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THE NEW ABELARD

A Romance

By Robert Buchanan

Author Of ‘The Shadow Of The Sword’ ‘God And The Man’ Etc.

In Three Volumes--Vol. I.

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London: Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly

1884



_DEDICATION_

TO MY DEAR FATHER

THE LATE ROBERT BUCHANAN

SOCIALIST LECTURER, REFORMER, AND POET I INSCBIBE

‘THE NEW ABELARD’




PREFATORY NOTE.

The leading character in this book is represented, dramatically, as
resembling, both in his strength and weakness, the great Abelard of
history. For this very reason he is described as failing miserably,
where a stronger man might never have foiled, in grasping the Higher
Rationalism as a law for life. He is, in fact, not meant for an ideal
hero, but for an ardent intellectual man, hopelessly biased against
veracity both by temperament and hereditary superstition.

I make this explanation in order to be beforehand with those who will
possibly hasten to explain to my readers that my philosophy of life is
at best retrograde, my modern thinker an impressionable spoony, and my
religious outlook taken in the shadow of the Churches and reading no
farther than the cloudy horizons of Ober-Ammergau.

Robert Buchanan.

London: March 12, 1884.




THE NEW ABELARD


PROEM

               Shipwreck... What succour?--

                   On the gnawing rocks

               The ship grinds to and fro with thunder-shocks,

               And thro’ her riven sides with ceaseless rush

               The foam-fleck’d waters gush:

               Above, the soot-black sky; around, the roar

               Of surges smiting on some unseen shore;

               Beneath, the burial-place of rolling waves--

               Flowerless, for ever shifting, wind-dug graves!


               A moment on the riven deck he stands,

               Praying to Heaven with wild uplifted hands,

               Then sees across the liquid wall afar

               A glimmer like a star;

               The lighthouse gleam! Upon the headland black

               The beacon burns and fronts the stormy wrack--

               Sole speck of light on gulfs of darkness, where

               Thunder the sullen breakers of despair...


               The ship is gone... Now in that gulf of death

               He swims and struggles on with failing breath:

               He grasps a plank--it sinks--too frail to upbear

               His leaden load of care;

               Another and another--straws!--they are gone!

               He cries aloud, stifles, and struggles on;

               For still thro’ voids of gloom his straining sight

               Sees the sad glimmer of a steadfast light!


               He gains the rocks... What shining hands are these,

               Reached out to pluck him from the cruel seas?

               What shape is this, that clad in raiment blest

               Now draws him to its breast!...

               Ah, Blessed One, still keeping, day and night,

               The lamp well trimm’d, the heavenly beacon bright,

               He knows Thee now!--he feels the sheltering gleam--

               And lo! the night of storm dissolves in dream!




CHAPTER I.--THE TWO.


               _Miriam_. But whither goest thou?

               _Walter._ On the highest peak,

               Among the snows, there grows a pale blue flower--

               The village maidens call it _Life-in-Death_,

               The old men _Sleep-no-more_; I have sworn to pluck it;

               Many have failed upon the same wild quest,

               And left their bleaching bones among the crags.

               If I should fail------------------------------------

               _Miriam._ Let me go with thee, “Walter!

               Let me not here i’ the valley--let us find

               The blessed flower together, dear, or die!

                        The Sorrowful Shepherdess.


On a windy night in the month of May, the full moon was flashing from
cloud to cloud, each so small that it began to melt instantaneously
beneath her hurried breath; and, in the fulness of the troubled light
that she was shedding, the bright tongues of the sea were creeping up
closer and closer through the creeks of the surrounding land, till they
quivered like quicksilver under the walls of Mossleigh Abbey, standing
dark and lonely amongst the Fens.

It was a night when, even in that solitude, everything seemed
mysteriously and troublously alive. The wind cried as with a living
voice, and the croaks of herons answered from the sands, The light of
the moon went and came as to a rhythmic respiration; and when it
hashed, the bats were seen hitting with thin z-like cry high up over the
waterside, and when it was dimmed the owl moaned from the ivied walls.
At intervals, from the distant lagoons, came the faint ‘quack, quack’
of flocks of ducks at feed. The night was still, but enchanted; subdued,
yet quivering with sinister life. Over and above all was the heavy
breath of the ocean, crawling nearer and nearer, eager yet fearful, with
deep tremors, to the electric wand of that heavenly light.

Presently, from inland, came another sound--the quick tramp of a horse’s
feet coming along the narrow road which wound up to, and past, the abbey
ruins. As it grew louder, it seemed that every other sound was hushed,
and everything listened to its coming; till at last, out of the
moonbeams and the shadows, flashed a tall white horse, ridden by a shape
in black.

Arrived opposite the ruins, the horse paused, and its rider, a woman,
looked eagerly up and down the road, whereupon, as if at a signal, all
the faint sounds of the night became audible again. The woman sat
still, listening; and her face looked like marble. After pausing thus
motionless for some minutes, she turned from the road, and walked her
horse through the broken wall, across a stone-strewn field, and in
through the gloomy arch of the silent abbey, till she reached the
roofless space within, where the grass grew rank and deep, mingled with
monstrous weeds, and running green and slimy over long neglected graves.

How dark and solemn it seemed between those crumbling walls, which only
the dark ivy seemed to hold together with its clutching sinewy fingers!
yet, through each of the broken windows, and through every archway, the
moonlight beamed, making streaks of luminous whiteness on the grassy
floor. The horse moved slowly, at his own will, picking his way
carefully among fragments of fallen masonry, and stopping short at
times to inspect curiously some object in his path. All was bright and
luminous overhead; all dim and ominous there below. At last, reaching
the centre of the place, the horse paused, and its rider again became
motionless, looking upward.

The moonlight pouring through one of the arched windows suffused her
face and form.

She was a fair woman, fair and tall, clad in a tight-fitting riding
dress of black, with black hat and backward-drooping veil. Her hair was
golden, almost a golden red, and smoothed down in waves over a low broad
forehead. Her eyes were grey and very large, her features exquisitely
cut, her mouth alone being, perhaps, though beautifully moulded, a
little too full and ripe; but let it be said in passing, this mouth was
the soul of her face--large, mobile, warm, passionate, yet strangely
firm and sweet. Looking into the grave eyes of this woman, you would
have said she was some saint, some beautiful madonna; looking at her
mouth and lips, you would have said it was the mouth of Cytherea, alive
with the very fire of love.

She sat motionless, still gazing upward on the dim milky azure, flecked
with the softest foam of clouds. Her face was bright and happy, patient
yet expectant; and when the low sounds of the night were wafted to her
ears, she sighed softly in unison, as if the sweetness of silence could
be borne no longer.

Suddenly she started, listening, and at the same moment her horse, with
dilated eyes and nostrils, trembled and pricked up his delicate ears.
Clear and distinct, from the distance, came the sound of another horse’s
feet. It came nearer and nearer, then it ceased close to the abbey wall;
and, almost simultaneously, the white steed threw forth his head and
neighed aloud.

The woman smiled happily, and patted his neck with her gloved hand.

A minute passed. Then through the great archway slowly came another
rider, a man. On seeing the first comer, he rose in the saddle and waved
his hand; then leaping down, he threw his reins over an iron hook fixed
in the wall, and came swiftly through the long grass.

A tall man of about thirty, wrapt in a dark riding cloak and wearing a
broad-brimmed clerical hat. He was clean shaven, but his black hair
fell about his shoulders. His eyes were black and piercing, his eyebrows
thick and dark. The head, with its square firm jaw and fine aquiline
features, was set firm upon a powerful neck and shoulders. His cloak,
falling back from the throat, showed the white neckcloth worn by English
clergymen.

The white horse did not stir as he approached, but, turning his head,
surveyed him calmly with an air of recognition. He came up, took
the rein and patted the horse’s neck, while the woman, with a cry of
welcome, leapt from her seat.

‘Shall I fasten your horse with mine?’ he asked, still holding the rein.

‘No; let him ramble among the grass. He will come at my call.’

Released and riderless, the horse moved slowly through the grass,
approaching the other in a leisurely way, with a view to a little equine
conversation. Meantime the man and woman had sprung into each other’s
arms, and were kissing each other like lovers--as indeed they were.

‘You are late, dearest,’ said the woman presently, when the first
delight of meeting was over. ‘I thought perhaps you could not come
to-night.’

Her voice was deep and musical--a soft contralto--with vibrations of
infinite tenderness. As she stood with him, fixing her eyes fondly
upon him, it almost seemed as if she, not he, were the masculine,
the predominant spirit; he the feminine, the possessed. Strong and
passionate as he seemed, he was weak and cold compared to her; and
whenever they clung together and kissed, it seemed as if her kisses
were given in the eagerness of mastery, his in the sweetness of
self-surrender. This, seeing her delicate beauty, and the powerful
determined face and form of the man, was strange enough.

‘I could not come earlier,’ he replied gently. ‘I had a call to a dying
man which detained me. I left his bedside and came straight hither.’

‘That is why you look so sad,’ she said, smiling and kissing him. ‘Ah,
yes--death is terrible!’

And she clung to him fondly, as if fearful that the cold cruel shadow
even then and there might come between them.

‘Not always, Alma. The poor man whose eyes I have just closed--he was
only a poor fenman--died with a faith so absolute, a peace so perfect,
that all the terrors of his position departed, leaving only an infinite
pathos. In the presence of such resignation I felt like an unholy
intruder. He went away as calmly as if Our Lord came to him in the very
flesh, holding out two loving hands--and, indeed, who knows? His eyes
were fixed at last as if he _saw_ something, and then... he smiled and
passed away.’

They moved along side by side through the deep shadows. She held his
hand in hers, drawing life and joy from the very touch.

‘What a beautiful night!’ he said at last, gazing upwards thoughtfully.
‘Surely, surely, the old argument is true, and that sky refutes the cry
of unbelief. And yet men perish, generations come and go, and still that
patient light shines on. This very place is a tomb, and we walk on the
graves of those who once lived and loved as we do now.’

‘Their souls are with God,’ she murmured; ‘yes, with God, up yonder!’

‘Amen to that. But when they lived, dearest, belief was so easy. They
were not thrust into a time of doubt and change. It was enough to close
the eyes and walk blindly on in assurance of a Saviour. Now we must
stare with naked eyes at the Skeleton of what was a living Truth.’

‘Do not say that. The truth lives, though its face has changed.’

‘_Does_ it live? God knows. Look at this deserted place, these ruined
walls. Just as this is to habitable places, is our old faith to the
modern world. Roofless, deserted, naked to heaven, stands the Church
of Christ. Soon it must perish altogether, leaving not a trace behind;
unless...’

‘Unless?...’

‘Unless, with God’s aid, it can be _restored_,’ he replied. ‘Even
then, perhaps, it would never be quite the same as it once was in the
childhood of the world; but it would at least be a Temple, not a ruin.’
‘That is always your dream, Ambrose.’

‘It is my dream--and my belief. Meanwhile, I am still like a man adrift.
O Alma, if I could only _believe_, like that poor dying man!’

‘You do believe,’ she murmured; ‘only your belief is not blind and
foolish. Why should you reproach yourself because you have rejected so
much of the old superstition?’

‘Because I am a minister of the Church, round which, like that dark
devouring ivy, the old superstitions still cling. Before you could make
this place what it once was, a prosperous abbey, with happy creatures
dwelling within it, you have to strip the old walls bare; and it is the
same with our religion. I am not strong enough for such a task. The very
falsehoods I would uproot have a certain fantastic holiness and beauty;
when I lay my hands upon them, as I have sometimes dared to do, I seem
to hear a heavenly voice rebuking me. Then I say to myself that perhaps,
after all, I am committing an act of desecration; and so--my life is
wasted.’

She watched him earnestly during a long pause which followed. At last
she said:--

‘Is it not, perhaps, that you _think_ of these things too much? Perhaps
it was not meant that we should always fix our eyes on what is so
mysterious. God hid himself away in the beginning, and it is not his
will that we should comprehend him.’

The clergyman shook his head in deprecation of that gentle suggestion.

‘Then why did He plant in our souls such a cruel longing? Why did He
tempt our wild inquiry, with those shining lights above us, with this
wondrous world, with every picture that surrounds the soul of man? No,
Alma, He does not hide himself away--it is we who turn our eyes from
him to make idols of stone or flesh, and to worship these. Where, then,
shall we find him? Not among the follies and superstitions of the ruined
Church at the altar of which I have ministered to my shame!’

His words had become so reckless, his manner so agitated, that she was
startled. Struck by a sudden thought, she cried--

‘Something new has happened? O Ambrose, what is it?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied; ‘that is, little or nothing. The Inquisition has
begun, that is all.’

‘What do you mean?’

He gave a curious laugh.

‘The clodhoppers of Fensea have, in their small way, the instinct
of Torquemada. The weasel is akin to the royal tiger. My Christian
congregation wish to deliver me over to the moral stake and faggot; as a
preliminary they have written to my Bishop.’

‘Of what do they complain _now_?’

‘That I am a heretic,’ he answered with the same cold laugh.’ Conceive
the ridiculousness of the situation! There was some dignity about heresy
in the old days, when it meant short shrift, a white shirt, and the
_auto-da-fé_. But an inquisition composed of Summerhayes the grocer,
Hayes the saddler, and Miss Rayleigh the schoolmistress; and, instead of
Torquemada, the mild old Bishop of Darkdale and Dells!’

She laughed too, but somewhat anxiously. Then she said tenderly, with a
certain worship--

‘You are too good for such a place. They do not understand you.’

His manner became serious in a moment.

‘I have flattered my pride with such a thought, but, after all, have
they not right on their side? They at least have a definite belief; they
at least are satisfied to worship _in a ruin_, and all they need is an
automaton to lead their prayers. When they have stripped me bare, and
driven me from the church----’

‘O Ambrose, will they do that?’

‘Certainly. It must come, sooner or later; perhaps the sooner the
better. I am tired of my own hypocrisy--of frightening the poor fools
with half-truths when the whole of the truth of unbelief is in my
heart.’

‘But you _do_ believe,’ she pleaded; ‘in God, and in our Saviour!’

‘Not in the letter, dearest. In the spirit, certainly!’

‘The spirit is everything. Can you not defend yourself?’

‘I shall not try. To attempt to do so would be another hypocrisy. I
shall resign.’

‘And then? You will go away?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you will take _me_ with you?’

He drew her gently to him; he kissed her on the forehead.

‘Why should you share my degradation?’ he said. ‘A minister who rejects
or is rejected by his Church is a broken man, broken and despised. In
these days martyrdom has no glory, no honour. You yourself would be the
first to feel the ignominy of my situation, the wretchedness of a petty
persecution. It would be better, perhaps, for us to part.’

But with a look of ineffable sweetness and devotion she crept closer to
him, and laid her head upon his breast.

‘We shall not part,’ she said. ‘Where you go I shall follow, as Rachel
followed her beloved. Your country shall be my country, dearest,
and--your God my God!’

All the troubled voices of the night responded to that loving murmur.
The moon rose up luminous into the open heaven above the abbey ruins,
and flashed upon the two clinging frames, in answer to the earth’s
incantation.




CHAPTER II.--OLD LETTERS.



               What’s an old letter but a rocket dark--

               Once fired i’ the air and left without a spark

               Of that which once, a fiery life within it,

               Shot up to heaven, and faded in a minute?

               But by the powdery smell and stick corroded,

               You guess--how noisily it once exploded!

                        _Cupid’s Postbag_ .



I.

_To the Right Reverend the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells._

Right Reverend Sir,--We, the undersigned, churchwardens and
parishioners of the Church of St. Mary Flagellant, in the parish of
Fensea and diocese of Dells, feel it our duty to call your lordship’s
attention to the conduct of the Rev. Ambrose Bradley, vicar of Fensea
aforesaid. It is not without great hesitation that we have come to the
conclusion that some sort of an inquiry is necessary. For many months
past the parish pulpit has been scandalised by opinions which, coming
from the pulpit of a Christian church, have caused the greatest
astonishment and horror; but the affair reached its culmination last
Ascension Day, when the Vicar actually expressed his scepticism as to
many of the Christian miracles, and particularly as to the Resurrection
of our Lord Jesus Christ _in the flesh_. It is also reported, we believe
on good authority, that Mr. Bradley is the author of an obnoxious
article in an infidel publication, calling in question such facts as the
miraculous conversion of the Apostle Paul, treating other portions of
the gospel narrative as merely ‘Symbolical,’ and classing the Bible
as only one of many Holy Books with equal pretensions to Divine
inspiration. Privately we believe the Vicar of Fensea upholds opinions
even more extraordinary than these. It is for your lordship to decide,
therefore, whether he is a fit person to fill the sacred office of a
Christian minister, especially in these times, when Antichrist is busy
at work and the seeds of unbelief find such ready acceptance, especially
in the bosom of the young. Personally, we have no complaint against
the Vicar, who is well liked by many of his congregation, and is very
zealous in works of charity and almsgiving. But the pride of carnal
knowledge and the vanity of secular approbation have turned him
from that narrow path which leads to righteousness, into the howling
wilderness of heterodoxy, wherein, having wandered too far, no man may
again find his soul alive. We beseech your lordship to investigate this
matter without delay; and, with the assurance of our deepest respect
and reverence, we beg to subscribe ourselves, your lordship’s humble and
obedient servants,

Henry Summerhayes,

Ezekiel Marvel,

Walter Rochford,

Simpson Pepperback,

John Dove,

Tabitha Rayleigh, _spinster_,

_all of the parish of Fensea._



II.


_From the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells to the Rev. Ambrose Bradley,
Vicar of Fensea._

Darkdale, May 28.

Dear Mr. Bradley.--I have just received from some of the leading members
of your congregation a communication of an extraordinary nature, calling
in question, I regret to say, not merely your manner of conducting the
sacred service in the church of Fensea, but your very personal orthodoxy
in those matters which are the pillars of the Christian faith. I cannot
but think that there is some mistake, for I know by early experience how
ready churchgoers are, especially in the rural districts, to distort the
significance of a preacher’s verbal expressions on difficult points of
doctrine.

When you were first promoted to the living of Fensea, you were named to
me as a young man of unusual faith and zeal--perfer-vid, indeed, to a
fault; and I need not say that I had heard of you otherwise as one from
whom your university expected great things. That is only a few years
ago. What then has occurred to cause this sad misconception (I take
it for granted that it _is_ a misconception) on the part of your
parishioners? Perhaps, like many other young preachers of undoubted
attainments but limited experience, you have been trying your oratorical
wings too much in flights of a mystic philosophy and a poetical
rhetoric; and in the course of these flights have, as rhetoricians will,
alarmed your hearers unnecessarily. Assuming this for a moment, will you
pardon me for saying that there are two ways of preaching the gospel:
one subtle and mystical, which appeals only to those spirits who have
penetrated into the adytum of Christian theology; one cardinal and
rational, which deals only with the simple truths of Christian teaching,
and can be understood by the veriest child. Perhaps, indeed, of these
two ways, the latter one most commends itself to God. ‘For except a man
be born again,’ _&c_. Be that as it may, and certainly I have no wish to
undervalue the subtleties of Christian philosophy, let me impress upon
you that, where a congregation is childlike, unprepared, and as it
were uninstructed, no teaching can be too direct and simple. Such a
congregation asks for bread, not for precious stones of oratory; for
kindly promise, not for mystical speculation. That you have seriously
questioned, even in your own mind, any of the Divine truths of our
creed, as expressed in that Book which is a light and a Jaw unto men, I
will not for a moment believe; but I shall be glad to receive forthwith,
over your own signature, an assurance that my surmise is a correct one,
and that you will be careful in the future to give no further occasion
for misconception.--I am, my dear Mr. Bradley, yours,

W. H. Darkdale and Dells.



III.


_From the Rev. Ambrose Bradley to the Right Reverend the Bishop of
Darkdale and Dells._

Vicarage, May 31, 1880.

My Dear Bishop,--I am obliged to you for your kind though categorical
letter, to which I hasten to give you a reply. That certain members of
my congregation should have forwarded complaints concerning me does
not surprise me, seeing that they have already taken me to task on many
occasions and made my progress here difficult, if not disagreeable. But
I think you will agree with me that there is only one light by which
a Christian man, even a Christian clergyman, can consent to be
directed--the light of his own conscience and intellect, Divinely
implanted within him for his spiritual guidance.

I will be quite candid with you. You ask what has changed me since the
day when, zealous, and, as you say, ‘perfervid,’ I was promoted to this
ministry. The answer is simple. A deep and conscientious study of the
wonderful truths of Science, an eager and impassioned study of the
beautiful truths of Art.

I seem to see you raise your hands in horror. But if you will bear with
me a little while, perhaps I may convince you that what I have said is
not so horrible after all--nay, that it expresses a conviction which
exists at the present moment in the bosom of many Christian men.

The great question before the world just now, when the foundations of a
particular faith are fatally shaken, when Science denies that Christ
as we conceive Him ever was, and when Art bewails wildly that He should
ever have been, is whether the Christian religion can continue to exist
at all; whether, when a few more years have passed away, it will not
present to a modern mind the spectacle that paganism once presented to
a mediaeval mind. Now, of our leading Churchmen, not even you, my Lord
Bishop, I feel sure, deny that the Church is in danger, both through
attacks from without and through a kind of dry-rot within. Lyell and
others have demolished and made ridiculous the Mosaic cosmogony Strauss
and others have demolished, with more or less success, the Biblical and
Christian miracles. No sane man now seriously believes that the sun ever
stood still, or that an ass spoke in human speech, or that a multitude
of people were ever fed with a few loaves and fishes, or that any solid
human form ever walked on the liquid sea. With the old supernaturalism
has gone the old asceticism or other-worldliness. It is now pretty well
agreed that there are substantially beautiful things in this world which
have precedence over fancifully beautiful things in the other. The poets
have taught us the loveliness of Nature, the painters have shown us
the loveliness of Art. Meantime, what does the Church do? Instead of
accepting the new knowledge and the new beauty, instead of building
herself up anew on the debris of her shattered superstitions, she buries
her face in her own ashes, and utters a senile wail of protestation.
Instead of calling upon her children to face the storm, and to build up
new bulwarks against the rising wave of secularism, she commands them to
wail with her, or _to be silent_. Instead of perceiving that the priests
of Baal and Antichrist might readily be overthrown with the weapons
forged by their own hands, she cowers before them powerless, in all the
paralysis of superstition, in all the blind fatuity of prayer.

But let us look the facts in the face.

The teachers of the new knowledge have unroofed our Temple to the
heavens, but have not destroyed its foundations; they have overthrown
its brazen images, but have not touched its solid walls. Put the case in
other and stronger words. The God who thundered upon Sinai has vanished
into air and cloud, but the God of man’s heavenly aspiration is
wonderfully quickened and alive. The Bible of wrath and prophecy is cast
contemptuously aside, but the Bible of eternal poetry is imperishable,
its wild dreams and aspirations being crystallised in such literature
as cannot die. The historic personality of the gentle rounder of
Christianity becomes fainter and fainter as the ages advance; but, on
the other hand, brighter and fairer grows the Divine Ideal which rose
from the ashes of that godlike man. Men reject the old miracles, but
they at last accept a miracle of human idealism. In one word, though
Christianity has perished as a dogmatic faith, it survives as the
philosophic religion of the world.

This being so, how does it behove a Christian minister, eating the
Church’s bread, but fully alive to her mortal danger, to steer his
course?

Shall he, as so many do, continue to act in the nineteenth century as
he would have acted in the fifteenth, or indeed in any century up to the
Revolution? Shall he base his teaching on the certainty of miracles, on
the existence of supernaturalism, on the evil of the human heart, the
vanity of this world, and the certainty of rewards and punishments
in another? Shall he brandish the old hell fire, or scatter the old
heavenly manna?

I do not think so!

Knowing in his heart that these things are merely the cast-off epidermis
of a living and growing creed, he may, in perfect consciousness of God’s
approval, put aside the miraculous as unproven if not irrelevant; warn
the people against mere supernaturalism; proclaim with the apostles of
the Renaissance the glory and loveliness of _this_ world--its wondrous
scenes, its marvellous story as written on the rocks and in the stars,
its divine science, its literature, its poetry, and its art; and
treading all the fire of Hell beneath his feet, and denouncing the
threat of eternal wrath as a chimera, base his hope of immortality on
the moral aspirations that, irrespective of dogma, are common to all
mankind.

This I think he may do, and must do, if the Church is to endure.

Let him do this, and let only a tithe of his brethren imitate him in so
doing, and out of this nucleus of simple believers, as out of the
little Galilean band, may be renewed a faith that will redeem the world.
Questioned of such a faith, Science will reply--‘I have measured the
heavens and the earth, I have traced back the book of the universe page
by page and letter by letter, but I have found neither here nor yonder
any proof that God is _not;_ nay, beyond and behind and within all
phenomena, there abides one unknown quantity which you are quite free to
call--God.

Similarly questioned, Art will answer--‘Since you have rejected what was
so hideous, tested by the beauty of this world, and since you hold even
my work necessary and holy, I too will confess with you that I hunger
for something fairer and less perishable; and in token of that hunger,
of that restless dream, I will be your Church’s handmaid, and try to
renew her Temple and make it fair.’

The keystone of the Church is Jesus Christ. Not the Jesus of the
miracles, not Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary, but Jesus Christ, the
Divine Ideal, the dream and glory of the human race. Not God who made
himself a man, but man who, by God’s inspiration, has been fashioned
unto the likeness of a God.

And what, as we behold him now, is this Divine Ideal--this man made God?

He is simply, as I conceive, the accumulated testimony of human
experience--of history, poetry, philosophy, science, and art--in favour
of a rational religion, the religion of earthly peace and heavenly love.
Built upon the groundwork of what, shorn of its miraculous pretensions,
was a gentle and perfect life, the Divine Ideal, or Ideal Person, began.
At first shadowy and almost sinister, then clearer and more beautiful;
then, descending through the ages, acquiring at every step some new
splendour of self-sacrifice, some new consecration of love or suffering,
from every heart that suffered patiently, from every soul that fed the
lamp of a celestial dream with the oil of sweet human love. And now,
far removed as is man himself from the archetypal ape, is the Christ of
modern Christendom, this spiritual Saviour of the world, from the
ghostly skeleton of the early martyrs, from the Crucified One of early
Christian art. The life of generations has gone to fashion him--all our
human experience has served to nourish him--gradually from age to age He
has drunk in the blood of suffering and the milk of knowledge, till He
stands supreme as we see him--not God, but man made God.

Does it matter so much, after all, whether we worship a person or an
idea, since, as I suggest, the Idea has become a Person, with all the
powers and privileges of divinity? Nay, who in this world is able,
even with the help of philosophy, to distinguish what _is_ from what
seems--the phenomenal from the real? So long as Our Lord exists as a
moral phenomenon, so long in other words as we can apprehend him as an
ideal of human life, Christ is not dead, and his resurrection is not
a dream. He walks the world. He remembers Greece and Rome, as well as
Galilee; He blesses the painter and the poet, as well as the preacher in
the Temple. He rejects nothing; He reads the rocks and the stars, and
He adds their gospel to his own; He cries to men of all creeds, as his
prototype cried to his disciples of yore, ‘Come unto me, all ye that are
heavy laden, and ye shall rest.’

Pardon me, my Lord Bishop, the desultory thoughts noted down in this
long letter. They perhaps give you some clue as to the sentiments
with which I pursue the Christian mission. You will doubtless think me
somewhat heterodox, but I have at least the courage of my opinions; and
on some such heterodoxy as mine--though on one, I hope, much broader
and wiser--it will soon be found necessary to reconstruct the Christian
Church, I am, my Lord Bishop, yours,

Ambrose Bradley.



IV.


_From the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells to the Rev. Ambrose Bradley,
Vicar of Fensea._

My Dear Sir,--I cannot express to you with what feelings of sorrow and
amazement I have read your terrible letter! I must see you personally at
once. My only hope now is that your communication represents a passing
aberration, rather than the normal condition of your mind. I shall be at
Darkdale on Saturday next, the 2nd. Will you make it convenient to be
in the town on that day, and to call upon me at about eleven in the
forenoon? I am,

W. M. Darkdale and Dells.




CHAPTER III.--THE BISHOP.


               A priest he was, not over-merry,

               Who loved sound doctrine and good sherry;

               Who wound his mind up every morning

               At the sedate cathedral’s warning,

               And found it soberly keep time,

               In a pocket, to each hourly chime;

               “Who, church’s clock-face dwelling under,

               Knew ’twas impossible to blunder,

               If Peter’s self at’s door should knock,

               And roundly ask him--_What’s o’clock?_

                        _The Hermitage_.


On the morning of June 2 the Rev. Ambrose Bradley left Fensea by
the early market train, and arrived at Darkdale just in time for his
interview with the Bishop of his diocese.

Seen in broad daylight, as he quickly made his way through the narrow
streets to the episcopal residence, Bradley looked pale and troubled,
yet determined. He was plainly drest, in a dark cloth suit, with broad
felt hat; and there was nothing in his attire, with the exception of his
white clerical necktie, to show that he held a sacred office. His dress,
indeed, was careless almost to slovenliness, and he carried a formidable
walking-stick of common wood. With his erect and powerful frame and his
closely shaven cheeks he resembled an athlete rather than a clergyman,
for he had been one of the foremost rowers and swimmers of his time.
He wore no gloves, and his hands, though small and well formed, were
slightly reddened by the sun.

Arrived at his destination, an old-fashioned residence, surrounded by a
large garden, he rang the gate bell, and was shown by a footman into the
house, where his card was taken by a solemn-looking person clerically
attired. After waiting a few moments in the hall, he was ushered into a
luxuriously furnished study, where he found the Bishop, with his nether
limbs wrapt in rugs, seated close to a blazing fire.

Bishop -------- was a little spare man of about sixty, with an aquiline
nose, a slightly receding forehead, a mild blue eye, and very white
hands. He was said to bear some facial likeness to Cardinal Newman, and
he secretly prided himself upon the resemblance. He spoke slowly and
with a certain precision, never hurrying himself in his utterance, and
giving full force to the periods of what was generally considered a
beautiful and silvery voice.

‘Good morning, Mr. Bradley,’ he said, without noticing the other’s
extended hand. ‘You will excuse my rising? The rheumatism in my knees
has been greatly increased by this wretched weather. Pray take a chair
by the fire.’

Bradley, however, found a seat as far from the fire as possible; for the
weather was far from cold, and the room itself was like a vapour bath.

There was a pause. The Bishop, shading his face with one white hand,
on which sparkled a valuable diamond ring, was furtively inspecting his
visitor.

‘You sent for me?’ said Bradley, somewhat awkwardly.

‘Yes--about that letter. I cannot tell you how distressed I was when
I received it; indeed, if I may express myself frankly, I never was
so shocked in my life. I had always thought you so different, so very
different. But there! I trust you have come to tell me that the hope
I expressed was right, and that it was under some temporary aberration
that you expressed sentiments so extraordinary, so peculiarly perverted,
and--hem!--unchristian.’

The clergyman’s dark eye flashed, and his brow was knitted.

‘Surely not unchristian,’ he returned.

‘Not merely that, sir, but positively atheistic!’ cried the Bishop,
wheeling round in his chair and looking his visitor full in the face.

‘Then I expressed myself miserably. I am not an atheist; God forbid!’

‘But as far as I can gather from your expressions, you absolutely dare
to question the sacred character of the Scriptures, and the Divine
nature and miraculous life and death of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ!’

‘Not at all,’ replied Bradley, quietly.

‘Not at all!’ echoed the Bishop.

‘Permit me to explain. I expressed my humble opinion that there are many
things in the Scriptures which are contradicted by modern evidence, so
that the sacred writings must be accepted not as history but as poetry;
and I said that, although the miraculous narrative of Christ’s life and
death might have to be revised, the beautiful Ideal it had set before us
was sufficient for all our needs. In other words, whether Our Lord was a
Divine personage or not, He had become a Divine Influence--which, after
all, is the same thing.’

‘It is _not_ the same thing, sir!’ exclaimed the Bishop, horrified. ‘It
is very far from being the same thing. Why, any Unitarian would admit
as much as you do!--and pardon me for reminding you, you are not a
Unitarian--you are a clergyman of the Church of England. You have
subscribed the Articles--you--God bless my soul! what is the world
coming to, when a Christian minister uses language worthy of the atheist
Bradlaugh?’

‘You remind me that I subscribed the Articles,’ said Bradley, still
preserving his calmness. ‘I did so without thought, as so many do, when
I was a very young man.’ ‘What are you now, sir? A young man, a very
young man; and in the audacious spirit of youth and inexperience you
touch on subjects which the wisest minds of the world have been content
to approach with reverence, with awe and trembling. I see your position
clearly enough. The horrible infidelity which fills the air at the
present day has penetrated your mind, and with the pride of intellectual
impiety--that very pride for which Satan was cast from heaven--you
profane the mysteries of your religion. After what you have said, I am
almost prepared to hear you tell me that you actually _did_ write that
article on Miracles, which your parishioners impute to you, in the
“Bi-monthly Review!”’

‘It is quite true. I did write that article.’

‘And you have contributed to other infidel publications; for instance,
to the “Charing Cross Chronicle,” which is edited by an infidel and
written for infidels?’

‘Excuse me; the “Chronicle” is not generally considered an infidel
publication.’

‘Have you contributed to it--yes or no, sir?’

‘Not on religious subjects; on literary topics only.’

‘But you have written for it; that is enough. All this being granted,
I think I may safely gather whence you receive your inspirations. From
that portion of the press which is attempting to destroy our most sacred
institutions, and which is endeavouring, in one way or another, to
undermine the whole foundations of the Christian Church.’

Bradley rose to his feet and stood on the hearthrug, facing his
superior, who looked up at him with ill-concealed horror and amazement.
By this time he was not a little agitated; but he still preserved a
certain outward composure, and his manner was full of the greatest
humility and respect.

‘Will you permit me to explain?’ he said in a low voice. ‘The hope and
dream of my life is to upraise the Church, not to destroy it.’

‘Humph! to upraise _a_ church, perhaps, but not the Church of Christ.’

‘The Church of Christ--a church wherein all men may worship,
irrespective of points of dogma, which have been the curse of every
religion, and of ours most of all. For such a communion only two
articles of faith would be necessary--a belief in an all-loving and
all-wise Creator, or First Unknown Cause, and a belief in a Divine
Character, created and evolved we need not ask how, but bearing the name
of the Founder of Christianity.’

‘And the Bible, sir, the Bible!’ cried the Bishop, impatiently. ‘What
would you do with that?’

‘I would use it in its proper place as--literature.’

‘Literature!’ said the Bishop with uplifted hands. ‘You would then class
that Blessed Book, from which the world has drawn the milk of immortal
life, in the same category as Homer’s Iliad, the profane poems of Horace
and Catullus, and--save the mark!--Lord Byron’s poems, and the miserable
novels of the period?’

‘You do not quite understand me!’

‘Sir, I understand you only too well.’

‘I do not call all printed matter literature; but I hold that all
literature of the higher kind is, like the Bible, divinely inspired.
Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare were as assuredly sent by God as Moses
and Elijah. Shall we call the Book of Job a divine piece of moral
teaching, and deny that title to “Hamlet” and “King Lear”? Is not the
“Faust” of Goethe as spiritual a product as the Song of Solomon? Ezekiel
was a prophet; prophets also are Emerson and Thoreau. Spinoza has been
called God-intoxicated; and it is true. There might be some question as
to the mission of Byron (though I myself believe there is none); but
surely no thinking person can reject the pretensions of that divine poet
and martyred man who wrote the “Prometheus Unbound”!’ ‘Shelley!’
ejaculated the other, as if a bomb had exploded under his feet. ‘Are you
actually speaking of _him_, sir?--the atheist.’

‘He was no atheist. More than most men he believed in God--a god of
love.’

This was too much. Quite forgetting his rheumatism, the Bishop threw off
his rugs and rose tremulously to his feet.

‘Mr. Bradley,’ he said, ‘let there be an end to this. I have heard you
patiently and respectfully, thinking perhaps you might have something
to say in your own defence; but every word you utter is an outrage--yes,
sir, an outrage. Such opinions as you have expressed here to-day, and
the other day in your letter, might be conceivable in a boy fresh from
college; but coming from one who has been actually ordained, and has
held more than one office in the Church, they savour of blasphemy. In
any case, I shall have to take the matter into consideration, with a
view to your immediate suspension. But if you wish it I will give
you time--a little time--to reflect. I would do anything to avoid a
scandal.’

The clergyman lifted his hat and stick, with a slight involuntary shrug
of the shoulder.

‘It is, then, as I expected,’ he said. ‘I am to be denounced and
unfrocked. The days of persecution are not yet quite over, I perceive.’

The Bishop flushed angrily.

‘It is absurd to talk of persecution in such a case, Mr. Bradley. Do
you yourself conceive it possible that you, bearing such opinions, can
remain in the Church?’

‘I do not conceive it possible. Shall I resign at once?’

‘Permit me to think it over, and perhaps to consult with those who in
such matters are wiser than myself. I shall do nothing hasty, or harsher
than the occasion warrants, be sure of that.’

‘Thank you,’ returned Bradley, with a peculiar smile.

‘You shall hear from me. In the meantime, let me entreat you to be
careful. Good morning.’

And with a cold bow the Bishop dismissed his visitor.

*****

On leaving the episcopal residence Bradley went straight to the railway
station, had a slight and hasty lunch at the buffet, and then took the
midday express to London. Entering a second-class carriage, the only
other occupants of which were a burly personage going up for a Cattle
Show and a spruce individual with ‘bagman’ written on every lineament
of his countenance, he resigned himself to reflections on his peculiar
position.

Throughout these reflections I have no intention of following him, but
they seemed less gloomy and miserable than might be conceived possible
under the circumstances. His eye was clear and determined, his mouth
set firmly, and now and then he smiled sadly to himself--just as he had
smiled in the presence of the Bishop.

The express reached London in about six hours, so that it was evening
when Bradley arrived at King’s Cross, carrying with him only a small
hand-bag. Instead of hailing a cab, he walked right on along the
streets--through Taviton Street to Russell Square, thence into Holborn,
and thence, across Lincoln’s Inn Fields, into the Strand. He then turned
off towards the Temple, which he entered with the air of one who knew
its quiet recesses well.

He was turning into Pump Court when he suddenly came face to face with a
man of about thirty, elegantly dressed, with faultless gloves and boots,
and carrying a light cane. He was very fresh and fair-complexioned,
with sandy whiskers and moustaches; and to complete his rather dandified
appearance he sported an eyeglass.

‘Cholmondeley!’ cried the clergyman, pronouncing it ‘Chumley’ according
to the approven mode.

‘Ambrose Bradley!’ returned the other. ‘Is it possible? Why, I thought
you were hundreds of miles away.’

‘I came up here by the express, and was just coming to see you.’

‘Then come along with me and dine at the “Reform.”’

They looked a strange contrast as they walked on side by side--the
powerful, gravelooking man, shabbily attired in his semiclerical dress,
and the elegant exquisite attired in the height of London fashion, with
his mild blue eye and his eyeglass in position. Yet John Cholmondeley
was something more than the mere ornamental young person he appeared;
and as for his mildness, who that had read his savage articles on
foreign politics in the ‘Bi-monthly Review’ would have taken him for a
harmless person? He was a Positivist of Positivists, an M.A. of Oxford,
and the acting-editor of the ‘Charing Cross Chronicle.’

His literary style was hysterical and almost feminine in its ferocity.
Personally he was an elegant young man, with a taste for good wines and
good cigars, and a tendency in external matters to follow the prevailing
fashion.

They drove to the ‘Reform’ in a hansom, and dined together. At the
table adjoining theirs on one side two Cabinet Ministers were seated in
company with Jack Bustle, of the ‘Chimes,’ and Sir Topaz Cromwell, the
young general just returned from South Africa; at the table on the other
side an Under-Secretary of State was giving a little feast to Joseph
Moody, the miners’ agent and delegate, who had been a miner himself,
and who was just then making some stir in political circles by his
propaganda.

After dinner they adjourned to the smoking-room, which they found
almost empty; and then, in a few eager sentences, Bradley explained his
position and solicited his friend’s advice. For that advice was well
worth having, Cholmondeley being not only a clever thinker but a shrewd
man of the world.




CHAPTER IV.--WORLDLY COUNSEL.


               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.




CHAPTER V.--‘MRS. MONTMORENCY.’


               Ay me, I sowed a seed in youth,

               Nor knew that ’twas a dragon’s tooth,

               Whereof has sprung to bring me shame

               Legions of woe without a name.--_Fausticulus._


The brougham passed rapidly up Wellington Street into Long Acre, thence
into Oxford Street, passing westward till it came to Regent Circus,
then it was driven up Portland Place to the gates of Regent’s Park. It
entered, and the hansom followed about fifty yards behind. Passing
to the left around the park, it reached Cranwell Terrace, and drew up
before one of the large houses fronting the artificial water.

The hansom paused too, but Bradley kept his seat until he saw the lady
and her companion alight, knock at the door, and enter in; while the
brougham drove round to the stables at the rear. Then he sprang out,
paid the man his sovereign, and prepared to follow.

For a moment he hesitated on the steps of the house, as if undecided
whether to knock or fly; but recovering his determination he knocked
loudly. The sound had scarcely died away when the door was opened by the
same elderly woman he had noticed at the theatre.

‘Mrs. Montmorency?’ he said, for he had got the name by heart.

The woman looked at him in surprise, and answered with a strong French
accent.

‘Madame has only just come in, and you cannot see her to-night.’

‘I _must_ see her,’ returned the clergyman, entering the hall. ‘It is a
matter of very important business.’

‘But it is so late. To-morrow, monsieur?’

‘To-morrow I am leaving London. I must see her at once.’

Seeing his persistence, and observing that he had the manners of a
gentleman, the woman yielded.

‘If you will step this way, I will tell madame, but I am afraid she will
not see you.’

So saying she led the way into a room on the ground floor, furnished
splendidly as a kind of study, and communicating with a small dining
room, which in its turn led to a large conservatory.

‘Your name, monsieur, if you please?’ said the woman.

‘My name is of no consequence--perhaps your mistress would not remember
it. Tell her simply that a gentleman wishes to see her on very important
business.’

With another look of wonder, the woman withdrew.

Still dreadfully pale and agitated, Bradley surveyed the apartment. It
was furnished oddly, but with a perfect disregard of expense. A gorgeous
Turkey carpet covered the floor; the curtains were of black-and-gold
tapestry, the chairs of gold and crimson. In a recess, close to the
window, was an elegant ormolu writing-desk, surmounted by a small marble
statue, representing a young maid just emerging from the bath. Copies
of well-known pictures covered the walls, but one picture was a genuine
Etty, representing Diana and her virgins surprised by Actæon. Over the
mantelpiece, which was strewn with golden and silver ornaments, and
several photographs in frames, was a copy of Titian’s Venus, very
admirably coloured.

To the inexperienced mind of the clergyman, ill acquainted with a
certain phase of society, the pictures seemed sinister, almost diabolic.
The room, moreover, was full of a certain sickly scent like _patchouli_,
as if some perfumed creature had just passed through it leaving the
scent behind.

He drew near the mantelpiece and looked at the photographs. Several of
them he failed to recognise, though they represented women well known
in the theatrical world; but in one he recognised the elderly gentleman
with the eyeglass whom he had seen at the theatre, in another the little
boy, and in two the mistress of the house herself. In one of the
two last she was represented semi-nude, in the spangled trunks,
flesh-coloured tights, and high-heeled boots of some fairy prince.

He was gazing at this photograph in horror, when he heard the rustle of
a dress behind him. Turning quickly, he found himself face to face with
the woman he sought.

The moment their eyes met, she uttered a sharp cry and went even more
pale than usual, if that were possible. As she recoiled before him, he
thought she did so in fear, but he was mistaken. All she did was to move
to the door, peep out into the lobby, then, closing the door rapidly,
she faced him again.

The expression of her face was curious to behold. It was a strange
mixture of devilry and effrontery. She wore the dress she had worn in
the theatre--her arms, neck, and bosom were still naked and covered with
diamonds; and her eyes flashed with a beautiful but forbidding light.

‘So it is _you!_’ she said in a low voice. ‘At last!’

He stood before her like a man of marble, livid, ghastly, unable to
speak, but surveying her with eyes of infinite despair. The sickly scent
he had noticed in the room clung about her, and filled the air he was
breathing.

There was a long silence. At last, unable any longer to bear his
steadfast gaze, she laughed sharply, and, tripping across the room,
threw herself in a chair.

‘Well?’ she said, looking up at him with a wicked smile.

His predominant thought then found a broken utterance.

‘It is true, then!--and I believed you _dead!_’

‘No doubt,’ she answered, showing her white teeth maliciously, ‘and you
are doubtless very sorry to find yourself mistaken. No, I am very much
alive, as you see. I would gladly have died to oblige you, but it was
impossible, _mon cher_. But won’t you take a seat? We can talk as well
sitting as standing, and I am very tired.’

Almost involuntarily, he obeyed her, and taking a chair sat down, still
with his wild eyes fixed upon her face.

‘My God!’ he murmured. ‘And you are still the same, after all these
years.’

She leant back in her chair, surveying him critically. It was obvious
that her light manner concealed a certain dread of him; for her bare
bosom rose and fell quickly, and her breath came in short sharp pants.

‘And you, my dear Ambrose, are not much changed--a little older, of
course, for you were only a foolish boy then, but still very much the
same. I suppose, by your clerical necktie, that you have gone into the
Church? Have you got on well? I am sure I hope so, with all my heart;
and I always said you were cut out for that kind of life.’

He listened to her like one listening to some evil spirit in a dream. It
was difficult for him to believe the evidence of his own senses. He had
been so certain that the woman was dead and buried past recall!

‘How did you find me out?’ she asked.

‘I saw you at the theatre, and followed you home.’

‘_Eh bien!_’ she exclaimed, with a very doubtful French pronunciation.
‘What do you want with me?’

‘Want with you?’ he repeated. ‘My God! Nothing!’

She laughed again, flashing her teeth and eyes. Then springing up, she
approached a small table, and took up a large box of cigarettes. Her
white hand trembled violently.

‘Can I offer you a cigarette?’ she said, glancing at him over her naked
shoulder.

‘No, no!’

‘With your permission I will light one myself!’ she said, striking a
wax match and suiting the action to the word. Then holding the cigarette
daintily between her white teeth, she again sat down facing him. ‘Well,
I am glad you have not come to make a scene. It is too late for that. We
agreed to part long ago, and it was all for the best.’

‘You _left_ me,’ he answered in a hollow voice.

‘Just so,’ she replied, watching the thin cloud of smoke as it wreathed
from her lips. ‘I left you because I saw we could never get along
together. It was a stupid thing of us to marry, but it would have been
a still stupider thing to remain tied together like two galley-slaves.
I was not the little innocent fool you supposed me, and you were not
the swell I at first imagined; so we were both taken in. I went to India
with young St. Clare, and after he left me I was very ill, and a report,
which I did not contradict, got into the papers that I had died. I went
on the stage out there under an assumed name, and some years ago
returned to England.’

‘And now,’ he asked with more decision than he had yet shown, ‘how are
you living?’

She smiled maliciously.

‘Why do you want to know?’

He rose and stood frowning over her, and despite her assumed
_sang-froid_ she looked a little alarmed.

‘Because, when all is said and done, I am your _husband!_ Whatever
you now call yourself, you are the same Mary Goodwin whom I married at
Oxford ten years ago, and the tie which links us together has never been
legally broken. Yet I find you here, living in luxury, and I suppose in
infamy. Who pays for it all? Who is your present victim?’

With an impatient gesture and a flash of her white teeth she threw her
cigarette into the fire, and rose up before him trembling, with fear, or
anger.

‘So you have found your tongue at last!’ she said. ‘Do you think I am
afraid of you? No, I defy you! This is my house, and if you are not
civil I will have you turned out of it. Bah! it is like you to come
threatening me, at the eleventh hour.’

Her petulant rage did not deceive him; it was only a mask hastily
assumed to conceal her growing alarm.

‘Answer my question, Mary!--how are you living?’

‘Sit down quietly, and I will tell you.’

He obeyed her, covering his eyes with his hand. She watched him for a
moment; then, reassured by his subdued manner, she proceeded.

‘I am not sure that I ought to tell you, but I dare say you would find
out. Lord Ombermere----’

‘Lord Ombermere!’ echoed the clergyman. ‘Why, to my knowledge, he has a
wife--and children.’

She shrugged her white shoulders, with a little grimace.

‘That is his affair, not mine,’ she said. ‘For the rest, I know the
fact, and never trouble myself about it. He is very good to me, and
awfully rich. I have all I want. He sent me to France and had me taught
French and music; and he has settled a competence upon our boy. That is
how the matter stands. I do pretty much as I like, but if Eustace knew
I had a husband actually living he would make a scene, and perhaps we
should have to part.’

‘Is it possible?--and--and are you happy?’

‘Perfectly,’ was the cool reply.

Bradley paced up and down the chamber in agitation.

‘Such a life is an infamy,’ he at last exclaimed. ‘It is an offence
against man and God.’

‘I know all that cant, and I suppose you speak as a clergyman; but I do
my duty by the man who keeps me, and never--like some I could name--have
intrigues with other men. It wouldn’t be fair, and it wouldn’t pay. I
hope,’ she added, as if struck suddenly by the thought, ‘you have not
come here to-night imagining I shall return to _you?_’ He recoiled as if
from a blow.

‘Return to me? God forbid!’

‘So say _I_, though you might put it a little more politely. By the way,
I forgot to ask you,--but perhaps you yourself have married again?’

The question came suddenly like a stab. Bradley started in fresh horror,
holding his hand upon his heart. She exclaimed:--

‘You might have done so, you know, thinking me food for worms, and if
such were the case you may be sure I should never have betrayed you. No;
“live and let live” is my motto. I am not such a fool as to suppose you
have never looked at another woman; and if you had consoled yourself,
taking some nice, pretty, quiet, homely creature, fit to be a
clergyman’s wife, to mend his stockings, and to visit the sick with
rolls of flannel and bottles of beef-tea, I should have thought you had
acted like a sensible man.’

It was too horrible. He felt stifled, asphyxiated. He had never before
encountered such a woman, though their name is legion in all the
Babylons, and he could not understand her. With a deep frown he rose to
his feet.

‘Are you going?’ she cried. ‘Pray don’t, till we understand each other!’

He turned and fixed his eyes despairingly upon her, looking so worn, so
miserable, that even her hard heart was touched.

‘Try to think I am really dead,’ she said, ‘and it will be all right.
I have changed both my life and my name, and no one of my old friends
knows me. I don’t act. Eustace wanted to take a theatre for me, but,
after all, I prefer idleness to work, and I am not likely to reappear.
I have no acquaintances out of theatrical circles, where I am known only
as Mrs. Montmorency. So you see there is no danger, _mon cher_. Let
me alone, and I shall let you alone. You can marry again whenever you
like.’

Again she touched that cruel chord, and again he seemed like a man
stabbed.

‘Marry?’ he echoed. ‘But I am not free! You are still my wife.’

‘I deny it,’ was the answer. ‘We are divorced; I divorced myself. It
is just the same as if we had gone before the judge: a course you will
surely never adopt, for it would disgrace you terribly and ruin _me_,
perhaps.

Eustace is horribly proud, and if it should all come out about his
keeping me, he would never forgive me. No, no, you’ll never be such a
fool!’

Yet she watched him eagerly, as if anxious for some assurance that he
would not draw her into the open daylight of a legal prosecution.

He answered her, as if following her own wild thoughts--

‘Why should I spare you? Why should I drag on my lifetime, tied by the
law to a shameless woman? Why should I keep your secret and countenance
your infamy? Do you take me for one of those men who have no souls, no
consciences, no honour? Do you think that I will bear the horror of
a guilty secret, now I know that you live, and that God has not been
merciful enough to rid me of such a curse?’

It was the first time he had seemed really violent. In his pain he
almost touched her with his clenched hand.

‘You had better not strike me!’ she said viciously.

At this moment the door opened, and a little boy (the same Bradley had
seen at the theatre) ran eagerly in. He was dressed in a suit of black
velvet, with bows of coloured ribbon, and, though he was pale and
evidently delicate, he looked charmingly innocent and pretty.

‘_Maman! maman!_’ he cried in French.

She returned angrily, answering him in the same tongue--

‘_Que cherchez-vous, Bébé? Allez-vous en!_’

‘_Maman, je viens vous souhaiter la bonne nuit!_

‘_Allez, allez_,’ she replied impatiently, ‘_je viendrai vous baiser
quand vous serez couché_.’

With a wondering look at the stranger the child ran from the room.

The interruption seemed to have calmed them both. There was a brief
silence, during which Bradley gazed drearily at the door through which
the child had vanished, and his companion seemed lost in thought.

The time has perhaps come to explain that, if this worldly and
sin-stained woman had one redeeming virtue, it was love for her little
boy. True, she showed it strangely, being subject to curious aberrations
of mood. The child was secretly afraid of her. Sometimes she would turn
upon him, for some trivial fault, with violent passion; the next moment
she would cover him with kisses and load him with toys. In her heart she
adored him; indeed, he was the only thing in the world that she felt to
be her own. She knew how terribly his birth, when he grew up, would tell
against his chances in life, and she had so managed matters that Lord
Ombermere had settled a large sum of money unconditionally upon the
child; which money was already invested for him, in his mother’s name,
in substantial Government securities. Her own relation with Ombermere, I
may remark in passing, was a curious one. Whenever he was in London, his
lordship dropped in every afternoon at about four, as ‘Mr. Montmorency’;
he took a cup of tea in company with mother and child; at a quarter to
six precisely he looked at his watch and rose to go; and at seven he was
dining in Bentinck Square, surrounded by his legal children, and faced
by his lady. Personally, he was a mild, pale man, without intelligence
or conversational powers of any kind, and ‘Mrs. Montmorency’ found his
company exceedingly tedious and tame.

‘You see my position,’ said Mrs. Montmorency at last. ‘If you have no
consideration for me, perhaps you will have some for my boy.’

The clergyman sighed, and looked at her as if dazed.

‘I must think it over,’ he said. ‘All this has come as a terrible shock
upon me.’

‘Shall I see you again?’

‘God knows!’

‘If you should call, never do so between four and six; those are
Eustace’s hours. I am generally in during the evening, unless I go to
the theatre. Good night!’

And with the ghost of a smile she extended her hand. He took it
vacantly, and held it limply for a moment. Then he dropped it with
another sigh, and went to the door, which he opened. Turning on
the threshold, he saw her standing in the centre of the room, pale,
beautiful, and baleful. She smiled again, flashing her eyes and showing
her white teeth. With a shudder that went through all his frame, he
passed out into the silent street.

It was now very late, and the Park lay still and sleeping under the
dim light of the moon. From time to time a carriage passed by, but the
pavement was quite deserted. Full of what he had seen, with the eyes of
his soul turned inward to the horrible reflection, he wandered slowly
along, his footfalls sounding hollow and ominous on the footpath, as he
went.

Instinctively, but almost unreflectingly, he took the direction of his
hotel; passed out of the park and into Harley Street, thence across
Cavendish Square to Regent Circus.

It seemed now to him as if his fate was sealed. God, in indignation at
his revolt, meant to deal him full measure. Attacked on one side by the
thunders of the Church, and tormented on the other by the ghost of his
own youthful folly, where was he to find firm foothold for his feet? His
one comfort in the strenuousness of his intellectual strife had been
the sympathy and devotion of a woman who was now surely lost to him for
ever; a woman who, compared to this frightful apparition of a dead past,
was a very spirit of heaven. Yes, he loved an angel--an angel who would
have redeemed him; and lo! in the very hour of his hope, his life was to
be possessed by an incarnate devil.

His thoughts travelled back to the past.

He thought of the time when he had first known Mary Goodwin. He was a
youth at Oxford, and she was the daughter of a small tradesman. She was
very pretty and modest-looking in those days; though she knew the world
well, and the worst side of it, she seemed to know it very little. His
boy’s heart went out to her beauty, and he became entangled in an amour
which he thought a seduction; she played her part prettily, with no lack
of tears, so that, although he already knew that his first wild fancy
was not love, he married her.

Afterwards his eyes were opened. The tender looking, mild-spoken,
black-eyed little beauty showed that she had been only acting a part. As
their marriage was a secret one, and they could not live together, she
resided in the town, and was left a good deal to herself. Once or twice
whispers came to his ears that he did not like, and he remonstrated
with her; she answered violently, in such terms as opened his eyes still
wider to her character. She was exorbitant in her demands for money,
and she dressed gorgeously, in execrable taste. When his supplies fell
short, as was inevitable, she was still well provided; and he accepted
her statement that the supplementary sums came from her father. Once,
coming upon her one evening unexpectedly, he found her hysterical and
much the worse for liquor: empty champagne bottles and glasses were
lying on the table, and the room was full of the scent of tobacco smoke.
He discovered that two men of his own college had been calling upon
her. A scene ensued, which was only one of many. I have no intention,
however, of going into all the wretched details of what is a very common
story; but it is sufficient to say that Bradley discovered himself
tied miserably to a creature without honour, without education, without
virtue, sometimes without decency. Nevertheless he did not cast her
out or expose her, but during the Vacation took her with him to London,
trying hard to reclaim her. It was while they were stopping there that
she relieved him of all further suspense by walking off one day with all
his ready cash, and joining an officer whose acquaintance she had made
by accident in the open street. Bradley searched for her everywhere
without success. It was not for many weeks afterwards that he received
a line from her, addressed from Gibraltar, telling him that she was _en
route_ for India, and that she had no wish either to see him or to hear
from him again.

So she disappeared from his life, and when the report of her death
reached him he was touched, but secretly relieved. Few even of his own
personal friends knew much of this chapter of his experience: he had
been wise enough to keep his actual marriage to the woman as dark as
possible. So he entered the Church a free man, and purer than most men
in having only one unfortunate record, throughout which he had acted
honourably, on his conscience.

And now, after all those years, she had arisen from the grave! At the
very moment when he was most threatened with other perils, of body
and of soul, and when his place in the world of work and duty was most
insecure, she had appeared, to drive him to despair! He had been so
certain that she had passed away, with all her sins, that she had become
in time almost a sad sweet memory, of one more sinned against than
sinning. And all the time she had been roaming up and down the earth,
painted and dissolute, cruel and predatory--no longer a reckless girl,
but a cold, calculating woman, with all the audacity of her experience.

But she was worse, he thought; she, in her splendour of wealth and
mature beauty, was infinitely fouler. How calmly she wore her infamy!
how lightly she trafficked with him for his silence, for his complicity!
Unconscious of her own monstrosity, she dared to bargain with _him_--her
husband--a priest of Christ!

Let those who sympathise with Bradley in his despair beware of sharing
his revengeful thoughts. In simple fact, the woman was rising, not
falling; her life, bad as it was from certain points of view, was still
a certain advance upon what it once had been--was certainly a purer and
an honester life than that of many men; than that, for example, of the
honoured member of the aristocracy who paid her bills. She was faithful
to this man, and her one dream was to secure comfort and security for
her child. She had never loved Bradley, and had never pretended to love
him. She did not wish to bring him any unhappiness. She had, as she
expressed it, divorced herself, and, according to her conceptions of
morality, she owed him no obligation.

But the more he thought of her and of the fatality of her resurrection,
the more his whole soul arose in hate against her.

Of course there was one way which led to liberty, the one which she had
implored him not to take. The law could doubtless at once grant him
a formal divorce from the woman; but this could not be done without
publicity, from which his soul shrank in horror. He pictured to himself
how his adversaries would exult on seeing his name dragged through the
mud! No; come what might, he would never think of that!

I cannot follow either his spiritual or his bodily wanderings any
further at present. He walked the night away, not returning to his hotel
until early dawn, when, pale, dishevelled, and wild, like a man after
a night’s dissipation (as, indeed, he seemed to the waiter, whose
experience of clergymen on town visits was not small), he called for his
hand-bag, had a hasty wash, and crept away to take the morning train.




CHAPTER VI.--ALMA.


               Blue-buskin’d, with the softest turquoise blue,

               Faint, as the speedwell’s azure dim with dew;

                   As far away in hue

                   As heaven the dainty shade is,

                   From the dark ultra-blue

                   Of literary ladies.--_The Mask_


On the morning that the Rev. Ambrose Bradley, Vicar of Fensea, had his
memorable interview with the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells, Miss
Alma Craik, of the Larches, walked on the home farm in the immediate
neighbourhood of her dwelling, accompanied by her dear friend and
companion Agatha Combe, and attended by half a dozen dogs of all sizes,
from a melancholy old St. Bernard to a frivolous Dandie Dinmont.

The two ladies, strolling along side by side, presented a curious
contrast, which was heightened not a little by their peculiarities
of costume. Miss Craik, bright as Eos, and tall and graceful as a
willow-wand, was clad in a pink morning dress, with pink plush hat to
match, and carried a parasol of the same colour. She walked lightly,
with a carriage which her detractors called proud, but which her
admirers thought infinitely easy and charming; conveying to the most
casual observer that she was a young lady with a will of her own,
perfectly mistress of herself, and at home among her possessions. Miss
Combe, on the other hand, was very short, scant of breath, and dressed
in a costume which looked like widow’s weeds, but which was nothing of
the sort, for at five-and-fifty she was still a virgin. Her face was
round and sunny, her eyes were bright and cheerful, and few could have
recognised, in so homely and kindly looking a person, the champion
of Woman’s Rights, the leader-writer of the ‘Morning News,’ and the
champion Agnostic of the controversial reviews.

Yet Miss Combe, though mild enough as a woman, was terribly fierce as
a writer. She had inherited her style and opinions from her father, a
friend and playfellow (if such an expression may be applied to persons
who _never_ played) of John Mill. She had been crammed very early with
Greek, Latin, moral science, and philosophy; and she would certainly
have developed into a female of the genus Griffin, had it not been for
a pious aunt who invited her once a year into the country, and there
managed to fill her lungs with fresh air and her mind with a certain
kind of natural religion. When Agnosticism was first invented she
clutched at the word, and enrolled herself as an amazon militant under
the banner of the creed. She hated two things about equally--Materialism
and dogmatic Christianity. She was, in fact, a busy little woman, with a
kind heart, and a brain not quite big enough to grasp all the issues she
was so fond of discussing.

Miss Craik had met her in London, and had taken to her
immediately--chiefly, if the truth must be told, on account of her
opinions; for though Miss Craik herself was nominally a Christian, she
was already a sufficiently lax one to enjoy all forms of heterodoxy.
They had come together first on one great _quoestio revata_, that of
vivisection, for they both adored dogs, and Miss Combe was their most
uncompromising champion against the users of the scalpel. So it happened
in the course of time that they spent a part of the year together. The
Larches was Miss Combe’s house whenever she chose to come to it, which
was very often, and she became, in a certain sense, the companion of her
rich young friend.

Their way lay along green uplands with a distant sight of the sea, and
they followed the footpath which led from field to field.

Presently Miss Combe, somewhat out of breath, seated herself on the
foot-rest of a stile.

‘Won’t you take a rest, dear?’ she said; ‘there’s room for two.’

The young lady shook her head. As she fixed her eyes upon her companion,
one peculiarity of hers became manifest. She was rather short-sighted,
and, whenever examining anything or anybody, slightly closed her
eyelashes.

‘If I were as rich as you,’ continued Miss Combe after a pause, ‘I know
what I should do with my money.’

‘Indeed! pray tell me.’

‘I should build a church to the New Faith!’

‘Are you serious?’ said Alma merrily. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t know what
the new faith is.’

‘The faith of Humanity; not Comte’s, which is Frenchified rubbish, but
the beautiful faith in human perfection and the divine future of the
race. Just think what a Church it would make! In the centre an altar “to
the Unknown God”; painted windows all round, with the figures of all
the great teachers, from Socrates to Herbert Spencer, and signs of the
zodiac and figures of the planets, if you like, on the celestial roof.’

‘I don’t quite see, Agatha, in what respect the new Church would be an
improvement on the old one,’ returned Alma; and as she spoke her eyes
travelled over the still landscape, and saw far away, between her and
the sea, the glittering spire of the church of Fensea.

‘It would be different in every particular,’ said Miss Combe
good-humouredly. ‘In the first place, the architecture would be, of
course, pure Greek, and there would be none of the paraphernalia of
superstition.’

‘And Jesus Christ?--would He have any place there at all? or would you
banish Him with the rest of the gods?’

‘Heaven forbid! He should be pictured in the very central window, over
the altar--not bleeding, horrible, and crucified, but as the happy
painters represented Him in the early centuries, a beautiful young
Shepherd--yes, beautiful as Apollo--carrying under His arm a stray
lamb.’

Alma sighed, and shook her head again. She was amused with her friend’s
opinions, and they never seemed to shock her, but her own attitude of
mind with regard to Christianity was very different.

‘Yet,’ she said, still watching the distant spire, ‘If you abolish
Christ crucified you abolish Christ the Saviour altogether; for sorrow,
suffering, and death were the signs of His heavenly mission. Besides, I
am of Mr. Bradley’s opinion, and think we have too many churches
already.’

‘Does _he_ think so?’ exclaimed Miss Combe with some surprise.

‘Yes, I have often heard him say that God’s temple is the best--the open
fields for a floor and the vaulted heavens for a roof.’

Miss Combe rose, and they strolled on together.

‘Is he as heterodox as ever?’ asked Miss Combe.

‘Mr. Bradley? I don’t know what you mean by heterodox, but he has his
own opinions on the articles of his religion.’

‘Just so. He doesn’t believe in the miracles, for example.’

‘Have you heard him say so?’

‘Not explicitly, but I have heard----’

‘You mustn’t believe all the nonsense you hear,’ cried Alma eagerly. ‘He
is too intellectual for the people, and they don’t understand him. You
shall go to church next Sunday, and hear him preach.’

‘But I’m not a church-goer,’ said the elder lady, smiling. ‘On Sundays I
always read Herbert Spencer. Sermons are always so stupid.’

‘Not always. Wait till you hear Mr. Bradley. When I listen to him, I
always think of the great Abelard, whom they called the “angel of
bright discourse.” He says such wonderful things, and his voice is so
beautiful. As he speaks, the church seems indeed a narrow place--too
small for such words, for such a speaker; and you long to hear him on
some mountain top, preaching to a multitude under the open sky.’

Miss Combe did not answer, but peeping sideways at her companion she saw
that her face was warmly flushed, and her eyes were strangely bright and
sparkling. She knew something, but not much, of Alma’s relations with
the vicar, and she hoped with all her heart that they would never lead
to matrimony. Alma was too wise a vestal, too precious to the cause of
causes, to be thrown away on a mere country clergyman. In fact, Miss
Combe had an errant brother of her own who, though an objectionable
person, was a freethinker, and in her eyes just the sort of husband for
her friend. He was rather poor, not particularly handsome, and somewhat
averse to soap and water; but he had held his own in platform argument
with divers clergymen, and was generally accounted a ticklish subject
for the Christians. So she presently remarked:--

‘The finest speaker I ever heard is my brother Tom. I wish you could
hear _him_.’

Alma had never done so, and, indeed, had never encountered the worthy in
question.

‘Is he a clergyman?’ she asked innocently. ‘Heaven forbid!’ cried Miss
Combe. ‘No; he speaks at the Hall of Science.’

‘Oh!’

‘We don’t quite agree philosophically, for he is too thick with
Bradlaugh’s party, but I know he’s coming round to Agnosticism. Poor
Tom! He is so clever, and has been so unfortunate. He married miserably,
you know.’

‘Indeed,’ said Alma, not much interested.

‘There was a black-eyed sibyl of a woman who admired one of the
Socialist lecturers, and when he died actually went to his lodgings, cut
off his head, and carried it home under her cloak in the omnibus.’

‘Horrible!’ said Alma with a shudder. ‘But what for?’

‘To _boil_, my dear, so that she might keep the skull as a sacred relic!
When Tom was introduced to her she had it under a glass case on her
mantelpiece. Well, she was a very intellectual creature, wonderfully
“advanced,” as they call it, and Tom was infatuated enough to make her
his wife. They lived together for a year or so; after which she took to
Spiritualism, and finally died in a madhouse. So poor Tom’s free, and I
hope when he marries again he’ll be more lucky.’

Of course Miss Combe did not for a moment believe that her brother would
have ever had any attraction in the eyes of her rich friend; for Tom
Combe was the reverse of winsome, even to humbler maidens--few of whom
felt drawn to a man who never brushed his hair, had a beard like a
Communist refugee, and smelt strongly of beer and tobacco. But blood is
thicker than water, and Miss Combe could not forbear putting in a word
in season.

The word made little or no impression. The stately beauty walked
silently on full of her own thoughts and dreams.




CHAPTER VII.--A SIDE CURRENT.


               That bore of bores--a tedious male cousin!--Old Play.


Loitering slowly onward from stile to stile, from field to field, and
from pasture to pasture, the two ladies at last reached a country road
leading right through the heart of the parish, and commanding from time
to time a view of the distant sea. They found Fensea, as usual, fast
asleep, basking in the midst of its own breath; the red-tiled houses
dormant, the population invisible, save in the square or market-place
opposite the tavern, where a drowsy cart-horse was blinking into a water
trough, and a somnambulistic ostler was vacantly looking on. Even in
the open shops such as Radford the linendraper’s and Summerhayes the
grocer’s, nothing seemed doing. But just as they left the village behind
them, and saw in front of them the spire of the village church peeping
through the trees, they suddenly came face to face with a human being
who was walking towards them in great haste and with some indications of
ill-temper.

‘Ah, here you are!’ ejaculated this individual. ‘I have been hunting for
you up and down.’

He was a man under thirty, and looking very little over twenty, though
his face showed little of the brightness and candour of early manhood.
His hair was cropped close and he was clean-shaven; his eyes were
yellowish and large, of an expression so fixed and peculiar as to have
been compared by irreverent friends to ‘hard-boiled eggs’; his forehead
was low, his jaw coarse and determined. With regard to his dress, it
was of the description known as horsey; short coat and tight-fitting
trousers of light tweed, a low-crowned hat of the same material, white
neckcloth fastened by a horseshoe pin.

This was George Craik, son of Sir George Craik, Bart., of Craik Castle,
in the neighbourhood, and Alma’s cousin on her father’s side.

Alma greeted him with a nod, while he shook hands with her companion.

‘Did you ride over, George?’ she inquired.

‘Yes; I put my nag up at the George, and walked up to the Larches. Not
finding you at home, I strolled down to the vicarage, thinking to find
you _there_. But old Bradley is not at home; so I suppose there was no
attraction to take you.’

The young lady’s cheek flushed, and she looked at her relation, not too
amicably.

‘Old Bradley, as you call him (though he is about your own age, I
suppose), is away in London. Did you want to see him?’

George shrugged his shoulders, and struck at his boots irritably with
his riding-whip.

‘I wanted to see _you_, as I told you. By the way, though, what’s this
they’re telling me about Bradley and the Bishop? He’s come to the length
of his tether at last, I suppose? Well, I always said he was no better
than an atheist, and a confounded radical into the bargain.’

‘An atheist, I presume,’ returned the young lady superciliously, ‘is a
person who does not believe in a Supreme Being. When you describe Mr.
Bradley as one, you forget he is a minister of the Church of Christ.’

George Craik scowled, and then laughed contemptuously.

‘Of course _you_ defend him!’ he cried. ‘You will tell me next, I dare
say, that you share his opinions.’

‘When you explain to me what they are, I will inform you,’ responded
Alma, moving slowly on, while George lounged after her, and Miss Combe
listened in amused amazement.

‘It’s a scandal,’ proceeded the young man, ‘that a fellow like that
should retain a living in the Church. Cripps tells me that his sermon
last Sunday went slap in the face of the Bible. I myself have heard him
say that some German fellow had proved the Gospels to be a tissue of
falsehoods.’

Without directly answering this invective, Alma looked coldly round at
her cousin over her shoulder. Her expression was not encouraging, and
her manner showed a very natural irritation.

‘How amiable we are this morning!’ she exclaimed. ‘Pray, do you come
all the way from Craik to give me a discussion on the whole duty of a
Christian clergyman? Really, George, such attempts at edification have a
curious effect, coming from _you_.’

The young man flushed scarlet, and winced nervously under his cousin’s
too ardent contempt.

‘I don’t pretend to be a saint,’ he said, ‘but I know what I’m talking
about. I call Bradley a renegade! It’s a mean thing, in my opinion, to
take money for preaching opinions in which a man does not believe.’

‘Only just now you said that he preached heresy--or atheism--whatever
you like to call it.’

‘Yes; and is paid for preaching the very reverse.’

Alma could no longer conceal her irritation.

‘Why should we discuss a topic you do not understand? Mr. Bradley is a
gentleman whose aims are too high for the ordinary comprehension, that
is all.’

‘Of course you think me a fool, and are polite enough to say so!’
persisted George. ‘Well, I should not mind so much if Bradley had not
succeeded in infecting _you_ with his pernicious opinions. He _has_ done
so, though you may deny it! Since he came to the neighbourhood, you have
not been like the same girl. The fellow ought to be horsewhipped if he
had his deserts.’

Alma stopped short, and looked the speaker in the face.

‘Be good enough to leave me,--and come back when you are in a better
temper.’

George gave a disagreeable laugh.

‘No; I’m coming to lunch with you.’

‘That you shall not, unless you promise to conduct yourself like a
gentleman.’

‘Well, hang the parson,--since you can’t bear him to be discussed. I
didn’t come over to quarrel.’

‘You generally succeed in doing so, however.’

‘No fault of mine; you snap a fellow’s head off, when he wants to give
you a bit of good advice. ‘There, there,’ he added, laughing again, but
not cordially, ‘let us drop the subject. I want something to eat.’

Alma echoed the laugh, with about an equal amount of cordiality.

‘Now you are talking of what you do understand. Lunch will be served at
two.’

As she spoke they were passing by the church gate, and saw, across the
churchyard, with its long rank grass and tombstones stained with mossy
slime, the old parish church of Fensea:--a quaint timeworn structure,
with an arched and gargoyled entrance, Gothic windows, and a belfry of
strange device. High up in the belfry, and on the boughs of the great
ash-trees surrounding the burial acre, jackdaws were gathered, sleepily
discussing the weather and their family affairs. A footpath, much
overgrown with grass, crossed from the church porch to a door in the
weather-beaten wall communicating with the adjacent vicarage--a large,
dismal, old-fashioned residence, buried in gloomy foliage.

Miss Combe glanced at church and churchyard with the air of superior
enlightenment which a Christian missionary might assume on approaching
some temple of Buddha or Brahma. George, glancing over the wall, uttered
an exclamation.

‘What’s the matter now?’ demanded Alma.

‘Brown’s blind mare grazing among the graves,’ said young Craik
with righteous indignation. He was about to enlarge further on the
delinquencies of the vicar, and the shameful condition of the parish, of
which he had just discovered a fresh illustration, but, remembering
his recent experience, he controlled himself and contented himself with
throwing a stone at the animal, which was leisurely cropping the grass
surrounding an ancient headstone. They walked on, and passed the front
of the vicarage, which looked out through sombre ash-trees on the road.
The place seemed dreary and desolate enough, despite a few flower-beds
and a green lawn. The windows were mantled in dark ivy, which drooped in
heavy clusters over the gloomy door.

Leaving the vicarage behind them, the three followed the country road
for about a mile, when, passing through the gate of a pretty lodge, they
entered an avenue of larch-trees leading up to the mansion to which they
gave their name. Here all was bright and well kept, the grass swards
cleanly swept and variegated with flower-beds, and leading on to
shrubberies full of flowering trees. The house itself, an elegant modern
structure, stood upon a slight eminence, and was reached by two marble
terraces commanding a sunny view of the open fields and distant sea.

It may be well to explain here that the Larches, with a large extent of
the surrounding property, belonged to Miss Alma Craik in her own right,
the lady being an orphan and an only child. Her father, a rich railway
contractor, had bought the property and built the house just before she
was born. During her infancy her mother had died, and before she was
of age her father too had joined the great majority; so that she found
herself, at a very early age, the heiress to a large property, and with
no relations in the world save her uncle, Sir George Craik, and his son.
Sir George, who had been knighted on the completion of a great railway
bridge considered a triumph of engineering skill, had bought an adjacent
property at about the time when his brother purchased the lands-of
Fensea.

The same contrast which was noticeable between the cousins had existed
between the brothers, Thomas and George Craik. They were both
Scotchmen, and had begun life as common working engineers, but there the
resemblance ceased. Thomas had been a comparative recluse, thoughtful,
melancholy, of advanced opinions, fond of books and abstruse
speculation; and his daughter’s liberal education had been the
consequence of his culture, and in a measure of his radicalism.
George was a man of the world, quick, fond of money, a Conservative in
politics, and a courtier by disposition, whose ambition was to found a
‘family,’ and who disapproved of all social changes unconnected with
the spread of the railway system and the success of his own commercial
speculations. Young George was his only son, and had acquired, at a very
early age, all the instincts (not to speak of many of the vices) of the
born aristocrat. He was particularly sensitive on the score of his
lowly origin, and his great grudge against society was that it had
not provided him with an old-fashioned ancestry. Failing the fact, he
assumed all the fiction, of an hereditary heir of the soil, but would
have given half his heirloom to any one who could have produced for him
an authentic ‘family tree,’ and convinced him that, despite his father’s
beginnings, his blood had in it a dash of ‘blue.’

George Craik lunched with his cousin and her companion in a spacious
chamber, communicating with the terrace by French windows opening to
the ground. He was not a conversationalist, and the meal passed in
comparative silence. Alma could not fail to perceive that the young man
was unusually preoccupied and taciturn.

At last he rose without ceremony, strolled out on the terrace, and lit a
cigar. He paced up and down for some minutes, then, with the air of one
whose mind is made up, he looked in and beckoned to his cousin.

‘Come out here,’ he said. ‘Never mind your hat--there is no sun to speak
of.’

After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped out and joined him.

‘Do you want me?’ she asked carelessly. ‘I would rather leave you
to your smoke, and go to the library with Miss Combe. We’re studying
Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles” together, and she reads a portion
aloud every afternoon.’

She knew that something was coming by the fixed gaze with which he
regarded her, and the peculiar expression in his eyes. His manner
was far less like that of a lover than that of a somewhat sulky and
tyrannical elder brother,--and indeed they had been so much together
from childhood upward that she felt the relation between them to be
quite a fraternal one. Nevertheless, his mind just then was occupied
with a warmer sentiment--the one, indeed, which often leads the way to
wedlock.

He began abruptly enough.

‘I say, Alma, how long is this to last?’ he demanded not without
asperity.

‘What, pray?’

‘Our perpetual misunderstandings. I declare if I did not know what a
queer girl you are, I should think you detested me!’

‘I like you well enough, George,--when you are agreeable, which is not
so often as I could wish.’

Thus she answered, with a somewhat weary laugh.

‘But you know I like _you_ better than anything in the world!’ he cried
eagerly. ‘You know I have set my heart on making you my wife.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, George!’ replied Alma. ‘Love between cousins is an
absurdity.’

She would have added an ‘enormity,’ having during her vagrant studies
imbibed strong views on the subject of consanguinity, but, advanced as
she was, she was not quite advanced enough to discuss a physiological
and social problem with the man who wanted to marry her. In simple
truth, she had the strongest personal objection to her cousin, in his
present character of lover.

‘I don’t see the absurdity of it,’ answered the young man, ‘nor does my
father. His heart is set upon this match, as you know; and besides, he
does not at all approve of your living the life you do--alone, without a
protector, and all that sort of thing.’

By this time Alma had quite recovered herself, and was able to reassume
the air of sweet superiority which is at once so bewitching in a pretty
woman, or so irritating. It did not bewitch George Craik; it irritated
him beyond measure. A not inconsiderable experience of vulgar amours in
the country, not to speak of the business known as sowing wild oats’ in
Paris and London, had familiarised him with a different type of woman.
In his cousin’s presence he felt, not abashed, but at a disadvantage.
She had a manner, too, of talking down to him, as to a younger brother,
which he disliked exceedingly; and more than once, when he had talked to
her in the language of love, he had smarted under her ridicule.

So now, instead of taking the matter too seriously, she smiled frankly
in his face, and quietly took his arm.

‘You must not talk like that, George,’ she said, walking up and down
with him. ‘When you do, I feel as if you were a very little boy, and I
quite an old woman. Even if I cared for you in that way--and I don’t,
and never shall--we are not at all suited to each other. Our thoughts
and aims in life are altogether different. I like you very much as a
cousin, of course, and that is just the reason why I can never think of
you as a husband. Don’t talk of it again, please!--and forgive me for
being quite frank--I should not like you to have any misconception on
the subject.’

‘I know what it is,’ he cried angrily. ‘It is that clergyman fellow! He
has come between us.’

‘Nothing of the sort,’ answered Alma with heightened colour. ‘If there
was not another man in the world, it would be all the same so far as you
and I are concerned.’

‘I don’t believe a word of it. Bradley is your choice. A pretty choice!
A fellow who is almost a beggar, and in a very short time will be kicked
out of the Church as a heretic.’

She released his arm, and drew away from him in deep exasperation; but
her feeling towards him was still that of an elder sister annoyed at the
_gaucherie_ of a privileged brother.

‘If you continue to talk like that of Mr. Bradley, we shall quarrel,
George. I think you had better go home now, and think it over. In any
case, you will do no good by abusing an innocent man who is vastly your
superior.’

All the bad blood of George Craik’s heart now mounted to his face, and
his frame shook with rage.

‘Bradley will have to reckon with me,’ he exclaimed furiously. ‘What
right has he to raise his eyes towards you? Until he came down here, we
were the best of friends; but he has poisoned your heart against me, and
against all your friends. Never mind! I’ll have it out with him, before
many days are done!’

Without deigning to reply, Alma walked from him into the house.

An hour later, George Craik mounted his horse at the inn, and rode
furiously homeward. An observer of human nature, noticing the expression
of his countenance, and taking count of his square-set jaw and savage
mouth, would have concluded perhaps that Alma estimated his opposition,
and perhaps his whole character, somewhat too lightly. He had a
bull-dog’s tenacity, when he had once made up his mind to a course of
action.

But when he was gone, the high-spirited lady of his affections dismissed
him completely from her thoughts. She joined Miss Combe in the library,
and was soon busy with the problem of the Unknowable, as presented in
the pages of the clearest-headed philosopher of our time.




CHAPTER VIII.--MYSTIFICATIONS.


               ‘What God hath joined, no man shall put asunder,’

               Even so I heard the preacher cry--and blunder!

               Alas, the sweet old text applied could he

               Only in Eden, or in Arcady.

               This text, methinks, is apter, more in season--

               ‘What man joins, God shall sunder--when there’s reason!’

                        _Mayfair: a Satire_ .


Ambrose Bradley came back from London a miserable man. Alighting late
in the evening at the nearest railway station, nearly ten miles distant,
he left his bag to be sent on by the carrier, and walked home through
the darkness on foot. It was late when he knocked at the vicarage doer,
and was admitted by his housekeeper, a melancholy village woman, whose
husband combined the offices of gardener and sexton. The house was dark
and desolate, like his thoughts. He shut himself up in his study, and at
once occupied himself in writing his sermon for the next day, which was
Sunday. This task occupied him until the early summer dawn crept coldly
into the room.

The Sunday came, dull and rainy; and Bradley went forth to face his
congregation with a deepening sense of guilt and shame. A glance showed
him that Alma occupied her usual place, close under the pulpit, but he
was careful not to meet her eyes. Not far from her sat Sir George Craik
and his son, both looking the very reverse of pious minded.

It was a very old church, with low Gothic arches and narrow painted
windows, through which little sunlight ever came. In the centre of the
nave was the tomb of the old knight of Fensea, who had once owned the
surrounding lauds, but whose race had been extinct for nearly a century;
he was depicted, life-size, in crusader’s costume, with long two-handed
sword by his side, and hands crossed lying on his breast. On the
time-stained walls around were other tombstones, with quaint Latin
inscriptions, some almost illegible; but one of brand-new marble
recorded the virtues of Thomas Craik, deceased, the civil engineer.

Alma noticed in a moment that Bradley was ghastly pale, and that he
faced his congregation with scarcely a remnant of his old assurance, or
rather enthusiasm. His voice, however, was clear and resonant as ever,
and under perfect command.

He preached a dreary sermon, orthodox enough to please the most
exacting, and on an old familiar text referring to those sins which are
said, sooner or later, to ‘find us out.’ All those members of the flock
who had signed the letter to the Bishop were there in force, eager to
detect new heresy, or confirmation of the old backsliding. They were
disappointed, and exchanged puzzled looks with one another. Sir George
Craik, who had been warned by his son to expect something scandalous,
listened with a puzzled scowl.

The service over, Alma lingered in the graveyard, expecting the
clergyman to come and seek her, as he was accustomed to do. He did
not appear; but in his stead came her uncle and cousin, the former
affectionately effusive, the latter with an air of respectful injury.
They went home with her and spent the afternoon. When they had driven
away, she announced her intention, in spite of showery weather and
slushy roads, of going to evening service. Miss Combe expressed her
desire of accompanying her, but meeting with no encouragement, decided
to remain at home.

There were very few people at the church that evening, and the service
was very short. Again Alma noticed the vicar’s death-pale face and
always averted eyes, and she instinctively felt that something terrible
had wrought a change in him. When the service was done, she waited for
him, but he did not come.

Half an hour afterwards, when it was quite dark, she knocked at the
vicarage door. It was answered by the melancholy housekeeper.

‘Is Mr. Bradley at home? I wish to speak to him.’

The woman looked confused and uncomfortable.

‘He be in, miss, but I think he be gone to bed wi’ a headache. He said
he were not to be disturbed, unless it were a sick call.’

Utterly amazed and deeply troubled, Alma turned from the door.

‘Tell him that I asked for him,’ she said coldly.

‘I will, miss,’ was the reply; and the door was closed.

With a heavy heart, Alma walked away Had she yielded to her first
impulse, she would have returned and insisted on an interview; but she
was too ashamed. Knowing as she did the closeness of the relationship
between them, knowing that the man was her accepted lover, she was
utterly at a loss to account for his extraordinary conduct. Could
anything have turned his heart against her, or have aroused his
displeasure? He had always been so different; so eager to meet her gaze
and to seek her company. _Now_, it was clear, he was completely changed,
and had carefully avoided her; nay, she had no doubt whatever, from the
housekeeper’s manner, that he had instructed her to deny him.

She walked on, half pained, half indignant. The night was dark, the road
desolate.

All at once she heard footsteps behind her, as of one rapidly running.
Presently someone came up breathless, and she heard a voice calling her
name.

‘Is it _you_, Alma?’ called the voice, which she recognised at once as
that of Bradley.

‘Yes, it is I,’ she answered coldly.

The next moment he was by her side.

‘I came after you. I could not let you go home without speaking a word
to you.’

The voice was strangely agitated, and its agitation communicated itself
to the hearer. She turned to him trembling violently, with an impulsive
cry.

‘O Ambrose, what has happened?’

‘Do not ask me to-night,’ was the reply.

‘When I have thought it all over, I shall be able to explain, but not
_now_. My darling, you must forgive me if I seem unkind and rude, but I
have been in great, great trouble, and even now I can scarcely realise
it all.’

‘You have seen the Bishop?’ she asked, thinking to touch the quick of
his trouble, and lead him to confession.

‘I have seen him, and, as I expected, I shall have to resign or suffer
a long persecution. Do not ask me to tell you more yet! Only forgive me
for having seemed cold and unkind--I would cut off my right hand rather
than cause you pain.’

They were walking on side by side in the direction of the ‘Larches.’ Not
once did Bradley attempt to embrace the woman he loved, or even to take
her hand. For a time she retained her self-possession, but at last,
yielding to the sharp strain upon her heart, she stopped short, and with
a sob, threw her arms around his neck.

‘Ambrose, why are you so strange? Have we not sworn to be all in all to
one another? Have I not said that your people shall be my people,
your God my God? Do not speak as if there was any change. Whatever
persecution you suffer I have a right to share.’

He seemed to shrink from her in terror, and tried to disengage himself
from her embrace.

‘Don’t, my darling! I can’t bear it! I need all my strength, and you
make me weak as a child. All _that_ is over now. I have no right to love
you.’

‘No right?’

‘None. I thought it might have been, but now I know it is impossible.
And I am not worthy of you; I was never worthy.’

‘Ambrose! has your heart then changed?’ ‘It will never change. I shall
love you till I die. But now you must see that all is different, that
our love is without hope and without blessing. There, there; don’t
weep!’ ‘You will always be the same to me,’ she cried. ‘Whatever
happens, or has happened, nothing can part you and me, if your heart is
still the same.’

‘You do not understand!’ he returned, and as he spoke he gently put her
aside. ‘All must be as if we had never met. God help me, I am not so
lost, so selfish, as to involve you in my ruin, or to preserve your
love with a living lie. Have compassion on me! I will see you again, or
better still, I will write to you--and then, you will understand.’

Before she could say another word to him he was gone. She stood alone
on the dark road, not far from the lights of the lodge. She called after
him, but he gave no answer, made no sign. Terror-stricken, appalled, and
ashamed, she walked on homeward, and entering the house, passed up to
her room, locked the door, and had her dark hour alone.

*****

The next day Alma rose early after a sleepless night. She found awaiting
her on the breakfast table a letter which had been brought by hand. She
opened it and read as follows:

My Darling,--Yes, I shall call you so for the last time, though it means
almost blasphemy. You would gather from my wild words last night that
what has happened forever puts out of sight and hope my dream of making
you my wife. You shall not share my degradation. You shall not bear the
burthen of my unfortunate opinions as a clergyman, now that my social
and religious plans and aims have fallen like a house of cards. It is
not that I have ceased to regard you as the one human being that could
make martyrdom happy for me, or existence endurable. As long as life
lasts I shall know that its only consecration would have come from you,
the best and noblest woman I have ever met, or can hope to meet. But the
very ground has opened under my feet. Instead of being a free agent,
as I believed, I am a slave, to whom love is a forbidden thing. Even to
think of it (as I have done once or twice, God help me, in my horror
and despair) is an outrage upon _you_. I shall soon be far from here. I
could not bear to dwell in the same place with one so dear, and to know
that she was lost to me for ever. Grant me your forgiveness, and if
you can, forget that I ever came to darken your life. My darling! my
darling! I cry again for the last time from the depths of my broken
heart, that God may bless you! For the little time that remains to me I
shall have this one comfort--the memory of your goodness, and that you
once loved me!

Ambrose Bradley.

*****

Alma read this letter again and again in the solitude of her own
chamber, and the more she read it the more utterly inscrutable it
seemed.

That night Bradley sat alone in his study, a broken and despairing man.
Before him on his desk lay a letter just written, in which he formally
communicated to the Bishop his resignation of his living, and begged to
be superseded as soon as possible. His eyes were red with weeping, his
whole aspect was indescribably weary and forlorn. So lost was he in his
own miserable thoughts, that he failed to notice a ring at the outer
door, and a momentary whispering which followed the opening of the door.
In another instant the chamber door opened, and a woman, cloaked and
veiled, appeared upon the threshold.

‘Alma!’ he cried, recognising the figure in a moment, and rising to his
feet in overmastering agitation.

Without a word she closed the door, and then, lifting her veil to show
a face as white as marble, gazed at him with eyes of infinite sorrow
and compassion. Meeting the gaze, and trembling before it, he sank again
into his chair, and hid his face in his hands.

‘Yes, I have come!’ she said in a low voice; then, without another word,
she crossed the room and laid her hand softly upon his shoulder.

Feeling the tender touch, he shivered and sobbed aloud.

‘O, why did you come?’ he cried. ‘You--you--have read my letter?’

‘Yes, Ambrose,’ she answered in the same low, far-away, despairing
voice. ‘That is why I came--to comfort you if I could. Look up! speak to
me! I can bear everything if I can only be still certain of your love.’

He uncovered his face, and gazed at her in astonishment.

‘What! can you forgive me?’

‘I have nothing to forgive,’ she replied mournfully. ‘Can you think that
my esteem for you is so slight a thing, so light a straw, that even this
cruel wind of evil fortune can blow it away? I know that you have been
honourable in word and deed; I know that you are the noblest and the
best of men. It is no fault of yours, dear, if God is so hard upon us;
no, no, _you_ are not to blame.’

‘But you do not understand! I am a broken man. I must leave this place,
and-----’

‘Listen to me,’ she said, interrupting him with that air of gentle
mastery which had ever exercised so great a spell upon him, and which
gave to her passionate beauty a certain splendour of command. ‘Do
you think you are quite just to _me_ when you speak--as you _have_
spoken--of leaving Fensea, and bidding me an eternal farewell? Since
this trouble in the church, you have acted as if I had no part and
parcel in your life, save that which might come if we were merely
married people; you have thought of me as of a woman to whom you were
betrothed, not as of a loving friend whom you might trust till death.
Do you think that my faith in you is so slight a thing that it cannot
survive even the loss of you as a lover, if that must be? Do you not
know that I am all yours, to the deepest fibre of my being, that your
sorrow is my sorrow, your God my God--even as I said? I am your sister
still, even if I am not to be your wife, and whither you go, be sure I
shall follow.’

He listened to her in wonder; for in proportion as he was troubled, she
was strangely calm, and her voice had a holy fervour before which he
bent in reverent humiliation. When she ceased, with her soft hand still
upon his shoulder, he raised his eyes to her, and they were dim with
tears.

‘You are too good!’ he said. ‘I am the dust beneath your feet.’

‘You are my hero and my master. As Heloise was to Abelard, so would I be
to you. So why should you grieve? I shall be to you as before, a loving
friend, perhaps a comforter, till death separates us in this world, to
meet in a better and a fairer.’

He took her hands in his own, and kissed them, his tears still falling.

‘Thank God you are so true! But how shall I look you in the face after
what has happened? You must despise me so much--yes, yes, you _must!_’

She would have answered him with fresh words of sweet assurance, but he
continued passionately:

‘Think of the world, Alma! Think of your own future, your own happiness!
Your life would be blighted, your love wasted, if you continued to care
for me. Better to forget me! better to say farewell!’

‘Do _you_ say that, Ambrose?’ she replied; ‘_you_ who first taught
me that love once born is imperishable, and that those He has once
united--not through the body merely, but through a sacrament of
souls--can never be sundered? Nay, you have still your work to do in the
world, and I--shall I not help you still? You will not go away?’

‘I have written my resignation to the Bishop. I shall quit this place
and the Church’s ministry for ever.’

‘Do not decide in haste,’ she said. ‘Is _this_ the letter?’

And as she spoke she went to the desk and took the letter in her hand.

‘Yes.’

‘Let me _burn_ the letter.’

‘Alma!’

‘Give yourself another week to think it over, for my sake. All this has
been so strange and so sudden that you have not had time to think it
out. For my sake, reflect.’

She held the letter over the lamp and looked at him for his answer;
he hung down his head in silence, and, taking the attitude for
acquiescence, she suffered the paper to reach the flame, and in a few
seconds it was consumed.

‘Good night!’ she said. ‘I must go now.’

‘Good night! and God bless you, Alma!’ They parted without one kiss or
embrace, but, holding each other’s hands, they looked long and tenderly
into each other’s faces. Then Alma went as she came, slipping quietly
away into the night. But no sooner had she left the vicarage than all
her self-command forsook her, and she wept hysterically under cover of
the darkness.

‘Yes, his God is my God,’ she murmured to herself. ‘May He give me
strength to bear this sorrow, and keep us together till the end!’




CHAPTER IX.--FAREWELL TO FENSEA.


_I am sick of time serving. I was borne in the land of Mother-Nakedness;
she who bare me was a true woman, and my father was sworn vassal to
King Candour, ere he died of a sunstroke; but villains robbed me of my
birthright, and I was sent to serve as a mercenary in the army of old
Hypocrisy, whom all men now hail Emperor and Pope. Now my armour is
rotten, my sword is broken, and I shall never fight more. Heigho! I
would I were sleeping under a green tree, in the land where the light
shines, and there is no lying!--The Comedy of Counterfeits._

After that night’s parting the lovers did not meet for several days.
Bradley went gloomily about his parochial duties, and when he was not so
engaged he was shut up in his study, engaged in correspondence or gloomy
contemplation. Alma did not seek him out again, for the very simple
reason that the nervous shock she had received had seriously affected
her generally robust health, and brought on a sort of feverish hysteria
complicated with sleeplessness, so that she kept her room for some
days, finding a homely nurse in Miss Combe. When Sunday came she was too
unwell to go to church.

In the afternoon she received the following letter:--

Dearest Alma.--For so I must still call you, since my spirit shrinks
from addressing you under any more formal name. I have heard that you
are ill, and I know the cause is not far to seek, since it must lie at
the door of him whose friendship has brought you so much misery. Pray
God it is only a passing shadow in your sunny life! An eternity of
punishment would not adequately meet my guilt if it should seriously
imperil your happiness or your health! Write to me, since I dare not,
must not, come to you--just one word to tell me you are better, and that
my fears on your account are without foundation. In the pulpit to-day,
when I missed your dear face, I felt terror-stricken and utterly
abandoned. Hell itself seemed opening under my feet, and every word I
uttered seemed miserable blasphemy. I knew then, if I did not know it
before, that my faith, my religion, my eternal happiness or misery,
still depend on _you_. A. B.

Two hours later Bradley received this reply

‘Do not distress yourself, dearest. I shall soon be quite well again. I
have been thinking it all over in solitude, and I feel quite sure
that if we are patient God will help us. Try to forget your great
persecution, and think rather of what is more solemn and urgent--your
position in the Church, and the justification of your faith before the
world.’

Ambrose Bradley read the above, and thought it strangely cold and calm;
he was himself too distracted to read between the lines and perceive the
bitter anguish of the writer. He still lacked the moral courage to make
a clean breast of the truth, and confess to Alma that his change had
come through that sad discovery in London. He dreaded her sorrow more
than her anger; for he knew, or feared, that the one unpardonable sin in
her eyes would be--to have loved another woman. She had no suspicion of
the truth. An entanglement of a disgraceful kind, involving the life
of a person of her own sex, was the last thing to occur to her mind
in connection with her lover. She attributed everything, his change of
manner, his strange passion, his unreasoning despair, to the exquisite
sensitiveness of a proudly intellectual nature. How deluded she was by
her own idolatry of his character the reader knows. What cared he for
the Church’s inquisition _now_? What cared he for dogmatic niceties,
or spiritual difficulties, or philosophic problems? He was sick of the
whole business, The great problem troubled him no longer, save that he
felt more and more in revolt against any kind of authority, more and
more tired of the sins and follies and blind fatalities of the world.
Even her tender appeals to his vanity seemed trivial and beside the
question. His ambition was dead.

Again and again he tried to summon up courage enough to make a complete
explanation; but his heart failed him, and so he temporised. He _could_
not say the word which, in all probability, would sunder them for ever.
He would wait; perhaps Heaven, in its mercy, might relieve him, and
justify him. In his own mind he felt himself a martyr; yet he could
escape the sense of contamination consequent on the possession of so
guilty a secret. The pure currents of his life seemed poisoned,--as
indeed they were.

The situation was a perilous one. Behind all Alma’s assumption of tender
acquiescence, she was deeply wounded by her lover’s want of confidence
in her devotion. His manner had shocked her inexpressibly, more even
than she yet knew, yet it only drew her more eagerly towards him. In her
despair and anger, she turned to the topic which, from the first moment
of their acquaintance, had been constantly upon his tongue, and she
tried to persuade herself that her strongest feeling towards him was
religious and intellectual. In reality, she was hungering towards
him with all the suppressed and suffocating passion of an unusually
passionate nature. Had he been a reckless man, unrestrained by moral
sanctions, she would have been at his mercy. So implicit was her faith
in the veracity of his perception, and so strong at the same time was
his personal attraction for her, that she might have been ready, for his
sake, had he told her the whole truth, to accept as right any course
of conduct, however questionable, which he might sanctify as right and
just.

From all this it will be gathered that Miss Alma Craik was in a position
of no inconsiderable peril. She had long been dwelling far too much
in the sphere of ideas, not to say crotchets, for a young lady without
protectors. Her one safeguard was her natural purity of disposition,
coupled with her strength of will. She was not the sort of woman to
be seduced into wrong-doing, as weak women are seduced, against her
conscience. Any mistake she might make in life was certain to be the
result of her own intellectual acquiescence,--or of wilful deception,
which indeed was imminent.

So the days passed on, in deepening gloom; for the situation was a
wretched one. Many other letters were interchanged, but the two seldom
met, and when they did it was only briefly and in the presence of other
people.

It was a life of torture, and could not last.

Meantime the Bishop of the diocese had not been idle. He had consulted
with the powers of the Church, and all had come to one conclusion--that
under any circumstances, a public scandal must be avoided. Pending any
action on the part of his superiors, Bradley gave no fresh occasion for
offence. His sermons became old-fashioned, not to say infantine. For the
rest, he was ready to resign at a moment’s notice; and he wrote to the
Bishop to that effect, inviting him to choose a successor.

‘After thinking the matter well over,’ he wrote, ‘I have concluded
that your lordship is right, and that my opinions are at present out of
harmony with the principles of the Establishment. A little while ago I
might have been inclined to stand my ground, or at any rate not to yield
without a protest; but my mind has changed, and I shall resign without
a murmur. Nor shall I seek another living in the English Church as at
present constituted. Even if I were likely to succeed in my search,
I should not try. Let me depart in peace, and rely on my uttering no
syllable which can be construed into resistance.’

The Bishop answered him eagerly, in the following words:

My dear Sir,--I think you have decided wisely, and I am grateful to you
for the temper in which you have accepted the situation. You have the
spirit of a true Christian, though your ideas are errant from the great
principles of Christianity. What I would suggest is this, and I hope
it will meet with your approval:--that under the plea of ill-health,
or some similar pretext, you offer your resignation, and withdraw
_temporarily_ from your ministry. I say temporarily, because I believe
that a brief period of reflection will bring you back to us with all
your original enthusiasm, with all the fresh faith and fervour of your
first days. When that time comes, the Church, I need not say, will
remember your self-sacrifice, and receive you back in due season like
the Prodigal Son. Until then, believe me, now as ever, your faithful
friend and well-wisher,

W. M., Darkdale and Dells.

*****

The result of this correspondence was speedily seen in a paragraph which
appeared in the ‘Guardian’:--

‘We understand that the Rev. Ambrose Bradley, M.A., vicar of Fensea, has
resigned his living on account of continued ill-health. The living is
in the gift of the Bishop of the diocese, who has not yet appointed a
successor.’

This paragraph was copied into the the local paper, and when they read
it, the Craiks (father and son) were exultant. Alma saw it also, but as
Bradley had privately intimated his decision to her, it caused her no
surprise. But an affair of so much importance was not destined to be
passed over so quietly. A few days later, a paragraph appeared in some
of the more secular journals to the effect that the Vicar of Fensea
had ‘seceded’ from the Christian Church, on account of his inability to
accept its dogmas, more particularly the Miracles and the Incarnation.
The announcement fell like a thunderbolt, and no one was more startled
by it than the clergyman himself.

He at once sat down and wrote the following letter to the ‘Guardian’:--

Sir,--I have seen with much pain a paragraph in several journals to the
effect that my reason for resigning the living of Fensea is because I
have ceased to believe in the essential truths of Christianity. Permit
me with indignation to protest against this unwarrantable imputation,
both upon myself and upon a religion for which I shall always have the
deepest reverence. My reasons for ceasing to hold office are known to
the Church authorities alone. It is enough to say that they are partly
connected with physical indisposition, and partly with private matters
with which the public has nothing to do. I believe now, as I have always
believed, that the Church of England possesses within herself the secret
which may yet win back an errant world into the fold of Christian faith.
In ceasing to hold office as a Christian clergyman, I do not cease in
my allegiance to Jesus Christ or to the Church He founded; and all
assertions to the contrary are quite without foundation.--I am, Sir,
&c.,

Ambrose Bradley.

*****

It will be seen that this epistle was couched in the most ambiguous
terms; it was perfectly true, yet thoroughly misleading, as indeed it
was meant to be. When he had written and posted it, Bradley felt that he
had reached the depth of moral humiliation. Still, he had not the heart
just then to say anything which might do injury, directly or indirectly,
to the Establishment in which he had been born and bred.




CHAPTER X.--FROM THE POST-BAG.



I.

_Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik._

Versailles,--, 18--.

Dearest Alma,--I came here from Rouen this day week, and have more than
once sat down to write to you; but my heart was too full, and the words
would not come, until to-day. Since we parted--since at your loving
intercession I consented to wander abroad for a year, and to write you
the record of my doings from time to time--I have been like a man in the
Inferno, miserable, despairing, thinking only of the Paradise from which
he has fallen; in other words, my sole thought has been of the heavenly
days now past, and of you.

Well, I must not talk of that; I must conquer my passionate words and
try to write coldly, dispassionately, according to promise, of the
things that I have seen. That I can do so at all, will be a proof to
you, my darling, that I am already much better. Another proof is that
I am almost able (as you will see when you read on) to resume my old
British prerogative of self-satisfied superiority over everything
foreign, especially over everything French. It is extraordinary how
thoroughly national even a cold-blooded cosmopolite becomes when
he finds himself daily confronted by habits of thought he does not
understand.

I am staying at a small hotel on the Paris side of Versailles, within
easy reach of the gay city either by train or tram. I have exchanged my
white neckcloth for a black necktie, and there is nothing in my dress
or manner to mark me out for that most disagreeable of fishes out
of water--a Parson in Paris! I see my clerical brethren sometimes,
white-tied, black-coated, broad-brim’d-hatted, striding along the
boulevards defiantly, or creeping down bye-streets furtively, or peeping
like guilty things into the windows of the photograph shops in the Rue
Rivoli. As I pass them by in my rough tourist’s suit, they doubtless
take me for some bagman out for a holiday; and I--I smile in my sleeve,
thinking how out of place they seem, here in Lutetia of the Parisians.

But my heart goes out most to those other brethren of mine, who draw
their light from Rome. One pities them deeply _now_, in the time of
their tribulation, as they crawl, forlorn and despised, about their
weary work. The public prints are full of cruel things concerning them,
hideous lampoons, unclean caricatures; what the Communist left surviving
the journalist daily hacks and stabs. And indeed, the whole of this city
presents the peculiar spectacle of a people without religion, without
any sort of spiritual aspiration. Even that vague effluence of
transcendental liberalism, which is preached by some of their leading
poets and thinkers, is pretty generally despised, Talking with a
leading bookseller the other day concerning your idol, Victor Hugo, and
discussing his recent utterances on religious subjects, I found the good
_bourgeois_ to be of opinion that the great poet’s brain was softening
through old age and personal vanity! The true hero of the hour, now
all the tinsel of the Empire is rubbed away, is a writer named Zola,
originally a printer’s devil, who is to modern light literature
what Schopenhauer is to philosophy--a dirty, muddy, gutter-searching
pessimist, who translates the ‘anarchy’ of the ancients into the bestial
_argot_ of the Quarties Latin.

It has been very well said by a wit of this nation that if on any fine
day the news arrived in Paris that ‘_God was dead_,’ it would not cause
the slightest astonishment or interest in a single _salon_; indeed, to
all political intents and purposes the Divinity is regarded as extinct.
A few old-fashioned people go to church, and here and there in the
streets you see little girls in white going to confirmation; but the
majority of the people are entirely without the religious sentiment in
any form. A loathsome publication, with hideous illustrations, called
the _Bible pour Rire_, is just now being issued in penny numbers; and
the character of its humour may be guessed when I tell you that one of
the pictures represents the ‘bon Dieu,’ dressed like an old clothesman,
striking a lucifer on the sole of his boot, while underneath are the
words, ‘And God said, Let there be Light!’ The same want of good taste,
to put reverence aside as out of the question, is quite as manifest in
the higher literature, as where Hugo himself, in a recent poem, thus
describes the Tout-Puissant, or All-Powerful:-

               Pris d’un vieux rhumatisme incurable à l’échine,

               Après avoir créé le monde, et la machine

               Des astres pêle-mêle au fond des horizons,

               La vie et l’engrenage énorme des saisons,

               La fleur, l’oiseau, la femme, et l’abîme, et la terre,

               Dieu s’est laissé tomber dans son fauteuil-Voltaire!

Is it any wonder that a few simple souls, who still cherish a certain
reverence for the obsolete orthodox terminology should go over in
despair to Rome?

One of the great questions of the day, discussed in a spirit of the
most brutal secularity, is Divorce. I know your exalted views on this
subject, your love of the beautiful old fashion which made marriage
eternal, a sacrament of souls, not to be abolished even by death itself.
Well, our French neighbours wish to render it a simple contract, to be
dissolved at the whim of the contracting-parties. Their own social life,
they think, is a living satire on the old dispensation.

But I sat down to write you a letter about myself, and here I am prosing
about the idle topics of the day, from religion to the matrimonial
musical glasses. I am wonderfully well in body; in fact, never better.
But oh, my Alma, I am still miserably sick of soul! More than ever do I
perceive that the world wants a creed. When the idea of God is effaced
from society, it becomes--this Paris--a death’s head with a mask of
pleasure:--

               The time is out of joint--ah cursed spite,

               That ever I was born to set it right!

All my foolish plans have fallen like a house of cards. I myself seem
strangling in the evils of the modern snake of Pessimism. If it were
not for you, my guardian angel, my star of comfort, I think I should try
euthanasia. Write to me! Tell me of yourself, of Fensea; no news that
comes from my heaven on earth will fail to interest and soothe me. What
do you think of my successor? and what does the local Inquisition think
of him? Next to the music of your voice will be the melody of your
written words. And forgive this long rambling letter. I write of
trifles light as air, because I _cannot_ write of what is deepest in my
heart.--Yours always,

Ambrose Bradley.



II.


_From Alma Craik to Ambrose Bradley._

Thanks, dearest Ambrose, for your long and loving letter. It came to me
in good season, when I was weary and anxious on your account, and I am
grateful for its good tidings and its tone of growing cheerfulness. You
see my prescription is already working wonders, for you wrote like your
old self--almost! I am so glad that you are well in health, so thankful
you are beginning to forget your trouble. If such a cure is possible in
a few short weeks, what will time not do in a year?

There is no news, that is, none worth telling.

Your successor (since you ask concerning him) is a mild old gentleman
with the most happy faith in _all_ the articles of the Athanasian
creed--particularly that of eternal punishment, which he expounds with
the most benevolent of smiles. I should say he will be a favourite;
indeed, he is a favourite already, though he has the disadvantage, from
the spinster point of view, of being a very, very married man. He has a
wife and seven children, all girls, and is far too poor in this world’s
goods to think much of his vested interest in those of the next world. I
have heard him preach once, which has sufficed.

What you say of life in France interests me exceedingly, and my heart
bleeds for those poor priests of the despised yet divine creed. If you
had not taught me a purer and a better faith, I think I should be a
Roman Catholic, and even as it is, I can feel nothing but sympathy for
the Church which, after all, possesses more than all others the form of
the Christian tradition.

Agatha Combe has returned to London. She is still full of that beautiful
idea (was it yours or mine, or does it belong to both of us?) of the New
Church, in which Religion, Science, and Art should all meet together in
one temple, as the handmaids of God. I hope you have not dismissed
it from your mind, or forgotten that, at a word from you, it may be
realised. Agatha’s conception of it was, I fear, a little too secular;
her Temple of worship would bear too close a resemblance to her
brother’s dingy Hall of Science. She has just finished a treatise, or
essay, to be published in one of the eclectic magazines, the subject,
‘Is growth possible to a dogmatic religion?’ Her answer is in the
negative, and she is dreadfully severe on what she calls the ‘tinkering’
fraternity, particularly her _bête noire_, young Mr. Mallock. Poor
Agatha! She should have been a man by rights, but cruel fate, by just a
movement of the balance, made her the dearest of old maids, and a Blue!
Under happier conditions, with just a little less of the intellectual
leaven, she would have made a capital wife for such a parson as your
successor; for in spite of her cleverness, and what they call her
infidelity, she is horribly superstitious--won’t pass a pin in the road
without lifting it up, throws salt over her shoulder if she happens
to spill a morsel, and can tell your fortune by the cards! Besides all
this, she is a born humanitarian; her thoughts for ever running on
the poor, and flannel, and soup-kitchens, and (not to leave the lower
animals out of her large heart) the woes of the vivisected dogs and
rabbits. And yet, when the pen is in her hand and her controversial vein
is open, she hurls her argumentative thunderbolts about like a positive
Demon!

There, I am trying to rattle on, as if I were a giddy girl of eighteen.
But my heart, like yours, is very full. Sometimes I feel as if you were
lost to me for ever; as if you were gone into a great darkness,
and would never come back. Dearest, you think of me sometimes--nay,
often?--and when your wound is healed, you will come back to me, better
and stronger and happier than ever, will you not? For am I not your
Rachel, who still follows you in soul wherever you go? I sit here for
hours together, thinking of the happy days that are fled for ever; then
I wander out to the churchyard, and look at the dear old vicarage, and
wherever I go I find some traces of him I love. Yesterday I went over to
the abbey. Do you remember, dear, when we last met there, and swore our
troth in the moonlight, with our ears full of the solemn murmuring of
the sea?

That reminds me of what you say concerning the French agitation on the
subject of Divorce. I read some time ago an abstract of M. Naquet’s
famous discourse--it was published in the English newspapers--and I felt
ashamed and sad beyond measure. How low must a nation have fallen when
one of its politicians dares to measure with a social foot-rule
the holiest of human covenants! If marriage is a bond to be worn or
abandoned at pleasure, if there is nothing more sacred between man and
woman than the mere union of the body, God help us women, and _me_ most
of all! For has not God already united my soul to yours, not as yet by
the sacrament of the Church, but by that sacrament of Love which is also
eternal; and if we were spiritually sundered, should I not die; and if
I thought that Death could break our sacrament of Love, should I not
become even as those outcast ones who believe there is no God? I have
never loved another man; you have never loved (how often have you not
sworn it to me!) another woman. Well, then, can man ever separate what
God has so joined together? Even if we were never man and wife in the
conventional sense, even if we never stand together at the earthly
altar, in the eyes of Heaven we are man and wife, and we have been
united at the altar of God. This, at least, is my conception of
Marriage.

Between those that love, Divorce (as these hucksters call it) is
impossible.

Alas! I write wildly, and my Abelard will smile at his handmaid’s eager
words. ‘Me-thinks the lady doth protest too much,’ I hear him exclaim
with Shakespeare. But I know that you hold with me that those things are
holy beyond vulgar conception.

Write to me again soon. All my joy in life is hearing from you.--Ever
your own,

Alma.



III.


_From Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik._

Dearest Alma,--Just a few lines to say that I am going on to Germany;
I will write to you again directly I come to an anchorage in that brave
land. For I am sick of France and Frenchmen; sick of a people that have
not been lessoned by misfortune, but still hunger for aggression and
revenge; sick of the Dead Sea fruit of Parisian pleasure, poisoned
and heart-eaten by the canker-worm of unbelief. Our English poetess
is virtuously indignant (you remember) with those who underrate this
nation.

               The English have a scornful insular way

               Of calling the French light, &c.

And it is true they are not light, but with the weight of their own
blind vanity, heavy as lead. The curse of spiritual dulness is upon
them. They talk rhodomontade and believe in nothing. How I burn for the
pure intellectual air of that nobler people which, in the name of the
God of Justice, recently taught France so terrible a lesson! Here, in
France, every man is a free agent, despising everything, the government
which he supports! the ideas which he fulminates, despising most his
own free, frivolous, miserable self: there, in Germany, each man is
a patriot and a pillar of the state, his only dream to uphold the
political fabric of a great nation. To efface one’s selfish interest is
the first step to becoming a good citizen; to believe in the government
of God, follows as a natural consequence.

What you say about our spiritual union, touches me to the soul, though
it is but the echo of my own fervent belief. But I am not so sure that
_all_ earthly unions, even when founded in affection and good faith, are
indissoluble. Surely also, there are marriages which it is righteous to
shatter and destroy?

You are a pure woman, to whom even a thought of impurity is impossible;
but alas! all women are not made in the same angelic mould, and we
see every day the spectacle of men linked to partners in every respect
unworthy. Surely you would not hold that the union of a true man with
a false woman, a woman who (for example) was untrue to her husband
in thought and deed, is to last for ever? I know that is the Catholic
teaching, that marriage is a permanent sacrament, and that no act of
the parties, however abominable, can render either of them free to
marry again; and we find even such half-hearted Liberals as Gladstone
upholding it (see his ‘Ecclesiastical Essays’), and flinging mud in the
blind face of Milton, because (out of the bitterness of his own cruel
experience) he argued the contrary. Divorce is recognised in our own
country and countenanced by our own religion; and I believe it to be
necessary for the guarantee of human happiness. What is most hideous in
our England is the horrible institution of the civil Court, where causes
that should be heard _in camerâ_ are exposed shamefully to the light of
day; so that men would rather bear their life-long torture than submit
to the ordeal of a degrading publicity, and only shameless men and women
dare to claim their freedom at so terrible a price.

I intended to write only a few lines, and here am I arguing with you on
paper, just as we used to argue in the old times _viva voce_, on a quite
indifferent question. Forgive me! And yet writing so seems like having
one of our nice, long, cosy, serious talks. Discussions of this kind are
like emptying one’s pocket to find what they contain; I never thought I
had any ideas on the subject till I began, schoolboy-like, to turn them
out!

God bless you, my darling! When you hear from me next, I shall be in
the land ol the ‘ich’ and the ‘nicht ich,’ of beer and philosophy, of
Deutschthum and Strasbourg pies.

Ambrose Bradley.



IV.


_The Same to the Same._

Dearest,--I wrote to you the other day from Berlin--merely a line to say
that my movements were uncertain, and asking you to address your next
letter care of Gradener the banker, here at Frankfort. I suppose there
must have been some delay in the transmission, or the letter must have
gone astray: at all events, here I am, and grievously disappointed to
find you have not written. Darling, do not keep me in suspense; but
answer this by return, and then you shall have a long prosy letter
descriptive of my recent experiences. Write! write!

Ambrose Bradley.



V.


_Alma Craik to Ambrose Bradley._

Dearest Ambrose,--You are right in supposing that your letter from
Berlin went astray; it has certainly never reached me, and you can
imagine my impatience in consequence. However, all’s well that ends
well; and the sight of your dear handwriting is like spring sunshine.

Since I last wrote to you I have been reading-in a French translation
those wonderful letters of Héloïse to the great Abelard, and his to her;
and somehow they seemed to bring you close to me, to recall your dear
face, the very sound of your beautiful voice. Dearest, what would you
have said if I had addressed this letter to you in the old sweet terms
used by my prototype--not for the world to see, but for your loving eyes
alone? ‘A son maître, ou plutôt à son père; à son époux, ou plutôt à son
frère: sa servante, ou plutôt sa fille; son épouse, ou plutôt sa sour;
à Ambrose, Alma.’ All these and more are you to me, my master and my
father, my husband and my brother; while I am at once your servant and
your daughter, your sister and your spouse. Do you believe, did you
ever feel inclined to believe, in the transmigration of souls? As I
read these letters, I seem to have lived before, in a stranger, stormier
time; and every word _she_ wrote seemed to be the very echo of my
burning heart. Ah! but our lot is happier, is it not? There is no shadow
of sin upon _us_ to darken our loving dream: we have nothing to undo,
nothing to regret; and surely our spiritual union is blest by God. For
myself, I want only one thing yet to complete my happiness--to see you
raised as _he_ was raised to a crown of honour and glory in the world.
What I think of you, all mankind must think of you, when they know you
as I know you, my apostle of all that is great and good. Ah, dearest, I
would gladly die, if by so doing I could win you the honour you deserve.

But I must stop now. When I begin to write to you, I scarcely know when
to cease. _Adieu, tout mon bien!_

Alma.



VI.


_Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik_

‘A Alma, sa bien-aimée épouse et sour en Jésus-Christ, Ambrose son époux
et frère en Jésus-Christ!’ Shall I begin thus, dearest, in the very
words of the great man to whom, despite my undeserving, you have
lovingly compared me? You see I remember them well. But alas! Abelard
was thrown on different days, when at least faith was _possible_. What
would he have become, I wonder, had he been born when the faith was
shipwrecked, and when the trumpet of Euroclydon was sounding the
destruction of all the creeds? Yonder, in France, one began to doubt
everything, even the divinity of love; so I fled from the Parisian
Sodom, trusting to find hope and comfort among the conquerors of Sedan.
Alas! I begin to think that I am a sort of modern Diogenes, seeking in
vain for a people with a Soul. I went first to Berlin, and found
there all the vice of Paris without its beauty, all the infidelity of
Frenchmen without their fitful enthusiasm in forlorn causes. The people
of Germany, it appears to me, put God and Bismarck in the same category;
they accept both as a solution of the political difficulty, but
they truly reverence neither. The typical German is a monstrosity,
a living-contradiction: intellectually an atheist, he assents to the
conventional uses of Deity; politically a freethinker, he is a slave to
the idea of nationality and a staunch upholder of the divine right of
kings. Long ago, the philosophers, armed with the jargon of an insincere
idealism, demolished Deism with one hand and set it up with the other;
what they proved by elaborate treatises not to exist, they established
as the only order of things worth believing; till at last the
culmination of philosophic inconsistency was reached in Hegel, who began
by the destruction of all religion and ended in the totem-worship of
second childhood. In the course of a very short experience, I have
learned cordially to dislike the Germans, and to perceive that, in spite
of their tall talk and their splendid organisation, they are completely
without ideas. In proportion as they have advanced politically, they
have retrograded intellectually. They have no literature now and no
philosophy; in one word, no spiritual zeal. They have stuck up as
their leader a man with the moral outlook of Brander in ‘Faust,’ a
swashbuckler politician, who swaggers up and down Europe and frowns
down liberalism wherever it appears. Upon my word, I even preferred the
Sullen Talent which he defeated at Sedan.

I think I see you smiling at my seeming anger; but I am not angry at
all--only woefully disenchanted.

This muddy nation stupefies me like its own beer. Its morality is
a sham, oscillating between female slavery in the kitchen and
male drunkenness in the beer-garden. The horrible military element
predominates everywhere; every shopkeeper is a martinet, every
philosopher a dull sergeant. And just in time to reap the fruit of the
predominant materialism or realism, has arisen the new Buddha Gautama
without his beneficence, his beauty, his tenderness, or his love for the
species.

Here in Frankfort (which I came to eagerly, thinking of its famous
Judenstrasse, and eager to find the idea of the ‘one God’ at least among
the Jews), I walk in the new Buddha’s footsteps wherever I go.

His name was Arthur Schopenhauer, a German of Germans, with the one
non-national merit, that he threw aside the mask of religion and
morality. He was a piggish, selfish, conceited, _honest_ scoundrel,
fond of gormandising, in love with his own shadow, miserable, and a
money-grubber like all his race. One anecdote they tell of him is worth
a thousand, as expressing the character of the man. Seated at the table
d’hôte here one day, and observing a stranger’s astonishment at the
amount he was consuming, Schopenhauer said, ‘I see you are astonished,
sir, that I eat twice as much as you, but the explanation is simple--_I
have twice as much brains!_’

The idea of this Heliogabalus of pessimism was that life is altogether
an unmixed evil; that all things are miserable of necessity, even the
birds when they sing on the green boughs, and the babes when they crow
upon the breast; and that the only happiness, to be secured by every man
as soon as possible, and the sooner the better, was in Nirwâna, or total
extinction. A cheerful creed, without a God of any kind--nay, without a
single godlike sentiment! There are pessimists and pessimists. Gautama
Buddha himself, _facile princeps_, based his creed upon infinite pity;
his sense of the sorrows of his fellow-creatures was so terrible as
to make existence practically unbearable. John Calvin was a Christian
pessimist; his whole nature was warped by the sense of infinite sin and
overclouded by the shadow of infinite justice. But this Buddha of
the Teutons is a different being; neither love nor pity, only a
predominating selfishness complicated with constitutional suspicion.

And yet, poor man, he was happy enough when his disciples hailed him
as the greatest philosopher of the age, the clearest intellect on
the planet; and nothing is more touching than to witness how, as his
influence grew, and he emerged from neglect, his faith in human nature
brightened. Had he lived a little longer and risen still higher in
esteem--had the powers that be crowned him, and the world applauded him,
he too, like Hegel, would doubtless have added to his creed a corollary
that, though there is no God, religion is an excellent thing; that
though there is no goodness, virtue is the only living truth!

Be that as it may, I am thoroughly convinced that there is no _via
media_ between Christ’s Christianity and Schopenhauer’s pessimism;
and these two religions, like the gods of good and evil, are just now
preparing for a final struggle on the battle-field of European thought.
Just at present I feel almost a pessimist myself, and inclined to laugh
more than ever at poor Kingsley’s feeble twaddle about this ‘singularly
well-constructed world.’ Every face I see, whether of Jew or Gentile,
is scribbled like the ledger with figures of addition and subtraction;
every eye is crowsfooted with tables of compound interest; and the
moneybags waddle up and down the streets, and look out of the country
house windows, like things without a soul. But across the river, at
Sachsenhausen, there are trees, in which the birds sing, and pretty
children, and lovers talking in the summer shade. I go there in the
summer afternoons and smoke my pipe, and think over the problem of the
time. Think you, dearest, that Schopenhauer was right, and that there
is no gladness or goodness in the world? Is the deathblow of foolish
supernaturalism the destruction also of heavenly love and hope? Nay, God
forbid! But this hideous pessimism is the natural revolt of the human
heart, after centuries of optimistic lies. Perhaps, when another century
has fled, mankind may thank God for Schopenhauer, who proved the potency
of materialistic Will, and for Strauss, who has shown the fallacy of
human judgment. The Germans have given us these two men as types of
their own degradation; and when we have thoroughly digested their bitter
gospel, we shall know how little hope for humanity lies _that_ way.
Meantime, the Divine Ideal, the spiritual Christ survives--the master of
the secret of sorrow, the lord of the shadowy land of hope. He turns his
back upon the temple erected in his name; he averts his sweet eyes
from those who deny He is, or ever was. He is patient, knowing that his
kingdom must some day come.

More than ever now do I feel what a power the Church might be if it
would only reconstruct itself by the light of the new knowledge. Without
it, both France and Germany are plunged into darkness and spiritual
death. As if man, constituted as he is, can exist without religion!
As if the creed of cakes and ale, or the gospel of Deutschthum and
Sauer-kraut were in any true sense of the word religion at all! No,
the hope and salvation of the human race lies now, as it lay eighteen
hundred years ago, in the Christian promise. If this life were all, if
this world were the play and not the prelude, then the new Buddha would
have conquered, and nothing be left us but Nirwâna. But the Spirit of
Man, which has created Christ and imagined God, knows better. It trusts
its own deathless instinct, and by the same law through which the
swallow wings its way, it prepares for flight to a sunnier zone.

Pray, my Alma, that even this holy instinct is not merely a dream! Pray
that God may keep us together till the time comes to follow the summer
of our love to its bright and heavenly home!--Yours till death, and
after death,

Ambrose Bradley.



VII.


_Alma Craik to Ambrose Bradley._

Your last letter, dearest Ambrose, has reached me here in London, where
I am staying for a short time with Agatha Combe. Everybody is out of
town, and even the Grosvenor Club (where I am writing this letter) is
quite deserted.

I never like London so much as when it is empty of everybody that one
knows.

And so you find the Germans as shallow as the French, and as far away
from the living truth it is your dream to preach? For my own part,
I think they must be rather a _stupid_ people, in spite of their
philosophic airs. Agatha has persuaded me lately to read a book by a man
called Haeckel, who is constructing the whole history of Evolution as
children make drawings, out of his own head; and when the silly man is
at a loss for a link in the chain, he invents one, and calls it by a
Latin name! I suppose Evolution is true (and I know you believe in it),
but if I may trust my poor woman’s wit, it proves nothing whatever. The
mystery of life remains just the same when all is said and done; and
I see as great a miracle in a drop of albumen passing through endless
progressions till it flowers in sense and soul, as in the creation of
all things at the fiat of an omnipotent personal God and Father. The
poor purblind German abolishes God altogether!

Agatha has read your Schopenhauer, and thinks him a wonderful man; I
believe, too, he has many disciples in this country. To me, judging
from what I hear of him, and also from your description of him, he seems
another _stupid_ giant--a Fee-fo-fi-fum full of self-conceit and hasty
pudding, and sure to fall a victim, some day, to Little Jack Horner.
But every word you write (it seems always like your own dear voice
speaking!) makes me think of yourself, of your quarrel with the Church,
and of your justification before the world. If purblind men like these
can persuade the world to listen to them, why should your ‘one talent,
which is death to lose,’ be wasted or thrown away? When you have
wandered a little longer, you must return and take your place as a
teacher and a preacher in the land, You must not continue to be an
exile. You are my hero, my Abelard, my teacher of all that is great
and good to a perverse generation, and I shall never be happy until
you reach the summit of your spiritual ambition and are recognised as a
modern apostle. You _must not_ leave the ministry; you must not abandon
your vocation; or if you do so, it must be only to change the scene of
your labours. Agatha Combe tells me that there is a great field for a
man like you in London; that the cultivated people here are sick of the
old dogmas, and yet equally sick of mere materialism; that what they
want is a leader such as you, who would take his stand upon the laws of’
reason, and preach a purified and exalted Christian ideal. Well, since
the English Establishment has rejected you, why not, in the greatest
city of the world, form a Church of your own? I have often thought
of this, but never so much as lately. There you are tongue-tied and
hand-tied, at the mercy of the ignorant who could never comprehend you;
_here_ you could speak with a free voice, as the great Abelard did when
he defied the thunders of the Vatican. Remember, I am rich. You have
only to say the word, and your handmaid (am I not still _that_, and your
spouse and your _sister_?) will upbuild you a Temple! Ah, how proudly!

Yes, think of _this_, think of the great work of your life, not of its
trivial disappointments. Be worthy of my dream of you, my Abelard.

When I see you wear your crown of honour with all the world worshipping
the new teaching, I shall be blest indeed.

Alma.



VIII.


_Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik._

Dearest Alma,--How good you are! How tenderly do you touch the core
of my own secret thought, making my whole spirit vibrate to the old
ambition, and my memory tremble with the enthusiasm of my first youth.
Oh, to be a modern Apostle, as you say! to sway the multitude with
words of power, to overthrow at once the tables of the money-changers of
materialism, and the dollish idols of the Old Church.

But I know too well my own incapacity, as compared with the magnitude
of that mighty task. I believe at once too little and too much; I should
shock the priests of Christ, and to the priests of Antichrist I should
be a standing jest; neither Montague nor Capidet would spare me, and I
should lose my spiritual life in some miserable polemical brawl.

It is so good of you, so like you, to think of it, and to offer out of
your own store to build me a church; but I am not so lost, so unworthy,
as to take advantage of your loving charity, and to secure my own
success--or rather, my almost certain failure--on such a foundation.

And that reminds me, dearest, of what in my mad vanity I had nearly
forgotten--the difference between our positions in the world. You are a
rich woman; I, as you know, am very poor. It was different, perhaps,
when I was an honoured member of the Church, with all its prizes and
honours before me; I certainly felt it to be different, though the
disparity always existed. But _now!_ I am an outcast, a ruined man,
without property of any kind. It would be base beyond measure to think
of dragging you down to my present level; and, remember, I have now no
opportunity to rise. If you linked your lot with mine, all the world
would think that I loved you, not for your dear self, but for your gold;
they would despise me, and think you were insane. No, dearest, I have
thought it sadly over, again and again, and I see that it is hopeless. I
have lost you for ever.

When you receive this, I shall be on my way to Rome.

How the very writing of that word thrills me, as if there were still
magic in the name that witched the world! Rome! the City of the Martyrs!
the City of the Church! the City of the Dead! Her glory is laid low,
her pride is dust and ashes, her voice is senile and old, and yet... the
name, the mighty deathless name, one to conjure with yet. Sometimes, in
my spiritual despair, I hear a voice whispering in my ear that one word
‘Rome’; and I seem to hear a mighty music, and a cry of rejoicing, and
to see a veiled Figure arising with the keys of all the creeds,--behind
her on the right her handmaid Science, behind her on the left her
handmaid Art, and over her the effulgence of the new-risen sun of
Christ.

And if such a dream were real, were it not possible, my Alma, that you
and I might enter the new Temple, not as man and wife, but as sister
and brother? There was something after all in that old idea of the
consecrated priest and the vestal virgin. I often think with St. Paul
that there is too much marrying and giving in marriage. ‘Brother and
sister’ sounds sweetly, does it not?

Forgive my wild words. I hardly know what I am writing. Your loving
letter has stirred all the fountains of my spirit, your kindness has
made me ashamed.

You shall hear from me again, from the very heart of the Seven Hills!
Meantime, God bless you!--Ever your faithful and devoted,

Ambrose Bradley.



IX.


_Alma Cram to Ambrose Bradley._

Be true to your old dream, dearest Ambrose, and remember that in its
fruition lies _my_ only chance of happiness. Do not talk of unworthiness
or unfitness; you are cruel to me when you distrust yourself. Will you
be very angry if I tell you a secret? Will you forgive me if I say to
you that even now the place where you shall preach the good tidings is
rising from the ground, and that in a little while, when you return, it
will be ready to welcome its master? But there, I have said too much.
If there is anything more you would know, you must guess it, dearest!
Enough to say that you have friends who love you, and who are not idle.

If I thought you meant what you said in your last I should indeed
despair; but it was the shadow of that abominable Schopenhauer who
spoke, and not my Abelard. To tell me that I am rich, and you are
poor--as if even a _mountain_ of money, high as Ararat, could separate
those whom God has joined! To talk of the world’s opinion, the people’s
misconception--as if the poor things who crawl on the ground could alter
the lives of those who soar with living thoughts to heaven! Get thee
behind me, Schopenhauer! When any voice, however like his own, talks of
the overthrow of the man I love, I only smile. I know better than to be
deceived by a trick of the ventriloquist. You and I know, my Ambrose,
that you have not been overthrown at all--that you have not fallen, but
risen--how high, the world shall know in a very little while.

Meantime, gather up strength, both of the body and the mind. Drink
strength from the air of the holy city, and come back to wear your
priestly robes. Your dream will be realised, be sure of that!

Do you think to daunt me when you say that I must not be your wife? Do
you think your handmaid cares so long as she may serve at your feet?
Call her by what name you please, spouse or sister, is it not all
the same? Your hope is my hope, your country my country, your God
my God--now and for ever. Only let us labour together earnestly,
truthfully, patiently, and all will be well.--Yours always faithfully
and affectionately,

Alma.


END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.