In the same excited mood, but repressing it with all the energy I could gather, I returned to the Hall and made my way to the library. There Charley soon joined me.

‘Why didn’t you come to breakfast?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been home, and changed my clothes,’ I answered. ‘I couldn’t well appear in a tail-coat. It’s bad enough to have to wear such an ugly thing by candle-light.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked again, after an interval of silence, which I judge from the question must have been rather a long one.

‘What is the matter with me, Charley?’

‘I can’t tell. You don’t seem yourself somehow.’

I do not know what answer I gave him, but I knew myself what was the matter with me well enough. The form and face of the maiden of my dream, the Athanasia lost that she might be found, blending with the face and form of Mary Osborne, filled my imagination so that I could think of nothing else. Gladly would I have been rid of even Charley’s company, that, while my hands were busy with the books, my heart might brood at will now upon the lovely dream, now upon the lovely vision to which I awoke from it, and which, had it not glided into the forms of the foregone dream, and possessed it with itself, would have banished it altogether. At length I was aware of light steps and sweet voices in the next room, and Mary and Clara presently entered.

How came it that the face of the one had lost the half of its radiance, and the face of the other had gathered all that the former had lost. Mary’s countenance was as still as ever; there was not in it a single ray of light beyond its usual expression; but I had become more capable of reading it, for the coalescence of the face of my dream with her dreaming face had given me its key; and I was now so far from indifferent, that I was afraid to look for fear of betraying the attraction I now found it exercise over me. Seldom surely has a man been so long familiar with and careless of any countenance to find it all at once an object of absorbing interest! The very fact of its want of revelation added immensely to its power over me now—for was I not in its secret? Did I not know what a lovely soul hid behind that unexpressive countenance? Did I not know that it was as the veil of the holy of holies, at times reflecting only the light of the seven golden lamps in the holy place; at others almost melted away in the rush of the radiance unspeakable from the hidden and holier side—the region whence come the revelations. To draw through it, if but once, the feeblest glimmer of the light I had but once beheld, seemed an ambition worthy of a life. Knowing her power of reticence, however, and of withdrawing from the outer courts into the penetralia of her sanctuary, guessing also at something of the aspect in which she regarded me, I dared not now make any such attempt. But I resolved to seize what opportunity might offer of convincing her that I was not so far out of sympathy with her as to be unworthy of holding closer converse; and I now began to feel distressed at what had given me little trouble before, namely, that she should suppose me the misleader of her brother, while I knew that, however far I might be from an absolute belief in things which she seemed never to have doubted, I was yet in some measure the means of keeping him from flinging aside the last cords which held him to the faith of his fathers. But I would not lead in any such direction, partly from the fear of hypocrisy, partly from horror at the idea of making capital of what little faith I had. But Charley himself afforded me an opportunity which I could not, whatever my scrupulosity, well avoid.

‘Have you ever looked into that little book, Charley?’ I said, finding in my hands an early edition of the Christian Morals of Sir Thomas Browne.—I wanted to say something, that I might not appear distraught.

‘No,’ he answered, with indifference, as he glanced at the title-page. ‘Is it anything particular?’

‘Everything he writes, however whimsical in parts, is well worth more than mere reading,’ I answered. ‘It is a strangely latinized style, but has its charm notwithstanding.’

He was turning over the leaves as I spoke. Receiving no response, I looked up. He seemed to have come upon something which had attracted him.

‘What have you found?’ I asked.

‘Here’s a chapter on the easiest way of putting a stop to it all,’ he answered.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He was a medical man—wasn’t he? I’m ashamed to say I know nothing about him.’

‘Yes, certainly he was.’

‘Then he knew what he was about.’

‘As well probably as any man of his profession at the time.’

‘He recommends drowning,’ said Charley, without raising his eyes from the book.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean for suicide.’

‘Nonsense, He was the last man to favour that. You must make a mistake. He was a thoroughly Christian man.’

‘I know nothing about that. Hear this.’

He read the following passages from the beginning of the thirteenth section of the second part.

‘With what shifts and pains we come into the world, we remember not; but ‘tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it. Many have studied to exasperate the ways of death, but fewer hours have been spent to soften that necessity.’—‘Ovid, the old heroes, and the Stoicks, who were so afraid of drowning, as dreading thereby the extinction of their soul, which they conceived to be a fire, stood probably in fear of an easier way of death; wherein the water, entering the possessions of air, makes a temporary suffocation, and kills as it were without a fever. Surely many, who have had the spirit to destroy themselves, have not been ingenious in the contrivance thereof.’—‘Cato is much to be pitied, who mangled himself with poniards; and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carried his delivery, not in the point but the pummel of his sword.’

‘Poison. I suppose,’ he said, as he ended the extract.

‘Yes, that’s the story, if you remember,’ I answered; ‘but I don’t see that Sir Thomas is favouring suicide. Not at all. What he writes there is merely a speculation on the comparative ease of different modes of dying. Let me see it.’

I took the book from his hands, and, glancing over the essay, read the closing passage.

‘But to learn to die, is better than to study the ways of dying. Death will find some ways to untie or cut the most gordian knots of life, and make men’s miseries as mortal as themselves: whereas evil spirits, as undying substances, are unseparable from their calamities; and, therefore, they everlastingly struggle under their angustias, and, bound up with immortality, can never get out of themselves.’

‘There! I told you so!’ cried Charley. Don’t you see? He is the most cunning arguer—beats Despair in the Fairy Queen hollow!’

By this time, either attracted by the stately flow of Sir Thomas’s speech, or by the tone of our disputation, the two girls had drawn nearer, and were listening.

‘What do you mean, Charley?’ I said, perceiving, however, the hold I had by my further quotation given him.

‘First of all, he tells you the easiest way of dying, and then informs you that it ends all your troubles. He is too cunning to say in so many words that there is no hereafter, but what else can he wish you to understand when he says that in dying we have the advantage over the evil spirits, who cannot by death get rid of their sufferings? I will read this book,’ he added, closing it and putting it in his pocket.

‘I wish you would,’ I said: ‘for although I confess you are logically right in your conclusions, I know Sir Thomas did not mean anything of the sort. He was only misled by his love of antithesis into a hasty and illogical remark. The whole tone of his book is against such a conclusion. Besides, I do not doubt he was thinking only of good people, for whom he believed all suffering over at their death.’

‘But I don’t see, supposing he does believe in immortality, why you should be so anxious about his orthodoxy on the other point. Didn’t Dr Donne, as good a man as any, I presume, argue on the part of the suicide?’

‘I have not read Dr Donne’s essay, but I suspect the obliquity of it has been much exaggerated.’

‘Why should you? I never saw any argument worth the name on the other side. We have plenty of expressions of horror—but those are not argument. Indeed, the mass of the vulgar are so afraid of dying that, apparently in terror lest suicide should prove infectious, they treat in a brutal manner the remains of the man who has only had the courage to free himself from a burden too hard for him to bear. It is all selfishness—nothing else. They love their paltry selves so much that they count it a greater sin to kill oneself than to kill another man—which seems to me absolutely devilish. Therefore, the vox populi, whether it be the vox Dei or not, is not nonsense merely, but absolute wickedness. Why shouldn’t a man kill himself?’

Clara was looking on rather than listening, and her interest seemed that of amusement only. Mary’s eyes were wide-fixed on the face of Charley, evidently tortured to find that to the other enormities of his unbelief was to be added the justification of suicide. His habit of arguing was doubtless well enough known to her to leave room for the mitigating possibility that he might be arguing only for argument’s sake, but what he said could not but be shocking to her upon any supposition.

I was not ready with an answer. Clara was the first to speak.

‘It’s a cowardly thing, anyhow,’ she said.

‘How do you make that out, Miss Clara?’ asked Charley. ‘I’m aware it’s the general opinion, but I don’t see it myself.’

‘It’s surely cowardly to run away in that fashion.’

‘For my part,’ returned Charley, ‘I feel that it requires more courage than I’ve got, and hence it comes, I suppose, that I admire any one who has the pluck.’

‘What vulgar words you use, Mr Charles!’ said Clara.

‘Besides,’ he went on, heedless of her remark, ‘a man may want to escape—not from his duties—he mayn’t know what they are—but from his own weakness and shame.’

‘But, Charley dear,’ said Mary, with a great light in her eyes, and the rest of her face as still as a sunless pond, ‘you don’t think of the sin of it. I know you are only talking, but some things oughtn’t to be talked of lightly.’

‘What makes it a sin? It’s not mentioned in the ten commandments,’ said Charley.

‘Surely it’s against the will of God, Charley dear.’

‘He hasn’t said anything about it, anyhow. And why should I have a thing forced upon me whether I will or not, and then be pulled up for throwing it away when I found it troublesome?’

‘Surely I don’t quite understand you, Charley.’

‘Well, if I must be more explicit—I was never asked whether I chose to be made or not. I never had the conditions laid before me. Here I am, and I can’t help myself—so far, I mean, as that here I am.’

‘But life is a good thing,’ said Mary, evidently struggling with an almost overpowering horror.

‘I don’t know that. My impression is that if I had been asked—’

‘But that couldn’t be, you know.’

‘Then it wasn’t fair. But why couldn’t I be made for a moment or two, long enough to have the thing laid before me, and be asked whether I would accept it or not? My impression is that I would have said—No, thank you; that is, if it was fairly put.’

I hastened to offer a remark, in the hope of softening the pain such flippancy must cause her.

‘And my impression is, Charley,’ I said, ‘that if such had been possible—’

‘Of course,’ he interrupted, ‘the God you believe in could have made me for a minute or two. He can, I suppose, unmake me now when he likes.’

‘Yes; but could he have made you all at once capable of understanding his plans, and your own future? Perhaps that is what he is doing now—making you, by all you are going through, capable of understanding them. Certainly the question could not have been put to you before you were able to comprehend it, and this may be the only way to make you able. Surely a being who could make you had a right to risk the chance, if I may be allowed such an expression, of your being satisfied in the end with what he saw to be good—so good indeed that, if we accept the New Testament story, he would have been willing to go through the same troubles himself for the same end.’

‘No, no; not the same troubles,’ he objected. ‘According to the story to which you refer, Jesus Christ was free from all that alone makes life unendurable—the bad inside you, that will come outside whether you will or not.’

‘I admit your objection. As to the evil coming out, I suspect it is better it should come out, so long as it is there. But the end is not yet; and still I insist the probability is that, if you could know it all now, you would say with submission, if not with hearty concurrence—“Thy will be done.”’

‘I have known people who could say that without knowing it all now, Mr Cumbermede,’ said Mary.

I had often called her by her Christian name, but she had never accepted the familiarity.

‘No doubt,’ said Charley, ‘but I’m not one of those.’

‘If you would but give in,’ said his sister, ‘you would—in the end, I mean—say, “It is well.” I am sure of that.’

‘Yes—perhaps I might—after all the suffering had been forced upon me, and was over at last—when I had been thoroughly exhausted and cowed, that is.’

‘Which wouldn’t satisfy any thinking soul, Charley—much less God,’ I said. ‘But if there be a God at all—’

Mary gave a slight inarticulate cry.

‘Dear Miss Osborne,’ I said, ‘I beg you will not misunderstand me. I cannot be sure about it, as you are—I wish I could—but I am not disputing it in the least; I am only trying to make my argument as strong as I can.—I was going to say to Charley—not to you—that, if there be a God, he would not have compelled us to be, except with the absolute fore-knowledge that, when we knew all about it, we would certainly declare ourselves ready to go through it all again if need should be, in order to attain the known end of his high calling.’

‘But isn’t it very presumptuous to assert anything about God which he has not revealed in his Word?’ said Mary, in a gentle, subdued voice, and looking at me with a sweet doubtfulness in her eyes.

‘I am only insisting on the perfection of God—as far as I can understand perfection,’ I answered.

‘But may not the perfection of God be something very different from anything we can understand?’

‘I will go further,’ I returned. ‘It must be something that we cannot understand—but different from what we can understand by being greater, not by being less.’

‘Mayn’t it be such that we can’t understand it at all?’ she insisted.

‘Then how should we ever worship him? How should we ever rejoice in him? Surely it is because you see God to be good—’

‘Or fancy you do,’ interposed Charley.

‘Or fancy you do,’ I assented, ‘that you love him—not merely because you are told he is good. The Fejee islander might assert his God to be good, but would that make you love him? If you heard that a great power, away somewhere, who had nothing to do with you at all, was very good, would that make you able to love him?’

‘Yes, it would,’ said Mary, decidedly. ‘It is only a good man who would see that God was good.’

‘There you argue entirely on my side. It must be because you supposed his goodness what you call goodness—not something else—that you could love him on testimony. But even then your love could not be of that mighty absorbing kind which alone you would think fit between you and your God. It would not be loving him with all your heart and soul and strength and mind—would it? It would be loving him second-hand—not because of himself, seen and known by yourself.’

‘But Charley does not even love God second-hand,’ she said, with a despairing mournfulness.

‘Perhaps because he is very anxious to love him first-hand, and what you tell him about God does not seem to him to be good. Surely neither man nor woman can love because of what seems not good! I confess one may love in spite of what is bad, but it must be because of other things that are good.’

She was silent.

‘However goodness may change its forms,’ I went on, ‘it must still be goodness; only if we are to adore it, we must see something of what it is—of itself. And the goodness we cannot see, the eternal goodness, high above us as the heavens are above the earth, must still be a goodness that includes, absorbs, elevates, purifies all our goodness, not tramples upon it and calls it wickedness. For if not such, then we have nothing in common with God, and what we call goodness is not of God. He has not even ordered it; or, if he has, he has ordered it only to order the contrary afterwards; and there is, in reality, no real goodness—at least in him; and, if not in him, of whom we spring—where then?—and what becomes of ours, poor as it is?’

My reader will see that I had already thought much about these things; although, I suspect, I have now not only expressed them far better than I could have expressed them in conversation, but with a degree of clearness which must be owing to the further continuance of the habit of reflecting on these and cognate subjects. Deep in my mind, however, something like this lay; and in some manner like this I tried to express it.

Finding that she continued silent, and that Charley did not appear inclined to renew the contest, anxious also to leave no embarrassing silence to choke the channel now open between us—I mean Mary and myself—I returned to the original question.

‘It seems to me, Charley—and it follows from all we have been saying—that the sin of suicide lies just in this, that it is an utter want of faith in God. I confess I do not see any Other ground on which to condemn it—provided, always, that the man has no other dependent upon him, none for whom he ought to live and work.’

‘But does a man owe nothing to himself?’ said Clara.

‘Nothing that I know of,’ I replied. ‘I am under no obligation to myself. How can I divide myself, and say that the one-half of me is indebted to the other? To my mind, it is a mere fiction of speech.’

‘But whence, then, should such a fiction arise?’ objected Charley, willing, perhaps, to defend Clara.

‘From the dim sense of a real obligation, I suspect—the object of which is mistaken. I suspect it really springs from our relation to the unknown God, so vaguely felt that a false form is readily accepted for its embodiment by a being who, in ignorance of its nature, is yet aware of its presence. I mean that what seems an obligation to self is in reality a dimly apprehended duty—an obligation to the unknown God, and not to self, in which lies no causing, therefore no obligating power.’

‘But why say the unknown God, Mr Cumbermede?’ asked Mary.

‘Because I do not believe that any one who knew him could possibly attribute to himself what belonged to Him—could, I mean, talk of an obligation to himself, when that obligation was to God.’

How far Mary Osborne followed the argument or agreed with it I cannot tell, but she gave me a look of something like gratitude, and my heart felt too big for its closed chamber.

At this moment the housemaid who had, along with the carpenter, assisted me in the library, entered the room. She was rather a forward girl, and I suppose presumed on our acquaintance to communicate directly with myself instead of going to the housekeeper. Seeing her approach as if she wanted to speak to me, I went to meet her. She handed me a small ring, saying, in a low voice,

‘I found this in your room, sir, and thought it better to bring it to you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, putting it at once on my little finger; ‘I am glad you found it.’

Charley and Clara had begun talking. I believe Clara was trying to make Charley give her the book he had pocketed, imagining it really of the character he had, half in sport, professed to believe it. But Mary had caught sight of the ring, and, with a bewildered expression on her countenance, was making a step towards me. I put a finger to my lips, and gave her a look by which I succeeded in arresting her. Utterly perplexed, I believe, she turned away towards the bookshelves behind her. I went into the next room, and called Charley.

‘I think we had better not go on with this talk,’ I said. ‘You are very imprudent indeed, Charley, to be always bringing up subjects that tend to widen the gulf between you and your sister. When I have a chance, I do what I can to make her doubt whether you are so far wrong as they think you, but you must give her time. All your kind of thought is so new to her that your words cannot possibly convey to her what is in your mind. If only she were not so afraid of me! But I think she begins to trust me a little.’

‘It’s no use,’ he returned. Her head is so full of rubbish!’

‘But her heart is so full of goodness!’

‘I wish you could make anything of her! But she looks up to my father with such a blind adoration that it isn’t of the slightest use attempting to put an atom of sense into her.’

‘I should indeed despair if I might only set about it after your fashion. You always seem to shut your eyes to the mental condition of those that differ from you. Instead of trying to understand them first, which gives the sole possible chance of your ever making them understand what you mean, you care only to present your opinions; and that you do in such a fashion that they must appear to them false. You even make yourself seem to hold these for very love of their untruth; and thus make it all but impossible for them to shake off their fetters: every truth in advance of what they have already learned, will henceforth come to them associated with your presumed backsliding and impenitence.’

‘Goodness! where did you learn their slang?’ cried Charley. ‘But impenitence, if you like,—not backsliding. I never made any profession. After all, however, their opinions don’t seem to hurt them—I mean my mother and sister.’

‘They must hurt them if only by hindering their growth. In time, of course, the angels of the heart will expel the demons of the brain; but it is a pity the process should be retarded by your behaviour.’

‘I know I am a brute, Wilfrid. I will try to hold my tongue.’

‘Depend upon it,’ I went on, ‘whatever such hearts can believe, is, as believed by them, to be treated with respect. It is because of the truth in it, not because of the falsehood, that they hold it; and when you speak against the false in it, you appear to them to speak against the true; for the dogma seems to them an unanalyzable unit. You assail the false with the recklessness of falsehood itself, careless of the injury you may inflict on the true.’

I was interrupted by the entrance of Clara.

‘If you gentlemen don’t want us any more, we had better go,’ she said.

I left Charley to answer her, and went back into the next room. Mary stood where I had left her, mechanically shifting and arranging the volumes on a shelf at the height of her eyes.

‘I think this is your ring, Miss Osborne,’ I said, in a low and hurried tone, offering it.

Her expression at first was only of questioning surprise, when suddenly something seemed to cross her mind; she turned pale as death, and put her hand on the bookshelves as if to support her; as suddenly flushed crimson for a moment, and again turned deadly pale—all before I could speak.

‘Don’t ask me any questions, dear Miss Osborne,’ I said. ‘And, please, trust me this far; don’t mention the loss of your ring to any one, unless it be your mother. Allow me to put it on your finger.’

{Illustration: “I THINK THIS IS YOUR RING, MISS OSBORNE."}

She gave me a glance I cannot and would not describe. It lies treasured—for ever, God grant!—in the secret jewel-house of my heart. She lifted a trembling left hand, and doubtingly held—half held it towards me. To this day I know nothing of the stones of that ring—not even their colour; but I know I should know it at once if I saw it. My hand trembled more than hers as I put it on the third finger.

What followed, I do not know. I think I left her there and went into the other room. When I returned a little after, I know she was gone. From that hour, not one word has ever passed between us in reference to the matter. The best of my conjectures remains but a conjecture; I know how the sword got there—nothing more.

I did not see her again that day, and did not seem to want to see her, but worked on amongst the books in a quiet exultation. My being seemed tenfold awake and alive. My thoughts dwelt on the rarely revealed loveliness of my Athanasia; and, although I should have scorned unspeakably to take the smallest advantage of having come to share a secret with her, I could not help rejoicing in the sense of nearness to and alone-ness with her which the possession of that secret gave me; while one of the most precious results of the new love which had thus all at once laid hold upon me, was the feeling—almost a conviction—that the dream was not a web self-wove in the loom of my brain, but that from somewhere, beyond my soul even, an influence had mingled with its longings to in-form the vision of that night—to be as it were a creative soul to what would otherwise have been but loose, chaotic, and shapeless vagaries of the unguided imagination. The events of that night were as the sudden opening of a door through which I caught a glimpse of that region of the supernal in which, whatever might be her theories concerning her experiences therein, Mary Osborne certainly lived, if ever any one lived. The degree of God’s presence with a creature is not to be measured by that creature’s interpretation of the manner in which he is revealed. The great question is whether he is revealed or not; and a strong truth can carry many parasitical errors.

I felt that now I could talk freely to her of what most perplexed me—not so much, I confess, with any hope that she might cast light on my difficulties, as in the assurance that she would not only influence me to think purely and nobly, but would urge me in the search after God. In such a relation of love to religion the vulgar mind will ever imagine ground for ridicule; but those who have most regarded human nature know well enough that the two have constantly manifested themselves in the closest relation; while even the poorest love is the enemy of selfishness unto the death, for the one or the other must give up the ghost. Not only must God be in all that is human, but of it he must be the root.