After Monica"s question it was no longer possible for Pauline when she was alone to avoid facing the problem of Guy"s att.i.tude toward religion.
The repression of her anxiety on this point had only increased the force of it when it was set free like this to compete with and in fact overshadow all other cares. Looking back to her earliest thoughts of the world as it would one day affect herself, she remembered how, if she had ever imagined someone in love with her, she had always created a figure whose faith would be an eternal and joyful contemplation. She had never invented for herself a marriage with someone merely good-looking or rich or endowed with any of the romantic attributes that young girls were supposed to award their ideals, as her cousins would say, of men.
When Guy entered her life, the only gift he brought her for which she was at all prepared was the conviction of his faith. This indeed was his spiritual and mental reality for her: the rest of him was a figment, a dream that might pa.s.s suddenly away. The visit of his father had given her a more clearly defined a.s.surance of his existence on earth, but his faith had been the heart of the immortal substance of her love for Guy.
The endlessness of their union was always present in her thoughts, the ultimate consolation of whatever delays they might be called upon to endure. Very often, even at the beginning of the engagement, Guy had frightened her sometimes by his indifference to immortality, sometimes by his harping upon the swift flight of youth, sometimes by his manifest indulgence of her creed. All these doubts, however, of his sympathy were allayed by his apparently deliberate pleasure in worship. She was angry with herself then for her mistrust of him, and her contentment had been perfect when in church he knelt beside her on that birthday of his, that day of their avowed betrothal, and on all those other occasions when he had given an outward proof of his faith. Now as she looked back on his absence from church lately, she could not but wonder whether all his attendance had not been a kind of fair-weather spoiling of her that could not withstand the least stress of worldly circ.u.mstance. She began to torment herself over every light remark that might have been a sneer and to look forward dreadfully to Guy"s abrupt declaration of a profound disbelief in everything she held most sacred. His cleverness, as he hated her to call it, intervened and seemed to wrench them asunder; and the more she pondered his behaviour, the more she became convinced that all the time Guy"s religion had merely been Guy"s kindness. This discovery was not to make her love him less; but it did throw upon her the responsibility of the knowledge that he had nothing within himself to fortify his soul, should mishap destroy his worldly confidence.
For a long time Pauline lay awake in the darkness, fretting herself on account of Guy"s resourcelessness of spirit, and to her imagination concentrated on this regard of him every hour seemed to make his solitude more terrible. Of her own religion she did not think, and Monica"s anxiety about their agreement after marriage was without the least hint of danger. The possibility of anyone"s, even Guy"s influencing her own faith was inconceivable; nor was she at all occupied with her own disappointment at not finding Guy constant to her belief in him. Pauline"s one grief was for him, that now when things were going badly he should be without spiritual hope. Suddenly her warm bed seemed to her wrong and luxurious in comparison with the chill darkness she imagined about Guy"s soul at this moment. Impulsively she threw back the sheets and knelt down beside the bed to pray for his peace. So vividly was she conscious of the need for prayer that she was carried to undreamed of heights of supplication, to strange summits whereon it seemed that if she could not pray she would never know how to pray again. Ordinarily her devotions had been but a beautiful and simple end or beginning of the day: they were a.s.sociated with the early warmth of the sunlight or with the gentle flutters of roosting birds: they were the comforting and tangible pledges of a childhood not yet utterly departed. Now the fires and ecstasies of a more searching faith had seized Pauline. No longer did there pa.s.s before her eyes a procession of gay-habited saints, glad celestial creatures that smiled down upon her from a paradise not much farther away than the Rectory garden: no longer did she find herself surrounded by the well-loved figures who when death took her to them would hold out their arms in actual welcome and whom she would recognize one by one. To-night these visions were uncapturable, and beyond the darkness they had forsaken stretched a terrifying void and beyond the void was nothing but light that seemed to have the power of thinking: "I am Truth!" A speck in that void she saw Guy spinning away from her, and it seemed that unless she prayed he would be spun irremediably out of her consciousness. It seemed that the fierceness of her prayer was like the fierceness of a flame that was granted the power to sustain him, for when sometimes the tongues of fire languished Guy would sink so far that only by summoning fresh force from the light beyond could she bring him back. Gradually, however, her power was waning and with whatever desperate force she prayed he could never be brought back to the point from which he had last slipped. He was spinning away into a horror of blackness....
"O Holy Ghost, save him," she cried. Then Pauline fainted, and wondered to find herself lying upon the cold floor when she woke as from a dream.
Yet it was not like the gasping rescue of oneself from a nightmare, for she lay awake a long while afterward in peace, and she slept as if upon a victory and very early in the morning went to church.
The days when the thrushes sang mattins were come and all the way she heard freshets of holy song pouring down through the air. She and her family always knelt apart from one another, and this morning Pauline chose a place hidden from the others, a place where she could lean her cheek against a pillar and be soothed by the cool touch of the stone like the a.s.surance of unfathomable and maternal love. Now to her calm spirit returned the vision of those happy heavenly creatures, the bright-suited and intimate companions of her childhood. They welcomed her this morning and thronged about her downcast eyes with many angels too that like Tobit"s angel walked by her side. Only her father"s mellow voice spoke from the chancel of earth, and even he in his violet chasuble took his place among the saints, and when she went up to the altar Heaven was once again very near to her.
In the morning coolness it was almost impossible to believe that last night she had fainted, and she began to believe the whole experience had been a dream"s agony. However, whether it were or not, she had made up her mind to ask Guy a direct question this afternoon. If as she feared, he was feeling hostile to religion she would accept the warning of the night and give all her determination to prayer for his faith to return.
When they were together, it was for a long time impossible to begin the subject, and it was not until Guy asked what was making her so abstracted that Pauline could ask why he never came to church any more.
In the pause before he answered, she suffered anew the torment of that struggle in the darkness.
"Does it worry you when I don"t come?" he asked.
"Well, yes, it does rather."
"Then of course I will come," said Guy at once.
Now this was exactly the reason for which least of all she wanted him to come, and a trace of her mortification may have been visible, because he asked immediately if that did not please her.
"Guy, don"t you want to come to church? You used to come happily, didn"t you?"
"I think I came chiefly to be near you," he said.
"That does make me so unhappy. I"d almost rather you came out of politeness to Father."
"Well, that was another reason," Guy admitted.
"And you never came because you wanted to?" she asked miserably.
"Of course I wanted to."
"But because you believed?"
"In what?"
"Oh, Guy, don"t be so cruel. Don"t you believe in anything?"
"I believe in you," he said. "Pauline, I believe in you so pa.s.sionately that when I am with you I believe in what you believe."
"Then you haven"t any faith?"
"I want to have it," said Guy. "If G.o.d won"t condescend to give it to me...." he broke off with a shrug.
"But religion is either true, or it isn"t true, and if it isn"t true, why do you encourage me in lies?" she demanded with desperate entreaty.
"I"m ready to believe," he said.
"How can you expect to have faith if your reason for it is merely to sit next me in church?" she asked bitterly.
"Now, I think it"s you who are being cruel," said Guy.
"I don"t care. I don"t care if I am cruel. You"ll break my heart."
"Good G.o.d," Guy exclaimed. "Haven"t I enough to torment me without religion appearing upon the scene? If you want me to hate it ... no, Pauline, I"m sorry ... you mustn"t think that I don"t long to have your faith. If I only could ... oh, Pauline, Pauline."
She yielded to his consolation, and when he told her of the poems sent back almost by return of post from the second publisher she must open wide her compa.s.sionate arms. Nevertheless he had somehow maltreated their love; and Pauline was aware of a wild effort to prepare for sorrow whether near at hand or still far off she did not know, but she seemed to hear it like a wind rising at sunset.
ANOTHER SPRING
_March_
When the poems were returned by three publishers within the first fortnight of March, Guy was inclined to surrender his vocation and to think about such regular work as would banish the reproach he began to fancy was now perceptible at the back of everybody"s eyes. The weather was abominably cold, and even Plashers Mead itself was no longer the embodiment of the old enthusiasm. Already in order to pay current expenses he was drawing upon the next quarter, and the combination of tradesmen"s books with icy draughts curling through the house produced an atmosphere of perpetual exasperation. It always seemed to be coldest on Monday morning and Miss Peasey _would_ breathe over his shoulder while he was adding up the bills.
"We apparently live on b.u.t.ter," he grumbled.
"Oh, no, it was really lamb you had yesterday," the housekeeper maintained irrelevantly.
"I said we apparently live on b.u.t.ter," Guy shouted.
Then of course Miss Peasey _would_ poke her veiny nose right down into the book, while the draught blew her hair about and unpleasantly tickled his cheek.
"It"s the best b.u.t.ter," she said sorrowfully at last.
"But my watch is quite all right."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I made an allusion to Alice in Wonderland," he shouted.
Miss Peasey retired from the room in dudgeon, and Guy wasted ten minutes in examining various theories on what his housekeeper could have thought he meant by his last remark. Finally he wrote off to a friend of his, an ardent young Radical peer with whom he had shared rooms at Oxford.
PLASHERS MEAD, WYCHFORD, OXON.
_March 15._