Crying for the Light Volume I Part 11

Thus talking to himself, our hero found himself in the neighbourhood of a well-known inn, and a smile from the barmaid-a showy specimen of her cla.s.s-was quite sufficient to induce him to enter. The fair creature, as she said, 'was a little low, and wanted a fellow to talk to.' Wentworth soon rose to the occasion, and when he left the hostelry, it was with a flushed cheek and a jaunty air. Indeed, he was quite mirthful till he reached a little cottage where he had spent many a riotous hour. To his consternation, the blinds were down, and there was an unspeakable air of desolation about the place, as if had come there the grim unbidden visitor whose name is Death. He summoned enough courage to enter, and came out, after a very short stay, looking pale and sad. Death had indeed been there, and taken away the breadwinner of the family, leaving wife and children desolate.

It was late when he reached the rendezvous of his companions, seedy fellows, but very happy, nevertheless, unshaven, with rather big beards and long hair, much given to smoking, and not over-clean in person or linen.

'You're late, young man,' said the eldest of the party, as Wentworth entered, 'and will have to stand gla.s.ses all round.'

'Certainly; but hear my excuse. I promised to be here at eight; it is now ten. I want an S. and B. I have not a rap in my pocket-absolutely cleared out.'

'Too bad! and yesterday was pay-day,' said the chairman. 'Wentworth, you profligate, I am ashamed of you. What an example you set these young people!'

'Shocking, shocking!' was the cry all round.

'Strike, but hear,' said Wentworth. 'You know poor Canning?' naming a comedian popular at the music-halls.

'Yes.'

'Well, he's dead; and there's a wife and five children, and an invalid aunt, without a halfpenny. I happened to come by the cottage as I was coming here, and I never saw a sadder sight. In one room the poor dead body; in another, women in hysterics, children weeping, and a vile harpy of a landlady standing at the door wanting her money. I paid her something to keep her quiet. That's why I'm cleaned out, knowing that you generous youths would give me something for the poor man's wife and family.'

Immediately every hand was put into its owner's pocket, and Wentworth was content with the result, and he prepared to enjoy himself after the fas.h.i.+on of the room, which was well patronized by gentlemen of the press, including the dreariest of shorthand writers and the most elegant of penny-a-liners. As one went out to deliver his copy another came in who had done so. The climax was reached when there came a gang of Parliamentary reporters from the Gallery with the news of a great division, a Ministerial defeat and a Parliamentary crisis, who seemed inclined to sit up late talking shop. Most of them had a cheerful gla.s.s, and when that is indulged in, it is astonis.h.i.+ng how witty a man becomes, and what a cause of wit in other men. A good deal of profane language was used, and now and then a little Latin or a sc.r.a.p of Greek. The atmosphere was as critical as it was clouded with tobacco. Wentworth took part in many a war of words, and

'Drank delight of battle with his peers.'

The sleepy waiter, reinforced by the sleepy landlord, had hard work to clear the room, which, however, was not done till the milkman might be heard going his early rounds, and the great world of London was preparing for the business of the day.

No wonder Wentworth rather liked that sort of life. It had for him the charm of novelty. At any rate, he breathed a freer air than he had ever done before. He could say what he meant. He had lived where that was impossible. There was little free speech or thought in pious circles, either Dissenting or Church, fifty years ago. Happily, the present generation lives and moves in a freer day, when a man is not sent to Coventry on account of honest doubt. The one drawback he felt was that he was rus.h.i.+ng to the other extreme.

When Johnson was about to write the life of Akenside, he asked Hannah More, as a friend of Sir James Stonehouse, Akenside's contemporary at the now far-famed borough of Northampton, if she could supply him with any information concerning him. On which she tells us she made an effort to recollect some sayings she had heard reported. This did not suit the Doctor, who impatiently exclaimed:

'Incident, child-incident is what a biographer wants. Did he break his leg?'

The great Doctor was but a superficial critic, after all. As a rule, writers nowadays care little about incident, and in this respect the public resembles them. Given a life of average duration and condition, and we know its inseparable incidents-incidents which are the general property and experience of the human family. In our day we like better to learn what is the hidden life-to see the springs and sources of action in the individual or the community at large-what are the seeds sown in the human heart, and what the fruit they bear. Nature works slowly and in order, and miracles are, if not impossible, at any rate rare. One can quite realize the feeling of the celebrated Rammohun Roy, when he contended that miracles were not the part of the Christian dispensation best adapted to the conversion of sceptics. Be that as it may, there was nothing of the miraculous in finding the ardent preacher of the Gospel now in the camp of the scorner. That was the result of causes long working unsuspected. He had been disgusted with the narrowness of the Church and people with whom he had come in contact. The G.o.d of his youth seemed to him hard, despotic, unmerciful, and unlovely. He had been bowed down to the earth with a great sorrow. Apparently the change was not for good. Once he was a preacher; now he never darkened church doors. Once he a.s.sociated with the G.o.dly; now he did nothing of the kind. In the language of the sects, now he was a son of perdition.

Of course a woman was at the bottom of it all. It was in Hamburg they met. There was a fas.h.i.+onable English boarding-school in that ancient city, and in the course of his travels Wentworth had spent a winter there. Indeed, it was on account of the beauty of one in particular that he had stopped there wasting his time and getting over head and ears in debt. It was all an accident; going up the old Steinweg, he had seen some of the young ladies of the English school coming down. One of them was Adele, blue-eyed, fresh and fair as the stars on a summer night.

Their eyes met, and Wentworth was over head and ears in love.

In a little while he managed to make the acquaintance of the lady at an evening party, where everyone was ravished with her musical genius. He was introduced to her, and found her English charming. It was evident that immense pains had been taken with her education. He had never met so brilliant a linguist before, French, German, Italian, English-in all she was equally at home. Again, he had met her at a fete without the gates, and had the honour of escorting her home. In a little while he had sent her a letter of which it is needless to describe the contents.

That letter was placed in her guardian's hands, and the result was an interview and a betrothal.

Had our hero been equal to the situation, had he had a proper amount of backbone, had he not been trained to lead an emotional life, had he attained to the true dignity of manhood, he either would have never thought of love of one in every way so much superior, or he would have returned to England at once to fight the battle of life for himself and to fit him for her. Alas! he was weak and intoxicated with love, hardly master of himself. He fell into bad society with men richer than himself, where he learned to drink and live recklessly. Away from her, loving her with the intensest and wildest pa.s.sion, he was utterly miserable. He returned to London, and got a little work to do in the way of reviewing.

In London he was worse off than in Hamburg. His mode of life lent itself easily to the wildest excesses. Had he brought back the lady with him as his wife it would have been otherwise. His was a nature that could not stand alone.

Some of his wealthy friends had married, and at their evening soirees he met men and women-authors, artists, statesmen, men of progress, men and women whose names the world yet gratefully remembers; and then away he would rush off to the lodgings of other friends-dissipated medical students as they were in those far-off days, types of the Bob Sawyer cla.s.s, and with gin-and-water would pa.s.s the night, unless, as was too frequently the case, they plunged into the debaucheries of London by night, when respectability had gone to bed.

Lower and lower did Wentworth fall, and then came the end. The lady discovered how romantic had been her dream, and the dismissed lover staggered under the blow. It is hard to realise what a moral wreck that pitiable wretch had become-how with no real excuse for his drink and dissipation, now almost a necessity of his life, all hope had vanished from his horizon, all faith in G.o.d or man.

For a time he led, as many do, a dual life-decent by day, the reverse by night. London is full of such men now. Fathers and mothers living far away in the quiet country home have no idea what London is by night, or was, for I write of a wild scene of dissipation which no longer exists.

A young man in business is sheltered more or less from the lowest abysses of London life. A young man in a decent home is also guarded to a certain extent. It is the stranger within the gates who, as a rule, falls the more easily to the allurements of vice. He is alone; he needs society. It is not good for man to be alone. If a man cannot have good society, the chances are he will have bad.

The Church at one time made no effort to bring back such lost ones. They drew a hard and fast line. They only admitted the hypocrite or the saint. Wentworth belonged to neither cla.s.s. In reality he had little altered. He left religious society because he could not with an honest conscience conform to its ideas, or speak its language, or adopt its conventionalisms. At one time he believed in it because he had been brought up in it. He had been taught phrases, and he used them without ever thinking of their meaning, and when the meaning did not come he went on using them, believing it would come. 'Preach faith till you have it,'

said an old divine to a young brother, 'and then you will preach it because you have it.' In Wentworth's case the remedy did not answer. He preached because he thought it his duty. He did not preach because he felt it dishonesty to use terms of doubtful meaning utilized in the pulpit in one sense, understood in the pew in another. He had not found light in Little Bethel or Cave Adullam. Was it to be found elsewhere, in the gaiety and dissipation of the world? Well, that was what he wanted to find out for himself. Like most of us, Wentworth was too impatient, and could not wait for the happy surrounding which comes to all true men soon or late. Religious people and he had parted. It seemed to him as if he could do no good, and as if the attempt to do so were harm. He had aimed high and fallen low. To save himself from starvation he did a little literary work, but that was a poor staff on which to lean. He had, as most of us have, daily wants, and, to meet them, required daily cash.

Turning one night into a tavern, he found two or three seedy-looking men manufacturing what they called 'flimsy' for one of the dailies. They took pity on him, and taught him how to do the same. For a time he was their a.s.sistant, and they gave him a share of the pay; but evil communications corrupt good manners, and, to drown all thought, he did as they did: sat up late in public-houses-these latter places kept open nearly all night then-and the excitement of the new life came to him as a pleasurable relief from the darkness which had cast a gloom on the morning of his days.

It became in time a habit with him to spend his nights in the music-halls, such as the Cider Cellars and Evans's, which now have long ceased to exist, where he could forget what he once was, and did not think of what he once hoped to be. At such places all cla.s.ses met in boon companions.h.i.+p-the lord and the lout, the drunken clergyman, the greenhorn from the country, the man of business, or county magistrate, or attorney up in town for a day or two and anxious to see life, the wild sawbones, who was supposed by his anxious parents far away to be walking the hospitals and fitting himself for a useful career, reporters, students, barristers, reckless men of all kinds, over whom tailors and landlords alike grieved. Then there were haunts still more infamous, frequented by women as reckless and abandoned as the men. Some had seen better days; some had loved, and been betrayed and abandoned; some had never known virtue in any shape; all on their way down to be trodden underfoot.

'I was gay myself once,' says many a man of the world, as he hears of the excesses of dissipation. Alas! so much the worse for him. It is true all experience makes a man, in one sense, wiser, if he be a wise man.

Yet it is a solemn truth that no tears, no penitence, no prayers, no exertions of an after-life, can restore to the sensualist or the profligate the bloom, the freshness and purity of early youth. None of us can blot out the past. The joyous aspect of innocence and grace can never be recalled, though, for all who seek it, there is a Divine mercy, lasting as eternity, broad as heaven itself.

At one time the idea of being in such company would have been shocking to Wentworth. There are thousands who, however, thus do fall away. But they do so little by little. No one suddenly becomes base, said the Latin moralist, and he is right. A real friend or two might have saved Wentworth many a bitter hour. But at that time the thing was impracticable. The line of demarcation between the Church and the world was too strictly drawn. In the parable of the Great Teacher, the tares and the wheat grew side by side. In its superior wisdom, the Church undertook to pull up and get rid of the tares, but in doing so a good deal of mischief was done. There was no halting between two opinions.

You were either converted or not. A man was either the child of G.o.d or of the devil. The Church held up an impossible and an unlovely Christianity, into the belief of which men and women were terrified.. To produce that effect there was no end of excitement, and then, when the excitement was over, in too many cases came the inevitable relapse. One result of this was that the victim had to look elsewhere for the excitement which had become part and parcel of his being-to the flowing bowl, to what is called jolly companions.h.i.+p, to the siren voice of worldly pleasure-and the novice falls too easily a prey. Abelard is a more common character than Simeon Stylites. The songs of Circe are pleasant to listen to, and there are roses and raptures for the sinner as well as the saint, and the roses and raptures are now-not in a world to come. The world has a great fascination for a lad brought up in a pious home, to whom it has been represented as a waste howling wilderness, peopled with devils fearful to gaze on. When he steps into it, and finds how unfairly it has been drawn to him by the Church, the chance is that he runs to the other extreme. We have hardly yet emanc.i.p.ated ourselves from the morbid and monkish theology of the Romish Church. There come to the writer sad recollections of a dismal theology to which he was expected to give his a.s.sent. Never did men then talk of man being made in the image of his Maker-of his being vicegerent of the earth, only a little lower than the angels, covered with glory and honour. All was devilish man could say or do. In vain was education, or science, or art.

The cleverer, the more useful, the more decent you were, the more mischievous, the further from G.o.d.

Such was the doctrine preached from a thousand pulpits, at any rate, not many years since. And thus it was that the churches were chiefly filled with ignorant women and old men, or with young people-who died early of consumption-who accepted everything they heard in the pulpit, who knew nothing of the world they denounced, to whom the language of pa.s.sion and temptation was unknown. It is easy to be religious when all that is irreligious has worked itself out of the man-to lead a dull, decent, formal life, when the capacity for excess is gone, or the spendthrift has been turned into a miser; when old age has taken from woman her power to tempt, and robbed the wine-cup of its fascination; when all a man wants is an easy-chair by a good fire. When we cry with Tennyson:

'Ruined trunks on withered forks, Empty scarecrows, I and you.'

But it is not everyone who cares for such companions.h.i.+p.

'Where are my dead forefathers?' asked the pagan Frisian of Bishop Wolfran, as he stood with one of his royal leg's in the baptismal font.

'In h.e.l.l with all the other unbelievers,' was the reply.

'Mighty well!' exclaimed Radbrod, removing his leg. 'Then I will rather feast with my ancestors in the halls of Woden, than dwell with your little starveling band of Christians in heaven.'

To return to Wentworth. He was disappointed, not only as regards the ministry, but as regards love, and that is a yet more awful thing.

Plotinus taught that G.o.d made women beautiful that by means of them men might be drawn to love a beauty that is divine. To one capable of strong affection no blow can be more terrible than that of a disappointed love.

It is vain to doubt on the subject. To all human appearances Wentworth was lost, but G.o.d never leaves a man to fall away for ever. 'A gracious hand,' writes the pious Wilberforce, 'leads us in ways we know not, not only with, but against our plans and inclinations.' Happily, this was so in Wentworth's case. There came to him strength to reform, to conquer himself, to rise out of his dead self to something higher and better, partly from the memory of a pious home, partly by the natural working of his soul, partly by the needs of daily life, partly and chiefly by contact with an actress, who reproached him with his idleness and want of energy and aimlessness. Both were Bohemians, but the woman supported herself and her widowed mother. Both had loved and lost, both had found the ways of transgressors hard, that pleasure is not happiness, that there is no way to escape from G.o.d's universal law, that wrongdoing, in thought or word or deed, is never without its inseparable penalty, and that is, the worm that dieth not, the fire that is not quenched. You may forget much, but you can never forget, if you live till the age of Methuselah, what you have done inconsistent with the native n.o.bility of man; if you have brought dishonour on your name, betrayed the right, trifled with a woman's heart, brought the gray hairs of father or mother to the grave with sorrow. The memory of such acts will continue, and sting and torture as long as life and though and being last. For such a one there are no waters of Lethe, cry for them as he will. A man cannot hide himself from himself. He may deceive the world; he may lead a life of pleasure; but he cannot deceive himself, however he may try to do so.

Alone in the stillness of the night, in the quiet of the sick-room, in the awful presence of death, conscience will speak, and he cannot stifle its voice. 'Be sure your sin will find you out' is the teaching of all daily life. To be happy even in this world, as old Franklin found out, you must be virtuous. It is a false creed, that which makes us believe that man is better without G.o.d than with Him-better as a vicious than a virtuous man-better as a mild Agnostic or a gay infidel than a decent, sober Christian.

The home training in evangelical circles fifty years ago had many serious defects. It was conducted too much with reference to the future world rather than the present one. Had Wentworth been taught the beauty of work-that life was a battlefield in which the victory was to the strong-that man was here to do the best he could for himself, to enjoy the world which the good G.o.d had made beautiful-that he was to aim high, to cherish n.o.ble expectations, to do manly deeds, to be true and honest and courageous, how different would have been his life! Only the emotional part of him had been developed, and he fell an easy prey when temptation came to him and the voice of pa.s.sion thundered in his ear and he fell. Why should he not, as he grew tired of sinning and repenting, he asked himself, ignore the past and find peace where peace could never be found? He would eat of the grapes of Sodom and the cl.u.s.ters of Gomorrah. He would sit in the seat of the scorner. There, at any rate, conscience would cease to sting. It was the old story over again.

_Facilis descensus Averni_.

Wentworth was beginning to find this out. He had eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as all must do-though some more than others-and he had found it fairer to the eye than pleasant to the palate. He was getting sick of worldly men and worldly things. There is a cant of the world as well as of the Church, and he had found it out.

The cloud pa.s.sed away, and then came to him a clearer spiritual insight than he had ever possessed before. He had lost the childish faith of his early home, and there came in its stead the grander and fuller one of a man who had put away childish things, who had fought his fears and gathered strength, who had fought his fears and gathered strength, who had found peace and safety, not in the pleasant places, gay with flowers and musical with the song of birds, where we never dream of danger, but in the storm and tempest of the raging sea. Old ideas, modified by hard experience, a.s.serted themselves; old inspirations were revived; old hopes and purposes were brought to life. He would be a preacher-but from the press, rather than from the more cramped and circ.u.mscribed pulpit.

Temporal things also went better with him. Some of his writings had been republished, and had brought him fame and fortune. In the accomplished actress of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, known as Miss Howard, he had met a sympathetic friend. It was she who had originally raised him from the Slough of Despond, and had recalled him to his better self.

It is told of an Indian Prince who in prosperity was too much elevated and in adversity too much depressed, that he gave notice that on his forthcoming birthday the most acceptable present that any of his courtiers could make him would be a sentence short enough to be engraved on a ring, and suggesting a remedy for the grievance of which he complained. Many phrases were accordingly proposed, but not one was deemed satisfactory, till his daughter came forward and offered an emerald on which were engraved two Arabic words, the literal translation of which was, 'This, too, will pa.s.s.' Warren Hastings, who told the story, adds how the sentence cheered him when on his trial in Westminster Hall. It was thus Wentworth was upheld, and 'This, too, will pa.s.s' was the thought that urged him on.

CHAPTER IX.

THE OLD, OLD STORY.

Once upon a time there was a sad hubbub in the Independent Chapel at Sloville. At the monthly tea-meeting of the teachers the prettiest of the female teachers was missing, much to the grief of the young men, and to the relief of some plain but pious young women, who had been rather in the shade since she had come amongst them.

'Where is Rose Wilc.o.x?' was the universal query.