The New Abelard (Vol. 1-3). Robert Williams Buchanan
is, that I do love the Church, and cannot part from her without deep pain—without, in fact, rupturing all my most cherished associations. But there is another complication which makes this affair unusually distressing to me. You know I am engaged to be married?’
‘Ah, yes! I heard something about it. I begin to see your difficulty. You are afraid——’
He hesitated, as if not liking to complete the sentence.
‘Afraid of what, pray?’
‘Well, that, when you are pronounced heretical, she will throw you over!’
The clergyman smiled curiously and shook his head.
‘If that were all,’ he replied, ‘I should be able very easily to resign myself to the consequences of my heresy; but, fortunately or unfortunately, the lady to whom I am engaged (our engagement, by the way, is only private) is not likely to throw me over, however much I may seem to deserve it.’
‘Then why distress yourself?’
‘Simply because I doubt my right to entail upon her the consequences of my heterodoxy. She herself is liberal-minded, but she does not perceive that any connection with a heretic must mean, for a sensitive woman, misery and martyrdom. When I leave the Church I shall be practically ruined—not exactly in pocket, for, as you know, I have some money of my own—but intellectually and socially. The Church never pardons, and seldom spares.’
‘But there are other careers open to you—literature, for example! We all know your talents—you would soon win an eminence from which you might laugh at your persecutors.’
‘Literature, my dear Cholmondeley, is simply empiricism—I see nothing in it to attract an earnest man.’
‘You are complimentary!’ cried Cholmondeley, with a laugh.
‘Oh!—you are different! You carry into journalism an amount of secular conviction which I could never emulate; and, moreover, you are one of those who, like Harry the Smith, always fight “for your own hand.” Now, I do not fight for my own hand; I repeat emphatically, all my care is for the Church. She may persecute me, she may despise me, but still I love her and believe in her, and shall pray till my last breath for the time when she will become reorganised.’
‘I see how all this will end,’ said the journalist, half seriously. ‘Some of these days you will go over to Rome!’
‘Do you think so? Well, I might do worse even than that, for in Rome, now as ever, I should find excellent company. But no, I don’t fancy that I shall go even halfway thither, unless—which is scarcely possible—I discover signs that the doting mother of Christianity accepts the new scientific miracle and puts Darwin out of the Index. Frankly, my difficulty is a social, or rather a personal, one. Ought I, a social outcast, to accept the devotion of one who would follow me, not merely out of the Church, but down into the very Hell of atheism, if I gave her the requisite encouragement?’
Cholmondeley did not reply, but after reflecting quietly for some moments he said:—
‘You have not told me the name of the lady.’
‘Miss Alma Craik.’
‘Not the heiress?’
‘Yes, the heiress.’
‘I know her cousin, George Craik—we were at school together. I thought they were engaged.’
‘They were once, but she broke it off long ago.’
‘And she has accepted you?’ ‘Unconditionally.’ He added with strange fervour: ‘She is the noblest, the sweetest, and most beautiful woman in the world.’
‘Then why on earth do you hesitate?’ asked Cholmondeley. ‘You are a lucky fellow.’
‘I hesitate for the reason I have told you. She had placed her love, her life, her fortune at my feet, devotedly and unreservedly. As a clergyman of the Church, as one who might have devoted his lifetime to the re-establishment of his religion and the regeneration of his order, one, moreover, whom the world would have honoured and approved as a good and faithful servant, I might have accepted the sacrifice; indeed, after some hesitation, I did accept it. But now it is altogether different. I cannot consent to her martyrdom, even though it would glorify mine.’
Although Bradley exercised the strongest control over his emotions, and endeavoured to discuss the subject as dispassionately and calmly as possible, it was clear to his listener that he was deeply and strangely moved. Cholmondeley was touched, for he well knew the secret tenderness of his friend’s nature. Under that coldly cut, almost stern face, with its firm eyebrows and finely chiselled lips—within that powerful frame which, so far at least as the torso was concerned, might have been used as a model for Hercules—there throbbed a heart of almost feminine sensitiveness and sweetness; of feminine passion too, if the truth must be told, for Bradley possessed the sensuousness of most powerful men. Bradley was turned thirty years of age, but he was as capable of a grande passion as a boy of twenty—as romantic, as high-flown, as full of the fervour of youth and the brightness of dream. With him, to love a woman was to love her with all his faith and all his life; he was far too earnest to trifle for a moment with the most sacred of all human sentiments. Cholmondeley was aware of this, and gauged the situation accordingly.
‘If my advice is worth anything,’ he said, ‘you will dismiss from your mind all ideas of martyrdom. You are really exaggerating the horrors of the situation; and, for the rest, where a woman loves a man as I am sure Miss Craik loves you, sacrifice of the kind you mention becomes easy, even delightful. Marry her, my dear Bradley, and from the very altar of pagan Hymen smile at the thunderbolts of the Church.’
Bradley seemed plunged in deep thought, and sat silent, leaning back and covering his face with one hand. At last he looked up, and exclaimed with unconcealed emotion—
‘No, I am not worthy of her! Even if my present record were clean, what could I say of my past? Such a woman should have a stainless husband! I have touched pitch, and been defiled.’
‘Come, come!’ said the journalist, not a little astonished. ‘Of all the men I ever knew—and I have known many—you are about the most irreproachable.’
The clergyman bent over the table, and said in a low voice, ‘Do you remember Mary Goodwin?’
‘Of course,’ replied the other with a laugh. ‘What! is it possible that you are reproaching yourself on that account? Absurd! You acted by her like a man of honour; but little Mary was too knowing for you, that was all.’
‘You knew I married her?’
‘I suspected it, knowing your high-flown notions of duty. We all pitied you—we all——’
‘Hush!’ said the clergyman, still in the same low, agitated voice. ‘Not a word against her. She is asleep and at peace; and if there was any sin I shared it—I who ought to have known better. Perhaps, had I been a better man, I might have made her truly happy; but she didn’t love me—I did not deserve her love—and so, as you know, we parted.’
‘I know she used you shamefully,’ returned Cholmondeley, with some impatience. ‘Come, I must speak! You picked her from the gutter, and made her what Mrs. Grundy calls an honest woman. How did she reward you? By bolting away with the first rascal who offered her the run of his purse and a flash set of diamonds. By-the-by, I heard of her last in India, where she was a member of a strolling company. Did she die out there?’
‘Yes,’ answered the clergyman, very sadly.
‘Nine years ago.’
‘You were only a boy,’ continued Cholmondeley, with an air of infinite age and experience, ‘and Mr. Verdant Green was nothing to you. You thought all women angels, at an age when most youngsters know them to be devils. Well, that’s all over, and you have nothing to reproach yourself with. I wish I could show as clean a book, old fellow.’
‘I do reproach myself,