"But would you not allow that the time comes when nothing can be done with them?"
"I will not allow it of any I have to do with, at least before I can say with confidence I have done all I can. After that another may be able to do more. And who shall say when God can do no more—God who takes no care of himself, and is laboriously working to get his children home."
"I confess," said Vavasor, "the condition of our poor in our large towns is the great question of the day."
"—which every one is waking up to talk about," said Hester, and said no more.
For, as one who tried to do something, she did not like to go on and say that if all who found the question interesting, would instead of talking about it do what they could, not to its solution but to its removal, they would at least make their mark on the rubbish-heap, of which not all the wind of words would in ten thousand years blow away a spadeful. And yet is talk a less evil than the mischief of mere experimenters. It is well there is the talk to keep many from doing positive harm. It is not those who, regarding the horrors around them as a nuisance, are bent upon their destruction, who will work any salvation in the earth, but those who see the wrongs of the poor, and strive to give them their own. Not those who desire a good report among men, nor those who seek an antidote against the tedium of a selfish existence, but those who, loving their own flesh and blood, and willing not merely to spend but to be spent for them, draw nigh them, being to being, will cause the light to rise upon such as now sit in darkness and the shadow of death. Love, and love alone, as from the first it is the source of all life, love alone, wise at once and foolish as a child, can work redemption. It is life drawing nigh to life, person to person, the human to human, that conquers death. This—therefore urges people to combine, seeking the strength of men, not the strength of God. The result is as he would have it—inevitable quarreling. The unfit brought in for strength are weakness and destruction. They want their own poor way, and destroy the work of their hands by the sound of their tongues. Combinations should be for passing necessities, and only between those who can each do good work alone, and will do it with or without combination. Whoever depends on combinations is a weakness to any association, society or church to which he may imagine himself to belong. The more easily any such can be dissolved the better. It is always by single individual communication that the truth has passed in power from soul to soul. Love alone, and the obligation thereto between the members of Christ's body, is the one eternal unbreakable bond. It is only where love is not that law must go. Law is indeed necessary, but woe to the community where love does not cast out—where at least love is not casting out law. Not all the laws in the universe can save a man from poverty, not to say from sin, not to say from conscious misery. Work on, ye who cannot see this. Do your best. You will be rewarded according to your honesty. You will be saved by the fire that will destroy your work, and will one day come to see that Christ's way, and no other whatever, can either redeem your own life, or render the condition of the poorest or the richest wretch such as would justify his creation. If by the passing of this or that more or less wise law, you could, in the person of his descendant of the third or fourth generation, make a well-to-do man of him, he would probably be a good deal farther from the kingdom of heaven than the beggar or the thief over whom you now lament. The criminal classes, to use your phrase, are not made up of quite the same persons in the eyes of the Supreme as in yours.
Vavasor began to think that if ever the day came when he might approach Hester "as a suitor for her hand," he must be very careful over what he called her philanthropic craze. But if ever he should in earnest set about winning her, he had full confidence in the artillery he could bring to the siege: he had not yet made any real effort to gain her affections.
Neither had he a doubt that, having succeeded, all would be easy, and he could do with her much as he pleased. He had no anxiety concerning the philanthropic craze thereafter. His wife, once introduced to such society as would then be her right, would speedily be cured of any such extravagance or enthusiasm as gave it the character of folly.
Under the influence of the lovely place, of the lovely weather, and of his admiration for Hester, the latent poetry of his nature awoke with increasing rapidity; and, this reacting on its partial occasion, he was growing more and more in love with Hester. He was now, to use the phrase with which he confessed the fact to himself, "over head and ears in love with her," and notwithstanding the difficulties in his way, it was a pleasant experience to him: like most who have gone through the same, he was at this time nearer knowing what bliss may be than he had ever been before. Most men have the gates once thus opened to them a little way, that they may have what poor suggestion may be given them, by their closing again, of how far off they are from them. Very hard! Is it? Then why in the name of God, will you not go up to them and enter? You do not like the conditions? But the conditions are the only natural possibilities of entrance. Enter as you are and you would but see the desert you think to leave behind you, not a glimpse of a promised land. The false cannot inherit the true nor the unclean the lovely.
And it began to grow plain to him that now his aunt could no longer look upon the idea of such an alliance, as she must naturally have regarded it before. It was a very different thing to see her in the midst of such grounds and in such a house, with all the old-fashioned comforts and luxuries of an ancient and prosperous family around her, and in that of a toiling littérateur in the dingy region of Bloomsbury, where everything was—of course respectable in a way, but that way a very inferior and—well, snuffy kind of way—where indeed you could not dissociate the idea of smoke and brokers' shops from the newest bonnet on Hester's queenly head! If he could get his aunt to see her in the midst of these surroundings, then her beauty would have a chance of working its natural effect upon her, tuned here to "its right praise and true perfection." She was not a jealous woman, and was ready to admire where she could, but not the less would keep even beauty at arm's length when prudence recommended: here, thought Vavasor, prudence would hold her peace. He would at least himself stand amid no small amount of justification.
By degrees, and without any transition marked of Hester, emboldened mainly by the influences of the soft dusky twilight, he came to speak with more warmth and nearer approach. His heart was tuned above its ordinary pitch, and he was borne a captive slave in the triumph of Nature's hour.