Foxglove Manor (Vol. 1-3). Robert Williams Buchanan
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.
A great stillness was growing over the land as he pursued his way. The woodlands had been left behind him, and their incessant murmur was now inaudible. Sleep and quietude had fallen on the level fields; not an ear of wheat stirred, no leaf rustled. The birds had all gone to nest, except a solitary string of belated crows, flying low down in black dots, against the distant silvery green horizon. The moon was rising through a low-lying haze, which had begun to spread over the landscape. The vicar looked at his watch. It was after nine o’clock. He began to hope that Edith had grown tired of waiting for him, and had returned home. He had a sickening feeling of repugnance and vague dread of meeting her.
Little more than a month after Mr. Santley had settled in Omberley, Miss Dove had come to live with her aunt.
Her father and mother had died within a year of each other, and the girl gladly accepted the offer of Mrs. Russell to consider her house as a home until she had had time to look about her. Edith had been left sufficiently well provided for, and her aunt, the widow of a banker, was in a position of independence, so that the disinterested offer was accepted without any sense of dependence or humiliation. The bright, innocent face of the girl instantly caught the eye of the vicar. He saw her frequently at her aunt’s house, and gradually learned to esteem, not only her excellent qualities, but to find a use for her accomplishments. She was especially fond of music, and when the vicar suggested that she might add to the beauty of the service at St. Cuthbert’s by interesting herself in the choir and presiding at the organ, she eagerly acquiesced. The church was one of Edith’s favourite haunts; and when the vicar, who was himself a lover of music, heard the soul-stirring vibrations of some masterpiece of the great composers, his steps were drawn by an easily explicable fatality to the side of the pretty performer. Still, it was a fatality. Slowly, and imperceptibly at first, the sense of pleasure at meeting grew up between the two; then swiftly and imperceptibly they found that there was something in the presence of each other that satisfied a vague, indefinable craving; and lastly, with a sudden access of self-consciousness, they looked into each other’s eyes, and each became gladly and tremulously aware of the other’s love. Edith was still young, almost too young yet to assume the station of the wife of the spiritual head of the parish; and Mr. Santley was not sure as to the manner in which his sister would receive the intimation that there was, even in the remote future, to be a new mistress brought to the Vicarage. The girl was, however, still too happy in the knowledge that she was beloved to look forward to marriage. With a strange, feminine inconsistency, she regarded their union with a certain dread and shamefacedness. It seemed such a dreadful exposure that all the village should know that they loved each other. “Oh no, no; it must not be for a long, long time yet!” she once exclaimed nervously. “Is it not sufficient happiness to know that I am yours and you are mine? I cannot bear to think that every one must know our secret.” To have those long, pleasant chats under cover of the music; to be invited to the Vicarage, and to sit and talk with him there; to receive those haphazard glances, as it were, while he was preaching; to be escorted home by him in the evening when it was dark, and no one could see that her hand was on his arm; to receive those almost stolen kisses; to feel his arm about her waist what more could maiden desire to dream over for weeks and months—for years, if need were?
Edith was endowed with the intense feminine faith and fervid ideality of the worshipper. To sit at her lover’s feet and to look up adoringly to him, was at once her favourite mental and physical attitude. On her side, she exercised a curious spiritual influence over him. There was such an aerial brightness and lightness about her, such sweet fragile loveliness in her form and figure, such tender abandonment of self in her disposition, that he felt he had not only a woman to love, but a beautiful childlike soul to keep unspotted from the world, to guide through the dark ways of life to the arms of the great loving Fatherhood of God. The presence of Edith helped him to banish the dark doubts and evil promptings of the spirit of unbelief. When she spoke to him of her spiritual experiences, he felt joyous ascensions of the heart which raised him nearer to heaven. She created in him the unspeakable holy longings and vague wants that give the lives of the mystic saints of Roman Catholicism so singular a blending of divine illumination and voluptuous colour. Unconsciously the vicar was realizing in his own nature Swedenborg’s doctrine of celestial affinities. This love restored to him the innocence and ardour of the days of Eden; he had found at once his Eve and his Paradise, and he felt that, as of old, God still walked in the garden in the cool of the day. Some such glamour surrounds the first developments of every sincere attachment. It is the first rosy tingling flush of dawn, dim and sweet and dreamy, and, like the dawn, it glows and brightens into the fierce clear heat of broad day, burning the dew from the petal and withering the blossom.
As Mr. Santley’s thoughts turned to Edith, the recollection of these things came vividly upon him. Only a week ago, and she was the one woman in the world he believed he could have chosen for his wife. In an instant,