IN ST. JAMES'S SQUARE.
On the afternoon when she was expecting Mr. and Mrs. Stobart, Lady Kilrush was surprised by a visit from an old friend whom she had almost forgotten. Her chair had just brought her from a round of visits, and she had not yet removed her hat and cloak, which Sophy was waiting to take from her, being ever jealous of her lady's French maid, when a visitor was announced—
"Mrs. Granger."
The room was the fourth and smallest of a suite of reception-rooms, which occupied the whole of the first floor, leaving space only for the wide central staircase, surrounded by a gallery that was a favourite resort of visitors at a crowded assembly, as a vantage-ground from which they could watch arrivals, look out for their particular friends, and criticize "clothes."
The room was half in dusk, and Antonia wondered who the little young lady in the cherry-coloured hood and satin petticoat of the same bright hue could be. It was not a colour favoured by people of taste at that time, and the little plump person in the high hoop had not the air of the Portland set, that recherché group of women among whom Antonia had been received on a friendly footing, on the strength of her own charms and Lady Peggy's popularity. Lady Peggy was of all the sets, best and worst, and exercised a commanding influence over all.
"My dear creature, sure you won't pretend you've forgot me?" cried the little woman, with broad, outspoken speech, after her first mincing salutation had been acknowledged by a stately curtsey and a "Your humble servant, madam."
"Why, 'tis Patty!" exclaimed Antonia, holding out both her hands.
"Yes, 'tis Patty—Mrs. Granger. Sure you remember old General Granger that you used to jeer at. I have been married to him over a year, and we have handsome lodgings in Leicester Square, and I keep my chair; and if he outlives his two elder brothers and three nephews, I shall be a peeress."
"My dear Patty, I am gladder than I can say to see your kind little face again. Sit down, child. You must stop and dine with me. I have some cousins coming to dinner, and some company afterwards."
"Well, I'm glad you're glad. I thought you was too proud to remember me, since you didn't send me a card for your ball t'other night, though all London was there."
"I did not know what had become of you. I have asked ever so many people who knew the theatres, and no one could say where Miss Lester had gone since her name vanished from the playbills."
"The General is a strait-laced old fool!" said Patty. "He doesn't like people to know I was an actress, though I flatter myself that nobody can hear me speak or see me curtsey without discovering it. There's an air of high comedy that nobody can mistake. Sure 'tis in the hope of catching it that fine ladies take up Kitty Clive."
"You mustn't call your husband a fool, Patty, especially if he's kind to you."
"Oh, he's kind enough, but he's very troublesome with his pussy-cats, and Minettes, and nonsense; though, to be sure, Minette is a prettier name than Martha, and genteeler than Patty. And he's very close with his money. I might have my coach as well as my chair if he wasn't a miser. I sometimes think I was a simpleton to leave the stage for a husband of seventy. Sure I might have been another Mrs. Cibber."
"You had been acting seven years, Patty. You gave your genius a fair chance."
"Pshaw, there's some that don't begin to hit the taste of the town till they've been at it three times seven. Look at old Colley, for instance. The managers kept him down half a lifetime. When I look at this house and think of my two parlours I feel I was a fool to marry the General. But there never was such a romance as your marriage."
"My marriage was a tragedy, Patty!"
"Ah, but you've got the comedy now. This fine house, and your hall porter—I never laid eyes on such a pompous creature—and your powdered footmen. You're a lucky devil, Tonia."
Antonia did not reprove her, being somewhat troubled in mind at the doubt of her own wisdom in bringing this free-and-easy young person in company with George Stobart and his wife. In her gladness at meeting the friend of her girlhood she had forgotten how strange such a mixture would be.
"If 'tis not convenient to dine with me to-day, Patty, I shall be just as pleased to see you to-morrow, or the first day that would suit you."
"Your ladyship—ladyship! oh, lord, ain't it droll?—your ladyship is vastly obleeging; but I came to stay if you'd have me. Granger is gone to Hounslow to dine with his old regiment, and I'm my own woman till ten o'clock. 'Twould be civil of you if you'd bid one of your footmen tell my chairmen to fetch me at a quarter to ten, and then we can sit by the fire and talk over old times. This is Mrs. Potter's girl, I doubt, she that waited upon us once when I took a dish of tea with you. How d'ye do, miss?"—holding out condescending finger-tips to Sophy, who had stood gazing at her since her entrance.
"Yes, this is Miss Potter, my friend and companion. You can take my hat and Mrs. Granger's hood, Sophy, and come back when Mr. and Mrs. Stobart are here."
When Sophy was gone, Lady Kilrush took Patty's plump cheeks between two caressing hands and contemplated her with a smile.
"You are as pretty as ever, child," she said, with an elder-sister air, as if she, instead of Patty, had been the senior by near a decade; "and I am glad to think you have left the playhouse and all its perils for a comfortable home with an honest man who loves you. Nay, I think you are prettier than you were in Covent Garden. The quiet life has freshened your looks. But you shouldn't wear cherry colour."
"Because of my red hair?"
"Because it is a cit's wife's colour, or a vain old woman's that wants to look young. 'Tis not the mode, Patty."
"My petticoat cost a pound a yard," said Patty, ruefully. "I thought the General would kill me when he saw the bill."
"Oh, 'tis pretty enough, and suits you well enough, chérie. I was half in jest. I have a kind friend who lectures me upon all such trifles, and so I thought I'd lecture you. And, my dearest Patty, as the cousin that's to dine with us is a very serious person, I should take it kindly of you not to talk of the playhouse, nor to abuse your husband."
"I hope I know how to behave in company," answered Patty, slightly huffed; and on Mr. and Mrs. Stobart being announced the next moment, she assumed a mincing stateliness which lasted the whole evening.
Stobart thought her an appalling personage, in spite of her reticence. Her cherry satin bodice was cut very low, and her ample bosom was spread with pearls and crosses like a jeweller's show-case. She made up for a paucity of diamonds by the size of her topazes and the profusion of her amethysts, and her Bristol paste buckles would have been big enough for the tallest of the Prussian king's grenadiers. Lucy Stobart, in her pearl-grey silk, made with a quaker-like simplicity, her pure complexion, golden-brown curls and slender shape, seemed all the lovelier by the contrast of Mrs. Granger's florid charms; but poor Patty behaved herself with an admirable reserve, and uttered no word that could offend.
Lucy looked at everything in a wondering rapture—the pictures, the marble busts on ebony and ormolu pedestals, the miniatures and jewels and toys scattered on tables, the glass cabinets displaying the most exquisite porcelain, the China monsters standing about the carpet, the confusion of beautiful objects which met her gaze on every side almost bewildered her. She looked about her like a child at a fair.
"And does your ladyship really live in this house?" she asked innocently. "'Tis not like a house to live in."
"Do you think it should he put under a glass case, or buried under burning ashes like Herculaneum, so that it may be found perfect and undisturbed two thousand years after we are all dead?" said Stobart, smiling at her.
He was pleased with her fresh young prettiness, which was not disgraced even by Antonia's imperial charms.
"You see, madam, how foolish I have been to indulge my wife with a sight of splendours which lie so far away from our lives," he said to Antonia, who accompanied them through the suite of drawing-rooms where clusters of candles had just been lighted in sconces on the walls, to show them the famous Gobelins tapestries that had once belonged to Madame de Montespan.
"I doubt, sir, Mrs. Stobart is too happy in her rural life ever to sigh for a large London house and its obligation to live in company," answered Antonia.
"I love our cottage dearly when my husband is at home, madam; but I have to spend weeks and months with no companion but my baby son, who can say but four words yet, while Mr. Stobart is wandering about the country with Mr. Wesley, and having sticks and stones aimed at him sometimes in the midst of his sermons. If your ladyship would persuade him to leave off field preaching I should be a happy woman."
"Nay, madam, I cannot come between a man and his conscience, however much our opinions may differ; and if Mr. Stobart thinks his sermons do good——"
"'Tis a question of living in light or darkness, madam. Those who carry the lamp John Wesley lighted know too well what need there is of their labours."
"You go among great sinners?"
"We go among the untaught savages of a civilized country, madam. If there is need of God's word anywhere upon this earth, it is needed where we go. Thousands of awakened souls answer for the usefulness of our labours."
"And you are content to pass your life in such work? You have not taken it up for a year or so, to abandon it when the fever of enthusiasm cools?"
"I have no such fever, madam. And to what should I go back if I took my hand from the plough? I have renounced the profession I loved, and have forfeited my mother's affection. She was my only near relation. My wife and I stand alone in the world; we have no friend but God, no profession but to serve Him."
"I wonder you do not go into the Church."
"The Church that has turned a cold shoulder upon Wesley and Whitefield is no church for me. I can do more good as a free man."
The door was flung open as the clock struck four, and Lady Margaret Laroche came fluttering in, almost before the butler could announce her.
"My matchless one, will you give me some dinner?" she demanded gaily. "I have been shopping in the city, hunting for feathers for my screen, and I know your hour. But I forgot you had visitors. Pray make us acquainted."
"My cousin, Mr. Stobart, Mrs. Stobart, Mrs. Granger." Lady Peggy sank to the floor in a curtsey, smiled benignantly at Lucy, and put up her glass to stare disapprovingly at Patty's cherry-coloured bodice.
Dinner was announced, and they went downstairs to that spacious dining-room, which had been so gloomy an apartment when Lord Kilrush dined there in his later years, generally alone. The room had seen wilder feasts than any that Lady Kilrush was likely to give there, when her late husband was in his pride of youth and folly, the boldest rake-hell in London.
The conversation at dinner was confined to Lady Margaret, Mr. Stobart, and Antonia; for Lucy had no more idea of talking than if she had been in church, and Mrs. Granger only opened her mouth when obliged by the business of the table, where two courses of eight dishes succeeded each other in the ponderous magnificence of silver and the substantiality of mock-turtle soup, turkey and chine, chicken pie, boiled rabbits, cod and oyster sauce, veal and ham, larded pheasants, with jellies and puddings, a bill of fare which, in its piling of Pelion upon Ossa, would be more likely to excite disgust than appetite in the modern gourmet. But in spite of such travelled wits as Bolingbroke, Walpole, Chesterfield, and Carteret, the antique Anglo-Saxon menu still obtained when George II. was king.
"You are the first Methodist I have ever dined with," said Lady Peggy, keenly interested in a new specimen of the varieties of mankind, "so I hope you will tell me all about this religious revival which has made such a stir among the lower classes, and sent Lady Huntingdon out of her wits."
"On my honour, madam, if but half the women of fashion in London were as sane as that noble lady, society would be in a much better way than it is."
"Oh, I grant you we have mad women enough. Nearly all the clever ones lean that way. But I doubt your religious mania is the worst; and a woman must be far gone who fills her house with a mixed rabble of crazy nobility and converted bricklayers. I am told Lady Huntingdon recognizes no distinctions of class among her followers."
"Nay, there you are wrong, Lady Peggy," cried Antonia, "for Mr. Whitefield preaches to the quality in her ladyship's drawing-room, but goes down to her kitchen to convert the rabble."
"Lady Huntingdon models her life upon the precepts of her Redeemer, madam," said Stobart, ignoring this interruption. "I hope you do not consider that an evidence of lunacy."
"There is a way of doing things, Mr. Stobart. God forbid I should blame anybody for being kind and condescending to the poor."
"Christians never condescend, madam. They have too acute a sense of their own lowness to consider any of their fellow-creatures beneath them. They are no more capable of condescending towards each other than the worms have that crawl in the same furrow."
"Ah, I see these Oxford Methodists have got you in their net. Well, sir, I admire an enthusiast, even if he is mistaken. Everybody in London is so much of a pattern that there are seasons when the wretch who fired the Ephesian dome would be a welcome figure in company—since any enthusiasm, right or wrong, is better than perpetual flatness."
"Lady Margaret has so active a mind that she tires of things sooner than most of us," said Antonia, smiling at the lively lady, whose hazel eyes twinkled almost as brightly as the few choice diamonds that sparkled in the folds of her Brussels neckerchief.
"I confess to being sick of feather-work and shell-work, and the women who can think of nothing else. And even the musical fanatics weary me with their everlasting babble about Handel and the Italian singers. There is not a spark of mind among the whole army of conoscenti. With a month's labour I'd teach the inhabitants of a parrot-house to jabber the same flummery."
And then Lady Peggy turned to Mr. Stobart and made him talk about his Methodists, as she called them, and listened with intelligent interest, and gave him no offence by her replies.
"Our cousin is a very pretty fellow, and the wife has not an ill figure," she said to Antonia after dinner, in a corner of the inner drawing-room, while Mrs. Stobart and Mrs. Granger sat side by side in the great saloon, looking at a portfolio of Italian prints; "but how, in the name of all that's odious, did you come by that cherry-coloured person?"
"She is my old friend, an actress at Drury Lane, but now retired from the stage and prosperously married."
"The creature has a pretty little face, but her clothes are execrable, and then the audacity of her shoulders! Such nakedness can only be suffered in a woman of the highest mode. Indecency with an ill-cut gown is unpardonable. Don't let her cross your threshold again, child."
"Dear Lady Peggy, you are too good a friend for me to disoblige you; but I will never be uncivil to one who was kind when I was poor."
"Well, well, you are a fine pig-headed creature, but if you must have such a friend, pray let your dressmaker clothe her. 'Twill cost you less than you will lose of credit by her appearance. Remember 'tis by your women friends you will be judged. 'Tis of little consequence what notorious gamblers and rakes pass in and out of your great assemblies, so long as they are men of fashion; but your women must be of the highest quality for birth, clothes, and breeding."
'Twas six o'clock, and a bevy of footmen were busied in setting out a tea and coffee table with Indian porcelain and silver urn, and the rooms began to be picturesquely sprinkled with elegant figures, like a canvas of Watteau's. It was a prettier scene than one of her ladyship's great assemblies, for the fine furniture, the priceless china and other ornaments were undisturbed, and there was enough space and atmosphere for people to admire the rooms and each other.
The Duchess of Portland and her chosen friend Mrs. Delany came sailing in, sparkling with gaiety, and tenderly embracing their matchless Orinda. Everybody of mark in those days had a nickname, and Mrs. Delany, who had a genius for finding nonsense names, had hit upon this one for Lady Kilrush; not because she was a poetess like the original Orinda, but because the epithet "matchless" seemed appropriate to so perfect a beauty and twenty thousand a year.
George Stobart stood in the curtained embrasure of a window, contemplating this elegant circle amidst which Antonia moved like a goddess, the loveliest where all had some claim to beauty, peerless among the élite of womankind. Her grace, her ease, her dignity would have become a throne, but every charm was natural, and a part of herself; not a modish demeanour acquired by an imitative faculty—the surface gloss of the low-born woman apt to mimic her betters. He could not withhold his admiration from charms that all the world admired, but the extravagance of the fashionable toilette disgusted him, and he looked with angry scorn at brocades of dazzling hues interwoven with gold and silver; court gowns of such elaborate decoration that a Spitalfields weaver might have worked half a lifetime upon a fabric where trees and flowers, garlands and classic temples, lakes and mountains were depicted in their natural colours on a ground of gold. He had been living among such people a few years ago, and had never questioned their right so to squander money; or, casually reckoning the cost of a woman's gala dress, or the wax candles burnt at a ball, he had approved such expenditure as a virtue in the rich, since it must needs be good for trade. To-night as he stood aloof, watching those radiant figures, his imagination conjured up the vision of an alley in which he had spent his morning hours, going from house to house, with a famished crowd hanging on his footsteps, a scene of sordid misery he could not remember without a shudder. Oh, those hungry faces, those gaunt and spectral forms, skeletons upon which the filthy rags hung loose; those faces of women that had once been fair, before vice, want, and the small-pox disfigured them; those villainous faces of men who had spent half their lives in jail, of women who had spent all their womanhood in infamy, and, mixed with these, the faces of little children still unmarked by the brand of sin, children whom he longed to gather up in his arms and carry out of that hell upon earth, had there been any refuge for such! His heart sickened as he looked at the splendour of clothes and jewels, pictures, statues, curios, and thought how many of God's creatures might be plucked from the furnace and set on the highway to heaven for the cost of all that finery.
He was not altogether a stranger in that scene, for he saw several old acquaintances among the company, but he felt himself out of touch with them, and tried to escape all greetings and inquiries. And later, when the tables had been opened, and half the assembly were seated at whist or commerce, while the other half pretended to listen to a pot-pourri from Handel's "Semele," arranged for fiddles and harpsichord, which was being performed in the saloon, he went to the inmost room where Lucy was sitting solitary beside the deserted tea-table.
"Come, child," he said curtly, "we have had enough of this. 'Tis a pleasure that leaves an ill taste in the mouth."
His wife rose with alacrity. She had crept away from the music-room, dazzled by the splendour of the scene, and too shy to remain among such magnificent people, who looked at her with a bland wonder through jewelled eye-glasses.
"I think there is to be a supper," she said hesitatingly.
"Do you wish to stay for it?"
"Nay, 'tis as you please."
"I have no pleasure but to escape from this herd."
Lucy saw that something had vexed him, and went hungry to bed, having been too much embarrassed by the unaccustomed attentions of splendid beings in livery to eat a good dinner.
There was nobody in the dining-room when Mr. and Mrs. Stobart went to breakfast at nine o'clock next morning. George, who had slept little, had been steeping himself in a grey fog in St. James's Park since eight; but Lucy had found it more difficult to dress herself, encumbered by the officious assistance of one of Antonia's women, than unaided in her own little bedchamber at Sheen.
"Her ladyship takes her chocolate in her dressing-room," the butler informed Mr. Stobart, "and desires that you and your lady will breakfast at your own hour," whereupon George and his wife seated themselves in the magnificent solitude of the dining-room, and ate moderately of a meal almost as abundant as the previous day's dinner, for what was less of substance upon the table was balanced by the cold joints, pies, and poultry of the "regalia," or sideboard display.
Lucy returned to her room directly after breakfast to pack her trunk, or rather to look on ruefully while her ladyship's woman packed it. Happily, all her garments were neat and in good condition, although of a quaker-like plainness.
George sat in the library, waiting till his wife should be ready for departure, and opened one book after another in a strange inability to fix his attention upon anything. How well he remembered that room, and his last interview with his cousin! This was the table on which Kilrush had struck his clenched fist, when he swore that not to secure a life of bliss would he marry beneath his rank. The mystery of his passionate words, his violent gesture, was clear enough now. To his pride of birth, to a foolish reverence for trivial things, he had sacrificed his earthly happiness. To the man who esteemed all things small in comparison with life eternal it seemed a paltry renunciation; yet there had been a kind of grandeur in it, a Roman stoicism that could suffer for an idea. And now that George Stobart knew the woman his cousin had loved, her charm, her beauty, he could better understand the pangs of unsatisfied love, the conflict between passion and pride.
There were hot-house flowers in a Nankin bowl on the table, and a fire of coal and logs burnt merrily in the wide basket grate. The room had a far more cheerful aspect on this November morning than on that sultry summer day, four years ago.
On a side table by the fireplace Stobart noticed a pile of books richly bound in crimson morocco—the newest edition of Voltaire.
"She reads and loves that arch mocker still, cherishes a writer who would laugh away her hope of heaven, her belief in the Physician of souls. Beset with temptation, the cynosure of profligates, she rejects the only rock that stands firm and high, a sure refuge when the waves of passion sweep over the drowning soul."
He remembered the world he lived in five years ago, a world that seemed as far away as if those years had been centuries. He knew that of the men who surrounded Lady Kilrush with the stately adulation courtiers offer to queens there was scarce one who was not at heart a seducer, who would not profit by the first hint of human weakness in their goddess. And she was alone, motherless, sisterless, without a friend of her own blood, alone among envious women and unprincipled men.
"Of all those fine gentlemen who prate of honour, and would rather commit murder than submit to a trumpery impertinence, I doubt if there is one who would scruple to act unfairly by a woman, or who would hold himself bound by the impassioned vows that cajoled her into sin," he thought.
He looked into the crimson-bound octavos, tossing them aside one by one. They were not all of them deadly, but the poison was there; in those satirical romances, in those "Questions sur l'Encyclopédie," in those notes upon ancient history, on page after page he might have found the same deadly mockery, the same insidious war against the Christian faith, l'Infâme.
The door was flung open by a footman, and Antonia appeared before him, radiant in the freshness of her morning beauty, unspoilt by eighteenth-century washes and pigments. She was dressed for walking, in a sea-green lute-string and a pink gauze hat, her elbow-sleeves and the bosom of her gown ruffled with the same pale pink, and she wore long loose straw-coloured Saxony gloves, wrinkled here and there from wrist to elbow. Her only jewels were diamond solitaire ear-rings and a diamond brooch with a pear-shaped pearl pendant, one of the famous Kilrush pearls, from the treasures of the Indian merchant, the spoil of kings and rajahs.
They shook hands, and she hoped he and Mrs. Stobart had breakfasted well.
"I take my own breakfast in my dressing-room with a book," she said apologetically, "because that is the only hour I can feel sure of being alone. Morning visits begin so early. I am deep in 'Sir Charles.' Incomparable man!"
"'Sir Charles?'" he faltered. "Oh, I understand. You are reading Richardson's new novel—a tedious, interminable book, I take it."
"Tedious! I tremble for the day when I finish it. The world will seem empty when I bid Harriet and Clementina farewell. But I shall return again and again to those dear creatures. I wish myself a bad memory for their sakes."
"Oh, madam, to be thus concerned about the flimsy creations of an old printer's idle brain!"
"Idle! Do you call genius idle? There was never another Richardson. I fear there never will be. A hundred years hence women will weep for Clarissa, and men will model themselves upon Grandison."
"It saddens me, madam, to see you as enthusiastic about a paltry fiction as I would have you about the truths of the gospel. And I see with pain that you still cherish the works of the most notorious blasphemer in Europe."
"The man who stands up like little David against the Goliath of intolerance; the man who has rescued the Calas family from undeserved infamy, cleared the name of that unhappy victim of a persecuting priesthood, condemned, not because it was clear that he was a murderer, but because it was certain that he was a Protestant."
"I own, madam, that in his fight for a dead man's honour, Monsieur de Voltaire acted handsomely. I am sorry that he who did so much for the love of his neighbour should spurn the gospel which instils that virtue."
"Voltaire loved his neighbour without being taught, or say rather that he can accept all that his reason approves in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, while he rejects the traditions of the Roman Church."
"Nay, did he stop there I were with him heart and soul. But he does more. He turns the Gospel light to darkness. Would to God, madam, that you could find a wiser guide for your footsteps through a world where Satan has spread his worst snares in the fairest places."
"Mr. Stobart," she said, looking at him gravely, her violet eyes darkened to black under the rosy shadow of her hat, "I sometimes wish I could believe in Christ the Saviour; but I would not if I must believe also in Satan. Let us argue no more upon theology; I only shock you. My coach is at the door, and I want to take Mrs. Stobart to an auction where I believe she will see the finest collection of Nankin monsters and willow-pattern tea-things that China has sent us since last winter. 'Tis the first sale of the season, and all the world will be there, and twenty who go to stare and chatter for one who means to buy."
"Your ladyship is vastly kind, but my wife and I must travel by the Richmond coach, which leaves the Golden Cross at noon. I have to thank you in her name and my own for your kind hospitality."
"Oh, sir, don't thank me. Only promise that you will come to see me again, and often. We will not talk about serious things, lest we should quarrel."
"Madam, if I come into this house again we must talk of serious things. Can I pretend to be your friend, see you living without God in the world—I who believe in His judgments as I believe in His mercies—and not try to save a beautiful soul that I see hovering above the pit of hell? Can I be your friend, and hold my peace?"
"Nay, sir, leave my soul to your God. If He is all you believe, He will not let me perish."
"If you are obstinate and deny Him He will cast you out. He has given you talents for which you have to render an account, intellect, force of will, wealth, and the power that goes with it. I will come to this house no more to see you wasting yourself upon insipid amusements, listening to idle flatteries, smiling upon sybarites and fops, moving from one to another, false alike to all, since all are your inferiors, and you can esteem none of them. Your coquetries, your friendships are alike hollow, as artificial as your swooning curtsey, taught by Serise, the dancing-master."
"Oh, sir, are all the Oxford Methodists as rude as you?"
"Forgive me, madam. I cannot stoop to that smooth lying that goes by the name of politeness. 'Now, now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation.' My heart yearns to snatch a sinner from doom. Five years ago I should have been among your admirers, should have burnt the incense of vain adulation before you, as at the shrine of a goddess, should have been made happy with a smile, ineffably blessed by a civil word. But I have lived aloof from your beau monde, and I come back to discover what a Sodom it is. The company I once loved fills me with disgust and loathing. I see the flames of Tophet behind your galaxy of wax candles, the rags of lost sinners under your gold and silver brocade. I will come here no more."
He moved towards the door, she following him, holding out both her hands.
"Mr. Stobart, you make life a tragedy. I protest that some of my friends in gold and silver brocade are as good Christians as even your kindness could desire me to be. They are more fortunate than I am in never having been taught to question the creed that satisfied their fathers and grandfathers. I sometimes wish I had less of the doubting spirit. But pray do not let theological differences part us. You and your wife are a kind of relations, for you are of my dear husband's blood; I can never forget that. Come, sir, let us be reasonable," she exclaimed, seating herself at the table, and motioning him to the opposite chair.
She was sitting where Kilrush had sat during that last interview with his kinsman, in the same high-backed chair, the bright colouring of her face and hat shining against a background of black horsehair.
"What do you want me to do? Of what sins am I to repent?" she asked, smiling at him. "I try to help my fellow-creatures, to be honest and truthful and kind. What more can I do?"
"Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor."
"I cannot do that. I think I have a right to be happy. Fate has flung riches into my lap; and I love the things that money buys—this house, foreign travel, ease and splendour, pictures, music, the friends that wealth and station have brought round me. I love to mix with the salt of the earth. And you want me to renounce all these things, and to live as Jesus of Nazareth lived—Jesus, the Son of Joseph the carpenter."
"Jesus, the Son of God, who so lived His brief life on earth to be for all mankind an example."
"And are we all to be peasants?"
"Believe me, madam, there is only one perfect form of the Christian life, and that is the imitation of Christ."
"You would make this a hateful world if you had your way, Mr. Stobart."
"I would make it a Christian world if I could, Lady Kilrush."
"Well, sir, let me help you with your poor. I should like to do that, though I do not mean to sell this house, or the jewels that my husband's grandfather brought from the East Indies. I can spare a good deal for almsgiving, and yet sparkle at St. James's. Take me to see your poor people at Lambeth. Bring their sorrows nearer to my heart. I know I am leading a foolish, idle life, made up of gratified vanities and futile fevers, but 'tis such a pleasant life. I had my day of drudgery and petty cares, the struggle to make one shilling go as far as five, and my heart dances for joy sometimes among the pleasures and splendours in which I move to-day. But be sure I have a heart to pity the suffering. Let me go with you to Lambeth. I will buy no china dragons to-day; and the money I put in my purse to waste on toys shall be given to your poor. Take me to them to-day. You can go back to Sheen by a later coach."
He refused at first, protesting that the places to which he went were no fitting scenes for her. She would have to confront vice as well as poverty—revolting sights, hideous language, Lazarus with his sores, and a blaspheming Lazarus—things odious and things terrible.
"I am not afraid," she answered. "If there are such things we ought to know of them. I do know that vice and sin exist. I am not an ignorant girl. I was not born in the purple."
She was impetuous, resolute, insistent, and she overruled all his objections.
"You will be sorry that I let you have your way," he said at last, "and I am foolish so to humour a fine lady's whim."
"I am not a fine lady to-day. There is more than one side to my character."
"If you mean to come with me, you had best put on a plainer gown."
"I have none plainer than this. 'Tis no matter if I spoil it, for I am tired of the colour. Oh, here is Mrs. Stobart," she cried, as a servant ushered in Lucy, who entered timidly, looking for her husband.
"Your ladyship's servant," she murmured with a curtsey. "Is it time for us to go home, George?"
"Time for me to take you to the coach, Lucy. I shall spend the day among my people."
"And I am to go home alone," his wife said ruefully.
"I shall be with you by tea-time, and you will have your boy and a world of household cares to engage you till then."
She brightened at this, and smiled at him.
"I'll warrant Hannah will not have dusted the parlour," she said. "Oh, madam, we have such pretty mahogany furniture, and I do love to keep it bright. There's nothing like elbow-grease for a mahogany table."
"I know that by experience, child. I have used it myself," Antonia answered gaily.
She was pleased and excited at the idea of a plunge into the mysteries of outcast London. She had been poor herself, but had known only the shabby genteel poverty which keeps shoes to its feet and a weathertight roof over its head. With want and rags and filth she had never come in contact save in her brief glimpse of the Irish and English towns at Limerick; and looking back upon that experience of a brain overwrought with grief, it seemed to her like a fever-dream. To-day she would go among the abodes of misery with a mind quick to see and understand. Surely, surely she could do her part in the duty that the rich owe the poor without selling all that she had, without abrogating one iota of the sumptuous surroundings so dear to her romantic temper, to her innate love of the beautiful.
She kissed Mrs. Stobart at parting, and promised to visit her at Sheen the first day she was free of engagements.
George found her chariot at the door when he came back from despatching his wife in the Richmond stage.
"Come, come," she said, "let us hasten to your poor wretches. I am dying to give them the guineas I meant for my monsters."
"Faith, madam, you will find monsters enough where we are going, but not such as a fine lady could display on her china cupboard."
Mr. Stobart stopped the carriage on the south side of Westminster Bridge.
"If you are not averse to walking some little distance, it might be well to send your carriage home," he said. "I can take you back to your house in a hackney coach;" and on this the chariot was dismissed.
"You shall not go a yard out of your way on my account," she said. "I am not afraid of going about alone. The great ladies I know would swoon if they found themselves in a London street unattended; but I am not like them."
He gave her his arm, and they threaded their way through a labyrinth of streets and alleys that lay between the Thames and the waste spaces of Lambeth Marsh, a dreary region where the water lay in stagnant pools, receptacles for all unconsidered filth, exhaling putrid fever. Here and there above the forest of chimneys and chance medley of roofs and gables there rose the bulk of a pottery, for this was the chosen place of the potter's art; but for the rest the desolate region between Stangate and the New Cut was given over to poverty and crime. Fine old houses that had once stood in the midst of fair gardens had been divided into miserable tenements, and swarmed like anthills with half-starved humanity; alleys so narrow that the sunshine rarely visited them, covered and crowded the old garden ground; four-storied houses, built with a supreme neglect of such trifles as light and air, overshadowed the low hovels that had once been rustic cottages smiling across modest flower-gardens.
Mr. Stobart came to a halt in a lane leading to the river, where a row of rickety wooden houses hung over an expanse of malodorous mud. The tide was out, and a troop of half-naked children were chasing a starved dog, with a kettle tied to his tail, through the slime and slush of the foreshore.
"Oh, the poor dog!" cried Tonia, as they stood on a causeway at the end of the lane. "For pity's sake stop those little wretches!"
George called to them, but they only looked at him, and pursued their sport. Had he been alone he would have given the little demons chase, but he could not risk bespattering himself from head to foot in a lady's company.
"There is but one way to stop them," he said, "and that is to teach them better. We are trying to do that in our schools, but the task needs twenty-fold more men and more money than we can command. 'Twould shock you, no doubt, to see how the children of the poor amuse themselves; but I question if there is more cruelty to the brute creation among those unenlightened brats than among the children of our nobility, who are bred up to think a cock-fight or a stag-hunt the summit of earthly bliss. Jim Rednap," he shouted, as the chase doubled and came within earshot, "if you don't untie that kettle and let the dog go, I'll give you a flogging that will make you squall."
The biggest of the boys looked up at this address, recognized a well-known figure, and called to his companions to stop. They halted, their yells ceased, and the hunted cur scrambled up the slippery stone steps, at the top of which Antonia and Stobart were standing. He caught the dog, took off the kettle, and flung it into the river. The boy Rednap came slowly up the steps.
"'Twarn't me that begun it," he said sheepishly.
"'Twas you that should have stopped it. You're bigger and older than the others. You are twice as wicked, because you know better. What will your poor mother say when I tell her that you take pleasure in tormenting God's creatures?"
He was stooping to pat the half-starved mongrel as he spoke to the boy, and perhaps that tender touch of his hand and his countenance as he looked at the beast, was a better lesson than his spoken reproof.
"See," Antonia said, dropping a shilling into the boy's grimy palm. "Fetch me twopenn'orth of bread for the dog, and keep the change for yourself."
The boy stared, clutched the coin, and ran off.
"Will he come back?" asked Antonia.
"Yes; he's not as bad as he looks. His mother is one of the lost sheep that the Shepherd has found. Her season of repentance will be but brief, poor soul, since she is marked for death; but she leans on Him who never turned the light of His countenance from the penitent sinner."
"Is the boy's father living?"
George Stobart shrugged his shoulders.
"Who knows? She does not, poor wretch! He is dead for her. She has three children, and has toiled to keep them from starving till she has fallen under her burden."
"Let me provide for them! Let her know that they will be cared for when she is gone. It may make her last hours happy," said Antonia, impetuously.
"I will not hinder you in any work of beneficence; but among so many and in such pressing need of help it would be well to take time, and to consider how you can make your money go furthest."
"I will buy no more foolish things—trumpery that I forget or sicken of a few hours after 'tis bought. I will go to no more china auctions, squander no more guineas at Mrs. Chenevix's. Oh, Mr. Stobart, I know you despise me because I am like the young man in the gospel story. I am too rich not to be fond of riches. But indeed, sir, I do desire to help the poor."
"I believe it, madam, and that God will bless your desires. 'Tis not easy for a woman in the bloom of youth and beauty to take up the cross as Lady Huntingdon has done—to dedicate all she has of fortune and influence to the service of Christ. 'Twere cruel to reproach you for falling short of so rare a perfection."
"I have been told that Lady Huntingdon leaves it to doubters like me to feed the hungry and clothe the naked—since the cry of the destitute appeals to all alike—and that she devotes all her means to paying preachers, and providing chapels."
"That, madam, is her view of Christ's service; and I doubt she is right. When all mankind believe in Christ, there will be no more want and misery in this world; for the rich will remember that to refuse help to His poor is to deny Him."
The boy came back, breathless with running, and carrying a twopenny loaf in his grimy paw. He had gnawed off a corner crust as he ran.
"Dogs don't love crust," he remarked apologetically, as he knelt down in the dirt and fed the famished cur.
He went with them presently to his mother's garret, where Antonia sat by the woman's bed for half an hour, while Stobart read or talked to her. His tenderness to the sick woman and the reasonableness of all he said impressed even the unbeliever. His words touched her heart, though they left her mind unconvinced. The room showed an exceeding poverty, but was cleaner than Antonia had hoped to find it; and she could but smile upon discovering that Mr. Stobart had helped the three children to scrub the floor and clean the windows in the course of his last visit, and had made Jim, the eldest of the family, promise to brush the hearth and dust the room every morning, and had supplied him with a broom, and soap, and other materials for cleanliness. The boy was his mother's sick nurse, and was really helpful in his rough way. The other two children attended at an infant school which Stobart had set up in a room near, at a minimum cost for rent and fire. The teachers were three young women of the prosperous middle-classes, who each worked two days a week without remuneration.
After this quiet visit to the dying woman, Stobart led Lady Kilrush through crowded courts and alleys, where every object that her eyes rested on was a thing that revolted or pained her—brutal faces; famished faces; lowering viciousness; despairing want; brazen impudence that fixed her with a bold stare, and then burst into an angry laugh at her beauty, or pointed scornfully to the diamonds in her ears. Insolent remarks were flung after her; children in the gutters larded their speech with curses; obscene exclamations greeted the strange apparition of a woman so unlike the native womanhood. Had she been some freak of nature at a show in Bartholomew Fair, she could scarcely have been looked at with a more brutal curiosity.
Stobart held her arm fast in his, and hurried her through the filthy throng, hurried her past houses that he knew for dangerous—houses in which small-pox or jail fever had been raging, fever as terrible as that of the year '50, when half the bar at the Old Bailey had been stricken with death during the long hours of a famous trial for murder. Jail birds were common in these rotten dens where King George's poor had their abode, and they brought small-pox and putrid fever home with them, from King George's populous prisons, where the vile and the unfortunate, the poor debtor and the notorious felon, were herded cheek by jowl in a common misery. He was careful to take her only into the cleanest houses, to steer clear of vice and violence. He showed her his best cases—cases where gospel teaching had worked for good; the people he had helped into a decent way of life; industrious mothers; pious old women toiling for orphaned grandchildren; young women, redeemed from sin, maintaining themselves in a semi-starvation, content to drudge twelve hours a day just to keep off hunger.
Her heart melted with pity, and glowed with generous impulses. She clasped the women's hands; she vowed she would be their friend and helper, and showered her gold among them.
"Teach me how to help them," she said. "Oh, these martyrs of poverty! Show me how to make their lives happier."
"Be sure I shall not be slack to engage your ladyship in good works," he answered cordially. "If you will suffer me to be your counsellor you may do a world of good, and yet keep your fine house and your Indian jewels. Your influence should enlist others in the crusade against misery. It needs but the superfluous wealth of all the rich to save the lives and the souls of all the poor."
He was hurrying her towards a coach stand, through the deepening gloom of November. They had spent more than three hours in these haunts of wretchedness, and the brief day had closed upon them. The lights on Westminster Bridge and King Street seemed to belong to another world as the coach drove to St. James's Square. Stobart insisted on accompanying Antonia to her own door, and took leave of her on the threshold with much more of friendship than he had shown her hitherto. He seemed to her a changed being since they had walked through those wretched alleys together. Hitherto his manner with her had been stiff and constrained, with an underlying air of disapproval. But now that she had seen him beside a sick-bed, and had seen how he loved and understood the poor, and how he was loved and understood by them, she began to realize how good and generous a heart beat under that chilling exterior. The idea of a man in the flower of his youth flinging off a profession he loved, to devote his life to charity appealed to all her best feelings.
"I shall wait on your wife to-morrow morning," she said. "You will have time before I come to decide what I can do to help those poor wretches. Their white faces would haunt my dreams to-night if I did not know that I could do something to make them happier."
"Sleep sweetly," he answered gently. "You have a heart to pity the poor."
He bent over her gloved hand, touched it lightly with his lips, and vanished as she crossed her threshold, where the hall-porter and three pompous footmen gave a royal air to her entrance.