The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

"They are not round yet," cried Antonia, snatching up her black silk domino from the chair where it hung. "Put on this, sir. So, so" – wrapping the voluminous cloak round the thief's thin frame. "Don't cry, Sally; we'll save him if we can, for your sake; and he'll turn honest for your sake. So; the cloak covers your feet. Why, I doubt I am the taller. Now for the mask," adjusting the little loup, which fastened with a spring, over the man's face, and the silk hood over his head.

"Come, Mr. Stobart, my chair is at the door," she said breathlessly. "Take this poor wretch downstairs, bundle him into the chair, and bid my servants carry him to my house, and hide him there. They can send a hackney coach to fetch me. Quick, quick!" she cried, stamping her foot; "quick, sir, if you would save a life."

Stobart looked from the masked figure to Antonia irresolutely, and then looked out of the river window. There was a mob hurrying along the muddy shore at the heels of three Bow Street runners, who were nearing the network of timbers below. There was no time for scruples. Five minutes would give the pursuers time to come round to the front of the house.

A wailing voice came from the bed —

"Oh, sir, save him, for Christ's sake! He was my first sweetheart; and he has always been kind to me. Give him this one chance."

The fugitive had not waited, but had scrambled downstairs in his strange disguise, stumbling every now and then when his feet caught in the trailing domino.

Antonia, watching from the window, saw him dash into the street, open the door of the sedan – 'twas not the first he had opened as violently – and disappear inside it.

The chairmen stood dumbfounded; and had not Stobart appeared on the instant to give them their lady's orders, might have raised an alarm. Drilled to obedience, however, the men took up their load in prompt and orderly style, and the sedan, with two running footmen guarding it, turned one corner of the street a minute before the constables came round the other.

It was an unspeakable mortification for these gentlemen when they found their bird flown, how they knew not, or, indeed, whether he had ever been in the house, which they searched from cellar to garret, giving as much trouble as they could to all its inhabitants. It was in vain that they questioned Sally Dormer, who swore it was years since she had set eyes on her old friend Jack Parsons. It shocked Stobart to see that this brand plucked from the burning could be so ready with a lie, and that the two women rejoiced in the escape of Mr. Parsons almost as if he had been a Christian martyr saved from the lions.

"He is a man; and 'twas a life – a life like yours or mine – that we were saving," Antonia said by-and-by, when he expressed surprise at her conduct. "'Tis a thing a woman does instinctively. I think I would do as much to save a sheep from the slaughter-house. 'Twas a happy thought that brought the sedan to my mind. I remembered Lord Nithisdale's escape in '15."

"Lady Nithisdale was saving her husband's life by that stratagem."

"And I was saving a thief whose face I had never seen till five minutes before I fastened my mask upon it. But I saw a man trembling for his life, like a bird in a net; and I remembered how savage our law is, and how light judge and jury make of a fellow-creature's doom. I shall pack the rascal off to America again, and dare him to do ill there after his escape. You must help me to get him down the river this night, Mr. Stobart, and stowed away upon the first ship that sails from Gravesend."

"I must, must I?"

"If you refuse, I must employ Goodwin, and that might be dangerous."

"I cannot refuse you. Can you doubt that I admire your kindness, your generous sympathy with creatures that suffer? But I tremble at the thought of a nature so impulsive, a heart so easily melted."

"Oh, it can be hard on occasion," she said proudly, remembering the lovers who had sighed at her feet and been sent away despairing, since her reign in London had begun, her supremacy as a beauty and a fortune.

Having consented to help in her work of mercy, Stobart performed his task faithfully. He had allies among the vagabond classes whose honour he could rely on, and with the help of two stalwart boatmen he conveyed Jack Parsons to Erith, and saw him on board a trading vessel, carrying a score or so of emigrants and a freight of miscellaneous merchandise to Boston, which by good luck was to sail with the next favourable wind. He provided the fugitive with proper clothing and necessaries for the voyage, which might last months, and took pains to clothe him like a small tradesman's son; and as such he was shipped, with his passage paid, and the promise of a five-pound note, to be given him by the captain before he landed in America, to maintain him till he got work.

"If the lady who saved you from the gallows should hear of you by-and-by as leading an honest life, I dare say she will help you to better yourself out yonder; but if you fall back into sin you will deserve the worst that can happen to a hardened reprobate;" and with these words of counsel, a New Testament, and Charles Wesley's hymn book, Mr. Stobart took leave of Antonia's protégé, who sobbed out broken words of gratitude to him and to the good lady, which sounded as if they came from the heart.

"I had my chance before, sir, and I threw it away – but God's curse blight me if I forget what that woman did for me."

Stobart wrote to Lady Kilrush, with an account of what he had done, but it was some days before he saw her. He had to take up the thread of his mission work, and had to wait upon Mr. Wesley more than once – to discuss his philanthropic labours – at his house by the Foundery. He saw Sally Dormer every day, and was touched by the poor creature's adoration of Antonia, whom she now regarded as a heaven-sent angel.

"Oh, sir, you told me once that her ladyship was an infidel; but, indeed, sir, whatever she says, whatever she thinks, you cannot believe that such a creature will be shut out from heaven. Sure, sir, heaven must be full of women like her, and God must love them, because they are good."

"No, Sally, God cannot love those who deny Christ."

"But indeed she does not. While you was away, when I was so ill, I asked her to read the Bible to me, and she let me choose the chapters – the Sermon on the Mount, and those chapters you love in St. John's Gospel – and she told me she loved Jesus – loved His words of kindness and mercy, His goodness to the sick and the poor, and to the little children."

"All that is no use, Sally, without faith in His atoning blood, without the conviction of sin, or the belief in saving grace. Yet I can scarce think that so good a woman as Lady Kilrush will be left for ever under the dominion of Satan. Faith will come to her some day – with the coming of sorrow."

"Yes, yes, it will come; and she will shine like a star in heaven. God cannot do without such angels round His throne."

Stobart reproved her gently for words that went too near blasphemy. He was melted by her affection for the generous friend who had done so much to brighten her declining days.

"She came to see me very often while you was away," Sally said; "and she paid the nurse-keeper to come every day, and sent me soups and jellies and all sorts of good things by a light-porter every morning. And she talks to me as if I was an honest woman. She never reminds me what a sinner I have been – or even that I'm not a lady."

It was more than a week after the scene in Sally Dormer's garret, and the ship that carried Mr. John Parsons was beating round the Start Point, when George Stobart called in St. James's Square early in the afternoon.

The dining-room door stood wide open as he crossed the hall, and he saw a long table strewed with roses and covered with gold plate, and the débris of a fashionable breakfast, chocolate-pots, champagne-glasses, carbonadoed hams, chickens and salads, jellies and junkets and creams.

"Her ladyship has been entertaining company," he said, with a sense of displeasure of which he felt ashamed, knowing how unreasonable it was. Had she not a right to live her own life, she who had never professed Christianity, least of all his kind of Christianity, which meant total renunciation of all self-indulgence, purple and fine linen, banquets and dances, splendid furniture and rich food?

"Yes, sir, her ladyship has been giving a breakfast-party to the Duke of Cumberland," replied the footman, swelling with pride. "Eight and twenty sat down – mostly dukes and duchesses – and Mr. Handel played on the 'arpsikon for an hour after breakfast. His royal 'ighness loves music," added the lackey, condescendingly, as he ushered Mr. Stobart into the library.

"Was Lord Dunkeld among the company?" Stobart asked.

"Yes, sir."

Stobart had come there charged with a mission, a self-imposed duty, which had been in his mind – paramount over all other considerations – ever since that night at Ranelagh, when he had seen Antonia and Lord Dunkeld together. Again and again he went over the same chain of reasoning, with always the same result. He saw her in the flower of youth, beautiful and impulsive, with a wild courage that scorned consequences, ready to break the law if her heart prompted; and he told himself that for such a woman marriage with a good man was the only safeguard from the innumerable perils of a woman's life. In her case marriage was inevitable. The worldlings would not cease from striving for so rich a prize. If she did not marry Dunkeld, she would marry some one else, his inferior, perhaps, in every virtue. It was his duty – his, as her friend, her earnest well-wisher – to persuade her to so suitable an alliance.

Having marked out this duty to be done, he was in a fever of anxiety to get his task accomplished. He was like a martyr, who knows death inevitable, and is eager for the faggot and the stake. That poignant eagerness was so strange a feeling – a fire of enthusiasm that was almost agony.

He walked up and down the library, agitated and impatient, his hands clasped above his head. He was wondering how she would receive his advice. She would be angry, perhaps; and would resent the impertinence of unsought counsel.

The windows were open, and the room was full of flowers and soft vernal air. A Kirkman harpsichord stood near the fireplace, scattered with loose sheets of music from the newest opera and oratorio. A guitar hung by a broad blue ribbon across an armchair. Light and trivial romances and modish magazines lay about the table; and another table was covered with baskets of shells and a half-finished picture-frame in shell-work. A white cockatoo cackled and screamed on his perch by a window. Nothing was wanting to mark the lady of fashion.

She came in, beaming with smiles, in the splendour of gala clothes, a sky-blue poplin sacque, covered with Irish lace, over a primrose satin petticoat powdered with silver shamrocks. Her hair was rolled back from her forehead, a little cap like a gauze butterfly was perched on the top of her head, and gauze lappets were crossed under her chin, and pinned with a single brilliant. The little cap gave a piquancy to her beauty, a dainty touch of the soubrette, which Boucher has immortalized in his portrait of the Pompadour.

"Well, sir," she cried gaily, making him a low curtsey, "we have broken the law between us, and I thank you heartily for your share in the offence against its majesty. Would to God that Admiral Byng could have been saved as easily!"

"You have a generous heart, madam – a heart too easily moved, perhaps, by human miseries, and I tremble for its impulses, while I admire its warmth and courage. You have never been absent from my thoughts since that morning in Sally's garret. Indeed, what man living could forget a scene so incongruous – yet – so beautiful?"

His voice faltered towards the end, and he leant against the late lord's tall armchair.

"You have not been kind in keeping away from me so long, when I was dying to give expression to my gratitude."

"Be sure my recompense was having obliged you. 'Twas superfluous to thank me. I have been very busy. I had arrears of work, and I knew all your hours were engaged."

"Sure there must always be something to do in a town full of people."

She was playing with the great white bird, smoothing his fluffy topknot, ruffling the soft saffron feathers round his neck, tempting him with the pink tips of taper fingers, flashing rose-coloured light from her diamond rings, whose splendour covered the slender hoop of gold with which Kilrush married her.

"You have been entertaining the Duke of Cumberland, I hear."

"Billy the Butcher! That's what my father and I used to call him, when we concocted Jacobite paragraphs for Lloyd's Evening Post. Yes, Mr. Stobart, I have been entertaining royalty for the first time in my life. The honour was not my own seeking either, for his royal highness challenged me to invite him."

"He would not be so much out of the fashion as not to be among your adorers."

"That is too prettily said for an Oxford Methodist. 'Tis a reminiscence of the soldier's manners. When the duke led me out for the second dance at the Duchess of Norfolk's ball he was pleased to compliment my housekeeping. 'I hear your ladyship's is the pleasantest house in town,' he said, 'but am I never to know more of it than hearsay?' On which I dropped my best curtsey, and told him that my house with all it contained was at his feet, and I had not finished my chocolate next morning before his royal highness's aide-de-camp was announced, who came to tell me his master would accept any invitation I was civil enough to send him."

"And this trivial conquest made you happy?"

"Sure it pleased me as any other toy would have done. 'Twas something to think about – whom I should invite – how I should dress my table. I strewed it from end to end with cut roses, brought up from Essex this morning, with the dew on their petals. Their perfume had a flavour of the East – some valley in Cashmere – till a succession of smoking roasts polluted the atmosphere. I had a mind to imitate mediæval feasts, and give the prince a pie full of live singing birds, but one hardly knows how the birds might behave when the pie was cut."

"You had one sensible man among your guests, I doubt."

"Merci du compliment – pour les autres. Pray who was this paragon?"

"Lord Dunkeld."

"You know Lord Dunkeld?"

"He was my intimate friend some years ago."

"Before you left off having any friends but Methodists?"

"Before I knew that life was too serious a thing for trifling friendships."

"I am glad you approve of Dunkeld. Of all my modish friends he is the one I like best."

"Is it not something better than liking? Dear Lady Kilrush, accept the counsel of a friend whose heart is tortured by the consciousness of your unprotected position, the infinite perils that surround youth and beauty in a world given over to folly – a world which the most appalling convulsion of nature and the sudden death of thousands of unprepared sinners could not awaken from its dream of pleasure. I see you in your grace and loveliness, of a character too generous to suspect evil, hemmed round with profligates, the companion of unfaithful wives and damaged misses. And since I cannot win you for Christ, since you are deaf and cold to the Saviour's voice, I would at least see you guarded by a man of honour – a man who knows the world he lives in, and would know how to protect an adored wife from its worst dangers."

"I hardly follow the drift of this harangue, sir."

"Marry Dunkeld. You could not choose a better man, and I know that he adores you."

"You are vastly kind, sir, to interest yourself in my matrimonial projects. But there is more of the old woman – the spinster aunt – in this unasked advice than I expected from so serious a person as Mr. Stobart."

"I fear you are offended."

He had grown pale to the lips as he talked to her. His whole countenance, and the thrilling note in his voice betrayed the intensity of his feeling.

"No, I am only amused. But I regret that you should have wasted trouble on my affairs. It is true that Lord Dunkeld has honoured me with the offer of his hand on more than one occasion, but he has had his answer; and he is so sensible a man that in rejecting him as a lover I have not lost him as a friend."

"He will offer again, and you will accept him."

"Never!" she exclaimed with sudden energy, dropping her light, half-mocking tone, and looking at him with flashing eyes. "I shall never take a second husband, sir. You may be sure of that."

A crimson fire flashed across his pallid face, and slowly faded. He drew a deep breath, and there was a silence of moments that seemed long.

"You – you – must have some reason for such a strange resolve."

"Yes, I have my reason."

"May I know it?" he asked, trembling with emotion.

"No, sir, neither you nor any one else. 'Tis my own secret. And now let us talk of other matters. It was on your conscience to give me a spinster aunt's advice. You have done your duty very prettily, and your conscience can be at rest."

He stood looking at her in a strange silence. The beautiful face which had fired with a transient passion was now only pensive. She seated herself in her favourite chair by the open window, took up a tapestry-frame, and began to work in minute stitches that needed exquisite precision of eye and hand.

How much of his future life or earthly happiness he would have given to fathom her thoughts! He had come there to persuade her to marry; he had convinced himself that she ought to marry; and yet his heart was beating with a wild gladness. He felt like a wretch who had escaped the gallows. The rope had been round his neck when the reprieve came.

"Tell me about your night-school," she said, without looking up from her work. "Do the numbers go on increasing?"

"I – I – can't talk of the school to-day," he said. "I have a world of business on my hands. Good-bye."

He left her on the instant without offering his hand, hurried through the hall, and opened the great door before the porter, somnolent after the morning's bustle, could struggle out of his leathern chair.

"Never, never, never more must I cross that threshold," he told himself as he walked away.

He stopped on the other side of the road, and looked back at the great handsome house, so dull externally, with its long rows of uniform windows, its massive pediment and heavy iron railings, with the tall extinguishers on each side of the door in a flourish of hammered iron.

"If I ever enter that house again I shall deserve to perish everlastingly," he thought.

'Twas four o'clock, and the sun was blazing, a midsummer afternoon in early May. He walked to his house in Lambeth like a man in a dream, from which he seemed to wake with a startled air when his wife ran out into the passage to welcome him.

"How pale you look," she said. "Is it one of your old headaches?"

"No, no; 'tis nothing but the sudden heat. You are pale enough yourself, poor little woman! Come, Lucy, give me an early tea, and I'll take you and the boy for a jaunt up the river."

"Oh, George, how good you are! 'Tis near a year since you gave us a treat, or yourself a holiday."

"I have worked too hard, perhaps, and might have given you more pleasure. 'Tis difficult not to be selfish, even in trying to do good."

"I'll have tea ready in a jiffy, and Georgie dressed. I've been sitting at the window watching the boats, and wishing ever so to be on the river."

"Thou shalt have thy wish for this once, love," he said gently.

He was silent all through the simple meal, eating hardly anything, though 'twas the first food he had tasted since a seven-o'clock breakfast. He found himself wondering at the sunshine and the brightness of things, like a man who has come away from a newly filled grave – a grave where all his hopes and affections lie buried.

Lucy and her boy sat opposite him, and in the gaiety of their own prattle were unaware of his silence. The boy was three years old, and of an inexhaustible loquacity, having been encouraged to babble in Lucy's lonely hours. The sweet little voice ran on like a ripple of music, his mother hushing him every now and then, while Stobart sat with his head leaning on his hand, thinking, thinking, thinking.

They went up the river to Putney in a skiff, Stobart rowing, and it was one of the happiest evenings in Lucy's life. She had occupation enough for all the way in pointing out the houses and churches and gardens to Georgie, who asked incessant questions. She did not see the rower's pallid brow, with its look of infinite pain.

They landed at Fulham, moored the boat at the bottom of some wooden steps, and sat on a green bank, while Georgie picked the flowers off the blossoming sedges. Stobart sat with his elbows on his knees, gazing at the opposite shore, the rustic street climbing up the hill, and white cottages scattered far apart against a background of meadowland golden with marsh marigolds.

"Has rowing made your head worse, George?" his wife asked timidly.

"No, dear, no! There is nothing the matter" – holding out his hand to her. "Only I have been thinking – thinking of you and the boy, and of your lives in that dull house by the river. It is dull, I'm afraid."

"Never, when you are at home," she answered quickly. "You are very studious, and you don't talk much; but I am happy, quite happy, when you are sitting there. To have your company is all I desire."

"I have been a neglectful husband of late, Lucy. Those poor wretches in the Marsh have taken too much of my time and thought. Whatever a man's work in the world may be, he ought to remember his home."

"It is only when you are away – quite away, on those long journeys with Mr. Wesley."

"I will give up those journeys. Let the men who have neither wives nor children carry on that work. Would you like me to take Orders, Lucy?"

"Take Orders?"

"Enter the Church of England as an ordained priest. I might settle down then, get a London living. I have friends who could help me. It would not be to break with Wesley; he is a staunch Churchman."

"Yes, yes, I should love to see you in a real pulpit in a handsome black gown. I should love you to be a clergyman. All the town would flock to hear you, and people would talk of you as they do of Mr. Whitefield."

"No, no. I have not the metal to forge his thunderbolts. But we can think about it. I mean to be a kinder husband, Lucy. Yes, my poor girl, a kinder husband. Sure ours was a love match, was it not?"

"I loved you from the moment I heard your voice, that night at the Foundery Chapel, when I woke out of a swoon and heard you speaking to me. And in all those happy days at Clapham, when I used to tremble at the sound of your footstep, and when you taught me to read good books, an ignorant girl like me, and to behave like a lady. Oh, George, you have always, always been good to me."

The sun set, and the stars shone out of the deep serene as they went home, and a profound peace fell upon George Stobart's melancholy soul. To do his duty! That was the only thing that remained to be done. He understood John Wesley's warning better now. His soul had been in peril unspeakable. He loved her, he loved her, that queen among women – loved her with a passion measured by her own perfections. As she outshone every woman he had ever seen in loveliness, mental and physical, so his love for her surpassed any love he had ever imagined.

And to-day, when she had looked at him with so glorious a light in her eyes, when she had declared she would never marry, and confessed that she had a secret – a secret she would tell to none – he had trembled with an exquisite joy, an overpowering fear, as the conviction that she loved him flashed into his mind.

Why not? 'Twas hardly strange that the flame which had kindled in his breast had found a responsive warmth in hers. They had been so much to each other, had lived in such harmony of desires and hopes, each equally earnest in the endeavour to redress some of the manifold wrongs of the world. She had flung herself heart and soul into his philanthropic work, and here they had ever been at one. Her presence, her voice, her sweetness and grace had become the first necessity of his life, the one thing without which life was worthless. Was it strange if he had become more to her than a common friend? Was it strange if, after giving him her friendship, she had given him her heart?