The Puritans Part 13

"No; but"--

"But what?"

He did not answer at once. He put down his empty cup absently, and then sat staring into the fire as if he were trying there to read the solution of the riddle of existence.

"Come," Helen observed, after waiting for a little, "you have something on your mind. What is it? It will do you good to tell it, even if I'm not clever enough to help you."

"I am sure that you could help me," he began eagerly; and then in a changed voice he added, "if anybody could."

She left her place behind the tea-table and came nearer to him, sitting directly before the fire. The light fell on her convincing face and on her wavy hair. She folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him.

"Well?" she said.

"I do not know how to say it," Philip responded slowly. "I am afraid that you have not much sympathy with my views of life."

"I probably have more than you realize. It's true that I do not believe as you do, but we are both Puritans at heart, so that in the end our theories come to much the same thing."

He looked up with evident inability to follow her meaning.

"I don't understand," he said.

"Very likely I couldn't make myself clear if I tried to explain.

Suppose we give up abstractions and come to the concrete. What is the especial thing in which you think that my theories are different from yours?"

"I do not think," he answered, hesitating more than ever, "that you have much sympathy with asceticism."

"None whatever," she declared uncompromisingly. "n.o.body could have more honor for a sacrifice to principle than I have; but I believe that a sacrifice to an idea is apt to be the outcome of nothing but vanity or policy."

"But what is the difference?"

"Why, an idea is a thing that we believe with the head; don't you know the way in which we think things out while we secretly feel altogether different?"

"I do not think I follow you; but surely self-denial is a sacrifice to principle."

"Not necessarily. I'm afraid I may seem to you profane, Philip, but I must say that it seems to me that asceticism is one of the worst plague-spots which ever afflicted humanity. The root of it is the pagan idea of propitiating a cruel deity by self-torture."

"How can you say so!" he cried. "It is the pure devotion of a man to the good of his higher nature and to the good of the race."

"As far as the race goes, vicarious suffering can't be anything, so far as I see, except an effort to placate an unforgiving deity. As for the devotion of a man to his higher nature, you will never convince me that to go against nature and to indulge in morbidness is improving to anything. But here we are, swamped in a bog of great moral propositions again. We can't agree about these things, and the thing which we really want to say will be lost sight of entirely."

He turned his face away from her again, either troubled by what she had been saying or unable to find words and confidence to go on with the confession of his trouble.

"Is it," Helen inquired, "that you have found that you have yourself a doubt of the value of asceticism?"

"No, not that," he answered, dropping his voice; "but--but I begin to doubt myself."

She leaned forward in her chair. Some power outside of her own will seemed to constrain her.

"Philip," she said, bending over and touching his hand, "has love made you doubt?"

The question evidently took him entirely by surprise. She wondered what impulse had made her speak and how her question would affect him. He flushed to his forehead, and cast at her a look so full of pathetic appeal that she felt the tears come into her eyes. It was the look of a hunted creature which sees no way of escape, yet which has not the fury of resistance, which pleads its own weakness. She knew that Philip could not equivocate and that the secret of his heart lay bare before her. She shrank from what she had done, and a flood of pity and sympathy filled her mind.

He gave her no more than a single look, and then buried his face in his hands.

"I have betrayed my high calling," he exclaimed in a voice of bitter suffering. "I have put my hand to the plough and looked back. I am too weak to be worthy to"--

"Stop," she interposed brusquely, although she was deeply touched. "I can't listen to that sort of talk. It isn't wholesome and it isn't manly. If you have fallen short of your ideal, your experience is that of the rest of the race. I suppose the secret of our making any progress is the power of conceiving things higher than we can reach. It keeps us trying."

"But I devoted myself to"--

"My dear boy," she interrupted him again, "you are like the rest of us.

You told yourself that you would be above all the pa.s.sions and emotions of common humanity, and you are discouraged to find that you're human after all. That's really the whole of it."

"But to allow yourself to love"--

It was not necessary for her to interrupt him now. He stopped of his own will, casting down his eyes and blushing like a school-boy. It seemed to her that it might be better to try raillery.

"To allow yourself, O wise cousin!" she cried. "Men do not allow or disallow themselves to love. It's deeper business than that."

"But I should have had strength not to yield."

"Is there anything discreditable in loving?" she demanded.

"There is for a priest."

"If there were, you are not a priest."

"In intention I am; and that is the same in the sight of Heaven."

She could not repress a gesture of impatience. She felt at once an inward annoyance and a secret admiration. The temper of his mind was exasperatingly like her own in its tenacity of conviction. He would not excuse himself by any shifts, no matter how convincing they might seem to others. The matter must be met fairly and frankly, and she must reach his deepest feelings if she would move him. She reflected how best to deal with him, and with her thoughts mingled the question whether Edith Fenton could return Philip's love. The young man was well made and sufficiently good-looking, although paled by study and austerities. He was of good birth and property, and from a worldly point of view not entirely an unsuitable match for the widow, should she think of a second husband. He was somewhat younger than Mrs.

Fenton; and Helen was not without the thought that this pa.s.sion might be on his part no more than the inevitable result of his coming in contact with a beautiful woman after having been immured in the monastic seclusion of the Clergy House; a pa.s.sion which would pa.s.s with a wider acquaintance with the world. The whole matter perplexed and troubled her, and yet she earnestly longed to help her cousin.

"Dear Philip," she said, "I can't tell you how I enter into your feeling. I don't agree with you, but we are not so far apart in temperament, if we are in doctrine. I'm afraid that you'll think that I'm merely tempting you when I say that it seems to me that your conscientiousness is entirely right, and that your conviction is all wrong."

"Of course I know that you do not hold the same faith that I do."

"But one of your own faith might remind you that your own church upholds the marriage of the clergy."

"Yes," he a.s.sented with apparent unwillingness, "but my conscience does not."

"Do you mean that you find your conscience a better guide than the church? That seems to put you on my ground, after all."

"Oh, no, no! Certainly I do not put myself above the authority of the church."

"The eagerness with which you disclaim any common ground with me isn't polite," she retorted, glad of a chance to speak more lightly and smilingly; "but it's sincere, and that is better."

"I wasn't trying to disclaim thinking as you do; but to insist that I do not set myself above the church."

"Then I repeat that the church sanctions the marriage of the clergy. If you don't agree, I don't see why you do not really belong in the Roman Catholic Church."