"I do not admit for a moment that you have the right to speak at all,"
Mr. Medlicott returned, but his adversary went on quietly.
"You must have remarked that Miss Rawson possesses beauty of form, sweet and tender flesh, soft coloring, and a look of health and warmth and life. All these charms tend to create in man a passionate physical love. That is cause and effect. For the sake of the present argument we will, for the moment, leave out all more important questions of the soul and things mental and spiritual. Well, who gave her these attributes? Did you or I—or even her parents, consciously? Or did the Supreme Being, whom you call God, endow her so? Admitted that He did—have you, then, or anyone else, the right to crush out the result of His endowment in a woman; crush her joy of them, force her into a life where their possession is looked upon as a temptation? Seek to marry her—remember that marriage physically means being certainly actuated to do so by their attraction—and yet believing that you sin each time you allow them to influence you." Count Roumovski's level voice took on a note of deep emotion and his blue eyes gleamed. "Why, the degradation is horrible to think of, sir, if you will face the truth—and this is the fate to which you would condemn this young and tender girl for your own selfishness, knowing she does not love you."
Eustace Medlicott walked up and down rapidly for a moment; he then picked up a book and threw it aside again in agitation. He was very pale now.
"I refuse to have the woman I have decided to marry snatched from me by any of your sophistries," he said breathlessly. "I am better able than you to save her soul, and she owes me honor and obedience—it is most unseemly to even mention the aspects you have done in a bond which is a sacrament of holy church and should be only approached in a spiritual frame of mind, not a carnal one."
"You are talking pure nonsense, sir," returned Count Roumovski sternly. "If that were the case the wording of your English marriage service would be different. First and foremost, marriage is a contract between two people to live together in union of body and to procreate children, which is the law of God and nature. Men added arrangement and endowment of property, and the church added spiritual sacrament. But God and nature invented the vital thing. If it were not so, it would have been possible for the spiritually minded, of which company you infer yourself to be, to live with a woman on terms of brother and sister, and never let the senses speak at all. There would then have been no necessity for the ceremony of marriage for priests with your views."
Eustace Medlicott shook with passion and emotion as he answered furiously: "You would turn the question into one of whether a priest should marry or not. It is a question which has agitated me all my life, and which I have only lately been able to come to a conclusion upon. I refuse to let you disturb me in it."
"I had not thought of doing so," Count Roumovski returned tranquilly. "You and your views and your destiny do not interest me, I must own, except in so far as they interfere with myself and the woman I love. You have proved yourself to be just a warped atom of the great creation, incapable of anything but ignoble narrowness. You cannot even examine your own emotions honestly and probe their meaning or you would realize no man should marry, be he priest or layman, if he looks upon the joys of physical love as base and his succumbing to them a proof of the power of the beast in himself. Because he then lives under continual degradation of soul by acting against his conscience."
Mr. Medlicott was now silent, almost choking with perturbation. So
Count Roumovski went on:
"The wise man faces the facts of nature. Looks straight to find God's meaning in them, and then tries to exalt and ennoble them to their loftiest good. He does not, in his puny impotence, quarrel with the all-powerful Creator and try to stamp out that with which He thought fit to endow human beings."
"Your words convey a flagrant denial of original sin, and I cannot listen to such an argument," Mr. Medlicott flashed, his anger now at white heat. "You would do away with a whole principle of the Christian religion."