CHAPTER VIII
BRIDE’S PERPLEXITIES
BUT if Eustace suffered from doubts and fears, even when embarked upon a cause which he fully believed to be that of right and justice, other people were not exempt from their share of perplexity and mental distress, and certainly the youthful Lady Bride was no exception to this rule. For her, things seemed to have come hardly. Just as she was deprived of the loving counsels and tender training of a mother whom she literally adored, was she confronted by problems and questions which had never entered into her inner life before, and which threatened at times to upheave many of her most cherished notions, or to land her in a perfect sea of doubt and bewilderment.
True, she had not grown up in actual ignorance of the questions beginning to agitate the world, but hitherto she had regarded them, as it were, from an infinite distance: they had not penetrated to her own sphere. She could regard them in perspective, and moralise upon them in an abstract fashion totally distinct from that which confronted her, now that they had in a sense intruded into her very home, and risen up in altogether unexpected proportion before her eyes. Calm as she appeared to the eyes of those about her, remote and aloof as Eustace felt her to be, dwelling in a world of her own, and hardly awake to the throbbing life of that other world of which he was a member, she was in reality far more aware of its pulsating life than he ever dreamed, and far more perplexed by the problems of the times than he as yet suspected. Pity and love for the humble and poor had been instilled into Bride’s heart by her mother from her earliest years, and it was a lesson not likely to be ignored now that she was left so lonely and desolate in her palatial home. Towards her father she felt a deep and reverential affection and compassion, and they had drawn a very little nearer together during this time of common sorrow; but the habits of a lifetime are seldom broken through, even when there is willingness to break them, and the Duke found himself unable to open his heart to his young daughter, as he had learned to do to his gentle wife, even when he was conscious that if the effort could be made it would be abundantly rewarded. He was gentle towards her, and more tender than he had ever been in his life before, but there was no impulse of confidence between them. It was just as hard for Bride to try to speak to him out of her heart (as she had been wont to do to her mother) as for him to cast off his reserve before her; so that when perplexities arose within her, the girl had to fight them out alone, and increasingly hard did she find the battle as day by day fresh thoughts and problems presented themselves before her mental vision.
Mr. St. Aubyn might have helped her, but she was timid of seeking him out. She felt towards him a deep and reverential affection. She had always hung upon his words when he visited her mother, and the two talked together long and earnestly of the coming crisis in the world’s history of which both were keenly conscious, and for which both were preparing themselves in different measure. But the girl had never opened her own heart to the clergyman, or indeed to any person except her mother, and she did not know how to make the first advance now, although feeling often in sore need of guidance and help.
But there was still one person to whom she sometimes spoke when the sense of the burden became greater than she could bear, and that was to the old gardener, Abner Tresithny. She had a great respect, and indeed affection, for the faithful old servant, who from childhood had always been ranked as one of her friends, so that the habit of reserve had not extended to her intercourse with him. Bride had her own outdoor pursuits in the garden, which Abner superintended with his advice and assistance, and as the pair worked together in greenhouse or potting-shed, they often talked of many other matters than the plants they tended. Bride had gained much of her insight into human nature and the state of the village from Abner; and now when Saul’s fervid discourses had stirred up so much excitement there, it was natural that the matter should be mentioned, and that other things of a kindred nature should be discussed.
Abner had been pained and grieved by his grandson’s (apparently sudden) development, and Bride saw that the subject was a sore one with him. With her ready tact she avoided the point which most pained the old man, and opened her heart to him on the subject which had been with her night and day for many a long week now, and which will raise itself before each one of us with a ceaseless iteration so long as this state of sin and misery lasts in the world.
“O Abner, can we wonder?—can we blame them so very much if they do rise in rebellion and revolt? Why is it—ah! why is it that some—not just a few here and there, but hundreds and thousands—even millions of human beings are born into the world to a life of hopeless misery, degradation, and poverty, from which not one man in a thousand has power to raise himself? My cousin has been telling me things—I have heard him and my father talking—and it goes to my very heart to think what it all means. I know—oh! I can never doubt it—that in every human soul there is the power to live the higher life by the grace of the Spirit of God; but oh! Abner, how is it, humanly speaking, possible that this germ of heavenly fire should be developed in such surroundings? How can those encompassed by every physical misery and degradation ever lift their hearts and their hopes heavenward? How can it be looked for? And why does God permit such awful inequalities in the destinies of His children? If He loves us all—as we know He does—why, oh! why are these things allowed?”
The pain in her face and in her voice plainly showed how deeply she had taken to heart what she had gleaned of late respecting the condition of a large section of the population at that time. Abner looked at his young mistress with a world of sympathy in his steady, deep-set eyes, and slowly shook his head.
“There be many of us ask that same question, my Ladybird, as we go on in life, and none of us can rightly answer it. And yet may be the answer is under our hand all the while. It is the sin of man that brought the curse into the world; and ever since the hardness of man’s heart has been making him choose the evil and the curse instead of the way of the Lord and the blessing, and every generation sinks the world deeper and deeper into the slough.”
“I know, I know that. Sin is at the root of all,” answered Bride, with quick eagerness, “but that does not seem to answer everything. It is the awful inequalities of the world that frighten me, and the sense of the terrible gulf that seems to divide such lives as mine from those of the miserable women and children born in the midst of a squalor and misery of which my cousin tells me I can have no conception. We are all born in sin, but we are not all born to utter want and wretchedness. God loves all His children alike: why should such things be? Oh, why should they be?”
She clasped her hands together in a passion of perplexity and pain. The eyes which were so deep and inscrutable to Eustace were full of a pleading intensity of gaze, as though she would wring an answer to her appeal from the heavens themselves. Abner looked at her with a softening of the lines of his rugged face; and as he steadily pursued his task of cleansing from blight a great camellia tree that stood in the centre of the conservatory, he made an answer that was eminently characteristic of him, and which roused the instant interest of the girl.
“My Ladybird, I think we can none of us rightly answer such a question, because the ways of the Almighty are past finding out, and we can by no stretch of our poor finite minds hope to understand the eternal wisdom of the Infinite. And yet, inasmuch as we have God’s own word that we are made in His image, we can just get here and there a glimpse into the workings of His mind; and I often think that a gardener at his toil gets a clearer bit of insight into His dealings than some others can do.”
“Oh, tell me how,” cried Bride, who dearly loved to listen to Abner’s deductions from the world of nature to the realm of human experience. She had been used to listening to his allegories from childhood, and always found in them food for thought and farther research.
Quietly pursuing his task, as was his way when thinking most deeply, Abner took up his parable again.
“It sometimes comes to me like this, my lady, when I am amongst my flowers and plants and seeds, and folks come to me and say, ‘Abner, why do you do this?’ and ‘Abner, why do you do that?’ Look at the little seeds as they lie on your hand—seeming so like to one another that even the best of us would be puzzled to know some kinds apart; but when they grow up, how different they appear, and how different they have to be treated! Some are hardy things, and are put out to face the biting winds and cruel snows of winter, and nothing given them for protection, whilst others are tenderly protected from the least hardship, and grow up in the soft warm air of the hot-house, watered and tended and watched over like petted children. Is it because the gardener loves one sort of seed more than another that he treats them so differently? What sort of a garden would he have when the summer came had he put the tender hot-house seeds out in the cold ground, and tried to grow the hardy seedlings in a hot-house? And then again, see how the different plants are treated as they grow up under the same gardener’s eye. Look at these great specimen heliotropes and fuchsias and petunias. How were they treated when they were young?—pinched in, trained, clipped, kept back, as it seemed, in every possible way, everything against them, everything, as one would say, taken from them, till the right stature and height and growth had been attained, and then encouraged to bud and break where it had been decided they should; and now see the beautiful graceful trees—a joy to the eye and to the heart—covered with blossom, rejoicing as it seems in their beauty, the pride of the gardener who seemed at first so cruel to them, so resolved to keep them barren and unlovely.”
Bride drew a long breath and clasped her hands together. She had asked sometimes deep down in her heart why her own life had been left so desolate by the death of her mother. Was she in some sort finding an answer now? Was it perhaps for her ultimate good and for the glory of God that she was thus heavily chastened in her youth?
Abner had made a slight pause, but now he continued, speaking in the same slow way, with the same rather remarkable choice of words for a man of his class.
“And again, look at another class of plants—look at our bulbs. Does not the gardener find a quiet nook for them in the garden where they will never be disturbed, and put them in, and let them come up year after year undisturbed and unmolested? Is it because he loves them more that he leaves them to bloom at their own time and in their own fashion, and does not even cut down their leaves when the blooming season is over? Why is he so cruel (as the ignorant folk might put it) to some of his plants, and so tender to others? Why does he treat them so differently? Why do some grow up and flourish for a season only, and are rooted up and cast away at its close, whilst others remain year by year in the ground, or are tended in warmth and luxury in the glass homes provided for them? Why such inequalities when originally all start alike from a tiny seed germ, one of which scarce differs from another? Is it because the gardener is partial or cruel? or because he knows as no untrained person can, what is best for each, and how in the end, after patient waiting and watching, the most perfect garden will arise up under his hand? And if this is so in our little world, can we not understand that it must be something the same in the great garden of God—that kingdom of Christ for which we are waiting and watching, and for which He is working in His own all-powerful and mysterious way? Ah! how often I think of that as I go about my daily toil—that reign of the Lord’s upon earth, when the wilderness shall blossom as the rose, where sorrow and pain and sin shall be done away, and we shall see the meaning of all those things which perplex and bewilder us now, and understand the love in the Father’s heart, although the discipline seemed hard to understand at the first.”
Bride raised her eyes with the light shining in them which the thought of the coming kingdom of the Lord always brought there.
“Ah! yes,” she said softly, “we shall know then—we shall understand then—we shall see face to face. O Abner, would that that day might come quickly! Ah! why does not God hear the cry of His people in their trouble and perplexities, and send forth the Great Deliverer? Are we not praying for His appearing hour by hour and day by day? Why does He tarry so long?”
Abner slowly shook his head. He understood perfectly those utterances of the girl, which from time to time filled Eustace with absolute bewilderment. One result of the awakening of spiritual perception, and of the unceasing prayer which had been offered up by all sorts and conditions of men for many years, had been a deep and earnest conviction that the Second Advent was at hand, that the French Revolution was but the commencement of the Great Apostasy of the latter days, and that the times of the end were approaching. Amongst all the confusion of prophetic interpretation stirring the minds of men and raising up countless differences of opinion and beliefs as to what was coming upon the earth, there stood out one paramount conviction which attracted multitudes to adhere to it, which was that before the final judgments were to be poured upon the earth, as foretold in the Revelation according to St. John, there would be a gathering together of the first-fruits to Christ—the dead and living saints called alike to meet Him in the air, and thus escape the horrors that were coming upon the world—the company typified in Scripture as the hundred and forty-four thousand sealed ones standing with the Lamb upon Mount Zion before the last vials of wrath are poured out, and before the resurrection of the multitude whom no man can number, who have come scathlessly through the great tribulation of the days of Antichrist.
This had been the unshaken conviction of the Duchess, and Bride had received it from her mother with an absolute trust. Abner, like many men of his class and race, was equally filled with a devout hope and expectation of living to see the Lord appear without sin unto salvation. The wave of revived spirituality and personal faith which had swept over the West-Country with the advance of Methodism a generation before, had, as it were, prepared the minds of men for a fresh development of faith in the fulfilment of God’s prophetic word. Methodism itself had already begun to fossilise to a certain extent into a system, and had been rent by faction and split into hostile camps; but this new wave of awakened spirituality was sweeping over the land with all its first strength, and destined in one form or another to do a great work in the Church. The thought and the hope of the Kingdom was one so familiar and so congenial to those who had accepted it, that already they were striving after the life of the Kingdom in the present world of sorrow and sin. To Bride it was the very source and centre of all her happiness in life, and anything that turned her thoughts back to it again brought solace and comfort with it; so that even the hope that the darkness and perplexity around her would be explained and made clear in the Kingdom, and that what she now saw with pain and shrinking would at last prove to be God’s way of bringing good out of the mass of evil engendered by the sin and disobedience of man, brought a measure of comfort with it, and Bride walked through the sunny gardens in a deep reverie, looking around her at the awakening of nature with a strange but intensely real hope that it was but the type and foretaste of another and more wondrous resurrection, in which she might be counted worthy to have a share, perhaps even before this same young year had run its appointed course.
Her meditations were interrupted by the sudden appearance at her side of her cousin Eustace. How he came she knew not. She had not observed his approach, but here he was walking beside her; and as she raised her eyes for a moment to his face, she was aware that it wore an expression of strange concentration, whilst at the same time in his voice there was a tone which she did not remember ever to have heard there before.
“Bride,” he said, speaking more abruptly than usual, “you know that I am going away soon?”
“I had heard something of it. I did not know the day was fixed. I think you must feel glad. There is so little to do at Penarvon—for one like you.”
“I fear your father thinks I have done too much, as it is,” answered Eustace hastily. “Bride, have I made him hate me? Has he spoken with disapproval of me to you?”
“Oh, no!” answered Bride. “My father seldom speaks disparagingly of any one who is not there to defend himself. He would say nothing to me that he did not say to you; and if he did. I could not repeat it, of course.”
“No,” answered Eustace quickly; “I was wrong in asking; but I was nervously afraid, I think, lest he should have said something to do hurt to my cause. Bride, are you sorry I am going away? Will you miss me when I am gone?”
He spoke with covert eagerness, almost with excitement, and Bride was puzzled at the note of emotion in his voice, and paused to consider her answer. She was always transparently truthful and sincere, and although brought up to show courtesy to all with whom she came in contact, she had never taught herself to utter the platitudes and shallow untruths of society, and chose her words with care when appealed to in such a fashion.
“I think I shall miss you,” she answered, looking reflectively before her. “It will seem strange not to see your face at table, or to have some one to talk to in the evenings. I think father will miss you too. He likes to converse with one who knows the world and can understand him. Perhaps you will come again some day, Eustace?”
“Do you ask it, Bride?” he questioned, his voice quivering.
“I have no power to invite guests to Penarvon,” she answered gently. “My father has never given me leave to do so; but I think he will be glad to think you will come again: he has so few belonging in any way to him now.”
“Would you be glad, Bride?” he asked, in the same tense and almost impassioned way; “that is what I wish to know. Would you be glad to think that I should come again soon?”
Something in his tone aroused in Bride a vague sense of shrinking and distaste. She could not understand exactly what produced this feeling; but at that moment her impulse was to leave her cousin hastily and fly to the shelter of her own room. That being impossible, she could only retire into the shell of her own impenetrable reserve, and Eustace was at once aware that some of the light had gone out of her eyes, and that she very slightly drew away from him.
“I do not know,” she said very quietly; “that depends upon so many things. You have been very kind, Eustace, and yet you have done things which have brought great trouble to us. If you could learn to be a comfort to my father, I would welcome you gladly again; but you can hardly expect it when you trouble and distress him.”
“Bride, Bride, do not speak so! do not drive me to despair!” cried Eustace suddenly, losing his long-preserved self-control. “Do you not know that I love you, that I have loved you almost ever since I saw you first three months ago? Oh, my love, my life, only love me in return, and do what you will with me! I am yours, body and soul, and together we will walk through life, and yours shall be the guiding and directing will, for you are the guiding star of my life! Bride, Bride! hear me! Be my wife, and I will be in the future what you will. You shall rule my life for me. Only let me know that your love is mine, and I care for nothing else!”
She understood then, and the surprise of it all held her mute and spellbound. Perhaps no maiden in the length and breadth of the land had grown up more oblivious of the thought of love and marriage than Lady Bride Marchmont. No young companions had she ever known to suggest such ideas. Her mother had preserved the guarded silence on the subject that mothers are wont to do whilst their daughters are yet young, and her father had followed his wife’s example. She had seen the best and happiest side of married life in the tender love and dependence of her parents; but as a thing applied to herself she had never given it a thought, and now she recoiled from this passionate appeal with a sense of shrinking and distaste which she found it difficult to refrain from expressing in words that would inflict pain on the man before her. She did not wish to pain him. She was woman enough to know that he meant to do her honour by this proffer of love and service; but he had utterly failed to awaken any answering chord in her heart, and she felt that he ought not to have spoken as he had done, or to use such arguments to her.
“No, Eustace,” she said, not ungently, as he tried to take her hand. “You must not speak to me so. It is not right. It is not even manly. I think you can know very little of me when you speak of offering yourself to me body and soul, or tell me that you care for nothing else if you can have my love. Do you think I can love any one, save with the love of a deep pity, who can place a mere earthly love before everything else, and talk as though his soul were his own to give into the keeping of another? Do you think I like to hear you say that you would even abandon a cause which seemed to you holy and just and right, simply because you think I may not approve it? Do you wish to make of me your conscience-keeper? O Eustace! think what such words mean!—think what treachery they imply, not only to God but to man, and I am sure you yourself will be ashamed of them.”
“I can think of nothing but that I love you, Bride,” broke in Eustace, hotly and passionately, his heart moved by the wonderful beauty of the woman before him; her utter unconsciousness of the wild passions of love and tenderness stirring within him only rousing him to a sense of wilder resolve to win her at all cost. “I love you! I love you! I love you! All my religion, all my faith, all my happiness here or hereafter are comprised within the limits of those three little words. I love you! Surely you will not tell me in return that you hate me, and would spurn me from your presence. O Bride, my life, my love! do not say that you have no love to give me in return.”
There was something so appealing in his voice that her heart was touched with compassion, though with no answering response. She let him possess himself of her hand, but it lay cool and passive in his hot clasp.
“I do not hate you, Eustace—why should I? I do not hate any living thing. I do not spurn you. I do not spurn your love.”
“My darling, ten thousand thanks for that sweet word. If my love is not spurned, surely it will some day be returned! Bride, you will at least let me hope that?”
“I cannot help what you hope,” she answered, with childlike frankness. “But, Eustace, I do not think I can ever love you as you wish, and I can never, never, never be your wife unless I do. I like you as a cousin; but indeed that is all. I do not understand what it is that makes you wish to marry me. We should be very unhappy together—I am quite sure of that.”
“Ah! no, Bride! Do not speak so. Unhappy, and with you!”
“I should be very unhappy,” answered the girl steadily, “and you ought to be, Eustace, if you really knew what love meant.”
He looked at her in amaze; that she should be speaking to him of the nature of love with that look of divine compassion in her eyes was a thing altogether too strange and perplexing. Her very attitude and quiet composure told of a heart unruffled as yet by any touch of human passion, and yet she was turning upon him and rebuking him for his ignorance. It was she who broke the momentary pause, seeming almost to read his thoughts.
“You wonder how I know perhaps, but, ah! if you had seen my father and mother together you would have understood. If you had known what love there was between my mother and me, you would understand. Do not I know what love is? Ah! do I not? It is the power to lay bare the innermost sanctuary of your soul, and to know that you will be understood, helped, strengthened, comforted. It is the knowledge that thoughts too deep, and hopes too wonderful and mysterious for words are shared together, and can be whispered of together without being tarnished by the poor attempt to reduce them to speech; the consciousness that in everything we are in accord, that we are often thinking the same things at the same moment; the knowledge that the deeper and deeper we go the more and more sympathy and sweet accord there is between us; that not only are we one in opinion about temporal and changing things, but knit close, close together in soul and spirit as well, sharing the same faith, the same hope, the same love! Ah! Eustace! if you had known such a love as that, you could never think that there would be happiness for you and me in linking our lives together!”
He stood silent, almost abashed, before her, marvelling alike at her eloquence and at the insight displayed of a union of spirit, of which Eustace was forced to admit that he had not thought. To win Bride as his wife, to set her up as his object of adoring love, had seemed all-sufficient to him hitherto. Now it suddenly dawned upon him that with such a woman as this, that would be but the travesty and mockery of happiness. She was right and he was wrong: without a deeper sympathy and love than any which had come into his philosophy as yet, marriage would be a doleful blunder. He would be no nearer to her than before—perhaps farther away. He must learn to share with her that inner and mystic life of which he saw glimpses from time to time when she opened out for a moment and showed him what lay below the calm surface of her nature. Either he must share that with her, or wean her away from it; replacing mysticism with philanthropy, fanaticism with practical benevolence, objective with subjective religion. One of those two ends must be accomplished before he could hope to win the desire of his heart. As he stood in the bright spring sunshine facing her, he became suddenly aware of that, and a new light leaped into his eyes—the light of battle and of resolve. He would win her yet, but it must be by slower steps than any he had contemplated hitherto. She was worthy of better things than becoming a mere dreamer and nunlike recluse. It should be his to lead her steps to surer ground, to show her that there was a higher Christianity than any of which she had hitherto dreamed. Not now—not all at once, but he would come again and begin upon a surer foundation. He looked into her eyes, and gently taking her hand before she had time to draw it away, he said quietly—
“Do not be afraid, Bride; I see that you judged more wisely than I. You are right and I am wrong, and I will go away and trouble you no more in the present; but the time will come when I shall return, and I trust that by slow and sure degrees we shall draw so closely together that you will no longer shrink from me in fear and trembling. You are very young, sweet cousin, and there are many things you have yet to learn. It is a beautiful thing, I doubt not, to hold commune in the spirit with the higher world; but we are set in our place here below for something I hold to be more truly noble than that. We are set in a world of sin and misery that we may gird our armour upon us and fight the battle with this sin and misery—fight it for our poor and afflicted brethren, as they cannot fight it for themselves. That is the true Christianity; that is the highest form of religious devotion. You can read it for yourself in your Bible—‘True religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the widows and orphans in their affliction’—to be ministers, in fact, of mercy and blessing in any sphere, of which one is given as the type.”
“Yes,” answered Bride very softly, “and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”
She looked straight at Eustace as she spoke, and he looked back at her, marvelling at the extraordinary depth and beauty of those dark eyes. He longed, as he had never longed before, to take her in his arms and hold her to his heart; but he knew that he must not, so with a great effort he restrained himself, and kept back the words of passionate love which rose to his lips.
“Yes,” he answered steadily; “and for your sweet sake, Bride, I will strive to do even that—evil and full of temptation as my world is.”
“Not for my sake, Eustace, not for my sake,” she replied, with an earnestness he scarcely understood; “that would be indeed a vain resolve. If you cannot yet strive in the power and might of the Risen and Ascended Lord, whom you deny, strive at least in the power of the right you own and believe in, though you know not from whence it comes.”
He looked at her in some amaze.
“Why do you say I deny your Risen Saviour, Bride?”
“Because I heard you with your own lips do so, in effect if not in actual words. You spoke of His miracles as being ordinary gifts of healing exaggerated by the devotion of His followers; of the Transfiguration being a like delusion—men awakened from sleep seeing their Master standing in the glory of the sunrise, and mistaking the morning mists for other luminous figures beside Him. You said that the Resurrection had been accounted for by the theory that the Saviour did not die, but was taken from the Cross in a state of trance, from which He recovered in the tomb.”
A flush mounted quickly into Eustace’s face.
“You mistake me, Bride,” he answered hastily. “We were discussing—Mr. St. Aubyn and I—some of the teachings of various philosophers and thinkers, and I was explaining to him how Paulus had extended to the New Testement the method which Eichhorn had applied to the Old. I was not defending the theory, but merely stating it as a matter of speculation amongst men of a certain school.”
Bride looked at him intently.
“If that is so, I am thankful and glad; but I heard too much not to know very well where your sympathies and convictions lie. If you do not follow the impious teachings of this Paulus, you are very far along the road which does not lead to the Father’s house. No, Eustace; let us talk no more of this—it is only painful to both. I shall never convince you; but I shall pray for you. And now farewell. I trust when next we meet it will be without this sense of unutterable distance between us; but it must be you to change—for I never shall.”
She turned and left him standing there in the sunshine. That same day Eustace took leave of Penarvon, and commenced his backward journey to London.