"Do you know," began Tremaine, getting to work, "that I have been doing nothing lately but thinking about you? And I have come to the conclusion that what appeals so much to me is your strength. The sweetness which attracts some men has no charm for me; I am one of the men who above all things admire and reverence a strong woman, though I know that the sweet and clinging woman is to some the ideal of feminine perfection. But different men, of course, admire different types."
"Exactly; there is a Latin proverb, something about tots and sentences, which embodies that idea," suggested Elisabeth, with a nervous, girlish laugh.
Alan did not smile; he made it a rule never to encourage flippancy in women.
"It is hardly kind of you to laugh at me when I am speaking seriously,"
he said, "and it would serve you right if I turned my horse"s head round and refused to let you hear your Bishop. But I will not punish you this time; I will heap coals of fire on your head by driving on."
"Oh! don"t begin heaping coals of fire on people"s head, Mr. Tremaine; it is a dangerous habit, and those who indulge in it always get their fingers burned in the end--just as they do when they play with edged tools, or do something (I forget what) with their own petard."
There was a moment"s silence, and then Alan said--
"It makes me very unhappy when you are in a mood like this; I do not understand it, and it seems to raise up an impa.s.sable barrier between us."
"Please don"t be unhappy about a little thing like that; wait till you break a front tooth, or lose your collar-stud, or have some other real trouble to cry over. But now you are making a trouble out of nothing, and I have no patience with people who make troubles out of nothing; it seems to me like getting one"s boots spoiled by a watering-cart when it is dry weather; and that is a thing which makes me most frightfully angry."
"Do many things make you angry, I wonder?"
"Some things and some people."
"Tell me what sort of people make a woman of your type angry."
Elisabeth fell into the trap; she could never resist the opportunity of discussing herself from an outside point of view. If Alan had said _you_, she would have snubbed him at once; but the well-chosen words, _a woman of your type_, completely carried her away. She was not an egotist; she was only intensely interested in herself as the single specimen of humanity which she was able to study exhaustively.
"I think the people who make me angry are the unresponsive people," she replied thoughtfully; "the people who do not put their minds into the same key as mine when I am talking to them. Don"t you know the sort?
When you discuss a thing from one standpoint they persist in discussing it from another; and as soon as you try to see it from their point of view, they fly off to a third. It isn"t so much that they differ from you--that you would not mind; there is a certain harmony in difference which is more effective than its unison of perfect agreement--but they sing the same tune in another key, and the discords are excruciating.
Then the people who argue make me angry; those who argue about trifles, I mean."
"Ah! All you women are alike in that; you love discussion, and hate argument. The cause of which is that you decide things by instinct rather than by reason, and that therefore--although you know you are right--you can not possibly prove it."
"Then," Elisabeth continued, "I get very angry with the people who will bother about non-essentials; who, when you have got hold of the vital centre of a question, stray off to side issues. They are first-cousins of the people who talk in different keys."
"I should have said they were the same."
"Well, perhaps they are; I believe you are right. Christopher Thornley is one of that sort; when you are discussing one side of a thing with him, you"ll find him playing bo-peep with you round the other; and you never can get him into the right mood at the right time. He makes me simply furious sometimes. Do you know, I think if I were a dog I should often bite Christopher? He makes me angry in a biting kind of way."
Alan smiled faintly at this; jokes at Christopher"s expense were naturally more humorous than jokes at his own. "And what other sorts of people make you angry?" he asked.
"I"m afraid the people who make me angriest of all are the people who won"t do what I tell them. They really madden me." And Elisabeth began to laugh. "I"ve got a horribly strong will, you see, and if people go against it, I want them to be sent to the dentist"s every morning, and to the photographer"s every afternoon, for the rest of their lives. Now Christopher is one of the worst of those; I can"t make him do what I want just because I want it; he always wishes to know why I want it, and that is so silly and tiresome of him, because nine times out of ten I don"t know myself."
"Very trying!"
"Christopher certainly has the knack of making me angrier than anybody else I ever met," said Elisabeth thoughtfully. "I wonder why it is? I suppose it must be because I have known him for so long. I can"t see any other reason. I am generally such an easy-going, good-tempered girl; but when Christopher begins to argue and dictate and contradict, the Furies simply aren"t in it with me."
"The excellent Thornley certainly has his limitations."
Elisabeth"s eyes flashed. She did not mind finding fault with Christopher herself; in fact, she found such fault-finding absolutely necessary to her well-being; but she resented any attempt on the part of another to usurp this, her peculiar prerogative. "He is very good, all the same," she said, "and extremely clever; and he is my greatest friend."
But Alan was bored by Christopher as a subject of conversation, so he changed him for Elisabeth"s self. "How loyal you are!" he exclaimed with admiration; "it is indeed a patent of n.o.bility to be counted among your friends."
The girl, having just been guilty of disloyalty, was naturally delighted at this compliment. "You always understand and appreciate me," she said gratefully, unconscious of the fact that it was Alan"s lack of understanding and appreciation which had aroused her grat.i.tude just then. Perfect comprehension--untempered by perfect love--would be a terrible thing; mercifully for us poor mortals it does not exist.
Alan went on: "Because I possess this patent of n.o.bility, I am going to presume upon my privileges and ask you to help me in my life-work; and my life-work, as you know, is to ameliorate the condition of the poor, and to carry to some extent the burdens which they are bound to bear."
Elisabeth looked up at him, her face full of interest; no appeal to her pity was ever made in vain. If people expected her to admire them, they were frequently disappointed; if they wished her to fear them, their wish was absolutely denied; but if they only wanted her to be sorry for them, they were abundantly satisfied, sympathy being the keynote of her character. She was too fastidious often to admire; she was too strong ever to fear; but her tenderness was unfailing toward those who had once appealed to her pity, and whose weakness had for once allowed itself to rest upon her strength. Therefore Alan"s desire to help the poor, and to make them happier, struck the dominant chord in her nature; but unfortunately when she raised her eyes, full of sympathetic sympathy, to his, she encountered that look in the latter which had frightened her at the beginning of the excursion; so she again clothed herself in her garment of flippancy, and hardened her heart as the nether millstone. In blissful unconsciousness Alan continued--
"Society is just now pa.s.sing through a transition stage. The interests of capital and labour are at war with each other; the rich and the poor are as two armies made ready for battle, and the question is, What can we do to bridge over the gulf between the cla.s.ses, and to induce them each to work for, instead of against, the other? It is these transition stages which have proved the most difficult epochs in the world"s history."
"I hate transition stages and revolutions, they are so unsettling. It seems to me they are just like the day when your room is cleaned; and that is the most uncomfortable day in the whole week. Don"t you know it?
You go upstairs in the accustomed way, fearing nothing; but when you open the door you find the air dark with dust and the floor with tea-leaves, and nothing looking as it ought to look. p.r.o.ne on its face on the bed, covered with a winding-sheet, lies your overthrown looking-gla.s.s; and underneath it, in a shapeless ma.s.s, are huddled together all the things that you hold dearest upon earth. You thrust in your hand to get something that you want, and it is a pure chance whether your Bible or your b.u.t.ton-hook rises to the surface. And it seems to me that transition periods are just like that."
"How volatile you are! One minute you are so serious and the next so frivolous that I fail to follow you. I often think that you must have some foreign blood in your veins, you are so utterly different from the typical, stolid, shy, self-conscious English-woman."
"I hope you don"t think I was made in Germany, like cheap china and imitation Astrakhan."
"Heaven forbid! The Germans are more stolid and serious than the English. But you must have a Celtic ancestor in you somewhere. Haven"t you?"
"Well, to tell you the truth, my great-grandmother was a Manxwoman; but we are ashamed to talk much about her, because it sounds as if she"d had no tail."
"Then you must have inherited your temperament from her. But now I want to talk to you seriously about doing something for the men who work in the coal-pits, and who--more even than the rest of their cla.s.s--are shut out from the joy and beauty of the world. Their lives not only are made hideous, but are also shortened, by the nature of their toil. Do you know what the average life of a miner is?"
"Of course I do: twenty-one years."
Alan frowned; he disapproved of jokes even more than of creeds, and understood them equally. "Miss Farringdon, you are not behaving fairly to me. You know what I mean well enough, but you wilfully misunderstand my words for the sake of laughing at them. But I will make you listen, all the same. I want to know if you will help me in my work by becoming my wife; and I think that even you can not help answering that question seriously."
The laughter vanished from Elisabeth"s face, as if it had been wiped out with a sponge. "Oh! I--I don"t know," she murmured lamely.
"Then you must find out. To me it seems that you are the one woman in all the world who was made for me. Your personality attracted me the first moment that I met you; and our subsequent companionship has proved that our minds habitually run in the same grooves, and that we naturally look at things from the same standpoint. That is so, is it not?"
"Yes."
"The only serious difference between us seemed to be the difference of faith. You had been trained in the doctrines of one of the strictest sects, while I had outgrown all dogmas and thrown aside all recognised forms of religion. So strong were my feelings on this point, that I would not have married any woman who still clung to the worn-out and (by me) disused traditions; but I fancy that I have succeeded in converting you to my views, and that our ideas upon religion are now practically identical. Is not that so?"
Elisabeth thought for a moment. "Yes," she answered slowly; "you have taught me that Christianity, like all the other old religions, has had its day; and that the world is now ready for a new dispensation."
"Exactly; and for a dispensation which shall unite the pure ethics of the Christian to the joyous vitality of the Greek, eliminating alike the melancholy of the one and the sensualism of the other. You agree with me in this, do you not?"
"You know that I do."
"I am glad, because--as I said before--I could not bear to marry any woman who did not see eye to eye with me on these vital matters. I love you very dearly, Elisabeth, and it would be a great grief to me if any question of opinion or conviction came between us; yet I do not believe that two people could possibly be happy together--however much they might love each other--if they were not one with each other on subjects such as these."
Elisabeth was silent; she was too much excited to speak. Her heart was thumping like the great hammer at the Osierfield, and she was trembling all over. So she held her peace as they drove up the princ.i.p.al street of Silverhampton and across the King"s Square to the lych-gate of St.
Peter"s Church; but Alan, looking into the tell-tale face he knew so well, was quite content.
Yet as she sat beside Alan in St. Peter"s Church that summer evening, and thought upon what she had just done, a great sadness filled Elisabeth"s soul. The sun shone brightly through the western window, and wrote mystic messages upon the gray stone walls; but the lights of the east window shone pale and cold in the distant apse, where the Figure of the Crucified gleamed white upon a foundation of emerald. And as she looked at the Figure, which the world has wept over and worshipped for nineteen centuries, she realized that this was the Symbol of all that she was giving up and leaving behind her--the Sign of that religion of love and sorrow which men call Christianity. She felt that wisdom must be justified of her children, and not least of her, Elisabeth Farringdon; nevertheless, she mourned for the myth which had once made life seem fair, and death even fairer. Although she had outgrown her belief in it, its beauty had still power to touch her heart, if not to convince her intellect; and she sighed as she recalled all that it had once meant, and how it had appeared to be the one satisfactory solution to the problems which weary and perplex mankind.
Now she must face all the problems over again in the grim twilight of dawning science, with no longer a Star of Bethlehem to show where the answer might be found; and her spirit quailed at the pitiless prospect.
She had never understood before how much that Symbol of eternal love and vicarious suffering had been to her, nor how puzzling would be the path through the wilderness if there were no Crucifix at life"s cross-roads to show the traveller which way to go; and her heart grew heavier as she took part in the sacred office of Evensong, and thought how beautiful it all would be if only it were true. She longed to be a little child again--a child to whom the things which are not seen are as the things which are seen, and the things which are not as the things which are; and she could have cried with homesickness when she remembered how firmly she had once believed that the shadow which hung over the Osierfield was a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, to testify that G.o.d was still watching over His people, as in the days of old. Now she knew that the pillar was only the smoke and the flame of human industries; and the knowledge brought a load of sadness, as it seemed to typify that there was no longer any help for the world but in itself.