“He is the noblest and most unselfish of men.”
“I admit his unselfishness—the purity of his intentions—the tenderness of his heart; but I deny his nobility. Ecclesiastic narrow-mindedness spoils a character that might have been perfect had it been less hampered by tradition. Cancellor is a couple of centuries behind the time. His Church is the Church of Laud.”
“I thought you admired and loved him, George,” said Mildred regretfully.
“I admire his good qualities, I love him for his thoroughness; but our creeds are wide apart. I cannot even pretend to think as he thinks.”
This confession increased Mildred’s sadness. She would have had her husband think as she thought, believe as she believed, in all spiritual things. The beloved child they had lost was waiting for them in heaven; and she would fain that they should both tread the same path to that better world where there would be no more tears, no more death—where day and night would be alike in the light of the great Throne. She shuddered at the thought of any difference of creed on her husband’s part, shuddered at that beginning of divergence which might end in infidelity. She had been educated by Clement Cancellor, and she thought as he thought. It seemed to her that she was surrounded by an atmosphere of doubt. In the books she read among the more cultivated people whom she met, she found the same tendency to speculative infidelity, pessimism, Darwinism, sociology, Pantheism, anything but Christian belief. The nearest approach to religious feeling seemed to be found in the theosophists, with their last fashionable Oriental improvements upon the teaching of Christ.
Clement Cancellor had trained her in the belief that there was one Church, one creed, one sovereign rule of life, outside which rigid boundary-line lay the dominion of Satan. And now, seeing her husband’s antagonism to her pastor upon this minor point of the marriage law, she began to ask herself whether those two might not stand as widely apart upon graver questions—whether George Greswold might not be one of those half-hearted Christians who attend their parish church and keep Sunday sacred because it is well to set a good example to their neighbours and dependants, while their own faith is little more than a memory of youthful beliefs, the fading reflection of a sun that has sunk below the horizon.
She had discovered her husband capable of a suppression of truth that was almost as bad as falsehood; and now having begun to doubt his conscientiousness, it was not unnatural that she should begin to doubt his religious feeling.
“Had he been as deeply religious as I thought him, he would not have so deceived me,” she told herself, still brooding upon that mystery of his first marriage.
Castellani’s presence in the house was a continual irritation to her. It tortured her to think that he knew more of her husband’s past life than was known to her. She longed to question him, yet refrained, feeling that there would be unspeakable meanness, treachery even, in obtaining any information about her husband’s past life except from his own lips. He had chosen to keep silence, he who could so easily have explained all things; and it was her duty to submit.
She tried to be interested in the concert, which involved a good deal of work for herself, as she was to play all the accompaniments, the piano part in a concertante duet by De Bériot with an amateur violin player, and a Hungarian march by a modern classic by way of overture. There were rehearsals nearly every day, with much talk and tea-drinking. Enderby Manor seemed given over to bustle and gaiety—that grave old house, which to her mind ought to have been silent as a sepulchre, now that Lola’s voice could sound there never more, except in dreams.