‘Dieu, qui, dÈs le commencemeut de la crÉation, avez en tirant la femme d’une cÔte de l’homme Établi le grand sacrement du mariage, vous qui l’avez honorÉe et relevÉe si hautsoit en vous, incarnant dans le sein d’une femme, soit en commenÇant vos miracles par celui des noces de Cana, vous qui avez jadis accordÉ ce remÈde, suivant vos vues, À mon incontinente faiblesse, ne repoussez pas les priÈres de votre servante: je les verse humblement aux pieds de votre divine majestÉ pour mes pÉchÉs et pour ceux de mon bien-aimÉ. O Dieu qui Êtes la bontÉ mÊme, pardonnez À nos crimes si grands, et que l’immensitÉ de votre misÉricorde se mesure À la multitude de nos fautes. Prenez contre vos serviteurs la verge de la correction, non le glaive de la fureur. Frappez la chair pour conserver les Âmes. Venez en pacificateur, non en vengeur; avec bontÉ plÛtot qu’avec justice; en pÈre misÉricordieux, non en maÎtre sÉvÈre.‘

The Prater of HÉloÏse (written for her by Abelard).

Alma remained as her uncle and cousin had left her, leaning against the mantelpiece, with her eyes fixed, her frame convulsively trembling. Yet her look and manner still would have confirmed Sir George in his opinion that she bore the shock ‘better than might have been expected.’ She did not cry or moan. Once or twice her hand was pressed upon her heart, as if to still its beating, that was all.

Nevertheless, she was already aware that the supreme sorrow, the fatal dishallucination, of her life had come. She saw all her cherished hopes and dreams, her fairy castles of hope and love, falling to pieces like houses of cards; the idol of her life falling with them, changing to clay and dust; the whole world darkening, all beauty withering, in a chilly wind from the eternity of shadows. If Ambrose Bradley was base, if the one true man she had ever known and loved was false, what remained? Nothing but disgrace and death.

He had been in her eyes next to God, without speck or flaw, perfectly noble and supreme; one by one he had absorbed all her childish faiths, while in idolatry of passion she had knelt at his feet adoring him—

He for God only, she for God in him.

And that godhead had sufficed.

She had given up to him, together with her faith, her hope, her understanding, her entire spiritual life.

Passionate by nature, she had never loved any other human creature; even such slight thrills of sympathy as most maidens feel, and which by some are christened ‘experiences,’ having been almost or quite unknown to her. She had been a studious, reserved girl, with a manner which repelled the approaches of beardless young men of her own age; her beauty attracted them, but her steadfast intellectual eyes frightened and cowed the most impudent among them. Not till she came into collision with Bradley did she understand what personal passion meant; and even the first overtures were intellectual, leading only by very slow degrees to a more tender relationship.

Alma Craik, in fact, was of the same fine clay of which enthusiasts have been made in all ages. Born in the age of Pericles, she would doubtless have belonged to the class of which Aspasia was an immortal type; in the early days of Christianity, she would have perhaps figured as a Saint; in its mediaeval days as a proselytising abbess; and now, in the days of Christian decadence, she opened her dreamy eyes on the troublous lights of spiritual Science, found in them her inspiration and her heavenly hope. But men cannot live by bread alone, and women cannot exist without love. Her large impulsive nature was barren and incomplete till she had discovered what the Greek hetairai found in Pericles, what the feminine martyrs found in Jesus, what Eloisa found in Abelard; that is to say, the realisation of a masculine ideal. She waited, almost without anticipation, till the hour was ripe.

Love comes not as a slave

To any beckoning finger; but, some day,

When least expected, cometh as a King,

And takes his throne.

So at last it was with the one love of Alma’s life. Without doubt, without fear or question, she suffered her lover to take full sovereignty, and to remain thenceforth throned and crowned.

And now, she asked herself shudderingly, was it all over? Had the end of her dream come, when she had scarcely realised its beginning? If this was so, the beautiful world was destroyed. If Bradley was unworthy, there was no goodness in man; and if the divine type in humanity was broken like a cast of clay, there was no comfort in religion, no certainty of God.

She looked at her watch; it was not far from midnight. She moved from her support, and walked nervously up and down the room.

At last her mind was made up. She put on her hat and mantle, and left the house.

In her hand she clutched the piece of paper which George Craik had given her, and which contained the name and address of Mrs. Montmorency.

The place was close at hand, not far indeed from Bradley’s residence and her own. She hastened thither without hesitation, her way lay along the borders of the park, past the very Church which she had spared no expense to build, so that she came into its shadow almost before she knew.

It was a still and windless night; the skies were blue and clear, with scarcely a cloud, and the air was full of the vitreous pour of the summer moon, which glimmered on the church windows with ghostly silvern light. From the ground there exhaled a sickly heavy odour—the scent of the heated dew-charged earth.

Alma stood for some time looking at the building with the fortunes of which her own seemed so closely and mysteriously blent. Its shadow fell upon her with ominous darkness.

Black and sepulchral it seemed now, instead of bright and full of joy. As she gazed upon it, and remembered how she had laboured to upbuild it, how she had watched it grow stone by stone, and felt the joy a child might feel in marking the growth of some radiant flower, it seemed the very embodiment of her own despair.

Now, for the first time, her tears began to flow, but slowly, as if from sources in an arid heart. If she had heard the truth that day, the labour of her life was done; the place she looked upon was curst, and the sooner some thunderbolt of God struck it, or the hand of man razed it to the ground, the better for all the world.

There was a light in the house close by—in the room where she knew her lover was sitting. She crept close to the rails of the garden, and looked at the light through her tears. As she gazed, she prayed; prayed that God might spare her yet, rebuke the satanic calumny, and restore her lord and master to her, pure and perfect as he had been.

Then, in her pity for him and for herself, she thought how base he might think her if she sought from any lips but his own the confirmation of her horrible fear. She would be faithful till the last. Instead of seeking out the shameless woman, she would go in and ask Bradley himself to confess the truth.

Swift action followed the thought. She opened the gate, crossed the small garden, and rang the bell.

The hollow sound, breaking on the solemn stillness, startled her, and she shrank trembling in the doorway; then she heard the sound of bolts being drawn, and the next moment the house door opened, and the clergyman appeared on the threshold, holding a light.

He looked wild and haggard enough, for indeed he had been having his dark hour alone. He wore a black dressing jacket with no waistcoat, and the collar of his shirt was open and tieless, falling open to show his powerful muscular throat.

‘Alma!’ he exclaimed in astonishment.

‘You here, and so late!’

‘Yes, it is I,’ she answered in a low voice. ‘I wish to speak to you. May I come in?’

He could not see her face, but the tones of her voice startled him, as he drew back to let her enter. She passed by him without a word, and hastened along the lobby to the study.

He closed the door softly, and followed her.

The moment he came into the bright lamplight of the room he saw her standing and facing him, her face white as death, her eyes dilated.

‘My darling, what is it? Are you ill?’ he cried.

But he had no need to ask any question. He saw in a moment that she knew his secret.

‘Close the door,’ she said in a low voice; and after he had obeyed her she continued, ‘Ambrose, I have come here to-night because I could not rest at home till I had spoken to you. I have heard something terrible—so terrible that, had I believed it utterly, I think I should not be living now. It is something that concerns us both—me, most of all. Do you know what I mean? Tell me, for God’s sake, if you know! Spare me the pain of an explanation if you can. Ah, God help me! I see you know!’

Their eyes met. He could not lie to her now.

‘Yes, I know,’ he replied.

‘But it is not true? Tell me it is not true?’

As she gazed at him, and stretched out her arms in wild entreaty, his grief was pitiful beyond measure. He turned his eyes away with a groan of agony.

She came close to him, and, taking his head in her trembling hands, turned his face again to hers. He collected all his strength to meet her reproachful gaze, while he replied, in a deep tremulous voice:—

‘You have heard that I have deceived you, that I am the most miserable wretch beneath the sun. You have heard—God help me!—that there is a woman living, other than yourself, who claims to be my wife.’

‘Yes! that is what I have heard. But I do not believe—I will not believe it. I have come to have from your own lips the assurance that it is a falsehood. Dear Ambrose, tell me so. I will believe you. Whatever you tell me, I will believe with all my soul.’

She clung to him tenderly as she spoke, with the tears streaming fast down her face.

Disengaging himself gently, he crossed the room to his desk, and placed his hand upon some papers scattered there, with the ink fresh upon them.

‘When I heard you knock,’ he said, ‘I was trying to write down, for your eyes to read, what my lips refused to tell, what I could not speak for utter, overpowering shame. I knew the secret must soon be known; I wished to be first to reveal it to you, that you might know the whole unvarnished truth. I was too late, I find. My enemies have been before me, and you have come to reproach me—as I deserve.’

‘I have not come for that,’ answered Alma, sobbing. ‘It is too late for reproaches. I only wish to know my fate.’

‘Then try and listen, while I tell you everything,’ said Bradley, in the same tone of utter misery and despair. ‘I am speaking my own death-warrant, I know; for with every word I utter I shall be tearing away another living link that binds you to my already broken heart. I have nothing to say in my own justification; no, not one word. If you could strike me dead at your feet, in your just and holy anger, it would be dealing with me as I deserve. I should have been strong; I was weak, a coward! I deserve neither mercy nor pity.’

It was strange how calm they both seemed; he as he addressed her in his low deep voice, she as she stood and listened. Both were deathly pale, but Alma’s tears were checked, as she looked in despair upon the man who had wrecked her life.

Then he told her the whole story: of how, in his youthful infatuation, he had married Mary Goodwin, how they had lived a wretched life together, how she had fled from him, and how for many a year he had thought her dead. His face trembled and his cheek flushed as he spoke of the new life that had dawned upon him, when long afterwards he became acquainted with herself; while she listened in agony, thinking of the pollution of that other woman’s embraces from which he had passed.

But presently she hearkened more peacefully, and a faint dim hope began to quicken in her soul—for as yet she but dimly apprehended Bradley’s situation. So far as she had heard, the man was comparatively blameless. The episode of his youth was a repulsive one, but the record of his manhood was clear. He had believed the woman dead, he had had every reason to believe it, and he had been, to all intents and purposes, free.

As he ceased, he heaved a sigh of deep relief, and her tears flowed more freely. She moved across the room, and took his hand.

‘I understand now,’ she said. ‘O Ambrose, why did you not confide in me from the first? There should have been no secrets between us.

I would freely have forgiven you.... And I forgive you now! When you married me, you believed the woman dead and in her grave. If she has arisen to part us so cruelly, the blame is not yours—thank God for that!’

But he shrank from her touch, and uttering a cry of agony sank into a chair, and hid his face in his hands.

‘Ambrose!’ she murmured, bending over him.

‘Do not touch me,’ he cried; ‘I have more to tell you yet—something that must break the last bond uniting us together, and degrade me for ever in your eyes. Alma, do not pity me; your pity tortures and destroys me, for I do not deserve it—I am a villain! Listen, then!

I betrayed you wilfully, diabolically; for when I went through the marriage ceremony with you I knew that Mary Goodwin was still alive!’

‘You knew it!—and, knowing it, you——’

She paused in horror, unable to complete the sentence.

‘I knew it, for I had seen her with my own eyes—so long ago as when I was vicar of Fensea. You remember my visit to London; you remember my trouble then, and you attributed it to my struggle with the Church authorities. That was the beginning of my fall; I was a coward and a liar from that hour; for I had met and spoken with my first wife.’

She shrank away from him now, indeed. The last remnant of his old nobility had fallen from him, leaving him utterly contemptible and ignoble.

‘Afterwards,’ he continued, ‘I was like a man for whose soul the angels of light and darkness struggle. You saw my anguish, but little guessed its cause. I had tried to fly from temptation. I went abroad; even there, your heavenly kindness reached me, and I was drawn back to your side. Then for a time I forgot everything, in the pride of intellect and newly acquired success. By accident, I heard the woman had gone abroad; and I knew well, or at least I believed, that she would never cross my path again. My love for you grew hourly; and I saw that you were unhappy, so long as our lives were passed asunder. Then in an evil moment I turned to my creed for inspiration. I did not turn to God, for I had almost ceased to believe in Him; but I sought justification from my conscience, which the spirit of evil had already warped. I reasoned with myself; I persuaded myself that I had been a martyr, that I owed the woman no faith, that I was still morally free. I examined the laws of marriage, and, the wish being father to the thought, found in them only folly, injustice, and superstition. I said to myself, “She and I are already divorced by her own innumerable acts of infamy;” I asked myself, “Shall I live on a perpetual bondslave to a form which I despise, to a creature who is utterly unworthy?” Coward that I was, I yielded, forgetting that no happiness can be upbuilt upon a lie. And see how I am punished! I have lost you for ever; I have lost my soul alive! I, who should have been your Instructor in all things holy, have been your guide in all things evil. I have brought the curse of heaven upon myself. I have put out my last strength in wickedness, and brought the roof of the temple down upon my head.’

In this manner his words flowed on, in a wild stream of sorrowful self-reproach. It seemed, indeed, that he found a relief in denouncing himself as infamous, and in prostrating himself, as it were, under the heel of the woman he had wronged.

But the more he reproached himself, the greater her compassion grew; till at last, in an agony of sympathy and pain, she knelt down by his side, and, sobbing passionately, put her arms around him.

‘Ambrose,’ she murmured, ‘Ambrose, do not speak so! do not break my heart! That woman shall not come between us. I do not care for the world, I do not care for the judgment of men. Bid me to remain with you to the end, and I will obey you.’

And she hid her face, blinded with weeping, upon his breast.

For a time there was silence; then the clergyman, conquering his emotion, gathered strength to speak again.

‘Alma! my darling! Do not tempt me with your divine goodness. Do not think me quite so lost as to spare myself and to destroy you. I have been weak hitherto; henceforth I will be cruel and inexorable. Do not waste a thought upon me; I am not worth it. Tomorrow I shall leave London. If I live, I will try, in penitence and suffering, to atone; but whether I live or die, you must forget that I ever lived to darken your young life.’

As he spoke, he endeavoured gently to disengage himself, but her arms were wound about him, and he could not stir.

‘No,’ she answered, ‘you must not leave me. I will still be your companion, your handmaid. Grant me that last mercy. Let me be your loving sister still, if I may not be your wife.’

‘Alma, it is impossible. We must part!’

‘If you go, I will follow you. Ambrose, you will not leave me behind you, to die of a broken heart. To see you, to be near you, will be enough; it is all I ask. You will continue the great work you have begun, and I—I will look on, and pray for you as before.’

It was more than the man could bear; he too began to sob convulsively, as if utterly broken.

‘O God! God!’ he cried, ‘I forgot Thee in mine own vain-glory, in my wicked lust of happiness and power! I wandered farther and farther away from Thy altars, from my childish faith, and at every step I took, my pride and folly grew! But now, at last, I know that it was a brazen image that I worship—nay, worse, the Phantom of my own miserable sinful self. Punish me, but let me come back to Thee! Destroy, but save me! I know now there is no God but One—the living, bleeding Christ whom I endeavoured to dethrone!’

She drew her face from his breast, and looked at him in terror, It seemed to her that he was raving.

‘Ambrose! my poor Ambrose! God has forgiven you, as I forgive you. You have been His faithful servant, His apostle!’

‘I have been a villain! I have fallen, as Satan fell, from intellectual vanity and pride. You talk to me of the great work that I have done; Alma, that work has been wholly evil, my creed a rotten reed. A materialist at heart, I thought that I could reject all certitude of faith, all fixity of form. My God became a shadow, my Christ a figment, my morality a platitude and a lie. Believing and accepting everything in the sphere of ideas, I believed nothing, accepted nothing, in the sphere of living facts. Descending by slow degrees to a creed of shallow materialism, I justified falseness to myself, and treachery to you. I walked in my blind self-idolatry, till the solid ground was rent open beneath me, as you have seen. In that final hour of temptation, of which I have spoken, a Christian would have turned to the Cross and found salvation. What was that Cross to me? A dream of the poet’s brain, a symbol which could not help me. I turned from it, and have to face, as my eternal punishment, all the horror and infamy of the old Hell.’

Every word that he uttered was true, even truer than he yet realised.

He had refined away his faith till it had become a mere figment. Christ the Divine Ideal had been powerless to keep him to the narrow path, whereas Christ the living Lawgiver might have enabled him to walk on a path thrice as narrow, yea, on the very edge of the great gulf, where there is scarcely foothold for a fly. I who write these lines, though perchance far away as Bradley himself from the acceptance of a Christian terminology, can at least say this for the Christian scheme—that it is complete as a law for life. Once accept its facts and theories, and it becomes as strong as an angel’s arm to hold us up in hours of weariness, weakness, and vacillation. The difficulty lies in that acceptance. But for common workaday use and practical human needs, transcendentalism, however Christian in its ideas, is utterly infirm. It will do when there is fair weather, when the beauty of Art will do, and when even the feeble glimmer of Æstheticism looks like sunlight and pure air. But when sorrow comes, when temptation beckons, when what is wanted is a staff to lean upon and a Divine finger to point and guide, woe to him who puts his trust in any transcendental creed, however fair!

It is the tendency of modern agnosticism to slacken the moral fibre of men, even more than to weaken their intellectual grasp. The laws of human life are written in letters of brass on the rock of Science, and it is the task of true Religion to read them and translate them for the common use. But the agnostic is as shortsighted as an owl, while the atheist is as blind as a bat; the one will not, and the other cannot, read the colossal cypher, interpret the simple speech, of God.

Ambrose Bradley was a man of keen intellect and remarkable intuitions, but he had broadened his faith to so great an extent that it became like one of many ways in a wilderness, leading anywhere, or nowhere. He had been able to accept ideals, never to cope with practicalities. His creed was beautiful as a rainbow, as many-coloured, as capable of stretching from heaven to earth and earth to heaven, but it faded, rainbow-like, when the sun sank and the darkness came. So must it be with all creeds which are not solid as the ground we walk on, strength-giving as the air we breath, simple as the thoughts of childhood, and inexorable as the solemn verity of death.

Such has been, throughout all success or failure, and such is, practical Christianity. Blessed is he who, in days of backsliding and unbelief, can become as a little child and lean all his hope upon it. Its earthly penance and its heavenly promise are interchangeable terms. The Christian dies that he may live; suffers that he may enjoy; relinquishes that he may gain; sacrifices his life that he may save it. He knows the beatitude of suffering, which no merely happy man can know. We who are worlds removed from the simple faith of the early world may at least admit all this, and then, with a sigh for the lost illusion, go dismally upon our way.

That night Ambrose Bindley found, to his astonishment, that Alma was still at his mercy, that at a word from him she would defy the world. Therein came his last temptation, his last chance of moral redemption. The Devil was at hand busily conjuring, but a holier presence was also there. The man’s soul was worth saving, and there was still a stake.

The game was decided for the time being when the clergyman spoke as follows:—

‘My darling, I am not so utterly lost as to let you share my degradation. I do not deserve your pity any more than I have deserved your love. Your goodness only makes me feel my own baseness twenty-fold. I should have told you the whole truth; I failed to do so, and I grossly deceived you; there fore it is just that I should be punished and driven forth. I have broken the laws of my country as well as the precepts of my creed. I shall leave England to-morrow, never to return.’

‘You must not go,’ answered Alma. ‘I know that we must separate, I see that it is sin to remain together, but over and above our miserable selves is the holy labour to which you have set your hand. Do not, I conjure you, abandon that! The last boon I shall ask you is to labour on in the church I upbuilt for you, and to keep your vow of faithful service.’

‘Alma, it is impossible! In a few days, possibly in a few hours, our secret will be known, and then——’

‘Your secret is safe with me,’ she replied, ‘and I will answer for my uncle and my cousin—that they shall leave you in peace. It is I that must leave England, not you. Your flight would cause a scandal and would destroy the great work for ever; my departure will be unnoticed and unheeded. Promise me, promise me to remain.’

‘I cannot, Alma!—God forbid!—and allow you, who are blameless, to be driven forth from your country and your home!’

‘I have no home, no country now,’ she said, and as she spoke her voice was full of the pathos of infinite despair. ‘I lost these, I lost everything, when I lost you. Dearest Ambrose, there is but one atonement possible for both of us! We must forget our vain happiness, and work for God.’

Her face became Madonna-like in its beautiful resignation. Bradley looked at her in wonder, and never before had he hated himself so much for what he had done. Had she heaped reproaches upon him, had she turned from him in the pride of passionate disdain, he could have borne it far better. But in so much as she assumed the sweetness of an angel, did he feel the misery and selfscorn of a devil.

And, if the truth must be spoken, Alma wondered at herself. She had thought at first, when the quick of her pain was first touched, that she must madden and die of agony; but her nature seemed flooded now with a piteous calm, and her mind hushed itself to the dead stillness of resignation. Alas! she had yet to discover how deep and incurable was the wound that she had received; how it was to fester and refuse all healing, even from the sacred unguents of religion.

‘Promise me,’ she continued after a pause, ‘to remain and labour in your vocation.’

‘Alma, I cannot!’

‘You must. You say you owe me reparation; let your reparation be this—to grant my last request.’

‘But it is a mockery!’ he pleaded. ‘Alma, if you knew how hollow, how empty of all living faith, my soul had become!’

‘Your faith is not dead,’ she replied.

‘Even if it be, He who works miracles will restore it to life. Promise to do as I beseech you, and be sure then of my forgiveness.

Promise!’

‘I promise,’ he said at last, unable to resist her.

‘Good-bye!’ she said, holding out her hand, which he took sobbing and covered with kisses. ‘I shall go away to some still place abroad where I may try to find peace. I may write to you sometimes, may I not? Surely there will be no sin in that! Yes, I will write to you; and you—you will let me know that you are well and happy.’

‘O Alma!’ he sobbed, falling on his knees before her, ‘my love! my better angel! I have destroyed you, I have trampled on the undriven snow!’

‘God is good,’ she answered. ‘Perhaps even this great sorrow is sent upon us in mercy, not in wrath. I will try to think so! Once more, good-bye!’

He rose to his feet, and, taking her tear-drenched face softly between his hands, kissed her upon the brow.

‘God bless and protect you!’ he cried. ‘Pray for me, my darling! I shall need all your prayers! Pray for me and forgive me!’

A minute later, and he was left alone. He would have followed her out into the night, as far as her own door, but she begged him not to do so. He stood at the gate, watching her as she flitted away. Then, with a cry of anguish, he looked towards his empty church standing shadowy in the cold moonlight, and re-entered his desolate home.