CHAPTER XVI.
I ONLY LEARNED TO DOUBT AT LAST.
Thesummer came in all its glory, a splendid summer for the wide airy corn-fields, where the lark sang high in a heaven of cloudless blue, above the broad ripples of tawny gold—a splendid summer for Hyde Park and the green valley through which Father Thames winds his silvern ribbon,—a delicious summer for the rich and prosperous in the land, for whom sunshine means pleasure; but a terrible summer for the overcrowded manufacturing town of Bridford, where a hot season meant fever and disease in its most malignant form. In the seething boiling-pot of those Bridford alleys the fair July weather brought endless sorrow and trouble; and wherever the trouble was worst and the sorrow heaviest Cyril Culverhouse was to be found. Night after night he was to be seen moving, quietly as a shadow, from house to house, to sit for an hour reading the gospelto some fever-parched sufferer whose dull eyes might never see another sunset. The days were not long enough for his work at this woeful time. He was obliged to give at least half his nights, and very often the whole of them, to his sad duties.
‘If you don’t take care, my dear fellow, you’ll knock yourself up,’ remonstrated the port-winey Vicar, shocked at his curate’s hollow eyes and pale cheeks. ‘It’s no use sacrificing yourself in this way. We’ve the same thing every summer. The thermometer and the death-rate go up together. Sanitary reform is what we want, Culverhouse. We Churchmen can do very little good.’
‘We can only do our duty,’ answered Cyril. ‘I am not afraid of fever.’
‘Well, as a single man you can face it with less scruple. I should go a great deal more among these poor creatures, but Mrs. Rollings is dreadfully nervous. She is so frightened about infection. With our large family we are bound to be careful. Even the funerals make her anxious. She won’t let me go near the children after I’ve buried a fever case. It’s a deplorable state of things.’
Cyril faced these deplorable things without fear or wavering. What had he to fear? It was such work as his soul loved. To be where he was most wanted, where the sky was darkest and his little lamp could be of most avail, that was his idea of a parish priest’s mission.
No heathens worshipping their wooden fetish in flowery islands of the fair South Seas could be further away from the light than these lost sheep of Israel; and it was to such as these he felt himself especially sent.
And then for his life. Like Hamlet, he valued that at ‘a pin’s fee.’ He would have asked no better gift from the gods than to die doing his duty—a soldier of the Church militant, struck down in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. All things which make an earthly lot sweet and valuable to man were lost to this man. He loved, and had renounced the woman he loved. He loved her still, more dearly than ever in separation; and he knew that she was to be the wife of another. Of fortune or advancement in life he had no hope. The Church is a profession few men would choose, desiringeither fortune or advancement. He had nothing to live for but his duty, and it would be sweeter to him to die for that than to go on living for it.
Every thought of Beatrix Harefield was pain; most painful of all was the thought that she would think him mean and cowardly for his defection. If she was innocent she must scorn him for his doubt of her. If she was guilty she must deem him a coward for refusing her remorse the shelter of his love. He remembered those lines of Moore’s,—
‘Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer,Though the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here.’
‘Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer,Though the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here.’
‘Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer,Though the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here.’
‘Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer,
Though the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here.’
He had been like the herd, and had fled from his beloved in the day of her shadowed fame. He thought of his defection with deepest regret; yet it seemed to him that to have done otherwise would have been to palter with the truth.
This burden of sad thought made him more desirous than another man would have been to lose his sense of individual pain in the sorrows of others. Parish priests had gone among the poor of Bridfordbefore Cyril’s time, but none with such a ready ear for their complaints.
There was a small household which had a peculiar interest for Cyril. A widow and her son occupied a wretched back room in one of the wretched houses in a blind alley, a festering lane shut from the air and light by the overshadowing bulk of a huge factory, whereof the chimney, although under legal covenant to consume its own smoke, rained showers of blacks upon the surrounding neighbourhood, like the spray from a perennial soot fountain.
Nothing could be more squalid than the house in which Mrs. Joyce and Emmanuel Joyce, her son, lived. Their neighbours were no cleaner or tidier than the rest of the community. There was the usual all-pervading odour of fried herrings, and decaying cabbage-leaves. The back yard, nine feet by six, was a horror to stop the nose at. The eye was offended by hideous sights, the ear was outraged by foulest language, and yet in this leper-house there was one spot which the infected air of the place had not tainted.
Mrs. Joyce and her son had contrived to impart neatness and order, and even a certain respectability to the one small back room on the ground-floor, which constituted their house and home. Very small were the means by which they had achieved this result, but the result was palpable to every eye.
‘It’s well to be them,’ said the mother of many children, peering with longing eyes into the neatly kept parlour. ‘If I had no childer I might make my place tidy; but where there’s childer there’s muck.’
Emmanuel Joyce was a cobbler by trade. Now of all trades perhaps cobbling is about one of the most unpleasant with which to be brought into immediate contact, but Emmanuel, who paid his weekly rent punctually, and was in that respect a striking exception, had obtained leave to erect a small shed in the angle of the yard next his window. This shed was looked at with envious eyes by some of his fellow-lodgers, and talked of invidiously as an encroachment; but here Emmanuel squatted at his work in all weathers, andhere he kept his tools, and those crippled boots and shoes upon which he exercised his healing art.
In the parlour he had contrived to build a couple of enclosed beds on the Scotch principle, which, though wanting in airiness, were tidy and decent. At night a curtain divided the one small room into two, and by day this curtain drawn back and neatly looped up, made one of the decorations of the neat parlour. A tall stand of flower-pots, Emmanuel’s dearest care, screened the loathesomeness of the yard, and made the one window a bank of foliage and gay colour. The shabby odds and ends of furniture shone with the beeswax and labour which Mrs. Joyce bestowed upon them in the intervals of her plain sewing. There were cheap prints on the wall above the mantelpiece, and on each side of the fireplace there were three deal shelves, containing Emmanuel’s much-prized collection of books, all picked up at odd times from the rubbish-box of a second-hand bookseller, and rebound and furbished by Emmanuel’s own dexterous hands.
‘My son is a great reader,’ Mrs. Joyce said proudly, during Cyril’s first visit. ‘He keeps the money other young men spend on beer to buy books with.’
Cyril went over to the shelves and looked at the books. Their character told him more about Emmanuel Joyce’s way of thinking than the mother would have cared to tell. There was an odd volume of Shelley, another of Keats, a Milton, and a Shakespeare. So much for the poets. Then came Rousseau’s ‘Confessions,’ in English, Tom Payne’s ‘Age of Reason,’ and a dozen other books all more or less infidel in their tendency.
‘Your son goes to church, I hope?’ said Cyril, after he had examined the books.
The widow hung her head, and began to fidget with the corner of her print apron.
‘I’m sorry to say he’s no church-goer, sir. It’s his only fault. He was brought up very strict, a little too strict, perhaps. We were chapel people in my husband’s lifetime, and I think he was a bit too hard on the boy. It turned Emmanuel’s stomach against religion. Andnow he’s got hold of all sorts of queer ideas, and he puts ’em into poetry. It’s beautiful poetry to listen to, full of book learning. My son reads it to me of an evening; but it soars too high for me sometimes, I can’t quite follow the ideas.’
‘I should like to have a little talk with your son,’ said Cyril.
‘Ah, sir, if you could but bring him to think better of his Maker, and his Maker’s way of managing this world, it would be a blessed thing,’ exclaimed the widow. ‘That’s all my son needs to make him as perfect as any human creature ever was upon this earth. He’s the best of sons, he’s the honestest, soberest, industriousest of young men. But it makes me shudder sometimes to hear him talk; that bold, as if he’d been up among the stars, and knew the way they’re worked. I believe it all comes of too much learning.’
‘Or too little,’ suggested Cyril.
‘Oh, sir, you wouldn’t say that if you was to see the books he devours. He belongs to the Mechanics’ Institute, and there isn’t a learnedbook they’ve got that he hasn’t gone right through. He don’t care for stories and such like. He calls them fiddle-faddle. But he’ll sit up half the night over a learned book, and then he puts his ideas into poetry.’
Cyril was warmly interested. To begin with, a cobbler who read Keats and Shelley stood out prominently from the ruck of cobblers. It has been said that cobblers, as men whose habits are sedentary and meditative, have a natural leaning to infidel opinions; but Cyril did not believe this. He did not believe that meditation must needs engender doubt. He who wrote the divinest work ever penned by an uninspired writer, ‘The Imitation of Christ,’ must have been of all men the most meditative. And did not Bunyan’s twelve years of imprisonment in Bedford gaol bear fruit in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress?’ a book that has done more to popularize Christianity than all the writings of all the bishops who ever wore lawn. Cyril could not see any reason why cobbling and Christian belief should be incompatible.
‘I will call and see your son,’ he said, Emmanuelhappening to be out of the way on his first visit.
He called the following evening, a dismal rainy evening, when he thought the cobbler, as a man not given to spend his time in tap-rooms, likely to be at home. Nor was he disappointed. Emmanuel Joyce was sitting at a little table, drawn close to the bank of flowers in the window, poring over a page of Carlyle’s ‘Latter Day Pamphlets,’ his elbow on the table, his thin hand entangled in his long hair, and with far from a comfortable expression of countenance.
That Thomas Carlyle is a grand and noble writer, no one who has ever read his ‘French Revolution,’ his ‘Life of John Sterling,’ and his ‘Hero Worship,’ could have the insolence to deny; but he is a writer demanding a considerable expenditure of brain power on the part of his readers; and for a worker who has been sitting in a cramped position all day mending shoes, to find himself lost among the Immensities, or vainly endeavouring to grapple with Phantasmal Captains, Ineptitudes, and other strange creatures, is hardly the mostrefreshing form of mental solace after physical labour.
Mrs. Joyce was sewing on the other side of the little table, wasting her eyesight in order to economize her candle. Mother and son rose at Cyril’s entrance, and the widow brought forward the best chair, a battered old easy chair, which her son had neatly covered with bright-looking chintz, for the visitor.
Emmanuel was tall, thin, and pale, with hollow cheeks and a projecting forehead, under which shone darkly bright eyes, large and bulbous. His lips were thin, his chin indicated a firmness of character verging upon obstinacy. It was an interesting face, but not altogether a pleasant one, save when the young man spoke to his mother, and then his countenance was lighted by a smile which made it beautiful.
‘Mother told me you’d been to see her, sir,’ he said. ‘She took it very kindly that you should spare time to sit down and chat a bit with her, especially as you didn’t leave a tract behind you.’
‘You don’t like tracts,’ said Cyril, smiling atthe energy with which the last sentence was spoken.
‘I detest them.’
‘Yet I think the book you are reading is something in the form of a tract,’ speculated Cyril, whose quick eye had caught the title of Carlyle’s book.
‘It is not a religious tract, sir. It appeals to man’s highest faculties—it kindles all that is best and greatest in his soul—but it does not pelt him with Scripture texts, or tell him that he is by nature a reprobate and castaway, judged and doomed before he was born.’
‘Do you think the Bible tells a man that?’
‘Yes, sir, it does. The Bible texts that were flung at my head in my childhood and boyhood were all to one purpose. They told me that I was a vessel of wrath, and that I was doomed to the burning. When I was eighteen years of age I began to think for myself.’
‘You began to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.’
‘No, sir. I had read Shelley’s “Queen Mab,” by that time, and I had my own ideas of the justice ofmy Creator. If He were just He would not create me for misery either here or hereafter. And then I looked round me and saw a world that reeked with human misery and divine injustice.’
‘Stop!’ cried Cyril. ‘Were this world the end of our life the differences in the fortunes of mankind might imply injustice in the Ruler of this world; but the balance is to be struck elsewhere—the day of reckoning is to come, when each man shall reap the reward of his works, whether they be good or evil.’
‘Am I to take your word for all that?’ asked Emmanuel, his projecting eyes shining with a fierce light. ‘You are like the rest of them. One after another they have come to me—Church of England, Wesleyans, Baptists, Ranters—all with the same dogmatic assertions. My own senses tell me that this world teems with suffering and wrong. Am I to take the other story on hearsay?’
‘Have you not seen something more than suffering and wrong?’ argued Cyril ‘Have you not seen that even in this brief mortal life—which true believers regard as but a troubled passage to eternal peace—have you not seen that even here men reapas they have sown? To the sober man health and tranquillity; to the drunkard disease and early death. To the honest man the world’s respect; to the reprobate the bitter cup of shame. This little room we sit in bears the evidence of your sober, industrious life. Where is the injustice here? Now and then we see a good man struggling with calamity—tried as Job was tried—chastened as David was chastened—but his struggles are an education for heaven; and could we but see rightly we might regard him as a chosen servant of God.’
‘And what of your hospitals for incurables, filled with beings created only to suffer?’
‘You have never visited one of those hospitals, or you would know that among those sufferers there are many whom heaven has gifted with a patience that makes life almost happy, and a faith that fills even their hours of pain with hope.’
‘Dreamers and enthusiasts all,’ said Emmanuel.
‘Amongst them are some who have talents that make life interesting—or even genius that lifts them up above the common earth and creates for them a world of their own. We cannot measure ourfellow-men’s misery or happiness, any more than we can measure the goodness and justice of God. Some of the most unhappy of men are those to whom fortune has given all good things.’
‘What do you deduce from this?’
‘That if we could know the hearts and minds of all men as God knows them we should not accuse our Maker of injustice. He has given us the highest of all gifts, understanding and free will. It is for us to work out our redemption with these.’
‘You believe in free will?’ asked Emmanuel.
‘As I believe in God’s justice.’
‘My father was a Calvinist. He believed himself one of the elect, and his fellow-men, mostly, outside the pale.’
‘You were brought up in that gloomy faith—the faith of that hard good man who had love and mercy neither for himself nor his fellow-men—who put an honest woman in jail for dancing at her kinsman’s wedding—and condemned a brother theologian to the stake for differing in opinion with him. Well, I can hardly wonder that your mind has taken a distorted view of Christianity, forthough a Calvinist may be a very good man, I doubt his being a pleasant man, or being able to make his faith sweet and pleasant to others. But if you will accept Christ’s Christianity for your guide—if you will look to Christ’s heaven as your goal—you will find no thorns in your path.’
And then, warming with his subject, Cyril spoke strongly and earnestly of gospel truth as he believed it—the unsophisticated teaching of Christ. Emmanuel Joyce listened, and liked to hear, but his opinions were not to be shaken in an evening. He had too long cherished and cosseted the demon of infidelity, to be able to thrust the foul fiend out of doors at a moment’s warning.
‘Come whenever you can spare an hour,’ he said, when Cyril was going away. ‘I like to hear you talk.’
‘I will come as often as I can; but on one condition.’
‘Name it.’
‘That you come to church.’
‘I’ll come to hear you preach. I’m never above hearing a good preacher.’
‘Come, that you may learn to pray,’ answered Cyril. ‘Life is a barren waste without that link between earth and heaven—the Jacob’s ladder of prayer, upon which angels are continually ascending and descending.’