“I shall never rest again!” — he said— “Not in the full sense that rest implies — until the end! I must occupy every moment now, — every moment, Douay! — or I shall go mad! The old days of leisurely study are over, — there is no more pleasure in peace! I must work, and I must fight — Oh my God, yes! I must fight hard—” —
He broke off — and seemed to lose himself in a sudden mist of misery.
“Yes, you will fight against your sorrow,” — said Douay soothingly— “That will be well for you! and brave—”
“Against my sorrow?” Everton’s voice rang out with a sudden bitter clearness— “No! I shall not fight against that, for that may be my only safety! Douay, don’t you understand? I must fight against a far worse enemy than sorrow — an enemy that is tearing my soul to shreds at this very moment — the monstrous mocking devil of Doubt!”
His face was white with strongly suppressed emotion; the trouble of his mind expressed itself in his very attitude, and Douay met his anguished, appealing gaze with a tender and compassionate serenity.
“In my Church,” he said softly, “there is no room for Doubt!”
“No room? No! — and why? Because you are slaves! — not to God, but to Man!” And the pent-up storm of thought suddenly let loose poured itself out in a torrent of unpremeditated speech— “And yet — one of the slaves as you are and as you are bound to be, doubt creeps in on your soul as on mine! — and sometimes — only sometimes — you wonder, as I do, whether the great Creator is the lover or the hater of all that He had made! Douay, forgive me! — be patient with me! — I must speak! You are happier than I in one respect — you have never loved — you have never married. Your Church knows so well that the ties of human affection are so much stronger than all that religion can teach, that she wisely forbids them to her priests. She sets before you Woman as a snare of the devil, instead of being what she is at her best — man’s only guardian angel!
Douay, if you knew — if you knew — !”
He paced the room restlessly, and Douay, answering nothing, sat down by the writing-desk, leaning one elbow on it and covering his eyes with his hand.
“If you knew,” went on Everton, passionately— “what my wife was to me! Oh, she was so full of sweet unwisdom! — so foolishly loving! — such a child in her fancies, and so pure in her soul! There was nothing heroic or strong about her — she was no guide, no adviser, — but she was all sweetness — just that! — all tenderness, — the very balm for my wounds of life! You do not know, — you cannot feel — how should you? — what it is to love! There was no gross passion in such love as ours; it was a love that God Himself might have spared had He been kind! But you do not understand. You have missed it all. It is what a dying lad said to me three years ago when I tried to comfort him with the hope of Heaven—’ Love is what the Lord Christ never knew — it’s what He missed — love for a woman — and there He fails to be our brother in sorrow,’ That’s true! The priests of your Church try to follow His example, — but He was divine — priests are but men — and men cannot live without love!”
With that he checked himself abruptly and stood rapt in a sudden cloud of thought. Douay removed his hand from his eyes and looked at him.
“Well!” he said, in a voice that trembled a little— “You have not finished. Go on!”
With a quick start Everton came out of his momentary reverie. He met Douay’s steady glance, and gave a wearied, half-apologetic gesture.
“You see my condition,” — he said, more calmly— “It is one of fear and, if I may put it so, of horrible amazement that God whom we worship as ‘Our Father’ can, for no cause at all, so grievously afflict His miserable creation! For half our sins are the result of ignorance which is not our fault, — and the love we are instinctively moved to feel for one another is the best part of us. Only think of it! This very day last week Azalea was alive — here, in my arms, — now, her sweet body is lying stiff and cold and lonely down in the dark earth, — and how has this cruelty been wrought? Simply because Heaven and the fates have favored a drunkard’s vengeance! A drunkard! — his diseased brain and reckless hand pitted against the pure life of an innocent woman! Is it just? Is it sport for the Almighty? Tell me? Can it be called Divine sport? — or Divine malice?”
“Richard, Richard!” exclaimed Douay, in poignant accents of grief— “I cannot hear you say these wild things, my friend! No! — for you are not wicked, — you are not blasphemous, — you are an honest and courageous man! But your soul is hanging on the cross to-day — and with our Blessed Lord Himself you cry:— ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me!’ My friend, my dear, dear friend, be patient! Sorrow is as necessary to the spirit as pain is to the body. Without pain, we should not appreciate health — without sorrow we should not understand joy. Surely this is the obvious? Your great and terrible grief has been visited upon you for some necessary purpose — you do not see it? — no! — but do not question the ways of the Almighty, Richard! — do not question! Say ‘Thy Will be done’ — with a pure intention and wait!” —
He was strongly moved, and his kind eyes were full of tears. But Richard stood looking at him, coldly impassive.
“You talk of sorrow and joy, pain and health,” — he said— “as if these things could any more affect me! Do you not realize that there may be a state of mind which no emotion can touch? That the soul of a man may be so numbed by speechless agony that even physical torture would scarcely draw from him a groan, and that in the dull monotony of the daily round there is nothing he so entirely longs for as death to end all? Do you know these lines of a modern poet?
“The pulse of war and passion of wonder,
The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine,
The stars that sing and the loves that thunder,
The music burning at heart like wine,
An armed archangel whose hands raise up
All senses mixed in the spirit’s cup,
Till flesh and spirit are molten asunder —
These things are over and no more mine!”
His voice, full in tone at first, dropped to a tired whisper, and he stared with a melancholy, unseeing gaze out through the window across which the curtains were not yet drawn for the night. Two or three stars sparkled in the glimmer of sky behind the panes, — the reflection of the lamp in the room flung a ray of light across the grass. The shapes of the trees were blurred in shadows, — the whole view of the garden, so lovely by day, seemed ‘without form and void.’ A deep sigh broke from his lips.
“I am not fit to speak to you, Douay,” — he went on, after a heavy pause— “Nor am I sufficiently myself to listen to consolation. All I can think of is that the light of my life has gone out, — and that my darling lies there all alone,” — and he pointed to the outside darkness where the tower of Shadbrook Church showed just the faintest gleam of gray-whiteness through the black clumps of trees— “Alone, — without husband or child, — alone in the grave!” — he stopped a moment, — then continued slowly— “by God’s will! And I must be alone, too, to-night, to reason with my destiny — to see if I can understand it, — so I will ask you to leave me to myself. Do not look so anxious! — you need not be afraid that I will do any violence to my own wretched being. I am not a coward. If I were I should not want to get face to face with God’s intention towards me. You are the kindest of friends, Douay! — and I thank you from my heart for all you have been and are to me, — but go now! — go back to your own little peaceful sanctuary where there is ‘no room for doubt’ — and leave me and the devils that beset me to fight it out together!”
Something singularly compelling and powerful was in his expression as he said these words, and Douay was fully conscious of the magnetism of a soul and intellect stronger than his own.
“It shall be as you wish!” he answered simply, almost humbly— “I will come again—”
“No — let me come to you first,” — said Everton— “Give me time. For I will no
t come till I have conquered, or am conquered!”
With very few more words they parted. Everton left to his own company in the house, — a house now grown so quiet since the merry laughter and light step of its fair mistress had ceased to stir the soft echoes, — stood for a few minutes listening to the complete silence. Then going noiselessly upstairs, he entered the nursery. Little Laurence was there, fast asleep. His nurse had, at Squire Hazlitt’s suggestion, taken him to Shadbrook Hall for the day while his mother’s funeral was in progress, and he had been brought back after it was over, rather tired and perplexed. Curled up cosily in his little bed, with one chubby arm outside the coverlet, he looked the fairer and finer image of Azalea in her fairest and sweetest moods, and Everton bent over him with a tenderness more sad than fond.
“How much better for him to die now!” he thought— “With all his beliefs untouched — his dreams unspoilt — than to live on and lose everything, even to the loss of faith in God!”
Then, — half ashamed of the bitterness that was in him — he softly withdrew, and going down again to his study resumed the almost mechanical occupation in which Douay had interrupted him, — the sorting of the letters and cards of condolence which would all have to be acknowledged. In doing this he came upon several which had not yet been opened, — one among these, with a gold crest emblazoned on the flap of the square-shaped envelope, had a faint, cloying perfume about it that affected him with a sense of nausea. He glanced at the handwriting, which was quite unfamiliar to him, and opened it. The sickly scent grew stronger as he drew out a small creamy sheet of notepaper, also crested in gold, but bearing no address. A couple of lines were written on it; —
‘I am sorry for your sorrow.
JACYNTH.’
The letter dropped from his hand to the floor, and he sat inert, lost in somber musing.
CHAPTER XVI
WHEN anything tragic or unfortunate occurs in a family it is the usual custom to shut up the house and go away for a change of air and scene. That Richard Everton did not follow this conventional line of action was a surprise to all those excellent people who expected him to do as they themselves would have done under similar circumstances. It was extraordinary, they said, — quite extraordinary — that he did not at once take a trip abroad or something of that kind. For there is a curious idea deeply implanted in the minds of society-mongers that if your heart is broken or your life wrecked, you will be all right if you go to Paris or Vienna or even New York. Home, on which you may possibly have expended your tenderest care, as well as most of your cash, is supposed to exercise no binding or soothing influence upon you. You must immediately start forth like a wandering cat and howl your griefs to the moon on foreign pantiles rather than on your own. It was, therefore, incredible, said the Everybody that is Nobody, that the Vicar of Shadbrook should remain in his Vicarage all alone after the burial of his murdered wife, and show no intention of moving, not even for so much as a week-end. Perhaps the poor man was going mad? And the gossips shook their heads and pursed their lips gloomily when they heard that he kept himself for the most part shut up within the four walls of his study reading and writing and seeing no visitors, his only companion being his little son. The duties of the parish were attended to meanwhile by a mild young curate, who being temporarily ‘unattached,’ had agreed (for a consideration, of course), to act under the Vicar’s orders for a fortnight, at the expiration of which time it was understood that Everton would have rallied sufficiently from the paralyzing blow that had fallen upon him to undertake his usual round of work. So for two Sundays the mild young curate took the services, and preached, or rather bleated, innocuous sermons of a nature not much above the comprehension of a child of four, — sermons that sent nearly all the congregation to sleep, and moved even the mentally quiescent Mrs. Moddley to remark that she ‘never did ‘ear such a dull bit o’ Christianity in all her mortal days.’
And Everton, for the time indifferent to the opinions expressed either by his parishioners or by the outside world, stayed in the seclusion and silence of his home, made so desolate now by the loss of her who had been its embodied joy, and watched from his study window the gradual brightening of the springtime in his garden, often wondering vaguely how it was that trees could break into leaf, and roses lift their fair buds to the sun when Azalea was dead. Yet he knew very well that Nature has neither time nor space for regret. Her lesson is ever to re-create life out of seeming death, — a lesson which is the alphabet of the Higher immortality. Gradually, very gradually, he attained sufficient strength and self-poise to be able to study his own dual being; — the body, which clamored and wept for its lost delight — the soul, which, stripped of all comfortable and merely conventional methods of religion, stood face to face with the vast problems of life and death — life and death as variously meted out to human beings by the Creator in so apparently indifferent a manner, that we are apt to call His will ‘capricious,’ when it is never anything else than the fulfillment of a law whose workings we are too ignorant to perceive or to define. And in solitary meditation he remembered, how when the trouble had first begun in the parish, and his wife had gone away for a time terrified by the mere hint of a threat from Dan Kiernan, he had in the loneliness then engendered by her absence, uttered a prayer that was like a vow:— “Command me as Thou wilt! Send me Thy Holy Orders, and even if they lead me to my death, I, ordained to serve Thee, will obey!” Were those words spoken lightly? Was he ready to draw back now? Could he not tread on the waves of sorrow and go forth to meet his Master there? Or was he like Peter who, ‘when he saw the wind boisterous he was afraid,’ — and, therefore, out of fear, began to sink?
“O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”
The gentle, reproachful words rang in his ears. ‘O thou of little faith !’ He thought of the modern world — a world of such ‘little faith ‘as to be scarcely any faith at all — a world that has exchanged the Gospel of Christ for that of personal convenience, — and he realized as he had often done before, that Self was the god of each man’s idolatry. Then was he too a Self-worshiper? Would he imprison earth and heaven within the narrow ring of his own particular misery? ‘O thou of little faith!’
Alone he struggled with himself, beset by a thousand temptations. One of these was to resign the church altogether and give up his ministry. The reason that suggested itself for this was that he was now uncertain whether he would be able to preach with conviction. If he in his own heart felt that God was cruel, how could he emphasize to others the truth of the Divine Beneficence? A man could only speak from his own experience. And experience had given him a bitter lesson which seemed wantonly wicked and unnecessary. Unnecessary? Yes. Surely, quite unnecessary. And yet — there was a latent trouble lurking in his mind which he could not express, — a vague longing to take up the cross that had been thrown so ruthlessly at his feet — a cross so heavy to bear that his whole spirit recoiled and rebelled at the lifting of it. And presently his thoughts, collecting round one center, settled on that alone, and he asked himself straightly— “Do I believe, or do I not believe? Am I sure that I accept Christ as God-in-Man and that I faithfully seek not only to interpret, but to live His Gospel?”
From this point he plunged into an abyss of darkness and the shadow of death, — into a No-Man’s-Land of wonder and fear. A long procession of the Churches as they are organized to-day passed before his mind’s eye, — Churches for the most part built up on some sort of self-constituted dogma, in which the simple teaching of the loving Saviour is almost entirely excluded. He thought of various ‘old’ and ‘new’ theologies, which set aside the divinity of Christ as a fable, and assume to teach that the poor potentiality of erring and ignorant man is all-sufficient to make of himself a god, — and he questioned whether he, a slight reed set against the wind, could be of any service to combat the growing heresy of the world. Slowly the answer was given — little by little through the midnight gloom of uncertainty came flickering gleams of li
ght, — his spirit struggled out of the blinding storm which had beaten him down and overwhelmed him, into a pale new dawn of hope and courage, — and one night he found himself on his knees, praying humbly and fervently for pardon as well as for guidance to that strong sweet Force of Divine Love than which there is nothing sweeter or stronger, and to which no human soul ever truly appealed in vain.
And when at last the Sunday came on which he had decided to resume duty, he was ready. Ready to face his congregation — ready, with strong heart, steady pulse and firm soul. The mist of tears and fire in his brain had cleared, — he was able to review every incident calmly, — to think of his dead wife as an ever-present, unseen, but actual companion — and to even spare a noble pity for the fate of the wretched Dan Kiernan whose end had been so swift and horrible, and whose mangled body had, after the brief inquest and usual verdict in such cases, been hastily buried by the parish within whose boundaries it had been found, — all these gruesome memories now settled as it were into a kind of dark horizon where the clouds hung black and heavy without the power to rise, — but in the foreground light had begun to shine.
On the last Saturday of his self-imposed solitude, Brand called in the evening to see how he was. Everton received him kindly, and with a quiet pathos that rather shook the good doctor from his own composure.
“And so you are going to preach to-morrow?” — he said— “Are you sure you are equal to it?”
Everton looked at him steadily.
“I think so,” — he answered— “I hope so.”
Brand took a turn or two up and down the room. The window was open, and the soft evening caroling of the birds echoed sweetly on the outside air.
“How’s the boy?” he inquired.
“Laurence? Very well. He is a great help to me.”
Brand looked at him curiously. It was odd to hear a baby of five described as ‘a great help’ to his father; — if he had said ‘a great comfort’ that would have been understood. But ‘a great help’! However —
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22) Page 731
