Chapter XIV: "one Thread in Life Worth Spinning." (3)

Oh, the mental oppression of those May afternoons, the dull misery, vague, undefined, but intolerable, in which every sound jarred, even the silver-sweet of his child's joyous voice, in which every sight was steeped in gloom, even the lovely river, rose-flushed and smiling in the evening light!

He was miserable, and he tried to find the cause of his misery in things which lay remote from the one image he dared not contemplate. He told himself that the burden under which he ached was only the monotonous quiet of his days--the want of strong interests and active efforts such as kept John Wesley's mind in the freshness of a perpetual youth. _That_ was the true fountain of Jouvence--action, progress, the consciousness of struggle and victory. He had tasted the joy of successful effort in his itinerant preaching--the uncouth mob crowding as to a show at a fair, the insulting assaults of semi-savages, the triumph when he had subjugated those rough natures, when by the mere force of his eloquence, by the magnetism of his own strong faith, he compelled the railers to listen, and saw ribald jokes change to eager interest, scorn give place to awe, and tears roll down the faces that sin had stained and blemished. All this had been to him as the wine of life; and this he had promised to renounce in order that he might do his duty as that commonplace domestic animal, a kind husband.

Sitting on the river bank in the summer quiet, in the rosy afterglow, amidst tall sedges and wild flowers that love the river, with his child prattling at his knee, playing with his watch-ribbon, asking questions that were never answered, and his wife seated at his side supremely content in having won him to give her so much of his company, George Stobart meditated upon the great mistake of his life--his marriage!

He remembered how lovely a creature the printer's daughter had seemed to him in her ecstasy of faith, how divine a thing the soul newly awakened to a sense of sin, and a desire for saving grace. His heart had gone out to her in an overwhelming wave of enthusiasm, a feeling so exalted, so different from any passion of his unregenerate years, that he had welcomed it as the one pure and perfect love of his life. He thought God had given him this friendless, ill-used girl to be his helpmeet, the sharer of all his aspirations, his lifelong labours in the service of Christ, as of that impassioned hour in Wesley's Chapel.

Soon, too soon, he had discovered the shallow nature behind that hysterical emotion, the tepid piety which alone remained after the fervour of newly awakened feelings. Too soon he had found that petty interests and trivial domestic cares and joys filled the measure of his wife's mind; that she thought more of her tea-trays and her sofa-covers than of thousands of Kingswood miners won from Satan to Christ; that he must never look to her for sympathy with his highest aspirations, hardly for interest in his everyday work among the poor.

When he suggested that she should help in his day nurseries or his infant schools, she refused with a shudder, lest she should bring home small-pox or scarlet fever to little Georgie. That fear of pestilence hung like a funeral pall over Lambeth Marsh; and all his efforts to popularize inoculation could do very little against dense ignorance, and terror of a preventive measure that seemed as bad as the disease.

"If I've got to have the small-pox anyhow, I'd sooner leave it to Providence," was the usual argument.

His marriage, so gravely resolved, with such generous disdain of worldly advantage, had not brought him happiness. The fellowship in thought and feeling, which is the soul of marriage, was wanting in a union that had yet every appearance of domestic affection, and which sufficed for the wife's content. She was happy, looking no deeper than the surface of things, and finding content in the calm prosperity of her life, the absence of poverty and ill-usage. His marriage was a mistake, and to the man who had taken upon himself, as he had done, the service of Christ's poor, any marriage must needs be a mistake. For the itinerant preacher, for the man with a suffering populace depending on his care, home ties were fetters that needs must gall. He could not serve two masters. He must be a half-hearted philanthropist or a neglectful husband; only an occasional preacher or a deserter of his home. He remembered the priests he had met and conversed with in France, men who had no claims, no interests outside their Church and their parish; and it seemed to him that he had bound himself with a servitude that made his service of Christ a dead letter.

His mission work must end if he was to do his duty at home. His career as John Wesley's helper had been the most absorbing episode in his life--a source of unbounded satisfaction to mind and conscience. He had gloried in the result of his labours, never questioning, in his own fervid faith, whether conversions so sudden would stand the test of time. He had counted every convert as a gain for ever, every flood of tears as a cleansing stream. But, precious though this work had been to him, conscience urged him to renounce it. His first duty was to make a home for the woman he had sworn to love and cherish. To this end he would try to become a priest of the Established Church, strive to obtain a London living, however small, and confine his service of Christ within a narrow radius, till fortune should widen his area of work. He had loved his freedom hitherto, the power to work for his own hand; but for Lucy's sake he would bend his shoulders to the Episcopal yoke, and enter on a phase of humble obedience to authority, prepared at any hour to be called to account for his opinions, and to be hampered and constrained in his gospel teaching. He would have to suffer, as others of the Oxford Methodists and their disciples had suffered, from the tyranny of ecclesiastical intolerance; but he would face all difficulties, submit to many restrictions, to make a home for his wife. And then there was always the hope that the Church of England would be swept from the great dismal swamp of formalism on the strong tide of the Great Revival, which ran higher and wider with every year of Wesley's and Whitefield's life. The teaching begun by Whitefield among the prisoners in Gloucester jail, by Wesley in the humble meeting-house in Fetter Lane, had spread over England, Scotland, and Ireland with an irresistible force, and must finally make its power felt in the Established Church.

From the market cross and the country side, from the colliers of Bristol and the miners of Cornwall, from the wild fervour of services and sermons under starlit skies, from congregations numbered by thousands, George Stobart was prepared to restrict the scope of his work to an obscure London pulpit or a poverty-stricken parish, content if in so doing his conscience could be at rest. But the outlook was dreary, and he began to measure the length of his earthly pilgrimage, and foresaw the long progress of eventless years, some little good done, perhaps, some souls gained for Christ, many small sorrows alleviated, but all his work shut within a narrow space, controlled by other people's opinions.

One agony which other men of deep religious feeling have suffered was spared to John Wesley's helper. His faith knew no shadow of change. His absolute belief in his God and his Saviour remained to him in the lowest depth of mental depression. He might feel himself a creature of sinful impulses, an outcast from God, but he never doubted the existence of that God, or the reality of that hereafter the hope of which lies at the root of all religion. The paradise of saints, the infinite joys of eternity, hung on the balance of good and evil, a stupendous stake, which most men played for with such wild recklessness, till the lights of this life began to fade, and the awful possibilities of that other life beyond the veil flashed on their troubled souls.

He was startled from the automatic monotony of his life by a letter whose superscription so agitated him that his shaking hand could scarcely break the seal. Indeed, he did not break it for some moments, but sat with the letter in his hand, staring at the familiar writing--Antonia's writing, a strong and firm penmanship, every letter definite and upright, somewhat resembling Joseph Addison's. Oh, how embued with sin, how trapped and entangled in Satan's net, must his soul be when only the sight of Antonia's writing could so move him!

He was alone. The letter had been brought him by the little maid-servant. His wife was upstairs, busy with her son, whose footsteps might be heard running across the floor above.

He broke the seal at last, and unfolded her letter.

* * * * *

"St. James's Square, Monday night.

"DEAR SIR,

"I believe it is near a month since you have honoured me
with a visit, nor was I so fortunate as to meet you on
Saturday afternoon, when I spent some hours among our poor
friends in the Marsh, and went to look at Sally's grave in
the Baptist burial-ground. I must impose on your goodness
to order a neat headstone, with the dear creature's name
and age, and one of those Scripture texts which so consoled
her last hours. I doubt, since the afternoon was so fine,
you were treating yourself to a rustic holiday with Mrs.
Stobart, to whom I beg you to present my affectionate
compliments.

"Well, sir, since you are too busy to visit me, I must needs
thrust my company upon you, at the risk of being thought
troublesome. In one of my conversations with Sally Dormer
the poor soul entreated me, with tearful urgency, to hear
the famous preacher who converted her, believing that even
my stubborn mind must yield to his invincible arguments,
must be touched and melted by his heavenly eloquence.
To soothe her agitated spirits I promised to hear Mr.
Whitefield preach, a promise which I gave the more readily
as my curiosity had been aroused by the reports I had heard
of his genius.

"I am told that he is to preach at Kennington Common
to-morrow night, to a vaster audience than his new
Tabernacle, large as it is, could contain, and I should like
better to hear him under the starry vault of a June evening
than in the sultry fustiness of a crowded meeting-house.
I have ever been interested in your description of those
open-air meetings where you yourself have been the preacher.
There is something romantic and heart-stirring in your
picture of the rugged heath, the throng of humanity huddled
together under a wild night sky, seeing not each other's
faces, but hearing the beating of each other's hearts, the
quickened breath of agitated feeling, and in the midst of
that listening silence the shrill cry of some overwrought
creature falling to the ground in a transport of agitation,
which you and Mr. Wesley take to be the visitation of a
Divine Power.

"I have not courage to go alone to such a meeting, and I
do not care to ask any of my modish friends to go with me,
though there are several among my acquaintance who are
admirers of Mr. Whitefield, and occasional attendants at
Lady Huntingdon's pious assemblies. To them, did I express
this desire, I might seem a hypocrite. You who have sounded
the depths of my mind, and who know that although I am an
unbeliever I have never been a scoffer, will think more
indulgently of me.

"The service is to begin at ten o'clock. I shall call at
your door at nine, and ask you to accompany me to Kennington
in my coach.

"I remain, dear sir, with heartfelt respect,

"Your very sincere and humble servant,

"ANTONIA KILRUSH."

"What has happened, George?" asked his wife, who had come into the room unheard by him, while he was reading his letter. "You look as pleased as if you had come into a fortune."

He looked up at her with a bewildered air, and for the moment could not answer.

"What does she say, George? 'Tis from Lady Kilrush, I know, for her footman is waiting in the passage."

"Yes, 'tis from Lady Kilrush. She desires to hear Whitefield preach to-morrow night, and asks me to accompany her."

"What, is she coming round, after all? I doubt you will be monstrous proud if you convert her."

"I should be monstrous happy--but it will be God's work, not mine. My words have been like the idle wind. Whitefield's influence might do something; but, alas! I fear even he will fail to touch that proud heart, that resolute mind, so strong in the sense of intellectual power. Will you go with us to-morrow?"

"Mr. Whitefield's sermons are so long, and the heat at the Tabernacle always makes my head ache."

"'Tis not at the Tabernacle, but at Kennington, in the open air."

"And we may have to stand all the time. I think I'd rather stay at home with Georgie."

"Her ladyship will call for me at nine. The boy will be in bed and asleep hours before."

"I love to sit by his bed sewing. He wakes sometimes, and likes to find me there; and sometimes he has bad dreams, and wakes in a fright."

"And wants his mother's hand and voice to soothe his spirits. Happy child, who knows not the burden of sin, and has but shadowy fears that vanish at a word of comfort! Well, you must do as you please, Lucy; but there will be room for you in her ladyship's coach."

"Oh, she is always kind, and I should love the ride; but Mr. Whitefield's sermons are so long."

Stobart wrote briefly to assure Lady Kilrush of his pleasure in being her escort to Kennington, with the customary formal conclusion, protesting himself her ladyship's "most obliged and most devoted humble servant."

When his letter was despatched he went out to the Marsh, and walked for an hour in that waste region outside the streets and alleys where his work lay. His wife's parlour had grown too small for him. He felt stifled within those four walls.

He would see her again, spend some hours in her company, her trusted friend and protector, permitted to guard her amidst that rabble throng which was likely to assemble on the common. His heart beat with a fierce rapture at the thought of those coming hours. Only to stand by her side under the summer stars, hemmed round, half suffocated by the crowd; only to see her, and to hear the adored music of her voice, the voice which had so haunted him of late, that he had started up out of sleep sometimes, hearing her call his name. Vain delusion, that betrayed the drift of his dreams!

Her coach was at his door five minutes before the hour. The night was sultry, and the two parlour windows were wide open. He had been leaning with folded arms upon the window-sill watching for her, while Lucy sat at the table sewing by the light of two candles in tall brass candlesticks. She had thought the pair of tallow candles a mark of gentility in the beginning of her married life, when the remembrance of the slum near Moorfields was fresh; but she knew better now, having seen the splendours of St. James's Square, and wax candles reckoned by the hundred.

Her ladyship had four horses to her chariot, and a couple of postillions. The lamps flamed through the summer darkness.

"I may be late," Stobart said hurriedly. "Don't sit up for me, Lucy."

He saw Antonia's face at the coach door, and the sight of it so moved him that he could scarcely speak.

His wife ran to bid him good-bye, with her customary childlike kiss, standing on tip-toe to offer him her fresh young lips, but he waved her aside.

"We shall be late. Good-night."

His heart was beating furiously. On the threshold of his door he had half a mind to excuse himself to Antonia, and to go back. He felt as if the devil was tugging him into some dark labyrinth of doom. This man believed in the devil as firmly as he believed in God--believed in an actual omnipresent Satan, ubiquitous, ever on the watch to decoy sinners, ever eager to people hell with renegades from Christ. And he felt, with a thrill of agony, that he was in the devil's clutch to-night. Satan was spreading his choicest lure to catch the sinner's soul--a woman's ineffable beauty.

She was alone, and welcomed him with her sweetest smile.

"I am turning my back on Handel's new oratorio to hear your Mr. Whitefield," she said, as they shook hands; "but now the hour is approaching I feel as eager as if I were going to see a new Romeo as seducing as Spranger Barry."

"Ah, madam, dared I hope that Whitefield's eloquence could change this frivolous humour to a beginning of belief! Could your stubborn mind once bend itself to understand the mysteries of God's redeeming grace you would not long remain in darkness. Could but one ray of Divine truth stream in upon your soul, like the shaft of sunshine through Newton's shutter, you would soon be drowned in light, dazzled by the prismatic glory of the Heavenly Sun."

"And blinded, as I doubt you are, sir. I will not impose upon you. I do not go to Kennington to be assured of free grace, or to be convinced of sin; but first to keep a promise to the dead, and next to follow the fashion, which is to hear and criticize Mr. Whitefield. Some of my friends swear he is a finer orator than Mr. Pitt."

After this they remained silent for the greater part of the way, Antonia watching the road, where the houses were set back behind long gardens, and where the countrified inns had ample space in front for a horse-trough and rustic tables and benches, with here and there a row of fine elms. That sense of space and air which is so sadly wanting now in the mighty wilderness of brick and stone gave a rural charm to the suburbs when George II. was king. Ten minutes' walk took a man from town to country, from streets and alleys to meadow and cornfield, hedgerow and thicket. The perfume of summer flowers was in the air through which they drove, and the village that hemmed the fatal common, so recently a scene of ignominious death, was as rustic as a hamlet in Buckinghamshire.

The crowd had gathered thickly, and had spread itself over the greater part of the common when Lady Kilrush's chariot drew up on the outskirts of the assembly. Stobart alighted and went to reconnoitre. A platform had been erected about six feet from the ground, and on this there had been placed a row of chairs, and a table for the preacher, with a brass lantern standing on each side of the large quarto Bible. Whitefield was there, with one of his helpers, a member of Parliament, his devoted adherent, and two ladies, one of whom was the Countess of Yarmouth's daughter, Lady Chesterfield, dowered with the blood of the Guelfs, and a fine fortune from the royal coffers, Whitefield's most illustrious convert, and a shining light in Lady Huntingdon's saintly circle.

Stobart was on terms of friendship with the orator, and had no difficulty in obtaining a seat for Lady Kilrush. Indeed, her ladyship's name would have obtained the favour as easily had she sent it by her footman, for George Whitefield loved to melt patrician hearts, and draw tears from proud eyes. Enthusiast as he was, there is a something in his familiar letters which suggests that aristocratic converts counted double. They were the _écarté_ kings, the trump-aces in the game he played against Satan.

Stobart brought Antonia through the crowd, and placed her in a chair at the end of the platform, farthest from the preacher, lest the thunder of his tremendous voice should sound too close to her ear.

There was a chair to spare for himself, and he took his seat at her side, in the silence of that vast audience, waiting for the giving out of the hymn with which these open-air services usually began.

Never before had Antonia seen so vast an assemblage hushed in a serious expectancy, with faces all turned to one point, that central spot above the heads of the crowd where the lanterns made an atmosphere of faint yellow light around George Whitefield's black figure standing beside the table, with one hand resting upon an open Bible, and the other uplifted to command silence and attention.

From the preacher's platform, almost to the edge of the common the crowd extended, black and dense, a company gathered from all over London, and compounded of classes so various that almost every Metropolitan type might be found there, from the Churchman of highest dignity, come to criticize and condemn, to the street-hawker, the professional mendicant, come to taste an excitement scarcely inferior to gin.

Whitefield's helper gave out the number of the hymn, and recited the first two lines in slow and distinct tones. Then, with a burst of sound loud as the stormy breakers rolling over a rock-bound beach, there rose the voices of a multitude that none could number, harsh and sweet, loud and low, soprano and contralto, bass and tenor, mingled in one vast chorus of praise. The effect was stupendous, and Antonia felt a catching of her breath, that was almost a sob. Did those words mean nothing, after all? Was that cry of a believing throng only empty air?

A short extempore prayer followed from the helper. George Whitefield's voice had not yet been heard. The influence of his presence was enough, and it may have been that his dramatic instinct led him to keep himself in reserve till that moment of hush and expectancy in which he pronounced the first words of his text.

He stood there, supreme in a force that is rare in the history of mankind, the force that rules multitudes. 'Twas no commanding grace of person that impressed this prodigious assembly. He stood there, the central point in that tremendous throng, a very common figure, short, fat, in a black gown with huge sleeves, and a ridiculous white wig, features without beauty or grandeur, eyes with a decided squint; and that vast concourse thrilled at his presence, as at a messenger from the throne of God. This was the heaven-born orator, the man who at two-and-twenty years of age had held assembled thousands spell-bound by his eloquence, the man gifted with a voice of surpassing beauty, and with a dramatic genius which enabled him to clothe abstract ideas with flesh and blood, and make them live and move before his awestruck hearers.

It was this dramatic genius that made Whitefield supreme over the masses. Those of his admirers who had leisure to read and weigh his published sermons might discover that he had no message to deliver, that those trumpet tones were but reverberations in the air, that of all who flocked to hear the famous preacher, none ever carried home a convincing and practicable scheme of religious life; yet none could doubt the power of the man to stir the feelings, to excite, awaken and alarm the ignorant and unenlightened, to melt and to startle even his superiors in education and refinement. None could deny that the man who began life as a pot-boy in a Gloucester tavern was the greatest preacher of his time.

Antonia watched and listened with a keen interest, enduring the heated atmosphere of the crowd as best she might. She had thrown off her mantle, and the starlight shone upon the marble of her throat and the diamond heart that fastened her gauze kerchief. One large ruby set in the midst of the diamonds enhanced their whiteness; and it seemed to Stobart as he looked at her that the vivid crimson spot symbolized his own heart's blood, always bleeding for her, drop by drop. Absorbed by her interest in the preacher, she was unconscious of those eyes that gazed at her with an unspeakable love, knew not that for this man it was happiness only to sit by her side, to watch every change in the lovely face, every grace of the perfect form, oblivious of the crowd, the orator, of everything upon earth except her.

To-night Whitefield was in one of his gloomy moods, the preacher of unmitigated Calvinism. It may be that his late quarrel with the Bishop of Bangor, and the persecution he had suffered at his West End chapel had soured him, and that he was unconsciously influenced by the hardness of a world in which a mighty hunter of souls was the mark for narrow-minded opposition and vulgar ridicule. His purpose to-night seemed rather to appal than to convince, to instil despair rather than hope.

His text from the Epistle of St. Jude was pronounced in solemn tones that reached wide across that closely packed mass of humanity--

"For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.... Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever."

In an oration that lasted nearly two hours the preacher rang the changes on these tremendous words. Through every phase of sin, through every stage of the downward journey, his imagination followed the sinner, "of old ordained" to perish everlastingly. His vivid words described a soul inevitably lost; and again and again the melancholy music of those phrases, "raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars; clouds without water," rang out over the awe-stricken throng, moved by this picture of an imagined doom, with an emotion scarcely less intense than the thrill of agony that ran through the crowd at Tyburn when the doomed sinner swung into Eternity.

It was with the picture of Judas, his final example of sin and death, that the preacher closed his discourse.

"Let those who tell you there is no such thing as predestination turn their eyes upon Judas," he said, his voice falling to that grave note which preluded terror. "Let them consider the arch-apostate, the son of perdition. Oh, my brethren, had ever mortal man such opportunities of salvation as Judas had? Have the angels who stand about the throne of God, His worshippers and subordinates, half such privileges as Judas had? To be the friend and companion of his Saviour, in daily and familiar association with the Redeemer of souls; to walk by His side through the fields of Palestine; to sit at meat with Him; to be with Him in sadness and in joy, in prayer and praise; to journey over the wild sea with Him, and behold His power to still the tempest; to be His bosom friend; to live on an equality with God! Think of him, oh, you sinners who have never seen your Saviour's face, think of Judas! Think of those three years of sweet converse! Think of that Divine condescension which received sinful man in the brotherhood of friendship! Think of those journeys by the Lake of Gennesaret, those pilgrimages of prayer and praise, the daily, the hourly companionship with Divinity, the affectionate familiarity with Ineffable Wisdom!

"And, O God, great God of sinners, to think what came of such unutterable privileges! The disciple, the companion, bartered all that glory and delight, flung away those inestimable joys for a handful of silver. Which of you dare disbelieve in predestined damnation when he contemplates this hideous fall, when he sees the chosen brother of Jesus sink to the base huckstering of a Jonathan Wild, one of the sacred twelve reduced to the level of informers and thief-catchers, trucking his soul's salvation against thirty pieces of silver?

"'Twas the inexorable destiny of the foredoomed sinner, the appointed end to which those footsteps beside the lake, those footsteps across the mountain, those footsteps through the temple, and in the market-place, fast or slow, were always moving. God had sentenced this man to the most awful doom the mind can conceive, created to betray, the foredoomed destroyer of his Saviour. Who can question that he was marked for hell? How else account for such a fall? I despise that shallow reasoner who will tell you that the fall of Judas was a gradual descent, beginning in avarice, ending in murder. I laugh at that fond theorizer who will tell you that Judas was an ambitious dreamer, longing to behold the Kingdom of Christ triumphant on earth, and thinking to realize that dazzling dream by bringing about the conflict between his Master and earthly authority. I laugh at him who tells me that Judas expected to see the power of the Synagogue and the Forum shrivel like a burning scroll before the face of the Messiah; and that it was on the failure of that hope he rushed to the Field of Blood.

"No, dear sinners, a thousand and a thousand times no! Over that guilty head the fiat of the Eternal had gone forth, 'This is the son of perdition, this is he who shall betray the Son of God.'"

Then, after a long pause, sinking his mighty voice almost to a whisper, the preacher asked--

"Is there any son of perdition here to-night? Is there one among you whose stubborn heart answers not to his Saviour's call--a wretch in love with vice, who would rather have sensual pleasures on earth than everlasting bliss in heaven--a modern Judas who sells his Redeemer's love for thirty pieces of the devil's money, thirty profligate raptures, thirty vicious indulgences, thirty debauches in filthy taverns, thirty nights of riot and wantonness among gamesters and loose women?

"If there be any such, cast him from you. However near, however dear--father, brother, husband, son, flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone. Cast him out; oh, you who value your eternal happiness! You cannot mistake the mark of the lost soul. The son of perdition bears a brand of sin that no eye can fail to recognize. 'Tis Satan's broad-arrow, and stamps the wretch foredoomed to hell. You who would taste the joys of heaven, hold no fellowship with such on earth."

The great throng heard those concluding phrases in a profound silence. The heavy stillness of a sultry night, the muffled roll of distant thunder, the fitful lightning, now faint, now vivid, that flashed across the scene, intensified the dramatic effect of the sermon, and the crowds that had gathered noisily with much talk and some jeering, dwindled and melted away subdued and thoughtful.

Like many other of Whitefield's sermons which moved multitudes, there was little left after the last resonance of the mighty voice had sunk into silence. But the immediate effect of his oration was tremendous. Garrick had said that he would give a hundred pounds if he could say "Oh!" like Whitefield; and what Garrick could not do must have been something of exceptional power.

Antonia had given her whole mind to the preacher; yet for her his sermon was but a dramatic effort, and she went back to her coach full of wonder at that vast influence which a fine voice and a cultivated elocution had exercised over the multitude in England and America.

Upon George Stobart the preacher's influence was stronger.

"The man makes me believe against my own reason," he said, "which has ever striven against the idea of a fatal necessity. Come, Lady Kilrush, confess that his eloquence moved you."

"I confess as much with all my heart; and I am very glad to have heard him. He is a finer actor--an unconscious actor, of course--than Garrick; at least, he has a greater power to appal an ignorant crowd."

"I see you are as stubborn as ever."

"My mind is not a weather-cock, to be driven by changing winds. I doubt Mr. Whitefield may do good by such a discourse as we have heard to-night. He may scare feeble sinners, and teach them to believe that, weak and wicked as they are, God has marked them for salvation. But what of the sinner deeply sunk in guilt--will not he see only the hopelessness of any struggle to escape from Satan? 'So be it,' he will cry; 'if I am the son of perdition, let me drown my soul in sin, and forget the injustice of God.'"

George Stobart's only answer was a despairing sigh. "Let me drown my soul in sin, and forget God." Those awful words too well depicted the condition of his own mind to-night, sitting by her side in the roomy chariot, apart from her, with his face turned to the open window, his eyes looking into the summer stillness, unseeing, his heart beating with the fierce throb of passion held in check.

Was not Whitefield right, after all? Were there not men whose names were written in the Book of Doom, wretches not born to be judged, but judged before they were born? To-night that religion of despair seemed to him the only possible creed. He had looked back and remembered the sins of his youth--his life at Eton--his life in the Army. And he had believed the stain of those sins washed away in one ineffable hour of spiritual anguish and spiritual joy, the conviction of sin followed by the assurance of free grace. He had believed his past life annihilated, and himself made a new creature, pure as Adam before the fall. And in the years that had followed that day of grace he had walked with head erect, and eyes looking up to heaven, strong in his belief in Christ, but strongest in his reliance upon his own good works.

O God, what availed his labour in the service of humanity, his sacrifice of worldly gain, his preaching, his prayers, his faithful study of God's word? A wave of passion surged across his soul, and all of good that there had been in him was swept away. The original man, foredoomed to evil, appeared again. A soul drowned in sin! Her words, so carelessly spoken, had denounced him.

The silence lasted long, and they were nearing the lights of London when Antonia spoke.

"You are very silent, Mr. Stobart," she said; "I hope you have not any trouble on your mind to-night."

"No, no."

"Then 'tis that hideous doctrine troubles you."

"Perhaps. What if it be the only true key to God's mysteries? Yes, I believe there are souls given over to Satan."

"Oh, if you believe in Satan you can believe anything."

"Can you look round the world you live in and doubt the Power of Evil?"

"Of the evil within us, no. 'Tis in ourselves, in our own hearts and minds the devil lives. We have to fight him there. Oh, I believe in that devil, the devil of many names. Envy, hatred, malice, jealousy, vanity, self-love, discontent. I know the fiend under most of his aliases. But our part is to be stronger than our own evil inclinations. I am not afraid of the devil."

"He speaks for you in that arrogant speech, and his name is pride."

"Well, perhaps I spoke with too much assurance; but I believe pride is a virtue in women, as courage is in men. Or, perhaps, pride in women is only courage by another name."

He did not reply for some moments; and then an irrepressible impulse made him touch on a perilous subject.

"Have you changed your mind about Lord Dunkeld?"

"As how, sir?" she asked, with a chilling air.

"Have you resolved to accept him as a husband? Surely you could not be for ever adamant against so noble a suitor."

"You are vastly impertinent, to repeat a question that I answered some time ago. No, sir, I shall never accept Lord Dunkeld, nor any other suitor--had he the highest rank in the kingdom."

"You must have some strong reason."

"I have my reason, an all-sufficient reason; and now, sir, no more, I beg you. Indeed, I wonder that you can distress me by renewing this argument."

"Oh, madam, if you but knew the motive of my impertinence, the anguish of heart that speaks in those words! I would have you happily mated, Antonia. I--_I_--who adore you. Yes, though my jealous soul could scarce contemplate the image of your husband without the murderer's impulse--though to think of you belonging to another would be a torment worse than hell-fire. Could you know how I have wrestled with Satan; how when I urged you to marry Dunkeld every word I spoke was like a knife driven through my heart; how I longed to fling myself at your feet, to tell you, as I tell you now, at the peril of my salvation, that I love you, with all the strength of my soul, my soul drowned in sin, the unpardonable sin of loving you, the sin for which I must lose heaven and reckon with Satan, my darling sin, the sin unto death, never to be repented of."

He was on his knees, and his arms were about her, drawing her averted face towards his own with a wild violence, till her brow touched his, and his lips were pressed against her burning cheek. She felt the passion of his kiss, and his tears upon her face, before she wrenched herself from his arms, and dashed down the glass in front of her.

"Stop!" she called out to the postillions.

Startled at her authoritative cry, they pulled up their horses suddenly, with a loud clattering on the stones, a hundred yards from the bridge.

"You devil!" she said to Stobart, between her set teeth. "You that I took for a saint! I will not breathe the same air with you."

The carriage had hardly stopped when she opened the door and sprang out, not waiting for her footman to let down the steps. He had been asleep in the rumble, and only alighted a moment before his mistress.

She walked towards the bridge in a tumult of agitation, Stobart at her side, while her carriage and horses stood still, and her servants waited for orders, wondering at this strange caprice of their lady's.

"Hypocrite! hypocrite!" she repeated. "You--the Christian, the preacher who calls sinners to repentance; the man who sacrificed fortune to marry the girl he loved."

"I knew not what love meant."

"You chose a simple girl for your wife, and tired of her; pretended friendship for me, and under that mask of friendship nursed your profligate dreams; and now you dare insult me with your unholy love."

"I should not have so dared, madam--indeed, I believe I might have conquered my passion--so far as to remain for ever silent--if--if your own words----"

"My words? When have I ever spoken a word that could warrant such an affront?"

"When I advised you to accept Dunkeld--you refused with such impassioned vehemence--you confessed you had a reason."

"And you thought 'twas because I loved another woman's husband--that 'twas your saintly self I cared for? No, sir, 'twas because I swore to Kilrush on his death-bed that I would never belong to another, that our union, of but one tragical hour, should be all I would ever know of wedlock. I belong to him now as I belonged to him then. I love his memory now as I loved him then. That, sir, was my reason. Are you not ashamed of your fatuous self-esteem, which took it for a confession of love? Love for you, the Methodist preacher, the man of God!"

"Yes, I am ashamed--I am drinking the cup of shame."

"You have tricked me, sir. You have deceived me very cruelly. I trusted you--I thought that I had a friend--one man in the world who treated me like a woman of sense--who dared to disapprove, where all the world basely flattered me. And you are the worst of all--the snake in the grass. But do you think I fear you? I had a better man than you at my feet--the man I loved--my first love--a man with sovereign power over the hearts of women. Do you think I fear you? No, sir, 'twas then the tempter tried me. If there is a devil who assails women, I met him then, and vanquished him."

She trembled from head to foot in the excess of her feeling. She was leaning against the balustrade in one of the semicircular recesses on the bridge. He was sitting at the furthest end of the stone bench, his elbows on his knees, his face hidden.

"You have made me hate myself," he said. "'Tis useless to ask you to forgive me; but you can forget that so base a worm crawls upon this earth. _That_ will cost you but a slight effort."

"Yes, I will try to forget you; and to forget how much I valued your friendship, or the friendship of the honourable man I took you for."

"I was that man, madam. Our friendship did not begin in treachery. I was your true and honourable friend--till--till the devil saw me in my foolish pride, my arrogant confidence in good works."

"Well, sir, 'tis a dream ended," she said, in those grave contralto tones that had ever been like music in his ear--the lower key to which her voice dropped when she was deeply moved; "and from to-night be good enough to remember that we are strangers."

"I shall not forget, madam, nor shall my presence make the future troublesome to you."

Something in his words scared her.

"You will do nothing violent--nothing desperately wicked?"

"No, madam, whatever the tempter whispers, however sweetly the river murmurs of rest and oblivion, I shall not kill myself. For me there is the 'something after death'!"

"Will you tell them to bring my coach?"

He rose and obeyed without a word, and stood by bareheaded till she drove away, not even offering to assist her as she stepped into the carriage, attended by her footman. Stobart stood watching till the chariot vanished in the darkness of the street beyond the bridge, then flung himself on the bench in the recess, and sat with his arms folded on the stone parapet, and his forehead leaning upon them, lost in despairing thoughts.

Judas, Judas, the companion of Christ, foredoomed to everlasting misery--Judas, the son of perdition! And what of him who six years ago gave himself to God--convinced of sin, sincerely repenting of the errors of his youth, resolved to lead a new life, to live in Christ and for Christ? How confident he had been, how happy in the assurance of grace--all his thoughts, all his desires in subjection to the Divine will, living not by the strict letter of Christ's law, but by every counsel of perfection, deeming no sacrifice of self too severe, no labour too exacting, in that heavenly service. And now, after that holy apprenticeship, after all those years of duty and obedience, after mounting so high upon the ladder of life, to find himself lying in the mire at the foot of it, caught in the toils of Satan, and again the slave of sin!

The slave of sin--yes--for though he hated the sin, he went on sinning. He loved her--he loved her with a passion that the Water of Life could not quench. How vain were those supplications for grace, those confessions of guilt which broke from his convulsed lips, while her image filled his heart. How vain his cry to Christ for help, while _her_ voice sounded in his ears, and the thought of her indignation, her scorn, her icy indifference, reigned supreme in the fiery tumult of his brain.

Oh, how he loathed himself for his folly; how he writhed under a proud man's agony of humiliation at the thought of his fatuous self-delusion! Something in her look, something in her tone when she protested against a second marriage, had thrilled him with the conviction that his love had found its answer in her heart. When did that fatal love begin? He knew not how the insidious poison stole into his senses; but he could recall his first consciousness of that blissful slavery, his first lapse from honour. He could remember the hour and the moment, they two walking through the squalid street in the winter twilight, her gloved hand resting lightly on his arm, her eyes looking up at him, sapphire-blue under the long dark lashes, her low voice murmuring words of pity for the dying child that she had nursed in her lap, for the broken-hearted mother they had just left, and in his heart a wild rapture that was new and sweet.

"I love her, I love her," he had told himself in that moment. "But she will never know. It is as if I loved an angel. She is as far from me. My conscience can suffer no stain from so pure, so distant a love."

Self-deluded sinner! Hypocrite to himself! He knew now that this moment marked the beginning of apostasy, the law of sin warring against the inward light. He knew now that this woman--noble-minded, chaste, charitable, a creature of kindly impulses and generous acts, for him represented Antichrist, and that from the hour in which he proved her stubborn in unbelief, he should have renounced her friendship. He had paltered with truth, had tried to reconcile the kingdom of darkness with the kingdom of light, had been satisfied with the vague hope of a deferred conversion, and had made his bosom friend of the woman who denied his Master.

He loved her--with a love not to be repented of--a love that ran in his veins and moved his heart, and seemed as much a part of his being as the nerves and bones and flesh and blood that made him a man. He might lie in dust and ashes at the foot of the cross, scourge himself to death with the penitent's whip; but while the heart beat and the brain could think the wicked love would be there; and he would die adoring her, die and perish everlastingly, lost to salvation, cut off from Christ's compassion, by that unhallowed love.

There was the agony for him, the believer. To abhor sin, to believe in everlasting punishment, and to feel the impossibility of a saving repentance, to know himself a son of perdition; since what could avail the pangs of remorse for the man who went on sinning, whose whole life was coloured by a guilty passion?

The Divine Teacher's stern denunciation of such sin rang in his ears, as he crouched with folded arms on the stone parapet, alone in the summer darkness, an outcast from God.

"He that looketh upon a woman!" On his adulterous heart that sentence burnt like vitriol upon tender flesh. Only by ceasing to love her could he cease to sin; and, looking forward through the long vista of the coming years, he saw no possibility of change in his guilty heart, no hope of respite from yearning and regret. Six years of repentance for the sins and follies of his youth; six years of faithful service; six years of peace and self-approval; and now behold him thrust outside the gate, a soul more lost than in those unregenerate days when the consciousness of sin was first awakened in his mind, when remorse for a youthful intrigue, in which he had been the victim and sport of a vile woman, and for a duel that had ended fatally, first became intolerable. For him, the earnest believer, to whom religion was a terrible reality, the fall from a state of grace meant the loss of that great hope which alone can make life worth living, that "hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began." For him sin unrepented of meant everlasting despair, the pains of hell, the companionship of devils.

He left the bridge, and wandered along the river bank, past his own house, past the Archbishop's Palace, to the dreary marshes between Lambeth and Battersea--wandered like a man hunted by evil spirits; and it was not till daylight that he turned his steps slowly homeward, dejected and forlorn.