The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

"Oh, but the fuller light will come! 'God is light.' He will not leave a soul so precious in darkness. I knew long ago, when I saw you among those wretched creatures at Lambeth, I knew you could not be for ever lost."

They walked on a little way in silence, facing towards the setting sun. They were crossing the public garden at Moorfields, where the cits and their wives and families walked on fine evenings.

"Will you not resume your work in my district? Our people long for you. Miss Potter is very kind – and your bounty is lavish – but they all want you, all those whom you visited three years ago, and who remember you with affection. Cannot you spare a little time from these new pensioners for your old friends?"

"Oh, sir, I doubt they are well cared for, now they have you."

"But will you not help me a little? Ah, madam, could you but understand what your help means for me! If you avoid the old places, the old people, can I believe that you have pardoned my sin of the past? Surely that one passionate hour has been expiated by the remorse of years."

"I have long since pardoned your folly, sir. Pray suffer me to forget it."

Her cold disdain stung him to the quick. She did not even account his passion worth her anger. How could he ever hope to break through that adamant, to melt that ice?

He was persistent in spite of her coldness, and at last she promised to return occasionally to her old work at Lambeth, and to visit the people he deemed most in need of her.

"I can but give them my surplus hours," she said, "since the best part of my life is pledged to Mr. Wesley. And now, sir, be so obliging as to call a coach, and suffer me to bid you good evening."

There was a stand of coaches close by, and he handed her to her seat in one. He stood bareheaded, watching her drive away. Her serious manner, with that touch of hauteur, kept him at an immeasurable distance. The familiar confidence of her old friendship seemed irrecoverably lost.

Nearly a year had gone since that meeting in the Whitechapel kitchen. It was spring again, but early spring, and the days were still short, and the skies still grey and cold, when George Stobart walked home with Antonia after her visit to another dying bed, the bed of extreme old age this time, the gradual fading out of the vital flame, feebler, paler, day by day, the bed of boundless faith and ecstatic anticipation of a new and fairer life.

She had seen the last sands of another life run down in the autumn of the past year. She had kept her promise, and had gone back to Bellagio in September, and had watched by her Italian grandfather's dying bed – a peaceful end, in the odour of sanctity. She had followed the old man to his last resting-place, and had stayed at Bellagio long enough to make all arrangements for Francesca's wedding, and her establishment as mistress of the old villino. She was married at the New Year, handsomely dowered by her English cousin, and having chosen a worthy mate. Antonia's obligations to her humble kinsfolk had been fulfilled.

Mr. Stobart and Lady Kilrush were on friendliest terms now; but no word of love had been spoken. To be with her, to hear her voice, to know that she liked his company, was so much; and to declare himself might be the breaking of a spell. They had been together often among the homes of the poor, in the library at St. James's Square, and sometimes in the churches and chapels where Wesley, Romaine, and other lights of the evangelical school were to be heard. But in all that time Stobart had obtained no farther profession of faith from Antonia.

"If to love Christ is to be a Christian, I am one," she told him, when he tried to bring her to his own way of thinking, and that was all.

Final perseverance, sanctification, justification, conviction of sin! Those phrases seemed to her only the shibboleth of a sect. But all the strength of her heart and intellect were engaged in those good works to which the Methodists attached only a secondary merit. Her compassion for human suffering was the dominating impulse of her life. She could feel for the thief in Newgate, pity the slut in Bridewell whose life had been one long disgrace. She had gone with Stobart into the prisons of London, those dark places as yet unvisited by Howard or Elizabeth Fry. She shrank from no form of suffering, so long as it was possible to help or to console.

She had done with the world and its pleasures. The recluse is soon forgotten in the merry-go-round of society. Her duchesses had long ceased to trouble themselves about her. The princes and princesses had forgotten her existence. The new reign had brought with it new interests, a new set. Women were the top of the fashion who had been dowdies; men who had been blockheads were wits.

Lord Dunkeld had married a rosy-cheeked damsel of eighteen summers, daughter and heiress of a Lord of Session, was settled on his Scotch estate, and had come to think Edinburgh the focus of intelligence and ton. The people who had courted and admired Lady Kilrush had long ceased to think of her, except as an eccentric, like Lady Huntingdon, who had caught the fever of piety that had been in the air for the last twenty years – the contagion of Methodism, Moravianism, Predestinarianism – some boring and essentially middle-class form of religion which banished her from polite company.

A woman who neither visits nor gives entertainments is socially dead. Her female friends spoke of her sometimes with pity, as an unfortunate who was afraid to let the town see her altered face, and who had taken to religion as a substitute for beauty. The idea that she was disfigured having once got abroad, her old rivals were slow to believe her face unspoilt, though people who had seen her at one of Lady Huntingdon's Thursdays swore that she was almost as handsome as ever.

"If she had not a cold, proud look that keeps an old friend at a distance," said one of her admirers, who had suffered one of Whitefield's sermons in order to meet her.

"She would not have you near enough to discover the ravages of that horrid malady. I'll wager her countenance is plastered a quarter of an inch thick with white lead," retorted the rival belle.

The library in St. James's Square was in the half light of a spring evening, as it had been a year ago when Stobart entered the room with so agonized an apprehension. He came in now with Antonia, a privileged guest, coming and going as in the years gone by, taking his rest by her fireside, after the burden of the day. Her only other visitors were Lady Margaret Laroche – who was faithful to her in spite of what she called her "degeneracy," and who came now and then to pour out her complaints at the foolishness of a world whose follies were necessary to her existence – and Patty Granger, whose dog-like fidelity made her ever welcome, and who loved to talk of Antonia's girlhood, and her own free and easy life in Covent Garden, when the General was a submissive lover, and not a peevish husband.

Stobart had been unusually silent during the walk from Lambeth, and Antonia had been full of thought, impressed as she ever was by that mystery of the passing spirit, that unanswerable question, "Whither goest thou, oh, departing soul, or is thy journey for ever finished, and is man's instinctive belief in immortality a vain dream?"

Antonia sank into her fireside chair, weary after a long day in wretched rooms, hearing and seeing sad things. She was almost too tired to talk, and was glad of Stobart's silence. Sophy would come presently and make the tea – it being supposed that no man-servant's hand was delicate enough to brew that choice infusion – and their spirits would revive. But in the meantime rest was all they wanted.

It startled her from this reposeful feeling when Stobart rose abruptly and began to pace the room, for some minutes in silence, broken only by a sigh, then bursting into impassioned speech.

"Antonia, I can lock up my heart no longer! 'Tis a year since I came from America to find a desolate home. For a year I have known myself a widower. Dare I break the spell of silence? Shall I lose all in asking for all? Will you banish me in anger, as you did when it was so black a sin to speak of my love?"

He flung himself on his knees beside her chair.

"Say you will be pitiful and kind, you who are all pity; and if you cannot give me what I ask, promise not to make me an outcast from your friendship."

"I shall never again cease to be your friend, sir!" she answered gently. "I think we know each other too well to quarrel. We are neither of us perfect creatures; but I believe you are a good Christian, and that your friendship will ever be precious to me."

"Make the bond something nearer than friendship, Antonia. Let it be the hallowed tie that makes two souls seem as one. Ah, my angelic friend, seldom has woman been so worshipped as you are by me. The love that stole upon my mind and heart unawares, in this room, when it was so foul a sin to love you; the love purified by years of repentance; the love that haunted me in the wilderness, through long days and nights of toil and pain, when your following ghost was nearer and more real to me than the foe that hemmed us round or the storm that beat upon our heads – that love is with me still, Antonia; time cannot change nor familiarity lessen it. Will you be for ever cold, for ever deaf to my prayer?"

She had heard him to the end. Was it for the joy of hearing him, though she knew what her answer must be? She knew now that she loved him, and had always loved him, from those days of a so-called friendship. She knew that he took all the zest out of her life when he left her; and that the want of his company had been a dull pain, underlying all varieties of pleasure, a sense of loss coming on her on a sudden amidst the tempestuous gaiety of a masquerade, haunting her in some melody at the opera house, saddening her in the midst of a gay throng, where arrows of wit flashed fast to an accompaniment of joyous laughter.

"Can you forget what I told you years ago?" she said. "A marriage is impossible for me. I am married to the dead. I gave myself to my husband for ever. I swore in his dying moments to belong to none but him."

"'Twere madness to keep so wild a vow."

"What! Do the Methodist Christians think it no sin to break their oath?"

"They would violate no vow made in their rational moments. But your promise was given in the delirium of grief, and he to whom you gave it could not be such a self-lover as to fetter youth and beauty to his coffin."

"'Twas he who claimed the promise, and I gave it in all seriousness. I loved him, sir. I would have given all the residue of my life for one year of happiness with him. I loved him; and our lives were severed by my act, severed for years, to unite in death. If there be that other world Mr. Wesley believes in, I may see him again, may be with him in eternity. That, sir, is indeed a great perhaps. I will not hazard such a chance of everlasting bliss."

"'Tis the pagan's heaven you picture, not the Christian's – the resumption of human ties, not union with Christ. Oh, can you be so cruel as to make my life miserable, to deny the lover who adores you, for the sake of the dead man who lies in the quiet sleep that has no knowledge of you and me – must lie there unknowing, uncaring, till the Day of Judgment?"

"If ever that day come he shall not find me forsworn; no, not even for you; not even to make you happy."

He had watched the exalted look in her face as the firelight shone upon it. She had looked upward as she spoke, her eyes dilated, her lips tremulous with emotion, and a fever spot on her cheek. But now on a sudden her head drooped, and she burst into tears.

"Not even for you," she sobbed.

It was her confession of love. In the next moment she was in his arms, and their lips had met. She let him hold her there, she let her head lie upon his shoulder, and suffered his impassioned kisses in the surprise of his wild vehemence.

"You love me, Antonia, you love me! No dead man shall stand between us. You must, you shall be mine!"

She released herself from his arms, and sprang to her feet.

"I am not so weak a thing as you fancy me, sir."

"I will not let you go. Shall a profligate's pale spectre stand between me and the woman I worship? A vow made under such conditions is no vow. Can it better him that my life should be miserable, that lovers as true as you and I should pine in solitude, go down to the grave without ever having known happiness? It shall not be."

"You are very imperious, Mr. Stobart; but I am the mistress of my own fate."

"I am very resolute. You love me, Antonia. Your tears, your lips have told me that divine secret."

"Be it so. I love you, sir. But I will not break my promise to one I loved better, my first dear love, the man who brought sunshine into my life, and extinguished the sun when he left me. The man who loved me better than he thought."

"Antonia!"

"Leave me, Mr. Stobart. If we are still to be friends, you had best leave me."

"It is no longer a question of friendship. I know now that you love me, and I swear I will not lose you."

"Leave me, sir," she exclaimed. "If you ever wish to see my face again, leave me this instant."

"At least be merciful. Do not send me from you in despair. Antonia, be kind! I cannot live without you."

"Go, sir; your vehemence, your boldness, leave me no power to reason or even to think. Go; and if after a night of thought I can bring myself to believe that I am not bound, body and soul, by my promise to the dead – "

"You will be mine," he cried, with outstretched arms, trying to clasp her again to his heart, but she drew herself away from him indignantly.

He grasped her unwilling hand, covered it with kisses and tears, and rushed from the room.

The watchmen were calling "Half-past eleven, and a fine night," when Lady Kilrush left her dressing-room, carrying a lighted candle and a key, and crossed the gallery to that other side of the spacious house where the late lord's rooms were situated. The household had retired soon after ten, and the great well staircase lay like a pit of darkness below the massive oak banisters. An oppressive silence, an oppressive gloom, pervaded the house, as Antonia unlocked the door that had seldom been opened since the coffin was carried out on the first stage of its long journey, on a summer night that memory recalled as if it had been yesterday. The atmosphere, the feelings of that night were in her mind as she crossed the threshold of the room which had never known the uses of human life since Kilrush occupied it. The wainscot mouse, the spider on the wall, the moth lurking in the window drapery, had been its only inhabitants.

The tall silver candlesticks, the portfolio and standish were on the table in the oak-panelled ante-room where Antonia remembered the lawyer and the doctor talking beside the empty hearth. The vastness of the bed-chamber had an appalling air in the glimmer of a single candle. Antonia's hand trembled as she lighted those other candles, the candles that had burnt beside the dying man when he spoke the words that made her a peeress.

How near that night seemed, as she stood beside the bed, funereal under the dark velvet hangings, a catafalque rather than a bed. She could hear the Bishop's full-mouthed tones, and that other voice, faltering and faint, but to her the world's best music.

"Oh, my beloved," she cried, falling on her knees beside the pillow on which his head had lain. "Oh, my dearest, kindest, best, surely it is you I love and none other – you, only you, only you!"

Her arms were folded on the coverlet, her head resting on them. She remained thus on her knees, for a long time, dreaming back the past. She lived again through those hours in Rupert Buildings, those hours spent in endless talk with Kilrush. They seemed to her now the most blissful hours of her life. She looked back and wondered at that happiness. Perhaps there was some touch of illusion in that dream of the past, something of the light that never was on sea or land; but to her there was no shadow of doubt that the joy of those past days exceeded all she had known of gladness since her husband's death.

She had made her night toilet and put on a loose silken négligé, meaning to spend the long hours in this room. Her first night in a husband's chamber – her wedding night, she thought, with a melancholy smile.

She had come here to solve the problem of the future, to determine whether she should or should not break her promise to the dead. For her, the free-thinker, it might seem a small thing to break a vow, when her keeping it would make a good man's life desolate. But despite the vagueness of her hope in the Hereafter, despite that early teaching which had bidden her believe in nothing that her human intelligence could not comprehend, her husband's image was a living presence in that room, a living influence in her life, and she could not imagine him lying in the dust, unconscious and indifferent. Somehow, somewhere, by some mysterious unthinkable means, the dead still lived, still loved her, still claimed her fidelity.

"My first dear love," she cried, in a burst of hysterical sobs, "I am yours and yours only. I can never belong to another, never own any husband but you."

Her tears, her reiterated vow soothed her. She rose from her knees, by-and-by, and sat on the bed, as she had sat when she held her dying lover in her arms. Gradually her head sank on the pillow where his head had lain, and she fell asleep.

"Past two o'clock, and a rainy night," called the watchman in the square.

Antonia did not wake till after five. The dead man was in her dreams through those three hours of deepest sleep. It was not George Stobart's impassioned embrace that haunted her slumber. The arms that encircled her, the lips that kissed her, were the arms and lips of the lover irrevocably lost, and there was a poignant joy in that embrace. Her wedding night! The words were repeated in her dreams. It was a night of dreams that ratified her promise to the dead. Surely he was near her! The voice that sounded so close to her ear, that very voice she knew so well, the lips whose touch thrilled her, gave her the assurance of immortality; and in some dim land she could not picture, under conditions beyond the limit of human intelligence, they two would meet again, husband and wife, spirit or flesh, reunited for ever.

George Stobart was at Kilrush House before nine o'clock. His patience could endure no longer. He had spent the night as he spent that other and much more miserable night after Whitefield's sermon, wandering about the waste places between Lambeth Palace and Vauxhall. Slumber or rest was out of the question.

The hall porter was more awake than usual, and answered his inquiry briskly.

"No, sir, not at home. Her ladyship has left London. She will lie at Devizes to-night, on her way to Ireland."

"Gone! Impossible!"

"It was very sudden, sir, and as much as could be done. 'Twas nearly six o'clock this morning when the servants had their orders. Her ladyship takes only Miss Potter, her French waiting woman, and one footman, in her travelling carriage and a post-chaise."

"What time did they leave?"

"They may have been gone over half an hour, sir. I heard the clock strike eight after the coaches left the door. I have her ladyship's letter for you, sir."

Stobart took the letter, speechless with mortification, and left the house before he broke the seal. It was a miserable morning, and he stood in the rain, under the low grey sky, while he read her letter, her letter of one line —

"Farewell for ever."

CHAPTER XX.

"AND CLEAVE UNTO THE BEST."

From the Revd. John Wesley to Mr. George Stobart"At Mrs. Berry's Lodgings, Bristol,"May 5th, 1762.

"MY DEAR FRIEND,

"Your letter surprised and grieved me; for I had hoped that Lady Kilrush would have smiled upon your suit, and that an union between two natures so ardent in Christian charity would be not only for your happiness, but for the spiritual welfare of that dear lady, and for the greater glory of God.

"Yet though I regret your disappointment I can but honour her ladyship for the reverence in which she holds her promise to the dead; nor can I do other than admire that chaste and heavenly disposition which would dedicate a lifetime to the memory of a husband who was hers only in one dying hour. Such widows are widows indeed!

"You ask for my counsel at this so serious crisis of your life, when the nature of your future work for Christ rests on your choice of action; first, whether you should take Holy Orders, before you go to America, a voyage upon which you tell me your mind is irrevocably fixed; and next whether you should accept her ladyship's munificent gift of the major portion of her funded property, and her mansion in St. James's Square, she retaining only her Irish estate, and the family seat on the Shannon. This latter question I unhesitatingly answer in the affirmative. The fact that this noble lady had executed the deed of gift which transferred her property to you before she declared her intention, in the touching letter which you send me, would show that she had deliberately resolved upon this sacrifice, and was influenced by the desire of doing justice to her late husband's nearest kinsman. She has indeed honoured me with a letter to that effect, and has moreover told me that she intends to spend the rest of her life in Ireland, where I hope occasionally to visit her.

"I say to you, George, accept this fortune, even though, in your present temper, it may seem a burden. Lady Kilrush will be still a rich woman; and you will have a wider scope for the employment of money in the service of Christ than any woman, not even that Mother in Israel, Lady Huntingdon, could find.

"The more serious question of your ordination I must leave to your own heart and mind, and the Spirit of God directing you. As an itinerant lay-preacher your ministry has borne good fruit, and if you transfer your labours to Georgia I shall sorely miss your help; but as an ordained priest you will enter a higher sphere of usefulness, and feel yourself sent out upon a nobler mission: so, my dear brother in Christ, I bid you go on and fear not. We desire to rivet the chains that bind us to the Church of England, not to loosen them; and the idea that we are drifting apart from that Church —injusta noverca though she has been to us – is a source of fear and trembling to many weak spirits, most of all to my dear brother Charles.

"For myself I care but little whether we continue to belong to the Established Church or be cast out; for sure I am that we have kindled a flame which neither men nor devils will ever be able to quench. Our fundamental principles are the fundamental principles of the Church, and will suffer no change. I have no fear for the Society, which, from so insignificant a beginning, has attained so vast an influence. I remember how, less than thirty years ago, two young men, without friends, without either power or fortune, set out from college to attempt a reformation, not of opinions, but of men's tempers and lives, of vice in every kind, of everything contrary to justice, mercy, or truth. For this we carried our lives in our hands, and were looked upon and treated as mad dogs. Knowing this of me you cannot think that I should fear to stand alone, the untrammelled shepherd of my flock. Your ordination, should you meet with a bishop of liberal mind, like Whitefield's friend, that good Bishop of Gloucester, ought not to hang tediously on hand. But I hope I may have many occasions for conversing with you before you sail for America, where, supplied with ample fortune, and armed with the faith that can move mountains, you may do much to maintain those noble enterprises, the Schools, the Orphanages, and Asylums, which Mr. Whitefield initiated, and to which he ever returns with fresh vigour. Would that he had a more robust constitution, and that we might hope to see his ministry continued to a green old age; but I fear he cannot long stand against the inroads of disease, accelerated by strenuous toil, preaching three times a day, long journeys in all weathers, the rough usage of the mob, and that fiery spirit which has been always like the sword that wears out the scabbard.

"On my return to the Foundery in the autumn I shall seek for you in your house at Lambeth. Till then, esteemed friend and fellow labourer, farewell.