‘Not before they were wanted!’ said Wentworth.
‘Speak for yourself, sir, if you please,’ said Buxton, with an assumed offended air.
‘Oh, I beg pardon! Pray proceed.’
‘I was going to say,’ said Buxton, ‘until interrupted in this unmannerly manner, you are enthusiasts, I am not. I doubt the dream of a new heaven and a new earth. It has done good in its time, I admit. It was the thought of the Messiah that was to come that nerved the heart of the Jew as he sat by the waters of Babylon and wept as he remembered Zion. Paul and the Apostles expected the new heaven and the new earth before they laid down their lives as martyrs for their inspiring faith. Upheld by the same living hope, tender and delicate maidens have gone to the grave exulting, and have glorified God at the stake or in the dungeon or on the scaffold. “The end of all things is at hand,” is ever the cry of the churches. It was that of Luther in his day, and is that of the Evangelicals in ours, who, if an earthquake destroys a town, or a deluge sweeps over the land, or the cholera breaks out in the East, or there are wars and rumours of wars, tell us these are the dread signs to mark the coming of the Son of Man with His saints to judge the earth. I feel rather inclined to believe with old Swedenborg that that day is past. The talk of a Millennium makes me sick. It is a delusion and a sham. Such men as Dr. Cumming, with their long array of dates and their wild dreams of the fulfilment of prophecy, make men like myself sceptics. It is clear to us that the odds, at any rate, are against the Christian.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘But this is a business scheme. We are not in search of the Millennium.’
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHIEFLY ABOUT THE LAND.
For three months an Englishman sits in sackcloth and ashes. The matter-of-fact reviewer will tell me this is not so; and he is right and so am I.
London is not a place to live in in winter; there is, unfortunately, no place in England that is. People talk of the weather. They cannot help themselves. In his old age Dr. Johnson wrote, ‘I am now reduced to think and am at last content to talk of the weather.’ That was a sign that the Doctor at last had fallen low. As Burney writes: ‘There was no information for which Dr. Johnson was less grateful than for that which concerned the weather.’ If any one of his intimate companions told him it was hot or cold, wet or dry, windy or calm; he would stop them by saying: ‘O-oh, O-oh! You are telling me of that of which none but men in a mine or a dungeon can be ignorant. Let us bear with patience or enjoy in quiet elementary changes either for the better or the worse, as they are never secrets.’ Nevertheless, the state of the weather continues in all circles an unfailing theme. Bad weather affects the spirits by depressing them, fine raises them. We are attuned to every action of the outer atmosphere. Our suicides in November are known all the world over. It is scarcely possible to be cheerful on a dull, cold, raw, foggy day. I wonder people who can afford to go away and have no pressing claims at home do not rush off to the Riviera in search of its blue sky, its summer suns, its wealth of flowers, its richer life for the delicate, or the infirm or old.
‘We must get out of England,’ said Wentworth to his wife, one dull wintry morn, when the raw cold seemed to fill every apartment in the house, and the outlook into the busy street only revealed half-starved figures in all their wretchedness. ‘We must get out of England, and the sooner the better.’
‘Yes, I’ve long been thinking so; but the question is, where to go. We have got to think of other people besides ourselves, and of other affairs than our own. But with our tastes and habits we can live cheaply anywhere, and I have no wish to go where we shall meet a lot of idle rich people only seeking to guard themselves from the English winter and spending life in frivolous indulgence. Let us take the question seriously.’