In Silk Attire: A Novel

Mr. Anerley made no answer. Then the other, driven out of the diplomatic method of approach into his natural manner, immediately said —

"Mr. Anerley, do you never think that it is a man's duty to think about things which are not of this world? Do you expect always to be satisfied with worldly good? You and I have had long conversations together; and I have found you so reasonable, so unprejudiced, so free to conviction, that I am amazed you do not recognise the necessity of thinking of something beyond this life that we lead just now."

"Cannot people think of these things outside a church, Mr. Bexley?" he said; but his face was quite grave, if not sad. "As you came into the garden just now, I was perplexing myself with that very question. I was sitting wondering if I should die and become nothing without having discovered how it was I came to live. It seems so singular that one should pass out of consciousness into the inorganic earth without having discovered what the earth is, and without having the least notion of how he himself came to be. Geology only presents you with a notion of tremendous time and change – it gives no clue to the beginning. And if there was no beginning, how is it that my brief consciousness only flickers up for a short time, and dies down again into darkness and night? How did there come to be a beginning to my consciousness?"

Mr. Bexley was astounded and grieved. He was accustomed, even in that little parish, to find people who had painful doubts about the Mosaic record of creation, who seemed perplexed about the sun, moon, and stars having all been created in order to light up the earth, and who accepted with joy and gladness any possible theory of reconciliation which gave them a more rational view of the world and their belief in the Bible at the same time. But he had not met a man who had passed to one side, as quite unworthy of attention, all theologic solutions of the difficulty whatever.

The very novelty of the obstacle, however, only excited his evangelical fervour. He avowed his object in having visited Chesnut Bank that evening (without, however, revealing at whose suggestion he had undertaken the task), and boldly endeavoured to grapple with the demon of unbelief which had possession of his friend's mind. He insisted on the fallibility of human reason. He pointed out that, without religion, morality was unable to make its way among the uneducated. He demonstrated that every age had its own proper religion, and that an age without a religion was on the brink of suicide. All these things, and many more, he urged with much eloquence and undoubted sincerity, and at the end he was surprised to learn that his auditor quite coincided with everything he had uttered.

"I know," he said, "that the present attitude of the majority of intellectual men in this country is a dangerous and impossible one. Men cannot live in an atmosphere of criticism. What we want just now is a new gospel fitted for the times; we want a crusade of some sort – a powerful belief that will develop all sorts of sympathetic emotions and idealisms, instead of leaving one a prey to cold analysis. But we haven't got it; and those who have gone beyond this tidal flow of the last great religious flood, find themselves stranded on dry land, without a blade of grass or a drop of water in sight. Give me a gospel, and I'll take it with pleasure. Whether it be a new series of religious symbolisms, or a splendid system of ethics, demanding action, or even a belief in humanity as a supreme and beautiful power – anything that can convince me and compel me to admire, I will take. But I don't want to deal in old symbols, and old beliefs, and old theories, that fit me no more than the monkey-jacket in which my mother sent me to school."

"You say you have got beyond us, and yet you acknowledge that you have been disappointed," urged Mr. Bexley. "Why not return to the Church, if only for personal satisfaction? You cannot be happy in your present position. You must be tormented by the most fearful doubts and anticipations. Are you not afflicted by moments of utter darkness, in which you long for the kindly hand of some spiritual authority to assist you and comfort you? In such perilous moments I believe I should go mad if I were to assure myself, for a single passing instant, that I was alone and unaided – that I had been teaching lies and superstitions all my life – that the world was a big machine, and we the accidental dust thrown out by its great chemic motions – that all the aspirations of our soul, and the voice of conscience, and the standards of right at which we aim, were all delusions and mockeries. I would not have life on such terms. I should know that I only existed through the brute ignorance and superstition of my stronger-made fellow-men not permitting them to kill me and all such as I, and then to seize our means of living. I should look forward to the time when these superstitions should be cleared away, and the world become a general scramble, handed over to those who had the longest claws and the fiercest teeth."

"Then," said Mr. Anerley, with a smile, "if the first glimpse of change is likely to derange your intellect in that fashion, and force you to so many absurd conclusions, you are better where you are. And about those moments of spiritual darkness, and torture, and longing of which you speak – I do not understand what they are. I am never visited by them. I thank God I have a tolerable digestion."

"Digestion!" repeated the other, bitterly. "It all comes to that. Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow ye die; and the only resurrection you hope for is to breathe the sunlight again as a buttercup or a dandelion. What is it, may I ask, entices you to remain in the position you occupy – that of being an honest man, credited with constant generous actions, kindly to your inferiors, and what not? Why should you be moral at all? Why should you not, if it pleased you, go into any depths of dissipation and debauchery? There is nothing to restrain you."

"Pardon me, there is. If it were worth the trouble, I dare say I could convince you that my code of morality is not only more comprehensive and more strict than yours, but that it rests on more explicable and more permanent foundations. But it is not worth the trouble to convince a single man at a time in which we are waiting for some great and general renovation."

So they went on, in the faint darkness, under the black branches and the grey sky. Mr. Bexley was not going to relinquish hope at the very outset; and he proceeded from point to point, adducing all the considerations which made it very much more advantageous to be orthodox than to be not orthodox. He might have persuaded a man who was hovering between the two states to go over to the bosom of the Church; but his entreaties, and representations, and arguments had little effect upon a man who was separated from him by the great chasm of a dawning era.

"Perhaps I may lament my present negative, critical attitude," said Mr. Anerley, quite frankly, "but I prefer it to yours. The successive tides of faith which pass over the world leave little circling eddies, and I have been caught in one of these; I cannot tell in what direction the next great movement will be – I only know I shall not see it."

The end of it was, just then, that Mr. Anerley begged of his neighbour and counsellor to go in-doors and have some supper with them. Mr. Bexley, a little disheartened, but still confident in his spiritual power to overcome, some time or other, the strong resistance of the unconverted man's heart, agreed; and so they both went into the house and entered the dining-room, where the supper-table had just been prepared. Mrs. Anerley started up, with her face red as fire, when she saw her husband and the clergyman enter together; and this obvious departure from her usual self-possessed and easy manner at once struck Mr. Anerley as being very peculiar. Nay, the poor little woman, feeling herself very guilty – harbouring a secret notion that she had tried to entrap her generous and open-minded husband – was more than ordinarily attentive and courteous to him. She was far more civil, and obliging, and formal towards him than towards her stranger-guest; and she never by any chance lifted her eyes to his.

Mr. Anerley saw it all, understood it all, and thought of it with an inward, pitying smile that was scarcely visible upon his lips. "There is a creature," he said to himself, "who might convert any man to anything, if she had the least logical chance on her side."

He saw also, or perhaps feared, that this embarrassment and restraint would only make her uncomfortable for the evening; and so, in his kindly way, he called Dove to him. The young girl went over to him, and he put his arm round her waist, and said:

"Do you see that small woman over there, who looks so guilty? She is guilty; and that gentleman there, whom you have been accustomed to regard as the very pattern of all the virtues in the parish, is her accomplice."

Mrs. Anerley started again, and glanced in a nervous way towards Mr. Bexley. Even her desire for her husband's salvation was lost in the inward vow that never, never again would she seek for aid out of the domestic circle.

"Their secret having been found out, Dove, it remains to award them their punishment. In my royal clemency, however, I leave the sentence in your hands."

"What have they been doing, papa?"

"Ask them. Call upon the female prisoner to stand forward and say why sentence should not be pronounced against her."

"It is not a subject for merriment, Hubert," said his wife, blushing hotly, "and if I did ask Mr. Bexley to speak to you as a friend – "

"You hear, Dove, she confesses to the conspiracy, and also criminates her fellow-prisoner. If I had a black cowl, and some sherry at 12s. a dozen, I should sentence them to drink half a bottle each, having first bade them a final and affectionate farewell."

"As it is, papa," said Dove, maliciously, "you had better give them some of that white Italian wine you are so fond of, and if they survive – "

"Mamma, order this girl to bed."

"That is what poor papa says whenever any one beats him in an argument, or says his wine isn't good," said Dove to Mr. Bexley.

But she went, nevertheless. For it was nearly ten o'clock, and although there was only a faint sickle of the moon now visible, that was still big enough to bear the thin thread of thought which so subtly connected her and her lover. She took out of her bosom a letter which she had received that morning, and she kissed it and held it in her hand, and said, looking up to the pale starlight and the clear white crescent —

"Moon, moon, will you tell him that I've got his letter, and that I've read it twenty times – a hundred times over, and yet he doesn't say a word about coming home? Will you ask him when he is coming back to me – and tell him to come quick, quick, for the days are getting wearier and wearier? Couldn't you come down for a little minute, and whisper to me, and tell me what he has been doing all this time, and what he is looking like, and what he is saying to you just now? Couldn't you give me a little glimpse of him, instead of keeping him to yourself, and staring down as if you didn't see anything at all? And you might as well tell him that I shall begin and hate Miss Brunel if he doesn't come back soon – and I'll play the 'Coulin' all day to myself when I'm alone, and be as miserable and wretched as ever I please. But here is a kiss for him anyway: and you wouldn't be so cruel as not to give him that!"

And Dove, having completed her orisons, went downstairs, with a smile on her sweet face – perhaps not thinking that the nightly staring at the moon, as the reader may perhaps suspect, had somewhat affected her brain. And she found Mr. Bexley more brilliant and eloquent than ever in his exposition of certain spiritual experiences; and she was in such a mood of half-hysteric delight and happiness that she could have put her arm round Mr. Anerley's neck, and begged him, for her sake, to be a little, just a little, more orthodox. As it was, he had promised to go inside the church next Sunday; and his wife was very happy.

CHAPTER XV.

SCHÖN-ROHTRAUT

Do you know the ballad of 'Schön-Rohtraut' – the king's daughter who would neither spin nor sew, but who fished, and hunted, and rode on horseback through the woods, with her father's page for her only companion? Was there any wonder that the youth grew sad, and inwardly cried to himself —

"O dass ich doch ein Königssohn wär,
Rohtraut, Schön-Rohtraut lieb' ich so sehr.
Schweig stille, mein Herze!"

One day they rested themselves under a great oak, and the merry Schön-Rohtraut laughed aloud at her woe-stricken page, and cried —

"Why do you look at me so longingly? If you have the heart to do it, come and kiss me, then!"

Whereupon the lad, with a terrible inward tremor, probably, went up and kissed Schön-Rohtraut's laughing lips. And they two rode quite silently home; but the page joyously said to himself, "I do not care now whether she were to be made Empress to-day; for all the leaves in the forest know that I have kissed Schön-Rohtraut's mouth."

There are many of us whose chief consolation it is to know that we have kissed Schön-Rohtraut's mouth. The middle-aged man, getting a trifle grey above the ears, sits by the fire of a winter evening, and thinks of his own particular Schön-Rohtraut.

"I did not marry her; but I loved her in the long-bygone time, and that is enough for me. I had my 'liberal education.' If I had married her, perhaps I should not be loving her now; and all my tender memories of her, and of that pleasant time, would have disappeared. But now no one can dispossess me of the triumphant consciousness that it was my good fortune to have kissed Schön-Rohtraut's mouth."

There is much sympathy abroad upon this matter; and I think we men never get nearer to each other than when we talk, after our wives have gone upstairs to bed, of our lost loves.

This was partly what Will Anerley said to himself as the little party sate under the white awning of the König Wilhelm, and slowly steamed up the yellow-green waters of the Rhine. Not without a tremor of conscience he said it; for he had a vague impression that he had been wantonly cruel to Dove. In the first moments of remorse after awaking to a sense of his present position, he had said —

"There remains but one thing to be done. I will at once return to England, and see Annie Brunel no more."

But a man approaching thirty has taught himself to believe that he has great fortitude, especially where the tenderer emotions are concerned; and his next reflection was —

"My sudden departure will only be a revelation to her, and happily she knows nothing about it. Besides, have I not sufficient strength of mind to spend a few days in the pleasant society of this young girl, without committing myself? The mischief is done, and I must suffer for my carelessness; but – "

But he would go on to Schönstein all the same, whither the two ladies had also consented to go. He did not deceive himself when he submitted to his own conscience this theory. He knew there was no danger of his disturbing Miss Brunel's peace of mind, and he knew that Dove would have no further injustice done her. It was he who was to suffer. His thoughtlessness had permitted the growth of a hopeless passion: it would never be known to her who had inspired it, nor to her whom it had dispossessed. He only should carry about with him the scourge; and he was not without a hope that time and travel would for once accommodate themselves to an absurd superstition, and cure him of an unfortunate love.

For the rest, he was almost glad that he had mentally kissed Schön-Rohtraut's mouth. The consciousness of this passionate and hopeless attachment was in itself a pure and elevated feeling – a maiden delight which had no earthly element mixed with it. It was so different from the kindly, affectionate interest he took in Dove – so different from that familiar liking which made him think nothing of kissing the young girl in an easy fraternal way. To think of kissing Annie Brunel! The page could only look wonderingly and longingly at his beautiful mistress, at her pretty lips and nut-white teeth, and say, "Schweig' stille, mein Herze!"

Quite assured of his own strength of will, he did not seek for a moment to withdraw himself from her, or raise any subtle barrier between them. In fact, he mockingly explained to himself, that as compensation for the pain which he would afterwards have to suffer, he would now sup to the full the delicious enjoyment of her society. He would study as much as he chose the fine artistic head, the beautiful, warm, Italian colour of her face, and her charming figure; and he would gaze his fill into the deep-grey eyes, which were always brightened up by an anticipatory kindliness when he approached. He remarked, however, that he had never seen them intensified by that passionate glow which he had observed on the stage – the emotional earnestness which belonged to what she called her "real life;" there was in the eyes merely a pleased satisfaction and good nature.

"When shall we get away from the Rhine?" she asked, as they were sailing past the black Loreleiberg.

"To-night," said the Count, "we shall stop at Mayence, and go on by rail to Freiburg to-morrow. Then we shall be away from the line of the tourists."

This was an extraordinary piece of generosity and concession on the part of Count Schönstein; for there was scarcely anything he loved more dearly on earth than to linger about the well-known routes, and figure as a German Count before the Cockney-tourists who crowded the railway stations and tables d'hôte.

"I am so glad," said Miss Brunel. "I cannot bear to be among those people. I feel as if I were a parlourmaid sitting in a carriage with her master and mistress, and fancying that she was being stared at for her impertinence by every passer-by. Don't tell me it is absurd, Mr. Anerley; for I know it is absurd. But I cannot help feeling so all the same. When anybody stares at me, I say to myself, 'Well, perhaps you've paid five shillings to stare at me in the theatre, and you think, of course, you have the same right here.'"