Kitabı oku: «The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival», sayfa 12
Her heart melted with pity, and glowed with generous impulses. She clasped the women's hands; she vowed she would be their friend and helper, and showered her gold among them.
"Teach me how to help them," she said. "Oh, these martyrs of poverty! Show me how to make their lives happier."
"Be sure I shall not be slack to engage your ladyship in good works," he answered cordially. "If you will suffer me to be your counsellor you may do a world of good, and yet keep your fine house and your Indian jewels. Your influence should enlist others in the crusade against misery. It needs but the superfluous wealth of all the rich to save the lives and the souls of all the poor."
He was hurrying her towards a coach stand, through the deepening gloom of November. They had spent more than three hours in these haunts of wretchedness, and the brief day had closed upon them. The lights on Westminster Bridge and King Street seemed to belong to another world as the coach drove to St. James's Square. Stobart insisted on accompanying Antonia to her own door, and took leave of her on the threshold with much more of friendship than he had shown her hitherto. He seemed to her a changed being since they had walked through those wretched alleys together. Hitherto his manner with her had been stiff and constrained, with an underlying air of disapproval. But now that she had seen him beside a sick-bed, and had seen how he loved and understood the poor, and how he was loved and understood by them, she began to realize how good and generous a heart beat under that chilling exterior. The idea of a man in the flower of his youth flinging off a profession he loved, to devote his life to charity appealed to all her best feelings.
"I shall wait on your wife to-morrow morning," she said. "You will have time before I come to decide what I can do to help those poor wretches. Their white faces would haunt my dreams to-night if I did not know that I could do something to make them happier."
"Sleep sweetly," he answered gently. "You have a heart to pity the poor."
He bent over her gloved hand, touched it lightly with his lips, and vanished as she crossed her threshold, where the hall-porter and three pompous footmen gave a royal air to her entrance.
CHAPTER XIV.
"ONE THREAD IN LIFE WORTH SPINNING."
Antonia spent the next morning, from twelve to two, in the cottage parlour at Sheen, where Stobart spread out his reports and calculations before her, showed her what he had done in the district John Wesley had allotted to him, and how much – how infinitely more than had been done – there remained to do!
"My own means are so narrow that I can give but little temporal help," he said. "I have to stand by with empty pockets and see suffering that a few shillings could relieve. I have even thought of appealing to my mother – who has not used me well – but she was married six months ago to an old admirer, Sir David Lanigan, an Irish soldier, and a fierce High Churchman, who hates the Wesleys; so I doubt 'twould be wasted humiliation to ask her for aid. I have not scrupled to beg of my rich friends, and have raised money to apprentice at least fifty lads who were in the way to become thieves and reprobates. I have ministered to the two ends of life – to childhood and old age. The middle period must fight for itself."
He read his notes of various hard cases. He had jotted down stern facts with a stern brevity; but the pathos in the facts themselves brought tears to Antonia's eyes more than once in the course of his reading. He showed her what good might be done by a few shillings a week to this family, in which there was a bedridden son – and to another where there was a consumptive daughter; how there was a little lad starving in the gutter who could be billeted upon a hard-working honest family – how for the cost of a room with fire and candle, and sixpence a day for a nurse, he could provide a nursery where the infants of the women-toilers could be kept during the day.
"I have heard of some nuns at Avignon who set up such a room for the women workers in the vineyards," he said. "I think they called it a crêche."
Mrs. Stobart sat by the window busy with her plain sewing, of which she had always enough to fill every leisure hour. She looked up now and then and listened, with a mild interest in her husband's work; but she was just a little tired of it, and the fervid enthusiasm of the time of her conversion seemed very far away. Staffordshire tea-things and copper tea-kettle, brass fender and mahogany bureau filled so large a place in her thoughts, after her husband and son, both of whom she loved with her utmost power of loving, which was not of a high order. She crept away at one o'clock to see her baby George eat his dinner. He was old enough to sit up in his high mahogany chair and feed himself, with many skirmishing movements of his spoon, which he brandished between the slow mouthfuls as if it were a tomahawk.
George and Antonia were so absorbed in their work that Mrs. Stobart had been gone nearly an hour before either of them knew she was absent. The maid came blundering in with a tray as the clock struck two, and began to lay the cloth. Antonia rose to take leave, and insisted on going at once. Her carriage had been waiting half an hour in a drizzling November rain. She left quickly, but not before she had seen that Mr. Stobart's dinner consisted of the somewhat scrimped remains of a shoulder of mutton, and a dish of potatoes boiled in their skins.
She knew some of the officers in his late regiment, and knew how they lived; and it shocked her a little to recall that squalid meal when she sat down at four o'clock, with a party of friends, at a table loaded with an extravagant profusion of the richest food her cook's inventive powers could bring together. She had seen the expensive French chef standing before her with pencil and bill of fare, racking his brains to devise something novel and costly.
That morning at Sheen was the beginning of a close alliance in the cause of charity between Mr. Stobart and Lady Kilrush. They were partners in a business of good works; and all questions of creed were for the most part ignored between them. He would have gladly spoken words in season, but she had a way of putting him off, and she had become to him so beneficent and divine a creature that it was difficult for him to remember that she was not a Christian.
The five thousand a year which she had so freely offered him for his own use she now set aside for his poor.
"I can spare as much," she said, "and yet be a fine lady. Some day, perhaps, when I am old and withered, like the hags that haunt Ranelagh, I may grow tired of finery; and then the poor shall have nearly all my money, and I will live as you do, in a cottage, at ten pounds a year, on a bone of cold mutton and a potato. But while I am young I doubt I shall go on caring for trumpery things. It is such a pleasant change, when I have been in one of your loathsome alleys, to find myself at Leicester House with the princess and her party of wits and savants, or at Carlisle House, dancing in a chain of dukes and duchesses, with a German Royal Highness for my partner."
The responsibilities that went with the administration of so large a fund made a change in George Stobart's life. His residence at Sheen had long been inconvenient, the journey to and fro wasting time for which he had better uses. Lucy loved her rustic home and garden in summer; but she was one of those people who love the country when the sun shines and the roses are in bloom. In the damp autumnal afternoons, when silvery mists veiled the common, her spirits sank, and she began to grow fretful at her husband's absence, and to reproach him if he were late in coming home.
He wanted his wife to be happy, and he wanted to be near the scene of his labours, and within half an hour's walk of St. James's Square. After a careful search he found a house on the south side of the Thames, a quarter of a mile from Westminster Bridge, in Crown Place, a modest terrace facing the river. The house was roomier and more convenient than his rustic cottage; but the long strip of garden between low walls was a sad falling off from the lawn and orchard at Sheen, and he feared that Lucy would regret the change.
Lucy had no regrets. The larger rooms at Lambeth, the dwarf cupboards on each side of the parlour fireplace, the convenient closets on the upper floor, the doorsteps and iron railings, and the view of the river, with the Abbey and Houses of Parliament, and the crowded roofs and chimneys of Westminster, filled her with delight. The cottage and garden had been enchanting while the glamour of newly wedded love shone upon them; but by the time her spirits had settled into a calm commonplace of domestic life Lucy had discovered that she hated the country, and smelt ghosts under the sloping ceilings of those quaint cottage garrets where generations of labouring men and women had been born and died. Not unseldom had she longed for the bustle of Moorfields, and the din and riot of Bartholomew Fair, the annual treat of her childhood.
She arranged her furniture in the new home with complacency, and thought her son's nursery and her best parlour the prettiest rooms in the world, much nicer to live in than her ladyship's suite of saloons, where the splendid spaciousness scared her. She had known few happier hours in her life than the February afternoon when Lady Kilrush and Sophy Potter came to tea, and were both full of compliments upon her parlour, which had been newly done up, with the panelled dado painted pink, and a wallpaper sprinkled with roses and butterflies.
Sophy Potter, who retired into the background of Antonia's life in St. James's Square, was often her companion in her visits to the poor, and took very kindly to the work. As it was hardly possible to avoid the peril of small-pox in such visits, Mr. Stobart prevailed upon mistress and maid to submit to the ordeal of inoculation. The operation in Sophy's case was succeeded by a mild form of the malady; but the virus had no effect upon Antonia, and her physician argued that the vigour of a constitution which resisted the artificial infection would ensure her immunity from the disease. Neither her husband's entreaties, nor the example of Lady Kilrush could induce Mrs. Stobart to brave the perils of inoculation. It was in vain that George pleaded, and set a doctor to argue with her. Her horror of the small-pox made her shrink with tears and trembling from the notion of the lightest attack produced artificially.
"If it kills me you will be sorry for having forced me to consent," she said, and George reluctantly submitted to her refusal. She never went among his poor, and had never expressed a desire to see them.
"I saw enough of such wretches round Moorfields," she said. "I never want to go near them again. And I have quite enough to do to keep my house clean, and look after my little boy. You would want another servant if I went trapesing about your lanes and alleys, when I ought to be washing the tea-things and polishing the furniture."
Could he be angry with her for being industrious and keeping his house a pattern of neatness? He had long ago come to understand the narrow range of her thoughts and feelings; but while she was pious and gentle and his devoted wife, he had no ground for thinking he had made a mistake in choosing a lowborn helpmeet.
From the hurried idleness of a fashionable life Antonia stole many hours for the dwellings of the poor. In most of her visits to those haunts of misery she was attended by Stobart; but she had a way of eluding his guardianship sometimes, and would set out alone, or with Miss Potter, on one of her visits of mercy.
As time went on he grew more apprehensive of danger in her explorations; for now that she was familiar with the class among which he worked, her intrepid spirit tempted her to plunge deeper into the dark abyss of guilty and unhappy lives.
The time came when he could no longer bear to think of the perils that surrounded her in the close and fetid alleys where typhus and small-pox were never wholly absent; and at the risk of offending her he assumed the voice of authority.
"You told me once that I was your only family connection," he said, "and I presume upon that slender tie to forbid you running such risks as you incur when you enter such a den of fever as the house where I found you yesterday."
"What, sir, you forbid me? – you whose clarion call startled me from my selfish pleasure; you who showed me my worthless life!"
"You have done much to redeem that worthlessness, by your sacrifice of income."
"Sacrifice! You know, sir, that in your heart of hearts you despise such paltering with charity. In your estimation, not to give all is to give nothing!"
"You paint me as a bigot, madam, and not as a Christian. Be sure that He who praised the Samaritan approves your charity, and that He who holds the seven stars in His right hand will open your eyes to the light of revelation. A soul so lofty will not be left for ever in darkness. But in the mean time there can be no good done by your presence in places where you hazard health and life. You have made me your almoner, and it is my duty to see that the uttermost good is done with the money you have entrusted to me. Your own presence in those perilous places is useless. You have no gospel to carry to the sick and dying."
"Oh, sir, I have sympathy and compassion to give them. I doubt they get enough of the gospel, and that the company of a woman who can feel for their sufferings and soothe them in their pain is not without use. There is no sick-bed that I have sat by where I have not been entreated to return. The poor creatures like to tell me their troubles, to expatiate on their miseries, and I listen, and never let them think I am tired."
"You scatter gold among them; you demoralize them by your reckless almsgiving."
"No, no, no! I feed them. If there come days when the larder is empty, they have at least the memory of a feast. Your gospel will not stop the pangs of hunger. That is but a hysterical devotion which goes famishing to bed to dream of the Golden City with jasper walls, and the angels standing round the throne. Dreams, dreams, only dreams! You stuff those suffering creatures with dreams."
"I strive to make them look beyond their sufferings here to the unspeakable bliss of the life hereafter," Stobart answered gravely; and then he entreated her to go no more into those alleys where he now worked every day, and from which he came to her two or three times a week to report progress.
He came to her after his work, in the hour before the six o'clock tea at which she was rarely without visitors. If he was told she had company he went away without seeing her; but between five and six was the likeliest hour for finding her alone, since her drawing-rooms were crowded with morning visitors, and her evenings were seasons of gaiety at home or abroad.
She received him always in the library, a room she loved, and where they had had their first serious conversation. Here, if he looked tired, she would order in the urn and tea-things, and would make tea for him, while he told her the story of the day. To sit in an easy-chair beside the wood fire and to have her minister to him made an oasis of rest in the desert of toil, and he soon began to look forward to this hour as the bright spot in his life, the recompense for every sacrifice of self.
The first thunder of a footman's double knock, the clatter of high heels and rustle of brocade in the hall, sent him away. He had made no second appearance among her modish visitors.
"Go and shine, and sparkle, and flutter your jewelled wings among other butterflies," he said. "I claim no part in your life in the world; but I am proud to know that there are hours in which you are something better than a woman of fashion."
The pleasures of the town and the assiduities of Antonia's friends and admirers became more absorbing as her influence in the great world increased. Her open-handed hospitality, the splendour of her house, and the success of her entertainments had placed her on a pinnacle of ton.
She held her own among the greatest ladies in London, and was on familiar terms with all the duchesses – Portland, Queensberry, Norfolk, Bedford, Hamilton – and nobody ever reminded her, by a shade of difference in their appreciation, that she had not been born in the purple.
She had more admirers than she took the trouble to count, and had refused offers of marriage that most women would have found irresistible. Charles Townshend had followed and courted her; and in spite of all she could do to discourage his addresses by a light gaiety of manner that proclaimed her indifference, he had found her alone one morning, and flung himself on his knees to sue for her hand.
Deeply hurt when she rejected him, he reproached her for having fooled him by her civility.
"Oh, sir, would you have me distant or sullen to the most brilliant man in London? I thought I let you see that, though I loved your company, my heart was disengaged, and that I had no preference for one man over another."
"I doubt, madam, you despise a plain mister, and will wait for the next marrying Duke. Wert not for the recent Marriage Act you might aspire to a prince of the blood royal. Your ambition would be justified by your beauty; and I believe your pride is equal to your charms."
"I shall never marry again, Mr. Townshend. I loved my husband; and the tragedy of our marriage made that love more sacred than the common affection of wives."
"Nay, madam, is there not something more potent than the memory of a departed husband, which makes you scorn my passion? I have several times met a certain grave gentleman in your hall, who seems privileged to enjoy your society when you have no other company, and who leaves you when your indifferent acquaintance are admitted."
"That gentleman is my dear lord's cousin, and a married man. He can have no influence upon my resolve against a second marriage."
She rang a bell, and made Mr. Townshend a curtsey which meant dismissal. He retired in silent displeasure, knowing that he had affronted her.
"'Tis deuced hard to be cut out by a sneaking Methodist," he muttered as he followed the footman downstairs.
He spent the evening at White's, played higher and drank deeper than usual, and was weak enough to mention the lady's name with a scornful anger which betrayed his mortification; and before the next night all the town knew that Townshend had been refused.
The rumour came to Stobart's knowledge a week later by means of a paragraph in the Daily Journal, with the usual initials and the usual stars. "Lady K., the beautiful widow, has fallen out with Mr. C. T., the aspiring politician, wit and trifler, whose eminent success as a lady-killer has made him unable to endure rejection at the hands of a beauty who, after all, belongs but to the lower ranks of the peerage, and cannot boast of a genteel ancestry."
Stobart read this stale news in a three-days'-old paper at the shabby coffee-house in the Borough, where he sometimes took a snack of bread and cheese and a glass of twopenny porter, instead of going home to dinner.
"I doubt she has many such offers," he thought, "for she hangs out every bait that can tempt a lover – beauty, parts, fortune. If she has refused Townshend 'tis, perhaps, only because there is some one else pleases her better. She will marry, and I shall lose her; for 'tis likely her husband will cut short her friendship for a follower of John Wesley, lest the Word of God should creep into his house unawares."
He left London early in April in Mr. Wesley's company, and rode with that indefatigable man through the rural English landscape, making from forty to fifty miles a day, and halting every day at some market cross, or on some heathy knoll on the outskirts of town or village, to preach the gospel to listening throngs. Their journey on this occasion took them through quiet agricultural communities and small market towns, where the ill-usage that Wesley had suffered at Bolton and at Falmouth was undreamt of among the congregations who hung upon his words and loved his presence. He was now in middle life, hale and wiry, a small, neatly built man, with an extraordinary capacity for enduring fatigue, and a serene temper which made light of scanty fare and rough quarters. He was an untiring rider, but had never troubled himself to acquire the art of horsemanship, and as he mostly read a book during his country rides, he had fallen into a slovenly, stooping attitude over the neck of his horse. He had been often thrown, but rarely hurt, and had a Spartan indifference to such disasters. He loved a good horse, but was willing to put up with any beast that would carry him to the spot where he was expected. He hated to break an appointment, and was the most punctual as well as the most polite of men.
He liked George Stobart, having assayed his mental and moral qualities at the beginning of their acquaintance, and having pronounced him true metal. He was a man of wide sympathies, and during this April journey through the heart of Hertfordshire, and then by the wooded pastures and wide grassy margins of the Warwickshire coach roads between Coventry and Stratford-on-Avon, he discovered that something was amiss with his helper.
"I hope you do not begin to tire of your work, Stobart," he said. "There are some young men I have seen put their hands to the plough in a fever of faith and piety, and drive their first furrow deep and straight, and then faith grows dim, and the line straggles, and my sorrowful heart tells me that the labourer is good for nothing. But I do not think you are of that kidney."
"I hope not, sir."
"But I see there is trouble of some sort on your mind. We passed a vista in that oak wood yonder, with the smiling sun showing like a disk of blood-red gold at the end of the clearing; and you, who have such an eye for landscape, stared at it with a vacant gaze. I'll vouch for it you have uneasy thoughts that come between you and God's beautiful world."
"I trouble myself without reason, sir, about a soul that I would fain win for Christ, and cannot."
"'Tis of your cousin's widow, Lady Kilrush, you are thinking," Wesley said, with a keen glance.
"Oh, sir, how did you divine that?"
"Because you told me of the lady's infidel opinions; and as I know how lavish she has been with her money in helping your work among the poor, I can understand that in sheer gratitude you would desire to bring her into the fold. I doubt you have tried, in all seriousness?"
"I have tried, sir; but not hard enough. My cousin is a strange creature – generous, impetuous, charitable; but she has a commanding temper, and a light way of putting me off in an argument, which make it hard to reason with her. And then I doubt Satan has ever the best of it, and that 'tis easier to argue on the evil side, easier to deny than to prove. When I am in my cousin's company, and we are both interested in the wretches she has saved from misery, I find myself forgetting that while she snatches the sick and famished from the jaws of death, her immortal soul is in danger of a worse death than the grave, and that in all the time we have been friends nothing has been done for her salvation."
"Mr. Stobart, I doubt you have thought too much of the woman and too little of the woman's unawakened soul," Wesley said, with grave reproof. "Her beauty has dazzled your senses; and conscience has been lulled to sleep. As your pastor and your friend I warn you that you do ill to cherish the company of a beautiful heathen, save with the sole intent of accomplishing her salvation."
"Oh, sir, can you think me so weak a wretch as to entertain one unworthy thought in relation to this lady, who has ever treated me with a sisterly friendship? The fact that she is exquisitely beautiful can make no difference in my concern for her. I would give half the years of my life to save her soul; and I see her carried along the flood-tide of modish pleasures, the mark for gamesters and spendthrifts, and I dread to hear that she has been won by the most audacious and the worst of the worthless crew."
"If you can keep your own conscience clear of evil, and win this woman from the toils of Satan, you will do well," said Wesley, "but tamper not with the truth; and if you fail in bringing her to a right way of thinking, part company with her for ever. You know that I am your friend, Stobart. My heart went out to you at the beginning of our acquaintance, when you told me of your marriage with a young woman so much your inferior in worldly rank, for your attachment to a girl of the servant class recalled my own experience. The woman I loved best, before I met Mrs. Wesley, was a woman who had been a domestic servant, but whose intellect and character fitted her for the highest place in the esteem of all good people. Circumstances prevented our union – and – I made another choice."
He concluded his speech with an involuntary sigh, and George Stobart knew that the great leader, who had many enthusiastic followers and helpers among the women of his flock, had not been fortunate in that one woman who ought to have been first in her sympathy with his work.
Stobart spent a month on the road with his chief, preaching at Bristol and to the Kingswood miners, and journeying from south to north with him, in company with one of Wesley's earliest and best lay preachers, a man of humble birth, but greatly gifted for his work among assemblies in which more than half of his hearers were heathens, to whom the Word of God was a new thing – souls dulled by the monotony of daily toil, and only to be aroused from the apathy of a brutish ignorance by an emotional preacher. Those who had stood by Whitefield's side when the tears rolled down the miners' blackened faces, knew how strong, how urgent, how pathetic must be the appeal, and how sure the result when that appeal is pitched in the right key.
The little band bore every hardship and inconvenience of a journey on horseback through all kinds of weather, with unvarying good humour; for Wesley's cheerful spirits set them so fine an example of Christian contentment that they who were his juniors would have been ashamed to complain.
In some of the towns on their route Mr. Wesley had friends who were eager to entertain the travellers, and in whose pious households they fared well. In other places they had to put up with the rough meals and hard beds of inns rarely frequented by gentlefolks; or sometimes, belated in desolate regions, had to take shelter in a roadside hovel, where they could scarce command a loaf of black bread for their supper, and a shakedown of straw for their couch.
May had begun when Wesley and his deacons arrived in London, after having preached to hundreds of thousands on their way. Stobart had been absent more than a month, and the time seemed much longer than it really was by reason of the distances traversed and the varieties of life encountered on the way. He had received a weekly letter from his wife, who told him of all her household cares, and of Georgie's daily growth in childish graces. He had answered all her letters, telling her of his adventures on the road, in which she took a keen interest, loving most of all to hear of the fine houses to which he was invited, the dishes at table, and the way they were served, the tea-things and tray, and if the urn were copper or silver, also the dress of the ladies, and whether they wore linen aprons in the morning. He knew her little weaknesses, and indulged her, and rarely returned from a journey without bringing her some trifling gift for her house, a cream-jug of some special ware, a damask table-cloth, or something he knew she loved.
Their union had been one of peace and a tranquil affection, which on Stobart's part outlived the brief fervour of a self-sacrificing love. The romantic feeling, the glow of religious enthusiasm which had led to his marriage, belonged to the past; but he told himself that he had done well to marry the printer's daughter, and that she was the fittest helpmeet he could have chosen, since she left him free to work out his salvation, and submitted with gentle obedience to the necessities of his spiritual life.
"Mr. Wesley would thank Providence for so placid a companion," he thought, having heard of his leader's sufferings from a virago who opened and destroyed his letters, insulted his friends, and tormented him with an unreasoning jealousy that made his home life a kind of martyrdom.
During that religious pilgrimage Stobart had written several times to Lady Kilrush – letters inspired by his intercourse with Wesley, and by the spiritual experiences of the day; letters written in the quiet of a sleeping household, and aflame with the ardent desire to save that one most precious soul from eternal condemnation. He had written with a vehement importunity which he had never ventured in his conversation; had wrestled with the infidel spirit as Jacob wrestled with the angel; had been moved even to tears by his own eloquence, carried away by the ardour of his feelings.
"Since I was last in your company I have seen multitudes won from Satan; have seen the roughest natures softened to penitent tears at the story of Calvary – the hardest hearts melted, reprobates and vagabonds laying down their burden of sins, and taking up the Cross. And I have thought of you, so gifted by nature, so rare a jewel for the crown of Christ – you whose inexhaustible treasures of love and compassion I have seen poured upon the most miserable of this world's outcasts, the very scum and refuse of debased humanity. You, so kind, so pitiful, so clear of brain and steadfast of purpose, can you for ever reject those Divine promises, that gift of eternal life by which alone we are better than the brutes that perish?"
