The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

"I'll have tea ready in a jiffy, and Georgie dressed. I've been sitting at the window watching the boats, and wishing ever so to be on the river."

"Thou shalt have thy wish for this once, love," he said gently.

He was silent all through the simple meal, eating hardly anything, though 'twas the first food he had tasted since a seven-o'clock breakfast. He found himself wondering at the sunshine and the brightness of things, like a man who has come away from a newly filled grave – a grave where all his hopes and affections lie buried.

Lucy and her boy sat opposite him, and in the gaiety of their own prattle were unaware of his silence. The boy was three years old, and of an inexhaustible loquacity, having been encouraged to babble in Lucy's lonely hours. The sweet little voice ran on like a ripple of music, his mother hushing him every now and then, while Stobart sat with his head leaning on his hand, thinking, thinking, thinking.

They went up the river to Putney in a skiff, Stobart rowing, and it was one of the happiest evenings in Lucy's life. She had occupation enough for all the way in pointing out the houses and churches and gardens to Georgie, who asked incessant questions. She did not see the rower's pallid brow, with its look of infinite pain.

They landed at Fulham, moored the boat at the bottom of some wooden steps, and sat on a green bank, while Georgie picked the flowers off the blossoming sedges. Stobart sat with his elbows on his knees, gazing at the opposite shore, the rustic street climbing up the hill, and white cottages scattered far apart against a background of meadowland golden with marsh marigolds.

"Has rowing made your head worse, George?" his wife asked timidly.

"No, dear, no! There is nothing the matter" – holding out his hand to her. "Only I have been thinking – thinking of you and the boy, and of your lives in that dull house by the river. It is dull, I'm afraid."

"Never, when you are at home," she answered quickly. "You are very studious, and you don't talk much; but I am happy, quite happy, when you are sitting there. To have your company is all I desire."

"I have been a neglectful husband of late, Lucy. Those poor wretches in the Marsh have taken too much of my time and thought. Whatever a man's work in the world may be, he ought to remember his home."

"It is only when you are away – quite away, on those long journeys with Mr. Wesley."

"I will give up those journeys. Let the men who have neither wives nor children carry on that work. Would you like me to take Orders, Lucy?"

"Take Orders?"

"Enter the Church of England as an ordained priest. I might settle down then, get a London living. I have friends who could help me. It would not be to break with Wesley; he is a staunch Churchman."

"Yes, yes, I should love to see you in a real pulpit in a handsome black gown. I should love you to be a clergyman. All the town would flock to hear you, and people would talk of you as they do of Mr. Whitefield."

"No, no. I have not the metal to forge his thunderbolts. But we can think about it. I mean to be a kinder husband, Lucy. Yes, my poor girl, a kinder husband. Sure ours was a love match, was it not?"

"I loved you from the moment I heard your voice, that night at the Foundery Chapel, when I woke out of a swoon and heard you speaking to me. And in all those happy days at Clapham, when I used to tremble at the sound of your footstep, and when you taught me to read good books, an ignorant girl like me, and to behave like a lady. Oh, George, you have always, always been good to me."

The sun set, and the stars shone out of the deep serene as they went home, and a profound peace fell upon George Stobart's melancholy soul. To do his duty! That was the only thing that remained to be done. He understood John Wesley's warning better now. His soul had been in peril unspeakable. He loved her, he loved her, that queen among women – loved her with a passion measured by her own perfections. As she outshone every woman he had ever seen in loveliness, mental and physical, so his love for her surpassed any love he had ever imagined.

And to-day, when she had looked at him with so glorious a light in her eyes, when she had declared she would never marry, and confessed that she had a secret – a secret she would tell to none – he had trembled with an exquisite joy, an overpowering fear, as the conviction that she loved him flashed into his mind.

Why not? 'Twas hardly strange that the flame which had kindled in his breast had found a responsive warmth in hers. They had been so much to each other, had lived in such harmony of desires and hopes, each equally earnest in the endeavour to redress some of the manifold wrongs of the world. She had flung herself heart and soul into his philanthropic work, and here they had ever been at one. Her presence, her voice, her sweetness and grace had become the first necessity of his life, the one thing without which life was worthless. Was it strange if he had become more to her than a common friend? Was it strange if, after giving him her friendship, she had given him her heart?

But, oh, how deep a fall for the man who had set his hopes on high things, who had put on the whole armour of faith, had called himself a soldier and servant of Christ, who had looked back with loathing at the folly and the impiety of his boyhood and youth, and had set his face towards the City of the Saints, scorning earthly things! How deep a fall for the man who had cried with St. Paul, "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain"! How deep a fall to know himself the slave of a forbidden love, possessed heart and brain and in every fibre of his being by a passion stronger than any feeling of his unregenerate youth! Well, he had to fight the good fight, and to conquer man's most implacable enemy, sin. A year ago he had thought himself so safe, so far advanced on the narrow path, having only to reproach himself sometimes for a certain coldness in private prayer; successful in his mission work; happy in a humble marriage; having surrendered all things that worldlings care for in order to lead the Christian life, and having found a passionless peace as his reward.

Never more, of his free will, would he see this daughter of Babylon, this enchanting heathen, who had cast her fatal spell around his life. It might not be possible to avoid chance meetings in those miserable abodes where it was her whim to play the angel of pity; but doubtless that caprice of a fine lady would pass, and Lambeth Marsh would know her no more.

She wrote to him about a week after his last visit to St. James's Square.

"Why do you not come to take a dish of tea with me? My friends are leaving for their country seats, and I have been alone several afternoons, expecting you. Were you affronted with me for calling you a spinster aunt? Sure our friendship, and my esteem for your goodness, should excuse that careless impertinence. I enclose a bank bill which I pray you to spend as quickly as possible in buying clothing and shoes for the little ragged wretches I met coming out of your school yesterday. Ah, when will there be such schools all over England, in every city, in every village? Sure some day the country will take a lesson from such men as you and Mr. Wesley, and the poor will be better cared for than they are now."

The easy assurance of her letter surprised him. Every line indicated the woman of the world, the finished coquette. He replied coldly, thanking her for her bounty, and giving his absorbing occupations as a reason for not waiting upon her.

They met a week later in Sally Dormer's garret; but Antonia was leaving as he entered, and he did nothing to detain her. He had a brief vision of her beauty, more simply dressed than usual, in a black silk mantle and hood over a grey tabinet gown. He came upon her some days after in a shed at the back of the Vauxhall Pottery, entertaining a large party of pottery girls at supper, herself the merriest of the band. She had her woman Sophy to help her, and Mrs. Patty Granger, and he had never seen a more jovial feast. There was a long table upon trestles, loaded with joints and poultry, pies and puddings, and great copper tankards of small beer; at which feast two reluctant footmen, with disgusted countenances, assisted in undress livery, while an old blind fiddler sat in a corner playing the gayest tunes in his répertoire.

Antonia begged Mr. Stobart to stay and keep them company, but he declined. It was his class night, he told her, and he had his adult scholars waiting for him hard by. He carried away the vision of her radiant countenance, supremely happy in the happiness she had made for others. Was it possible better to realize the lessons of the Divine Altruist? And yet she was no more a Christian than the profligate Bolingbroke or the cynic Voltaire.

He was consistent and conscientious in his determination to avoid her, so far as possible without incivility. The town was beginning to thin, and he heard with relief that she was going on a visit to the Duchess of Portland at Bulstrode, near Maidenhead. In the autumn she was to be at Tunbridge Wells, to drink the waters, a business of six weeks.

"My physician orders it, though I swear I have nothing the matter with me," she told him, at one of their chance meetings in the Marsh. "'Tis good for my nerves to waste six weeks in a place where there is a dance every night, and where I shall spend every day in a crowd."

In another of these casual meetings she upbraided him for having deserted her.

"I have been more than usually busy," he said. "My schools are growing, and the dispensary is daily becoming a more serious business."

"Everything with you is serious; but you cannot be so seriously busy as not to have leisure for a dish of tea in St. James's Square once in a fortnight. Sure you know my heart is with you in all your good works, and that I like to hear about them."

"Indeed, madam, I am eternally grateful for your sympathy and your help; but of late I have had no leisure. My wife's spirits were suffering from a close London house, and I devote every hour I can steal from my work to giving her change of air."

"I am glad to hear it. Yes, Mrs. Stobart must miss your pretty garden at Sheen."

That month of May seemed to George Stobart to contain the longest and weariest days and hours he had ever known. The weather was close and oppressive, the rank odours of the Marsh were at their worst; jail fever, small-pox, putrid throats, all the most dreaded forms of infectious sickness hung heavy over the dwellers in that poverty-stricken settlement – the pottery hands, the glass-polishers, the lace-workers, the industrious and the idle, the honest and the criminal classes whom fate had herded together, unwilling neighbours in an equality of poverty.

He worked among the sick and the dying with unflagging zeal; he gave them the best of himself, all that he had of faith in God and Christ, sustaining their spirits in the last awful hours of consciousness by his own exaltation. He gave them inexhaustible pity and love, the compassion that is only possible to a man of keen imagination and quick sympathies. He understood their inarticulate sorrows, and was able to lift their minds above the actual to the unseen, and to convince them of an eternity of bliss that should pay them for a life of misery – promise more easy to believe now that all life's miseries belonged to the past, and the long agony of living was dwarfed by the nearness of death.

He followed Sally Dormer to her last resting-place in an obscure graveyard, and he provided for her brother's maintenance in the family of a hard-working carpenter, to whom the boy was to be apprenticed in due time. He had a more personal interest in this little lad than in his other scholars, remembering Antonia's interest in the dead woman, her almost sisterly affection for that fallen sister. The boy was intelligent, and took kindly to the simple tasks set him at Mr. Stobart's school, where the teaching went no further than reading, writing, and cyphering, and where the founder's sole ambition was to rear a generation of believing Christians, steeped, from the very dawn of intelligence, in the knowledge of Christ's life and example. He relied on those gospel lessons of universal charity and brotherly love, as an enduring influence over the minds and actions of his pupils, and hoped that from his school-rooms – some of them no better than an outhouse or a roomy garret, the humble predecessors of those ragged schools which were to begin their blessed work half a century later – the gospel light would radiate far and wide across the gloom of outcast lives and homes now ruled by Satan.

In his devotion to his mission work Mr. Stobart had not forgotten his promise to make his wife's life happier. He spent all the finest afternoons in rural airings with Lucy and little George; sometimes on the river, sometimes taking a little journey by coach as far as Sutton, or Ewell, or to Hampton Court; sometimes walking to Clapham Common, or as far as Dulwich, through lanes where the hedgerow oaks and elms hung a canopy of translucent green over the grassy path, and where they came every now and then on a patch of copse or a little wood, in which it was pleasant to sit and rest while the boy played about among the young fern in a rapture of delight.

He lavished kindness upon his wife and child. Never had there been a more indulgent father or a more attentive husband. Lucy, whose flower-like prettiness had faded a little in the smoke from the potteries and the Vauxhall glass-works, recovered her rose-and-lily tints in these excursions, and was full of grateful affection which touched her husband's heart. There was something pathetic in her accepting kindness as a favour which another woman would have claimed by the divine right of a wife. It pleased him to see her happy; and his conscience, which had been cruelly disturbed of late, was now at rest. But even that inward peace could not cure the dull aching of his heart, which ached he scarce knew why; or it might be that he stubbornly refused to know. He would have told himself, if he could, that the pain was physical, and that the weariness of life which followed him through every scene, and most of all in this sweet summer idlesse, was a question of bodily health, a lassitude for which a modish physician would have ordered "the Bath" or "the Wells."

Oh, the mental oppression of those May afternoons, the dull misery, vague, undefined, but intolerable, in which every sound jarred, even the silver-sweet of his child's joyous voice, in which every sight was steeped in gloom, even the lovely river, rose-flushed and smiling in the evening light!

He was miserable, and he tried to find the cause of his misery in things which lay remote from the one image he dared not contemplate. He told himself that the burden under which he ached was only the monotonous quiet of his days – the want of strong interests and active efforts such as kept John Wesley's mind in the freshness of a perpetual youth. That was the true fountain of Jouvence – action, progress, the consciousness of struggle and victory. He had tasted the joy of successful effort in his itinerant preaching – the uncouth mob crowding as to a show at a fair, the insulting assaults of semi-savages, the triumph when he had subjugated those rough natures, when by the mere force of his eloquence, by the magnetism of his own strong faith, he compelled the railers to listen, and saw ribald jokes change to eager interest, scorn give place to awe, and tears roll down the faces that sin had stained and blemished. All this had been to him as the wine of life; and this he had promised to renounce in order that he might do his duty as that commonplace domestic animal, a kind husband.

Sitting on the river bank in the summer quiet, in the rosy afterglow, amidst tall sedges and wild flowers that love the river, with his child prattling at his knee, playing with his watch-ribbon, asking questions that were never answered, and his wife seated at his side supremely content in having won him to give her so much of his company, George Stobart meditated upon the great mistake of his life – his marriage!

He remembered how lovely a creature the printer's daughter had seemed to him in her ecstasy of faith, how divine a thing the soul newly awakened to a sense of sin, and a desire for saving grace. His heart had gone out to her in an overwhelming wave of enthusiasm, a feeling so exalted, so different from any passion of his unregenerate years, that he had welcomed it as the one pure and perfect love of his life. He thought God had given him this friendless, ill-used girl to be his helpmeet, the sharer of all his aspirations, his lifelong labours in the service of Christ, as of that impassioned hour in Wesley's Chapel.

Soon, too soon, he had discovered the shallow nature behind that hysterical emotion, the tepid piety which alone remained after the fervour of newly awakened feelings. Too soon he had found that petty interests and trivial domestic cares and joys filled the measure of his wife's mind; that she thought more of her tea-trays and her sofa-covers than of thousands of Kingswood miners won from Satan to Christ; that he must never look to her for sympathy with his highest aspirations, hardly for interest in his everyday work among the poor.

When he suggested that she should help in his day nurseries or his infant schools, she refused with a shudder, lest she should bring home small-pox or scarlet fever to little Georgie. That fear of pestilence hung like a funeral pall over Lambeth Marsh; and all his efforts to popularize inoculation could do very little against dense ignorance, and terror of a preventive measure that seemed as bad as the disease.

"If I've got to have the small-pox anyhow, I'd sooner leave it to Providence," was the usual argument.

His marriage, so gravely resolved, with such generous disdain of worldly advantage, had not brought him happiness. The fellowship in thought and feeling, which is the soul of marriage, was wanting in a union that had yet every appearance of domestic affection, and which sufficed for the wife's content. She was happy, looking no deeper than the surface of things, and finding content in the calm prosperity of her life, the absence of poverty and ill-usage. His marriage was a mistake, and to the man who had taken upon himself, as he had done, the service of Christ's poor, any marriage must needs be a mistake. For the itinerant preacher, for the man with a suffering populace depending on his care, home ties were fetters that needs must gall. He could not serve two masters. He must be a half-hearted philanthropist or a neglectful husband; only an occasional preacher or a deserter of his home. He remembered the priests he had met and conversed with in France, men who had no claims, no interests outside their Church and their parish; and it seemed to him that he had bound himself with a servitude that made his service of Christ a dead letter.

His mission work must end if he was to do his duty at home. His career as John Wesley's helper had been the most absorbing episode in his life – a source of unbounded satisfaction to mind and conscience. He had gloried in the result of his labours, never questioning, in his own fervid faith, whether conversions so sudden would stand the test of time. He had counted every convert as a gain for ever, every flood of tears as a cleansing stream. But, precious though this work had been to him, conscience urged him to renounce it. His first duty was to make a home for the woman he had sworn to love and cherish. To this end he would try to become a priest of the Established Church, strive to obtain a London living, however small, and confine his service of Christ within a narrow radius, till fortune should widen his area of work. He had loved his freedom hitherto, the power to work for his own hand; but for Lucy's sake he would bend his shoulders to the Episcopal yoke, and enter on a phase of humble obedience to authority, prepared at any hour to be called to account for his opinions, and to be hampered and constrained in his gospel teaching. He would have to suffer, as others of the Oxford Methodists and their disciples had suffered, from the tyranny of ecclesiastical intolerance; but he would face all difficulties, submit to many restrictions, to make a home for his wife. And then there was always the hope that the Church of England would be swept from the great dismal swamp of formalism on the strong tide of the Great Revival, which ran higher and wider with every year of Wesley's and Whitefield's life. The teaching begun by Whitefield among the prisoners in Gloucester jail, by Wesley in the humble meeting-house in Fetter Lane, had spread over England, Scotland, and Ireland with an irresistible force, and must finally make its power felt in the Established Church.

From the market cross and the country side, from the colliers of Bristol and the miners of Cornwall, from the wild fervour of services and sermons under starlit skies, from congregations numbered by thousands, George Stobart was prepared to restrict the scope of his work to an obscure London pulpit or a poverty-stricken parish, content if in so doing his conscience could be at rest. But the outlook was dreary, and he began to measure the length of his earthly pilgrimage, and foresaw the long progress of eventless years, some little good done, perhaps, some souls gained for Christ, many small sorrows alleviated, but all his work shut within a narrow space, controlled by other people's opinions.

One agony which other men of deep religious feeling have suffered was spared to John Wesley's helper. His faith knew no shadow of change. His absolute belief in his God and his Saviour remained to him in the lowest depth of mental depression. He might feel himself a creature of sinful impulses, an outcast from God, but he never doubted the existence of that God, or the reality of that hereafter the hope of which lies at the root of all religion. The paradise of saints, the infinite joys of eternity, hung on the balance of good and evil, a stupendous stake, which most men played for with such wild recklessness, till the lights of this life began to fade, and the awful possibilities of that other life beyond the veil flashed on their troubled souls.