The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

"You have at least the consolation of your son's affection, Mrs. Stobart, and it must be pleasant for you to watch the growth of his intelligence. Is he as healthy and as handsome as when I saw him last?"

"Handsomer, I think, your ladyship."

"Will he be home from school presently? I should love to see him."

"Nay, madam, that's impossible, for he is living at the Bath with his grandmother, Lady Lanigan. Mr. Stobart wrote to her before he left Portsmouth, a farewell letter that melted her hard heart. 'Twas after the news of the taking of Louisburg, when her ladyship came here in a terrible fantig, and almost swooned when she saw the boy, and swore he was the image of his father at the same age."

"And she carried him away with her on a visit?"

"Yes, madam. She begged so hard that I could not deny her. For you see, madam, he is her only grandson; and there's a fortune going begging, as you may say. His father was too proud to try and bring her round; but if Georgie behaves prettily, who knows but she may send him to Eton – where his father was bred – and leave him the whole of her fortune?"

"True, madam. No doubt you have done best for your boy. But I fear you must feel lonely without him."

"Oh, I missed him sadly for the first week or two, madam; but a child in a house, where there's but one servant, is a constant trouble. In and out, in and out with muddy shoes, morning, noon, and night. 'Tis clean, clean, clean after them all day long, and it makes one's girl cross and impudent. He has his grandma's own woman to wash and dress him, and a footman to change his shoes when he comes in from the street."

"Is the visit to last long?"

"That depends upon his behaviour, and if her ladyship cottons to him."

"Well, so long as you can do without him, of course 'tis best," said Antonia, in a dull voice.

Her mind was wandering to that exile whose name she would not pronounce. To have sacrificed station and fortune for such a wife as this – for a woman without heart or brains, who had not enough natural feeling to tremble for a husband in danger, or to grieve at the absence of an only child!

After a few visits to her Lambeth pensioners, Lady Kilrush wearied of the work, and allowed herself to be charitable by deputy. She hated the starched prig who had taken Stobart's place in the parish. She missed the quick sympathy, the strength and earnestness of the man who had helped her to understand the world's outcasts; and as her social engagements were more numerous than last winter, she abandoned the attempt to combine philanthropy with fashion, and made Sophy her deputy in the Marsh.

Sophy had a tender heart, and loved to distribute her ladyship's bounty. She liked the priggish Wesleyan, Mr. Samson Barker, who lectured and domineered over her, but who was a conscientious youth, and innocent of all evil, the outcome of nonconformist ancestors, a feeble specimen of humanity, with a high narrow forehead, pale protuberant eyes, and a receding chin. Impressed by his mental and moral superiority, Sophy, who began by ridiculing him, soon thought him beautiful, and held it one of her highest privileges to sit under his favourite preacher, Mr. William Romaine, at St. Olave's, Southwark, and to be allowed to invite Mr. Barker to Antonia's tea-table now and then, where his appearance was a source of amusement to the rest of the company, who declared that her ladyship was at heart a Methodist, though she read Tindal and Toland, and affected liberal ideas.

"Before next season we shall hear of you among the Lady Bettys and Lady Fannys who throng Lady Huntingdon's drawing-room, and intoxicate their senses with Whitefield's raving," said one of her adorers; "and then there will be no more dinners and suppers, no more dances and drums – only gruel and flannel petticoats for old women."

Lady Kilrush drained the cup of London pleasures that winter, and was a leader in every aristocratic dissipation, shining like a star in all the choicest assemblies, but so erratic in her movements as to win for herself the sobriquet of "the Comet."

"The last spot of earth where 'twould seem reasonable to expect you is the place where one is most likely to find you," Mr. Walpole told her one night, at a dinner of hard-drinking and hard-playing politicians, where Antonia, Lady Coventry, and a couple of duchesses were the only women in a party of twenty.

She had adorers of every age, from octogenarian peers, and generals who had fought under Marlborough, to beardless boys just of age and squandering their twenty thousands a year at White's and the Cocoa Tree. The fact that she kept every admirer at the same distance made her irresistible. To be adamant where other women were wax; to receive the flatteries of trifling fops, the ardent worship of souls of flame, with the same goddess air, smiling at her victims, kind to all, but particular to none! That deliberate and stately North Briton, Lord Dunkeld, hung upon her footsteps with an untiring devotion that was the despair of a score of young women of quality, who wanted to marry him, and thought they had pretensions for the place.

'Twas a season of unusual gaiety, as if the thirst for pleasure were intensified by the news of the war, and the consciousness of fellow countrymen starving, perishing, massacred, scalped, or burnt alive, in the pathless forests across the Atlantic. The taking of Louisburg had set all England in a tumult of pride and delight, to the forgetfulness of the catastrophe at Ticonderoga, where there had been terrible losses under Abercromby, and of the death of Lord Howe, the young, the ardent, the born leader of men, slain by the enemy's first volley.

George Stobart's name figured in Amherst's despatches. He had fought in the trenches with his old regiment; he had been with Wolfe in the storming of Gallows Hill; and had been recommended for a commission on account of his gallant behaviour. People complimented Antonia about her "pious friend."

The King was near dying at the beginning of the winter, and the lion at the Tower happening to expire of old age, while his Majesty lay ill, the royal beast's dissolution was taken as a fatal augury, and his master was given over by the gossips. But King George recovered, and Sunday parties, drums and masquerades, auctions, ridottos, oratorios, operas, plays, and little suppers, went on again merrily all through the cold weather.

In the summer of 1759 Lady Kilrush carried out a long-cherished design of revisiting Italy. When last in that country her father's critical state of health had been a drag upon her movements. She would go there now a free agent, with ample leisure to explore the region in which she was most keenly interested, those romantic hills above the Lake of Como, where her mother's birthplace was to be found.

She took Sophy, her French maid, Rodolphine, and her first footman, who was an Italian, and travelled by Ostend and the Hague and the Rhine to Basle, then by Lucerne and Fluellen, to the rugged steeps of the St. Gothard, loitering on the road, and seeing all the churches and picture-galleries that were worth looking at, her travelling carriage half full of books, and her maid and footman following in a post-chaise with the luggage, which was a lighter load of trunks and imperials than a woman of ton might have been supposed to require, her ladyship's travelling toilette being of a severe simplicity.

When George II. was king there was a luxury of travelling, which made amends for the want of the train de luxe and the wagon-lit. It was the luxury of slowness; the delicious leisure of long days in the midst of exquisite scenery – by lake, and river, and mountain pass – that had time to grow into the mind and memory of the traveller; journeys in which there were long oases of rest; perfumed summer nights in quiet places, where the church bell was the only sound; mornings in obscure galleries where one picture in a catalogue of a hundred was a gem to be remembered ever after; glimpses of humble lives, saunterings in market-places, adventures, perils perhaps, an alarm of brigands, ears listening for a sudden shot ringing sharp among snow-clad hills – all the terrors, joys, chances, surprises of a difficult road; and at one's inn a warmth of welcome and a deferential service that in some wise atoned for bad cooking and ill-furnished rooms.

To Antonia that Italian journey offered a delicious repose from the fever of London pleasures. After George Stobart's departure for America there had been a jarring note in the harmony of life – a note that had to be drowned somehow; and hence had come that craving for excitement, that hastening from one trivial pleasure to another, which had made her so conspicuous a figure in the London of last winter.

In the solemn silence of everlasting hills, in a solitude that to Sophy seemed a thing of horror, Antonia thought of her last season; the crowded rooms, reeking with odours of pulvilio and melting wax, the painted faces, the atmosphere of heat and hair-powder, the diamonds; the haggard looks and burning eyes, round the tables where play ran high; the hatred and malice; the jests that wounded like daggers; the smiles that murdered reputations.

"Shall I ever go back to it all, and think a London season life's supreme felicity?" she wondered, standing in front of the Capuchins' Hospice, among the granite peaks of the St. Gothard, in the chill mountain air, while the mules were being saddled for the descent into Italy. They had ridden yesterday morning through the Urnerloch – that wonderful passage of two hundred feet through the solid rock, which had been made early in the century – by the green meadows of Andermatt, and across the Ursern valley; they had wound slowly upward through a wild and barren region to the friendly hospice where there was always welcome and shelter.

Lady Kilrush had left her English travelling carriage at Lucerne, and the journey from Airolo to Como would be made in an Italian post-chaise. Her footman was a native of Bellinzona, and was able to arrange all the details of their route.

At Como she hired one of the country boats, new from the builders, and engaged four stalwart Italian boatmen, who were to be in her service while she made a leisurely tour of the lake, stopping wherever the scene pleased her fancy, and putting up with the most primitive accommodation, provided the inn were clean, and the prospect beautiful.

That year of 1759, remarkable for the success of British arms in Europe, Hindostan, and America, the "great year," as Horace Walpole calls it, was also a year of golden weather, a summer of sunshine and cloudless skies, and Antonia revelled in the warmth and light of that lovely scene. It seemed as if every drop of blood in her veins rejoiced in the glory of her mother's birthplace. Here, in what spot she knew not, but somewhere along these sunlit hills that sloped gently to the lake, her mother's early years had been spent. She would have given much to find the spot; and in her long rambles with Sophy, or alone, she rarely passed a church without entering it, and if she could find the village priest rarely left him till he had searched the register of marriages for her father's name. But no such name appeared in those humble records; and she thought that her father might have carried his fugitive bride to Milan, or even into Switzerland, before the marriage ceremony was possible; the girl being under age, and the bridegroom a heretic. She looked with interest at every villa that sheltered a noble family, and questioned the peasants, and the people of the inn, about all the important inhabitants of their neighbourhood, hoping to hear in such or such a patrician family of a runaway marriage with a wandering Englishman. But the old people to whom she chiefly addressed herself had no memory of such an event.

It was the beginning of September, and the scene and atmosphere had lost nothing of their charm by familiarity, so having made the tour of the lake villages, and being somewhat tired of rough fare, ill-furnished rooms, and most of all of Sophy's repinings for the comforts of St. James's Square, Lady Kilrush hired a villa near the quaint little town of Bellagio, a villa perched almost at the point of the wooded promontory, with a garden that sloped to the water's edge. The villa belonged to one of Antonia's fashionable friends – a certain Lady Despard, a banker's widow, who gave herself more airs than an empress, and preferred Rome or Florence to London, because of the superior consequence her wealth gave her in cities where the measure of her rank was not too precisely known. This lady – after trying to imitate Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and live among a peasant population – had wearied of her villa and the little town at her gates, the church bells, the voices of the fishermen, the feasts and processions, and lack of modish company; and her house was to be let furnished with all its amenities.

Antonia engaged the villa for a month, at a liberal rent, and established herself, with Giuseppe, the Italian footman, as her major-domo, and a modest household of his selection; not a household of much polish or experience, but of willing hands, smiling faces, eyes that sparkled and danced with the golden light of Italy. Antonia was at home and happy among these people, who served her as it were upon their knees, and whose voices had a note that was like a caress.

"I can understand how my mother loved her garden of roses, her chestnut woods, and long terraces where the vines make a roof of shade, and how she must have pined in a dull English village – a Lincolnshire village, dismal flats without a tree, straight roads, and church steeples, with the lead-coloured sea making a level line in the distance, that seems like the end of the world. Alas, to her eyes, accustomed to this golden land, these mountains climbing up to heaven, how heart-breaking it must all have been!"

Summer in Italy, summer on the Lake of Como. Never till now had Antonia known what summer means – that perfect glory of sunlight, that magical atmosphere, half golden light and half azure haze, in which earthly things put on the glory of a dream. Never before had she enjoyed the restfulness of a land where the atmosphere and the light are enough for happiness, a sensuous happiness, perhaps, but leaving the spirit wings free for flight. After the stress and tumult of a London winter, the strife of paltry ambitions, the malevolence that called itself wit, the aching sense of loneliness in a crowd, what bliss to loll at ease in the spacious country boat, under the arched awning, while the oars dipped, and the water rippled, and life went by like a sleep! She had almost left off remembering the days of the week, the passage of time. She only knew that the moon was waning. That great golden disk which had bathed the hills in light and tempted her to loiter on the lake till midnight, was no more. There was only a ragged crescent that rose in the dead of night and filled her with melancholy. She stood at her open window, in the dark hour before dawn, drinking the cool sweet air, and full of sorrowful thoughts.

Where was George Stobart under that dwindling moon? In what grim and frowning wilderness, amidst what desolate waste of mountains, in what wild scene of savage warfare, hemmed round by painted foes, deafened by war cries more hideous than the howling of the wolves in the midnight woods, done to death by the ingenious cruelties of human fiends, or dying of famine and neglected wounds, crawling on bleeding feet till the wearied body dropped across the narrow track that the tramp of soldiers had worn through the wilderness, dying forsaken and alone, perhaps, in the pitilessness of a panic flight.

Her heart ached as she thought of him. Alas, why had he been false to his own convictions, to his own faith? She knew that he had once been sincere, had once been strong in a hope that she could not share. When first she knew him he had been a good man. She looked back, and recalled the domestic picture – the rustic lawn basking in the June sunshine, the warm air perfumed with pinks and southernwood, and the husband seated in his garden reading to his wife. She had looked down at him from the proud height of her philosophy, had scorned his unquestioning belief in things unseen; but she had respected him for his renunciation of all the luxuries and pleasures the common herd love.

Of the progress of the American campaign since the victory at Cape Breton she knew very little. The posts between Italy and England were of a hopeless irregularity, and the newspapers which she had ordered to be sent her were more than half of them lost or stopped on the way, while an occasional gossiping letter from a fashionable friend told her more of the new clothes at the Birthday than the triumphs or reverses of British arms. The London papers were at this time more concerned about Prince Ferdinand's victory over the French at Minden, and Lord George Sackville's strange backwardness in following up the Prince's success, than about the fortunes of Amherst or Forbes, and the wild warfare of the West.

It was perhaps from the desire to be better informed that Antonia was glad to see Lord Dunkeld, who surprised her by alighting from a boat at the landing stage of her villa, in the first week of her residence. He found her sitting in her garden, dreaming over a book. He had arrived at Varenna on the previous evening, he told her, and meant to stop some time at the inn, which commanded a fine view of the two lakes, and had better accommodation than was usual in out-of-the-way places.

"May one ask what brings your lordship to Italy, when most of the fine gentlemen I know are shooting partridges in Norfolk?" Antonia asked, when they were seated on a marble bench in front of the lake.

There was a fountain on the lawn near them, and oleanders white and red, masses of blossom and delicate lance-shaped leaves, made a screen against wind and sun, and there were red roses trailing all along the marble balustrade above the lake, and poppies pink, and red, and white, and pale pink cyclamen, filled a circular bed at the base of a statue of Flora, and all the garden seemed alive with colour and light. A double flight of steps, broad and shallow, went down to the water, and Dunkeld's boat was moored there, with his two boatmen lounging under the awning, idle and contented. It is a stiff pull from Varenna to the point, when the wind is blowing from Lecco.

"Will your ladyship scorn me if I confess that I love better to sit in an Italian garden than to tramp over a Norfolk stubble? There is a delicate freshness in the scent of a turnip field at early morning; but I prefer roses, and the company of one woman in the world."

"Oh, my lord, keep your compliments for St. James's. They are out of harmony with my life here."

"Am I to have no license to say foolish things, after having crossed the Alps to see you?"

"Oh, sir, I am very credulous, but I cannot believe you have been so simple as to travel over a thousand miles for a pleasure that you could enjoy next month in London."

"I should have died of that other month. I bore your absence as long as I could, and questioned all your friends and your hall-porter to discover any hope of your return. But no one would satisfy me, and my heart sickened of uncertainty. So ten days ago I ordered my chaise for Dover, and have scarce drawn rein till last night at Varenna, where I heard of your ladyship. Nay, spare me that vexed look. I come as a friend, not as an importunate suitor. Do you suppose I forget that I am forbid all ecstatic hopes?"

She gave a troubled sigh, and rose from the bench, with an agitated air.

"Lady Kilrush, cannot you believe in friendship?" he asked, following her.

"Hardly. I have believed, and have had my confidence betrayed."

"When you told me that I could never be your husband, that a life's devotion, the adoration of the Indian for his God, could not move your heart to love me, I swore to school myself to indifference, thought it was possible to live contentedly without you. I have not learnt that lesson, madam; but I have taught myself to think of your merits, your perfections, as I might of a sister's; and I ask you to give me something of a sister's regard. You need not fear me, madam. Youth and the ardour of youth have gone by. I doubt you know that I was unhappy in an early attachment, and that the exquisite creature who was to have been my wife died in my arms in her father's park, struck by lightning. She was but eighteen, and I less than three years older. The stroke that should have taken us both, and sealed our love for eternity, left me to mourn her, and to doubt God's goodness, till time chastened my rebellious thoughts."

"I have heard that sad story, my lord, and have understood why you were more serious than other men of your age and circumstances. You have been happy in finding the consolations of religion."

"Alas, madam, to be without a fixed hope in a better world is to live in the midst of chaos. A Christian's faith is like a lamp burning at the end of a long dark passage. No matter if it seem but an infinitesimal point of light in the distance, 'twill serve to guide his footsteps through the gloom."

"Would not duty, honour, conscience do as much for him?"

"Perhaps, madam, since conscience is but another name for the fear of God. Be sure the time will come when a mind so superior as yours will be awakened to the truth; but I doubt the Christian religion has suffered in your esteem by your acquaintance with Mr. Stobart. The conversation of a fanatical Methodist, the jargon of Wesley and Whitefield, their unctuous cant repeated parrot-wise by a tyro, could but move your disgust."

"Indeed, my lord, you wrong my cousin, George Stobart," Antonia answered eagerly. "He is no canter – no parrot-echo of another man's words. His sacrifice of fortune and station should vouch for his sincerity."

"Oh, we will say he is of the stuff that makes martyrs, if your ladyship pleases; but 'tis a pity that a gentleman of birth and breeding – a soldier – should have taken up with the Methodist crew. Some one told me he has the gift of preaching. I doubt he expounds the doctrine of irresistible grace in Lady Huntingdon's kitchen, for the vulgar, while Whitefield thumps a cushion in her ladyship's drawing-room."

"My cousin has left off preaching for these two years last past, sir, and is fighting for his king in North America."

"Gad's life! Then he is a better man than I took him for, when his puritan countenance and grey suit passed me in your ladyship's hall. The American campaign is no child's play. Even our sturdy Highlanders have been panic-struck at the cruelties of those Indian fiends, whose war-whoops surpass the Scottish yell as a tiger outroars an ox."

"Can your lordship tell me the latest news of the war?"

"'Tis a tale of barren victories and heavy losses. Englishmen and colonials have fought like heroes, and endured like martyrs; but I doubt the end of the campaign is still far off. The effect of last year's victory at Louisburg, at which we in England made such an uproar, was weakened by Abercromby's defeat at Ticonderoga, and by Amherst's refusal to risk an immediate attack upon Quebec. Had he taken Wolfe's advice Canada would have been ours before now; but Amherst ever erred on the side of caution. He is all for forts and block-houses, deliberation and defence – Wolfe all for the glorious hazards of attack."

"Then I doubt my cousin, Mr. Stobart, would sooner be with Wolfe than with Amherst."

"Is the gentleman such a fire-eater?"

"I believe he loves war, and would hate shilly-shally no less than Mr. Wolfe," Antonia answered, with a deep blush, and a sudden embarrassment.

The desperate mood in which Stobart left England had been in her mind as she spoke.

"Well, if he is with Amherst he has not seen much fighting since he left Cape Breton. Does he not write to you occasionally?"

"No, he writes only to his wife, and not often to her."

"'Tis not easy for a soldier on the march through a wilderness to despatch a letter – or even to write one," said Lord Dunkeld.

After this his lordship's boat was moored by the villa landing-stage in some hour of every day. His society was not unpleasant to Antonia in her Italian solitude. He had sworn to be her friend; and she thought she had at last discovered a man capable of friendship. She had no fear of being taken off her guard, shocked and insulted, as she had been by George Stobart. Here was no slumbering volcano, no snake in the grass, only a grave and dignified gentleman, of unimpeachable honour, and an old-fashioned piety, fully impressed by his own importance, who would fain have won her for his wife, but who, disappointed in that desire, wished to keep her for his friend.