In Silk Attire: A Novel

Yet it was the Rhine did all the mischief that night. Imagine for a moment the position. They had arrived in Cologne somewhere about five in the afternoon, and had driven to the Hôtel de Hollande, which, as everybody knows, overlooks the river. Then they had dined. Then they had walked round to the Cathedral, where the Count proudly contributed a single Friedrich towards helping King William in his efforts to complete the building. Then they had gone to one of the shops opposite, where the Count, in purchasing some photographs, insisted on talking German to a man who knew English thoroughly. Then he had stalked into Jean Marie Farina's place at the corner, and brought out one of Farina's largest bottles for Miss Brunel; he carrying it down to the hotel, the observant townspeople turning and staring at the big Englishman. By this time the sun had gone down, the twilight was growing darker, the faint lights of the city beginning to tell through the grey.

There were gardens, said the porter, at the top of the hotel – beautiful gardens, looking down on the river; if the gentlemen wished to smoke, wine could be carried up.

"No," said the Count. "I must commit the rudeness of going off to my room. I did not sleep, like you people, in the train."

So he bade them good-night and disappeared.

"But we ought to go up and see the gardens," said Annie Brunel.

"I think so," said Will. "Mrs. Christmas, will you take my arm? It is a long climb. And now that you have surrendered yourself to my care, may I recommend a luxury peculiar to the place? One ought never to sit in Rhine gardens without sparkling Muscatel, seltzer-water, and ice, to be drank out of frosted champagne-glasses, in the open air, with flowers around us, and the river below – "

"You anticipate," said Miss Brunel. "Perhaps the gardens are only a smoking-room, filled with people."

The "gardens" turned out to be a long and spacious balcony, not projecting from the building, but formed out of the upper floor. There were tables and chairs about; and a raised seat which ran along the entire front. The pillars supporting the roof were wound round with trailing evergreens, the tendrils and leaves of which scarcely stirred in the cool night air; finally, the place was quite empty.

Annie Brunel stepped over to the front of the balcony, and looked down; then a little cry of surprise and delight escaped her.

"Come," she said to Mrs. Christmas – "come over here; it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

Beautiful enough it was – far too beautiful to be put down here in words. The moon had arisen by this time – the yellow moon of the Rhine – and it had come up and over the vague brown shadows of Deutz until it hung above the river. Where it touched the water there was a broad lane of broken, rippling silver; but all the rest of the wide and silent stream was of a dull olive hue, on which (looking from this great height) you saw the sharp black hulls of the boats. Then far along the opposite bank, and across the bridges, and down on the quays underneath were glittering beads of orange fire; and on the river there were other lights – moving crimson and green spots which marked the lazy barges and the steamers out there. When one of the boats came slowly up, the olive-green plain was cleft in two, and you saw waving lines of silver widening out to the bank on either side; then the throb of the paddle and the roar of the steam ceased; a green lamp was run up to the masthead, to beam there like a fire-fly; the olive river grew smooth and silent again; and the perfect, breathless peace of the night was unbroken. A clear, transparent night, without darkness; and yet these points of orange, and green, and scarlet burned sharply; and the soft moonlight on the river shone whiter than phosphorus. So still a night, too, that the voices on the quays floated up to this high balcony – vague, echo-like, undistinguishable.

Annie Brunel was too much impressed by the singular loveliness of the night and of the picture before her to say anything. She sate up on the raised bench; and looking out from between the pillars, Will could see her figure, framed, as it were, by the surrounding leaves. Against the clear dark sky her head was softly defined, and her face caught a pale tinge of the moonlight as she sate quite still and seemed to listen.

He forgot all about the iced wine and his cigar. He forgot even Mrs. Christmas, who sate in the shadow of one of the pillars, and also looked down on the broad panorama before her.

Then Miss Brunel began to talk to him; and it seemed to him that her voice was unusually low, and sad, and tender. It may have been the melancholy of the place – for all very beautiful things haunt us and torture us with a vague, strange longing – or it may be that some old recollections had been awakened within her; but she spoke to him with a frank, close, touching confidence, such as he had never seen her exhibit to any one. Nor was he aware of the manner in which he reciprocated these confidences; nor of the dangerous simplicity of many things he said to her – suggestions which she was too much preoccupied to notice. But even in such rare moments as these, when we seem to throw off the cold attudinizing of life and speak direct to each other, heart to heart, a double mental process is possible, and we may be unconsciously shaping our wishes in accordance with those too exalted sentiments born of incautious speech. And Will went on in this fashion. The past was past; let no harm be said of it; and yet it had been unsatisfactory to him. There had been no generous warmth in it; no passionate glow; only the vague commonplaces of pleasure, which left no throb of regret behind them. And now he felt within him a capacity, a desire, for a fuller and richer life – a new, fresh, hopeful life, with undreamed of emotions and sensations. Why should he not leave England for ever? What was England to him? With only one companion, who had aspirations like his own, who could receive his confidences, who might love with a passion strong as that he knew lay latent in his own heart, who had these divine, exalted sympathies —

He was looking up at the beautiful face of the young girl, cold and clear-cut like marble, in the moonlight; and he was not aware that he had been thinking of her. All at once that horrible consciousness flashed in upon him like a bolt of consuming fire; his heart gave one big throb, and he almost staggered back as he said to himself, with remorse, and horror, and shame —

"O God, I love this woman with my whole soul; and what shall I say to my poor Dove?"

She sate up there, pure and calm, like some glorified saint, and saw nothing of the hell of contending emotions which raged below in her companion's breast. Unconscious of it all, she sate and dreamed the dreams of a happy and contented soul. As for him, he was overwhelmed with shame, and pity, and despair. And as he thought of Dove, and St. Mary-Kirby, the dull sonorous striking of some great bell suddenly reminded him of his promise.

He hastily pulled out his watch – half-past ten, English time. She, down in the quiet Kentish vale, had remembered his promise (indeed, had she not dreamed of it all day?) had gone to her window, and tenderly thought of her lover, and with happy tears in her eyes had sent him many a kindly message across the sea; he– what his thoughts had been at the same moment he scarcely dared confess to his awakened self.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE OUTCAST

"Quite true, my dear," said Mr. Anerley, gently. "If I had risen at six, gone and dipped myself in the river, and then taken a walk, I should have been in a sufficiently self-satisfied and virtuous frame of mind to have accompanied you to church. But I try to avoid carnal pride. Indeed, I don't know how Satan managed to develop so much intolerable vanity, unless he was in the habit of rising at a prodigiously early hour and taking a cold bath."

"Oh, papa, how dare you say such a thing?" said a soft voice just beside him; and he turned to the open breakfast-room window to see Dove's pretty face, under a bright little summer bonnet, looking in at him reproachfully.

"Come, get away to church, both of you," he said. "There goes the cracked bell."

So Mrs. Anerley and Dove went alone to church; the former very silent and sad. The tender little woman could do nothing for this husband of hers – nothing but pray for him, in an inaudible way, during those moments of solemn silence which occur between divisions of the service.

A quarter of an hour afterwards Mr. Anerley rose, and also walked along to the little grey building. All the people by this time were inside; and as he entered the churchyard the choir was singing. He sate down on one of the gravestones that were placed among the long, green, rank grass; and having pulled his straw hat over his forehead, to shelter his eyes and face from the strong sunlight, he listened, in a dreamy way, to the sweet singing of the children and the solemn and soft intoning of the organ.

It was his favourite method of going to church.

"You get all the emotional exaltation of the service," he used to say, "without having your intellect ruffled. And when the children have done their singing, instead of listening to a feeble sermon, you sit out in the clear sunlight and look down on the quiet valley, and the river, and the trees."

So he sate, and listened and dreamed, while the softened music played upon his fancies, and produced a moving panorama of pious scenes – of the old Jew-life, the early Christian wanderings, the mediæval mysteries, and superstitions, and heroisms.

"How fortunate religion has been," he thought, "to secure the exclusive aid of music and architecture! Philosophy and science have had to fight their way single-handed; but she has come armed with weapons of emotional coercion to over-awe and convince the intellectually unimpressionable. In a great cathedral, with slow, sonorous chanting reverberating through the long stone galleries, and tapers lit in the mysterious twilight, every man thinks it is religion, not art, which almost forces him down upon his knees."

Here the music ceased abruptly, and presently there was a confused murmur of syllables – the clergyman either preaching or reading.

"Sermons are like Scotch bagpipes," said Mr. Anerley to himself, as he rose and left the churchyard to wander down to the riverside. "They sound very well when one doesn't hear them."

That very day there was a conspiracy formed against the carnal peace of mind of this aimlessly speculating philosopher. Mr. Bexley's sermon had been specially touching to the few ladies who attended the little church; and the tender, conjugal soul of Mrs. Anerley was grieved beyond measure as she thought of the outcast whom she had left behind. Rhetorical threats of damnation passed lightly over her; indeed, you cannot easily persuade a woman that the lover of her youth has any cause to fear eternal punishment; but a far less sensitive woman than Mrs. Anerley might well have been saddened by that incomprehensible barrier which existed between her and her husband.

"And it is only on this one point," she thought to herself, bitterly. "Was there ever such a husband as he is – so forbearing, and kind, and generous? Was there ever such a father as he has shown himself to be, both to Will and to this poor Dove? And yet they talk of him as if he were a great sinner; and I know that Mrs. Bexley said she feared he was among the lost."

Be sure Mrs. Bexley did not gain in Mrs. Anerley's esteem by that unhappy conjecture. From the moment of its utterance, the two women, though they outwardly met with cold courtesy, were sworn enemies; and a feud which owed its origin to the question of the eternal destiny of a human soul, condescended to exhibit itself in a bitter rivalry as to which of the two disputants should be able to wear the most stylish bonnet. Was it the righteousness of her cause, or her husband's longer purse, which generally gave Mrs. Anerley the victory over the chagrined and mortified wife of the pastor?

But with Mr. Bexley, Mrs. Anerley continued on the most friendly terms; and on this day, so anxious was she, poor soul, to see her husband united to her in the bonds of faith, that she talked to Mr. Bexley for a few minutes, and begged him to call round in the evening and try the effect of spiritual counsel on this sheep who had wandered from the fold.

Mr. Bexley was precisely the man to undertake such a responsibility with gladness – nay, with eagerness. Many a time had he dined at Mr. Anerley's house; but, being a gentleman as well as a clergyman, he did not seek to take advantage of his position, and turn the kindly after-dinner talk of the household into a professional séance. But when he was appealed to by the wife of the mentally sick man he responded joyously. He was a very shy and nervously sensitive man – as you might have seen by his fine, lank, yellow hair, the singular purity of his complexion, the weakness of his eyes, and a certain spasmodic affection of the corner of his lips – but he had no fear of ridicule when he was on his Master's service. Mr. Anerley and he, indeed, were great friends; and the former, though he used to laugh at the clergyman's ignorance of guns and rods, and at his almost childish optimism, respected him as one honest man respects another. The rationalist looked upon the supernaturalisms of this neighbour of his with much curiosity, some wonder, and a little admiration. Yet he never could quite account for these phenomena. He could not understand, for instance, why one of the most subtle and dispassionate minds of our day should sadly address an old friend as from the other side of the grave, simply because the latter was removed from him by a few (to Mr. Anerley) unimportant and merely technical doctrinal points. Mr. Bexley was a constant puzzle to him. Indeed, the firmest facts in Mr. Bexley's theory of life were what a Sensationalist would at once put down as delusions or mere hypotheses. He was full of the most exalted ideas of duty, of moral responsibility, of the value of fine shades of opinion and psychical experience. He worshipped Dr. Newman, whose verses he regarded as a new light thrown upon the history of the soul. He had a passionate admiration for the Spectator; and shed, at least, a good deal of political enlightenment upon his parish by insisting on the farmers around reading each number as it was sent down from London. Mr. Bexley ought never to have been in the service of a State church. He had the "prophetic" instinct. Proselytism came as natural to him as the act of walking. He abhorred and detested leaving things alone, and letting them right themselves. This Kentish Jonah found a Nineveh wherever he went; he was never afraid to attack it single-handed; and most of all, he raised his voice against the materialists and sensationalists – the destroyers of the beautiful idealisms of the soul.

When one's wife and her favourite clergyman enter into league against one's convictions, the chances are that the convictions will suffer. Such combinations are unfair. There are some men, for example, who would refuse to be attended by a doctor who was on very friendly terms with an undertaker; they fear the chance of collusion.

It was almost dusk when Mr. Bexley went round to Chesnut Bank, and then he found Mr. Anerley seated outside, on a carved oaken bench, under some lime-trees fronting the lawn. He was alone, and on the rude table before him were some decanters and bottles, one or two fruit-plates, and a box of cigars.

"Oh, good evening, Mr. Bexley," said the lost one; "will you have a cigar?"

"Thank you."

"Sit down. That's claret next you, and there's still some sparkling Burgundy in the bottle. The children are very fond of it – I suppose because it looks like currant-jelly in hysterics."

Cigars and claret don't seem quite the avenue by which to approach an inquiry into the condition of a man's soul; but Mr. Bexley was too excited to heed what he did. He had the proselytising ecstasy upon him. He was like one of the old crusaders about to ride up to the gate of a godless Saracen city and demand its surrender. Did not Greatheart, when about to engage with the giant, refresh himself with the wine which Christiana carried?

"You were not at church this morning," he said, carelessly.

But his assumed carelessness was too evident; his forte was not diplomacy.

"Well, no," said Mr. Anerley, quietly: he did not take the trouble to reflect on the object of the question, for he had been considering graver matters when Mr. Bexley arrived.

"You have not been to church for a long time," continued the yellow-haired, soft-voiced preacher, insidiously but nervously. "Indeed, you don't seem to think church-going of any importance."

Mr. Anerley made no answer. Then the other, driven out of the diplomatic method of approach into his natural manner, immediately said —

"Mr. Anerley, do you never think that it is a man's duty to think about things which are not of this world? Do you expect always to be satisfied with worldly good? You and I have had long conversations together; and I have found you so reasonable, so unprejudiced, so free to conviction, that I am amazed you do not recognise the necessity of thinking of something beyond this life that we lead just now."

"Cannot people think of these things outside a church, Mr. Bexley?" he said; but his face was quite grave, if not sad. "As you came into the garden just now, I was perplexing myself with that very question. I was sitting wondering if I should die and become nothing without having discovered how it was I came to live. It seems so singular that one should pass out of consciousness into the inorganic earth without having discovered what the earth is, and without having the least notion of how he himself came to be. Geology only presents you with a notion of tremendous time and change – it gives no clue to the beginning. And if there was no beginning, how is it that my brief consciousness only flickers up for a short time, and dies down again into darkness and night? How did there come to be a beginning to my consciousness?"

Mr. Bexley was astounded and grieved. He was accustomed, even in that little parish, to find people who had painful doubts about the Mosaic record of creation, who seemed perplexed about the sun, moon, and stars having all been created in order to light up the earth, and who accepted with joy and gladness any possible theory of reconciliation which gave them a more rational view of the world and their belief in the Bible at the same time. But he had not met a man who had passed to one side, as quite unworthy of attention, all theologic solutions of the difficulty whatever.

The very novelty of the obstacle, however, only excited his evangelical fervour. He avowed his object in having visited Chesnut Bank that evening (without, however, revealing at whose suggestion he had undertaken the task), and boldly endeavoured to grapple with the demon of unbelief which had possession of his friend's mind. He insisted on the fallibility of human reason. He pointed out that, without religion, morality was unable to make its way among the uneducated. He demonstrated that every age had its own proper religion, and that an age without a religion was on the brink of suicide. All these things, and many more, he urged with much eloquence and undoubted sincerity, and at the end he was surprised to learn that his auditor quite coincided with everything he had uttered.

"I know," he said, "that the present attitude of the majority of intellectual men in this country is a dangerous and impossible one. Men cannot live in an atmosphere of criticism. What we want just now is a new gospel fitted for the times; we want a crusade of some sort – a powerful belief that will develop all sorts of sympathetic emotions and idealisms, instead of leaving one a prey to cold analysis. But we haven't got it; and those who have gone beyond this tidal flow of the last great religious flood, find themselves stranded on dry land, without a blade of grass or a drop of water in sight. Give me a gospel, and I'll take it with pleasure. Whether it be a new series of religious symbolisms, or a splendid system of ethics, demanding action, or even a belief in humanity as a supreme and beautiful power – anything that can convince me and compel me to admire, I will take. But I don't want to deal in old symbols, and old beliefs, and old theories, that fit me no more than the monkey-jacket in which my mother sent me to school."

"You say you have got beyond us, and yet you acknowledge that you have been disappointed," urged Mr. Bexley. "Why not return to the Church, if only for personal satisfaction? You cannot be happy in your present position. You must be tormented by the most fearful doubts and anticipations. Are you not afflicted by moments of utter darkness, in which you long for the kindly hand of some spiritual authority to assist you and comfort you? In such perilous moments I believe I should go mad if I were to assure myself, for a single passing instant, that I was alone and unaided – that I had been teaching lies and superstitions all my life – that the world was a big machine, and we the accidental dust thrown out by its great chemic motions – that all the aspirations of our soul, and the voice of conscience, and the standards of right at which we aim, were all delusions and mockeries. I would not have life on such terms. I should know that I only existed through the brute ignorance and superstition of my stronger-made fellow-men not permitting them to kill me and all such as I, and then to seize our means of living. I should look forward to the time when these superstitions should be cleared away, and the world become a general scramble, handed over to those who had the longest claws and the fiercest teeth."

"Then," said Mr. Anerley, with a smile, "if the first glimpse of change is likely to derange your intellect in that fashion, and force you to so many absurd conclusions, you are better where you are. And about those moments of spiritual darkness, and torture, and longing of which you speak – I do not understand what they are. I am never visited by them. I thank God I have a tolerable digestion."

"Digestion!" repeated the other, bitterly. "It all comes to that. Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow ye die; and the only resurrection you hope for is to breathe the sunlight again as a buttercup or a dandelion. What is it, may I ask, entices you to remain in the position you occupy – that of being an honest man, credited with constant generous actions, kindly to your inferiors, and what not? Why should you be moral at all? Why should you not, if it pleased you, go into any depths of dissipation and debauchery? There is nothing to restrain you."

"Pardon me, there is. If it were worth the trouble, I dare say I could convince you that my code of morality is not only more comprehensive and more strict than yours, but that it rests on more explicable and more permanent foundations. But it is not worth the trouble to convince a single man at a time in which we are waiting for some great and general renovation."

So they went on, in the faint darkness, under the black branches and the grey sky. Mr. Bexley was not going to relinquish hope at the very outset; and he proceeded from point to point, adducing all the considerations which made it very much more advantageous to be orthodox than to be not orthodox. He might have persuaded a man who was hovering between the two states to go over to the bosom of the Church; but his entreaties, and representations, and arguments had little effect upon a man who was separated from him by the great chasm of a dawning era.

"Perhaps I may lament my present negative, critical attitude," said Mr. Anerley, quite frankly, "but I prefer it to yours. The successive tides of faith which pass over the world leave little circling eddies, and I have been caught in one of these; I cannot tell in what direction the next great movement will be – I only know I shall not see it."

The end of it was, just then, that Mr. Anerley begged of his neighbour and counsellor to go in-doors and have some supper with them. Mr. Bexley, a little disheartened, but still confident in his spiritual power to overcome, some time or other, the strong resistance of the unconverted man's heart, agreed; and so they both went into the house and entered the dining-room, where the supper-table had just been prepared. Mrs. Anerley started up, with her face red as fire, when she saw her husband and the clergyman enter together; and this obvious departure from her usual self-possessed and easy manner at once struck Mr. Anerley as being very peculiar. Nay, the poor little woman, feeling herself very guilty – harbouring a secret notion that she had tried to entrap her generous and open-minded husband – was more than ordinarily attentive and courteous to him. She was far more civil, and obliging, and formal towards him than towards her stranger-guest; and she never by any chance lifted her eyes to his.