Mark Rutherford's Deliverance

by William Hale White

One day in December the squire had gone out with the hounds. Clem, going on from bad to worse, had now reached the point of planning to be at the Hall when the squire was not at home. On that particular afternoon Clem was there. It was about half-past four o’clock, and the master was not expected till six. There had been some music, the lady accompanying, and Clem singing. It was over, and Clem, sitting down beside her at the piano, and pointing out with his right hand some passage which had troubled him, had placed his left arm on her shoulder, and round her neck, she not resisting. He always swore afterwards that never till then had such a familiarity as this been permitted, and I believe that he did not tell a lie. But what was there in that familiarity? The worst was already there, and it was through a mere accident that it never showed itself. The accident was this. The squire, for some unknown reason, had returned earlier than usual, and dismounting in the stable-yard, had walked round the garden on the turf which came close to the windows of the ground floor. Passing the drawing-room window, and looking in by the edge of the drawn-down blind, he saw his wife and Clem just at the moment described. He slipped round to the door, took off his boots so that he might not be heard, and as there was a large screen inside the room he was able to enter it unobserved. Clem caught sight of him just as he emerged from behind the screen, and started up instantly in great confusion, the lady, with greater presence of mind, remaining perfectly still. Without a word the squire strode up to Clem, struck out at him, caught him just over the temple, and felled him instantaneously. He lay for some time senseless, and what passed between husband and wife I cannot say. After about ten minutes, perhaps, Clem came to himself; there was nobody to be seen; and he managed to get up and crawl home. He told his wife he had met with an accident; that he would go to bed, and that she should know all about it when he was better. His forehead was dressed, and to bed he went. That night Mrs. Butts had a letter. It ran as follows:—

“Madam,—It may at first sight seem a harsh thing for me to write and tell you what I have to say, but I can assure you I do not mean to be anything but kind to you, and I think it will be better, for reasons which I will afterwards explain, that I should communicate with you rather than with your husband. For some time past I have suspected that he was too fond of my wife, and last night I caught him with his arms round her neck. In a moment of not unjustifiable anger I knocked him down. I have not the honour of knowing you personally, but from what I have heard of you I am sure that he has not the slightest reason for playing with other women. A man who will do what he has done will be very likely to conceal from you the true cause of his disaster, and if you know the cause you may perhaps be able to reclaim him. If he has any sense of honour left in him, and of what is due to you, he will seek your pardon for his baseness, and you will have a hold on him afterwards which you would not have if you were in ignorance of what has happened. For him I do not care a straw, but for you I feel deeply, and I believe that my frankness with you, although it may cause you much suffering now, will save you more hereafter. I have only one condition to make. Mr. Butts must leave this place, and never let me see his face again. He has ruined my peace. Nothing will be published through me, for, as far as I can prevent it, I will have no public exposure. If Mr. Butts were to remain here it would be dangerous for us to meet, and probably everything, by some chance, would become common property.—Believe me to be, Madam, with many assurances of respect, truly yours,—.”

I cannot distinguish the precise proportion of cruelty in this letter. Did the writer designedly torture Butts by telling his wife, or did he really think that she would in the end be happier because Butts would not have a secret reserved from her,—a temptation to lying—and because with this secret in her possession, he might perhaps be restrained in future? Nobody knows. All we know is that there are very few human actions of which it can be said that this or that taken by itself produced them. With our inborn tendency to abstract, to separate mentally the concrete into factors which do not exist separately, we are always disposed to assign causes which are too simple, and which, in fact, have no being in rerum natura. Nothing in nature is propelled or impeded by one force acting alone. There is no such thing, save in the brain of the mathematician. I see no reason why even motives diametrically opposite should not unite in one resulting deed, and think it very probable that the squire was both cruel and merciful to the same person in the letter; influenced by exactly conflicting passions, whose conflict ended so.

As to the squire and his wife, they lived together just as before. I do not think, that, excepting the four persons concerned, anybody ever heard a syllable about the affair, save myself a long while afterwards. Clem, however, packed up and left the town, after selling his business. He had a reputation for restlessness; and his departure, although it was sudden, was no surprise. He betook himself to Australia, his wife going with him. I heard that they had gone, and heard also that he was tired of school-keeping in England, and had determined to try his fortune in another part of the world. Our friendship had dwindled to nothing, and I thought no more about him. Mrs. Butts never uttered one word of reproach to her husband. I cannot say that she loved him as she could have loved, but she had accepted him, and she said to herself that as perhaps it was through her lack of sympathy with him that he had strayed, it was her duty more and more to draw him to herself. She had a divine disposition, not infrequent amongst women, to seek in herself the reason for any wrong which was done to her. That almost instinctive tendency in men, to excuse, to transfer blame to others, to be angry with somebody else when they suffer from the consequences of their own misdeeds, in her did not exist.

During almost the whole of her married life, before this affair between the squire and Clem, Mrs. Butts had had much trouble, although her trouble was, perhaps, rather the absence of joy than the presence of any poignant grief. She was much by herself. She had never been a great reader, but in her frequent solitude she was forced to do something in order to obtain relief, and she naturally turned to the Bible. It would be foolish to say that the Bible alone was to be credited with the support she received. It may only have been the occasion for a revelation of the strength that was in her. Reading, however, under such circumstances, is likely to be peculiarly profitable. It is never so profitable as when it is undertaken in order that a positive need may be satisfied or an inquiry answered. She discovered in the Bible much that persons to whom it is a mere literature would never find. The water of life was not merely admirable to the eye; she drank it, and knew what a property it possessed for quenching thirst. No doubt the thought of a heaven hereafter was especially consolatory. She was able to endure, and even to be happy because the vision of lengthening sorrow was bounded by a better world beyond. “A very poor, barbarous gospel,” thinks the philosopher who rests on his Marcus Antoninus and Epictetus. I do not mean to say, that in the shape in which she believed this doctrine, it was not poor and barbarous, but yet we all of us, whatever our creed may be, must lay hold at times for salvation upon something like it. Those who have been plunged up to the very lips in affliction know its necessity. To such as these it is idle work for the prosperous and the comfortable to preach satisfaction with the life that now is. There are seasons when it is our sole resource to recollect that in a few short years we shall be at rest. While upon this subject I may say, too, that some injustice has been done to the Christian creed of immortality as an influence in determining men’s conduct. Paul preached the imminent advent of Christ and besought his disciples, therefore, to watch, and we ask ourselves what is the moral value to us of such an admonition. But surely if we are to have any reasons for being virtuous, this is as good as any other. It is just as respectable to believe that we ought to abstain from iniquity because Christ is at hand, and we expect to meet Him, as to abstain from it because by our abstention we shall be healthier or more prosperous. Paul had a dream—an absurd dream let us call it—of an immediate millennium, and of the return of his Master surrounded with divine splendour, judging mankind and adjusting the balance between good and evil. It was a baseless dream, and the enlightened may call it ridiculous. It is anything but that, it is the very opposite of that. Putting aside its temporary mode of expression, it is the hope and the prophecy of all noble hearts, a sign of their inability to concur in the present condition of things.

Going back to Clem’s wife; she laid hold, as I have said, upon heaven. The thought wrought in her something more than forgetfulness of pain or the expectation of counterpoising bliss. We can understand what this something was, for although we know no such heaven as hers, a new temper is imparted to us, a new spirit breathed into us; I was about to say a new hope bestowed upon us, when we consider that we live surrounded by the soundless depths in which the stars repose. Such a consideration has a direct practical effect upon us, and so had the future upon the mind of Mrs. Butts. “Why dost thou judge thy brother,” says Paul, “for we shall all stand before the judgment-seat of God.” Paul does not mean that God will punish him and that we may rest satisfied that our enemy will be turned into hell fire. Rather does he mean, what we, too, feel, that, reflecting on the great idea of God, and upon all that it involves, our animosities are softened, and our heat against our brother is cooled.

One or two reflections may perhaps be permitted here on this passage in Mrs. Butts’ history.

The fidelity of Clem’s wife to him, if not entirely due to the New Testament, was in a great measure traceable to it. She had learned from the Epistle to the Corinthians that charity beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things; and she interpreted this to mean, not merely charity to those whom she loved by nature, but charity to those with whom she was not in sympathy, and who even wronged her. Christianity no doubt does teach such a charity as this, a love which is to be: independent of mere personal likes and dislikes, a love of the human in man. The natural man, the man of this century, uncontrolled by Christianity, considers himself a model of what is virtuous and heroic if he really loves his friends, and he permits all kinds of savage antipathies to those of his fellow creatures with whom he is not in harmony. Jesus on the other hand asks with His usual perfect simplicity, “If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same?” It would be a great step in advance for most of us to love anybody, and the publicans of the time of Jesus must have been a much more Christian set than most Christians of the present day; but that we should love those who do not love us is a height never scaled now, except by a few of the elect in whom Christ still survives. In the gospel of Luke, also, Mrs. Butts read that she was to hope for nothing again from her love, and that she was to be merciful, as her Father in heaven is merciful. That is really the expression of the idea in morality, and incalculable is the blessing that our great religious teacher should have been bold enough to teach the idea, and not any limitation of it. He always taught it, the inward born, the heavenly law towards which everything strives. He always trusted it; He did not deal in exceptions; He relied on it to the uttermost, never despairing. This has always seemed to me to be the real meaning of the word faith. It is permanent confidence in the idea, a confidence never to be broken down by apparent failure, or by examples by which ordinary people prove that qualification is necessary. It was precisely because Jesus taught the idea, and nothing below it, that He had such authority over a soul like my friend’s, and the effect produced by Him could not have been produced by anybody nearer to ordinary humanity.

It must be admitted, too, that the Calvinism of those days had a powerful influence in enabling men and women to endure, although I object to giving the name of Calvin to a philosophy which is a necessity in all ages. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.” This is the last word which can be said. Nothing can go beyond it, and at times it is the only ground which we feel does not shake under our feet. All life is summed up, and due account is taken of it, according to its degree. Mrs. Butts’ Calvinism, however, hardly took the usual dogmatic form. She was too simple to penetrate the depths of metaphysical theology, and she never would have dared to set down any of her fellow creatures as irrevocably lost. She adapted the Calvinistic creed to something which suited her. For example, she fully understood what St. Paul means when he tells the Thessalonians that because they were called, therefore they were to stand fast. She thought with Paul that being called; having a duty plainly laid upon her; being bidden as if by a general to do something, she ought to stand fast; and she stood fast, supported against all pressure by the consciousness of fulfilling the special orders of One who was her superior. There is no doubt that this dogma of a personal calling is a great consolation, and it is a great truth. Looking at the masses of humanity, driven this way and that way, the Christian teaching is apt to be forgotten that for each individual soul there is a vocation as real as if that soul were alone upon the planet. Yet it is a fact. We are blinded to it and can hardly believe it, because of the impotency of our little intellects to conceive a destiny which shall take care of every atom of life on the globe: we are compelled to think that in such vast crowds of people as we behold, individuals must elude the eye of the Maker, and be swept into forgetfulness. But the truth of truths is that the mind of the universe is not our mind, or at any rate controlled by our limitations.

This has been a long digression which I did not intend; but I could not help it. I was anxious to show how Mrs. Butts met her trouble through her religion. The apostle says that “they drank of that spiritual Rock which followed them, and that Rock was Christ.” That was true of her. The way through the desert was not annihilated; the path remained stony and sore to the feet, but it was accompanied to the end by a sweet stream to which she could turn aside, and from which she could obtain refreshment and strength.