"Ah, poor gentleman!" said she to herself; "he's had a bit of bad news."
He had had something like it. He walked very rapidly up Gray's Inn Road, knowing little and caring less whither he was going, till he found himself in the fields beyond Clerkenwell. There he threw himself on the grass, and resting his head upon his hands, gave himself up for one hour to mournful and profitless visions of that Auvergne home, and of the unknown father and mother who might have loved him once.
"And I shall never see them!" he thought. "So near the Waldensian valleys:—what a stronghold of heresy they must be! Ah, well! I can say every day a mass with an intention for my parents. Who knows if God may be merciful to them, after all? The soul is worth more than the body, and eternal happiness is worth more than any amount of ease or felicity in this world. From what a fate, therefore, have I been rescued! I ought to be very thankful."
But gratitude and love are the last things into which a man can scold himself, and Stevens did not feel so thankful as he thought he ought to be. He might have been more so, had he known that Father Boniface had not troubled himself to tell him the exact truth. It was from the outermost village of the Val Martino, in the Waldensian valleys, not from Auvergne, that he had been stolen away. And in that Val Martino, though he was never to know it, every night knelt Lucetta Carmagnoli, mourning before God—less for the martyred husband, or for the two brave young sons slain in battle, than for the lost first-born, whose fate she could guess only too well. Wavering from hour to hour between the passion of hope—"Oh that Ishmael might live before Thee!"[[8]]—and the passion of despair—"Would God I had died for thee! O Absalom, my son, my son!"[[9]]
Such prayers and tears seem lost sometimes. But "are they not in Thy book?"[[10]] "What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter."[[11]] It is not only Simon the son of Jonas who is asked, now in the tempest, now in the still, small voice, "Lovest thou Me more than these?"[[12]]
Stevens rose from his green couch, and walked back to London. His heart had been dormant all his life till now, and it went easily to sleep again. His conscience the Jesuits had crushed and twisted and trained so early that it never troubled him with a single pang. By the time that he had reached Fleet Street, and had solaced his inner man with a second dish of coffee (and something in it) at the Tory coffee-house, Mr. Cuthbert Stevens was himself again. And if he did look back on the hour spent in the fields at Clerkenwell, it was only to reflect with momentary annoyance that, as he would have phrased it, he had made a fool of himself. And it was very rarely indeed that he thought that substantive applicable in the slightest degree to the Rev. Cuthbert Stevens.
"Well, there is one comfort," he meditated, as he sat imbibing the mixture: "nobody saw me do it."
And fortified by this consideration, and the coffee, &c., Mr. Stevens walked into the residence of the Editor of the Postboy, and expressed his desire for an interview with that rather awful individual. There was a smile on his lips when he came out. He was engaged at a high salary to supply foreign news to the columns of the Whig paper. Mr. Buckley, the Ministerial agent, had spoken very highly of Mr. Stevens to the Editor. Mr. Stevens was rejoiced to hear it, and he told the truth for once when he said so. The Editor thought Mr. Stevens set a rather high value on his services. Mr. Stevens could assure him that he had received innumerable applications from the Tory side, and it was only his deep attachment to the Whig cause, and his respect for the Postboy in particular, which had led him, by asking so little, rather to underrate the importance of the information he could supply. The importance, indeed, of the information which Stevens could have supplied would not have been overrated at double the figure; but of this little fact the Editor of the Postboy was unconscious.
Here we part with the Rev. Cuthbert Stevens. The rest of his life was a mere repetition, with variations, of what we have seen. The Whigs continued to take him for a Whig spy, the Tories for a Tory, while he himself cared in reality for neither, and was devoted but to one thing, and ready to be either, neither, or both, in the service and at the command of that Church which supplied to him the place of home, and parents, and friends, and God. And at the close of such a life followed the priest, and the crucifix, and the unction, and the false hope which shall perish, and the death that has no bands.
Ere this Rome has employed, and destroyed, many a Cuthbert Stevens. What do the crushed devotees matter to the idol? Let the car of Juggernaut roll on! "Thou art become guilty in thy blood that thou hast shed, and hast defiled thyself in thine idols which thou hast made."[[13]] "In the cup which she hath filled, fill to her double."[[14]]