The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

"Bid my servants fetch me at one o'clock, if you please, Sir Joseph," she said to the cavalier on her left.

"At one! Impossible! 'Tis nearly eleven already. I shall order them at three, and I'll wager they'll have to wait hours after that."

"You make very sure of your dance pleasing folks," she said. "I doubt I shall have yawned myself half dead before three o'clock; but you'll have to find me a seat in a dark corner where I can sleep behind my fan."

"There are no dark corners – except in the gallery for lovers and dowagers – and I pledge myself nobody under forty shall have any disposition for slumber," protested Sir Joseph, as he ran off to give her orders.

She passed under the lamp-lit portico on Lord Dunkeld's arm.

"That is the man she will marry," Stobart thought, as he walked away, hurrying from the crowd and the lights, and noise and laughter, and past a tavern a little way off, in front of which an army of footmen and links were gathered, and where they and the crowd were being served with beer and gin. He was glad to get into a dark lane that led towards Westminster Bridge, skirting the river, and to be able to think quietly.

She would marry Dunkeld. Was it not the best thing she could do – her best chance for the saving of that immortal soul which he had tried in vain to save? Dunkeld was no idle pleasure-lover, though he mixed in the diversions of his time. He was a politician, had written more than one pamphlet that had commanded the attention of the town. He was a good Churchman, a regular attendant at the Chapel Royal. He was rich enough to be above suspicion of mercenary views. He had never been a gambler or a profligate. He was seven and thirty, Antonia's senior by about twelve years. Assuredly she would be safer from the evil of the time as Dunkeld's wife than in her present unprotected position.

He repeated these arguments with unending iteration throughout his homeward walk. It was perhaps his duty to urge this union upon her. She had never spoken to him of Dunkeld, or in so casual a tone that he had suspected her of no uncommon friendship for that excellent man; yet he could hardly doubt that she favoured his suit. Dunkeld was handsome, accomplished, of an ancient Scottish family, had made his mark in the English House of Commons. Stobart could scarcely believe it possible that such a suitor had failed to engage Antonia's affections. At any rate, it was his duty – his duty as a friend, as a Christian – to persuade her to this marriage.

He found his wife sitting up for him, and the supper untouched, though it was midnight when he got home. The supper was but a frugal meal of bread and cheese, a spring salad, and small beer; but the table was neatly laid with a clean damask cloth, and adorned with a Lowestoft bowl of wallflowers. Lucy had a genius for small things, and was quick to learn any art that light hands and perseverance could accomplish.

"How late you are, George!" she exclaimed. "I was almost frightened. Have you been teaching your night class all these hours?"

"No, 'tis not a class night. I have been roaming the streets, full of thought, but idle of purpose. I let myself drift with the crowd, and went to stare at the fine people going into Ranelagh."

"You! Well, 'tis a wonder. But why didn't you take me? I should have loved to see the fancy dresses and masks and dominos. Indeed, I should have asked you many a time to let me see the quality going to Court, only I fancied you thought all such shows wicked."

"A wicked waste of time. I doubt I have been wickedly wasting my time to-night, Lucy; yet perhaps some good may come of my idleness. God can turn even our errors to profit."

"Oh, George, I have done very wrong," his wife said, with sudden seriousness. "I have forgotten something."

"Nay, child, 'tis not the first time. Thy genius never showed strongest in remembering things."

"But this was a serious thing, and you'll scold me when you know it."

"Be brief, dear, and I promise to be indulgent."

"You know Sally Dormer, the poor woman that's in a consumption, and that you and her ladyship are concerned about?"

"Yes."

"Her young brother called the day you came home, and told me the doctor had given her over, and she wanted to see you – she was pining and fretting because you was away; and she had been a terrible sinner, the boy said, and was afeared to meet her God. I meant to tell you the first minute I saw you, George; and then I was so glad to see you, and that put everything out of my head."

"And kept it out of your head for a week, Lucy – the prayer of a dying woman?"

"Ah, now you are angry with me."

"No, no; but I am sorry – very sorry. The poor soul is dead, perhaps. I might have been with her at the last hour, and might have given her hope and comfort. You should not forget such things as those, Lucy; your heart should serve instead of memory when a dying penitent's peace is in question."

"Oh, I am a hateful wretch, and I'd sooner you scolded me than not. But you had been away so long, and I had fretted about you, and was so glad to have you again."

She was in tears, and he held out his hand to her across the table.

"Don't cry, Lucy. Perhaps I do ill to leave you – even in God's service; but the call is strong."

He left his thought unspoken. He had been thinking that the man who gave himself to the service of Christ should have neither wife nor child. The earthly and the heavenly love were not compatible.

"I will go to Sally's garret the first thing to-morrow morning," he said. "Please God I may not be too late!"

He was silent for the rest of the meal, and his slumbers were brief and perturbed, his fitful sleep haunted by visions of splendour and beauty: the brazen duchess, erstwhile maid-of-honour, wife of two husbands, radiant and half-naked as the goddess of chastity, with a diamond crescent on her brow; and that other woman, whose modest bearing gave the grace of purity even to the splendour of her jewels and glittering silver gown. Dream faces followed him through the labyrinth of sleep, and his last dream was of the nightmare kind. He was in the retreat at Fontenoy, fighting at close quarters with a French dragoon, whom he knew of a sudden for the foul fiend in person, and that the stake for which he fought was Antonia's soul.

"He shall not have her," he cried. "I'd sooner see her another man's wife than the devil's prize."

He was awakened by his own voice, in a hoarse, gasping cry, and starting up in the broad light of a May morning, looked at his watch, and found it was half-past five. He rose quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping wife, and made his morning toilet in a little back room that served as his dressing-closet – a Spartan chamber, in which an abundance of cold water was his only luxury. He left the house soon after six, and walked quickly through the quiet morning streets to the pestiferous alley where Sally Dormer lay dying or dead.

She was one of his penitents, a woman who was still young, and had once been beautiful, steeped in sin in the very morning of life, in the company of thieves and highwaymen, grown prematurely old in a profligate career, a courtesan's neglected offspring, and carrying the seeds of consumption from her cradle. Her mother had been dead ten years; her father had never been known to her; her only relative was a boy of eleven, her mother's sole legacy. A sermon of Whitefield's preached to thousands of hearers on Kennington Common, in the sultry stillness of an August night, had awakened her to the knowledge of sin. She was one of the many who went to hear the famous preacher, prompted by idle curiosity, and who left him changed and exalted, shuddering at the sins of the past, horrified at the perils of the future. That wave of penitent feeling might have ebbed as quickly as it rose but for George Stobart, who found the sinner while the effect of Whitefield's eloquence was new, and completed the work of conversion – a work more easily accomplished, perhaps, by reason of Sally Dormer's broken health.

She had been marked for death before that sultry night when she had stood under the summer stars, trembling at Whitefield's picture of the sinner's doom, pale to the lips as he dwelt on the terrors of hell, and God's curse upon the stubborn unbeliever. "All the curses of the law belong to you, oh, ye adamantine hearts, that melt not at the name of Jesus. Cursed are you when you go out; cursed are you when you come in; cursed are your thoughts; cursed are your words; cursed are your deeds! Everything you do, say, or think, from morning to night, is only one continued series of sin. Awake, awake, thou that sleepest, melt and tremble, heart of stone. Look to Him whom thou hast pierced! Look and love; look and mourn; look and praise. Though thou art stained with sin, and black with iniquity, thy God is yet thy God!"

Stobart had told Antonia of Sally Dormer's condition, and had provided by her means for the penitent's comfort in her lingering illness, the fatal end of which was obvious, however much her state varied from week to week. But he had opposed Antonia's desire to visit the invalid, shrinking with actual pain from the idea of any contact between the spotless woman and the castaway, who in her remorse for her past life was apt to expatiate upon vile experiences.

Five minutes' walk brought Mr. Stobart to a narrow street on the edge of the river, a street long given over to the dregs of humanity. The houses were old and dilapidated, and several of those on the water-side had been shored up at the back with timber supports, moss-grown and slimy from the river fog, yet a favourite climbing place for vagabond boys, as well as for a colony of starveling rats.

Sally's lodging was on the third story of a corner house, one of the oldest and most tumble-down, but also one of the most spacious, having formed part of a nobleman's mansion under the Tudor kings, when all the river-side was pleasaunce and garden.

The garret occupied the whole of the top floor, under a steeply sloping roof, and had two windows, one looking to the street, the other to the river. Here Sally had been slowly dying for near half a year, in charge of her little brother, and under the supervision of the dispensary doctor, who saw her daily.

The house was quiet in the summer morning. The men who had work to do had gone about it; the idlers were still in bed; the more respectable among the women were occupied with their children or their housework. Stobart met no one in the gloom of the rickety staircase, where the rotten boards offered numerous pitfalls for the unwary. He was used to ruin and decay in that water-side region, and trod carefully. The last flight was little better than a ladder, at the top of which he saw the garret door ajar, and heard a voice he knew speaking in tones so low and gentle that speech seemed a caress.

It was Antonia's voice. She was sitting by Sally Dormer's pillow, in all the splendour of white and silver brocade, diamond tiara and jewelled stomacher. Her right arm was round the sick woman, and Sally's dishevelled head leant against her shoulder.

"Great Heaven, what a change of scene!" he said, as he bent down and took Sally's hand. "'Tis not many hours since I saw you at Ranelagh."

"Were you at Ranelagh?"

"At the gate only. I do not enter such paradises. I went there last night, after your door was shut in my face for the third time. It seemed my only chance of seeing you; and the sight was worth a journey. But what madness to come here alone in your finery, to flash jewels worth a king's ransom before starving desperadoes! Sure 'twas wilfully to provoke danger."

"I am not afraid. My coach brought me to the end of the street, and my chair is to fetch me presently. I shall be taken care of, sir, be sure. This foolish Sally had set her heart on seeing me in my masquerade finery, so I came straight from Ranelagh; and I have been telling Sally about the ball and the beauties."

"An edifying discourse, truly!"

"Oh, you shall edify her to your heart's content when I am gone. I have been trying to amuse her. I stole those sweetmeats for Harry from the royal table" – smiling at the boy, who was sitting on the end of the bed, with his mouth full of bonbons. "I smuggled them into my pocket while the duke was talking to me."

"I was at Ranelagh once, your ladyship," said Sally, touching the gems on Antonia's stomacher one by one with her attenuated finger-tips, as if she were counting them, and as if their brilliancy gave her pleasure. "'Twas when I was young and lived like a lady. My first sweetheart took me there. He was a gentleman then. 'Twas before he took to the road. I dream of him often as he was in those days, seven years ago. He is changed now, and so am I. Sometimes I can scarce believe we are the same flesh and blood. 'Twas a handsome face, a dear face! I see it in my dreams every night."

"Sally, Sally, is this the spirit in which to remember your sins?" exclaimed Stobart, reprovingly. "See, madam, what mischief your mistaken kindness has done."

"No, no, no! My poor Sally is no less a true penitent because her thoughts turn for a few moments to the days that are gone. 'Tis a fault in your religion, sir, that it is all gloom. Your Master took a kinder view of life, and was indulgent to human affections as He was pitiful to human pains. Sally has made her peace with God, and believes in a happy world where her sins will be forgiven, and she will wear the white robe of innocence, and hear the songs of angels round the heavenly throne."

"If thou hast indeed assurance of salvation, Sally, thou art happier than the great ones of the earth, who wilfully refuse their portion in Christ's atoning blood, who can neither realize their own iniquity, nor the Redeemer's power to take away their sins," Stobart said gravely.

"'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,'" murmured Sally, her fingers still wandering about Antonia's jewels, touching necklace and tiara, and the raven hair that fell in heavy curls about the full white throat.

"How beautiful you are!" she murmured. "If the angels are like you, and as kind, how dearly I shall love them! Poor hell-deserving me! Will they be kind, and never cast my sins in my face, nor draw their skirts away from me, and quicken their steps, as I have seen modest women do in the streets?"

"We are told that God's angels are much kinder than modest women, Sally," Antonia answered, smiling at her as she offered a cup of cooling drink to the parched lips.

She had been teaching the eleven-year-old Harry to make lemonade for his sick sister. One of the ladies from the infant nursery came in every day to make Sally's bed and clean her room, and for the rest the precocious little brother, reared in muddle, idleness, and intermittent starvation, was much more helpful than a happier child would have been.

"Shall I read to you, Sally?" Stobart asked in his grave voice, seating himself in an old rush-bottomed chair at the foot of the bed.

"Oh, sir, pray with me, pray for me! I would rather hear your prayers than the book. They do me more good."

Antonia gently withdrew her arm from the sick woman's waist, and arranged the pillows at her back – luxurious down pillows supplied from the trop-plein of St. James's Square – and rose from her seat by the bed.

"Good-bye, Sally," she said, putting on her black domino, which she had thrown off at the invalid's request, to exhibit the splendours beneath. "I shall come and see you soon again; and I leave you with a good friend."

"Oh, my lady, do stop for a bit. I love to have you by my bed; and, oh, I want you to hear his prayers. I want you to be justified by faith, you who have never sinned."

"Hush, hush, Sally!"

"Who know not sin – like mine. I want you to believe as I do. I want to meet you in heaven among the happy souls washed white in the blood of the Lamb. Stay and hear him pray."

"I'll stay for a little to please you, Sally; but indeed I am out of place here," Antonia said gravely, as she resumed her seat.

Stobart was kneeling at the foot of the bed, his face bent upon his clasped hands, and the women had been speaking in almost whispers, Sally's voice being weak from illness, and Antonia's lowered in sympathy. He looked up presently after a long silence and began his prayer. He had been struggling against earthly thoughts, striving for that detachment of mind and senses which he had found more and more difficult of late, striving to concentrate all his forces of heart and intellect upon the dying woman – the newly awakened soul hovering on the threshold of eternity. Could there be a more enthralling theme, a subject more removed from earthly desires and earthly temptations?

Antonia looked at him with something of awe in her gaze. She had never heard him pray. He had argued with her; he had striven his hardest to make her think as he thought; but he had never prayed for her. Into that holier region, that nearer approach to the God he worshipped, she had never passed. The temple doors were shut against so obstinate an unbeliever, so hardened a scorner.

His face seemed the face of a stranger, transfigured by that rapture of faith in the spirit world, made like to the angels in whose actual and everlasting existence this man – this rational, educated Englishman, of an over-civilized epoch – firmly believed. He believed, and was made happy by his belief. This present life was of no more value to him than the dull brown husk of the worm that knows it is to be a butterfly. To the Voltairean this thing was wonderful. The very strangeness of it fascinated her, and she listened with deepest interest to George Stobart's prayer.

His opening invocation had a formal tone. The words came slowly, and for some minutes his prayer was woven out of those familiar and moving texts he loved, while the thoughts and feelings of the man himself rose slowly from the depths of a heart that seemed ice-bound; but the man believed in Him to whom he prayed, and presently the ice melted, and the fire came, and the speaker forgot all surrounding things – the lovely eyes watching him in a grave wonder, the feelings and doubts and apprehensions of last night. The earthly fetters fell away from his liberated soul, and he was alone with his God, as much alone as Moses on the mountain, as Christ in the garden. Then, and then only, the man became eloquent. Moving words came from the heart so deeply moved, burning words from the spirit on fire with an exalted faith.

Sally Dormer sobbed upon Antonia's breast, the unbeliever looking down upon her with a tender pity, glad that the slow and painful passage to the grave should be soothed by beautiful fables, by dreams that took the sting from death.

Perhaps the thing that moved Antonia most was the unspeakable pity and compassion, the love that this man felt for the castaway. She had been told that the Oxford Methodists were a sanctimonious, pragmatical sect, whose heaven was an exclusive freehold, and who delighted in consigning their fellow-creatures to everlasting flames. But here she found sympathy with the sinner stronger than abhorrence of the sin. And her reason – that reason of which she was so proud – told her that with such a sinner none but an enthusiast could have prevailed. It needed the fiery speech of a Whitefield, the passionate appeal of an impassioned orator, to awaken a soul so dead.

"'Awake, thou that sleepest,'" cries the Church to the heathen; but if the Church that calls is a formal, unloving, half-somnolent Church, what chance of awakening?

The great Revival had been the work of a handful of young men – men whom the Church might have kept had her rulers been able to gauge their power, but who had been sent into the fields to carry on their work of conversion as their Master was sent before them.

Antonia was no nearer belief in Stobart's creed than she had been yesterday; but she was impressed by the sincerity of the man, the vitality of an unquestioning faith.

He was interrupted in the midst of an impassioned sentence by a startling appearance. The lattice facing the river had been left open to the balmy morning air. The casement rattled suddenly, and a pair of hands appeared clutching the sill, followed almost instantly by the vision of a ghastly face with starting eyeballs and panting mouth; and then a slenderly built man scrambled through the opening, and dropped head foremost into the room, breathless, and speechless for the moment.

George Stobart started to his feet.

"What are you doing here, fellow?" he exclaimed angrily.

The man took no notice of the question, but flung himself on his knees by the bed, and grasped Sally's hand. His clothes were torn and mud-stained, one of his coat-sleeves was ripped from wrist to shoulder. Great beads of sweat rolled down his ashen face.

"Hide me, hide me, Sally," he gasped hoarsely. "If ever you loved me, save me from the gallows. Hide me somewhere behind your bed – in your closet – anywhere. The constables are after me. It's a hanging business."

"Oh, Jack, I thought you was in Georgia – safe, and leading an honest life."

"I've come back. I'm one of them that can't be honest. They're after me. I gave them the slip on the bridge – ran for my life – climbed the old timbers. Hell, how slippery they are! They'll be round the corner directly. They'll search every house in the street."

He was looking about the room with strained eyes, searching for some hole to hide in. There was a curious kind of closet in the slope of the rafters, filling an acute angle. He was making for this, then stopped and ran to the window facing the river.

"Get out of this, fellow," said Stobart. "This woman has done with the companions of sin. Go!"

"No, no," cried Antonia; "you shall not give him over to those bloodhounds."

"What, madam, would you make yourself the abettor of crime – come between a felon and the law which protects honest people from thieves and murderers?"

"I hate your laws – your inexorable judges, your murdering laws, which will hang a child that never knew right from wrong for a stolen sixpence."

"They are round the corner; they are looking at the house," gasped the fugitive, moving from the window and looking round the room in a wild despair.

He had been caught in that very house years before, when he and Sally Dormer lodged there together, and when he was one of the luckiest professionals on the Dover road, with a couple of good horses, and a genius for getting clear off after a job. He had escaped by the skin of his teeth on that occasion, the witnesses for identification breaking down in the inquiry before the magistrate. He had saved his neck and some of the profits from an audacious attack on the Dover mail, and had gone to America in a shipload of mixed company, swearing to turn honest and cheat Jack Ketch. But he could as easily have turned wild Indian; and after a spirited career in Georgia he had got himself back to London, and being in low water, without means to buy himself a good horse, had sunk to the meaner status of foot-pad, and this morning had been concerned with three others in an attempt to stop a great lady's coach on the way from Ranelagh.

A chosen few among the most dissipated of the company had kept the ball going till seven o'clock, and had gone to breakfast and cards after seven – and it was one of these great ladies whose chariot had been stopped in the loneliest part of the road, between Chelsea and the Five Fields.

Antonia was looking out of the window that overhung the street. The thief made a rush towards the same window, and stopped midway, staring at this queen-like figure in mute surprise. Her beauty, her sumptuous dress and jewels made him almost think this dazzling appearance the hallucination of his own distraught brain. "Is it real?" he muttered, and then went back to the other casement, and looked out again.

"They are coming," he said in a dull voice. "'Tis no use to hide in that rat-hole. They'd have me out in a trice. The game's up, Sally. I shall dance upon nothing at Tyburn before the month is out."

He looked to the priming of a pair of pistols which he carried in a leather belt. They were ready for work. He took his stand behind the garret door. The first man who entered that room would be accounted for. They would not risk an ascent upon those slippery old beams which he had climbed for sport many a time in his boyhood; they would make their entrance from the street. Well, there was some hope of giving them trouble on the top flight of stairs, almost as steep as a ladder, and rotten enough to let them down headlong with a little extra impetus from above.