The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

"I will not hinder you in any work of beneficence; but among so many and in such pressing need of help it would be well to take time, and to consider how you can make your money go furthest."

"I will buy no more foolish things – trumpery that I forget or sicken of a few hours after 'tis bought. I will go to no more china auctions, squander no more guineas at Mrs. Chenevix's. Oh, Mr. Stobart, I know you despise me because I am like the young man in the gospel story. I am too rich not to be fond of riches. But indeed, sir, I do desire to help the poor."

"I believe it, madam, and that God will bless your desires. 'Tis not easy for a woman in the bloom of youth and beauty to take up the cross as Lady Huntingdon has done – to dedicate all she has of fortune and influence to the service of Christ. 'Twere cruel to reproach you for falling short of so rare a perfection."

"I have been told that Lady Huntingdon leaves it to doubters like me to feed the hungry and clothe the naked – since the cry of the destitute appeals to all alike – and that she devotes all her means to paying preachers, and providing chapels."

"That, madam, is her view of Christ's service; and I doubt she is right. When all mankind believe in Christ, there will be no more want and misery in this world; for the rich will remember that to refuse help to His poor is to deny Him."

The boy came back, breathless with running, and carrying a twopenny loaf in his grimy paw. He had gnawed off a corner crust as he ran.

"Dogs don't love crust," he remarked apologetically, as he knelt down in the dirt and fed the famished cur.

He went with them presently to his mother's garret, where Antonia sat by the woman's bed for half an hour, while Stobart read or talked to her. His tenderness to the sick woman and the reasonableness of all he said impressed even the unbeliever. His words touched her heart, though they left her mind unconvinced. The room showed an exceeding poverty, but was cleaner than Antonia had hoped to find it; and she could but smile upon discovering that Mr. Stobart had helped the three children to scrub the floor and clean the windows in the course of his last visit, and had made Jim, the eldest of the family, promise to brush the hearth and dust the room every morning, and had supplied him with a broom, and soap, and other materials for cleanliness. The boy was his mother's sick nurse, and was really helpful in his rough way. The other two children attended at an infant school which Stobart had set up in a room near, at a minimum cost for rent and fire. The teachers were three young women of the prosperous middle-classes, who each worked two days a week without remuneration.

After this quiet visit to the dying woman, Stobart led Lady Kilrush through crowded courts and alleys, where every object that her eyes rested on was a thing that revolted or pained her – brutal faces; famished faces; lowering viciousness; despairing want; brazen impudence that fixed her with a bold stare, and then burst into an angry laugh at her beauty, or pointed scornfully to the diamonds in her ears. Insolent remarks were flung after her; children in the gutters larded their speech with curses; obscene exclamations greeted the strange apparition of a woman so unlike the native womanhood. Had she been some freak of nature at a show in Bartholomew Fair, she could scarcely have been looked at with a more brutal curiosity.

Stobart held her arm fast in his, and hurried her through the filthy throng, hurried her past houses that he knew for dangerous – houses in which small-pox or jail fever had been raging, fever as terrible as that of the year '50, when half the bar at the Old Bailey had been stricken with death during the long hours of a famous trial for murder. Jail birds were common in these rotten dens where King George's poor had their abode, and they brought small-pox and putrid fever home with them, from King George's populous prisons, where the vile and the unfortunate, the poor debtor and the notorious felon, were herded cheek by jowl in a common misery. He was careful to take her only into the cleanest houses, to steer clear of vice and violence. He showed her his best cases – cases where gospel teaching had worked for good; the people he had helped into a decent way of life; industrious mothers; pious old women toiling for orphaned grandchildren; young women, redeemed from sin, maintaining themselves in a semi-starvation, content to drudge twelve hours a day just to keep off hunger.

Her heart melted with pity, and glowed with generous impulses. She clasped the women's hands; she vowed she would be their friend and helper, and showered her gold among them.

"Teach me how to help them," she said. "Oh, these martyrs of poverty! Show me how to make their lives happier."

"Be sure I shall not be slack to engage your ladyship in good works," he answered cordially. "If you will suffer me to be your counsellor you may do a world of good, and yet keep your fine house and your Indian jewels. Your influence should enlist others in the crusade against misery. It needs but the superfluous wealth of all the rich to save the lives and the souls of all the poor."

He was hurrying her towards a coach stand, through the deepening gloom of November. They had spent more than three hours in these haunts of wretchedness, and the brief day had closed upon them. The lights on Westminster Bridge and King Street seemed to belong to another world as the coach drove to St. James's Square. Stobart insisted on accompanying Antonia to her own door, and took leave of her on the threshold with much more of friendship than he had shown her hitherto. He seemed to her a changed being since they had walked through those wretched alleys together. Hitherto his manner with her had been stiff and constrained, with an underlying air of disapproval. But now that she had seen him beside a sick-bed, and had seen how he loved and understood the poor, and how he was loved and understood by them, she began to realize how good and generous a heart beat under that chilling exterior. The idea of a man in the flower of his youth flinging off a profession he loved, to devote his life to charity appealed to all her best feelings.

"I shall wait on your wife to-morrow morning," she said. "You will have time before I come to decide what I can do to help those poor wretches. Their white faces would haunt my dreams to-night if I did not know that I could do something to make them happier."

"Sleep sweetly," he answered gently. "You have a heart to pity the poor."

He bent over her gloved hand, touched it lightly with his lips, and vanished as she crossed her threshold, where the hall-porter and three pompous footmen gave a royal air to her entrance.

CHAPTER XIV.

"ONE THREAD IN LIFE WORTH SPINNING."

Antonia spent the next morning, from twelve to two, in the cottage parlour at Sheen, where Stobart spread out his reports and calculations before her, showed her what he had done in the district John Wesley had allotted to him, and how much – how infinitely more than had been done – there remained to do!

"My own means are so narrow that I can give but little temporal help," he said. "I have to stand by with empty pockets and see suffering that a few shillings could relieve. I have even thought of appealing to my mother – who has not used me well – but she was married six months ago to an old admirer, Sir David Lanigan, an Irish soldier, and a fierce High Churchman, who hates the Wesleys; so I doubt 'twould be wasted humiliation to ask her for aid. I have not scrupled to beg of my rich friends, and have raised money to apprentice at least fifty lads who were in the way to become thieves and reprobates. I have ministered to the two ends of life – to childhood and old age. The middle period must fight for itself."

He read his notes of various hard cases. He had jotted down stern facts with a stern brevity; but the pathos in the facts themselves brought tears to Antonia's eyes more than once in the course of his reading. He showed her what good might be done by a few shillings a week to this family, in which there was a bedridden son – and to another where there was a consumptive daughter; how there was a little lad starving in the gutter who could be billeted upon a hard-working honest family – how for the cost of a room with fire and candle, and sixpence a day for a nurse, he could provide a nursery where the infants of the women-toilers could be kept during the day.

"I have heard of some nuns at Avignon who set up such a room for the women workers in the vineyards," he said. "I think they called it a crêche."

Mrs. Stobart sat by the window busy with her plain sewing, of which she had always enough to fill every leisure hour. She looked up now and then and listened, with a mild interest in her husband's work; but she was just a little tired of it, and the fervid enthusiasm of the time of her conversion seemed very far away. Staffordshire tea-things and copper tea-kettle, brass fender and mahogany bureau filled so large a place in her thoughts, after her husband and son, both of whom she loved with her utmost power of loving, which was not of a high order. She crept away at one o'clock to see her baby George eat his dinner. He was old enough to sit up in his high mahogany chair and feed himself, with many skirmishing movements of his spoon, which he brandished between the slow mouthfuls as if it were a tomahawk.

George and Antonia were so absorbed in their work that Mrs. Stobart had been gone nearly an hour before either of them knew she was absent. The maid came blundering in with a tray as the clock struck two, and began to lay the cloth. Antonia rose to take leave, and insisted on going at once. Her carriage had been waiting half an hour in a drizzling November rain. She left quickly, but not before she had seen that Mr. Stobart's dinner consisted of the somewhat scrimped remains of a shoulder of mutton, and a dish of potatoes boiled in their skins.

She knew some of the officers in his late regiment, and knew how they lived; and it shocked her a little to recall that squalid meal when she sat down at four o'clock, with a party of friends, at a table loaded with an extravagant profusion of the richest food her cook's inventive powers could bring together. She had seen the expensive French chef standing before her with pencil and bill of fare, racking his brains to devise something novel and costly.

That morning at Sheen was the beginning of a close alliance in the cause of charity between Mr. Stobart and Lady Kilrush. They were partners in a business of good works; and all questions of creed were for the most part ignored between them. He would have gladly spoken words in season, but she had a way of putting him off, and she had become to him so beneficent and divine a creature that it was difficult for him to remember that she was not a Christian.

The five thousand a year which she had so freely offered him for his own use she now set aside for his poor.

"I can spare as much," she said, "and yet be a fine lady. Some day, perhaps, when I am old and withered, like the hags that haunt Ranelagh, I may grow tired of finery; and then the poor shall have nearly all my money, and I will live as you do, in a cottage, at ten pounds a year, on a bone of cold mutton and a potato. But while I am young I doubt I shall go on caring for trumpery things. It is such a pleasant change, when I have been in one of your loathsome alleys, to find myself at Leicester House with the princess and her party of wits and savants, or at Carlisle House, dancing in a chain of dukes and duchesses, with a German Royal Highness for my partner."

The responsibilities that went with the administration of so large a fund made a change in George Stobart's life. His residence at Sheen had long been inconvenient, the journey to and fro wasting time for which he had better uses. Lucy loved her rustic home and garden in summer; but she was one of those people who love the country when the sun shines and the roses are in bloom. In the damp autumnal afternoons, when silvery mists veiled the common, her spirits sank, and she began to grow fretful at her husband's absence, and to reproach him if he were late in coming home.

He wanted his wife to be happy, and he wanted to be near the scene of his labours, and within half an hour's walk of St. James's Square. After a careful search he found a house on the south side of the Thames, a quarter of a mile from Westminster Bridge, in Crown Place, a modest terrace facing the river. The house was roomier and more convenient than his rustic cottage; but the long strip of garden between low walls was a sad falling off from the lawn and orchard at Sheen, and he feared that Lucy would regret the change.

Lucy had no regrets. The larger rooms at Lambeth, the dwarf cupboards on each side of the parlour fireplace, the convenient closets on the upper floor, the doorsteps and iron railings, and the view of the river, with the Abbey and Houses of Parliament, and the crowded roofs and chimneys of Westminster, filled her with delight. The cottage and garden had been enchanting while the glamour of newly wedded love shone upon them; but by the time her spirits had settled into a calm commonplace of domestic life Lucy had discovered that she hated the country, and smelt ghosts under the sloping ceilings of those quaint cottage garrets where generations of labouring men and women had been born and died. Not unseldom had she longed for the bustle of Moorfields, and the din and riot of Bartholomew Fair, the annual treat of her childhood.

She arranged her furniture in the new home with complacency, and thought her son's nursery and her best parlour the prettiest rooms in the world, much nicer to live in than her ladyship's suite of saloons, where the splendid spaciousness scared her. She had known few happier hours in her life than the February afternoon when Lady Kilrush and Sophy Potter came to tea, and were both full of compliments upon her parlour, which had been newly done up, with the panelled dado painted pink, and a wallpaper sprinkled with roses and butterflies.

Sophy Potter, who retired into the background of Antonia's life in St. James's Square, was often her companion in her visits to the poor, and took very kindly to the work. As it was hardly possible to avoid the peril of small-pox in such visits, Mr. Stobart prevailed upon mistress and maid to submit to the ordeal of inoculation. The operation in Sophy's case was succeeded by a mild form of the malady; but the virus had no effect upon Antonia, and her physician argued that the vigour of a constitution which resisted the artificial infection would ensure her immunity from the disease. Neither her husband's entreaties, nor the example of Lady Kilrush could induce Mrs. Stobart to brave the perils of inoculation. It was in vain that George pleaded, and set a doctor to argue with her. Her horror of the small-pox made her shrink with tears and trembling from the notion of the lightest attack produced artificially.

"If it kills me you will be sorry for having forced me to consent," she said, and George reluctantly submitted to her refusal. She never went among his poor, and had never expressed a desire to see them.

"I saw enough of such wretches round Moorfields," she said. "I never want to go near them again. And I have quite enough to do to keep my house clean, and look after my little boy. You would want another servant if I went trapesing about your lanes and alleys, when I ought to be washing the tea-things and polishing the furniture."

Could he be angry with her for being industrious and keeping his house a pattern of neatness? He had long ago come to understand the narrow range of her thoughts and feelings; but while she was pious and gentle and his devoted wife, he had no ground for thinking he had made a mistake in choosing a lowborn helpmeet.

From the hurried idleness of a fashionable life Antonia stole many hours for the dwellings of the poor. In most of her visits to those haunts of misery she was attended by Stobart; but she had a way of eluding his guardianship sometimes, and would set out alone, or with Miss Potter, on one of her visits of mercy.

As time went on he grew more apprehensive of danger in her explorations; for now that she was familiar with the class among which he worked, her intrepid spirit tempted her to plunge deeper into the dark abyss of guilty and unhappy lives.

The time came when he could no longer bear to think of the perils that surrounded her in the close and fetid alleys where typhus and small-pox were never wholly absent; and at the risk of offending her he assumed the voice of authority.

"You told me once that I was your only family connection," he said, "and I presume upon that slender tie to forbid you running such risks as you incur when you enter such a den of fever as the house where I found you yesterday."

"What, sir, you forbid me? – you whose clarion call startled me from my selfish pleasure; you who showed me my worthless life!"

"You have done much to redeem that worthlessness, by your sacrifice of income."

"Sacrifice! You know, sir, that in your heart of hearts you despise such paltering with charity. In your estimation, not to give all is to give nothing!"

"You paint me as a bigot, madam, and not as a Christian. Be sure that He who praised the Samaritan approves your charity, and that He who holds the seven stars in His right hand will open your eyes to the light of revelation. A soul so lofty will not be left for ever in darkness. But in the mean time there can be no good done by your presence in places where you hazard health and life. You have made me your almoner, and it is my duty to see that the uttermost good is done with the money you have entrusted to me. Your own presence in those perilous places is useless. You have no gospel to carry to the sick and dying."

"Oh, sir, I have sympathy and compassion to give them. I doubt they get enough of the gospel, and that the company of a woman who can feel for their sufferings and soothe them in their pain is not without use. There is no sick-bed that I have sat by where I have not been entreated to return. The poor creatures like to tell me their troubles, to expatiate on their miseries, and I listen, and never let them think I am tired."

"You scatter gold among them; you demoralize them by your reckless almsgiving."

"No, no, no! I feed them. If there come days when the larder is empty, they have at least the memory of a feast. Your gospel will not stop the pangs of hunger. That is but a hysterical devotion which goes famishing to bed to dream of the Golden City with jasper walls, and the angels standing round the throne. Dreams, dreams, only dreams! You stuff those suffering creatures with dreams."

"I strive to make them look beyond their sufferings here to the unspeakable bliss of the life hereafter," Stobart answered gravely; and then he entreated her to go no more into those alleys where he now worked every day, and from which he came to her two or three times a week to report progress.

He came to her after his work, in the hour before the six o'clock tea at which she was rarely without visitors. If he was told she had company he went away without seeing her; but between five and six was the likeliest hour for finding her alone, since her drawing-rooms were crowded with morning visitors, and her evenings were seasons of gaiety at home or abroad.