"Yes; glad and thankful." He paused; his thin sensitive lips trembled, and when he spoke again it was in a low constrained voice, as if he were struggling with some powerful feeling.
"I wanted you to learn by failure that it is not what we know, nor what we do, but what we are that matters in the sight of G.o.d."
"Yes, I know that." She sat looking up, with her head a little on one side, holding her chin in one hand: it had been her att.i.tude in her student days at Oxford when trying to follow a difficult lecture, and she reverted to it now. For Mr. Flaxman Reed was very difficult. His style fascinated and yet repelled her, and in this case the style was the man.
"What am I?" said Audrey, presently. It was a curious question, and none of her friends had answered it to her satisfaction. She was eager to know Mr. Reed"s opinion. He turned and looked at her, and his eyes were two clear lights under the shadow of the sharp eyebone.
"What are you? With all your faults and all your failures, you are something infinitely more valuable than you know."
"What makes you say so?"
"I say so because I think that G.o.d cares more for those that hunger and thirst after righteousness than for those who are filled at his table.
Believe me, nothing in all our intercourse has touched me so much as this confession of your failure."
"Has it really? Can you--can you trust me again in spite of it?"
"Yes; you have trusted me. I take it as one of the greatest pleasures, the greatest privileges of my life, that you should have come to me as you have done--not when you were bright and happy, but in your weakness and distress, in what I imagine to have been the darkest hour of all, when refuge failed you, and no man cared for your soul."
"No; that"s the worst of it,--that there"s n.o.body to turn to--n.o.body cares. If I thought that you cared--but----"
"Indeed I care."
"For my soul--yes." Her "yes" was a deep sigh.
"Why not? It is my office. A priest is answerable to G.o.d for the souls of his people."
He spoke with a touch of austerity in his tone. Something warned him that if this conversation was to be profitable to either of them, he must avoid personalities. His position in the Church was a compromise.
His att.i.tude towards Audrey Craven was only another kind of compromise,--so much concession to her weakness, so much to her appealing womanhood. He had begun by believing in her soul,--that was the plea he made to the fierce exacting conscience, always requiring a spiritual motive for his simplest actions,--and he had ended by creating the thing he believed in, and in his own language he was answerable to G.o.d for it. But hitherto with his own nature he had made no compromise.
He had sacrificed heart, senses, and intellect to the tyranny of his conscience; he had ceased to dread their insane revolt against that benevolent despotism. And now the question that tormented him was whether all the time he had not been temporising with his own inexorable humanity, whether his relations with Audrey Craven did not involve a perpetual intrigue between the earthly and the heavenly. For there was a strange discrepancy between his simple heart that took all things seriously--even a frivolous woman--and the tortuous entangled thing that was his conscience. He went on at first in the same self-controlled voice, monotonous but for a peculiar throbbing stress on some words, and he seemed to be speaking more to himself than her.
"You say you can do nothing, and I believe it. What of that? The things that are seen are temporal, the things that are unseen are eternal. Our deeds are of the things that are seen; they are part of the visible finite world, done with our hands, with our body. They belong to the flesh that profiteth nothing. It is only the spirit, only the pure and holy will, that gives them life. That will is not ours--not yours or mine. Before we can receive it our will must die; otherwise there would be two wills in us struggling for possession. You have come to me for help--after all I can give you none. I can only tell you what I know--that there is no way of peace but the way of renunciation. I can only say: if your will is not yet one with G.o.d"s will, renounce it--give it up. Then and then only you will live--not before. Look there!" he pointed to the crucifix. "The great Pagan religions had each their symbol of life. For us who are Christ"s the symbol of life is the crucifix. Crucify self. When you have done that, you will have no need to come and ask me what you must do and what you must leave undone. Your deeds are--they _must_ be pure."
His excitement moved her, her eyes filled with tears; but she followed his words slowly and painfully. He was always making these speeches to her, full of the things she could not understand. How often she had felt this sense of effort and pain in the old "art" days with Ted, or when she had been held helpless in the grasp of Wyndham"s relentless intellect. She had chafed when the barriers rose between her mind and theirs. But between her and this nineteenth century ascetic there was an immeasurable gulf fixed; she could not reach the hand he stretched out to her across it. Even his living presence seemed endlessly far from hers, and the thought of that separation filled her with a deep resigned humility. Now, though his thoughts were poured into her consciousness without mixing with it, cloudy, insoluble, troubling its blank transparency, something in the rhythmic movement of his words stirred her, so responsive was she to every impression of sense. They recalled to her that other gospel of life preached to her by Langley, and though she understood imperfectly, she felt the difference with shame. The young priest went on, still as if speaking to himself.
"There are only two things we have to learn--the knowledge of self and the knowledge of G.o.d, and they hang together. If there is any sin in us, unconfessed and unrecognised as sin, there is no knowledge of G.o.d and no union with him possible for us."
She rose, moved a step forward, and then stood looking at him irresolutely. Truly a revelation was there for her; but she was in that state of excitement in which we are more capable of making revelations than of receiving them. He had risen too, and was holding out his hand.
"Well," he said more gently, "there is something you want to say to me.
Please sit down again."
She shook her head and still stood upright. Possessed with the thought of the confession she was about to make, she felt that she needed all the dignity that att.i.tude afforded. At last she spoke, very low and quickly, keeping her eyes fixed on the floor.
"You say you know me, but you don"t. You don"t know what I am--what I am capable of. But I must tell you,--the thought of it is stifling me.
Once, only two years ago, I had a terrible temptation. It came to me through some one whom I loved--very dearly. I was ready to give up everything--_everything_, you understand--for him; and I would have done it, only--G.o.d was good to me. He made it impossible for me, and I was saved. But I am just as bad, just as guilty, as if he had let it happen."
It was done. The unutterable thing was said. For once Audrey had been absolutely truthful and sincere. The soul that he had evoked had come forth as it were new-born out of the darkness.
At first neither of them spoke. Then he sat down and thanked her, simply, for what she had just told him. But to his own shame and grief he had nothing more to say. He had heard many a confession, and from many a guiltier woman"s lips, but none so piteous, because none so purely spontaneous, as this. And to all he had given pity, counsel, and help.
But now he was dumb.
She was thirsting for help, for help that she could understand. She clasped her hands imploringly and looked into his face, but it had no pity for her and no deliverance. She could see nothing there but grief--grief terrible and profound.
"I see. Then you too judge me--like the rest."
"G.o.d forbid. I judge no man." Which was true, for it was the woman he had judged.
She looked at him again, a long look full of wonder and reproach; then she went quietly away.
She had reached the end of the narrow pa.s.sage leading from the study to the front hall, when she recollected that she had left behind her a small manual of devotion. He had given it to her not long ago. She went back for it, and knocked softly at the study door. There was no answer, and supposing that he had gone through into the room beyond, she opened the door and looked in.
He was kneeling in the far corner of the study, with his hands stretched out before the crucifix. From the threshold where she stood she could see the agony of his uplifted face and hear his prayer. "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
Audrey knew then that for one moment the love she had hungered and thirsted after, more than after righteousness, had been actually within her grasp, and that she had lost it. The shadow of an uncommitted sin stood between her and the one man by whom and for whom she could have grown pure and womanly and good. For Flaxman Reed had loved her, though up to that evening he had been in complete ignorance of the fact, being already wedded to what the world considers an impossible ideal.
Such is the power of suggestion, that Audrey"s confession of her weakness had revealed to him his own. If she had been all that he believed her to be, he might not have regarded his feeling for her as in itself of the nature of sin; but his sensitive soul, made morbid by its self-imposed asceticism, recoiled from the very thought of impurity in the woman he loved. Hence his powerlessness to help her. He knew, none better, that a stronger man would not have felt this difficulty. He had trembled before his own intellect; now he was afraid of his own heart.
Audrey--it was for such that his Christ had died. And he could not even speak a word to save her.
He became almost blasphemous in his agony. Christ had died on _his_ cross. He, Christ"s servant, had crucified self--and it could not die.
Was this the ironic destiny of all ideals too austere for earth, too divine for humanity?
Not long afterwards Flaxman Reed was received into the communion of the Church of Rome. He had done with compromise.
CHAPTER XXVII
It was Audrey"s fate to be condemned by those whom she had most cared for. Ted and Vincent, Langley and Katherine, and lastly Mr. Flaxman Reed, they had all judged her--harshly, imperfectly, as human nature judges. Of the five, perhaps Vincent, because he was a child of Nature, and Katherine, because she was a good woman, alone appreciated the more pathetic of Audrey"s effects. She presented the moving spectacle of a small creature struggling with things too great for her. Love, art, nature, religion, she had never really given herself up to any one of them; but she had called upon them all in turn, and instead of sustaining, they had overwhelmed her.
And it seemed that Mr. Flaxman Reed, as the minister of the religion in which she had sought shelter for a day, had failed her the most unexpectedly, and in her direst necessity. And yet he had done more for her than any of the others. She had lied to all of them; he had made it possible for her to be true. Flaxman Reed would certainly not have called himself a psychological realist; but by reason of his one strength, his habit of constant communion with the unseen, he had solved Langley Wyndham"s problem. It would never have occurred to the great novelist, in his search for the real Audrey, to look deeper than the "primitive pa.s.sions," or to suspect that the secret of personality could lie in so pure a piece of mechanism as the human conscience.
Soon after her confession Audrey left town for the neighbourhood of Oxford. She may have perceived that London was too vast a stage for her slender performances; or she may have had some idea of following up a line slanting gently between the two paths pointed out to her by Langley Wyndham and Flaxman Reed, who had been the strongest forces in her life.
She had come to herself, but she was not the stuff of which renunciants are made.
It was about three years later that Mr. Langley Wyndham, looking over his "Times" one morning, had the joy of reading the announcement of Miss Audrey Craven"s marriage with Algernon Jackson, Esq., of Broughton Poggs, in the county of Oxfordshire.
It was true. After all, Audrey had married a nonent.i.ty: it was the end of her long quest of the eminent and superlative.
Mr. Jackson was certainly not an eminent person, and he was superlative only in so far as he pa.s.sed for "the biggest bore in the county"; but he had the positive merit of being a gentleman, which in these days of a talented democracy amounts almost to genius. Since that night when, as a guileless undergraduate, he had interfered with Audrey"s first introduction to Langley Wyndham, Mr. Jackson"s career had been simplicity itself. He had tried most of the learned professions, and failed in all he tried. He then took up model goose-farming on a large scale, and achieved success amidst the jeers of his family and friends.
The echo of that derision was soon lost in the jingle of Algernon"s guineas. Not every one can attain a golden mediocrity; and it was a great step for a man who had hitherto ranked as a nonent.i.ty. On the strength of it he asked the beautiful Miss Craven to be his wife, and no one was more surprised than himself when she consented. She was his first and last love--of a series of loves. For Mr. Jackson had never read "Laura"; indeed he read but few books, and if you had told him of Langley Wyndham"s masterpiece to-day, he would have forgotten all about it by to-morrow; he would certainly never have thought of identifying its heroine with his wife.
n.o.body ever understood why Audrey made that marriage. For any one who had enjoyed the friendship of such men as Langley Wyndham and Flaxman Reed, there was bathos in the step; it seemed an ugly concession to actuality. It may have been; for Audrey was nothing if not modern, the daughter of an age that has flirted with half-a-dozen ideals, all equally fascinating, and finally decided in favour of a mature realism.
She may have learned that hardest lesson of the schools, the translation of life"s drama from fancy into fact; found out that all the time the grey old chorus has been singing, not of love and joy, as she once in her ignorance imagined, but of unspeakable rest on the great consoling plat.i.tudes of life, where there is no more revelation because there is no mystery, and no despair because there is no hope. The text of that chorus is often corrupt, but the meaning is never hopelessly obscure. In other words, she may have married Mr. Jackson in a fit of pessimism.
Or perhaps--perhaps she had profited by the more cheerful though equally important lesson of the playground; learned that whether the game of life be fast or slow, dull or amusing, matters little when you are knocked out in the first round (she herself had had many rounds, not counting Mr. Jackson); that in these circ.u.mstances one may still find considerable entertainment in looking on; and that in any case the player is not for the game, but the game for the player. The player--who may be left on the ground long after all games have been played out. But this is to suppose that Audrey was a philosopher, which is manifestly absurd.