Final perseverance, sanctification, justification, conviction of sin! Those phrases seemed to her only the shibboleth of a sect. But all the strength of her heart and intellect were engaged in those good works to which the Methodists attached only a secondary merit. Her compassion for human suffering was the dominating impulse of her life. She could feel for the thief in Newgate, pity the slut in Bridewell whose life had been one long disgrace. She had gone with Stobart into the prisons of London, those dark places as yet unvisited by Howard or Elizabeth Fry. She shrank from no form of suffering, so long as it was possible to help or to console.
She had done with the world and its pleasures. The recluse is soon forgotten in the merry-go-round of society. Her duchesses had long ceased to trouble themselves about her. The princes and princesses had forgotten her existence. The new reign had brought with it new interests, a new set. Women were the top of the fashion who had been dowdies; men who had been blockheads were wits.
Lord Dunkeld had married a rosy-cheeked damsel of eighteen summers, daughter and heiress of a Lord of Session, was settled on his Scotch estate, and had come to think Edinburgh the focus of intelligence and ton. The people who had courted and admired Lady Kilrush had long ceased to think of her, except as an eccentric, like Lady Huntingdon, who had caught the fever of piety that had been in the air for the last twenty years—the contagion of Methodism, Moravianism, Predestinarianism—some boring and essentially middle-class form of religion which banished her from polite company.
A woman who neither visits nor gives entertainments is socially dead. Her female friends spoke of her sometimes with pity, as an unfortunate who was afraid to let the town see her altered face, and who had taken to religion as a substitute for beauty. The idea that she was disfigured having once got abroad, her old rivals were slow to believe her face unspoilt, though people who had seen her at one of Lady Huntingdon's Thursdays swore that she was almost as handsome as ever.
"If she had not a cold, proud look that keeps an old friend at a distance," said one of her admirers, who had suffered one of Whitefield's sermons in order to meet her.
"She would not have you near enough to discover the ravages of that horrid malady. I'll wager her countenance is plastered a quarter of an inch thick with white lead," retorted the rival belle.
The library in St. James's Square was in the half light of a spring evening, as it had been a year ago when Stobart entered the room with so agonized an apprehension. He came in now with Antonia, a privileged guest, coming and going as in the years gone by, taking his rest by her fireside, after the burden of the day. Her only other visitors were Lady Margaret Laroche—who was faithful to her in spite of what she called her "degeneracy," and who came now and then to pour out her complaints at the foolishness of a world whose follies were necessary to her existence—and Patty Granger, whose dog-like fidelity made her ever welcome, and who loved to talk of Antonia's girlhood, and her own free and easy life in Covent Garden, when the General was a submissive lover, and not a peevish husband.
Stobart had been unusually silent during the walk from Lambeth, and Antonia had been full of thought, impressed as she ever was by that mystery of the passing spirit, that unanswerable question, "Whither goest thou, oh, departing soul, or is thy journey for ever finished, and is man's instinctive belief in immortality a vain dream?"
Antonia sank into her fireside chair, weary after a long day in wretched rooms, hearing and seeing sad things. She was almost too tired to talk, and was glad of Stobart's silence. Sophy would come presently and make the tea—it being supposed that no man-servant's hand was delicate enough to brew that choice infusion—and their spirits would revive. But in the meantime rest was all they wanted.
It startled her from this reposeful feeling when Stobart rose abruptly and began to pace the room, for some minutes in silence, broken only by a sigh, then bursting into impassioned speech.