"Well, said Virginia, "it is nice of you to say that; but still----Ah me! Ah me!"
And her bosom heaved slowly with a soft, long sigh.
CHAPTER XVII.
Virginia was preparing, with a rueful face, to resume her enjoyment of the higher pleasures, when a horrible smell, like that of an open drain, was suddenly blown in through the window.
Virginia stopped her nose with her handkerchief. The Professor"s conduct was very different.
"Oh, rapture!" he cried, jumping up from his seat, "I smell the missing link." And in another instant he was gone.
"Well," said Virginia, "here is one comfort. Whilst Paul is away I shall be relieved from the higher pleasures. Alas!" she cried, as she flung herself down on the sofa, "he is so nice-looking, and such an enlightened thinker. But it is plain he has never loved, or else very certainly he would love again."
Paul returned in about a couple of hours, again unsuccessful in his search.
"Ah!" cried Virginia, "I am so glad you have not caught the creature!"
"Glad!" echoed the Professor, "glad! Do you know that till I have caught the missing link the cause of glorious truth will suffer grievously?
The missing link is the token of the solemn fact of our origin from inorganic matter. I did but catch one blessed glimpse of him. He had certainly a silver band about his neck. He was about three feet high. He was rolling in a lump of carrion. It is through him that we are related to the stars--the holy, the glorious stars, about which we know so little."
"Bother the stars!" said Virginia; "I couldn"t bear, Paul, that anything should come between you and me. I have been thinking of you and longing for you the whole time you have been away."
"What!" cried Paul, "and how have you been able to forego the pleasures of the intellect?"
"I have deserted them," cried Virginia, "for the pleasures of the imagination, which I gathered from you were also very enn.o.bling. And I found they were so; for I have been imagining that you loved me. Why is the reality less enn.o.bling than the imagination? Paul, you shall love me; I will force you to love me. It will make us both so happy: we shall never go to h.e.l.l for it; and it cannot possibly cause the slightest scandal."
The Professor was more bewildered than ever by these appeals. He wondered how Humanity would ever get on if one half of it cared nothing for pure truth, and persisted in following the vulgar impulses that had been the most distinguishing feature of its benighted past--that is to say, those ages of its existence of which any record has been preserved for us. Luckily, however, Virginia came to his a.s.sistance.
"I think I know, Paul," she said, "why I do not care as I should do for the intellectual pleasures. We have both been seeking them by ourselves; and we have been therefore egoistic hedonists. It is quite true, as you say, that selfishness is a despicable thing. Let me," she went on, sitting down beside him, "look through your microscope along with you.
I think perhaps, if we shared the pleasure, the missing link"s parasites might have some interest for me."
The Professor was overjoyed at this proposal. The two sat down side by side, and tried their best to look simultaneously through the eye-piece of the microscope. Virginia in a moment expressed herself much satisfied. It is true they saw nothing; but their cheeks touched. The Professor too seemed contented, and said they should both be in a state of rapture when they had got the right focus. At last Virginia whispered, with a soft smile--
"Suppose we put that nasty microscope aside; it is only in the way. And then, oh, Paul; dear love, dove of a Paul! we can kiss each other to our heart"s content."
Paul thought Virginia quite incorrigible, and rushed headlong out of the room.
CHAPTER XVIII.
"Alas!" cried Paul, "what can be done to convince one half of Humanity that it is really devoted to the higher pleasures and does not care for the lower--at least nothing to speak of?" The poor man was in a state of dreadful perplexity, and felt wellnigh distracted. At last a light broke in on him. He remembered that as one of his most revered masters, Professor Tyndall, had admitted, a great part of Humanity would always need a religion, and that Virginia now had none. He at once rushed back to her. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "all is explained now. You cannot be in love with me, for that would be unlawful pa.s.sion. Unlawful pa.s.sion is unreasonable, and unreasonable pa.s.sion would quite upset a system of pure reason, which is what exact thought shows us is soon going to govern the world. No! the emotions that you fancy are directed to me are in reality cosmic emotion--in other words, are the reasonable religion of the future. I must now initiate you in its solemn and unspeakably significant worship."
"Religion!" exclaimed Virginia, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
"It is not kind of you to be making fun of me. There is no G.o.d, no soul, and no supernatural order, and above all there is no h.e.l.l. How then can you talk to me about religion?"
"You," replied Paul, "are a.s.sociating religion with theology, as indeed the world hitherto always has done. But those two things, as Professor Huxley well observes, have absolutely nothing to do with each other. "It may be," says that great teacher, "that the object of a man"s religion is an ideal of sensual enjoyment, or----""
"Ah!" cried Virginia, "that is my religion, Paul."
"Nonsense!" replied Paul; "that cannot be the religion of half Humanity, else high, holy, solemn, awful morality would never be able to stand on its own basis. See, the night has fallen, the glorious moon has arisen, the stupendous stars are sparkling in the firmament. Come down with me to the sea-sh.o.r.e, where we may be face to face with nature, and I will show you then what true religion--what true worship is."
The two went out together. They stood on the smooth sands, which glittered white and silvery in the dazzling moonlight All was hushed.
The gentle murmur of the trees, and the soft splash of the sea, seemed only to make the silence audible. The Professor paused close beside Virginia, and took her hand. Virginia liked that, and thought that religion without theology was not perhaps so bad after all. Meanwhile Paul had fixed his eyes on the moon. Then, in a voice almost broken with emotion, he whispered, "The prayer of the man of science, it has been said, must be for the most part of the silent sort. He who said that was wrong. It need not be silent; it need only be inarticulate. I have discovered an audible and a reasonable liturgy which will give utterance to the full to the religion of exact thought. Let us both join our voices, and let us croon at the moon."
The Professor at once began a long, low howling. Virginia joined him, until she was out of breath.
"Oh, Paul," she said at last, "is this more rational than the Lord"s Prayer?"
"Yes," said the Professor, "for we can a.n.a.lyse and comprehend that; but true religious feeling, as Professor Tyndall tells us, we can neither a.n.a.lyse nor comprehend. See how big nature is, and how little--ah, how little!--we know about it. Is it not solemn, and sublime, and awful?
Come let us howl again."
The Professor"s devotional fervour grew every moment. At last he put his hand to his mouth, and began hooting like an owl, till it seemed that all the island echoed to him. The louder Paul hooted and howled, the more near did he draw to Virginia.
"Ah!" he said, as he put his arm about her waist, "it is in solemn moments like this that the solidarity of mankind becomes apparent."
Virginia, during the last few moments, had stuck her fingers in her ears. She now took them out, and, throwing her arms round Paul"s neck, tried, with her cheek on his shoulder, to make another little hoot; but the sound her lips formed was much more like a kiss. The power of religion was at last too much for Paul.
"For the sake of cosmic emotion," he exclaimed, "O other half of Humanity, and for the sake of rational religion, both of which are showing themselves under quite a new light to me, I will kiss you."
The Professor was bending down his face over her, when, as if by magic, he started, stopped, and remained as one petrified. Amidst the sharp silence, there rang a human shout from the rocks.
"Oh!" shrieked Virginia, falling on her knees, "it is a miracle! it is a miracle! And I know--merciful heavens--I know the meaning of it. G.o.d is angry with us for pretending that we do not believe on Him."
The Professor was as white as a sheet; but he struggled with his perturbation manfully.
"It is not a miracle," he cried, "but an hallucination. It is an axiom with exact thinkers that all proofs of the miraculous are hallucinations."
"See," shrieked Virginia again, "they are coming, they are coming. Do not you see them?"
Paul looked, and there sure enough, were two figures, a male and a female, advancing slowly towards them, across the moonlit sand.
"It is nothing," cried Paul; "it cannot possibly be anything. I protest, in the name of science, that it is an optical delusion."
Suddenly the female figure exclaimed, "Thank G.o.d, it is he!"
In another moment the male figure exclaimed, "Thank G.o.d, it is she!"
"My husband!" gasped Virginia.
"My wife!" replied the bishop, for it was none other than he. "Welcome to Chasuble Island. By the blessing of G.o.d it is on your own home you have been wrecked, and you have been living in the very house that I had intended to prepare for you. Providentially, too, Professor Darnley"s wife has called here, in her search for her husband, who has overstayed his time. See, my love, my dove, my beauty, here is the monkey I promised you as a pet, which broke loose a few days ago, and which I was in the act of looking for when your joint cries attracted us, and we found you."