The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

Not by Lord Dunkeld, who started post-haste for London directly he heard of her illness, and being informed that she was out of danger, and sitting up in her dressing-room every afternoon, pleaded hard to be admitted, but was resolutely refused.

Sophy wrote to him at her mistress's dictation, assuring him of her lady's unchanging esteem, but adding that she was too much out of spirits to see even her most valued friends.

"Most valued! I wonder what value she sets upon me?" questioned Dunkeld, cruelly disappointed. "'Tis the parson-soldier, or the soldier-parson she values. Perhaps the loss of her beauty moves her most because she will be less fair in his eyes. I doubt that it is always of one man only that a woman thinks, when she rejoices in her beauty. It is for his sake; to please his eye! The fellow may be a Caliban, perhaps, and yet he is the shrine at which she offers her charms."

He tried to picture that glorious beauty changed to ugliness, tried and could not; for he could not banish her image as he had seen her in Italy. Her beauty sparkled and shone before him; and imagination could not conjure up the tragic transformation.

"There is no change that could lessen my love," he thought. "She has grown into my heart, and is a part of my life. I may be appalled when I see her, may suffer tortures at a sight so piteous; but she will be dearer to me in her ruined beauty than the handsomest woman in London."

He thought of one of the handsomest, the exquisite Lady Coventry, the younger of the Gunning sisters, whose brief reign was hastening towards its melancholy close: a butterfly creature, inferior to Antonia in all mental qualities, but with much grace and sparkle, and an Irishwoman's high spirits. The Ring in Hyde Park, the Rotunda at Ranelagh, the Opera House and the Pantheon, would be poorer for the loss of that brilliant figure.

"And if Antonia appears there no more 'twill be two stars dropped out of our firmament," thought Dunkeld.

It was in vain that Patty urged her friend to try the waters of Bath or Bristol, as Dr. Heberden had advised, seeing that his patient was slow to recover her strength. Antonia refused to leave St. James's Square.

"If I went to drink the waters I should have a host of trivial acquaintances buzzing round me," she told Patty. "And I have taken a hatred of all company, but yours and Sophy's. Indeed, I think I hate the world. Here I am as safe as in a prison; for my fine friends will think the house infected, and will be afraid to trust their beauty in it."

"Sure there has been pains enough taken to drive away the contagion," said Sophy, who had suffered some inconvenience from the stringent measures Lady Kilrush had insisted upon after her recovery.

"But my friends do not know that, and till they forget my illness this house is my castle."

Mrs. Granger dropped in at teatime two or three times a week, and brought the gossip of the town, and exercised all her wit to enliven her friend; but Antonia seemed sunk in a hopeless languor and melancholy, and only affected an interest in the outside world to please her visitor.

"I'll swear you are not listening, and have scarce heard a word of it," Patty would exclaim, stopping midway in her account of the last event that had startled the town. A rich old Mrs. Somebody who was going to marry a boy; or a high-born Iphigenia sacrificed to an octogenarian bridegroom.

Antonia had left off caring what people did, or what became of them.

Even the doings of her duchesses had ceased to interest. They had sent affectionate notes and messages, and she had responded civilly. The Duke of Cumberland had sent an equerry with his card, and tender inquiries. The Princess had sent one of her ladies. And all that Antonia desired in her present mood was to be forgotten. She was glad that Lady Margaret Laroche, whom she liked best of all of her fashionable friends, was spending the winter in Paris; since she could hardly have denied herself where she was under so many obligations.

She read the papers every day, wondering whether she would ever come upon George Stobart's name in the news from America; but the name had not appeared, nor had Mr. Stobart been heard of at his own house at the beginning of the year, when she sent a servant to inquire of the woman in charge there. It was a bitter cold winter; but London was full of movement and gaiety while Antonia sat alone in the library at the back of the great solemn house, where the shutting of one of the massive doors reverberated from cellar to roof-tree in the silence. Never had there been a gayer season. It seemed as if the noise of all the crackers and squibs that had been burnt after the news from Quebec was still in the air. The cold weather killed a good many old people, and there were the usual number of putrid sore throats and typhus fevers in the fine West End mansions; but the herd went on their way rejoicing and illuminating, and praising God for the triumph of English arms on land and sea, since the victories of the great year '59 were being briskly followed up in the year that had just begun – the thirty-third of his Majesty's illustrious reign. His Majesty was waxing old and feeble, and the hero of Dettingen was soon to follow that other old lion in the Tower; and most people's eyes were turned to the mild effulgence of the rising star, the young Prince of Wales, or to the Prince's mother, and his guardian, my Lord Bute, who might be supposed to direct that youthful mind. Soon, very soon, the great bell would be tolling, the muffled drums beating, and the pomp of a royal funeral would fill the night with torches and solemn music.

That bitter winter was over, and the river was running gaily under April skies, when George Stobart came up the Thames to the Pool of London. What an insignificant river it seemed after the St. Lawrence! what a poor little flat world lay all around him, as his eyes looked out upon his native land – melancholy eyes, that found no joy in anything, no pleasure in that aspect of familiar scenes which delights most wanderers in their home-coming. Duty brought him home, while inclination would have kept him in Georgia, whither he had made his way by a difficult and perilous journey, from the snow-fields and frozen rivers of Canada to the orange groves and sunny sea of the South, after a weary time in the hospital at Quebec. There had been much for him to see in the little colony established by the philanthropic Oglethorpe five-and-twenty years before, a refuge and a home for poor debtors from the English prisons. He had preached several times in one of the school-rooms at Savannah; and the fire and fervour of his exhortations had won him a numerous following, black and white. He had gone among Whitefield's slaves; but although he found them for the most part well-used and contented, he loathed a condition which Whitefield justified, and against which Wesley had never lifted up his voice. To Stobart this buying and selling of humanity was intolerable. True that in these pious communities the African was better off than many a slave of toil in Spitalfields or Whitechapel; but he lived under the fear of the lash, and he knew not when it might suit his owner's convenience to sell him into a worse bondage.

It was with a willing heart that the soldier-priest laid down the sword and took up the Bible. In his hours of despair, in all the longing and regret of a hopeless love, his faith had remained unshaken. There was still the terror, and there was still the hope: the fear of everlasting condemnation, the hope of life eternal. Among the ignorant throng whom the great evangelist awakened to a sense of sin and a yearning for pardon, there were numerous backsliders; but the men of education and enlightenment who followed John Wesley seldom fell away. To them the things unseen, the promise and the hope, were more real than the bustle and strife of the world that hemmed them round. They walked the streets of the city with their eyes looking afar off, their thoughts full of that heavenly kingdom where life would put on a loveliness unthinkable here below. Sickening at the horrors of a world in which there were such things as the gallows at Tyburn, with its batch of victims ten or a dozen at a time – men, women, boys and girls, children almost; the Fleet prison; Bedlam, with its manacles and scourges, and Sunday promenades for the idle curious; Bridewell, Newgate. Sickening at such a world as this, the Methodist turned his ecstatic gaze towards that Kingdom of Christ the Lord, where there should be no more tears, no more war, no more oppression, no more grinding poverty or foul disease, and where all the redeemed should be equals in one brotherhood of heavenly love.

George Stobart went back to his mission work as faithful a believer as in the day of his conversion. He had not been an idle servant while he was with his regiment. He had preached the gospel wherever he could find hearers, had been instant in season and out of season; but his persistence had not been of a noisy kind, and although his superior officers were disposed to docket him as a religious monomaniac, after the manner of Methodists, they had never found him troublesome or insubordinate.

"Mr. Stobart is a gentleman," said the major. "And if expounding the Scriptures to a parcel of unbelieving rascals can console him for short rations, and keep him warm in a temperature ten degrees below zero – why, who the deuce would deny him that luxury? If he's a saint at his prayers, he's a devil in a mêlée; and he saved my scalp from the redskins when we were fighting in the dark in the marshes before Louisburg."

Stobart landed at the docks, had his luggage put on a hackney coach, and drove to his house at Lambeth, without a shadow of doubt that he would find all things as he had left them more than two years ago. Lucy's last letter had been written in a cheerful spirit. She was elated at Georgie's good luck in pleasing his grandmamma, and she prophesied that he would inherit Lady Lanigan's fortune and become a person of importance. Her father's drunken habits and persecuting visits were her only trouble. Her health was good, and her last maidservant was the best she had found since she began housekeeping. True that this letter had been written more than half a year ago; but the idea of change or misfortune in the quiet life at home hardly entered into the mind of the man who had so lately passed through all the perils of the siege of Quebec, from the first disastrous attack on the heights of the Montmorenci to the daring escalade and the battle on the Plains of Abraham, to say nothing of minor dangers and adventures which had made his life of the last two years a series of hairbreadth escapes. He counted on his wife's smiling welcome; and in the tediousness of the voyage he had been schooling himself to his duty as a husband, to give love for love with liberal measure, to make his wife's future years happy.

"Poor Wesley's only mistake in life is to have made an unfortunate marriage, and not to be able to make the best of a bad bargain," he thought. "But my Lucy is no such termagant as Mrs. John; and I must be a wretch if I cannot live contentedly with her. She was fair, and gentle, and loving; and I chose her for the companion of my life. I must stand by my choice."

In long, wakeful nights, when the ship was rolling in a stormy sea, he had ample leisure to travel again and again over the same ground, to make the same resolutions, to repeat the same prayers for strength within and guidance from above.

There was one name he never breathed to himself, one face he tried to shut out of his memory; but such names and such faces have the sleeper at their mercy; and his dreams were often haunted by an image that his waking thoughts ever strove to banish.

The spring afternoon was grey and cheerless; a fine rain was falling; and the narrow streets, muddy gutters, and smoky atmosphere of London were not attractive after the clear air and bright white light of Georgia.

He felt in worse spirits than before he left the ship – his prison of near six weeks – and the journey seemed interminable; but the coach rolled over Westminster Bridge at last, and drew up in front of his house. The outside shutters were closed over the parlour windows, though it was only five o'clock and broad daylight. Lucy must be away from home; with his mother, perhaps, who, having melted to the grandson, might have made a further concession and extended her kindness to the daughter-in-law – her meek protégée of days gone by. The suggestion seemed reasonable; but the aspect of those closed shutters chilled him.

He knocked loudly at first; and knocked a second time before the door was opened by a decent old woman in clean white cap and apron.

"Is your mistress away from home?"

The explanation was slow, disjointed, on the woman's part. His questioning was quick, impassioned, horror-stricken; but the story was told at last, the woman sparing him no ghastly particulars: the patient's sufferings; the disfiguring malady which had afterwards seized Lady Kilrush, who had come through it worse than Mrs. Stobart, and was said to be a terrible "objick." Poor Lady Kilrush! who had been so kind, and had visited Mrs. Stobart at the risk of her life, although the doctors had warned her of her danger times and often. And now she was shut up in her house and would see no one, not even her own servants, without the black velvet mask which she wore day and night.

Stobart had gone into the parlour while they were talking. The grey day came in through the holes in the shutters, and made a twilight in the familiar room. Everything was the same as when his wife used to dust and polish the furniture with indefatigable care, and place every chair and table with a prim correctness of line that had often irritated him. There was the bureau at which he used to write; and the little Pembroke table was in its own place between the windows, with the big Bible laid upon a patchwork mat.

And she for whom he had made the home was lying yonder in Mortlake churchyard, the place of rustic graves through which he had passed so often, crossing the meadows between Sheen and the church, on his way to the river. She was gone! and all his schemes for making her life happy, all his remorseful thoughts of her, had been in vain. She was gone! His last irrevocable act had been an act of unkindness. He had left her to die alone.

For his sins against God he might atone, and might feel the assurance of pardon; but for his sin against this weak mortal who had loved him, and whom he had sworn to cherish, there was no possibility of atonement.

"Not to her, not to her," he thought. "I may repent in sackcloth and ashes – I may rip the flesh from my bones with the penitent's scourge, like Henry Plantagenet. But could he make amends to the martyr Becket? Can I make amends to her? 'O God! O God! that it were possible to undo things done; to call back yesterday!'" he thought, recalling a passage in an old play that had burnt itself into his brain, by many a pang of regret for acts ill done or duties neglected.

He wandered from room to room in the familiar house which seemed so strange in its blank emptiness, looking at everything with brooding gaze – the parlour where he had spent so many solitary hours in study and in prayer. His books were on the shelves as he had left them – the old Puritan writers he loved – Baxter, Charnock, Howe, Bunyan. He had taken only three books on his voyage: his Bible, a pocket Milton, and Charles Wesley's Hymns. His study looked as if he had left it yesterday. The trees and shrubs were budding in the long slip of garden, where he had paced the narrow pathway so often in troubled thought.

He went upstairs, and stood beside the bed where his wife had lain in her last sleep. The curtains had been stripped from the tent-bedstead, the carpet taken up, and every scrap of drapery removed from the windows when the house was disinfected. The room looked poverty-stricken and grim.

The caretaker followed him from room to room, praising herself for the cleanliness of the house, and keeping up a continuous stream of talk to which he gave the scantiest attention. In the bedchamber she was reminded of Lady Kilrush and her goodness, and began to dilate upon that theme.

Was there ever such a noble lady? She had thought of everything. He might make himself quite happy about his poor dear lady. Never had a patient been better nursed. Her ladyship never missed a day, and saw with her own eyes that everything was being done. And she was with his lady a long time on that last day when the fever left her and she was able to talk sensibly. And his lady was quite happy at the last – oh, so happy! And the old woman clasped her hands in a kind of ecstasy. "Quite blind," she said, "and with a handkerchief bound over her poor eyes – but oh, so happy!"

He left the house, heavy-hearted, and walked across the bridge and by Whitehall to St. James's Square. He could not exist in uncertainty about Antonia's fate. He must discover if there were any truth in what the woman had told him, if that resplendent beauty, Nature's choicest dower given to one woman among thousands, had indeed been sacrificed. So great a sacrifice made by an Infidel! a woman who had no hope in an everlasting reward for the renunciation of happiness here. He recalled the exquisite face that had lured him to sin, and pictured it scarred and blemished – as he had seen so many faces, – changed by that fatal disease which leaves ruin where it spares life. He shuddered and sickened at the vision his imagination evoked. Would he honour her less, adore her less, so disfigured? He had told himself sometimes in his guilty reveries, when Satan had got the better of him, that he would love her if she were a leper; that it was the soul, the noble, the daring, the generous nature of the woman that he idolized; that he was scarcely a sinner for loving the most perfect creature God had ever made.

If she hid her blemished face from the world, would she consent to see him? Or would he find his sin still unpardoned? Would she hold him at a distance for ever because of one fatal hour in his life? She could scarcely forget their last parting, when she had prayed never to look upon his face again; but time might have mitigated her wrath, and she might have forgiven him.

Her ladyship saw no visitors, the porter told him, and was about to shut the door in his face; but Mr. Stobart pushed his way in, and scribbled a note at a writing-table in the hall.

"Pray be so kind as to see me. I want to thank you for your goodness to my wife. I landed in London two hours ago on my arrival from America."

He walked up and down the hall while a footman carried the note to his mistress. His heart beat heavily, tortured with the anticipation of horror; to look upon the altered face; to have to tell himself that this was Antonia.

The man came back, solemn and slow, in his rich livery and powdered head. Her ladyship would see Mr. Stobart.

She was sitting in a large armchair by the fire, her face showing dimly in the twilight. He could distinguish nothing but her pallor and the difference in the style of her hair. The flowing curls that he had admired were gone. He felt thankful for the darkness which spared him the immediate sight of her changed aspect.

"I am glad you are back in England, Mr. Stobart, and have escaped the perils of that dreadful war," she said, in a low, grave voice. "But you have had a sorrowful welcome home."

"Yes, it was a heavy blow."

"I hope you had received Lady Lanigan's letter, and that the blow was softened by foreknowledge."

"No, I had no letter; I came home expecting to find all things as I left them. My mind was full of schemes for making my wife happier than I had made her in the past. But I doubt sins of omission are irrevocable. A man may sometimes undo what he has done, but he cannot make amends for what he has left undone."

There was a silence. The shadows deepened. The wood fire burnt low and gave no light.

"I have no words to thank you for your goodness to my wife," he said. "That you should go to her in her loneliness, that you should so brave all perils, be so compassionate, so self-sacrificing! What can I say to you? There is nothing nobler in the lives of the saints. There was never Christian living more worthy to be called Christ's disciple."