The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

"Lady Margaret has so active a mind that she tires of things sooner than most of us," said Antonia, smiling at the lively lady, whose hazel eyes twinkled almost as brightly as the few choice diamonds that sparkled in the folds of her Brussels neckerchief.

"I confess to being sick of feather-work and shell-work, and the women who can think of nothing else. And even the musical fanatics weary me with their everlasting babble about Handel and the Italian singers. There is not a spark of mind among the whole army of conoscenti. With a month's labour I'd teach the inhabitants of a parrot-house to jabber the same flummery."

And then Lady Peggy turned to Mr. Stobart and made him talk about his Methodists, as she called them, and listened with intelligent interest, and gave him no offence by her replies.

"Our cousin is a very pretty fellow, and the wife has not an ill figure," she said to Antonia after dinner, in a corner of the inner drawing-room, while Mrs. Stobart and Mrs. Granger sat side by side in the great saloon, looking at a portfolio of Italian prints; "but how, in the name of all that's odious, did you come by that cherry-coloured person?"

"She is my old friend, an actress at Drury Lane, but now retired from the stage and prosperously married."

"The creature has a pretty little face, but her clothes are execrable, and then the audacity of her shoulders! Such nakedness can only be suffered in a woman of the highest mode. Indecency with an ill-cut gown is unpardonable. Don't let her cross your threshold again, child."

"Dear Lady Peggy, you are too good a friend for me to disoblige you; but I will never be uncivil to one who was kind when I was poor."

"Well, well, you are a fine pig-headed creature, but if you must have such a friend, pray let your dressmaker clothe her. 'Twill cost you less than you will lose of credit by her appearance. Remember 'tis by your women friends you will be judged. 'Tis of little consequence what notorious gamblers and rakes pass in and out of your great assemblies, so long as they are men of fashion; but your women must be of the highest quality for birth, clothes, and breeding."

'Twas six o'clock, and a bevy of footmen were busied in setting out a tea and coffee table with Indian porcelain and silver urn, and the rooms began to be picturesquely sprinkled with elegant figures, like a canvas of Watteau's. It was a prettier scene than one of her ladyship's great assemblies, for the fine furniture, the priceless china and other ornaments were undisturbed, and there was enough space and atmosphere for people to admire the rooms and each other.

The Duchess of Portland and her chosen friend Mrs. Delany came sailing in, sparkling with gaiety, and tenderly embracing their matchless Orinda. Everybody of mark in those days had a nickname, and Mrs. Delany, who had a genius for finding nonsense names, had hit upon this one for Lady Kilrush; not because she was a poetess like the original Orinda, but because the epithet "matchless" seemed appropriate to so perfect a beauty and twenty thousand a year.

George Stobart stood in the curtained embrasure of a window, contemplating this elegant circle amidst which Antonia moved like a goddess, the loveliest where all had some claim to beauty, peerless among the élite of womankind. Her grace, her ease, her dignity would have become a throne, but every charm was natural, and a part of herself; not a modish demeanour acquired by an imitative faculty – the surface gloss of the low-born woman apt to mimic her betters. He could not withhold his admiration from charms that all the world admired, but the extravagance of the fashionable toilette disgusted him, and he looked with angry scorn at brocades of dazzling hues interwoven with gold and silver; court gowns of such elaborate decoration that a Spitalfields weaver might have worked half a lifetime upon a fabric where trees and flowers, garlands and classic temples, lakes and mountains were depicted in their natural colours on a ground of gold. He had been living among such people a few years ago, and had never questioned their right so to squander money; or, casually reckoning the cost of a woman's gala dress, or the wax candles burnt at a ball, he had approved such expenditure as a virtue in the rich, since it must needs be good for trade. To-night as he stood aloof, watching those radiant figures, his imagination conjured up the vision of an alley in which he had spent his morning hours, going from house to house, with a famished crowd hanging on his footsteps, a scene of sordid misery he could not remember without a shudder. Oh, those hungry faces, those gaunt and spectral forms, skeletons upon which the filthy rags hung loose; those faces of women that had once been fair, before vice, want, and the small-pox disfigured them; those villainous faces of men who had spent half their lives in jail, of women who had spent all their womanhood in infamy, and, mixed with these, the faces of little children still unmarked by the brand of sin, children whom he longed to gather up in his arms and carry out of that hell upon earth, had there been any refuge for such! His heart sickened as he looked at the splendour of clothes and jewels, pictures, statues, curios, and thought how many of God's creatures might be plucked from the furnace and set on the highway to heaven for the cost of all that finery.

He was not altogether a stranger in that scene, for he saw several old acquaintances among the company, but he felt himself out of touch with them, and tried to escape all greetings and inquiries. And later, when the tables had been opened, and half the assembly were seated at whist or commerce, while the other half pretended to listen to a pot-pourri from Handel's "Semele," arranged for fiddles and harpsichord, which was being performed in the saloon, he went to the inmost room where Lucy was sitting solitary beside the deserted tea-table.

"Come, child," he said curtly, "we have had enough of this. 'Tis a pleasure that leaves an ill taste in the mouth."

His wife rose with alacrity. She had crept away from the music-room, dazzled by the splendour of the scene, and too shy to remain among such magnificent people, who looked at her with a bland wonder through jewelled eye-glasses.

"I think there is to be a supper," she said hesitatingly.

"Do you wish to stay for it?"

"Nay, 'tis as you please."

"I have no pleasure but to escape from this herd."

Lucy saw that something had vexed him, and went hungry to bed, having been too much embarrassed by the unaccustomed attentions of splendid beings in livery to eat a good dinner.

There was nobody in the dining-room when Mr. and Mrs. Stobart went to breakfast at nine o'clock next morning. George, who had slept little, had been steeping himself in a grey fog in St. James's Park since eight; but Lucy had found it more difficult to dress herself, encumbered by the officious assistance of one of Antonia's women, than unaided in her own little bedchamber at Sheen.

"Her ladyship takes her chocolate in her dressing-room," the butler informed Mr. Stobart, "and desires that you and your lady will breakfast at your own hour," whereupon George and his wife seated themselves in the magnificent solitude of the dining-room, and ate moderately of a meal almost as abundant as the previous day's dinner, for what was less of substance upon the table was balanced by the cold joints, pies, and poultry of the "regalia," or sideboard display.

Lucy returned to her room directly after breakfast to pack her trunk, or rather to look on ruefully while her ladyship's woman packed it. Happily, all her garments were neat and in good condition, although of a quaker-like plainness.

George sat in the library, waiting till his wife should be ready for departure, and opened one book after another in a strange inability to fix his attention upon anything. How well he remembered that room, and his last interview with his cousin! This was the table on which Kilrush had struck his clenched fist, when he swore that not to secure a life of bliss would he marry beneath his rank. The mystery of his passionate words, his violent gesture, was clear enough now. To his pride of birth, to a foolish reverence for trivial things, he had sacrificed his earthly happiness. To the man who esteemed all things small in comparison with life eternal it seemed a paltry renunciation; yet there had been a kind of grandeur in it, a Roman stoicism that could suffer for an idea. And now that George Stobart knew the woman his cousin had loved, her charm, her beauty, he could better understand the pangs of unsatisfied love, the conflict between passion and pride.

There were hot-house flowers in a Nankin bowl on the table, and a fire of coal and logs burnt merrily in the wide basket grate. The room had a far more cheerful aspect on this November morning than on that sultry summer day, four years ago.

On a side table by the fireplace Stobart noticed a pile of books richly bound in crimson morocco – the newest edition of Voltaire.

"She reads and loves that arch mocker still, cherishes a writer who would laugh away her hope of heaven, her belief in the Physician of souls. Beset with temptation, the cynosure of profligates, she rejects the only rock that stands firm and high, a sure refuge when the waves of passion sweep over the drowning soul."

He remembered the world he lived in five years ago, a world that seemed as far away as if those years had been centuries. He knew that of the men who surrounded Lady Kilrush with the stately adulation courtiers offer to queens there was scarce one who was not at heart a seducer, who would not profit by the first hint of human weakness in their goddess. And she was alone, motherless, sisterless, without a friend of her own blood, alone among envious women and unprincipled men.

"Of all those fine gentlemen who prate of honour, and would rather commit murder than submit to a trumpery impertinence, I doubt if there is one who would scruple to act unfairly by a woman, or who would hold himself bound by the impassioned vows that cajoled her into sin," he thought.

He looked into the crimson-bound octavos, tossing them aside one by one. They were not all of them deadly, but the poison was there; in those satirical romances, in those "Questions sur l'Encyclopédie," in those notes upon ancient history, on page after page he might have found the same deadly mockery, the same insidious war against the Christian faith, l'Infâme.

The door was flung open by a footman, and Antonia appeared before him, radiant in the freshness of her morning beauty, unspoilt by eighteenth-century washes and pigments. She was dressed for walking, in a sea-green lute-string and a pink gauze hat, her elbow-sleeves and the bosom of her gown ruffled with the same pale pink, and she wore long loose straw-coloured Saxony gloves, wrinkled here and there from wrist to elbow. Her only jewels were diamond solitaire ear-rings and a diamond brooch with a pear-shaped pearl pendant, one of the famous Kilrush pearls, from the treasures of the Indian merchant, the spoil of kings and rajahs.

They shook hands, and she hoped he and Mrs. Stobart had breakfasted well.

"I take my own breakfast in my dressing-room with a book," she said apologetically, "because that is the only hour I can feel sure of being alone. Morning visits begin so early. I am deep in 'Sir Charles.' Incomparable man!"

"'Sir Charles?'" he faltered. "Oh, I understand. You are reading Richardson's new novel – a tedious, interminable book, I take it."

"Tedious! I tremble for the day when I finish it. The world will seem empty when I bid Harriet and Clementina farewell. But I shall return again and again to those dear creatures. I wish myself a bad memory for their sakes."

"Oh, madam, to be thus concerned about the flimsy creations of an old printer's idle brain!"

"Idle! Do you call genius idle? There was never another Richardson. I fear there never will be. A hundred years hence women will weep for Clarissa, and men will model themselves upon Grandison."

"It saddens me, madam, to see you as enthusiastic about a paltry fiction as I would have you about the truths of the gospel. And I see with pain that you still cherish the works of the most notorious blasphemer in Europe."

"The man who stands up like little David against the Goliath of intolerance; the man who has rescued the Calas family from undeserved infamy, cleared the name of that unhappy victim of a persecuting priesthood, condemned, not because it was clear that he was a murderer, but because it was certain that he was a Protestant."

"I own, madam, that in his fight for a dead man's honour, Monsieur de Voltaire acted handsomely. I am sorry that he who did so much for the love of his neighbour should spurn the gospel which instils that virtue."

"Voltaire loved his neighbour without being taught, or say rather that he can accept all that his reason approves in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, while he rejects the traditions of the Roman Church."

"Nay, did he stop there I were with him heart and soul. But he does more. He turns the Gospel light to darkness. Would to God, madam, that you could find a wiser guide for your footsteps through a world where Satan has spread his worst snares in the fairest places."

"Mr. Stobart," she said, looking at him gravely, her violet eyes darkened to black under the rosy shadow of her hat, "I sometimes wish I could believe in Christ the Saviour; but I would not if I must believe also in Satan. Let us argue no more upon theology; I only shock you. My coach is at the door, and I want to take Mrs. Stobart to an auction where I believe she will see the finest collection of Nankin monsters and willow-pattern tea-things that China has sent us since last winter. 'Tis the first sale of the season, and all the world will be there, and twenty who go to stare and chatter for one who means to buy."

"Your ladyship is vastly kind, but my wife and I must travel by the Richmond coach, which leaves the Golden Cross at noon. I have to thank you in her name and my own for your kind hospitality."

"Oh, sir, don't thank me. Only promise that you will come to see me again, and often. We will not talk about serious things, lest we should quarrel."

"Madam, if I come into this house again we must talk of serious things. Can I pretend to be your friend, see you living without God in the world – I who believe in His judgments as I believe in His mercies – and not try to save a beautiful soul that I see hovering above the pit of hell? Can I be your friend, and hold my peace?"

"Nay, sir, leave my soul to your God. If He is all you believe, He will not let me perish."

"If you are obstinate and deny Him He will cast you out. He has given you talents for which you have to render an account, intellect, force of will, wealth, and the power that goes with it. I will come to this house no more to see you wasting yourself upon insipid amusements, listening to idle flatteries, smiling upon sybarites and fops, moving from one to another, false alike to all, since all are your inferiors, and you can esteem none of them. Your coquetries, your friendships are alike hollow, as artificial as your swooning curtsey, taught by Serise, the dancing-master."

"Oh, sir, are all the Oxford Methodists as rude as you?"

"Forgive me, madam. I cannot stoop to that smooth lying that goes by the name of politeness. 'Now, now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation.' My heart yearns to snatch a sinner from doom. Five years ago I should have been among your admirers, should have burnt the incense of vain adulation before you, as at the shrine of a goddess, should have been made happy with a smile, ineffably blessed by a civil word. But I have lived aloof from your beau monde, and I come back to discover what a Sodom it is. The company I once loved fills me with disgust and loathing. I see the flames of Tophet behind your galaxy of wax candles, the rags of lost sinners under your gold and silver brocade. I will come here no more."

He moved towards the door, she following him, holding out both her hands.

"Mr. Stobart, you make life a tragedy. I protest that some of my friends in gold and silver brocade are as good Christians as even your kindness could desire me to be. They are more fortunate than I am in never having been taught to question the creed that satisfied their fathers and grandfathers. I sometimes wish I had less of the doubting spirit. But pray do not let theological differences part us. You and your wife are a kind of relations, for you are of my dear husband's blood; I can never forget that. Come, sir, let us be reasonable," she exclaimed, seating herself at the table, and motioning him to the opposite chair.

She was sitting where Kilrush had sat during that last interview with his kinsman, in the same high-backed chair, the bright colouring of her face and hat shining against a background of black horsehair.

"What do you want me to do? Of what sins am I to repent?" she asked, smiling at him. "I try to help my fellow-creatures, to be honest and truthful and kind. What more can I do?"

"Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor."

"I cannot do that. I think I have a right to be happy. Fate has flung riches into my lap; and I love the things that money buys – this house, foreign travel, ease and splendour, pictures, music, the friends that wealth and station have brought round me. I love to mix with the salt of the earth. And you want me to renounce all these things, and to live as Jesus of Nazareth lived – Jesus, the Son of Joseph the carpenter."

"Jesus, the Son of God, who so lived His brief life on earth to be for all mankind an example."

"And are we all to be peasants?"

"Believe me, madam, there is only one perfect form of the Christian life, and that is the imitation of Christ."

"You would make this a hateful world if you had your way, Mr. Stobart."

"I would make it a Christian world if I could, Lady Kilrush."

"Well, sir, let me help you with your poor. I should like to do that, though I do not mean to sell this house, or the jewels that my husband's grandfather brought from the East Indies. I can spare a good deal for almsgiving, and yet sparkle at St. James's. Take me to see your poor people at Lambeth. Bring their sorrows nearer to my heart. I know I am leading a foolish, idle life, made up of gratified vanities and futile fevers, but 'tis such a pleasant life. I had my day of drudgery and petty cares, the struggle to make one shilling go as far as five, and my heart dances for joy sometimes among the pleasures and splendours in which I move to-day. But be sure I have a heart to pity the suffering. Let me go with you to Lambeth. I will buy no china dragons to-day; and the money I put in my purse to waste on toys shall be given to your poor. Take me to them to-day. You can go back to Sheen by a later coach."

He refused at first, protesting that the places to which he went were no fitting scenes for her. She would have to confront vice as well as poverty – revolting sights, hideous language, Lazarus with his sores, and a blaspheming Lazarus – things odious and things terrible.

"I am not afraid," she answered. "If there are such things we ought to know of them. I do know that vice and sin exist. I am not an ignorant girl. I was not born in the purple."

She was impetuous, resolute, insistent, and she overruled all his objections.

"You will be sorry that I let you have your way," he said at last, "and I am foolish so to humour a fine lady's whim."

"I am not a fine lady to-day. There is more than one side to my character."

"If you mean to come with me, you had best put on a plainer gown."

"I have none plainer than this. 'Tis no matter if I spoil it, for I am tired of the colour. Oh, here is Mrs. Stobart," she cried, as a servant ushered in Lucy, who entered timidly, looking for her husband.

"Your ladyship's servant," she murmured with a curtsey. "Is it time for us to go home, George?"

"Time for me to take you to the coach, Lucy. I shall spend the day among my people."

"And I am to go home alone," his wife said ruefully.

"I shall be with you by tea-time, and you will have your boy and a world of household cares to engage you till then."

She brightened at this, and smiled at him.

"I'll warrant Hannah will not have dusted the parlour," she said. "Oh, madam, we have such pretty mahogany furniture, and I do love to keep it bright. There's nothing like elbow-grease for a mahogany table."

"I know that by experience, child. I have used it myself," Antonia answered gaily.

She was pleased and excited at the idea of a plunge into the mysteries of outcast London. She had been poor herself, but had known only the shabby genteel poverty which keeps shoes to its feet and a weathertight roof over its head. With want and rags and filth she had never come in contact save in her brief glimpse of the Irish and English towns at Limerick; and looking back upon that experience of a brain overwrought with grief, it seemed to her like a fever-dream. To-day she would go among the abodes of misery with a mind quick to see and understand. Surely, surely she could do her part in the duty that the rich owe the poor without selling all that she had, without abrogating one iota of the sumptuous surroundings so dear to her romantic temper, to her innate love of the beautiful.

She kissed Mrs. Stobart at parting, and promised to visit her at Sheen the first day she was free of engagements.

George found her chariot at the door when he came back from despatching his wife in the Richmond stage.

"Come, come," she said, "let us hasten to your poor wretches. I am dying to give them the guineas I meant for my monsters."

"Faith, madam, you will find monsters enough where we are going, but not such as a fine lady could display on her china cupboard."

Mr. Stobart stopped the carriage on the south side of Westminster Bridge.

"If you are not averse to walking some little distance, it might be well to send your carriage home," he said. "I can take you back to your house in a hackney coach;" and on this the chariot was dismissed.

"You shall not go a yard out of your way on my account," she said. "I am not afraid of going about alone. The great ladies I know would swoon if they found themselves in a London street unattended; but I am not like them."

He gave her his arm, and they threaded their way through a labyrinth of streets and alleys that lay between the Thames and the waste spaces of Lambeth Marsh, a dreary region where the water lay in stagnant pools, receptacles for all unconsidered filth, exhaling putrid fever. Here and there above the forest of chimneys and chance medley of roofs and gables there rose the bulk of a pottery, for this was the chosen place of the potter's art; but for the rest the desolate region between Stangate and the New Cut was given over to poverty and crime. Fine old houses that had once stood in the midst of fair gardens had been divided into miserable tenements, and swarmed like anthills with half-starved humanity; alleys so narrow that the sunshine rarely visited them, covered and crowded the old garden ground; four-storied houses, built with a supreme neglect of such trifles as light and air, overshadowed the low hovels that had once been rustic cottages smiling across modest flower-gardens.

Mr. Stobart came to a halt in a lane leading to the river, where a row of rickety wooden houses hung over an expanse of malodorous mud. The tide was out, and a troop of half-naked children were chasing a starved dog, with a kettle tied to his tail, through the slime and slush of the foreshore.

"Oh, the poor dog!" cried Tonia, as they stood on a causeway at the end of the lane. "For pity's sake stop those little wretches!"

George called to them, but they only looked at him, and pursued their sport. Had he been alone he would have given the little demons chase, but he could not risk bespattering himself from head to foot in a lady's company.

"There is but one way to stop them," he said, "and that is to teach them better. We are trying to do that in our schools, but the task needs twenty-fold more men and more money than we can command. 'Twould shock you, no doubt, to see how the children of the poor amuse themselves; but I question if there is more cruelty to the brute creation among those unenlightened brats than among the children of our nobility, who are bred up to think a cock-fight or a stag-hunt the summit of earthly bliss. Jim Rednap," he shouted, as the chase doubled and came within earshot, "if you don't untie that kettle and let the dog go, I'll give you a flogging that will make you squall."