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CHAPTER XII. CONSCIENCE
Mrs. Haldane came no more to the Vicarage that week, and on Sunday she did not remain, as she had hitherto done, for the communion at the close of the morning service. She was evidently deeply offended, and was doing all she could to avoid meeting the vicar. With him that week had been one of terrible conflict. Tortured with remorse and shame, he was still mad with passion. That kiss was still burning on his lips. He still could feel that voluptuous form in his arms. It seemed, indeed, as though Mrs. Haldane were his evil genius, driving him on to destruction. He was unable to pray; and when he sat down to prepare his sermon, her face rose between him and the paper, and, starting up, he rushed from the house and walked rapidly away into the country. This was in the forenoon, and he walked on and on at a quick pace for several hours. He passed little hamlets and farmsteads which he did not notice, for his mind was absorbed in a wretchedness so intense that he scarcely was conscious of what he was doing. In the afternoon he came to a wood, and, worn out with fatigue and agitation, he entered it and flung himself beneath the shadow of a tree.
There he lay, a prey to conscience, till the sun went down. He had had no food since morning, and he was now weak and nervous. He returned from the wood to the high-road and retraced his steps homeward. As he passed by the wayside cottages, he was tempted once or twice to stop and ask for bread and milk, but after a mental contest he each time conquered the pangs of hunger and thirst, and went on again. The fathers of the desert had subdued the lusts of the flesh by hunger and stripes and physical suffering, and if mortification could exorcise the evil spirit within him, he would have no mercy on himself. He was a great distance from home, and, notwithstanding his resolution to suffer and endure, he was several times forced to sit down and rest on heaps of broken stones by the wayside; and on one of these occasions a spray of bramble-berries hanging over the hedge caught his eye, and looked so rich and sweet that he plucked one and raised it to his mouth. The next moment, however, he had flung it away from him. On another occasion he was startled to his feet by the sound of wheels, and as he walked on he was overtaken by a neighbouring farmer in his gig, who drew up as he was passing, and touched his hat.
“Making for home, Mr. Santley?” he asked, as he shook up the cushion on the vacant seat beside him. “I can put you down at your own door, sir.”
“Thank you, Mr. Henderson; I prefer walking, and I have some business to attend to.”
“All right, sir. It’s a fine evening for a walk. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
The vicar watched the gig diminish on the distant road till at length the hedgerows concealed it, with a certain sense of stoical satisfaction. He felt he was not all weakness; there was yet left some power of self-denial, some fortitude to endure self-inflicted chastisement.
It was nearly dark when he arrived again in Omberley. The windows were ruddy with fire and gaslight; there were no children playing in the streets; several of the small shopkeepers who kept open late, were now at last putting up their shutters. There was a genial glow from the red-curtained window of the village inn, and a sound of singing and merriment.
“Why should I not go in and join them?” he thought to himself. “What an effect it would have, if I stepped into the sanded taproom and called for a pipe and a quart of beer! The vicar smoking a long clay, with his frothing pewter on the deal table beside him! Why not? Has not the vicar his gross appetites as well as you? Why should you be scandalized, friends, if he should indulge in the same merry way as yourselves? Is he not a mere man like you, with the same animal needs and cravings? Fools, who shrink with horror from the humanity of a man because he wears a black coat and talks to you of duty and sacrifice and godliness! How little you know the poor wretch to whom you look for counsel and comfort and mediation with Heaven!”
He was turning away, when the taproom door was flung open, and half a dozen tipsy men, cursing and quarrelling, staggered out into the street.
Among them was a handsome, swarthy girl of two and twenty, gaily dressed in colours, with a coloured handkerchief bound over her black hair, and a guitar in her hand. They were evidently quarrelling about the girl, who was doing her best to make peace among them.
“You does me no good by your fighting and kicking up a row, masters. Decent folks won’t let a wench into the house when there’s always a fight got up about her. You spoils my market, and gets me an ill name, masters.”
“Any way, Jack Haywood shan’t lay a finger on thee, Sal!” cried a burly young fellow, deep in his cups, as he clenched his horny fist and shook it at Jack.
“What is’t to you what Jack does?” returned the girl, saucily. “Neither Jack nor thee shall lay a finger on me against my will. I reckon I can take care o’ myself, masters.”
“Ay, ay, thou canst that!” assented several voices.
The vicar, who had stood to witness this scene, now stepped in among the group. The men recognized him, and, touching their forelocks, slunk away in sheepish silence. He uttered not a word, but his pale face sobered them like a dash of cold water. Only the girl was left, and she stood, red and frightened, while her hands were nervously busied with the guitar.
“You are back again, Sal, and at your old ways,” said the vicar, in a low voice. “I see, all good advice and all encouragement are wasted on you.”
“I can’t help it, sir,” said the girl, sullenly. “I was born bad; I’m of a bad lot. It’s no use trying any more. It’s in the blood and the bone, and it’ll come out, in spite of everything.”
“Have you made much to-day?” asked the vicar.
“A shilling.”
“Where are you going to stop tonight?”
“At old Mary Henson’s, in Bara Street.”
“Then, go home at once, Sal,” said the vicar, giving her a half-crown. “Will you promise me?”
“Yes.”
“And you will speak to no man tonight? You promise?”
“Yes,” said the girl, taking the money, with a strange look of inquiry at the vicar.
“And try to say your prayers before you go to sleep.”
The girl dropped a curtsy, and went slowly down the street. With a bitter laugh, the vicar pursued his way homeward.
“In the blood and the bone! In the blood and the bone!” he; repeated to himself. “You are right, girl; we are born bad – born bad. The bestial madness of ages and aeons, the lust and lasciviousness of countless generations, are still in our blood, and our instincts are still the instincts of the beast and the savage. Hypocrite and blasphemer that I am! Whited sepulchre, reeking with corruption! Living lie and mask of holiness! O God, what a wretch am I, who dare, to speak of purity and repentance to this woman!”
When he reached the Vicarage, his sister was anxiously awaiting him, and supper was ready.
“Where have you been so long?” she asked, a little impatiently. “I think you might leave word when you expect to be detained beyond your usual time. It is eleven o’clock.”
“I could not say how long I should be,” replied the vicar, with a weary look, which touched his sister and changed her ill-temper to solicitude.
“You are quite tired out, poor fellow,” she said, laying her hand on his shoulder. “Well, come to supper. It is ready.”
“I cannot take anything at present,” replied Mr. Santley. “I will, go and do a little of my sermon.”
“Shall I leave something out for you, then?”
“Yes, please. Good night.”
He went into the study, lit the gas, and, locking the door, flung himself into an armchair.
“In the blood! in the blood!” he bitterly communed with himself. “And, with all our wild dreams and aspirations, we are but what science says we are, the conqueror of the lascivious ape, the offspring of some common ancestral bestiality, which transmitted to the simian its animalism free and unfettered except by appetite, and to man the germs of a moral law which must be for ever at variance with his sensual instincts. God! we are worse than apes – we the immortals, with our ideals of spirit and purity!”
He rose, and going across the room to the tall, carved oak cupboard, whose contents were a secret to all but himself, he unlocked it and opened the folding doors. The light fell on a large, beautiful statue of the Madonna, with the Infant Christ in her arms. The figure was in plaster, exquisitely coloured, and of a rare loveliness. He looked at it abstractedly for a long while.
“Mother of God!” he exclaimed at length, with passionate fervour. “Spotless virgin, woman above all women glorified, the solitary boast of our tainted nature – oh, dream and desire of men striving for their lost innocence, how vainly have I worshipped and prayed to thee! How ardently have I believed in thy immaculate motherhood! How yearningly I have cried to thee for thy aid and intercession! And no answer has been granted to my supplications. My feverish exaltation has passed from me, leaving me weak and at the mercy of my senses. Art thou, too, but a poetic myth of a later superstition – an idealization more beautiful, more divine than the frail goddesses of Greece and Rome? The art and poetry of the world have turned to thee for inspiration, the ascetic has filled the cold cell with the shining vision of thee, altars have been raised to thee over half the globe, the prayers of nations ascend to thee, and art thou but a beautiful conception of the heart, powerless to aid or to hear thy suppliants?”
He paused, as if, indeed, he expected some sign or word in answer to his wild appeal. Then, closing the doors again and locking them, he went towards his-desk. On it lay the manuscript of the sermon he had preached on the Unknown God.
“The Unknown God!” he exclaimed. “What if her husband is right! What if, indeed, there be no God, no God for us, no God of whom we shall ever be conscious! All science points that way. When the man is dead, his soul is dead too. We deny it; but what is our denial worth? It is our interest to deny it. All phenomena contradict our denial. No man has ever risen from the grave to give us assurance of our immortality. Ah, truly, ‘if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain!’”
He paced the room excitedly.
“Why act the knave and the hypocrite longer? Why delude the world with a false hope of a future that can never be? Why preach prayer and sacrifice, and suffering and patience, when this life is all? If Christ is not risen, our preaching is vain, and your faith is also vain.”
He again paced the room; and then, going to a drawer where the keys of the church were kept, he took them, and stole noiselessly out of the house. All was very still outside. The stars were shining, and it was duskily clear. He traversed the churchyard, and reaching the porch he unlocked the door and entered. It was quite dark, except that the tall, narrow windows looked grey against the blackness of the rest of the building, and a little bead of flame burned in the sanctuary lamp. He closed the door after him, and went up the echoing nave to the chancel. Thence he groped his way to the pulpit, and ascending he looked down into the darkness before him.
He stood there in silence, straining his eyes into the gloom, and gradually there came out of the darkness faint, spectral rows of faces, turned up to his with a horrified and bewildered aspect. He uttered no word, but in his brain he was preaching from the text of Paul, and proving that Christ, indeed, had never risen, and that their faith was vain. This world was all, and there was nothing beyond it. Vice and virtue were but social and physical distinctions, implying that the consequences of the one were destructive of happiness, of the other were conducive to happiness. Sin was a fiction, and the sense of sinfulness a morbid development of the imagination. Every man was a law unto himself, and that law must be obeyed. A mans actions were the outcome of his constitution. He was not morally responsible for them. Indeed, moral responsibility was a philosophical error. In dumb show was that long, phrenzied sermon preached to a phantom congregation. At the close the vicar, omitting the usual form of benediction, descended from the pulpit, staggered across the chancel, and fell in a swoon at the foot of the steps which led to the altar.
CHAPTER XIII. IN THE LABORATORY
The grey dawn was glimmering through the chancel when Mr. Santley regained consciousness. He looked wonderingly about him, and at first was unable to understand how he came to be in his present position. That physical collapse had been a merciful relief from a state of mental tension which had become intolerable. He felt faint but calm, and the horrible excitement of the last few hours presented itself to his memory as a sort of ghastly nightmare from which he had been providentially awakened.
He rose and went out into the churchyard. The air was moist and cool. A strange white mist lay in fantastic pools and streaks on the bare hayfields. The corn was full of an indistinct white gauzy vapour. So were the trees. There was not much of it in the open air. It had a spectral look, and, like spirits, it seemed to require some material thing to interpenetrate and rest upon. The grass was heavy with dew, and the gravelled walk as dark coloured as though there had been rain. From the corn came the sound of innumerable chirpings and twitterings. The fields seemed to be swarming with sweet, sharp musical notes. In the trees, too, though there was no stir of wings, there was a very tumult of bird-song – not the full, joyous outpouring, but a ceaseless orchestral tuning up and rehearsing as it were. The familiar graveyard in this unusual misty light, and alive with this strange music, seemed a place in which ne had never been before. The effect was as novel as the first appearance of a well-known landscape buried in snow.
The newness of what was so familiar excited an indefinable interest in him. He felt somehow as though he had passed through the valley of the shadow, and this was the day after death – that death by which we shall not all die, but by which we and all things shall be changed. He lingered in that mental state in which thought expands beyond the bounds of consciousness, and it was not till a low, faint flush of red began to colour the east that he returned to the Vicarage, and, throwing himself on his bed, fell into the deep, dreamless sleep of exhaustion.
It was fortunate for Mr. Santley that he had inherited a magnificent constitution, or the consequences of this wild conflict might have been disastrous. He woke late, but the brief period of rest and unconsciousness had repaired the reckless waste of nervous force. Only a profound sadness remained as a testimony of the terrible nature of the emotion he had endured. The rest of the week passed in a sort of weary, listless stupor and the same heavy sadness. When Sunday came round, he shuddered as he ascended the pulpit at the recollection of that phantasmal audience to which he had last preached; but his intellect was clear and sane, and he kept faithfully to the written discourse spread out before him. He was not surprised that Mrs. Haldane left before he had any opportunity of speaking to her.
He had half expected as much. She regarded him with a cold, haughty contempt – a contempt too passionless to permit her even to avenge the insult he had offered her by exposing him to his parishioners. She knew he loved her – and indeed was not this folly proof of the frantic character of his love? – and she knew that total loss of her would be the greatest chastisement even vindictiveness could wish to inflict upon him. It would have been possible for him, he thought, to bear in silence any punishment from her except this icy contempt and utter indifference. If she had hated him, if she had pursued him with bitter hostility, if she had disgraced him, he could have endured it; it would have been no more than he merited. But that she should simply ignore him, that she should not consider it worth her while even to be angry, was an intolerable humiliation.
In spite of all, he still loved her! It was useless to seek to delude himself into any belief to the contrary. He loved her, in defiance of honour, goodness; in spite of misery and shame; in spite of divine or human law; in spite of man or God. He loved her with a mad, despairing passion, which he might conceal from all eyes for a little while, but which he could never quell; which he felt would some day break out in a frantic paroxysm that would involve both him and her in a common ruin. Home, position, reputation, this life and the next – he could sacrifice all for her. He could not exist without her. To see her and be never seen by her was a living hell. If he were, indeed, to be for ever doomed to this misery, better that he should perish at once, and have done for ever with the torture of being.
This alternative presented itself to the vicar not merely as one of those exaggerated expressions of feeling common to many men in moments of unendurable pain or depression, but as a sober reality. An existence in which Mrs. Haldane took no part and shared no interest was literally to him an existence more hateful than self-destruction itself. On the Monday he proceeded to the neighbouring market town, and bought a revolver and a packet of cartridges. He loaded the weapon on the road, and threw the remaining cartridges away. That evening he spent in looking over his papers, a large number of which he burned. He then sat down, and wrote for some time; but when he had finished, he threw what he had written into the fire. What need was there to put any explanation on record? He then took from the bookcase the great poem of Lucretius, and read till a late hour.
Next morning he arose early, and seemed in better spirits than he had been for some time. He told his sister that he was going to walk over to Foxglove Manor, and was not certain as to when he would return. He left the house, humming a tune, and set out at a brisk pace through the village. The weather was bright and inspiriting. The country never before seemed so full of health and gladness and joyous life. The lark was singing far up in the shining blue sky; butterflies went fluttering across the road; whirring flights of birds along the hedgerows preceded him all the way. He looked at everything and noticed everything – the bright flowers growing among the wayside weeds; the snail which had crept on to the footpath, and whose shell he carefully avoided. He observed too much to think; but one thought, underlying this discursive activity of mind, kept him company all the while – “I have struggled and prayed; I have tried to believe and to trust; I can do no more. If there be a God who is concerned in man, let him now give evidence of His providence.”
When he reached the Manor, he was ushered into the reception-room, where he was not kept long waiting. Mrs. Haldane entered the apartment, and received him with a chilling courtesy. She noticed that, though he had advanced eagerly at her entrance, he had not offered her his hand; and now that she had bowed to him with a certain constrained grace, he stood regarding her hesitatingly.
“I have come,” he said at last, in a low, nervous voice, “to throw myself on your mercy, to beg your forgiveness, to ask you once more to restore me your confidence and friendship.”
“I freely forgive you, Mr. Santley,” she replied at once. “It is better that what has taken place should be forgiven and forgotten as speedily as possible. But my confidence and friendship! How can I trust you any more? And I did trust and esteem you so much. I regarded you – But I will not even reproach you with having destroyed my idealization of you.”
“Reproach me and censure me as you will,” he cried earnestly; “but do not cast me away from you, do not be heartlessly indifferent to me. It lies in your hands to make my life happy or miserable. It depends on you whether I can live at all.”
“That cannot be,” replied Mrs. Haldane, shaking her head gravely.
“It is and must be,” said the vicar. “All my future, both here and hereafter, hangs on your decision now. I have fought with myself, and prayed to God to be delivered from my bondage; but it is in vain. No answer has been vouchsafed to my supplications; no grace, no strength has been granted in my need. Had I prayed to the deaf impersonal power which your husband believes in, I could not have been more hopelessly unheard or unheeded. The conflict is over. I am the gladiator fallen in the arena, and it rests with you to give the signal of reprieve or destruction.”
“I do not understand you, Mr. Santley,” she said, feeling alarmed and excited. “What do you ask? What would you have me do?”
“Oh, what would I have you do!” he exclaimed passionately; then, checking himself abruptly, he continued eagerly, “I would have you be as you were before I offended you. I would have you forgive my offence.”
“I have promised to forgive and forget it,” said Mrs. Haldane.
“No; do not forget it, but pardon it, and try to look upon it as more venial than you now do. Oh, Ellen, had I not loved you beyond all that a man values in this world, would it be possible to have so far fallen in your esteem?”
She frowned, and was about to interrupt him; but he went on hurriedly – “Do not be angry. I will not speak to you of love again. I will only answer your question. I would, as I have said, that you should forgive my offence, and be the same to me as though it had never happened. Not only my use in life, my happiness, my honour depend on this, but life itself. I cannot exist without some share in your thoughts, in your interests, in your regard. Life would be intolerable if you were to be wholly taken away from me. Do I ask too much? Answer me quickly, for I am prepared for either alternative. You and God – if, indeed, there be above us a God who sees and cares – must now decide my course.”
“You frighten and bewilder me with your passion. I do not know what to answer you. Indeed, I hardly know whether I understand you. I have forgiven you. I bear you no ill will. I hope, indeed, that you may be happy, and that you may soon find some one who will be worthier of your love than I could have been. I am both sorry and ashamed of what has happened, and I will try to forget it, both for your sake and my own. Have I not said enough?”
“And the future?” he asked, with an anxious look.
“‘The future will be a continuation of the past, seeing that all is forgiven and forgotten.”
“And you will still allow me to speak to you, to see you? You will not treat me with silence and indifference?”
“I will be as I used to be,” said Ellen, with a look of doubt and hesitation. “And you will trust me?”
“Are you to be trusted, Mr. Santley?” she asked in a low voice. “You know how fully I trusted you before.”
“And you must trust me again if all is to be the same as it was. Is not that our agreement?”
“I will try to, but the result will entirely depend upon yourself.”
“I cannot say how thankful and grateful I am to you,” he said, extending his hand.
She took it, and he raised hers to his lips, though she coloured and tried to withdraw it.
“Nay, it is but a token of my gratitude and submission. I am thankful to live, and you do not know how certainly you have enabled me to live.”
“My husband is in the laboratory,” said Mrs. Haldane, who felt uneasy, and wished to bring this interview to a close.
“Shall we join him?
“Certainly, if you wish it.”
They found Mr. Haldane busily engaged in writing, while the sinister-looking attendant, with the dark, startling eyes, was noiselessly occupied in filling a number of flasks with some mysterious decoction intended for immediate experiment.
“Ever busy!” exclaimed the vicar.
“Busier than ever just now,” replied Mr. Haldane. “I am preparing a paper which I intend to read on Tuesday next before the scientific congress at Paris.”
“Are you going to Paris?” asked Mr. Santley, with surprise, and addressing the question rather to Mrs. Haldane than her husband.
“Mr. Haldane is going, but I remain here.”
A look of relief passed over the vicar’s face.
“And what is the subject of your paper, if curiosity be pardonable?” he asked.
“Oh, it is a chapter from the great opus on morals. I call it ‘The Problem of Suicide.’ A singularly fascinating subject to one who has paid any attention to it, I assure you. Does it happen to have fallen in your line of study?”
“I cannot say it has.”
“You would find some curious generalizations here, in that case,” said Mr. Haldane, pointing to the sheets of paper on his desk. “For instance, I suppose you would be hardly prepared to grant that suicide, which seems a barbarous and unenlightened act, is really an effect of civilization, or that an act which appears more than any other an evidence of individual spontaneity, is in fact the inevitable issue of universal and absolute social law.”
“I am certainly not prepared to concede that.”
“No; few persons unacquainted with the subject would be. Still, the facts remain. The suicide who imagines he is rebelling against all law and asserting his individual independence, is but illustrating the coercion of the physical and psychical dispensation. Why, you shall not even choose your own weapon of destruction, or select the spot in which you shall die. Law will fix those apparently trivial details for you. If your suicide is an Englishman, for example, he will prefer hanging to cutting and stabbing, cutting and stabbing to drowning, drowning to poison, and poison to firearms. With English women the order of preference is modified. A third of the women, and hardly a seventh of the men, seek death by drowning; while a seventh of the women poison themselves, but only a fifteenth of the men. The ratios hold good from year to year – relatively at least – for suicide is largely on the increase. You should look into the matter for yourself. It is a most attractive social problem.”
“Perhaps Mr. Santley would like to look at your paper?” suggested Mrs. Haldane.
“You shall be very welcome to see it when I return,” said the philosopher.
“Thank you very much. I have no doubt it will be extremely interesting. And when do you leave?”
“The day after to-morrow. I shall spend a day or two in London, and possibly a week or a fortnight in Paris. Indeed, I have some notion of paying a flying visit to Berlin.”
That afternoon, as the vicar returned home, he paused by a pool in one of the fields that skirted the high-road, and flung his revolver into it.
“Can it be possible,” he asked himself, “that man has no volition, no independence of action; that his choice of life or death even is not a choice, but a predetermined issue of mechanical forces?” He watched the ripples die away on the water, and then resumed his way.
“Are we mere automata, accomplishing not our own wills, but the secret purpose of a subtle agency, of whose control we are unconscious?”
Gradually the problem which perplexed him gave place to another wave of thought. His step became firmer and more elastic, and his face brightened.
The thought which effected this change in his demeanour was Mr. Haldane’s departure. What might not happen in those few days of absence? Was not Mr. Haldane also accomplishing an unknown, destiny? Might not this journey be providential? Or say, rather an unanticipated road to the great end? Suppose Mr. Haldane should never return!
The possibilities involved in that reflection!
Then he thought of Mrs. Haldane. For a week, perhaps for a fortnight, she would be alone at the Manor. For a fortnight? Who could foretell – perhaps for ever!
