Foxglove Manor, Volume I (of III)

As Mr. Santley entered one of the walks which led to the terraced entrance, Mrs. Haldane, who had observed his approach, appeared on the stone steps, and descended to meet him.

“How good of you to come so early!” she exclaimed. “George will be delighted. He is in his laboratory, experimenting as usual. We shall join him, after you have had some refreshment.”

“No refreshment for me, thank you.”

“Are you quite sure? You must require something after so long a walk.”

“Nothing really, I assure you.”

“Well, I shall not press you, as we shall have dinner soon. Shall we go to Mr. Haldane? Have you visited the Manor before – not in our absence? How do you like it?”

“I envy you your magnificent woods.

“Yes; are they not charming? And you will like the house, too, when you have seen it.”

“Do you not find it dull, however?” asked the vicar, looking into her face with an expression of keen scrutiny. “You are still young – in the blossom of your youth – and society must still have its attractions for you.”

“One enjoys society all the more after a little seclusion.”

“No doubt.”

“And we have just returned, you must recollect, from a whole year of wandering and sight-seeing, so that it is a positive relief to awaken morning after morning and find the same peaceful landscape, the same quiet woods about one.”

“That is very natural; but the heart does not long remain content with the unchanging face of nature, however beautiful it may be. Even the best and strongest require sympathy, and when once we become conscious of that want – ”

“Have you begun to feel it?” she asked suddenly, as he paused.

“I suppose it is the inevitable experience of a clergyman in a country parish,” he replied, with a smile.

“Yes, I suppose it is. So few can take an interest in your tastes, and aspirations, and intellectual pleasures, and pursuits. Is not that so?”

“It may seem vanity to think so.”

“Oh no; I think not. The people you meet every day are mostly concerned in their turnips or the wheat or their cattle, and their talk is the merest village gossip. It must indeed be very depressing to listen day after day to nothing but that. One has, of course, a refuge in books.”

“But books are not life. The daydreams of the library are a poor substitute for the real action of a mans own heart and brain.”

“Then one has also the great fields of natural science to explore. I think you will find the work of my husband interesting, and if you could turn your mind in the same direction, you would find in him inexhaustible sympathy.”

As she spoke, they reached the low-arched portal of the chapel. The thick oaken door, studded with big iron nails, was open, and before them stood a man who bowed profoundly to Mrs. Haldane, and then darted a swift, penetrating glance at the vicar.

“Mr. Haldane is within, Baptisto?” she asked.

“Yes, senora.”

He stood aside to allow them to pass, and as Mr. Santley entered he regarded the man with an eye which photographed every feature of his dark Spanish face. It was a face which, once seen, stamped itself in haunting lineaments on the memory. A dusky olive complexion; a fierce, handsome mouth and chin; a broad, intelligent forehead; short, crisp black hair sprinkled with grey; a thin, black moustache, twisted and pointed at the ends; and a pair of big, black, unfathomable eyes, filled with liquid fire. It was the man’s eyes that arrested the attention first, gave character not only to the face but to the man himself, and indeed served to identify him. In the village, “the foreign gentleman with the eyes” was the popular and sufficient description of Baptisto.

CHAPTER VI. THE UNKNOWN GOD

As the vicar entered the chapel, he stopped short, struck with astonishment at the singular appearance of the interior.

The sunlight streaming through the leaded diamond panes of the casements, instead of falling on the familiar pews, flagged nave, and solemn walls, shone with a startling effect on the heterogeneous contents of a museum and laboratory. Along one side of the building were ranged several glass cases containing collections of fossils, arctic and tropical shells, antique implements of flint, stone, and bronze, and geological specimens. The walls were decorated with savage curiosities – shields of skin, carved clubs and paddles, spears and arrows tipped with flint or fishbone, mats of grass, strings of wampum, and dresses of skins and feathers. On a couple of small shelves grinned two rows of hideous crania, gathered as ethnic types from all quarters of the barbarian world, and beside them lay a plaster cast of a famous paleolithic skull. On the various stands and tables in different parts of the room were retorts and crucibles, curious tubes, glasses and flasks, electric jars and batteries, balances, microscopes, prisms, strange instruments of brass and glass, and a bewildering litter of odds and ends, for which only a student of science could find a name or a use. At the further end of the room, under the coloured east window, stood an escritoire covered with a confused mass of paper, and beside it stood a small table piled with books.

As Mrs. Haldane and the vicar entered, the master of Foxglove Manor, who had been writing, rose, laid down his pipe, buttoned his old velvet shooting-jacket, and hastened forward to welcome his visitor.

Baptisto gravely set a couple of chairs, and, at a sign from his master, bowed profoundly, and retired to the further end of the apartment.

“Do you smoke, Mr. Santley?” Mr. Haldane asked, glancing at a box of new clay pipes.

“No, thank you; but I do not dislike the smell of tobacco. I find, however, that smoking disagrees with me – irritates instead of soothing, as professors of the weed tell me it should do.”

“Touches the solar plexus, eh? Then beware of it! The value of the solar system is often determined by the condition of the solar plexus.”

“That does seem to be frequently the case,” replied Mr. Santley, smiling.

“Invariably, my dear sir, as the ancients were well aware when they formulated that comprehensive, but little comprehended, proverb of the sound mind in the sound body. It is curious how frequently modern science finds herself demonstrating the truth of the guesses of the old philosophers!”

“I perceive you are devoted to science,” said Mr. Santley, waving his hand towards the evidences of his host’s taste.

“Oh yes, he is perpetually experimenting in some direction or other,” said Mrs. Haldane, with a laugh. “I believe he and Baptisto would pass the night here, boiling germs or mounting all manner of invisible little monsters for the microscope, if I allowed them. You must know, Mr. Santley, that Mr. Haldane is writing a magnum opus– ‘The History of Morals,’ I believe, is to be the title – and what with his experiments and his chapters, he can scarcely find time to dine.”

“You have been happy in your subject,” said the vicar, turning to the master of the Manor. “The history of morals must be an enthralling book. I can scarcely imagine any subject affording larger scope for literary genius than this of the development of that divine law written on the heart of Adam. Why do you smile, may I ask?”

“Pardon me; I was not conscious that I did smile, except mentally. You will excuse me, however, if I frankly say that I was smiling at your conception of the genesis of morality. What you term the divine law written on the heart of Adam represents to me a very advanced stage in the development of the moral sense. We must begin far beyond Adam, my dear sir, if we would arrive at a philosophic appreciation of the subject. We must explore as far as possible into that misty and enigmatic period which precedes historical record; approach as nearly as may be to the time when in the savage, possibly semi-simian, brain of the earliest of our predecessors experience had begun to reiterate her proofs that what was good was to his personal advantage, and that what was bad entailed loss and suffering. It has hitherto been the habit to believe that the Decalogue was revealed from Sinai in thunder and lightning and clouds of darkness. As a dramatic image or allegory only should that be accepted. Clouds of darkness do indeed surround the genesis of the moral in man, and the law has been revealed by the deadly lightnings of disease and war and famine and misery, through unknown and innumerable generations. No divine law was written on the heart of the first man, or society would not be where it is to-day. No; unhappily, one might say, morality has been like everything else human – like everything else, human or not, – like the coloured flower to the plant, the gay plumage to the bird, a dearly bought conquest, a painfully laboured evolution.”

Once or twice during Mr. Haldane’s remarks, the vicar had raised his hand in disclaimer, but waited till he had finished before speaking.

“I was about to protest,” he now said, “against several of your expressions, but I fear controversy is of little good when the disputants argue from different premises. I perceive that you have accepted a theory of life which completely shuts out God from His creation.”

“Pardon me; like the old Greek, I can still raise an altar to the unknown God.”

“To a cold, remote, indifferent abstraction, then,” replied Mr. Santley, impulsively; “to a God unknowing as unknown – a vague, unrealizable, impersonal Power.”

“Impersonal, I grant you, and therefore more logical, even according to human reason, than the huge, passionate anthropomorphism of Jew and Christian. Consciousness and personality imply the notion of limits and conditions; and which is the grander idea – a limited, conditioned Power, however great, or, an absolute transcendent Godhead, free from all the limits which govern our finite being? God cannot be conscious as we understand consciousness, nor personal as we understand personality-If He were, then indeed we might well believe that we were made after His image and likeness.”

“And can you find comfort in such a creed? Can you turn for strength, or grace, or consolation to such a power as you describe?”

“Why should I?” asked Mr. Haldane, smiling. “If I need any of these things, my need is the result of some law violated or unobserved. The world is ruled by law, and every breach of law entails an inescapable penalty. If I suffer I must endure.”

“That is cold comfort for all the sum of misery in the world.”

“It is the only true comfort. The rest is delusion. Preach that every violated law avenges itself, not in some half mythical hell at the close of a life that seems illimitable – for men never do realize that they will one day die – but avenges itself here and now; preach that no crucified Redeemer can interfere between the violator of the law and its penalty; preach that if men sin they will infallibly suffer, and you will really do something to regenerate mankind. Christianity, with its doctrines of atonement and vicarious suffering and redemption, has done as much to fill the world with vice, crime, and disease as the most degraded, creed of pagan or savage. The groaning and travail of creation are clamant proofs that vicarious suffering and redemption are the veriest dreams.”

“Either purposely or inadvertently you mix up the physical and the moral law,” interposed the vicar.

“The physical and the moral are but one law, articles of the one universal code of nature.”

“True,” said the vicar. “I forgot that you denied man his immortal soul, as you deny him his divine sonship. And so you are content to believe that man is born to live, labour, suffer, and perish.”

“Concede that God is content that such should be man’s destiny,” replied Mr. Haldane, “what then?”

“What then?” echoed the vicar, rising from his chair with flashing eyes and agitated face; “why, then life is a fiendish mockery!”

Mr. Haldane’s face wore a grim smile as he heard the bitter emphasis of the vicar’s reply.

“Ah, my worthy friend,” he said, “you illustrate how necessary it is that when one has his hand full of truth he should only open it one finger at a time. If you revolt thus angrily against the new gospel, what can be expected from the ignorant and the vicious? The meaning and purpose of life does not depend on whether the individual man shall perish or shall be immortal. If perish he must, he may at least perish heroically. Annihilation or immortality does not affect the validity of religion, whose paramount aim is not to prepare for another world, but to make the best of this – to realize its ideal greatness and nobility. If life should suddenly appear a mockery, contrast the present with that remote past of the naked savage of the stone age, or the brutal condition of his more remote sylvan ancestor, learning to walk erect and to articulate; and then summon up a vision of the possible future, when superstition shall have ceased to embitter man’s life, when a knowledge of natural law shall have made men virtuous, when disease shall have vanished from the world, and the nations shall, in a golden age of peace and perfected arts, have learnt the method of a patriarchal longevity. Millions of individuals have wept and toiled and perished to secure for us the present; we and millions shall weep and toil and perish to secure the future for them.”

“And that you take to be the significance of life, the progress of the race?”

“And is not that at least as noble a significance as a heaven peopled with the penitent thief, the drunkard, the gallow’s-bird, the harlot, the thousand bestial types of humanity redeemed by vicarious agony – the thousand brutes of civilization who, in this age, are not fit for life even on this earth, to say nothing of an enlarged immortality?”

“But with ever-rising grades of immortality before them, even those bestial types might ascend to a perfect manhood, and shall they perish?”

“Have they not been ascending ever since the Miocene?” asked Mr. Haldane, with a scornful laugh. “However, it is little use discussing the matter. As you have said, we cannot agree upon first principles. Let me show you, instead, some of my curiosities. Did you ever see the Mentone skull? Here is a plaster cast of it.”

“And do you accept this dark and comfortless creed of your husband?” asked Mr. Santley, turning to Mrs. Haldane as he took the cast in his hand.

“Oh no,” she replied, raising her soft dark eyes to him earnestly; “the progress of humanity does not satisfy me as an explanation of the enigma of life in man or woman. I cannot abandon my old faith and trust in the God-Man for an unknown power who does not care for my suffering and cannot hear my prayers. What to me can such a god be? And what can life be but a mockery if my soul, with its yearnings and aspirations and ideals, ceases to exist after death – has no other world but this, in which I know its infinite wants can never be satisfied?”

The vicar’s face brightened, and his heart beat with a strange, impulsive ardour as he listened to her. Why had this woman, whose enthusiasm and sympathy might have enabled him to realize his own high ideal of the spiritual, been denied him? What evil destiny had bound her for ever to a man whose paralyzing creed must make a perpetual division between them – a man who could look into her sweet face and yet think of her as merely a beautiful animal; who could fold her in his arms, and yet tranquilly accept the teaching that at death that pure, radiant soul of hers would be for ever extinguished? These thoughts and feelings went through the vicars consciousness swiftly as sunshine and shadow over a landscape.

His eyes dropped on the plaster cast in his hand.

“This is very old?” he asked musingly.

“One of the oldest skulls in the world,” replied Mr. Haldane. “It was discovered by Dr. Rivière in a cave at Mentone, in a cliff overlooking the sea. The man belonged to the ancient stone age, and was contemporary with the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros of the Post-pliocene. The cave was a place of burial, and on the head of the skeleton was a thickly plaited network of sea-shells, with a fringe of deers’ teeth around the edge; the limbs were adorned with bracelets and anklets of shells also; and in front of the face was placed a little oxide of iron, used as war-paint, no doubt.”

“Even in the Post-pliocene, then,” said the vicar, “it would appear that man believed in a hereafter.”

“Ah, yes; it is an antique superstition, and even yet we have not outgrown it-Human progress is slow.”

“And this face was raised to the blue sky ages ago, looking for God!”

Mr. Haldane shrugged his shoulders, and smiled grimly.

“How is it possible that you, who-must share the weaknesses and sorrows of the human heart, can so stoically accept the horrible prospect of annihilation?” asked the vicar, half angrily.

“I accept truths. Do you imagine I prefer annihilation? I could wish that life were ordered otherwise, but wishing’ cannot change an eternal system. Immortality cannot be achieved by defying’ annihilation.”

“Have you realized death?” exclaimed the vicar, passionately. “Can you, dare you, look forward to a time when, say, your wife shall lie cold and lifeless, – and hold to the doctrine that you have lost her for ever, that never again shall your spirit mingle with hers, that you and she are for all eternity divorced?”

“You appeal to the passions, and not to the reason,” replied Mr. Haldane, coldly. “What holds good for the beast which perishes, holds good for all of us, and will hold good for those who come after us, and who will be greater and nobler than we.”

“Be it so,” replied the vicar, in an undertone. As he spoke he bit his lip, and his cheek coloured. The thought was not meant for utterance, but it slipped into words before he was aware. For the full significance of that thought was a singular exemplification of the conflicting spiritual and animal natures of the man. That divorce of death which had been pronounced inevitable opened before him, in a dreamy vista of the future, a new world of ecstatic beatitude, where his soul and the radiant spirit of the woman who stood beside him should be mingled together in indissoluble communion.

CHAPTER VII. CELESTIAL AFFINITIES

Shortly afterwards Mrs. Haldane suggested that they should take a turn about the grounds, instead of wasting the sunshine indoors. As they left the chapel the vicar paused and looked back at the ivy-draped building, with its half-hidden lancets.

“You have turned a sacred edifice to a strange use,” he said. “Here, within the walls where past generations have dwelt and worshipped, you have set up your apparatus for the destruction of man’s holiest heritage. Pardon me if I speak warmly, but to me this appears to be sacrilege.”

“The Church has always been intolerant of science and research,” replied Mr. Haldane, good-humouredly, “and it is the fortune of conflict if sometimes we are able to make reprisals. But, seriously, I see no desecration here.”

“No desecration in converting Gods house into a laboratory to analyze soul and spirit into function and force!”

“No desecration,” should say, “in converting the shrine of a narrow, selfish superstition into a schoolroom where one may learn a truer and a grander theology, and a less presumptuous and illusive theory of life. It is, however, impossible for us to be at one on these matters; let us at least agree to differ amicably. Your predecessor and I found much of common interest. He was of the old school, but life had taught him a kindly tolerance of opinion. To you, as I gleaned from your sermon yesterday, the new philosophy and modern criticism are familiar. You must surely concede that the old theological ground must be immeasurably widened, if you are still resolved to occupy it. Why should you fear truth, if God has indeed revealed Himself to the Church?”

“The Church does not fear truth,” replied the vicar; “but she does fear the wild speculations and guesses at truth which unsettle the faith of the world. For myself I have looked into some of these fantastic theories of science, and I repudiate them as at once blasphemous and hopeless. It is easy to destroy the old trust in the beneficence of Providence, in the redemption and destiny of man; but when you have accomplished that, you can go no further. Tyndall proves to you that all life in the world is the outcome of antecedent life; Haeckel contends that science must in the long run accept spontaneous generation. Your leading men are at loggerheads; and it signifies little which is right, for in either case the causa causans is only removed one link further back in the chain of causation. Some of you hold that there is only matter and force in the universe, but on others it is beginning to dawn that possibly matter and force are in the ultimate one and the same. And again, it signifies little which is right, for both, being conditioned, must have had a beginning. A God, a creative Power, is needed in the long run – ‘a power behind humanity, and behind all other things,’ as Herbert Spencer describes it; a God of whom science can predicate nothing, of whom science declares it to be beyond her province to speak, but of whom every heart is at some time vividly conscious and has been from the beginning – demonstrably from the Paleolithic period until now.”

“Oh, Mr. Santley, I am so pleased you have said that. I have often wished that I were able to answer my husband, but I have no power of argument,” said Mrs. Haldane, looking gratefully at the vicar. “You must not think he is not a good, a real practical Christian, in spite of his opinions.”

Mr. Haldane laughed quietly as his wife slipped her hand into his.

“As to the God of the Paleolithic man, Mr. Santley forgets that it was at best a personification of some of the great natural powers – wind; rain, thunder, sunshine, and moonlight; and as to Christianity, my dear, there is much in the teaching of Christ, and even of the Church, which I reverence and hold sacred. Morality, and the consequent civilization of the world, owes more to Christianity than to any other creed. It has done much evil, but I think it has done more good. Purified from its mythic delusions, it has still a splendid future before it.”

“And à propos of practical Christianity, Mr. Santley,” continued Mrs. Haldane, “I want to talk to you about the parish. I am eager to begin with my poor people again; and, by-the-bye, the children have, I understand, had no school treat yet this year. Now, sit down here and tell me all about your sick, in the first place.”

Mr. Haldane stood listening to the woes and illnesses of the village for a few minutes, and then left them together in deep discussions over flannels and medicines and nourishing food. Dinner passed pleasantly enough. The vicar had satisfied his conscience by protesting against the desecration of the chapel and the disastrous results of scientific research. Clearly it was useless, and worse than useless, to contend with this large-natured, clear-headed unbeliever. It was infinitely more agreeable to feel the soft dark light of Mrs. Haldane’s eyes dwelling on his face, and to listen to the music of her voice as she told him of their travels abroad. In his imagination the scenes she described rose before him, and he and she were the central figures in the clear, new landscape. He thought of their walks on the cliffs and on the sea-shore, in the golden days that had gone by. How easily it might have been!

The sun had gone down when he parted from his host and hostess at the great gate at the end of the avenue. He had declined their offer to drive him over to Omberley. He preferred walking in the cool of the evening, and the distance was, he professed, not at all too great. As he shook hands with her, that wild, etherial fancy of a world to come, in which her husband would have no claim to her, brightened his eyes and flushed his cheek. There was a strange nervous pressure in the touch of his hand, and an expression of surprise started into her face. He noticed it at once, and was warned. Mr. Haldane’s farewell was bluffly cordial, and he warmly pressed the vicar to call on them at any time that best suited his convenience.

They were pretty sure to be always at home, and they were not likely to have too much company.

As he walked along the high-road, bordered on one side with the green murmuring masses of foliage, and on the other with waving breadths of corn, his mind was absorbed in that new dream of transcendent love. There was nothing earthly or gross in this dawning glow of spiritual passion; indeed, it raised him in delicious exaltation beyond the coarseness of the physical, till, as it suddenly occurred to him that somewhere on his way Edith was waiting for him, his heart rose in revulsion at the recollection of her. At the same time there was a large element of the sensuous beauty of transient humanity in that celestial forecast. The pure, radiant spirit of the woman he loved still wore the sweet lineaments of her earthly loveliness. Death had not destroyed that magical face; those dark, luminous, loving eyes; that sweet shape of womanhood. The spiritual body was cast in the mould of the physical, and the chief difference lay in a shining mistiness of colour, which floated in a sort of elusive drapery about the glorified woman, and replaced the worldly silks and satins of the living wife. This spiritual being was no intangible abstraction, of which only the intellect could take cognizance. As in its temporal condition, it could still kiss and thrill with a touch. Clearly, however unconscious he might be of the fact, the vicar’s conception of the divine was intensely human, and his spiritual idealizations were the immediate growth and delicate blossom of the senses.