley with cool astonishment.

‘Not at all. It is precisely because I love the Church, because I believe in its spiritual mission, that I would wish to see it reorganised on a scientific and rational basis. When all is said and done, I am a Christian—that is, a believer in the Divine Idea of self-sacrifice and the enthusiasm of humanity. All that is beautiful and holy, all that may redeem man and lead him to an everlasting righteousness, is, in my opinion, summed up in the one word, Christianity.’

‘But, my dear Bradley, you have rejected the thing! Why not dispense with the name as well?’

‘I believe the name to be indispensable. I believe, moreover, that the world would waste away of its own carnality and atheism without a Christian priesthood. In the flesh or in the spirit Christ lives, to redeem the world.’

‘Since you believe so much,’ said Cholmondrley drily, ‘it is a pity you don’t believe a little more. For my own part, you know my opinion—which is, that Christ gets a great deal more credit for what is good in civilisation than He deserves. Science has done more in one hundred years to redeem the race than Christianity has done in eighteen hundred. Verb, sap.’

‘Science is one of his handmaids,’ returned Bradley, ‘and Art is another; that is why I would admit both of these into the service of the Temple. But bereft of his influence, separated from the Divine Idea, and oblivious of the Divine Character, both Science and Art go stumbling in the dark—and blaspheme. When Science gives the lie to any deathless human instinct—when, for example, she negatives the dream of personal immortality—she simply stultifies herself; for she knows nothing and can tell us nothing on that subject, whereas Christ, answering the impulse of the human heart, tells us all. When Art says that she labours for her own sake, and that the mere reproduction of beautiful earthly forms is soul-satisfying, she also is stultified; for there is no true art apart from the religious spirit. In one word, Science and Art, rightly read, are an integral part of the world’s religion, which is Christianity.’

‘I confess I don’t follow you,’ said the journalist, laughing; ‘but there, you were always a dreamer. Frankly, I think this bolstering up of an old creed with the truths of the new is a little dishonest. Christianity is based upon certain miraculous events, which have been proved to be untrue; man’s foolish belief in their truth has led to an unlimited amount of misery; and having disposed of your creed’s miraculous pretensions——’

‘Are you quite sure you have disposed of them?’ interrupted Bradley. ‘In any case, is not the personal and posthumous influence of Our Saviour, as seen in the world’s history, quite as miraculous as any of the events recorded of Him during His lifetime?’

‘On the contrary! But upon my life, Bradley, I don’t know where to have you! You seem to have taken a brief on both sides. Beware of indecision—it won’t do in religion. You are stumbling between two stools.’

‘Then I say with Mercutio, “a plague on both your houses!” ’ cried Bradley, laughing.

‘But don’t you see I want to reconcile them?’

‘You won’t do it. It’s too old a feud—a vendetta, in fact. Remember what Mercutio himself got by trying to be a peacemaker. The world can understand your Tybalts and your Parises—that is to say, your fire-eating Voltaires and your determined Tom Paines—but it distrusts the men who, like Matt Arnold et hoc genus omne, believe simply nothing, and yet try to whitewash the old idols.’

There was a silence. The two men looked at each other in friendly antagonism, Cholmondeley puffing his cigar leisurely with the air of a man who had solved the great problem, and Bradley smoking with a certain suppressed excitement.

Presently the clergyman spoke again.

‘I don’t think we shall agree—so let us cease to argue. What I want you to understand is, that I do love the Church, and cannot part from her without deep pain—without, in fact, rupturing all my most cherished associations. But there is another complication which makes this affair unusually distressing to me. You know I am engaged to be married?’

‘Ah, yes! I heard something about it. I begin to see your difficulty. You are afraid——’

He hesitated, as if not liking to complete the sentence.

‘Afraid of what, pray?’

‘Well, that, when you are pronounced heretical, she will throw you over!’

The clergyman smiled curiously and shook his head.

‘If that were all,’ he replied, ‘I should be able very easily to resign myself to the consequences of my heresy; but, fortunately or unfortunately, the lady to whom I am engaged (our engagement, by the way, is only private) is not likely to throw me over, however much I may seem to deserve it.’

‘Then why distress yourself?’

‘Simply because I doubt my right to entail upon her the consequences of my heterodoxy. She herself is liberal-minded, but she does not perceive that any connection with a heretic must mean, for a sensitive woman, misery and martyrdom. When I leave the Church I shall be practically ruined—not exactly in pocket, for, as you know, I have some money of my own—but intellectually and socially. The Church never pardons, and seldom spares.’

‘But there are other careers open to you—literature, for example! We all know your talents—you would soon win an eminence from which you might laugh at your persecutors.’

‘Literature, my dear Cholmondeley, is simply empiricism—I see nothing in it to attract an earnest man.’

‘You are complimentary!’ cried Cholmondeley, with a laugh.

‘Oh!—you are different! You carry into journalism an amount of secular conviction which I could never emulate; and, moreover, you are one of those who, like Harry the Smith, always fight “for your own hand.” Now, I do not fight for my own hand; I repeat emphatically, all my care is for the Church. She may persecute me, she may despise me, but still I love her and believe in her, and shall pray till my last breath for the time when she will become reorganised.’

‘I see how all this will end,’ said the journalist, half seriously. ‘Some of these days you will go over to Rome!’

‘Do you think so? Well, I might do worse even than that, for in Rome, now as ever, I should find excellent company. But no, I don’t fancy that I shall go even halfway thither, unless—which is scarcely possible—I discover signs that the doting mother of Christianity accepts the new scientific miracle and puts Darwin out of the Index. Frankly, my difficulty is a social, or rather a personal, one. Ought I, a social outcast, to accept the devotion of one who would follow me, not merely out of the Church, but down into the very Hell of atheism, if I gave her the requisite encouragement?’

Cholmondeley did not reply, but after reflecting quietly for some moments he said:—

‘You have not told me the name of the lady.’

‘Miss Alma Craik.’

‘Not the heiress?’

‘Yes, the heiress.’

‘I know her cousin, George Craik—we were at school together. I thought they were engaged.’

‘They were once, but she broke it off long ago.’

‘And she has accepted you?’ ‘Unconditionally.’ He added with strange fervour: ‘She is the noblest, the sweetest, and most beautiful woman in the world.’

‘Then why on earth do you hesitate?’ asked Cholmondeley. ‘You are a lucky fellow.’

‘I hesitate for the reason I have told you. She had placed her love, her life, her fortune at my feet, devotedly and unreservedly. As a clergyman of the Church, as one who might have devoted his lifetime to the re-establishment of his religion and the regeneration of his order, one, moreover, whom the world would have honoured and approved as a good and faithful servant, I might have accepted the sacrifice; indeed, after some hesitation, I did accept it. But now it is altogether different. I cannot consent to her martyrdom, even though it would glorify mine.’

Although Bradley exercised the strongest control over his emotions, and endeavoured to discuss the subject as dispassionately and calmly as possible, it was clear to his listener that he was deeply and strangely moved. Cholmondeley was touched, for he well knew the secret tenderness of his friend’s nature. Under that coldly cut, almost stern face, with its firm eyebrows and finely chiselled lips—within that powerful frame which, so far at least as the torso was concerned, might have been used as a model for Hercules—there throbbed a heart of almost feminine sensitiveness and sweetness; of feminine passion too, if the truth must be told, for Bradley possessed the sensuousness of most powerful men. Bradley was turned thirty years of age, but he was as capable of a grande passion as a boy of twenty—as romantic, as high-flown, as full of the fervour of youth and the brightness of dream. With him, to love a woman was to love her with all his faith and all his life; he was far too earnest to trifle for a moment with the most sacred of all human sentiments. Cholmondeley was aware of this, and gauged the situation accordingly.

‘If my advice is worth anything,’ he said, ‘you will dismiss from your mind all ideas of martyrdom. You are really exaggerating the horrors of the situation; and, for the rest, where a woman loves a man as I am sure Miss Craik loves you, sacrifice of the kind you mention becomes easy, even delightful. Marry her, my dear Bradley, and from the very altar of pagan Hymen smile at the thunderbolts of the Church.’

Bradley seemed plunged in deep thought, and sat silent, leaning back and covering his face with one hand. At last he looked up, and exclaimed with unconcealed emotion—

‘No, I am not worthy of her! Even if my present record were clean, what could I say of my past? Such a woman should have a stainless husband! I have touched pitch, and been defiled.’

‘Come, come!’ said the journalist, not a little astonished. ‘Of all the men I ever knew—and I have known many—you are about the most irreproachable.’

The clergyman bent over the table, and said in a low voice, ‘Do you remember Mary Goodwin?’

‘Of course,’ replied the other with a laugh. ‘What! is it possible that you are reproaching yourself on that account? Absurd! You acted by her like a man of honour; but little Mary was too knowing for you, that was all.’

‘You knew I married her?’

‘I suspected it, knowing your high-flown notions of duty. We all pitied you—we all——’

‘Hush!’ said the clergyman, still in the same low, agitated voice. ‘Not a word against her. She is asleep and at peace; and if there was any sin I shared it—I who ought to have known better. Perhaps, had I been a better man, I might have made her truly happy; but she didn’t love me—I did not deserve her love—and so, as you know, we parted.’

‘I know she used you shamefully,’ returned Cholmondeley, with some impatience. ‘Come, I must speak! You picked her from the gutter, and made her what Mrs. Grundy calls an honest woman. How did she reward you? By bolting away with the first rascal who offered her the run of his purse and a flash set of diamonds. By-the-by, I heard of her last in India, where she was a member of a strolling company. Did she die out there?’

‘Yes,’ answered the clergyman, very sadly.

‘Nine years ago.’

‘You were only a boy,’ continued Cholmondeley, with an air of infinite age and experience, ‘and Mr. Verdant Green was nothing to you. You thought all women angels, at an age when most youngsters know them to be devils. Well, that’s all over, and you have nothing to reproach yourself with. I wish I could show as clean a book, old fellow.’

‘I do reproach myself, nevertheless,’ was the reply. ‘That boyish episode has left its taint on my whole life; yes, it is like the mark of a brand burned into the very flesh. I had no right to woo another woman; yet I have done so, to my shame, and now Heaven is about to punish me by stripping me bare in her sight and making me a social outlaw. I have deserved it all.’

The two remained together for some time longer, but Bradley, though he listened gently to his friends remonstrances, could not be persuaded to take a less gloomy view of the situation. He was relieved unconsciously, nevertheless, by the other’s cheery and worldly counsel. It was something, at least, to have eased his heart, to have poured the secret of his sorrow and fear into a sympathetic bosom.

They had dined very early, and when they rose to separate it was only half-past eight o’clock.

‘Will you go on to my chambers?’ asked Cholmondeley. ‘I can give you a bed, and I will join you after I have done my duties at the office.’

‘No; I shall sleep at Morley’s Hotel, and take the early morning express down home.’

They strolled together along Pall Mall and across Leicester Square, where they separated, Cholmondeley sauntering airily, with that sense of superhuman insight which sits so lightly on the daily journalist, towards the newspaper office in Cumberland Street, and the clergyman turning into Morley’s, where he was well known, to arrange for his room.

As it was still so early, however, Bradley did not stay in the hotel, but lighted his pipe and strolled thoughtfully along the busy Strand.

At a little after nine o’clock he found himself close to the Parthenon Theatre, where ‘Hamlet’ was then being performed for over the hundredth night. He had always been a lover of the theatre, and he now remembered that Mr. Aram’s performance of the Danish prince was the talk of London. Glad to discover any means of distracting his dreary thoughts, he paid his two shillings, and found a place at the back of the pit.

The third act was just beginning as he entered, and it was not until its conclusion that he began to look around the crowded house. The assemblage was a fashionable one, and every box as well as every stall was occupied. Many of the intelligent spectators held in their hands books of the play, with which they might be supposed to be acquainting themselves for the first time; and all wore upon their faces more or less of that bored expression characteristic of audiences which take their pleasures sadly, not to say stupidly. In all the broad earth there is nothing which can quite equal the sedate unintelligence of an English theatrical audience.

Suddenly, as he gazed, his eyes became attracted by a face in one of the private boxes—he started, went pale, and looked again—as he did so, the head was turned away towards the back of the box. Trembling like one that had seen an apparition, he waited for it to incline again his way—and when it did so he watched it in positive horror. As if to convince himself of its identity, he borrowed an opera-glass from a respectable-looking man seated near him, and fixed it on the face in the box.

The face of a woman, splendidly attired, with diamonds sparkling on her naked throat and arms, and other diamonds in her hair. The hair was jet-black, and worn very low down on the forehead, almost reaching to the thick black eyebrows, beneath which shone a pair of eyes as black and bold as those of Circe herself. Her complexion had the olive clearness of a perfect brunette, and her mouth, which was ripe and full, was crimson red as some poisonous flower—not with blood, but paint. She was certainly very handsome, though somewhat petite and over-plump. Her only visible companion was a plainly dressed elderly woman, with whom she seldom exchanged a word, and a little boy of seven, elegantly dressed.

Bradley looked again and again, and the more he looked the more his wonder and horror grew. During all the rest of the performance he scarcely withdrew his eyes, but just before the curtain fell he slipped out of the pit, and passed round to the portico in front of the theatre.

There he waited, in the shadow of one of the pillars, till the throng began to flow forth, and the linkmen began summoning the carriages and cabs to take up their elegant burthens. The vestibule of the theatre was full of gentlemen in full dress and ladies in opera-cloaks, laughing and chatting over the evening’s performance. He drew close to the glass doors and looked in, pale as death.

At last he saw the lady he sought, standing with the woman and the child, and talking gaily with an elderly gentleman who sported an eyeglass. How bold and beautiful she looked! He watched her in fascination, always taking care to keep out of the range of her vision.

At last she shook hands with the gentleman, and moved towards the door. He drew back into the shadow.

She stood on the threshold, looking out into the night, and the linkman ran up to her, touching his cap.

‘Mrs. Montmorency’s carriage,’ she said in a clear silvery voice; and the man ran off to seek the vehicle.

Presently a smart brougham came up, and, accompanied by her elderly companion and the child, she stepped in. Almost simultaneously, Bradley crossed the pavement and leapt into a hansom.

‘Keep that carriage in view,’ he said to the driver, pointing to the brougham, ‘and I will give you a sovereign.’

The man laughed and nodded, and immediately the pursuit began.