Part 53 (1/2)
Eleanor--for so I must call her now--stood watching me for a few minutes, and then glided back to the bedside, and sat down again.
”You find the room quiet?”
”Wonderfully quiet. The roar of the city outside is almost soothing, and the noise of every carriage seems to cease suddenly just as it becomes painfully near.”
”We have had straw laid down,” she answered, ”all along this part of the street.”
This last drop of kindness filled the cup to overflowing: a veil fell from before my eyes--it was she who had been my friend, my guardian angel, from the beginning!
”You--you--idiot that I have been! I see it all now. It was you who laid that paper to catch my eye on that first evening at D * * *!--you paid my debt to my cousin!--you visited Mackaye in his last illness!”
She made a sign of a.s.sent.
”You saw from the beginning my danger, my weakness!--you tried to turn me from my frantic and fruitless pa.s.sion!--you tried to save me from the very gulf into which I forced myself!--and I--I have hated you in return--cherished suspicions too ridiculous to confess, only equalled by the absurdity of that other dream!”
”Would that other dream have ever given you peace, even if it had ever become reality?”
She spoke gently, slowly, seriously; waiting between each question for the answer which I dared not give.
”What was it that you adored? a soul or a face? The inward reality or the outward symbol, which is only valuable as a sacrament of the loveliness within?”
”Ay!” thought I, ”and was that loveliness within? What was that beauty but a hollow mask?” How barren, borrowed, trivial, every thought and word of hers seemed now, as I looked back upon them, in comparison with the rich luxuriance, the startling originality, of thought, and deed, and sympathy, in her who now sat by me, wan and faded, beautiful no more as men call beauty, but with the spirit of an archangel gazing from those clear, fiery eyes! And as I looked at her, an emotion utterly new to me arose; utter trust, delight, submission, grat.i.tude, awe--if it was love, it was love as of a dog towards his master....
”Ay,” I murmured, half unconscious that I spoke aloud, ”her I loved, and love no longer; but you, you I wors.h.i.+p, and for ever!”
”Wors.h.i.+p G.o.d,” she answered. ”If it shall please you hereafter to call me friend, I shall refuse neither the name nor its duties. But remember always, that whatsoever interest I feel in you, and, indeed, have felt from the first time I saw your poems, I cannot give or accept friends.h.i.+p upon any ground so shallow and changeable as personal preference. The time was when I thought it a mark of superior intellect and refinement to be as exclusive in my friends.h.i.+ps as in my theories. Now I have learnt that that is most spiritual and n.o.ble which is also most universal. If we are to call each other friends, it must be for a reason which equally includes the outcast and the profligate, the felon, and the slave.”
”What do you mean?” I asked, half disappointed.
”Only for the sake of Him who died for all alike.”
Why did she rise and call Crossthwaite from the next room where he was writing? Was it from the womanly tact and delicacy which feared lest my excited feelings might lead me on to some too daring expression, and give me the pain of a rebuff, however gentle; or was it that she wished him, as well as me, to hear the memorable words which followed, to which she seemed to have been all along alluring me, and calling up in my mind, one by one, the very questions to which she had prepared the answers?
”That name!” I answered. ”Alas! has it not been in every age the watchword, not of an all-embracing charity, but of self-conceit and bigotry, excommunication and persecution?”
”That is what men have made it; not G.o.d, or He who bears it, the Son of G.o.d. Yes, men have separated from each other, slandered each other, murdered each other in that name, and blasphemed it by that very act. But when did they unite in any name but that? Look all history through--from the early churches, unconscious and infantile ideas of G.o.d's kingdom, as Eden was of the human race, when love alone was law, and none said that aught that he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common--Whose name was the, bond of unity for that brotherhood, such as the earth had never seen--when the Roman lady and the Negro slave partook together at the table of the same bread and wine, and sat together at the feet of the Syrian tent-maker?--'One is our Master, even Christ, who sits at the right hand of G.o.d, and in Him we are all brothers.' Not self-chosen preference for His precepts, but the overwhelming faith in His presence, His rule, His love, bound those rich hearts together. Look onward, too, at the first followers of St. Bennet and St. Francis, at the Cameronians among their Scottish hills, or the little persecuted flock who in a dark and G.o.dless time gathered around Wesley by pit mouths and on Cornish cliffs--Look, too, at the great societies of our own days, which, however imperfectly, still lovingly and earnestly do their measure of G.o.d's work at home and abroad; and say, when was there ever real union, co-operation, philanthropy, equality, brotherhood, among men, save in loyalty to Him--Jesus, who died upon the cross?”
And she bowed her head reverently before that unseen Majesty; and then looked up at us again--Those eyes, now br.i.m.m.i.n.g full of earnest tears, would have melted stonier hearts than ours that day.
”Do you not believe me? Then I must quote against you one of your own prophets--a ruined angel--even as you might have been.
”When Camille Desmoulins, the revolutionary, about to die, as is the fate of such, by the hands of revolutionaries, was asked his age, he answered, they say, that it was the same as that of the 'bon sans-culotte Jesus.'
I do not blame those who shrink from that speech as blasphemous. I, too, have spoken hasty words and hard, and prided myself on breaking the bruised reed, and quenching the smoking flax. Time was when I should have been the loudest in denouncing poor Camille; but I have long since seemed to see in those words the distortion of an almighty truth--a truth that shall shake thrones, and princ.i.p.alities, and powers, and fill the earth with its sound, as with the trump of G.o.d; a prophecy like Balaam's of old--'I shall see Him, but not nigh; I shall behold Him, but not near.'... Take all the heroes, prophets, poets, philosophers--where will you find the true demagogue--the speaker to man simply as man--the friend of publicans and sinners, the stern foe of the scribe and the Pharisee--with whom was no respect of persons--where is he? Socrates and Plato were n.o.ble; Zerdusht and Confutzee, for aught we know, were n.o.bler still; but what were they but the exclusive mystagogues of an enlightened few, like our own Emersons and Strausses, to compare great with small? What gospel have they, or Strauss, or Emerson, for the poor, the suffering, the oppressed? The People's Friend? Where will you find him, but in Jesus of Nazareth?”
”We feel that; I a.s.sure you, we feel that,” said Crossthwaite. ”There are thousands of us who delight in His moral teaching, as the perfection of human excellence.”
”And what gospel is there in a moral teaching? What good news is it to the savage of St. Giles, to the artizan, crushed by the compet.i.tion of others and his own evil habits, to tell him that he can be free--if he can make himself free?--That all men are his equals--if he can rise to their level, or pull them down to his?--All men his brothers--if he can only stop them from devouring him, or making it necessary for him to devour them? Liberty, equality, and brotherhood? Let the history of every nation, of every revolution--let your own sad experience speak--have they been aught as yet but delusive phantoms--angels that turned to fiends the moment you seemed about to clasp them? Remember the tenth of April, and the plots thereof, and answer your own hearts!”
Crossthwaite buried his face in his hands.
”What!” I answered, pa.s.sionately, ”will you rob us poor creatures of our only faith, our only hope on earth? Let us be deceived, and deceived again, yet we will believe! We will hope on in spite of hope. We may die, but the idea lives for ever. Liberty, equality, and fraternity must come. We know, we know, that they must come; and woe to those who seek to rob us of our faith!”