Kitabı oku: «Foxglove Manor, Volume I (of III)», sayfa 4

CHAPTER VI. THE UNKNOWN GOD

As the vicar entered the chapel, he stopped short, struck with astonishment at the singular appearance of the interior.

The sunlight streaming through the leaded diamond panes of the casements, instead of falling on the familiar pews, flagged nave, and solemn walls, shone with a startling effect on the heterogeneous contents of a museum and laboratory. Along one side of the building were ranged several glass cases containing collections of fossils, arctic and tropical shells, antique implements of flint, stone, and bronze, and geological specimens. The walls were decorated with savage curiosities – shields of skin, carved clubs and paddles, spears and arrows tipped with flint or fishbone, mats of grass, strings of wampum, and dresses of skins and feathers. On a couple of small shelves grinned two rows of hideous crania, gathered as ethnic types from all quarters of the barbarian world, and beside them lay a plaster cast of a famous paleolithic skull. On the various stands and tables in different parts of the room were retorts and crucibles, curious tubes, glasses and flasks, electric jars and batteries, balances, microscopes, prisms, strange instruments of brass and glass, and a bewildering litter of odds and ends, for which only a student of science could find a name or a use. At the further end of the room, under the coloured east window, stood an escritoire covered with a confused mass of paper, and beside it stood a small table piled with books.

As Mrs. Haldane and the vicar entered, the master of Foxglove Manor, who had been writing, rose, laid down his pipe, buttoned his old velvet shooting-jacket, and hastened forward to welcome his visitor.

Baptisto gravely set a couple of chairs, and, at a sign from his master, bowed profoundly, and retired to the further end of the apartment.

“Do you smoke, Mr. Santley?” Mr. Haldane asked, glancing at a box of new clay pipes.

“No, thank you; but I do not dislike the smell of tobacco. I find, however, that smoking disagrees with me – irritates instead of soothing, as professors of the weed tell me it should do.”

“Touches the solar plexus, eh? Then beware of it! The value of the solar system is often determined by the condition of the solar plexus.”

“That does seem to be frequently the case,” replied Mr. Santley, smiling.

“Invariably, my dear sir, as the ancients were well aware when they formulated that comprehensive, but little comprehended, proverb of the sound mind in the sound body. It is curious how frequently modern science finds herself demonstrating the truth of the guesses of the old philosophers!”

“I perceive you are devoted to science,” said Mr. Santley, waving his hand towards the evidences of his host’s taste.

“Oh yes, he is perpetually experimenting in some direction or other,” said Mrs. Haldane, with a laugh. “I believe he and Baptisto would pass the night here, boiling germs or mounting all manner of invisible little monsters for the microscope, if I allowed them. You must know, Mr. Santley, that Mr. Haldane is writing a magnum opus– ‘The History of Morals,’ I believe, is to be the title – and what with his experiments and his chapters, he can scarcely find time to dine.”

“You have been happy in your subject,” said the vicar, turning to the master of the Manor. “The history of morals must be an enthralling book. I can scarcely imagine any subject affording larger scope for literary genius than this of the development of that divine law written on the heart of Adam. Why do you smile, may I ask?”

“Pardon me; I was not conscious that I did smile, except mentally. You will excuse me, however, if I frankly say that I was smiling at your conception of the genesis of morality. What you term the divine law written on the heart of Adam represents to me a very advanced stage in the development of the moral sense. We must begin far beyond Adam, my dear sir, if we would arrive at a philosophic appreciation of the subject. We must explore as far as possible into that misty and enigmatic period which precedes historical record; approach as nearly as may be to the time when in the savage, possibly semi-simian, brain of the earliest of our predecessors experience had begun to reiterate her proofs that what was good was to his personal advantage, and that what was bad entailed loss and suffering. It has hitherto been the habit to believe that the Decalogue was revealed from Sinai in thunder and lightning and clouds of darkness. As a dramatic image or allegory only should that be accepted. Clouds of darkness do indeed surround the genesis of the moral in man, and the law has been revealed by the deadly lightnings of disease and war and famine and misery, through unknown and innumerable generations. No divine law was written on the heart of the first man, or society would not be where it is to-day. No; unhappily, one might say, morality has been like everything else human – like everything else, human or not, – like the coloured flower to the plant, the gay plumage to the bird, a dearly bought conquest, a painfully laboured evolution.”

Once or twice during Mr. Haldane’s remarks, the vicar had raised his hand in disclaimer, but waited till he had finished before speaking.

“I was about to protest,” he now said, “against several of your expressions, but I fear controversy is of little good when the disputants argue from different premises. I perceive that you have accepted a theory of life which completely shuts out God from His creation.”

“Pardon me; like the old Greek, I can still raise an altar to the unknown God.”

“To a cold, remote, indifferent abstraction, then,” replied Mr. Santley, impulsively; “to a God unknowing as unknown – a vague, unrealizable, impersonal Power.”

“Impersonal, I grant you, and therefore more logical, even according to human reason, than the huge, passionate anthropomorphism of Jew and Christian. Consciousness and personality imply the notion of limits and conditions; and which is the grander idea – a limited, conditioned Power, however great, or, an absolute transcendent Godhead, free from all the limits which govern our finite being? God cannot be conscious as we understand consciousness, nor personal as we understand personality-If He were, then indeed we might well believe that we were made after His image and likeness.”

“And can you find comfort in such a creed? Can you turn for strength, or grace, or consolation to such a power as you describe?”

“Why should I?” asked Mr. Haldane, smiling. “If I need any of these things, my need is the result of some law violated or unobserved. The world is ruled by law, and every breach of law entails an inescapable penalty. If I suffer I must endure.”

“That is cold comfort for all the sum of misery in the world.”

“It is the only true comfort. The rest is delusion. Preach that every violated law avenges itself, not in some half mythical hell at the close of a life that seems illimitable – for men never do realize that they will one day die – but avenges itself here and now; preach that no crucified Redeemer can interfere between the violator of the law and its penalty; preach that if men sin they will infallibly suffer, and you will really do something to regenerate mankind. Christianity, with its doctrines of atonement and vicarious suffering and redemption, has done as much to fill the world with vice, crime, and disease as the most degraded, creed of pagan or savage. The groaning and travail of creation are clamant proofs that vicarious suffering and redemption are the veriest dreams.”

“Either purposely or inadvertently you mix up the physical and the moral law,” interposed the vicar.

“The physical and the moral are but one law, articles of the one universal code of nature.”

“True,” said the vicar. “I forgot that you denied man his immortal soul, as you deny him his divine sonship. And so you are content to believe that man is born to live, labour, suffer, and perish.”

“Concede that God is content that such should be man’s destiny,” replied Mr. Haldane, “what then?”

“What then?” echoed the vicar, rising from his chair with flashing eyes and agitated face; “why, then life is a fiendish mockery!”

Mr. Haldane’s face wore a grim smile as he heard the bitter emphasis of the vicar’s reply.

“Ah, my worthy friend,” he said, “you illustrate how necessary it is that when one has his hand full of truth he should only open it one finger at a time. If you revolt thus angrily against the new gospel, what can be expected from the ignorant and the vicious? The meaning and purpose of life does not depend on whether the individual man shall perish or shall be immortal. If perish he must, he may at least perish heroically. Annihilation or immortality does not affect the validity of religion, whose paramount aim is not to prepare for another world, but to make the best of this – to realize its ideal greatness and nobility. If life should suddenly appear a mockery, contrast the present with that remote past of the naked savage of the stone age, or the brutal condition of his more remote sylvan ancestor, learning to walk erect and to articulate; and then summon up a vision of the possible future, when superstition shall have ceased to embitter man’s life, when a knowledge of natural law shall have made men virtuous, when disease shall have vanished from the world, and the nations shall, in a golden age of peace and perfected arts, have learnt the method of a patriarchal longevity. Millions of individuals have wept and toiled and perished to secure for us the present; we and millions shall weep and toil and perish to secure the future for them.”

“And that you take to be the significance of life, the progress of the race?”

“And is not that at least as noble a significance as a heaven peopled with the penitent thief, the drunkard, the gallow’s-bird, the harlot, the thousand bestial types of humanity redeemed by vicarious agony – the thousand brutes of civilization who, in this age, are not fit for life even on this earth, to say nothing of an enlarged immortality?”

“But with ever-rising grades of immortality before them, even those bestial types might ascend to a perfect manhood, and shall they perish?”

“Have they not been ascending ever since the Miocene?” asked Mr. Haldane, with a scornful laugh. “However, it is little use discussing the matter. As you have said, we cannot agree upon first principles. Let me show you, instead, some of my curiosities. Did you ever see the Mentone skull? Here is a plaster cast of it.”

“And do you accept this dark and comfortless creed of your husband?” asked Mr. Santley, turning to Mrs. Haldane as he took the cast in his hand.

“Oh no,” she replied, raising her soft dark eyes to him earnestly; “the progress of humanity does not satisfy me as an explanation of the enigma of life in man or woman. I cannot abandon my old faith and trust in the God-Man for an unknown power who does not care for my suffering and cannot hear my prayers. What to me can such a god be? And what can life be but a mockery if my soul, with its yearnings and aspirations and ideals, ceases to exist after death – has no other world but this, in which I know its infinite wants can never be satisfied?”

The vicar’s face brightened, and his heart beat with a strange, impulsive ardour as he listened to her. Why had this woman, whose enthusiasm and sympathy might have enabled him to realize his own high ideal of the spiritual, been denied him? What evil destiny had bound her for ever to a man whose paralyzing creed must make a perpetual division between them – a man who could look into her sweet face and yet think of her as merely a beautiful animal; who could fold her in his arms, and yet tranquilly accept the teaching that at death that pure, radiant soul of hers would be for ever extinguished? These thoughts and feelings went through the vicars consciousness swiftly as sunshine and shadow over a landscape.

His eyes dropped on the plaster cast in his hand.

“This is very old?” he asked musingly.

“One of the oldest skulls in the world,” replied Mr. Haldane. “It was discovered by Dr. Rivière in a cave at Mentone, in a cliff overlooking the sea. The man belonged to the ancient stone age, and was contemporary with the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros of the Post-pliocene. The cave was a place of burial, and on the head of the skeleton was a thickly plaited network of sea-shells, with a fringe of deers’ teeth around the edge; the limbs were adorned with bracelets and anklets of shells also; and in front of the face was placed a little oxide of iron, used as war-paint, no doubt.”

“Even in the Post-pliocene, then,” said the vicar, “it would appear that man believed in a hereafter.”

“Ah, yes; it is an antique superstition, and even yet we have not outgrown it-Human progress is slow.”

“And this face was raised to the blue sky ages ago, looking for God!”

Mr. Haldane shrugged his shoulders, and smiled grimly.

“How is it possible that you, who-must share the weaknesses and sorrows of the human heart, can so stoically accept the horrible prospect of annihilation?” asked the vicar, half angrily.

“I accept truths. Do you imagine I prefer annihilation? I could wish that life were ordered otherwise, but wishing’ cannot change an eternal system. Immortality cannot be achieved by defying’ annihilation.”

“Have you realized death?” exclaimed the vicar, passionately. “Can you, dare you, look forward to a time when, say, your wife shall lie cold and lifeless, – and hold to the doctrine that you have lost her for ever, that never again shall your spirit mingle with hers, that you and she are for all eternity divorced?”

“You appeal to the passions, and not to the reason,” replied Mr. Haldane, coldly. “What holds good for the beast which perishes, holds good for all of us, and will hold good for those who come after us, and who will be greater and nobler than we.”

“Be it so,” replied the vicar, in an undertone. As he spoke he bit his lip, and his cheek coloured. The thought was not meant for utterance, but it slipped into words before he was aware. For the full significance of that thought was a singular exemplification of the conflicting spiritual and animal natures of the man. That divorce of death which had been pronounced inevitable opened before him, in a dreamy vista of the future, a new world of ecstatic beatitude, where his soul and the radiant spirit of the woman who stood beside him should be mingled together in indissoluble communion.

CHAPTER VII. CELESTIAL AFFINITIES

Shortly afterwards Mrs. Haldane suggested that they should take a turn about the grounds, instead of wasting the sunshine indoors. As they left the chapel the vicar paused and looked back at the ivy-draped building, with its half-hidden lancets.

“You have turned a sacred edifice to a strange use,” he said. “Here, within the walls where past generations have dwelt and worshipped, you have set up your apparatus for the destruction of man’s holiest heritage. Pardon me if I speak warmly, but to me this appears to be sacrilege.”

“The Church has always been intolerant of science and research,” replied Mr. Haldane, good-humouredly, “and it is the fortune of conflict if sometimes we are able to make reprisals. But, seriously, I see no desecration here.”

“No desecration in converting Gods house into a laboratory to analyze soul and spirit into function and force!”

“No desecration,” should say, “in converting the shrine of a narrow, selfish superstition into a schoolroom where one may learn a truer and a grander theology, and a less presumptuous and illusive theory of life. It is, however, impossible for us to be at one on these matters; let us at least agree to differ amicably. Your predecessor and I found much of common interest. He was of the old school, but life had taught him a kindly tolerance of opinion. To you, as I gleaned from your sermon yesterday, the new philosophy and modern criticism are familiar. You must surely concede that the old theological ground must be immeasurably widened, if you are still resolved to occupy it. Why should you fear truth, if God has indeed revealed Himself to the Church?”

“The Church does not fear truth,” replied the vicar; “but she does fear the wild speculations and guesses at truth which unsettle the faith of the world. For myself I have looked into some of these fantastic theories of science, and I repudiate them as at once blasphemous and hopeless. It is easy to destroy the old trust in the beneficence of Providence, in the redemption and destiny of man; but when you have accomplished that, you can go no further. Tyndall proves to you that all life in the world is the outcome of antecedent life; Haeckel contends that science must in the long run accept spontaneous generation. Your leading men are at loggerheads; and it signifies little which is right, for in either case the causa causans is only removed one link further back in the chain of causation. Some of you hold that there is only matter and force in the universe, but on others it is beginning to dawn that possibly matter and force are in the ultimate one and the same. And again, it signifies little which is right, for both, being conditioned, must have had a beginning. A God, a creative Power, is needed in the long run – ‘a power behind humanity, and behind all other things,’ as Herbert Spencer describes it; a God of whom science can predicate nothing, of whom science declares it to be beyond her province to speak, but of whom every heart is at some time vividly conscious and has been from the beginning – demonstrably from the Paleolithic period until now.”

“Oh, Mr. Santley, I am so pleased you have said that. I have often wished that I were able to answer my husband, but I have no power of argument,” said Mrs. Haldane, looking gratefully at the vicar. “You must not think he is not a good, a real practical Christian, in spite of his opinions.”

Mr. Haldane laughed quietly as his wife slipped her hand into his.

“As to the God of the Paleolithic man, Mr. Santley forgets that it was at best a personification of some of the great natural powers – wind; rain, thunder, sunshine, and moonlight; and as to Christianity, my dear, there is much in the teaching of Christ, and even of the Church, which I reverence and hold sacred. Morality, and the consequent civilization of the world, owes more to Christianity than to any other creed. It has done much evil, but I think it has done more good. Purified from its mythic delusions, it has still a splendid future before it.”

“And à propos of practical Christianity, Mr. Santley,” continued Mrs. Haldane, “I want to talk to you about the parish. I am eager to begin with my poor people again; and, by-the-bye, the children have, I understand, had no school treat yet this year. Now, sit down here and tell me all about your sick, in the first place.”

Mr. Haldane stood listening to the woes and illnesses of the village for a few minutes, and then left them together in deep discussions over flannels and medicines and nourishing food. Dinner passed pleasantly enough. The vicar had satisfied his conscience by protesting against the desecration of the chapel and the disastrous results of scientific research. Clearly it was useless, and worse than useless, to contend with this large-natured, clear-headed unbeliever. It was infinitely more agreeable to feel the soft dark light of Mrs. Haldane’s eyes dwelling on his face, and to listen to the music of her voice as she told him of their travels abroad. In his imagination the scenes she described rose before him, and he and she were the central figures in the clear, new landscape. He thought of their walks on the cliffs and on the sea-shore, in the golden days that had gone by. How easily it might have been!

The sun had gone down when he parted from his host and hostess at the great gate at the end of the avenue. He had declined their offer to drive him over to Omberley. He preferred walking in the cool of the evening, and the distance was, he professed, not at all too great. As he shook hands with her, that wild, etherial fancy of a world to come, in which her husband would have no claim to her, brightened his eyes and flushed his cheek. There was a strange nervous pressure in the touch of his hand, and an expression of surprise started into her face. He noticed it at once, and was warned. Mr. Haldane’s farewell was bluffly cordial, and he warmly pressed the vicar to call on them at any time that best suited his convenience.

They were pretty sure to be always at home, and they were not likely to have too much company.

As he walked along the high-road, bordered on one side with the green murmuring masses of foliage, and on the other with waving breadths of corn, his mind was absorbed in that new dream of transcendent love. There was nothing earthly or gross in this dawning glow of spiritual passion; indeed, it raised him in delicious exaltation beyond the coarseness of the physical, till, as it suddenly occurred to him that somewhere on his way Edith was waiting for him, his heart rose in revulsion at the recollection of her. At the same time there was a large element of the sensuous beauty of transient humanity in that celestial forecast. The pure, radiant spirit of the woman he loved still wore the sweet lineaments of her earthly loveliness. Death had not destroyed that magical face; those dark, luminous, loving eyes; that sweet shape of womanhood. The spiritual body was cast in the mould of the physical, and the chief difference lay in a shining mistiness of colour, which floated in a sort of elusive drapery about the glorified woman, and replaced the worldly silks and satins of the living wife. This spiritual being was no intangible abstraction, of which only the intellect could take cognizance. As in its temporal condition, it could still kiss and thrill with a touch. Clearly, however unconscious he might be of the fact, the vicar’s conception of the divine was intensely human, and his spiritual idealizations were the immediate growth and delicate blossom of the senses.

A great stillness was growing over the land as he pursued his way. The woodlands had been left behind him, and their incessant murmur was now inaudible. Sleep and quietude had fallen on the level fields; not an ear of wheat stirred, no leaf rustled. The birds had all gone to nest, except a solitary string of belated crows, flying low down in black dots, against the distant silvery green horizon. The moon was rising through a low-lying haze, which had begun to spread over the landscape. The vicar looked at his watch. It was after nine o’clock. He began to hope that Edith had grown tired of waiting for him, and had returned home. He had a sickening feeling of repugnance and vague dread of meeting her.

Little more than a month after Mr. Santley had settled in Omberley, Miss Dove had come to live with her aunt.

Her father and mother had died within a year of each other, and the girl gladly accepted the offer of Mrs. Russell to consider her house as a home until she had had time to look about her. Edith had been left sufficiently well provided for, and her aunt, the widow of a banker, was in a position of independence, so that the disinterested offer was accepted without any sense of dependence or humiliation. The bright, innocent face of the girl instantly caught the eye of the vicar. He saw her frequently at her aunt’s house, and gradually learned to esteem, not only her excellent qualities, but to find a use for her accomplishments. She was especially fond of music, and when the vicar suggested that she might add to the beauty of the service at St. Cuthbert’s by interesting herself in the choir and presiding at the organ, she eagerly acquiesced. The church was one of Edith’s favourite haunts; and when the vicar, who was himself a lover of music, heard the soul-stirring vibrations of some masterpiece of the great composers, his steps were drawn by an easily explicable fatality to the side of the pretty performer. Still, it was a fatality. Slowly, and imperceptibly at first, the sense of pleasure at meeting grew up between the two; then swiftly and imperceptibly they found that there was something in the presence of each other that satisfied a vague, indefinable craving; and lastly, with a sudden access of self-consciousness, they looked into each other’s eyes, and each became gladly and tremulously aware of the other’s love. Edith was still young, almost too young yet to assume the station of the wife of the spiritual head of the parish; and Mr. Santley was not sure as to the manner in which his sister would receive the intimation that there was, even in the remote future, to be a new mistress brought to the Vicarage. The girl was, however, still too happy in the knowledge that she was beloved to look forward to marriage. With a strange, feminine inconsistency, she regarded their union with a certain dread and shamefacedness. It seemed such a dreadful exposure that all the village should know that they loved each other. “Oh no, no; it must not be for a long, long time yet!” she once exclaimed nervously. “Is it not sufficient happiness to know that I am yours and you are mine? I cannot bear to think that every one must know our secret.” To have those long, pleasant chats under cover of the music; to be invited to the Vicarage, and to sit and talk with him there; to receive those haphazard glances, as it were, while he was preaching; to be escorted home by him in the evening when it was dark, and no one could see that her hand was on his arm; to receive those almost stolen kisses; to feel his arm about her waist what more could maiden desire to dream over for weeks and months – for years, if need were?

Edith was endowed with the intense feminine faith and fervid ideality of the worshipper. To sit at her lover’s feet and to look up adoringly to him, was at once her favourite mental and physical attitude. On her side, she exercised a curious spiritual influence over him. There was such an aerial brightness and lightness about her, such sweet fragile loveliness in her form and figure, such tender abandonment of self in her disposition, that he felt he had not only a woman to love, but a beautiful childlike soul to keep unspotted from the world, to guide through the dark ways of life to the arms of the great loving Fatherhood of God. The presence of Edith helped him to banish the dark doubts and evil promptings of the spirit of unbelief. When she spoke to him of her spiritual experiences, he felt joyous ascensions of the heart which raised him nearer to heaven. She created in him the unspeakable holy longings and vague wants that give the lives of the mystic saints of Roman Catholicism so singular a blending of divine illumination and voluptuous colour. Unconsciously the vicar was realizing in his own nature Swedenborg’s doctrine of celestial affinities. This love restored to him the innocence and ardour of the days of Eden; he had found at once his Eve and his Paradise, and he felt that, as of old, God still walked in the garden in the cool of the day. Some such glamour surrounds the first developments of every sincere attachment. It is the first rosy tingling flush of dawn, dim and sweet and dreamy, and, like the dawn, it glows and brightens into the fierce clear heat of broad day, burning the dew from the petal and withering the blossom.

As Mr. Santley’s thoughts turned to Edith, the recollection of these things came vividly upon him. Only a week ago, and she was the one woman in the world he believed he could have chosen for his wife. In an instant, at the sight of a face, all had been changed. His love had become a burthen, a shame, a dread to him. Edith had grown hateful to him. At the same time, he could not deaden the sting of remorse as he reflected on his broken vows. The passionate protestations he had uttered sounded again in his ears in accents of bitter mockery; the pledges he had given seemed now to him hideous blasphemies.

At a bend of the road he suddenly came in sight of a figure moving before him in the dusk. He knew at a glance it was she, and he prepared himself for the meeting. Although he earnestly wished to disembarrass himself of her, he found himself unable to do so at once and brutally. He would try to estrange her, and free himself little by little.

As they approached each other he saw that Edith’s face was grave and sad. She was trying to learn from his look in what manner she ought to speak to him.

His assurances on the previous evening had not tranquillized her, and she had still a terrible misgiving that a chasm was widening between them.

The vicar was the first to speak.

“I am a little later than I expected,” he said, as he held out his hand to her.

“It does not signify now. I was only afraid that you might be so late I should have to go home without seeing you.”

He made no reply, and they walked on side by side in silence for a few seconds. At last she stopped abruptly and looked at him.

“Charles,” she said, “you know what you said to me last night?”

“Yes.”

“Was it true?”

“Why should you ask such a question? Why should you doubt its truth?”

“I try not to doubt it, but I cannot help it. Oh, tell me again that you do not hate and contemn me! Tell me you still love me.”

“My dear Edith,” replied the vicar, laying his hand on her arm, “you are not well. You have been overtaxing your strength and exciting yourself.”

Edith did not answer, but the tears rose to her eyes and began to run down her cheeks. She did not sob or make any sound of weeping, but her hand was pressed against her throat.

“Come, don’t cry like that; you know I cannot bear to see you cry.”

He stopped as he spoke, and took her hand in his. They stood still a little while, and she at length was able to speak.

“Do you remember,” she asked in a low, broken voice, “that I once told you you were my conscience?”

He regarded her uneasily before he replied.

“Yes; you once said that, I know. But why return to that now?”