Elisabeth"s mood changed at once, and her face grew serious. "I want to teach people that they were sent into the world to be happy, and not to be miserable; and that there is no virtue in turning their backs to the sunshine and choosing to walk in the shade. I want to teach people that the world is beautiful, and that it is only a superficial view that finds it common and unclean. I want to teach people that human nature is good and not evil, and that life is a glorious battlefield and not a sordid struggle. In short, I want to teach people the dignity of themselves; and there is no grander lesson."
"Except, perhaps, the unworthiness of themselves," suggested Christopher.
"No, no, Chris; you are wrong to be so hard and cynical. Can"t you understand how I am longing to help the men and women I see around me, who are dying for want of joy and beauty in their lives? It is the old struggle between h.e.l.lenism and Hebraism--between happiness and righteousness. We are sorely in need, here in England to-day, of the Greek spirit of Pantheism, which found G.o.d in life and art and nature, "as well as in sorrow and renunciation and death."
"But it is in sorrow and renunciation and death that we need Him; and you, who have always had everything you want, can not understand this: no more could the Pagans and the Royalists; but the early Christians and the persecuted Puritans could."
"Puritanism has much to answer for in England," said Elisabeth; "we have to thank Puritanism for teaching men that only by hurting themselves can they please their Maker, and that G.o.d has given them tastes and hopes and desires merely in order to mortify the same. And it is all false--utterly false. The G.o.d of the Pagan is surely a more merciful Being than the G.o.d of the Puritan."
"A more indulgent Being, perhaps, but not necessarily a more merciful one, Elisabeth. I disagree with the Puritans on many points, but I can not help admitting that their conception of G.o.d was a fine one, even though it erred on the side of severity. The Pagan converted the G.o.dhead into flesh, remember; but the Puritan exalted manhood into G.o.d."
"Still, I never could bear the Puritans," Elisabeth went on; "they turned the England of Queen Elizabeth--the most glorious England the world has ever known--into one enormous Nonconformist Conscience; and England has never been perfectly normal since. Besides, they discovered that nature, and art, and human affection, which are really revelations of G.o.d, were actually sins against Him. As I said before, I can never forgive the Puritans for eradicating the beauty from holiness, and for giving man the spirit of heaviness in place of the garment of praise."
"I wonder if Paganism helped you much when you were poor and ill and unhappy, and things in general had gone wrong with you. I daresay it was very nice for the cheerful, prosperous people; but how about those who had never got what they wanted out of life, and were never likely to get it?" Christopher, like other people, looked at most matters from his own individual standpoint; and his own individual standpoint was not at all a comfortable spot just then.
"The Greeks suffered and died as did the Jews and the Christians,"
replied Elisabeth, "yet they were a joyous and light-hearted race. It is not sorrow that saddens the world, but rather modern Christianity"s idealization of sorrow. I do not believe we should be half as miserable as we are if we did not believe that there is virtue in misery, and that by disowning our mercies and discarding our blessings we are currying favour in the eyes of the Being, Who, nevertheless, has showered those mercies and those blessings upon us."
Thus had Alan Tremaine"s influence gradually unmoored Elisabeth from the old faiths in which she had been brought up; and he had done it so gradually that the girl was quite unconscious of how far she had drifted from her former anchorage. He was too well-bred ever to be blatant in his unbelief--he would as soon have thought of attacking a man"s family to his face as of attacking his creed; but subtly and with infinite tact he endeavoured to prove that to adapt ancient revelations to modern requirements was merely putting new wine into old bottles and mending old garments with new cloth; and Elisabeth was as yet too young and inexperienced to see any fallacy in his carefully prepared arguments.
She had n.o.body to help her to resist him, poor child! and she was dazzled with the consciousness of intellectual power which his att.i.tude of mind appeared to take for granted. Miss Farringdon was cast in too stern a mould to have any sympathy or patience with the blind gropings of an undisciplined young soul; and Christopher--who generally understood and sympathized with all Elisabeth"s difficulties and phases--was so jealous of her obvious attachment to Tremaine, and so unhappy on account of it, that for the time being the faithful friend was entirely swallowed up in the irate lover, sighing like one of the Osierfield furnaces. Of course this was very unfair and tiresome of him--n.o.body could deny that; but it is sometimes trying to the amiability of even the best of men to realize that the purely mundane and undeserved accident of want of money can shut them off entirely from ever attaining to the best kind of happiness whereof their natures are capable--and especially when they know that their natures are capable of attaining and appreciating a very high standard of happiness indeed. It may not be right to be unsociable because one is unhappy, but it is very human and most particularly masculine; and Christopher just then was both miserable and a man.
There was much about Alan that was very attractive to Elisabeth: he possessed a certain subtlety of thought and an almost feminine quickness of perception which appealed powerfully to her imagination. Imagination was Elisabeth"s weak, as well as her strong, point. She was incapable of seeing people as they really were; but erected a purely imaginary edifice of character on the foundations of such attributes as her rapid intuition either rightly or wrongly perceived them to possess. As a rule, she thought better of her friends than they deserved--or, at any rate, she recognised in them that ideal which they were capable of attaining, but whereto they sometimes failed to attain.
Life is apt to be a little hard on the women of Elisabeth"s type, who idealize their fellows until the latter lose all semblance of reality; for experience, with its inevitable disillusionment, can not fail to put their ideal lovers and friends far from them, and to hide their etherealized acquaintances out of their sight; and to give instead, to the fond, trusting souls, half-hearted lovers, semi-sincere friends, and acquaintances who care for them only as the world can care. Poor imaginative women--who dreamed that you had found a perfect knight and a faithful friend, and then discovered that these were only an ordinary selfish man and woman after all--life has many more such surprises in store for you; and the surprises will shock you less and hurt you more as the years roll on! But though life will have its surprises for you, death perchance will have none; for when the secrets of all hearts are opened, and all thwarted desires are made known, it may be that the ordinary selfish man and woman will stand forth as the perfect knight and faithful friend that G.o.d intended them, and you believed them, and they tried yet failed to be; and you will be satisfied at last when you see your beloved ones wake up after His likeness, and will smile as you say to them, "So it is really you after all."
Although Tremaine might be lacking in his duty toward G.o.d, he fulfilled (in the spirit if not in the letter) his duty toward his neighbour; and Elisabeth was fairly dazzled by his many schemes for making life easier and happier to the people who dwelt in the darkness of the Black Country.
It was while he was thus figuring as her ideal hero that Elisabeth went to stay with Felicia Herbert, near a manufacturing town in Yorkshire.
Felicia had been once or twice to the Willows, and was well acquainted with the physical and biographical characteristics of the place; and she cherished a profound admiration both for Miss Farringdon and Christopher Thornley. Tremaine she had never met--he had been abroad each time that she had visited Sedgehill--but she disapproved most heartily of his influence upon Elisabeth, and of his views as set forth by that young lady. Felicia had been brought up along extremely strict lines, and in a spirit of comfortable intolerance of all forms of religion not absolutely identical with her own; consequently, a man with no form of religion at all was to her a very terrible monster indeed. On the Sundays of her early youth she had perused a story treating of an Unbeliever (always spelled with a capital U), and the punishments that were meted out to the daughter of light who was unequally yoked with him; and she was imbued with a strong conviction that these same punishments were destined to fall upon Elisabeth"s head, should Elisabeth incline favourably to the (at present) hypothetical suit of the master of the Moat House. Thus it happened that when Elisabeth came to the Herberts", full of girlish admiration for Alan Tremaine, Felicia did her best to ripen that admiration into love by abusing Alan in and out of season, and by endeavouring to prove that an attachment to him would be a soul-destroyer of the most irreparable completeness.
"It is no use talking to me about his goodness," she said; "n.o.body is good who isn"t a Christian."
"But he is good," persisted Elisabeth--"most tremendously good. The poor people simply adore him, he does such a lot for them; and he couldn"t have lovelier thoughts and higher ideals if he were a girl instead of a man. There must be different ways of goodness, Felicia."
"There are not different ways of goodness; mamma says there are not, and it is very wicked to believe that there are. I am afraid you are not half as religious as you were at Fox How."
"Yes, I am; but I have learned that true religion is a state of mind rather than a code of dogmas."
Felicia looked uncomfortable. "I wish you wouldn"t talk like that; I am sure mamma wouldn"t like it--she can not bear anything that borders on the profane."
"I am not bordering on the profane; I am only saying what I uphold is true. I can not take things for granted as you do; I have to think them out for myself; and I have come to the conclusion that what a man is is of far more importance than what a man believes."
"But you ought not to think things like that, Elisabeth; it isn"t right to do so."
"I can"t help thinking it. I am an independent being with a mind of my own, and I must make up that mind according to what I see going on around me. What on earth is the good of having an intellect, if you submit that intellect to the will of another? I wonder how you can take your ideas all ready-made from your mother," exclaimed Elisabeth, who just then was taking all hers ready-made from Alan Tremaine.
"Well, I can not argue. I am not clever enough; and, besides, mamma doesn"t like us to argue upon religious subjects--she says it is unsettling; so I will only say that I know you are wrong, and then we will let the matter drop and talk about Christopher. How is he?"
"Oh, he is all right, only very horrid. To tell you the truth, I am getting to dislike Christopher."
"Elisabeth!" Felicia"s Madonna-like face became quite sorrowful.
"Well, I am; and so would you, if he was as stand-off to you as he is to me. I can"t think what is wrong with him; but whatever I do, and however nice I try to be to him, the North Pole is warm and neighbourly compared with him. I"m sick of him and his unsociable ways!"
"But you and he used to be such friends."
"I know that; and I would be friends now if he would let me. But how can you be friends with a man who is as reserved as the Great Pyramid and as uncommunicative as the Sphinx, and who sticks up iron palings all round himself, like a specimen tree in the park, so that n.o.body can get near him? If a man wants a girl to like him he should be nice to her, and not require an introduction every time they meet."
Felicia sighed: her sweet, placid nature was apt to be overpowered by Elisabeth"s rapid changes of front. "But he used to be so fond of you,"
she expostulated feebly.
Elisabeth shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, I suppose he likes me now, in his cold, self-satisfied way: it isn"t that. What I complain of is that he doesn"t admire me enough, and I do so love to be admired."
"Do you mean he doesn"t think you are pretty?" Felicia always had to have things fully explained to her; excess of imagination could never lead her astray, whatever it might do to her friend.
"Of course not; I don"t see how he could, considering that I"m not: women don"t expect men to admire them for things that they don"t possess," replied Elisabeth, who had still much to learn. "What I mean is he doesn"t realize how clever I am--he despises me just as he used to despise me when I was a little girl and he was a big boy--and that is awfully riling when you know you are clever."
"Is it? I would much rather a man liked me than thought I was clever."
"I wouldn"t; anybody can like you, but it takes a clever person to appreciate cleverness. I have studied myself thoroughly, and I have come to the conclusion that I need appreciation far more than affection: I"m made like that."
"I don"t understand you. To me affection is everything, and I can not live without it. If people are really fond of me, they can think me as stupid as they like."
Elisabeth"s face grew thoughtful; she was always interested in the a.n.a.lysis of herself and her friends. "How different we two are! I couldn"t forgive a person for thinking me stupid, even if I knew that person adored me. To me no amount of affection would make up for the lack of appreciation. I want to be understood as well as liked, and that is where Christopher and I come across each other; he never understands me in the least. Now that is why Mr. Tremaine and I get on so well together; he understands and appreciates me so thoroughly."
Felicia"s pretty month fell into stern lines of disapproval. "I am sure I should hate Mr. Tremaine if I knew him," she said.
"Oh, no, you wouldn"t--you simply couldn"t, Felicia, he is so delightful. And, what is more, he is so frightfully interesting: whatever he says and does, he always makes you think about him. Now, however fond you were of Chris--and he really is very good and kind in some ways--you could never think about him: it would be such dreadfully uninteresting thinking, if you did."
"I don"t know about that; Christopher is very comfortable and homelike, somehow," replied Felicia.
"So are rice-puddings and flannel petticoats, but you don"t occupy your most exalted moments in meditating upon them."
"Do you know, Elisabeth, I sometimes think that Christopher is in love with you." Unlike Elisabeth, Felicia never saw what did not exist, and therefore was able sometimes to perceive what did.
"Good gracious, what an idea! He"d simply roar with laughter at the mere thought of such a thing! Why, Christopher isn"t capable of falling in love with anybody; he hasn"t got it in him, he is so frightfully matter-of-fact."
Felicia looked dubious. "Then don"t you think he will ever marry?"
"Oh, yes, he"ll marry fast enough--a sweet, domestic woman, who plays the piano and does crochet-work; and he will talk to her about the price of iron and the integrity of the empire, and will think that he is making love, and she will think so too. And they will both of them go down to their graves without ever finding out that the life is more than meat or the body than raiment."
Elisabeth was very hard on Christopher just then, and nothing that Felicia could say succeeded in softening her. Women are apt to be hard when they are quite young--and sometimes even later.
Felicia Herbert was the eldest of a large family. Her parents, though well-to-do, were not rich; and it was the dream of Mrs. Herbert"s life that her daughter"s beauty should bring about a great match. She was a good woman according to her lights, and a most excellent wife and mother; but if she had a weakness--and who (except, of course, one"s self) is without one?--that weakness was social ambition.
"You will understand, my dear," she said confidentially to Elisabeth, "that it would be the greatest comfort to Mr. Herbert and myself to see Felicia married to a G.o.d-fearing man; and, of course, if he kept his own carriage as well we should be all the better satisfied."