Chapter XIV: "one Thread in Life Worth Spinning." (2)

Stobart had told Antonia of Sally Dormer's condition, and had provided by her means for the penitent's comfort in her lingering illness, the fatal end of which was obvious, however much her state varied from week to week. But he had opposed Antonia's desire to visit the invalid, shrinking with actual pain from the idea of any contact between the spotless woman and the castaway, who in her remorse for her past life was apt to expatiate upon vile experiences.

Five minutes' walk brought Mr. Stobart to a narrow street on the edge of the river, a street long given over to the dregs of humanity. The houses were old and dilapidated, and several of those on the water-side had been shored up at the back with timber supports, moss-grown and slimy from the river fog, yet a favourite climbing place for vagabond boys, as well as for a colony of starveling rats.

Sally's lodging was on the third story of a corner house, one of the oldest and most tumble-down, but also one of the most spacious, having formed part of a nobleman's mansion under the Tudor kings, when all the river-side was pleasaunce and garden.

The garret occupied the whole of the top floor, under a steeply sloping roof, and had two windows, one looking to the street, the other to the river. Here Sally had been slowly dying for near half a year, in charge of her little brother, and under the supervision of the dispensary doctor, who saw her daily.

The house was quiet in the summer morning. The men who had work to do had gone about it; the idlers were still in bed; the more respectable among the women were occupied with their children or their housework. Stobart met no one in the gloom of the rickety staircase, where the rotten boards offered numerous pitfalls for the unwary. He was used to ruin and decay in that water-side region, and trod carefully. The last flight was little better than a ladder, at the top of which he saw the garret door ajar, and heard a voice he knew speaking in tones so low and gentle that speech seemed a caress.

It was Antonia's voice. She was sitting by Sally Dormer's pillow, in all the splendour of white and silver brocade, diamond tiara and jewelled stomacher. Her right arm was round the sick woman, and Sally's dishevelled head leant against her shoulder.

"Great Heaven, what a change of scene!" he said, as he bent down and took Sally's hand. "'Tis not many hours since I saw you at Ranelagh."

"Were _you_ at Ranelagh?"

"At the gate only. I do not enter such paradises. I went there last night, after your door was shut in my face for the third time. It seemed my only chance of seeing you; and the sight was worth a journey. But what madness to come here alone in your finery, to flash jewels worth a king's ransom before starving desperadoes! Sure 'twas wilfully to provoke danger."

"I am not afraid. My coach brought me to the end of the street, and my chair is to fetch me presently. I shall be taken care of, sir, be sure. This foolish Sally had set her heart on seeing me in my masquerade finery, so I came straight from Ranelagh; and I have been telling Sally about the ball and the beauties."

"An edifying discourse, truly!"

"Oh, you shall edify her to your heart's content when I am gone. I have been trying to amuse her. I stole those sweetmeats for Harry from the royal table"--smiling at the boy, who was sitting on the end of the bed, with his mouth full of bonbons. "I smuggled them into my pocket while the duke was talking to me."

"I was at Ranelagh once, your ladyship," said Sally, touching the gems on Antonia's stomacher one by one with her attenuated finger-tips, as if she were counting them, and as if their brilliancy gave her pleasure. "'Twas when I was young and lived like a lady. My first sweetheart took me there. He was a gentleman then. 'Twas before he took to the road. I dream of him often as he was in those days, seven years ago. He is changed now, and so am I. Sometimes I can scarce believe we are the same flesh and blood. 'Twas a handsome face, a dear face! I see it in my dreams every night."

"Sally, Sally, is this the spirit in which to remember your sins?" exclaimed Stobart, reprovingly. "See, madam, what mischief your mistaken kindness has done."

"No, no, no! My poor Sally is no less a true penitent because her thoughts turn for a few moments to the days that are gone. 'Tis a fault in your religion, sir, that it is all gloom. Your Master took a kinder view of life, and was indulgent to human affections as He was pitiful to human pains. Sally has made her peace with God, and believes in a happy world where her sins will be forgiven, and she will wear the white robe of innocence, and hear the songs of angels round the heavenly throne."

"If thou hast indeed assurance of salvation, Sally, thou art happier than the great ones of the earth, who wilfully refuse their portion in Christ's atoning blood, who can neither realize their own iniquity, nor the Redeemer's power to take away their sins," Stobart said gravely.

"'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,'" murmured Sally, her fingers still wandering about Antonia's jewels, touching necklace and tiara, and the raven hair that fell in heavy curls about the full white throat.

"How beautiful you are!" she murmured. "If the angels are like you, and as kind, how dearly I shall love them! Poor hell-deserving me! _Will_ they be kind, and never cast my sins in my face, nor draw their skirts away from me, and quicken their steps, as I have seen modest women do in the streets?"

"We are told that God's angels are much kinder than modest women, Sally," Antonia answered, smiling at her as she offered a cup of cooling drink to the parched lips.

She had been teaching the eleven-year-old Harry to make lemonade for his sick sister. One of the ladies from the infant nursery came in every day to make Sally's bed and clean her room, and for the rest the precocious little brother, reared in muddle, idleness, and intermittent starvation, was much more helpful than a happier child would have been.

"Shall I read to you, Sally?" Stobart asked in his grave voice, seating himself in an old rush-bottomed chair at the foot of the bed.

"Oh, sir, pray with me, pray for me! I would rather hear your prayers than the book. They do me more good."

Antonia gently withdrew her arm from the sick woman's waist, and arranged the pillows at her back--luxurious down pillows supplied from the _trop-plein_ of St. James's Square--and rose from her seat by the bed.

"Good-bye, Sally," she said, putting on her black domino, which she had thrown off at the invalid's request, to exhibit the splendours beneath. "I shall come and see you soon again; and I leave you with a good friend."

"Oh, my lady, do stop for a bit. I love to have you by my bed; and, oh, I want you to hear his prayers. I want you to be justified by faith, you who have never sinned."

"Hush, hush, Sally!"

"Who know not sin--like mine. I want you to believe as I do. I want to meet you in heaven among the happy souls washed white in the blood of the Lamb. Stay and hear him pray."

"I'll stay for a little to please you, Sally; but indeed I am out of place here," Antonia said gravely, as she resumed her seat.

Stobart was kneeling at the foot of the bed, his face bent upon his clasped hands, and the women had been speaking in almost whispers, Sally's voice being weak from illness, and Antonia's lowered in sympathy. He looked up presently after a long silence and began his prayer. He had been struggling against earthly thoughts, striving for that detachment of mind and senses which he had found more and more difficult of late, striving to concentrate all his forces of heart and intellect upon the dying woman--the newly awakened soul hovering on the threshold of eternity. Could there be a more enthralling theme, a subject more removed from earthly desires and earthly temptations?

Antonia looked at him with something of awe in her gaze. She had never heard him pray. He had argued with her; he had striven his hardest to make her think as he thought; but he had never prayed for her. Into that holier region, that nearer approach to the God he worshipped, she had never passed. The temple doors were shut against so obstinate an unbeliever, so hardened a scorner.

His face seemed the face of a stranger, transfigured by that rapture of faith in the spirit world, made like to the angels in whose actual and everlasting existence this man--this rational, educated Englishman, of an over-civilized epoch--firmly believed. He believed, and was made happy by his belief. This present life was of no more value to him than the dull brown husk of the worm that knows it is to be a butterfly. To the Voltairean this thing was wonderful. The very strangeness of it fascinated her, and she listened with deepest interest to George Stobart's prayer.

His opening invocation had a formal tone. The words came slowly, and for some minutes his prayer was woven out of those familiar and moving texts he loved, while the thoughts and feelings of the man himself rose slowly from the depths of a heart that seemed ice-bound; but the man believed in Him to whom he prayed, and presently the ice melted, and the fire came, and the speaker forgot all surrounding things--the lovely eyes watching him in a grave wonder, the feelings and doubts and apprehensions of last night. The earthly fetters fell away from his liberated soul, and he was alone with his God, as much alone as Moses on the mountain, as Christ in the garden. Then, and then only, the man became eloquent. Moving words came from the heart so deeply moved, burning words from the spirit on fire with an exalted faith.

Sally Dormer sobbed upon Antonia's breast, the unbeliever looking down upon her with a tender pity, glad that the slow and painful passage to the grave should be soothed by beautiful fables, by dreams that took the sting from death.

Perhaps the thing that moved Antonia most was the unspeakable pity and compassion, the love that this man felt for the castaway. She had been told that the Oxford Methodists were a sanctimonious, pragmatical sect, whose heaven was an exclusive freehold, and who delighted in consigning their fellow-creatures to everlasting flames. But here she found sympathy with the sinner stronger than abhorrence of the sin. And her reason--that reason of which she was so proud--told her that with such a sinner none but an enthusiast could have prevailed. It needed the fiery speech of a Whitefield, the passionate appeal of an impassioned orator, to awaken a soul so dead.

"'Awake, thou that sleepest,'" cries the Church to the heathen; but if the Church that calls is a formal, unloving, half-somnolent Church, what chance of awakening?

The great Revival had been the work of a handful of young men--men whom the Church might have kept had her rulers been able to gauge their power, but who had been sent into the fields to carry on their work of conversion as their Master was sent before them.

Antonia was no nearer belief in Stobart's creed than she had been yesterday; but she was impressed by the sincerity of the man, the vitality of an unquestioning faith.

He was interrupted in the midst of an impassioned sentence by a startling appearance. The lattice facing the river had been left open to the balmy morning air. The casement rattled suddenly, and a pair of hands appeared clutching the sill, followed almost instantly by the vision of a ghastly face with starting eyeballs and panting mouth; and then a slenderly built man scrambled through the opening, and dropped head foremost into the room, breathless, and speechless for the moment.

George Stobart started to his feet.

"What are you doing here, fellow?" he exclaimed angrily.

The man took no notice of the question, but flung himself on his knees by the bed, and grasped Sally's hand. His clothes were torn and mud-stained, one of his coat-sleeves was ripped from wrist to shoulder. Great beads of sweat rolled down his ashen face.

"Hide me, hide me, Sally," he gasped hoarsely. "If ever you loved me, save me from the gallows. Hide me somewhere behind your bed--in your closet--anywhere. The constables are after me. It's a hanging business."

"Oh, Jack, I thought you was in Georgia--safe, and leading an honest life."

"I've come back. I'm one of them that can't be honest. They're after me. I gave them the slip on the bridge--ran for my life--climbed the old timbers. Hell, how slippery they are! They'll be round the corner directly. They'll search every house in the street."

He was looking about the room with strained eyes, searching for some hole to hide in. There was a curious kind of closet in the slope of the rafters, filling an acute angle. He was making for this, then stopped and ran to the window facing the river.

"Get out of this, fellow," said Stobart. "This woman has done with the companions of sin. Go!"

"No, no," cried Antonia; "you shall not give him over to those bloodhounds."

"What, madam, would you make yourself the abettor of crime--come between a felon and the law which protects honest people from thieves and murderers?"

"I hate your laws--your inexorable judges, your murdering laws, which will hang a child that never knew right from wrong for a stolen sixpence."

"They are round the corner; they are looking at the house," gasped the fugitive, moving from the window and looking round the room in a wild despair.

He had been caught in that very house years before, when he and Sally Dormer lodged there together, and when he was one of the luckiest professionals on the Dover road, with a couple of good horses, and a genius for getting clear off after a job. He had escaped by the skin of his teeth on that occasion, the witnesses for identification breaking down in the inquiry before the magistrate. He had saved his neck and some of the profits from an audacious attack on the Dover mail, and had gone to America in a shipload of mixed company, swearing to turn honest and cheat Jack Ketch. But he could as easily have turned wild Indian; and after a spirited career in Georgia he had got himself back to London, and being in low water, without means to buy himself a good horse, had sunk to the meaner status of foot-pad, and this morning had been concerned with three others in an attempt to stop a great lady's coach on the way from Ranelagh.

A chosen few among the most dissipated of the company had kept the ball going till seven o'clock, and had gone to breakfast and cards after seven--and it was one of these great ladies whose chariot had been stopped in the loneliest part of the road, between Chelsea and the Five Fields.

Antonia was looking out of the window that overhung the street. The thief made a rush towards the same window, and stopped midway, staring at this queen-like figure in mute surprise. Her beauty, her sumptuous dress and jewels made him almost think this dazzling appearance the hallucination of his own distraught brain. "Is it real?" he muttered, and then went back to the other casement, and looked out again.

"They are coming," he said in a dull voice. "'Tis no use to hide in that rat-hole. They'd have me out in a trice. The game's up, Sally. I shall dance upon nothing at Tyburn before the month is out."

He looked to the priming of a pair of pistols which he carried in a leather belt. They were ready for work. He took his stand behind the garret door. The first man who entered that room would be accounted for. They would not risk an ascent upon those slippery old beams which he had climbed for sport many a time in his boyhood; they would make their entrance from the street. Well, there was some hope of giving them trouble on the top flight of stairs, almost as steep as a ladder, and rotten enough to let them down headlong with a little extra impetus from above.

"They are not round yet," cried Antonia, snatching up her black silk domino from the chair where it hung. "Put on this, sir. So, so"--wrapping the voluminous cloak round the thief's thin frame. "Don't cry, Sally; we'll save him if we can, for your sake; and he'll turn honest for your sake. So; the cloak covers your feet. Why, I doubt I am the taller. Now for the mask," adjusting the little loup, which fastened with a spring, over the man's face, and the silk hood over his head.

"Come, Mr. Stobart, my chair is at the door," she said breathlessly. "Take this poor wretch downstairs, bundle him into the chair, and bid my servants carry him to my house, and hide him there. They can send a hackney coach to fetch me. Quick, quick!" she cried, stamping her foot; "quick, sir, if you would save a life."

Stobart looked from the masked figure to Antonia irresolutely, and then looked out of the river window. There was a mob hurrying along the muddy shore at the heels of three Bow Street runners, who were nearing the network of timbers below. There was no time for scruples. Five minutes would give the pursuers time to come round to the front of the house.

A wailing voice came from the bed--

"Oh, sir, save him, for Christ's sake! He was my first sweetheart; and he has always been kind to me. Give him this one chance."

The fugitive had not waited, but had scrambled downstairs in his strange disguise, stumbling every now and then when his feet caught in the trailing domino.

Antonia, watching from the window, saw him dash into the street, open the door of the sedan--'twas not the first he had opened as violently--and disappear inside it.

The chairmen stood dumbfounded; and had not Stobart appeared on the instant to give them their lady's orders, might have raised an alarm. Drilled to obedience, however, the men took up their load in prompt and orderly style, and the sedan, with two running footmen guarding it, turned one corner of the street a minute before the constables came round the other.

It was an unspeakable mortification for these gentlemen when they found their bird flown, how they knew not, or, indeed, whether he had ever been in the house, which they searched from cellar to garret, giving as much trouble as they could to all its inhabitants. It was in vain that they questioned Sally Dormer, who swore it was years since she had set eyes on her old friend Jack Parsons. It shocked Stobart to see that this brand plucked from the burning could be so ready with a lie, and that the two women rejoiced in the escape of Mr. Parsons almost as if he had been a Christian martyr saved from the lions.

"He is a man; and 'twas a life--a life like yours or mine--that we were saving," Antonia said by-and-by, when he expressed surprise at her conduct. "'Tis a thing a woman does instinctively. I think I would do as much to save a sheep from the slaughter-house. 'Twas a happy thought that brought the sedan to my mind. I remembered Lord Nithisdale's escape in '15."

"Lady Nithisdale was saving her husband's life by that stratagem."

"And I was saving a thief whose face I had never seen till five minutes before I fastened my mask upon it. But I saw a man trembling for his life, like a bird in a net; and I remembered how savage our law is, and how light judge and jury make of a fellow-creature's doom. I shall pack the rascal off to America again, and dare him to do ill there after his escape. You must help me to get him down the river this night, Mr. Stobart, and stowed away upon the first ship that sails from Gravesend."

"I must, must I?"

"If you refuse, I must employ Goodwin, and that might be dangerous."

"I cannot refuse you. Can you doubt that I admire your kindness, your generous sympathy with creatures that suffer? But I tremble at the thought of a nature so impulsive, a heart so easily melted."

"Oh, it can be hard on occasion," she said proudly, remembering the lovers who had sighed at her feet and been sent away despairing, since her reign in London had begun, her supremacy as a beauty and a fortune.

Having consented to help in her work of mercy, Stobart performed his task faithfully. He had allies among the vagabond classes whose honour he could rely on, and with the help of two stalwart boatmen he conveyed Jack Parsons to Erith, and saw him on board a trading vessel, carrying a score or so of emigrants and a freight of miscellaneous merchandise to Boston, which by good luck was to sail with the next favourable wind. He provided the fugitive with proper clothing and necessaries for the voyage, which might last months, and took pains to clothe him like a small tradesman's son; and as such he was shipped, with his passage paid, and the promise of a five-pound note, to be given him by the captain before he landed in America, to maintain him till he got work.

"If the lady who saved you from the gallows should hear of you by-and-by as leading an honest life, I dare say she will help you to better yourself out yonder; but if you fall back into sin you will deserve the worst that can happen to a hardened reprobate;" and with these words of counsel, a New Testament, and Charles Wesley's hymn book, Mr. Stobart took leave of Antonia's _protégé_, who sobbed out broken words of gratitude to him and to the good lady, which sounded as if they came from the heart.

"I had my chance before, sir, and I threw it away--but God's curse blight me if I forget what that woman did for me."

Stobart wrote to Lady Kilrush, with an account of what he had done, but it was some days before he saw her. He had to take up the thread of his mission work, and had to wait upon Mr. Wesley more than once--to discuss his philanthropic labours--at his house by the Foundery. He saw Sally Dormer every day, and was touched by the poor creature's adoration of Antonia, whom she now regarded as a heaven-sent angel.

"Oh, sir, you told me once that her ladyship was an infidel; but, indeed, sir, whatever she says, whatever she thinks, you cannot believe that such a creature will be shut out from heaven. Sure, sir, heaven must be full of women like her, and God must love them, because they are good."

"No, Sally, God cannot love those who deny Christ."

"But indeed she does not. While you was away, when I was so ill, I asked her to read the Bible to me, and she let me choose the chapters--the Sermon on the Mount, and those chapters you love in St. John's Gospel--and she told me she loved Jesus--loved His words of kindness and mercy, His goodness to the sick and the poor, and to the little children."

"All that is no use, Sally, without faith in His atoning blood, without the conviction of sin, or the belief in saving grace. Yet I can scarce think that so good a woman as Lady Kilrush will be left for ever under the dominion of Satan. Faith will come to her some day--with the coming of sorrow."

"Yes, yes, it will come; and she will shine like a star in heaven. God cannot do without such angels round His throne."

Stobart reproved her gently for words that went too near blasphemy. He was melted by her affection for the generous friend who had done so much to brighten her declining days.

"She came to see me very often while you was away," Sally said; "and she paid the nurse-keeper to come every day, and sent me soups and jellies and all sorts of good things by a light-porter every morning. And she talks to me as if I was an honest woman. She never reminds me what a sinner I have been--or even that I'm not a lady."

* * * * *

It was more than a week after the scene in Sally Dormer's garret, and the ship that carried Mr. John Parsons was beating round the Start Point, when George Stobart called in St. James's Square early in the afternoon.

The dining-room door stood wide open as he crossed the hall, and he saw a long table strewed with roses and covered with gold plate, and the _débris_ of a fashionable breakfast, chocolate-pots, champagne-glasses, carbonadoed hams, chickens and salads, jellies and junkets and creams.

"Her ladyship has been entertaining company," he said, with a sense of displeasure of which he felt ashamed, knowing how unreasonable it was. Had she not a right to live her own life, she who had never professed Christianity, least of all his kind of Christianity, which meant total renunciation of all self-indulgence, purple and fine linen, banquets and dances, splendid furniture and rich food?

"Yes, sir, her ladyship has been giving a breakfast-party to the Duke of Cumberland," replied the footman, swelling with pride. "Eight and twenty sat down--mostly dukes and duchesses--and Mr. Handel played on the 'arpsikon for an hour after breakfast. His royal 'ighness loves music," added the lackey, condescendingly, as he ushered Mr. Stobart into the library.

"Was Lord Dunkeld among the company?" Stobart asked.

"Yes, sir."

Stobart had come there charged with a mission, a self-imposed duty, which had been in his mind--paramount over all other considerations--ever since that night at Ranelagh, when he had seen Antonia and Lord Dunkeld together. Again and again he went over the same chain of reasoning, with always the same result. He saw her in the flower of youth, beautiful and impulsive, with a wild courage that scorned consequences, ready to break the law if her heart prompted; and he told himself that for such a woman marriage with a good man was the only safeguard from the innumerable perils of a woman's life. In her case marriage was inevitable. The worldlings would not cease from striving for so rich a prize. If she did not marry Dunkeld, she would marry some one else, his inferior, perhaps, in every virtue. It was his duty--his, as her friend, her earnest well-wisher--to persuade her to so suitable an alliance.

Having marked out this duty to be done, he was in a fever of anxiety to get his task accomplished. He was like a martyr, who knows death inevitable, and is eager for the faggot and the stake. That poignant eagerness was so strange a feeling--a fire of enthusiasm that was almost agony.

He walked up and down the library, agitated and impatient, his hands clasped above his head. He was wondering how she would receive his advice. She would be angry, perhaps; and would resent the impertinence of unsought counsel.

The windows were open, and the room was full of flowers and soft vernal air. A Kirkman harpsichord stood near the fireplace, scattered with loose sheets of music from the newest opera and oratorio. A guitar hung by a broad blue ribbon across an armchair. Light and trivial romances and modish magazines lay about the table; and another table was covered with baskets of shells and a half-finished picture-frame in shell-work. A white cockatoo cackled and screamed on his perch by a window. Nothing was wanting to mark the lady of fashion.

She came in, beaming with smiles, in the splendour of gala clothes, a sky-blue poplin sacque, covered with Irish lace, over a primrose satin petticoat powdered with silver shamrocks. Her hair was rolled back from her forehead, a little cap like a gauze butterfly was perched on the top of her head, and gauze lappets were crossed under her chin, and pinned with a single brilliant. The little cap gave a piquancy to her beauty, a dainty touch of the _soubrette_, which Boucher has immortalized in his portrait of the Pompadour.

"Well, sir," she cried gaily, making him a low curtsey, "we have broken the law between us, and I thank you heartily for your share in the offence against its majesty. Would to God that Admiral Byng could have been saved as easily!"

"You have a generous heart, madam--a heart too easily moved, perhaps, by human miseries, and I tremble for its impulses, while I admire its warmth and courage. You have never been absent from my thoughts since that morning in Sally's garret. Indeed, what man living could forget a scene so incongruous--yet--so beautiful?"

His voice faltered towards the end, and he leant against the late lord's tall armchair.

"You have not been kind in keeping away from me so long, when I was dying to give expression to my gratitude."

"Be sure my recompense was having obliged you. 'Twas superfluous to thank me. I have been very busy. I had arrears of work, and I knew all _your_ hours were engaged."

"Sure there must always be something to do in a town full of people."

She was playing with the great white bird, smoothing his fluffy topknot, ruffling the soft saffron feathers round his neck, tempting him with the pink tips of taper fingers, flashing rose-coloured light from her diamond rings, whose splendour covered the slender hoop of gold with which Kilrush married her.

"You have been entertaining the Duke of Cumberland, I hear."

"Billy the Butcher! That's what my father and I used to call him, when we concocted Jacobite paragraphs for _Lloyd's Evening Post_. Yes, Mr. Stobart, I have been entertaining royalty for the first time in my life. The honour was not my own seeking either, for his royal highness challenged me to invite him."

"He would not be so much out of the fashion as not to be among your adorers."

"That is too prettily said for an Oxford Methodist. 'Tis a reminiscence of the soldier's manners. When the duke led me out for the second dance at the Duchess of Norfolk's ball he was pleased to compliment my housekeeping. 'I hear your ladyship's is the pleasantest house in town,' he said, 'but am I never to know more of it than hearsay?' On which I dropped my best curtsey, and told him that my house with all it contained was at his feet, and I had not finished my chocolate next morning before his royal highness's aide-de-camp was announced, who came to tell me his master would accept any invitation I was civil enough to send him."

"And this trivial conquest made you happy?"

"Sure it pleased me as any other toy would have done. 'Twas something to think about--whom I should invite--how I should dress my table. I strewed it from end to end with cut roses, brought up from Essex this morning, with the dew on their petals. Their perfume had a flavour of the East--some valley in Cashmere--till a succession of smoking roasts polluted the atmosphere. I had a mind to imitate mediæval feasts, and give the prince a pie full of live singing birds, but one hardly knows how the birds might behave when the pie was cut."

"You had one sensible man among your guests, I doubt."

"_Merci du compliment--pour les autres_. Pray who was this paragon?"

"Lord Dunkeld."

"You know Lord Dunkeld?"

"He was my intimate friend some years ago."

"Before you left off having any friends but Methodists?"

"Before I knew that life was too serious a thing for trifling friendships."

"I am glad you approve of Dunkeld. Of all my modish friends he is the one I like best."

"Is it not something better than liking? Dear Lady Kilrush, accept the counsel of a friend whose heart is tortured by the consciousness of your unprotected position, the infinite perils that surround youth and beauty in a world given over to folly--a world which the most appalling convulsion of nature and the sudden death of thousands of unprepared sinners could not awaken from its dream of pleasure. I see you in your grace and loveliness, of a character too generous to suspect evil, hemmed round with profligates, the companion of unfaithful wives and damaged misses. And since I cannot win you for Christ, since you are deaf and cold to the Saviour's voice, I would at least see you guarded by a man of honour--a man who knows the world he lives in, and would know how to protect an adored wife from its worst dangers."

"I hardly follow the drift of this harangue, sir."

"Marry Dunkeld. You could not choose a better man, and I know that he adores you."

"You are vastly kind, sir, to interest yourself in my matrimonial projects. But there is more of the old woman--the spinster aunt--in this unasked advice than I expected from so serious a person as Mr. Stobart."

"I fear you are offended."

He had grown pale to the lips as he talked to her. His whole countenance, and the thrilling note in his voice betrayed the intensity of his feeling.

"No, I am only amused. But I regret that you should have wasted trouble on my affairs. It is true that Lord Dunkeld has honoured me with the offer of his hand on more than one occasion, but he has had his answer; and he is so sensible a man that in rejecting him as a lover I have not lost him as a friend."

"He will offer again, and you will accept him."

"Never!" she exclaimed with sudden energy, dropping her light, half-mocking tone, and looking at him with flashing eyes. "I shall never take a second husband, sir. You may be sure of that."

A crimson fire flashed across his pallid face, and slowly faded. He drew a deep breath, and there was a silence of moments that seemed long.

"You--you--must have some reason for such a strange resolve."

"Yes, I have my reason."

"May I know it?" he asked, trembling with emotion.

"No, sir, neither you nor any one else. 'Tis my own secret. And now let us talk of other matters. It was on your conscience to give me a spinster aunt's advice. You have done your duty very prettily, and your conscience can be at rest."

He stood looking at her in a strange silence. The beautiful face which had fired with a transient passion was now only pensive. She seated herself in her favourite chair by the open window, took up a tapestry-frame, and began to work in minute stitches that needed exquisite precision of eye and hand.

How much of his future life or earthly happiness he would have given to fathom her thoughts! He had come there to persuade her to marry; he had convinced himself that she ought to marry; and yet his heart was beating with a wild gladness. He felt like a wretch who had escaped the gallows. The rope had been round his neck when the reprieve came.

"Tell me about your night-school," she said, without looking up from her work. "Do the numbers go on increasing?"

"I--I--can't talk of the school to-day," he said. "I have a world of business on my hands. Good-bye."

He left her on the instant without offering his hand, hurried through the hall, and opened the great door before the porter, somnolent after the morning's bustle, could struggle out of his leathern chair.

"Never, never, never more must I cross that threshold," he told himself as he walked away.

He stopped on the other side of the road, and looked back at the great handsome house, so dull externally, with its long rows of uniform windows, its massive pediment and heavy iron railings, with the tall extinguishers on each side of the door in a flourish of hammered iron.

"If I ever enter that house again I shall deserve to perish everlastingly," he thought.

'Twas four o'clock, and the sun was blazing, a midsummer afternoon in early May. He walked to his house in Lambeth like a man in a dream, from which he seemed to wake with a startled air when his wife ran out into the passage to welcome him.

"How pale you look," she said. "Is it one of your old headaches?"

"No, no; 'tis nothing but the sudden heat. You are pale enough yourself, poor little woman! Come, Lucy, give me an early tea, and I'll take you and the boy for a jaunt up the river."

"Oh, George, how good you are! 'Tis near a year since you gave us a treat, or yourself a holiday."

"I have worked too hard, perhaps, and might have given you more pleasure. 'Tis difficult not to be selfish, even in trying to do good."

"I'll have tea ready in a jiffy, and Georgie dressed. I've been sitting at the window watching the boats, and wishing ever so to be on the river."

"Thou shalt have thy wish for this once, love," he said gently.

He was silent all through the simple meal, eating hardly anything, though 'twas the first food he had tasted since a seven-o'clock breakfast. He found himself wondering at the sunshine and the brightness of things, like a man who has come away from a newly filled grave--a grave where all his hopes and affections lie buried.

Lucy and her boy sat opposite him, and in the gaiety of their own prattle were unaware of his silence. The boy was three years old, and of an inexhaustible loquacity, having been encouraged to babble in Lucy's lonely hours. The sweet little voice ran on like a ripple of music, his mother hushing him every now and then, while Stobart sat with his head leaning on his hand, thinking, thinking, thinking.

They went up the river to Putney in a skiff, Stobart rowing, and it was one of the happiest evenings in Lucy's life. She had occupation enough for all the way in pointing out the houses and churches and gardens to Georgie, who asked incessant questions. She did not see the rower's pallid brow, with its look of infinite pain.

They landed at Fulham, moored the boat at the bottom of some wooden steps, and sat on a green bank, while Georgie picked the flowers off the blossoming sedges. Stobart sat with his elbows on his knees, gazing at the opposite shore, the rustic street climbing up the hill, and white cottages scattered far apart against a background of meadowland golden with marsh marigolds.

"Has rowing made your head worse, George?" his wife asked timidly.

"No, dear, no! There is nothing the matter"--holding out his hand to her. "Only I have been thinking--thinking of you and the boy, and of your lives in that dull house by the river. It is dull, I'm afraid."

"Never, when you are at home," she answered quickly. "You are very studious, and you don't talk much; but I am happy, quite happy, when you are sitting there. To have your company is all I desire."

"I have been a neglectful husband of late, Lucy. Those poor wretches in the Marsh have taken too much of my time and thought. Whatever a man's work in the world may be, he ought to remember his home."

"It is only when you are away--quite away, on those long journeys with Mr. Wesley."

"I will give up those journeys. Let the men who have neither wives nor children carry on _that_ work. Would you like me to take Orders, Lucy?"

"Take Orders?"

"Enter the Church of England as an ordained priest. I might settle down then, get a London living. I have friends who could help me. It would not be to break with Wesley; he is a staunch Churchman."

"Yes, yes, I should love to see you in a real pulpit in a handsome black gown. I should love you to be a clergyman. All the town would flock to hear you, and people would talk of you as they do of Mr. Whitefield."

"No, no. I have not the metal to forge his thunderbolts. But we can think about it. I mean to be a kinder husband, Lucy. Yes, my poor girl, a kinder husband. Sure ours was a love match, was it not?"

"I loved you from the moment I heard your voice, that night at the Foundery Chapel, when I woke out of a swoon and heard you speaking to me. And in all those happy days at Clapham, when I used to tremble at the sound of your footstep, and when you taught me to read good books, an ignorant girl like me, and to behave like a lady. Oh, George, you have always, always been good to me."

The sun set, and the stars shone out of the deep serene as they went home, and a profound peace fell upon George Stobart's melancholy soul. To do his duty! That was the only thing that remained to be done. He understood John Wesley's warning better now. His soul had been in peril unspeakable. He loved her, he loved her, that queen among women--loved her with a passion measured by her own perfections. As she outshone every woman he had ever seen in loveliness, mental and physical, so his love for her surpassed any love he had ever imagined.

And to-day, when she had looked at him with so glorious a light in her eyes, when she had declared she would never marry, and confessed that she had a secret--a secret she would tell to none--he had trembled with an exquisite joy, an overpowering fear, as the conviction that she loved him flashed into his mind.

Why not? 'Twas hardly strange that the flame which had kindled in his breast had found a responsive warmth in hers. They had been so much to each other, had lived in such harmony of desires and hopes, each equally earnest in the endeavour to redress some of the manifold wrongs of the world. She had flung herself heart and soul into his philanthropic work, and here they had ever been at one. Her presence, her voice, her sweetness and grace had become the first necessity of his life, the one thing without which life was worthless. Was it strange if he had become more to her than a common friend? Was it strange if, after giving him her friendship, she had given him her heart?

But, oh, how deep a fall for the man who had set his hopes on high things, who had put on the whole armour of faith, had called himself a soldier and servant of Christ, who had looked back with loathing at the folly and the impiety of his boyhood and youth, and had set his face towards the City of the Saints, scorning earthly things! How deep a fall for the man who had cried with St. Paul, "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain"! How deep a fall to know himself the slave of a forbidden love, possessed heart and brain and in every fibre of his being by a passion stronger than any feeling of his unregenerate youth! Well, he had to fight the good fight, and to conquer man's most implacable enemy, sin. A year ago he had thought himself so safe, so far advanced on the narrow path, having only to reproach himself sometimes for a certain coldness in private prayer; successful in his mission work; happy in a humble marriage; having surrendered all things that worldlings care for in order to lead the Christian life, and having found a passionless peace as his reward.

Never more, of his free will, would he see this daughter of Babylon, this enchanting heathen, who had cast her fatal spell around his life. It might not be possible to avoid chance meetings in those miserable abodes where it was her whim to play the angel of pity; but doubtless that caprice of a fine lady would pass, and Lambeth Marsh would know her no more.

She wrote to him about a week after his last visit to St. James's Square.

"Why do you not come to take a dish of tea with me? My friends are leaving for their country seats, and I have been alone several afternoons, expecting you. Were you affronted with me for calling you a spinster aunt? Sure our friendship, and my esteem for your goodness, should excuse that careless impertinence. I enclose a bank bill which I pray you to spend as quickly as possible in buying clothing and shoes for the little ragged wretches I met coming out of your school yesterday. Ah, when will there be such schools all over England, in every city, in every village? Sure some day the country will take a lesson from such men as you and Mr. Wesley, and the poor will be better cared for than they are now."

The easy assurance of her letter surprised him. Every line indicated the woman of the world, the finished coquette. He replied coldly, thanking her for her bounty, and giving his absorbing occupations as a reason for not waiting upon her.

They met a week later in Sally Dormer's garret; but Antonia was leaving as he entered, and he did nothing to detain her. He had a brief vision of her beauty, more simply dressed than usual, in a black silk mantle and hood over a grey tabinet gown. He came upon her some days after in a shed at the back of the Vauxhall Pottery, entertaining a large party of pottery girls at supper, herself the merriest of the band. She had her woman Sophy to help her, and Mrs. Patty Granger, and he had never seen a more jovial feast. There was a long table upon trestles, loaded with joints and poultry, pies and puddings, and great copper tankards of small beer; at which feast two reluctant footmen, with disgusted countenances, assisted in undress livery, while an old blind fiddler sat in a corner playing the gayest tunes in his _répertoire_.

Antonia begged Mr. Stobart to stay and keep them company, but he declined. It was his class night, he told her, and he had his adult scholars waiting for him hard by. He carried away the vision of her radiant countenance, supremely happy in the happiness she had made for others. Was it possible better to realize the lessons of the Divine Altruist? And yet she was no more a Christian than the profligate Bolingbroke or the cynic Voltaire.

He was consistent and conscientious in his determination to avoid her, so far as possible without incivility. The town was beginning to thin, and he heard with relief that she was going on a visit to the Duchess of Portland at Bulstrode, near Maidenhead. In the autumn she was to be at Tunbridge Wells, to drink the waters, a business of six weeks.

"My physician orders it, though I swear I have nothing the matter with me," she told him, at one of their chance meetings in the Marsh. "'Tis good for my nerves to waste six weeks in a place where there is a dance every night, and where I shall spend every day in a crowd."

In another of these casual meetings she upbraided him for having deserted her.

"I have been more than usually busy," he said. "My schools are growing, and the dispensary is daily becoming a more serious business."

"Everything with you is serious; but you cannot be so seriously busy as not to have leisure for a dish of tea in St. James's Square once in a fortnight. Sure you know my heart is with you in all your good works, and that I like to hear about them."

"Indeed, madam, I am eternally grateful for your sympathy and your help; but of late I have had no leisure. My wife's spirits were suffering from a close London house, and I devote every hour I can steal from my work to giving her change of air."

"I am glad to hear it. Yes, Mrs. Stobart must miss your pretty garden at Sheen."

* * * * *

That month of May seemed to George Stobart to contain the longest and weariest days and hours he had ever known. The weather was close and oppressive, the rank odours of the Marsh were at their worst; jail fever, small-pox, putrid throats, all the most dreaded forms of infectious sickness hung heavy over the dwellers in that poverty-stricken settlement--the pottery hands, the glass-polishers, the lace-workers, the industrious and the idle, the honest and the criminal classes whom fate had herded together, unwilling neighbours in an equality of poverty.

He worked among the sick and the dying with unflagging zeal; he gave them the best of himself, all that he had of faith in God and Christ, sustaining their spirits in the last awful hours of consciousness by his own exaltation. He gave them inexhaustible pity and love, the compassion that is only possible to a man of keen imagination and quick sympathies. He understood their inarticulate sorrows, and was able to lift their minds above the actual to the unseen, and to convince them of an eternity of bliss that should pay them for a life of misery--promise more easy to believe now that all life's miseries belonged to the past, and the long agony of living was dwarfed by the nearness of death.

He followed Sally Dormer to her last resting-place in an obscure graveyard, and he provided for her brother's maintenance in the family of a hard-working carpenter, to whom the boy was to be apprenticed in due time. He had a more personal interest in this little lad than in his other scholars, remembering Antonia's interest in the dead woman, her almost sisterly affection for that fallen sister. The boy was intelligent, and took kindly to the simple tasks set him at Mr. Stobart's school, where the teaching went no further than reading, writing, and cyphering, and where the founder's sole ambition was to rear a generation of believing Christians, steeped, from the very dawn of intelligence, in the knowledge of Christ's life and example. He relied on those gospel lessons of universal charity and brotherly love, as an enduring influence over the minds and actions of his pupils, and hoped that from his school-rooms--some of them no better than an outhouse or a roomy garret, the humble predecessors of those ragged schools which were to begin their blessed work half a century later--the gospel light would radiate far and wide across the gloom of outcast lives and homes now ruled by Satan.

In his devotion to his mission work Mr. Stobart had not forgotten his promise to make his wife's life happier. He spent all the finest afternoons in rural airings with Lucy and little George; sometimes on the river, sometimes taking a little journey by coach as far as Sutton, or Ewell, or to Hampton Court; sometimes walking to Clapham Common, or as far as Dulwich, through lanes where the hedgerow oaks and elms hung a canopy of translucent green over the grassy path, and where they came every now and then on a patch of copse or a little wood, in which it was pleasant to sit and rest while the boy played about among the young fern in a rapture of delight.

He lavished kindness upon his wife and child. Never had there been a more indulgent father or a more attentive husband. Lucy, whose flower-like prettiness had faded a little in the smoke from the potteries and the Vauxhall glass-works, recovered her rose-and-lily tints in these excursions, and was full of grateful affection which touched her husband's heart. There was something pathetic in her accepting kindness as a favour which another woman would have claimed by the divine right of a wife. It pleased him to see her happy; and his conscience, which had been cruelly disturbed of late, was now at rest. But even that inward peace could not cure the dull aching of his heart, which ached he scarce knew why; or it might be that he stubbornly refused to know. He would have told himself, if he could, that the pain was physical, and that the weariness of life which followed him through every scene, and most of all in this sweet summer _idlesse_, was a question of bodily health, a lassitude for which a modish physician would have ordered "the Bath" or "the Wells."