Yeast: a Problem Part 7

'Pardon, but you must excuse me.'

'Why? He is one of the saintliest of men!'

'To tell the truth, I have been to him already.'

'You do not mean it! And what did he tell you?'

'What the rest of the world does--hearsays.'

'But did you not find him most kind?'

'I went to him to be comforted and guided. He received me as a criminal. He told me that my first duty was penitence; that as long as I lived the life I did, he could not dare to cast his pearls before swine by answering my doubts; that I was in a state incapable of appreciating spiritual truths; and, therefore, he had no right to tell me any.'

'And what did he tell you?'

'Several spiritual lies instead, I thought. He told me, hearing me quote Schiller, to beware of the Germans, for they were all Pantheists at heart. I asked him whether he included Lange and Bunsen, and it appeared that he had never read a German book in his life. He then flew furiously at Mr. Carlyle, and I found that all he knew of him was from a certain review in the Quarterly. He called Boehmen a theosophic Atheist. I should have burst out at that, had I not read the very words in a High Church review the day before, and hoped that he was not aware of the impudent falsehood which he was retailing. Whenever I feebly interposed an objection to anything he said (for, after all, he talked on), he told me to hear the Catholic Church. I asked him which Catholic Church? He said the English. I asked him whether it was to be the Church of the sixth century, or the thirteenth, or the seventeenth or the eighteenth? He told me the one and eternal Church which belonged as much to the nineteenth century as to the first. I begged to know whether, then, I was to hear the Church according to Simeon, or according to Newman, or according to St. Paul; for they seemed to me a little at variance? He told me, austerely enough, that the mind of the Church was embodied in her Liturgy and Articles. To which I answered, that the mind of the episcopal clergy might, perhaps, be; but, then, how happened it that they were always quarrelling and calling hard names about the sense of those very doc.u.ments? And so I left him, a.s.suring him that, living in the nineteenth century, I wanted to hear the Church of the nineteenth century, and no other; and should be most happy to listen to her, as soon as she had made up her mind what to say.'

Argemone was angry and disappointed. She felt she could not cope with Lancelot's quaint logic, which, however unsound, cut deeper into questions than she had yet looked for herself. Somehow, too, she was tongue-tied before him just when she wanted to be most eloquent in behalf of her principles; and that fretted her still more. But his manner puzzled her most of all. First he would run on with his face turned away, as if soliloquising out into the air, and then suddenly look round at her with most fascinating humility; and, then, in a moment, a dark shade would pa.s.s over his countenance, and he would look like one possessed, and his lips wreathe in a sinister artificial smile, and his wild eyes glare through and through her with such cunning understanding of himself and her, that, for the first time in her life, she quailed and felt frightened, as if in the power of a madman. She turned hastily away to shake off the spell.

He sprang after her, almost on his knees, and looked up into her beautiful face with an imploring cry.

'What, do you, too, throw me off? Will you, too, treat the poor wild uneducated sportsman as a Pariah and an outcast, because he is not ashamed to be a man?--because he cannot stuff his soul's hunger with cut-and-dried hearsays, but dares to think for himself?-- because he wants to believe things, and dare not be satisfied with only believing that he ought to believe them?'

She paused, astonished.

'Ah, yes,' he went on, 'I hoped too much! What right had I to expect that you would understand me? What right, still more, to expect that you would stoop, any more than the rest of the world, to speak to me, as if I could become anything better than the wild hog I seem? Oh yes!--the chrysalis has no b.u.t.terfly in it, of course!

Stamp on the ugly motionless thing! And yet--you look so beautiful and good!--are all my dreams to perish, about the Alrunen and prophet-maidens, how they charmed our old fighting, hunting forefathers into purity and sweet obedience among their Saxon forests? Has woman forgotten her mission--to look at the heart and have mercy, while cold man looks at the act and condemns? Do you, too, like the rest of mankind, think no-belief better than misbelief; and smile on hypocrisy, lip-a.s.sent, practical Atheism, sooner than on the unpardonable sin of making a mistake? Will you, like the rest of this wise world, let a man's spirit rot asleep into the pit, if he will only lie quiet and not disturb your smooth respectabilities; but if he dares, in waking, to yawn in an unorthodox manner, knock him on the head at once, and "break the bruised reed," and "quench the smoking flax"? And yet you churchgoers have "renounced the world"!'

'What do you want, in Heaven's name?' asked Argemone, half terrified.

'I want YOU to tell me that. Here I am, with youth, health, strength, money, every blessing of life but one; and I am utterly miserable. I want some one to tell me what I want.'

'Is it not that you want--religion?'

'I see hundreds who have what you call religion, with whom I should scorn to change my irreligion.'

'But, Mr. Smith, are you not--are you not wicked?--They tell me so,'

said Argemone, with an effort, 'And is that not the cause of your disease?'

Lancelot laughed.

'No, fairest prophetess, it is the disease itself. "Why am I what I am, when I know more and more daily what I could be?"--That is the mystery; and my sins are the fruit, and not the root of it. Who will explain that?'

Argemone began,--

'The Church--'

'Oh, Miss Lavington,' cried he, impatiently, 'will you, too, send me back to that cold abstraction? I came to you, however presumptuous, for living, human advice to a living, human heart; and will you pa.s.s off on me that Proteus-dream the Church, which in every man's mouth has a different meaning? In one book, meaning a method of education, only it has never been carried out; in another, a system of polity,--only it has never been realised;--now a set of words written in books, on whose meaning all are divided; now a body of men who are daily excommunicating each other as heretics and apostates; now a universal idea; now the narrowest and most exclusive of all parties. Really, before you ask me to hear the Church, I have a right to ask you to define what the Church is.'

'Our Articles define it,' said Argemone drily.

'The "Visible Church," at least, it defines as "a company of faithful men, in which," etc. But how does it define the "Invisible" one? And what does "faithful" mean? What if I thought Cromwell and Pierre Leroux infinitely more faithful men in their way, and better members of the "Invisible Church," than the torturer-pedant Laud, or the facing bothways Protestant-Manichee Taylor?'

It was lucky for the life of young Love that the discussion went no further: Argemone was becoming scandalised beyond all measure.

But, happily, the colonel interposed,--

'Look here; tell me if you know for whom this sketch is meant?'

'Tregarva, the keeper: who can doubt?' answered they both at once.

'Has not Mellot succeeded perfectly?'

'Yes,' said Lancelot. 'But what wonder, with such a n.o.ble subject!

What a grand benevolence is enthroned on that lofty forehead!'

'Oh, you would say so, indeed,' interposed Honoria, 'if you knew him! The stories that I could tell you about him! How he would go into cottages, read to sick people by the hour, dress the children, cook the food for them, as tenderly as any woman! I found out, last winter, if you will believe it, that he lived on bread and water, to give out of his own wages--which are barely twelve s.h.i.+llings a week- -five s.h.i.+llings a week for more than two months to a poor labouring man, to prevent his going to the workhouse, and being parted from his wife and children.'

'n.o.ble, indeed!' said Lancelot. 'I do not wonder now at the effect his conversation just now had on me.'

'Has he been talking to you?' said Honoria eagerly. 'He seldom speaks to any one.'

'He has to me; and so well, that were I sure that the poor were as ill off as he says, and that I had the power of altering the system a hair, I could find it in my heart to excuse all political grievance-mongers, and turn one myself.'

Claude Mellot clapped his white woman-like hands.

'Bravo! bravo! O wonderful conversion! Lancelot has at last discovered that, besides the "glorious Past," there is a Present worthy of his sublime notice! We may now hope, in time, that he will discover the existence of a Future!'

'But, Mr. Mellot,' said Honoria, 'why have you been so unfaithful to your original? why have you, like all artists, been trying to soften and refine on your model?'

'Because, my dear lady, we are bound to see everything in its ideal- -not as it is, but as it ought to be, and will be, when the vices of this pitiful civilised world are exploded, and sanitary reform, and a variety of occupation, and harmonious education, let each man fulfil in body and soul the ideal which G.o.d embodied in him.'

'Fourierist!' cried Lancelot, laughing. 'But surely you never saw a face which had lost by wear less of the divine image? How thoroughly it exemplifies your great law of Protestant art, that "the Ideal is best manifested in the Peculiar." How cla.s.sic, how independent of clime or race, is its bland, majestic self- possession! how thoroughly Norse its ma.s.sive squareness!'

'And yet, as a Cornishman, he should be no Norseman.'

'I beg your pardon! Like all n.o.ble races, the Cornish owe their n.o.bleness to the impurity of their blood--to its perpetual loans from foreign veins. See how the serpentine curve of his nose, his long nostril, and protruding, sharp-cut lips, mark his share of Phoenician or Jewish blood! how Norse, again, that dome-shaped forehead! how Celtic those dark curls, that restless gray eye, with its "swinden blicken," like Von Troneg Hagen's in the Niebelungen Lied!'

He turned: Honoria was devouring his words. He saw it, for he was in love, and young love makes man's senses as keen as woman's.

'Look! look at him now!' said Claude, in a low voice. 'How he sits, with his hands on his knees, the enormous size of his limbs quite concealed by the careless grace, with his Egyptian face, like some dumb granite Memnon!'

'Only waiting,' said Lancelot, 'for the day-star to arise on him and awake him into voice.'

He looked at Honoria as he spoke. She blushed angrily; and yet a sort of sympathy arose from that moment between Lancelot and herself.

Our hero feared he had gone too far, and tried to turn the subject off.

The smooth mill-head was alive with rising trout.