“Yes.” Even Vanbrugh shrank from speaking his whole mind about Lord Alistair to the trembling mother. “If you can persuade him to stay with you it may check him.”
The Duchess was afraid to carry her soundings further. For the first time it dawned upon her that Sir Bernard was capable of taking a critical view of such a son-in-law.
She had conveyed the physician’s judgment to Alistair, and Alistair had rejoiced her by a promise of amendment which had so far been kept. To help him, the Duchess had insisted on sacrificing her own glass of wine, and as both the Vanbrughs were water-drinkers, all intoxicants had silently disappeared from the tables of both households.
Alistair was touched by his mother’s self-denial on his behalf, and cheered by Hero’s delicate sympathy. In the first flush of his new resolution, amid the distractions of his changed life, and buoyed up by the inspiration of his love, the path of reformation was made smooth for him. The gloomy feelings that had haunted him in London returned into the remote recesses of consciousness. The bright constellation of Ormuzd rose beckoning before him, and the dark Sign of the Suffering One sank below the horizon of life.
The only reminders he had of the past were the letters that reached him from Molly Finucane.
At first the letters had come every day, passionate, reproachful, entreating him to return to her. Molly protested that she had seen no more of Mendes; that she was selling everything in the house at Chelsea; that they would still have enough to go on with till Alistair’s allowance from his brother became due; that she would follow him and live with him where and how he would. When Alistair wrote back what he intended for a final farewell, and sent a banknote given him by his mother, Molly returned the note torn into a dozen pieces. Then the letters became fewer and more pleading and pitiful. At last there came one telling him that Molly had taken refuge with her brother, whose address she gave him, in some Lambeth slum. After that there were no more letters. The little woman had sunk in despair.
Alistair tried hard to forget Molly Finucane, and for a time it seemed to him that he had succeeded. His love, if the passion she had aroused in him deserved that name, had died out of itself, his compassion had been put to sleep by the influences brought to bear upon him. If these good women, if one so filled with the spirit of Christian charity as his mother, could see nothing blameworthy in his desertion of Molly—indeed, nothing that was not wholly praiseworthy—surely it was absurd for him, the prodigal and the bankrupt, the unbeliever and the misanthrope, to let himself be tormented by misgivings. To ruin what was left of his own life for the sake of one whom no human sacrifice could redeem—surely this were madness rather than heroism.
In this mood he became a ready listener to the philosophy of Sir Bernard Vanbrugh; and Sir Bernard expounded his philosophy with some of that proselytizing zeal which marked the last generation of scientists, the Huxleys and the Tyndalls, before Science had laid down her arms at the feet of the great Sphynx, and confessed that she had found no better symbol to replace the old.
It would have surprised and alarmed the Duchess if she had been told that the topic most frequently discussed between Sir Bernard Vanbrugh and her son was religion. It would have more than surprised her, it would have found her utterly incredulous, if anyone had told her that Alistair had an intensely religious nature.
To her unnaturally stunted mind the word “religion” had only one meaning, and unbelief only one excuse. Alistair had heard the Gospel. In his boyhood he had shown signs of yielding to its influence; it followed, therefore, that his later rejection of it was a deliberate surrender to Satan. Everything in his troubled life that had resulted from his having been violently robbed of his own religion she attributed to his wilful and wicked refusal to embrace hers.