Argemone need never have known of Lancelot’s share in the poaching affray; but he dared not conceal anything from her. And so he boldly went up the next day to the Priory, not to beg pardon, but to justify himself, and succeeded. And, before long, he found himself fairly installed as her pupil, nominally in spiritual matters, but really in subjects of which she little dreamed.
Every day he came to read and talk with her, and whatever objections Mrs. Lavington expressed were silenced by Argemone. She would have it so, and her mother neither dared nor knew how to control her. The daughter had utterly out-read and out-thought her less educated parent, who was clinging in honest bigotry to the old forms, while Argemone was wandering forth over the chaos of the strange new age,—a poor homeless Noah’s dove, seeking rest for the sole of her foot and finding none. And now all motherly influence and sympathy had vanished, and Mrs. Lavington, in fear and wonder, let her daughter go her own way. She could not have done better, perhaps; for Providence had found for Argemone a better guide than her mother could have done, and her new pupil was rapidly becoming her teacher. She was matched, for the first time, with a man who was her own equal in intellect and knowledge; and she felt how real was that sexual difference which she had been accustomed to consider as an insolent calumny against woman. Proudly and indignantly she struggled against the conviction, but in vain. Again and again she argued with him, and was vanquished,—or, at least, what is far better, made to see how many different sides there are to every question. All appeals to authority he answered with a contemptuous smile. ‘The best authorities?’ he used to say. ‘On what question do not the best authorities flatly contradict each other? And why? Because every man believes just what it suits him to believe. Don’t fancy that men reason themselves into convictions; the prejudices and feelings of their hearts give them some idea or theory, and then they find facts at their leisure to prove their theory true. Every man sees facts through narrow spectacles, red, or green, or blue, as his nation or his temperament colours them: and he is quite right, only he must allow us the liberty of having our spectacles too. Authority is only good for proving facts. We must draw our own conclusions.’ And Argemone began to suspect that he was right,—at least to see that her opinions were mere hearsays, picked up at her own will and fancy; while his were living, daily-growing ideas. Her mind was beside his as the vase of cut flowers by the side of the rugged tree, whose roots are feeding deep in the mother earth. In him she first learnt how one great truth received into the depths of the soul germinates there, and bears fruit a thousandfold; explaining, and connecting, and glorifying innumerable things, apparently the most unlike and insignificant; and daily she became a more reverent listener, and gave herself up, half against her will and conscience, to the guidance of a man whom she knew to be her inferior in morals and in orthodoxy. She had worshipped intellect, and now it had become her tyrant; and she was ready to give up every belief which she once had prized, to flutter like a moth round its fascinating brilliance.
Who can blame her, poor girl? For Lancelot’s humility was even more irresistible than his eloquence. He assumed no superiority. He demanded her assent to truths, not because they were his opinions, but simply for the truth’s sake; and on all points which touched the heart he looked up to her as infallible and inspired. In questions of morality, of taste, of feeling, he listened not as a lover to his mistress, but rather as a baby to its mother; and thus, half unconsciously to himself, he taught her where her true kingdom lay,—that the heart, and not the brain, enshrines the priceless pearl of womanhood, the oracular jewel, the ‘Urim and Thummim,’ before which gross man can only inquire and adore.
And, in the meantime, a change was passing upon Lancelot. His morbid vanity—that brawl-begotten child of struggling self-conceit and self-disgust—was vanishing away; and as Mr. Tennyson says in one of those priceless idyls of his, before which the shade of Theocritus must hide his diminished head,—
‘He was altered, and began
To move about the house with joy,
And with the certain step of man.’
He had, at last, found one person who could appreciate him. And in deliberate confidence he set to work to conquer her, and make her his own. It was a traitorous return, but a very natural one. And she, sweet creature! walked straight into the pleasant snare, utterly blind, because she fancied that she saw clearly. In the pride of her mysticism, she had fancied herself above so commonplace a passion as love. It was a curious feature of lower humanity, which she might investigate and analyse harmlessly as a cold scientific spectator; and, in her mingled pride and purity, she used to indulge Lancelot in metaphysical disquisitions about love and beauty, like that first one in their walk home from Minchampstead, from which a less celestially innocent soul would have shrunk. She thought, forsooth, as the old proverb says, that she could deal in honey, without putting her hand to her mouth. But Lancelot knew better, and marked her for his own. And daily his self-confidence and sense of rightful power developed, and with them, paradoxical as it may seem, the bitterest self-abasement. The contact of her stainless innocence, the growing certainty that the destiny of that innocence was irrevocably bound up with his own, made him shrink from her whenever he remembered his own guilty career. To remember that there were passages in it which she must never know—that she would cast him from her with abhorrence if she once really understood their vileness? To think that, amid all the closest bonds of love, there must for ever be an awful, silent gulf in the past, of which they must never speak!—That she would bring to him what he could never, never bring to her!—The thought was unbearable. And as hideous recollections used to rise before him, devilish caricatures of his former self, mopping and mowing at him in his dreams, he would start from his lonely bed, and pace the room for hours, or saddle his horse, and ride all night long aimlessly through the awful woods, vainly trying to escape himself. How gladly, at those moments, he would have welcomed centuries of a material hell, to escape from the more awful spiritual hell within him,—to buy back that pearl of innocence which he had cast recklessly to be trampled under the feet of his own swinish passions! But, no; that which was done could never be undone,—never, to all eternity. And more than once, as he wandered restlessly from one room to another, the barrels of his pistols seemed to glitter with a cold, devilish smile, and call to him,—
‘Come to us! and with one touch of your finger, send that bursting spirit which throbs against your brow to flit forth free, and nevermore to defile her purity by your presence!’
But no, again: a voice within seemed to command him to go on, and claim her, and win her, spite of his own vileness. And in after years, slowly, and in fear and trembling, he knew it for the voice of God, who had been leading him to become worthy of her through that bitter shame of his own unworthiness.
As One higher than them would have it, she took a fancy to read Homer in the original, and Lancelot could do no less than offer his services as translator. She would prepare for him portions of the Odyssey, and every day that he came up to the Priory he used to comment on it to her; and so for many a week, in the dark wainscoted library, and in the clipt yew-alleys of the old gardens, and under the brown autumn trees, they quarried together in that unexhausted mine, among the records of the rich Titan-youth of man. And step by step Lancelot opened to her the everlasting significance of the poem; the unconscious purity which lingers in it, like the last rays of the Paradise dawn; its sense of the dignity of man as man; the religious reverence with which it speaks of all human ties, human strength and beauty—ay, even of merely animal human appetites, as God-given and Godlike symbols. She could not but listen and admire, when he introduced her to the sheer paganism of Schiller’s Gods of Greece; for on this subject he was more eloquent than on any. He had gradually, in fact, as we have seen, dropped all faith in anything but Nature; the slightest fact about a bone or a weed was more important to him than all the books of divinity which Argemone lent him—to be laid by unread.
‘What do you believe in?’ she asked him one day, sadly.
‘In this !’ he said, stamping his foot on the ground. ‘In the earth I stand on, and the things I see walking and growing on it. There may be something beside it—what you call a spiritual world. But if He who made me intended me to think of spirit first, He would have let me see it first. But as He has given me material senses, and put me in a material world, I take it as a fair hint that I am meant to use those senses first, whatever may come after. I may be intended to understand the unseen world, but if so, it must be, as I suspect, by understanding the visible one: and there are enough wonders there to occupy me for some time to come.’
‘But the Bible?’ (Argemone had given up long ago wasting words about the ‘Church.’)
‘My only Bible as yet is Bacon. I know that he is right, whoever is wrong. If that Hebrew Bible is to be believed by me, it must agree with what I know already from science.’
What was to be done with so intractable a heretic? Call him an infidel and a Materialist, of course, and cast him off with horror. But Argemone was beginning to find out that, when people are really in earnest, it may be better sometimes to leave God’s methods of educating them alone, instead of calling the poor honest seekers hard names, which the speakers themselves don’t understand.
But words would fail sometimes, and in default of them Lancelot had recourse to drawings, and manifested in them a talent for thinking in visible forms which put the climax to all Argemone’s wonder. A single profile, even a mere mathematical figure, would, in his hands, become the illustration of a spiritual truth. And, in time, every fresh lesson on the Odyssey was accompanied by its illustration,—some bold and simple outline drawing. In Argemone’s eyes, the sketches were immaculate and inspired; for their chief, almost their only fault, was just those mere anatomical slips which a woman would hardly perceive, provided the forms were generally graceful and bold.
One day his fancy attempted a bolder flight. He brought a large pen-and-ink drawing, and laying it silently on the table before her, fixed his eyes intensely on her face. The sketch was labelled, the ‘Triumph of Woman.’ In the foreground, to the right and left, were scattered groups of men, in the dresses and insignia of every period and occupation. The distance showed, in a few bold outlines, a dreary desert, broken by alpine ridges, and furrowed here and there by a wandering watercourse. Long shadows pointed to the half-risen sun, whose disc was climbing above the waste horizon. And in front of the sun, down the path of the morning beams, came Woman, clothed only in the armour of her own loveliness. Her bearing was stately, and yet modest; in her face pensive tenderness seemed wedded with earnest joy. In her right hand lay a cross, the emblem of self-sacrifice. Her path across the desert was marked by the flowers which sprang up beneath her steps; the wild gazelle stept forward trustingly to lick her hand; a single wandering butterfly fluttered round her head. As the group, one by one, caught sight of her, a human tenderness and intelligence seemed to light up every face. The scholar dropt his book, the miser his gold, the savage his weapons; even in the visage of the half-slumbering sot some nobler recollection seemed wistfully to struggle into life. The artist caught up his pencil, the poet his lyre, with eyes that beamed forth sudden inspiration. The sage, whose broad brow rose above the group like some torrent furrowed Alp, scathed with all the temptations and all the sorrows of his race, watched with a thoughtful smile that preacher more mighty than himself. A youth, decked out in the most fantastic fopperies of the middle age, stood with clasped hands and brimming eyes, as remorse and pleasure struggled in his face; and as he looked, the fierce sensual features seemed to melt, and his flesh came again to him like the flesh of a little child. The slave forgot his fetters; little children clapped their hands; and the toil-worn, stunted, savage woman sprung forward to kneel at her feet, and see herself transfigured in that new and divine ideal of her sex.
Descriptions of drawings are clumsy things at best; the reader must fill up the sketch for himself by the eye of faith.
Entranced in wonder and pleasure, Argemone let her eyes wander over the drawing. And her feelings for Lancelot amounted almost to worship, as she apprehended the harmonious unity of the manifold conception,—the rugged boldness of the groups in front, the soft grandeur of the figure which was the lodestar of all their emotions—the virginal purity of the whole. And when she fancied that she traced in those bland aquiline lineaments, and in the crisp ringlets which floated like a cloud down to the knees of the figure, some traces of her own likeness, a dream of a new destiny flitted before her,—she blushed to her very neck; and as she bent her face over the drawing and gazed, her whole soul seemed to rise into her eyes, and a single tear dropped upon the paper. She laid her hand over it, and then turned hastily away.
‘You do not like it! I have been too bold,’—said Lancelot, fearfully.
‘Oh, no! no! It is so beautiful—so full of deep wisdom! But—but—You may leave it.’
Lancelot slipped silently out of the room, he hardly knew why; and when he was gone, Argemone caught up the drawing, pressed it to her bosom, covered it with kisses, and hid it, as too precious for any eyes but her own, in the farthest corner of her secrétaire.
And yet she fancied that she was not in love!
The vicar saw the growth of this intimacy with a fast-lengthening face; for it was very evident that Argemone could not serve two masters so utterly contradictory as himself and Lancelot, and that either the lover or the father-confessor must speedily resign office. The vicar had had great disadvantages, by the bye, in fulfilling the latter function; for his visits at the Priory had been all but forbidden; and Argemone’s ‘spiritual state’ had been directed by means of a secret correspondence,—a method which some clergymen, and some young ladies too, have discovered, in the last few years, to be quite consistent with moral delicacy and filial obedience. John Bull, like a stupid fellow as he is, has still his doubts upon the point; but he should remember that though St. Paul tells women when they want advice to ask their husbands at home, yet if the poor woman has no husband, or, as often happens, her husband’s advice is unpleasant, to whom is she to go but to the next best substitute, her spiritual cicisbeo, or favourite clergyman? In sad earnest, neither husband nor parent deserves pity in the immense majority of such cases. Woman will have guidance. It is her delight and glory to be led; and if her husband or her parents will not meet the cravings of her intellect, she must go elsewhere to find a teacher, and run into the wildest extravagances of private judgment, in the very hope of getting rid of it, just as poor Argemone had been led to do.
And, indeed, she had, of late, wandered into very strange paths: would to God they were as uncommon as strange! Both she and the vicar had a great wish that she should lead a ‘devoted life;’ but then they both disdained to use common means for their object. The good old English plan of district visiting, by which ladies can have mercy on the bodies and souls of those below them, without casting off the holy discipline which a home, even the most ungenial, alone supplies, savoured too much of mere ‘Protestantism.’ It might be God’s plan for christianising England just now, but that was no reason, alas! for its being their plan: they wanted something more ‘Catholic,’ more in accordance with Church principles (for, indeed, is it not the business of the Church to correct the errors of Providence!); and what they sought they found at once in a certain favourite establishment of the vicar’s, a Church-of-England béguinage , or quasi-Protestant nunnery, which he fostered in a neighbouring city, and went thither on all high tides to confess the young ladies, who were in all things nuns, but bound by no vows, except, of course, such as they might choose to make for themselves in private.
Here they laboured among the lowest haunts of misery and sin, piously and self-denyingly enough, sweet souls! in hope of ‘the peculiar crown,’ and a higher place in heaven than the relations whom they had left behind them ‘in the world,’ and unshackled by the interference of parents, and other such merely fleshly relationships, which, as they cannot have been instituted by God merely to be trampled under foot on the path to holiness, and cannot well have instituted themselves (unless, after all, the Materialists are right, and this world does grind of itself, except when its Maker happens to interfere once every thousand years), must needs have been instituted by the devil. And so more than one girl in that nunnery, and out of it, too, believed in her inmost heart, though her ‘Catholic principles,’ by a happy inconsistency, forbade her to say so.
In a moment of excitement, fascinated by the romance of the notion, Argemone had proposed to her mother to allow her to enter this béguinage , and called in the vicar as advocate; which produced a correspondence between him and Mrs. Lavington, stormy on her side, provokingly calm on his: and when the poor lady, tired of raging, had descended to an affecting appeal to his human sympathies, entreating him to spare a mother’s feelings, he had answered with the same impassive fanaticism, that ‘he was surprised at her putting a mother’s selfish feelings in competition with the sanctity of her child,’ and that ‘had his own daughter shown such a desire for a higher vocation, he should have esteemed it the very highest honour;’ to which Mrs. Lavington answered, naively enough, that ‘it depended very much on what his daughter was like.’—So he was all but forbidden the house. Nevertheless he contrived, by means of this same secret correspondence, to keep alive in Argemone’s mind the longing to turn nun, and fancied honestly that he was doing God service, while he was pampering the poor girl’s lust for singularity and self-glorification.
But, lately, Argemone’s letters had become less frequent and less confiding; and the vicar, who well knew the reason, had resolved to bring the matter to a crisis.
So he wrote earnestly and peremptorily to his pupil, urging her, with all his subtle and refined eloquence, to make a final appeal to her mother, and if that failed, to act ‘as her conscience should direct her;’ and enclosed an answer from the superior of the convent, to a letter which Argemone had in a mad moment asked him to write. The superior’s letter spoke of Argemone’s joining her as a settled matter, and of her room as ready for her, while it lauded to the skies the peaceful activity and usefulness of the establishment. This letter troubled Argemone exceedingly. She had never before been compelled to face her own feelings, either about the nunnery or about Lancelot. She had taken up the fancy of becoming a Sister of Charity, not as Honoria might have done, from genuine love of the poor, but from ‘a sense of duty.’ Almsgiving and visiting the sick were one of the methods of earning heaven prescribed by her new creed. She was ashamed of her own laziness by the side of Honoria’s simple benevolence; and, sad though it may be to have to say it, she longed to outdo her by some signal act of self-sacrifice. She had looked to this nunnery, too, as an escape, once and for all, from her own luxury, just as people who have not strength to be temperate take refuge in teetotalism; and the thought of menial services towards the poor, however distasteful to her, came in quite prettily to fill up the little ideal of a life of romantic asceticisms and mystic contemplation, which gave the true charm in her eyes to her wild project. But now—just as a field had opened to her cravings after poetry and art, wider and richer than she had ever imagined—just as those simple childlike views of man and nature, which she had learnt to despise, were assuming an awful holiness in her eyes—just as she had found a human soul to whose regeneration she could devote all her energies,—to be required to give all up, perhaps for ever (and she felt that if at all, it ought to be for ever);—it was too much for her little heart to bear; and she cried bitterly; and tried to pray, and could not; and longed for a strong and tender bosom on which to lay her head, and pour out all her doubts and struggles; and there was none. Her mother did not understand—hardly loved her. Honoria loved her; but understood her even less than her mother. Pride—the pride of intellect, the pride of self-will—had long since sealed her lips to her own family. . . .
And then, out of the darkness of her heart, Lancelot’s image rose before her stronger than all, tenderer than all; and as she remembered his magical faculty of anticipating all her thoughts, embodying for her all her vague surmises, he seemed to beckon her towards him.—She shuddered and turned away. And now she first became conscious how he had haunted her thoughts in the last few months, not as a soul to be saved, but as a living man—his face, his figure, his voice, his every gesture and expression, rising clear before her, in spite of herself, by day and night.
And then she thought of his last drawing, and the looks which had accompanied it,—unmistakable looks of passionate and adoring love. There was no denying it—she had always known that he loved her, but she had never dared to confess it to herself. But now the earthquake was come, and all the secrets of her heart burst upward to the light, and she faced the thought in shame and terror. ‘How unjust I have been to him! how cruel! thus to entice him on in hopeless love!’
She lifted up her eyes, and saw in the mirror opposite the reflection of her own exquisite beauty.
‘I could have known what I was doing! I knew all the while! And yet it is so delicious to feel that any one loves me! Is it selfishness? It is selfishness, to pamper my vanity on an affection which I do not, will not return. I will not be thus in debt to him, even for his love. I do not love him—I do not; and even if I did, to give myself up to a man of whom I know so little, who is not even a Christian, much less a Churchman! Ay! and to give up my will to any man! to become the subject, the slave, of another human being! I, who have worshipped the belief in woman’s independence, the hope of woman’s enfranchisement, who have felt how glorious it is to live like the angels, single and self-sustained! What if I cut the Gordian knot, and here make, once for all, a vow of perpetual celibacy?’
She flung herself on her knees—she could not collect her thoughts.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I am not prepared for this. It is too solemn to be undertaken in this miserable whirlwind of passion. I will fast, and meditate, and go up formally to the little chapel, and there devote myself to God; and, in the meantime, to write at once to the superior of the Béguines; to go to my mother, and tell her once for all—What? Must I lose him?—must I give him up? Not his love—I cannot give up that—would that I could! but no! he will love me for ever. I know it as well as if an angel told me. But to give up him! Never to see him! never to hear his voice! never to walk with him among the beech woods any more! Oh, Argemone! Argemone! miserable girl! and is it come to this?’ And she threw herself on the sofa, and hid her face in her hands.
Yes, Argemone, it is come to this; and the best thing you can do, is just what you are doing—to lie there and cry yourself to sleep, while the angels are laughing kindly (if a solemn public, who settles everything for them, will permit them to laugh) at the rickety old windmill of sham-Popery which you have taken for a real giant.
At that same day and hour, as it chanced, Lancelot, little dreaming what the said windmill was grinding for him, was scribbling a hasty and angry answer to a letter of Luke’s, which, perhaps, came that very morning in order to put him into a proper temper for the demolishing of windmills. It ran thus,—
‘Ay, my good Cousin,—So I expected—
‘Suave mari magno turbantibus æquora ventis
E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem . . .
Pleasant and easy for you Protestants (for I will call you what you are, in spite of your own denials, a truly consistent and logical Protestant—and therefore a Materialist)—easy for you, I say, to sit on the shore, in cold, cruel self-satisfaction, and tell the poor wretch buffeting with the waves what he ought to do while he is choking and drowning. . . . Thank Heaven, the storm has stranded me upon the everlasting Rock of Peter;—but it has been a sore trouble to reach it. Protestants, who look at creeds as things to be changed like coats, whenever they seem not to fit them, little know what we Catholic-hearted ones suffer. . . . If they did, they would be more merciful and more chary in the requirements of us, just as we are in the very throe of a new-born existence. The excellent man, to whose care I have committed myself, has a wise and a tender heart . . . he saw no harm in my concealing from my father the spiritual reason of my giving up my curacy (for I have given it up), and only giving the outward, but equally true reason, that I found it on the whole an ineligible and distressing post. . . . I know you will apply to such an act that disgusting monosyllable of which Protestants are so fond. He felt with me and for me—for my horror of giving pain to my father, and for my wearied and excited state of mind; and strangely enough—to show how differently, according to the difference of the organs, the same object may appear to two people—he quoted in my favour that very verse which you wrest against me. He wished me to show my father that I had only changed my heaven, and not my character, by becoming an Ultramontane-Catholic . . . that, as far as his esteem and affection were founded on anything in me, the ground of it did not vanish with my conversion. If I had told him at once of my altered opinions, he would have henceforth viewed every word and action with a perjudiced eye. . . . Protestants are so bigoted . . . but if, after seeing me for a month or two the same Luke that he had ever known me, he were gradually informed that I had all the while held that creed which he had considered incompatible with such a life as I hope mine would be—you must see the effect which it ought to have. . . . I don’t doubt that you will complain of all this. . . . All I can say is, that I cannot sympathise with that superstitious reverence for mere verbal truth, which is so common among Protestants. . . . It seems to me they throw away the spirit of truth, in their idolatry of its letter. For instance,—what is the use of informing a man of a true fact but to induce a true opinion in him? But if, by clinging to the exact letter of the fact, you create a false opinion in his mind, as I should do in my father’s case, if by telling him at once of my change, I gave him an unjust horror of Catholicism,—you do not tell him the truth. . . . You may speak what is true to you,—but it becomes an error when received into his mind. . . . If his mind is a refracting and polarising medium—if the crystalline lens of his soul’s eye has been changed into tourmaline or Labrador spar—the only way to give him a true image of the fact, is to present it to him already properly altered in form, and adapted to suit the obliquity of his vision; in order that the very refractive power of his faculties may, instead of distorting it, correct it, and make it straight for him; and so a verbal wrong in fact may possess him with a right opinion. . . .
‘You see the whole question turns on your Protestant deification of the intellect. . . . If you really believed, as you all say you do, that the nature of man, and therefore his intellect among the rest, was utterly corrupt, you would not be so superstitiously careful to tell the truth . . . as you call it; because you would know that man’s heart, if not his head, would needs turn the truth into a lie by its own corruption. . . . The proper use of reasoning is to produce opinion,—and if the subject in which you wish to produce the opinion is diseased, you must adapt the medicine accordingly.’
To all which Lancelot, with several strong curses, scrawled the following answer:—
‘And this is my Cousin Luke!—Well, I shall believe henceforward that there is, after all, a thousand times greater moral gulf fixed between Popery and Tractarianism, than between Tractarianism and the extremest Protestantism. My dear fellow,—I won’t bother you, by cutting up your charming ambiguous middle terms, which make reason and reasoning identical, or your theory that the office of reasoning is to induce opinions—(the devil take opinions, right or wrong—I want facts, faith in real facts!)—or about deifying the intellect—as if all sound intellect was not in itself divine light—a revelation to man of absolute laws independent of him, as the very heathens hold. But this I will do—thank you most sincerely for the compliment you pay us Cismontane heretics. We do retain some dim belief in a God—even I am beginning to believe in believing in Him. And therefore, as I begin to suppose, it is, that we reverence facts, as the work of God, His acted words and will, which we dare not falsify; which we believe will tell their own story better than we can tell it for them. If our eyes are dimmed, we think it safer to clear them, which do belong to us, than to bedevil, by the light of those very already dimmed eyes, the objects round, which do not belong to us. Whether we are consistent or not about the corruptness of man, we are about the incorruptness of God; and therefore about that of the facts by which God teaches men: and believe, and will continue to believe, that the blackest of all sins, the deepest of all Atheisms, that which, above all things, proves no faith in God’s government of the universe, no sense of His presence, no understanding of His character, is—a lie.
‘One word more—Unless you tell your father within twenty-four hours after receiving this letter, I will. And I, being a Protestant (if cursing Popery means Protestantism), mean what I say.’
As Lancelot walked up to the Priory that morning, the Reverend Panurgus O’Blareaway dashed out of a cottage by the roadside, and seized him unceremoniously by the shoulders. He was a specimen of humanity which Lancelot could not help at once liking and despising; a quaint mixture of conceit and earnestness, uniting the shrewdness of a stockjobber with the frolic of a schoolboy broke loose. He was rector of a place in the west of Ireland, containing some ten Protestants and some thousand Papists. Being, unfortunately for himself, a red-hot Orangeman, he had thought fit to quarrel with the priest, in consequence of which he found himself deprived both of tithes and congregation; and after receiving three or four Rockite letters, and a charge of slugs through his hat (of which he always talked as if being shot at was the most pleasant and amusing feature of Irish life), he repaired to England, and there, after trying to set up as popular preacher in London, declaiming at Exeter Hall, and writing for all the third-rate magazines, found himself incumbent of Lower Whitford. He worked there, as he said himself, ‘like a horse;’ spent his mornings in the schools, his afternoons in the cottages; preached four or five extempore sermons every week to overflowing congregations; took the lead, by virtue of the ‘gift of the gab,’ at all ‘religious’ meetings for ten miles round; and really did a great deal of good in his way. He had an unblushing candour about his own worldly ambition, with a tremendous brogue; and prided himself on exaggerating deliberately both of these excellences.
‘The top of the morning to ye, Mr. Smith. Ye haven’t such a thing as a cegar about ye? I’ve been preaching to school-children till me throat’s as dry as the slave of a lime-burner’s coat.’
‘I am very sorry; but, really, I have left my case at home.’
‘Oh! ah! faix and I forgot. Ye mustn’t be smokin’ the nasty things going up to the castle. Och, Mr. Smith, but you’re the lucky man!’
‘I am much obliged to you for the compliment,’ said Lancelot, gruffly; ‘but really I don’t see how I deserve it.’
‘Desarve it! Sure luck’s all, and that’s your luck, and not your deserts at all. To have the handsomest girl in the county dying for love of ye’—(Panurgus had a happy knack of blurting out truths—when they were pleasant ones). ‘And she just the beautifulest creature that ever spilte shoe-leather, barring Lady Philandria Mountflunkey, of Castle Mountflunkey, Quane’s County, that shall be nameless.’
‘Upon my word, O’Blareaway, you seem to be better acquainted with my matters than I am. Don’t you think, on the whole, it might be better to mind your own business?’
‘Me own business! Poker o’ Moses! and ain’t it me own business? Haven’t ye spilte my tenderest hopes? And good luck to ye in that same, for ye’re as pretty a rider as ever kicked coping-stones out of a wall; and poor Paddy loves a sportsman by nature. Och! but ye’ve got a hand of trumps this time. Didn’t I mate the vicar the other day, and spake my mind to him?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Lancelot, with a strong expletive.
‘Faix, I told him he might as well Faugh a ballagh —make a rid road, and get out of that, with his bowings and his crossings, and his Popery made asy for small minds, for there was a gun a-field that would wipe his eye,—maning yourself, ye Prathestant.’
‘All I can say is, that you had really better mind your own business, and I’ll mind my own.’
‘Och,’ said the good-natured Irishman, ‘and it’s you must mind my business, and I’ll mind yours; and that’s all fair and aqual. Ye’ve cut me out intirely at the Priory, ye Tory, and so ye’re bound to give me a lift somehow. Couldn’t ye look me out a fine fat widow, with an illigant little fortune? For what’s England made for except to find poor Paddy a wife and money? Ah, ye may laugh, but I’d buy me a chapel at the West-end: me talents are thrown away here intirely, wasting me swateness on the desert air, as Tom Moore says’ (Panurgus used to attribute all quotations whatsoever to Irish geniuses); ‘and I flatter meself I’m the boy to shute the Gospel to the aristocracy.’
Lancelot burst into a roar of laughter, and escaped over the next gate: but the Irishman’s coarse hints stuck by him as they were intended to do. ‘Dying for the love of me!’ He knew it was an impudent exaggeration, but, somehow, it gave him confidence; ‘there is no smoke,’ he thought, ‘without fire.’ And his heart beat high with new hopes, for which he laughed at himself all the while. It was just the cordial which he needed. That conversation determined the history of his life.
He met Argemone that morning in the library, as usual; but he soon found that she was not thinking of Homer. She was moody and abstracted; and he could not help at last saying,—
‘I am afraid I and my classics are de trop this morning, Miss Lavington.’
‘Oh, no, no. Never that.’ She turned away her head. He fancied that it was to hide a tear.
Suddenly she rose, and turned to him with a clear, calm, gentle gaze.
‘Listen to me, Mr. Smith. We must part to-day, and for ever. This intimacy has gone on—too long, I am afraid, for your happiness. And now, like all pleasant things in this miserable world, it must cease. I cannot tell you why; but you will trust me. I thank you for it—I thank God for it. I have learnt things from it which I shall never forget. I have learnt, at least from it, to esteem and honour you. You have vast powers. Nothing, nothing, I believe, is too high for you to attempt and succeed. But we must part; and now, God be with you. Oh, that you would but believe that these glorious talents are His loan! That you would but be a true and loyal knight to him who said—“Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls!”—Ay,’ she went on, more and more passionately, for she felt that not she, but One mightier than herself was speaking through her, ‘then you might be great indeed. Then I might watch your name from afar, rising higher and higher daily in the ranks of God’s own heroes. I see it—and you have taught me to see it—that you are meant for a faith nobler and deeper than all doctrines and systems can give. You must become the philosopher, who can discover new truths—the artist who can embody them in new forms, while poor I—And that is another reason why we should part.—Hush! hear me out. I must not be a clog, to drag you down in your course. Take this, and farewell; and remember that you once had a friend called Argemone.’
She put into his hands a little Bible. He took it, and laid it down on the table.
For a minute he stood silent and rooted to the spot. Disappointment, shame, rage, hatred, all boiled up madly within him. The bitterest insults rose to his lips—‘Flirt, cold-hearted pedant, fanatic!’ but they sank again unspoken, as he looked into the celestial azure of those eyes, calm and pure as a soft evening sky. A mighty struggle between good and evil shook his heart to the roots; and, for the first time in his life, his soul breathed out one real prayer, that God would help him now or never to play the man. And in a moment the darkness passed; a new spirit called out all the latent strength within him; and gently and proudly he answered her,—
‘Yes, I will go. I have had mad dreams, conceited and insolent, and have met with my deserts. Brute and fool as I am, I have aspired even to you! And I have gained, in the sunshine of your condescension, strength and purity.—Is not that enough for me? And now I will show you that I love you—by obeying you. You tell me to depart—I go for ever.’
He turned away. Why did she almost spring after him?
‘Lancelot! one word! Do not misunderstand me, as I know you will. You will think me so cold, heartless, fickle.—Oh, you do not know—you never can know—how much I, too, have felt!’
He stopped, spell-bound. In an instant his conversation with the Irishman flashed up before him with new force and meaning. A thousand petty incidents, which he had driven contemptuously from his mind, returned as triumphant evidences; and, with an impetuous determination, he cried out,—
‘I see—I see it all, Argemone! We love each other! You are mine, never to be parted!’
What was her womanhood, that it could stand against the energy of his manly will! The almost coarse simplicity of his words silenced her with a delicious violence. She could only bury her face in her hands and sob out,—
‘Oh, Lancelot, Lancelot, whither are you forcing me?’
‘I am forcing you no whither. God, the Father of spirits, is leading you! You, who believe in Him, how dare you fight against Him?’
‘Lancelot, I cannot—I cannot listen to you—read that!’ And she handed him the vicar’s letter. He read it, tossed it on the carpet, and crushed it with his heel.
‘Wretched pedant! Can your intellect be deluded by such barefaced sophistries? “God’s will,” forsooth! And if your mother’s opposition is not a sign that God’s will—if it mean anything except your own will, or that—that man’s—is against this mad project, and not for it, what sign would you have? So “celibacy is the highest state!” And why? Because “it is the safest and the easiest road to heaven?” A pretty reason, vicar! I should have thought that that was a sign of a lower state and not a higher. Noble spirits show their nobleness by daring the most difficult paths. And even if marriage was but one weed-field of temptations, as these miserable pedants say, who have either never tried it, or misused it to their own shame, it would be a greater deed to conquer its temptations than to flee from them in cowardly longings after ease and safety!’
She did not answer him, but kept her face buried in her hands.
‘Again, I say, Argemone, will you fight against Fate—Providence—God—call it what you will? Who made us meet at the chapel? Who made me, by my accident, a guest in your father’s house! Who put it into your heart to care for my poor soul? Who gave us this strange attraction towards each other, in spite of our unlikeness? Wonderful that the very chain of circumstances which you seem to fancy the offspring of chance or the devil, should have first taught me to believe that there is a God who guides us! Argemone! speak, tell me, if you will, to go for ever; but tell me first the truth—You love me!’
A strong shudder ran through her frame—the ice of artificial years cracked, and the clear stream of her woman’s nature welled up to the light, as pure as when she first lay on her mother’s bosom: she lifted up her eyes, and with one long look of passionate tenderness she faltered out,—
‘I love you!’
He did not stir, but watched her with clasped hands, like one who in dreams finds himself in some fairy palace, and fears that a movement may break the spell.
‘Now, go,’ she said; ‘go, and let me collect my thoughts. All this has been too much for me. Do not look sad—you may come again to-morrow.’
She smiled and held out her hand. He caught it, covered it with kisses, and pressed it to his heart. She half drew it back, frightened. The sensation was new to her. Again the delicious feeling of being utterly in his power came over her, and she left her hand upon his heart, and blushed as she felt its passionate throbbings.
He turned to go—not as before. She followed with greedy eyes her new-found treasure; and as the door closed behind him, she felt as if Lancelot was the whole world, and there was nothing beside him, and wondered how a moment had made him all in all to her; and then she sank upon her knees, and folded her hands upon her bosom, and her prayers for him were like the prayers of a little child.
But what had become of the ‘bit of writing’ which Harry Verney, by the instigation of his evil genius, had put into the squire’s fly-book? Tregarva had waited in terrible suspense for many weeks, expecting the explosion which he knew must follow its discovery. He had confided to Lancelot the contents of the paper, and Lancelot had tried many stratagems to get possession of it, but all in vain. Tregarva took this as calmly as he did everything else. Only once, on the morning of the éclaircissement between Lancelot and Argemone, he talked to Lancelot of leaving his place, and going out to seek his fortune; but some spell, which he did not explain, seemed to chain him to the Priory. Lancelot thought it was the want of money, and offered to lend him ten pounds whenever he liked; but Tregarva shook his head.
‘You have treated me, sir, as no one else has done—like a man and a friend; but I am not going to make a market of your generosity. I will owe no man anything, save to love one another.’
‘But how do you intend to live?’ asked Lancelot, as they stood together in the cloisters.
‘There’s enough of me, sir, to make a good navigator if all trades fail.’
‘Nonsense! you must not throw yourself away so.’
‘Oh, sir, there’s good to be done, believe me, among those poor fellows. They wander up and down the land like hogs and heathens, and no one tells them that they have a soul to be saved. Not one parson in a thousand gives a thought to them. They can manage old folks and little children, sir, but, somehow, they never can get hold of the young men—just those who want them most. There’s a talk about ragged schools, now. Why don’t they try ragged churches, sir, and a ragged service?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why, sir, the parsons are ready enough to save souls, but it must be only according to rule and regulation. Before the Gospel can be preached there must be three thousand pounds got together for a church, and a thousand for an endowment, not to mention the thousand pounds that the clergyman’s education costs: I don’t think of his own keep, sir; that’s little enough, often; and those that work hardest get least pay, it seems to me. But after all that expense, when they’ve built the church, it’s the tradesmen, and the gentry, and the old folk that fill it, and the working men never come near it from one year’s end to another.’
‘What’s the cause, do you think?’ asked Lancelot, who had himself remarked the same thing more than once.
‘Half of the reason, sir, I do believe, is that same Prayer-book. Not that the Prayer-book ain’t a fine book enough, and a true one; but, don’t you see, sir, to understand the virtue of it, the poor fellows ought to be already just what you want to make them.’
‘You mean that they ought to be thorough Christians already, to appreciate the spirituality of the liturgy.’
‘You’ve hit it, sir. And see what comes of the present plan; how a navvy drops into a church by accident, and there he has to sit like a fish out of water, through that hour’s service, staring or sleeping, before he can hear a word that he understands; and, sir, when the sermon does come at last, it’s not many of them can make much out of those fine book-words and long sentences. Why don’t they have a short simple service, now and then, that might catch the ears of the roughs and the blowens, without tiring out the poor thoughtless creatures’ patience, as they do now?’
‘Because,’ said Lancelot,—‘because—I really don’t know why.—But I think there is a simpler plan than even a ragged service.’
‘What, then, sir?’
‘Field-preaching. If the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, let Mahomet go to the mountain.’
‘Right, sir; right you are. “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in.” And why are they to speak to them only one by one? Why not by the dozen and the hundred? We Wesleyans know, sir,—for the matter of that, every soldier knows,—what virtue there is in getting a lot of men together; how good and evil spread like wildfire through a crowd; and one man, if you can stir him up, will become leaven to leaven the whole lump. Oh why, sir, are they so afraid of field-preaching? Was not their Master and mine the prince of all field-preachers? Think, if the Apostles had waited to collect subscriptions for a church before they spoke to the poor heathens, where should we have been now?’
Lancelot could not but agree. But at that moment a footman came up, and, with a face half laughing, half terrified, said,—
‘Tregarva, master wants you in the study. And please, sir, I think you had better go in too; master knows you’re here, and you might speak a word for good, for he’s raging like a mad bull.’
‘I knew it would come at last,’ said Tregarva, quietly, as he followed Lancelot into the house.
It had come at last. The squire was sitting in his study, purple with rage, while his daughters were trying vainly to pacify him. All the men-servants, grooms, and helpers, were drawn up in line along the wall, and greeted Tregarva, whom they all heartily liked, with sly and sorrowful looks of warning,
‘Here, you sir; you—, look at this! Is this the way you repay me? I, who have kept you out of the workhouse, treated you like my own child? And then to go and write filthy, rascally, Radical ballads on me and mine! This comes of your Methodism, you canting, sneaking hypocrite!—you viper—you adder—you snake—you—!’ And the squire, whose vocabulary was not large, at a loss for another synonym, rounded off his oration by a torrent of oaths; at which Argemone, taking Honoria’s hand, walked proudly out of the room, with one glance at Lancelot of mingled shame and love. ‘This is your handwriting, you villain! you know it’ (and the squire tossed the fatal paper across the table); ‘though I suppose you’ll lie about it. How can you depend on fellows who speak evil of their betters? But all the servants are ready to swear it’s your handwriting.’
‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ interposed the old butler, ‘we didn’t quite say that; but we’ll all swear it isn’t ours.’
‘The paper is mine,’ said Tregarva.
‘Confound your coolness! He’s no more ashamed of it than—Read it out, Smith, read it out every word; and let them all hear how this pauper, this ballad-singing vagabond, whom I have bred up to insult me, dares to abuse his own master.’
‘I have not abused you, sir,’ answered Tregarva. ‘I will be heard, sir!’ he went on in a voice which made the old man start from his seat and clench his fist but he sat down again. ‘Not a word in it is meant for you. You have been a kind and a good master to me. Ask where you will if I was ever heard to say a word against you. I would have cut off my right hand sooner than write about you or yours. But what I had to say about others lies there, and I am not ashamed of it.’
‘Not against me? Read it out, Smith, and see if every word of it don’t hit at me, and at my daughters, too, by—, worst of all! Read it out, I say!’
Lancelot hesitated; but the squire, who was utterly beside himself, began to swear at him also, as masters of hounds are privileged to do; and Lancelot, to whom the whole scene was becoming every moment more and more intensely ludicrous, thought it best to take up the paper and begin:—
‘A ROUGH RHYME ON A ROUGH MATTER.
‘The merry brown hares came leaping
Over the crest of the hill,
Where the clover and corn lay sleeping
Under the moonlight still.
‘Leaping late and early,
Till under their bite and their tread
The swedes, and the wheat, and the barley,
Lay cankered, and trampled, and dead.
‘A poacher’s widow sat sighing
On the side of the white chalk bank,
Where under the gloomy fir-woods
One spot in the ley throve rank.
‘She watched a long tuft of clover,
Where rabbit or hare never ran;
For its black sour haulm covered over
The blood of a murdered man.
‘She thought of the dark plantation,
And the hares and her husband’s blood,
And the voice of her indignation
Rose up to the throne of God.
‘“I am long past wailing and whining—
I have wept too much in my life:
I’ve had twenty years of pining
As an English labourer’s wife.
‘“A labourer in Christian England,
Where they cant of a Saviour’s name,
And yet waste men’s lives like the vermin’s
For a few more brace of game.
‘“There’s blood on your new foreign shrubs, squire;
There’s blood on your pointer’s feet;
There’s blood on the game you sell, squire,
And there’s blood on the game you eat!”’
‘You villain!’ interposed the squire, ‘when did I ever sell a head of game?’
‘“You have sold the labouring man, squire,
Body and soul to shame,
To pay for your seat in the House, squire,
And to pay for the feed of your game.
“‘You made him a poacher yourself, squire,
When you’d give neither work nor meat;
And your barley-fed hares robbed the garden
At our starving children’s feet;
‘“When packed in one reeking chamber,
Man, maid, mother, and little ones lay;
While the rain pattered in on the rotting bride-bed,
And the walls let in the day;
‘“When we lay in the burning fever
On the mud of the cold clay floor,
Till you parted us all for three months, squire,
At the cursed workhouse door.
“‘We quarrelled like brutes, and who wonders?
What self-respect could we keep,
Worse housed than your hacks and your pointers,
Worse fed than your hogs and your sheep?”’
‘And yet he has the impudence to say he don’t mean me!’ grumbled the old man. Tregarva winced a good deal—as if he knew what was coming next; and then looked up relieved when he found Lancelot had omitted a stanza—which I shall not omit.
‘“Our daughters with base-born babies
Have wandered away in their shame;
If your misses had slept, squire, where they did,
Your misses might do the same.
“‘Can your lady patch hearts that are breaking
With handfuls of coals and rice,
Or by dealing out flannel and sheeting
A little below cost price?
“‘You may tire of the gaol and the workhouse,
And take to allotments and schools,
But you’ve run up a debt that will never
Be repaid us by penny-club rules.
‘“In the season of shame and sadness,
In the dark and dreary day
When scrofula, gout, and madness,
Are eating your race away;
“‘When to kennels and liveried varlets
You have cast your daughters’ bread;
And worn out with liquor and harlots,
Your heir at your feet lies dead;
“‘When your youngest, the mealy-mouthed rector,
Lets your soul rot asleep to the grave,
You will find in your God the protector
Of the freeman you fancied your slave.”
‘She looked at the tuft of clover,
And wept till her heart grew light;
And at last, when her passion was over,
Went wandering into the night.
‘But the merry brown hares came leaping
Over the uplands still,
Where the clover and corn lay sleeping
On the side of the white chalk hill.’
‘Surely, sir,’ said Lancelot, ‘you cannot suppose that this latter part applies to you. or your family?’
‘If it don’t, it applies to half the gentlemen in the vale, and that’s just as bad. What right has the fellow to speak evil of dignities?’ continued he, quoting the only text in the Bible which he was inclined to make a ‘rule absolute.’ ‘What does such an insolent dog deserve? What don’t he deserve, I say?’
‘I think,’ quoth Lancelot, ambiguously, ‘that a man who can write such ballads is not fit to be your gamekeeper, and I think he feels so himself;’ and Lancelot stole an encouraging look at Tregarva.
‘And I say, sir,’ the keeper answered, with an effort, ‘that I leave Mr. Lavington’s service here on the spot, once and for all.’
‘And that you may do, my fine fellow!’ roared the squire. ‘Pay the rascal his wages, steward, and then duck him soundly in the weir-pool. He had better have stayed there when he fell in last.’
‘So I had, indeed, I think. But I’ll take none of your money. The day Harry Verney was buried I vowed that I’d touch no more of the wages of blood. I’m going, sir; I never harmed you, or meant a hard word of all this for you, or dreamt that you or any living soul would ever see it. But what I’ve seen myself, in spite of myself, I’ve set down here, and am not ashamed of it. And woe,’ he went on with an almost prophetic solemnity in his tone and gesture—‘woe to those who do these things! and woe to those also who, though they dare not do them themselves, yet excuse and defend them who dare, just because the world calls them gentlemen, and not tyrants and oppressors.’
He turned to go. The squire, bursting with passion, sprang up with a terrible oath, turned deadly pale, staggered, and dropped senseless on the floor.
They all rushed to lift him up. Tregarva was the first to take him in his arms and place him tenderly in his chair, where he lay back with glassy eyes, snoring heavily in a fit of apoplexy.
‘Go; for God’s sake, go,’ whispered Lancelot to the keeper, ‘and wait for me at Lower Whitford. I must see you before you stir.’
The keeper slipped away sadly. The ladies rushed in—a groom galloped off for the doctor—met him luckily in the village, and, in a few minutes, the squire was bled and put to bed, and showed hopeful signs of returning consciousness. And as Argemone and Lancelot leant together over his pillow, her hair touched her lover’s, and her fragrant breath was warm upon his cheek; and her bright eyes met his and drank light from them, like glittering planets gazing at their sun.
The obnoxious ballad produced the most opposite effects on Argemone and on Honoria. Argemone, whose reverence for the formalities and the respectabilities of society, never very great, had, of late, utterly vanished before Lancelot’s bad counsel, could think of it only as a work of art, and conceived the most romantic longing to raise Tregarva into some station where his talents might have free play. To Honoria, on the other hand, it appeared only as a very fierce, coarse, and impertinent satire, which had nearly killed her father. True, there was not a thought in it which had not at some time or other crossed her own mind; but that made her dislike all the more to see those thoughts put into plain English. That very intense tenderness and excitability which made her toil herself among the poor, and had called out both her admiration of Tregarva and her extravagant passion at his danger, made her also shrink with disgust from anything which thrust on her a painful reality, which she could not remedy. She was a staunch believer, too, in that peculiar creed which allows every one to feel for the poor, except themselves, and considers that to plead the cause of working-men is, in a gentleman, the perfection of virtue, but in a working-man himself, sheer high treason. And so beside her father’s sick-bed she thought of the keeper only as a scorpion whom she had helped to warm into life; and sighing assent to her mother, when she said, ‘That wretch, and he seemed so pious and so obliging! who would have dreamt that he was such a horrid Radical?’ she let him vanish from her mind and out of Whitford Priors, little knowing the sore weight of manly love he bore with him.
As soon as Lancelot could leave the Priory, he hastened home to find Tregarva. The keeper had packed up all his small possessions and brought them down to Lower Whitford, through which the London coach passed. He was determined to go to London and seek his fortune. He talked of turning coal-heaver, Methodist preacher, anything that came to hand, provided that he could but keep independence and a clear conscience. And all the while the man seemed to be struggling with some great purpose,—to feel that he had a work to do, though what it was, and how it was to be done, he did not see.
‘I am a tall man,’ he said, ‘like Saul the son of Kish; and I am going forth, like him, sir, to find my father’s asses. I doubt I shan’t have to look far for some of them.’
‘And perhaps,’ said Lancelot, laughing, ‘to find a kingdom.’
‘May be so, sir. I have found one already, by God’s grace, and I’m much mistaken if I don’t begin to see my way towards another.’
‘And what is that?’
‘The kingdom of God on earth, sir, as well as in heaven. Come it must, sir, and come it will some day.’
Lancelot shook his head.
Tregarva lifted up his eyes and said,—
‘Are we not taught to pray for the coming of His kingdom, sir? And do you fancy that He who gave the lesson would have set all mankind to pray for what He never meant should come to pass?’
Lancelot was silent. The words gained a new and blessed meaning in his eyes.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the time, at least, of their fulfilment is far enough off. Union-workhouses and child-murder don’t look much like it. Talking of that, Tregarva, what is to become of your promise to take me to a village wake, and show me what the poor are like?’
‘I can keep it this night, sir. There is a revel at Bone-sake, about five miles up the river. Will you go with a discharged gamekeeper?’
‘I will go with Paul Tregarva, whom I honour and esteem as one of God’s own noblemen; who has taught me what a man can be, and what I am not,’—and Lancelot grasped the keeper’s hand warmly. Tregarva brushed his hand across his eyes, and answered,—
‘“I said in my haste, All men are liars;” and God has just given me the lie back in my own teeth. Well, sir, we will go to-night. You are not ashamed of putting on a smock-frock? For if you go as a gentleman, you will hear no more of them than a hawk does of a covey of partridges.’
So the expedition was agreed on, and Lancelot and the keeper parted until the evening.
But why had the vicar been rambling on all that morning through pouring rain, on the top of the London coach? And why was he so anxious in his inquiries as to the certainty of catching the up-train? Because he had had considerable experience in that wisdom of the serpent, whose combination with the innocence of the dove, in somewhat ultramontane proportions, is recommended by certain late leaders of his school. He had made up his mind, after his conversation with the Irishman, that he must either oust Lancelot at once, or submit to be ousted by him, and he was now on his way to Lancelot’s uncle and trustee, the London banker.
He knew that the banker had some influence with his nephew, whose whole property was invested in the bank, and who had besides a deep respect for the kindly and upright practical mind of the veteran Mammonite. And the vicar knew, too, that he himself had some influence with the banker, whose son Luke had been his pupil at college. And when the young man lay sick of a dangerous illness, brought on by debauchery, into which weakness rather than vice had tempted him, the vicar had watched and prayed by his bed, nursed him as tenderly as a mother, and so won over his better heart that he became completely reclaimed, and took holy orders with the most earnest intention to play the man therein, as repentant rakes will often do, half from a mere revulsion to asceticism, half from real gratitude for their deliverance. This good deed had placed the banker in the vicar’s debt, and he loved and reverenced him in spite of his dread of ‘Popish novelties.’ And now the good priest was going to open to him just as much of his heart as should seem fit; and by saying a great deal about Lancelot’s evil doings, opinions, and companions, and nothing at all about the heiress of Whitford, persuade the banker to use all his influence in drawing Lancelot up to London, and leaving a clear stage for his plans on Argemone. He caught the up-train, he arrived safe and sound in town, but what he did there must be told in another chapter.