CHAPTER V
MAN OF THE WORLD AND MYSTIC
THERE be no zarvice in the church to-day, my lady—not to St. Bride’s,” said a garden lad to Bride one bright Sunday morning in February as she was returning from a walk along the cliff in time for the eight-o’clock breakfast. Eustace had met her strolling homewards and had joined her. This had happened once or twice lately, and the strangeness of the feeling of having a companion was beginning to wear off.
“No service?” questioned the girl, pausing in her walk. “Is Mr. Tremodart ill? I had not heard of it.”
The lad scratched his head as he replied in the slow drawl of his native place—
“’Tisn’t ezactly that, my lady. Passon isn’t zick; but he du have one of his hens a settin’ in the pulpit, and zo he du not wish her distarbed.”
Eustace broke into a peal of laughter. It seemed a delicious notion to him that the service of the parish church was to be suspended because an erratic hen had chosen to sit herself in the sacred building. It chimed in with many notions he already held of the effeteness and deadness of the Church. He glanced into his companion’s face for an answering smile, but Bride was looking straight before her with an expression in her liquid dark eyes which he was quite unable to fathom.
“You can go to hear Mr. St. Aubyn at St. Erme, George,” she said kindly to the lad, after a moment’s pause, but he only scratched his head again, and said—
“Mappen I’ll go tu Dan’s and year Maister Tresithny. They du zay as he’ll read a bit out o’ the book and tell folks what it all means.”
“That will be better than getting into mischief,” said the lady, with a grave though kindly look at the lad; and then she passed onwards to the house, Eustace walking beside her, smiling still.
“Are the services of the Church often suspended here for such weighty reasons?” he asked.
“Not often,” answered Bride, still in the same gravely quiet way; “but Mr. Tremodart is hardly alive to the sacredness of his calling nor the sanctity of his office. He is a kind man, but he does not win souls by his teaching. The church is very badly attended: no doubt he thinks one service more or less of small importance. The people, I believe, like him all the better for giving them an occasional holiday from attendance, even though they may be very irregular in coming.”
“I should think that highly probable,” answered Eustace, still examining Bride’s face with some curiosity, as if anxious to gauge her thoughts on this subject and to seek to find in them some accord with his own. “My experiences of the services at St. Bride’s Church are not very stirring. The smell of dry-rot suggests the idea that it has been caught from the calibre of the discourses heard there. Our friend Mr. Tremodart may have many virtues, but he has not the gift of eloquence.”
Bride made no response. In her eyes there was a look akin to pain, as though she felt the truth of the stricture, and yet it went against her to admit its truth.
Eustace waited for a moment and then continued in the same light way—
“And will the service of the parish church be suspended for three Sundays?—for, if my boyish recollections serve me, that is the time required by a hen for bringing off her brood.”
“Oh, no,” answered Bride, with a quick earnestness and energy, “that will certainly not be. Poor Mr. Tremodart, he knows no better perhaps; but it is very, very sad. I suppose it was only found out last night or this morning. There was no sermon last Sunday, so I suppose the eggs collecting in the pulpit were not noticed. Of course they should have been taken away at once. But Mr. Tremodart is very fond of his animals, and he does not think of sacred things quite as—as—others do. Of course it will be done before next Sunday. Oh, I am sorry it has happened. I am sorry for the poor people.”
Eustace could not understand her mood. He saw only the humorous side of the incident, but he would not say so to her. He was very anxious to approach nearer in thought and feeling to his beautiful cousin, who was as yet almost as much of a stranger to him as she had been upon the day of his arrival. Although he saw her daily, sat at table with her, and sometimes spent an hour over the piano with her in the evening (for both were good musicians, as things went in those days), he still felt as though she were a thing apart from him, wrapped in a world of her own of which he knew nothing. The barrier which divided them was at once impenetrable and invisible, yet he had never succeeded in discovering wherein its power lay, and what might be done to break it down and bring them together.
“You will go to St. Erme’s Church to-day, I suppose?” he said next, without trying to solve the problem suggested by her speech. “I have never attended St. Erme for a service, although I have met Mr. St. Aubyn. Will you let me be your escort there? I suppose your father will hardly walk as far.”
“No, I think not. He seldom goes out when there is no service at St. Bride. He does not care for Mr. St. Aubyn’s preaching as I do: he prefers that of Mr. Tremodart.”
Eustace secretly thought it must be a queer sort of preaching that could be inferior to that of the parson of St. Bride’s; but he made no remark, and merely asked—
“Then you will let me be your escort?”
“Thank you,” answered Bride quietly; “if you wish to go, I think you will be rewarded.”
Eustace felt that his reward would be in the pleasure of the walk to and fro with his cousin; but he did not say so, even though rather exaggerated and high-flown compliments were then the fashion of the day more than they have since become. Something in Bride’s aspect and manner always withheld him from uttering words of that kind, and his own honesty and common-sense kept him at all times within bounds, so that he had never acquired the foolish foppery that was fashionable amongst the gilded youth of the aristocracy. In one thing at least he and Bride were agreed—that life was given for something more than mere idle amusement and pleasure-seeking. And when they started off together for their two miles’ walk across cliff and down for the little church of St. Erme, Eustace began to ask questions of her as to the condition of the people, their ignorance, their poverty, their state of apathy and neglect, which all at once aroused her interest and sympathy, and caused her to open out towards him as she had never done before.
Bride loved the people—that was the first fact he gathered from the answers she made him. She loved them—and he loved them too. He was conscious that they loved them with a difference—that when they spoke of raising them and making them better and happier, she was thinking of one thing and he of another. He was conscious of this, but he did not think she was; and he was very careful to say no word to check the impulse of confidence which had arisen between them. Bride was grieved for the state of things about her: she mourned over the degradation, the apathy, the almost bestial indifference to higher things that reigned amongst the humble folks about her home. She spoke with a glimmer as of tears in her eyes of their absolute indifference to all that was high and noble and true; of the deep superstitions, which stultified their spiritual aspirations, and the blind error and folly of those who, turning away from God, sought wisdom and help from those calling themselves witches—many of whom did possess, or appear to possess, occult powers that it was impossible altogether to explain away or disbelieve.
“Yes, Bride, it is very sad to hear of,” said Eustace gravely, “and it all points to the same thing. We must teach the people. We must raise them. We must feed them with wholesome food, and then they will turn away in disgust from these effete superstitions, which are only the outcome of ignorance and degraded minds.”
“I fear me there is something worse in them than that, Eustace,” said Bride, looking out before her with that luminous gaze he often noticed in her, which suggested a mind moving in a sphere above that of the common earth. “It is the work of something more than blind ignorance. It is the work of the devil himself. The powers many of these witches exert is something beyond what any mere trickery can account for. There is an agency beyond anything of that sort—it is the devil who endows these miserable beings with powers above those of their fellows. God have mercy on the souls of such! For in an evil hour, and for the hope of worldly gain, they have placed their neck beneath an awful yoke, and God alone knows whether for such there can be pardon and restoration!”
Eustace listened in silent amazement. He knew that gross superstition reigned amongst the degraded and ignorant; but he had always believed that it was confined to them, and that those who had enjoyed the advantages of education were far above anything so credulous as a belief in a personal devil working through the medium of men. It was an age when materialism and rationalism in one form or another stalked triumphantly over the earth. Spirituality was at a low ebb; the Catholic revival was in its infancy. The wave of earnestness and spiritual light which had been awakened by Wesley had dwindled and spent itself, leaving many traces behind of piety and zeal, but without accomplishing that work of awakening its founders had hoped to do. The Court set a bad example; the people followed it more or less. It was an age of laxity both in morals and in thought; but the prevailing tone of ordinary men was one of condescending scepticism—tolerating religion, but believing that a new era was coming upon the world in which Christianity should be superseded by “natural religion”—a thing far purer and higher in the estimation of its devotees.
That the world was evil, and in the greatest need of reform, Eustace would be the last man to deny; but to refer the gross superstitions of a benighted peasantry to the direct agency of a personal devil savoured to his mind of utter childishness, although possibly it was not more logically untenable than a belief in a personal Saviour, from whom proceeded all holy impulses, all elevating and pardoning love, all earnest searchings after the higher life. But if he was equally sceptical on both of these points, he would fain have gauged the soul of his companion, being keenly interested, not only in herself, but in every aspect of thought as it presented itself to minds of different calibre.
“You mean that you still believe in a certain devil-possession?” he asked tentatively; and Bride turned upon him one long inscrutable glance as she answered, after a long pause—
“Has the world ever been without devil-possession of one kind or another, varying infinitely in its forms, to blind and deceive those who dwell on the earth? What is sin at all but the work in men’s hearts of the devil and his angels, ever prompting, deceiving, suggesting? But where ignorance is grossest, and the light of God shines least, there he finds the readiest victims to listen to his seducing whispers.” She paused a moment, looked first at Eustace, with the earnestness that always perplexed and stimulated his curiosity, and then added, in a much lower tone, “And are we not to look for more and more indications of his powers, more manifestations of them in forms of every kind, in the days that are coming?”
“Why?” asked Eustace, in a tone as low as hers.
She clasped her hands lightly together as she made reply—
“Ah! because the days of the end are approaching—because the great day of Armageddon is coming upon us, and the armies of heaven and hell are mustering in battle-array for that awful final struggle which shall mark the end of this dispensation, in which the Antichrist shall be revealed—the man of sin, in whom the great apostasy shall be consummated, and whom the Lord shall finally destroy when He rides triumphant to do the final will of God, with the armies of heaven following Him on white horses. And will the devil be idle when he knows that his time is but short? Will he fail to send the strong delusion to blind men’s eyes, and make them ready to hail the Man of Sin when he shall arise? Men have thought that they saw him in the great conqueror whose power was broken but a few short years ago; but there is another and a greater to arise than he, and the devil is working now in the hearts of men to prepare them for his coming.”
Eustace regarded her with keen interest and curiosity as she spoke. Her face had kindled in a wonderful way. In the liquid depths of her eyes there were strange lights shining. That she saw before her as in a picture all that she spoke of he could not doubt, nor yet that she hoped herself to be numbered in the armies of the Lord of Hosts when He went forth conquering and to conquer. He had never before met mysticism carried to such a point, and it stirred his pulses with quick thrills of wonderment and curiosity.
“But, Bride, I would understand more of this,” he said very gently, so as not to rouse her from her trance of feeling. “How do you know that the days of the end are approaching so near? Why should not the world be, as many believe her to be, still in her infancy?”
“Because the voice of God has been awakened in the Church,” answered Bride, in a low tense tone. “Because God has at last answered the prayers of those who, ever since those awful days of the uprising in France, have been sending up supplications to His throne to send us light and help from above. He has answered. He has shown us through holy men, who have been, with fasting and prayer, making study of the prophetic books of Scripture, so long sealed to man, what all this stirring and uprising of the nations portends; and He has told us that this is the beginning of those judgments of God, which in the last days He will pour out upon the earth, when the apostasy of the world and of the Church shall be avenged, and the Lord will purify the earth before He comes to reign there. We know, because the voice of the Lord has spoken it. But the world will not hear His voice. The world will not listen; and the devil, for fear lest it should, sends false voices—messages from the dead—teaches men to inquire of spirits that peep and mutter, instead of inquiring to the living God; and so we see an awakening of the spirits of evil as well as of those of good; and so it will go on, each party growing stronger and stronger; though that of the evil one will have the seeming mastery, till the final struggle shall be consummated, and the enemies of God overthrown for ever.”
Eustace was saved the perplexity of trying to find an answer by the sudden approach of Mr. St. Aubyn (whose old-fashioned rectory house they were now passing) just as he turned out of his gate in the direction of the church. He greeted Bride and her companion cordially, made them promise to come to his house at the conclusion of the service and refresh themselves before their walk home, and then had them ushered into the rectory pew, which was always empty at this time of year, for his wife was a great invalid, and could only get out of doors in the most genial season of the year.
The little church of St. Erme was very antiquated, and interesting to archæologists; but under Mr. St. Aubyn’s care it had lost the air of neglect and desolation which was so common in rural churches. The congregation was good for the size of the place, and the service was reverently and intelligently conducted. The sermon was very simple, in accordance with the needs of the flock; but there was a vein of spirituality and piety running through it that struck Eustace as being unusual and original, and kept alive his interest in the views of “pietists,” as he classified them in his mind. He had been taught to regard every form of belief or unbelief as a portion of a classified system of speculation or philosophy; and he was glad to think he might have an opportunity of some conversation with Mr. St. Aubyn after the service, as he had struck him on other occasions when they had met as being a man of intellect and wide reading.
The Rector himself escorted the guests to his house, and Bride went upstairs to see the invalid, who reminded her a little of her own mother, and whose presence always acted on her soothingly and gratefully.
She felt refreshed by the hour spent in that quiet room, refreshed in body and mind. She had had food given her to eat; and communion of thought with one who sympathised with her, even where their opinions might not be altogether in accord, was more to her in those days than any bodily sustenance could be. Since her mother’s death Bride had been shut up entirely within herself, and it is not good for such an ardent soul as hers to be deprived of the natural outlet of speech with her fellow-man.
When the girl went downstairs again, she found the two men deep in talk, and sat quietly down in a shadowy corner to wait till they had finished. Mr. St. Aubyn observed her entrance, though Eustace, whose back was towards her, did not. The two were keenly interested in their discourse, and continued it with animation. Bride soon began to pick up the drift of it, and listened with wonder and amaze, a sense of indignation and sadness inextricably mixed together falling upon her as she realised what it all meant.
The two scholars were discussing the various phases of German rationalism which had arisen close on the heels of French and English deism; and from the tone taken by Eustace it was abundantly evident that he was deeply bitten by the philosophy of Wolff, by the destructive rationalism of Semler and Bretschneider, and the subjective philosophy of Kant and his followers, who evolve all things in heaven and earth from their own consciousness of them, on the principle that “cogito, ergo sum.”
He had been educated at Jena and Weimar, where this school of philosophy had its headquarters; and he was deeply impregnated with the teaching of those who had followed upon the first bold propounders of its doctrines. The names of Descartes and Locke, Spinoza and Fichte, fell glibly from his tongue, as he ran through in a masterly way the methods of these great thinkers of the different centuries, and strove to show how, one after another, each in a different way had struggled to show a blinded world that there could be no religion that did not appeal to the reason; that the allegorical and the dogmatic methods of interpreting Scripture had been tried in the balances and found wanting, and that only the historic—the true rational interpretation—could be found lasting with thinking men.
It was with a smile, and with great courtesy and patience, that Mr. St. Aubyn listened to the clear and terse arguments of his intellectual guest; and then he asked him what he thought of the Berlin school of thought, which had trodden quickly upon the heels of the one he had been ardently advocating—asked him what had been the teaching of Schleiermacher and Neander and De Wette, and whether they had been able (whilst giving all due weight to the value of reason) to remain where the destructive rationalist thinkers had left them. Already they had begun to strive to reconstruct a living and personal Christ out of the ruins of the historic method, which would have robbed Him of all but a shadowy existence as a misguided though well-meaning fanatic, deceiving and deceived. How was it men could never rest without some theory of a Divine personality, call it by what name they would? Was it not the most rational deduction to admit that the reason for this inherent longing (which none of the world’s greatest thinkers had ever attempted to deny) was that the subjective philosophy never can content the heart of man; that man must have an object of worship, an external standard, a living Head, and not an abstraction, simply because there is a living God, who created him in His own image; because he has been redeemed by a living and incarnate Saviour, and because the Spirit of the Eternal God the Father and the Son is for ever working in his heart, and seeking to bring it back to uniformity with the heart of Christ, overflowing with love towards God and towards man?
That, in brief, was the argument on both sides, only argued out at length with skill and knowledge and versatility of thought by each combatant. Bride, in her dim corner, sat and listened, and sometimes shivered in horror, sometimes glowed with an ecstatic rapture, but always listened with undivided attention, for these matters were not to her the dry arguments of philosophers merely, but indications of the spirit of perversity and blindness at work in the world in the latter days—the spirit of the lawless one, coming in every insidious form; first under the guise of liberality of thought and intellect, then teaching men to throw off from them all the fetters imposed by the precepts of Christ, all the external authority of the Church; paving the way for that other rising against kings and rulers and external authority of any kind whatsoever which she had been warned was one of the signs of the latter days, when the voice of the people should prevail once again, and they should give the power to him who should come “in his own name.”
But the discussion ended at last as all such do, each man thinking as he did before, though glad of the opportunity of exchanging ideas with a scholar and person of intellectual acumen.
“We can at least agree to differ,” said Mr. St. Aubyn, as he shook hands warmly. “We can be friends, even though we have our private thoughts about each other’s folly. You are young yet. You have your tilt with the world before you. It is natural to your age and temperament to take nothing on trust, to examine all for yourself. Perhaps in the days to come you may learn the lesson which other philosophers of your own school have done—that there is no living on systems and philosophies—that the hungry human heart of man must have more to feed on than husks. Well, there is the Bread of Life waiting for you when you are willing to receive it. I think the day will come when you will take it at the hands of the all-forgiving and all-loving Father.”
Eustace smiled, and pressed the hand he held. He was no bigot, and he had a vein of poetical imagination within him to which these words appealed. Besides, Bride was standing by, and he would not willingly have pained her. He did not know how much she had heard of the previous discussion, nor how much she would have understood if she had heard. He said his adieus cordially, hoped he and Mr. St. Aubyn would often meet, and gave his arm to his cousin to escort her home again.
He was sufficiently thoughtful himself that his silence did not strike him till they had walked some way; but when he did strive to speak on subjects which generally commanded her interest, he found her absolutely unresponsive.
He looked at her, and saw that her face was cold and tranquil in its statuesque beauty. The light which so often beamed in her eyes was extinguished now. She was very pale, and moved mechanically, and as though with something of an effort. He asked her if she were tired, but received a monosyllabic negative; and then he made one more effort to interest her by a theme which had never failed heretofore.
The ignorance of the peasantry was with her, as with him, a source of pain and dissatisfaction. She and her mother had been planning, before the death of the latter, how some small beginning might be made to get the children taught just such rudiments of knowledge as should raise them above the level of the beasts they tended. Hardly a single labourer or respectable working man in country districts could either read or write. Sometimes a substantial farmer could do no more than set his name to a bill; and clever lads, who might have raised themselves in the world, were kept down and hampered all their lives by the inability to master the rudiments of education. Bride’s grief was that none of the villagers and fisher-folks could read the Bible—that it must remain to them a sealed book, save when others expounded it to them. Eustace’s objection to ignorance was very differently grounded; but hitherto the subject had been one of common interest, and when together they had taken pleasure in discussing Bride’s favourite plan of erecting a small school in memory of her mother, where such men, women, and children as could find time and had the desire to learn might be taught by a qualified person, and gradually win for the place a higher standard of life and faith than was to be found in the surrounding villages.
But even this subject to-day did not rouse in the girl any spark of her wonted interest. She looked at him with steadfast sadness, as he spoke of what he meant to try to do in this matter in other places (he did not, from motives of delicacy, identify himself too much with St. Bride in talking to his cousin), and said very gently, but with a severity which was not altogether without intention—
“I am not sure that the people will not be better as they are, Eustace, than taught as you will be likely to teach them.”
The young man flushed quickly. Philosopher though he was, he was human, and this was a taunt he hardly cared to let pass.
“Do you mean to say that you think I should do them harm and not good by helping them out of their mists of darkness?” he asked, with slight incisiveness of manner.
“Do you think you would be helping them out of the mists of darkness?” asked the girl, suddenly turning her eyes upon him, with a look he could not fathom.
“Certainly,” he answered quickly, and without hesitation.
Her face was turned away then. He only saw the pale pure profile outlined against the sky.
“I am afraid not,” she answered, in a quiet serious way, that indicated sadness if not depression; “there are worse forms of darkness than intellectual darkness.”
“Do you think so?” he answered, in a tone that implied absolute disagreement.
“I know it,” she answered, without the smallest hesitation. “Intellectual darkness is sad, carried to the extent we see it here. But spiritual darkness is a thousand times sadder, and, oh! how much more difficult to enlighten!”
He said nothing. “Why try to argue with a fanatic?” he thought, and they took their homeward way in silence.
Bride left him at the castle door and went quietly up to her room. Eustace stood looking after her.
“You are very beautiful, my cousin,” he said to himself, “and you fascinate me as no woman has fascinated me yet; but you are a mystic and a fanatic both—and both these are beings inexplicable to me—and yet I shall try to find you out, and teach you that there are nobler things a woman can be than you have dreamed of as yet.”