"A sense of futility is a sense of incompleteness," he said, "and generally precedes a sense of power."
"Ah, you have gained that! Yet it must always have been latent in you--you make one feel it. But now!" she exclaimed, as though the discovery had just dawned on her, "now you will need power, now you will have to fight as you have never fought in your life."
He found her enthusiasm as difficult to withstand as her stoicism.
"Yes, I shall have to fight," he admitted. Her partisanship was sweet.
"When you tell them what you have told me," she continued, as though working it out in her own mind, "they will never submit to it, if they can help it. My father will never submit to it. They will try to put you out, as a heretic,--won"t they?"
"I have an idea that they will," he conceded, with a smile.
"And won"t they succeed? Haven"t they the power?"
"It depends,--in the first place, on whether the bishop thinks me a heretic."
"Have you asked him?"
"No."
"But can"t they make you resign?"
"They can deprive me of my salary."
She did not press this.
"You mustn"t think me a martyr," he pleaded, in a lighter tone.
She paid no heed to this protest, but continued to regard him with a face lighted by enthusiasm.
"Oh, that"s splendid of you!" she cried. "You are going to speak the truth as you see it, and let them do their worst. Of course, fundamentally, it isn"t merely because they"re orthodox that they won"t like it, although they"ll say so, and perhaps think so. It will be because if you have really found the truth--they will instinctively, fear its release. For it has a social bearing, too--hasn"t it?--although you haven"t explained that part of it."
"It has a distinct social bearing," he replied, amazed at the way her mind flew forward and grasped the entire issue, in spite of the fact that her honesty still refused to concede his premises. Such were the contradictions in her that he loved. And, though she did not suspect it, she had in her the Crusader"s spirit. "I have always remembered what you once said, that many who believed themselves Christians had an instinctive feeling that there is a spark in Christianity which, if allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their control.
And that they had covered the spark with ashes. I, too," he added whimsically, "was buried under the ashes."
"And the spark," she demanded, "is not Socialism--their nightmare?"
"The spark is Christianity itself--but I am afraid they will not be able to distinguish it from Socialism. The central paradox in Christianity consists in the harmonizing of the individual and socialistic spirit, and this removes it as far from the present political doctrine of socialism as it is possible to be. Christianity, looked at from a certain viewpoint,--and I think the proper viewpoint,--is the most individualistic of religions, since its basic principle is the development of the individual into an autonomous being."
They stood facing each other on an open stretch of lawn. The place was deserted. Through the trees, in the near distance, the sightless front of the Ferguson mansion blazed under the September sun.
"Individualistic!" she repeated, as though dazed by the word applied to the religion she had discarded. "I can"t understand. Do you think I ever can understand?" she asked him, simply.
"It seems to me you understand more than you are willing to give yourself credit for," he answered seriously. "You don"t take into account your att.i.tude."
"I see what you mean--a willingness to take the right road, if I can find it. I am not at all sure that I want to take it. But you must tell me more--more of what you have discovered. Will you?"
He just hesitated. She herself appeared to acknowledge no bar to their further intimacy--why should he?
"I will tell you all I know," he said.
Suddenly, as if by a transference of thought, she voiced what he had in mind.
"You are going to tell them the truth about themselves!" she exclaimed.
"--That they are not Christians!"
His silence was an admission.
"You must see," he told her, after the moment they had looked into each other"s faces, "that this is the main reason why I must stay at St.
John"s, in the Church, if I conscientiously can."
"I see. The easier course would be to resign, to have scruples. And you believe there is a future for the Church."
"I believe it," he a.s.sented.
She still held his eyes.
"Yes, it is worth doing. If you see it that way it is more worth doing than anything else. Please don"t think," she said, "that I don"t appreciate why you have told me all this, why you have given me your reasons. I know it hasn"t been easy. It"s because you wish me to have faith in you for my own sake, not for yours. And I am grateful."
"And if that faith is justified, as you will help to justify it, that it may be transferred to a larger sphere," he answered.
She gave him her hand, but did not reply.
CHAPTER XIX. MR. GOODRICH BECOMES A PARTISAN
I
In these days of his preparation, she haunted him continually. In her he saw typified all those who possessed the divine discontent, the yearning unsatisfied,--the fatalists and the dreamers. And yet she seemed to have risen through instinct to share the fire of his vision of religion revealed to the countless ranks of strugglers as the hidden motive-power of the world, the impetus of scientist, statesman, artist, and philanthropist! They had stood together on the heights of the larger view, whence the whole of the battle-line lay disclosed.
At other and more poignant moments he saw her as waving him bravely on while he steamed out through towering seas to safety. The impression was that of smiling at her destiny. Had she fixed upon it? and did she linger now only that she might inspire him in his charge? She was capable, he knew, of taking calmly the irrevocable step, of accepting the decree as she read it. The thought tortured, the desire to save her from herself obsessed him; with true clairvoyance she had divined him aright when she had said that he wished her to have faith in him for her own sake. Could he save her in spite of herself? and how? He could not see her, except by chance. Was she waiting until he should have crossed the bar before she should pay some inexorable penalty of which he knew nothing?
Thus he speculated, suffered, was at once cast down and lifted up by the thought of her. To him, at least, she was one of those rare and dauntless women, the red stars of history, by whom the Dantes and Leonardos are fired to express the inexpressible, and common clay is fused and made mad: one of those women who, the more they reveal, become the more inscrutable. Divinely inarticulate, he called her; arousing the pa.s.sion of the man, yet stirring the sublimer efforts of the G.o.d.
What her feelings toward him, whether she loved him as a woman loves a man he could not say, no man being a judge in the supreme instance. She beheld him emanc.i.p.ated, perhaps, from what she might have called the fetters of an orthodoxy for which she felt an instinctive antagonism; but whether, though proclaiming himself free, the fact of his continuation in the ministry would not of itself set up in her a reaction, he was unable to predict. Her antipathy to forms, he saw, was inherent. Her interest--her fascinated absorption, it might be called--in his struggle was spiritual, indeed, but it also had mixed in it the individualistic zeal of the nonconformist. She resented the trammels of society; though she suffered from her efforts to transcend them. The course he had determined upon appeared to her as a rebellion not only against a cut-and-dried state of mind, but also against vested privilege. Yet she had in her, as she confessed, the craving for what privilege brings in the way of harmonious surroundings. He loved her for her contradictions.
Thus he was utterly unable to see what the future held for him in the way of continued communion with her, to evolve any satisfactory theory as to why she remained in the city. She had told him that the gardens were an excuse. She had come, by her own intimation, to reflect, to decide some momentous question. Marriage? He found this too agitating to dwell upon, summoning, as it did, conjectures of the men she might have known; and it was perhaps natural, in view of her att.i.tude, that he could only think of such a decision on her part as surrender.
That he had caught and held her attention, although by no conscious effort of his own, was clear to him. But had he not merely arrested her?
Would she not presently disappear, leaving only in his life the scarlet thread which she had woven into it for all time? Would he not fail to change, permanently, the texture of hers?
Such were his hopes and fears concerning her, and they were mingled inextricably with other hopes and fears which had to do with the great venture of his life. He dwelt in a realm of paradoxes, discovered that exaltation was not incompatible with anxiety and dread. He had no thought of wavering; he had achieved to an extent he would not have believed possible the sense of consecration which brings with it indifference to personal fortunes, and the revelation of the inner world, and yet he shrank from the wounds he was about to receive--and give. Outwardly controlled, he lived in the state of intense excitement of the leader waiting for the time to charge.
II