"Save her! Save her!"
Whether he was heeded amid the babble of cries and all the noises which seemed to swell to drown his voice, he could not tell, but in another instant he felt that friendly hands had seized Miss Morison, and were endeavoring to lift her insensible form. He strove to loosen his hold, but the effort gave him agony so intolerable that he could do nothing. A thousand points seemed to rend and tear him as he tried to move, and when a voice somewhere above him shouted: "We'll have to try to lift them together!" he experienced a strange sort of double consciousness as if he stood outside of himself and heard others talking of him. He felt himself grasped under the arms, and the pain of being moved was too horrible to be endured. He shrieked in mortal agony, and then in a whirl of dizzying circles seemed to go down in a tide of blackness sparkling with millions of sharp scintillations.
VIII
LIKE COVERED FIRE
Much Ado about Nothing, iii. 1.
Philip Ashe found himself less and less able either to understand or to sympathize with the politics of Mrs. Wilson. He believed in the righteousness of her cause, and was keenly alive to the peril of the appointment of Mr. Strathmore to the vacant bishopric. It is an inevitable and necessary condition of enthusiasm that it shall be narrow; and religious fervor would be impossible to a mind open to conviction. To accept the possibility of any opposed truth is to be secretly doubtful of the creed which one holds; and tolerance is of necessity the child of indifference. Had Ashe been able to perceive that the church would go on much the same no matter which of the rival candidates was chosen, it would have been impossible for him to be so deeply concerned for the success of Father Frontford. As it was he was as much in earnest as Mrs. Wilson, and thus he felt forced to acquiesce in the strangeness of her methods of work. He said to himself that he supposed this electioneering to be a necessity, no matter how unpleasant; and he added the reflection that in any case it was not in his power to prevent it.
Other feelings were, moreover, completely absorbing his mind. Although he was not yet conscious that anything had come between him and the church, priesthood in which had been his highest earthly ideal, the truth was that his passion for Mrs. Fenton waxed steadily. Chance threw them together. Mrs. Fenton had been appointed to a committee on charities, and it happened that Ashe was a visitor in the North End in a region which the committee were making an especial field of labor. He was called into consultation with her, and sometimes they even went together to visit some of the poverty-stricken families which evidently existed chiefly to be subjects for philanthropic manipulation. Day by day Ashe felt her speak to him more easily and familiarly; and although their talk was strictly impersonal and unemotional, none the less did it feed his growing love.
The nature which does not sometimes try to deceive itself is an abnormal one; and Ashe was not behind his fellows in devising excuses for the joy which he found in Mrs. Fenton's presence. He dwelt in his musings upon her devotion to the church, her good works, her visitings of the poor and sick. He assured himself with a vehemence too feverish not to be fallacious that he was instigated only by entirely disinterested feelings; by the desire to assist in deeds of Christian helpfulness, and by pleasure in the society of one whose devotion to godliness was so marked. He argued with himself as eagerly as if he were struggling to convince another, protesting to his own secret heart as earnestly as he would have protested to a friend.
A man seldom really deceives himself, however, save in thinking that he can deceive himself. There were moments in which his inner self rose up and laughed him to scorn; moments in which his sin glowed before him in colors blood-red. He saw himself apostate, false to his vows, drawn away by his earthly lusts and beguiled. There were nights when he cast himself upon the ground in an agony of self-abasement, beating his breast and praying in a passion of remorse; times when by the cruelty of his self-accusings he involuntarily sought to do penance for the sweet sin which festered in his bosom.
Worse than all was the color which was imparted to his passion by the self-imposed prohibitions which he was violating. The insistence upon the earthly side of love which is an inevitable accompaniment to the idea that woman is a temptation, cannot but degrade the relation of the sexes in the mind of the professed celibate. To keep before the thoughts the theory that passion is a snare and a pollution is to render it impossible to love with purity and self-abandonment. Poor Philip, endowed at birth with a nature of instinctive delicacy, could not free himself from the taint of his training; yet he shrank as from hot iron from the blasphemy of connecting any shadow of earthliness with the woman who had become his ideal. His only resource was to take refuge in repeating to himself that he did not love Mrs. Fenton; but even in denying it he felt that he was defending himself from a charge which was a degradation to her as well as to himself. He fell into that morbid state of mind where whatever he tried as a remedy made his disease but the worse; where the idea of love was the more horrible to him the more it possessed and pervaded his whole being.
Mrs. Herman was not unobservant of his condition, although she was far from understanding his state of mind. She felt that there was little use in forcing his confidence, but she gave him now and then an opportunity to confide in her, feeling sure that he would be the better for freeing his heart in speech.