We Two Part 15

He was nice looking, but somewhat freckled, and though he was tall and strongly built, he somehow betrayed that he had led a sedentary life and looked, in fact, as if he wanted a training in gymnastics. For the rest he was shrewd, business-like, good-natured, and at present very conceited. He had been Erica's friend and playfellow as long as she could remember; they were brother and sister in all but the name, for they had lived within a stone's throw of each other all their lives, and now shared the same house.

"I never heard you come in," she said, smiling a little. "You must have been very quiet."

"I don't believe you'd hear a salute fired in the next room if you were reading, you little book worm! But look here; I've got a parody on the chieftain that'll make you cry with laughing. You remember the smashed windows at the meeting at Rilchester last week?"

Erica remembered well enough, she had felt sore and angry about it, and the comments in the newspapers had not been consolatory. She had learned to dread even the comic papers; but there was nothing spiteful in the one which Tom produced that evening. It was headed:

Scotch song (Tune--"Twas within a mile of Edinboro'town")

"Twas within a hall of Rilchester town, In the bleak spring-time of the year, Luke Raeburn gave a lecture on the soul of man, And found that it cost him dear.

Windows all were smashed that day, They said: 'The atheist can pay.'

But Scottish Raeburn, frowning cried: 'Na, na, it winna do, I canna, canna, winna, winna, munna pay for you.'"

The parody ran on through the three verses of the song, the conclusion was really witty, and there was no sting in it. Erica laughed over it as she had not laughed for weeks. Tom, who had been trying unsuccessfully to cheer her ever since her return, was quite relieved.

"I believe the sixpence a day style suits you," he said. "But, I say, isn't anything coming up? I'm as hungry as a hunter."

Their elders being away for a few days, Tom and Erica were amusing themselves by trying to live on the rather strange diet of the man who published his plan for living at the smallest possible cost. They were already beginning to be rather weary of porridge, pea soup and lentils.

This evening pea soup was in the ascendant, and Erica, tired with a long afternoon's work, felt as if she could almost as soon have eaten Thames mud.

"Dear me," she said, "it never struck me, this is our Lenten penance!

Now, wouldn't any one looking in fancy we were poor Romanists without an indulgence?"

"Certainly without any self-indulgence," said Tom, who never lost an opportunity of making a bad pun.

"It would be a great indulgence to stop eating," said Erica, sighing over the soup yet to be swallowed.

"Do you think it is more inspiriting to fast in order to save one's soul than it is to pay the chieftain's debts? I wish I could honestly say, like the little French girl in her confession: 'J'ai trop mang.'"

Tom dearly loved that story, he was exceeding fond of getting choice little anecdotes from various religious newspapers, especially those which dealt in much abuse of the Church of Rome, and he retailed them CON AMORE. Erica listened to several, and laughed a good deal over them.

"I wonder, though, they don't see how they play into our hands by putting in these things," she said after Tom had given her a description of some ludicrous attack made by a ritualist on an evangelical. "I should have thought they would have tried to agree whenever they could, instead of which they seem almost as spiteful to each other as they are to us."

"They'd know better if they'd more than a grain of sense between them,"

said Tom, sweepingly, "but they haven't; and as they're always playing battledoor and shuttlec.o.c.k with that, it isn't much good to either.

Of course they play into our hands. I believe the spiteful ultra-high paper, and the spiteful ultra-low paper do more to promote atheism than the 'Idol-Breaker' itself."

"How dreadful it must be for men like Mr. Osmond, who see all round, and yet can't stop what they must think the mischief. Mr. Osmond has been here this afternoon."

"Ah, now, he's a stunning fellow, if you like," said Tom. "He's not one of the pig-headed narrow-minded set. How he comes to be a parson I can't make out."

"Well, you see, from their point of view it is the best thing to be; I mean he gets plenty of scope for work. I fancy he feels as much obliged to speak and teach as father does."

"Pity he's not on our side," said Tom; "they say he's a first-rate speaker. But I'm afraid he is perfectly crazy on that point; he'll never come over."

"I don't think we've a right to put the whole of his religiousness down to a mania," said Erica. "Besides, he is not the sort of man to be even a little mad, there's nothing the least fanatical about him."

"Call it delusion if you like it better. What's in a name? The thing remains the same. A man can't believe what is utterly against reason without becoming, as far as that particular belief is concerned, unreasonable, beyond the pale of reason, therefore deluded, therefore mad."

Erica looked perplexed; she did not think Tom's logic altogether good, but she could not correct it. There was, however, a want of generosity about the a.s.sertion which instantly appealed to her fine sense of honor.

"I can't argue it out," she said at last, "but it doesn't seem to me fair to put down what we can't understand in other people to madness; it never seemed to me quite fair for Festus to accuse Paul of madness when he really had made a splendid defense, and it doesn't seem fair that you should accuse Mr. Osmond of being mad."

"Only on that one point," said Tom. "Just a little touched, you know.

How else can you account for a man like that believing what he professes to believe?"

"I don't know," said Erica, relapsing into perplexed silence.

"Besides," continued Tom, "you cry out because I say they must be just a little touched, but they accuse us of something far worse than madness, they accuse us of absolute wickedness."

"Not all of them," said Erica.

"The greater part," said Tom. "How often do you think the chieftain meets with really fair treatment from the antagonists?"

Erica had nothing to say to this. The harshness and intolerance which her father had constantly to encounter was the great grief of her life, the perpetual source of indignation, her strongest argument against Christianity.

"Have you much to do tonight?" she asked, not anxious to stir up afresh the revolt against the world's injustice which the merest touch would set working within her. "I was thinking that, if there was time to spare, we might go to see the professor; he has promised to show me some experiments."

"Electricity?" Tom p.r.i.c.ked up his ears. "Not half a bad idea. If you'll help me we can polish off the letters in an hour or so, and be free by eight o'clock."

They set to work, and between them disposed of the correspondence.

It was a great relief to Erica after her long day's work to be out in the cool evening air. The night was fine but very windy, indeed the sudden gusts at the street corners made her glad to take Tom's arm.

Once, as they rather slackened their speed, half baffled by the storm, a sentence from a pa.s.ser-by fell on their ears. The speaker looked like a countryman.

"Give me a good gas-burner with pipes and a meter that a honest man can understand! Now this 'ere elective light I say it's not canny; I've no belief in things o' that kind, it won't never--"

The rest of the speech died away in the distance. Tom and Erica laughed, but the incident set Erica thinking. Here was a man who would not believe what he could not understand, who wanted "pipes and a meter,"

and for want of comprehensible outward signs pooh-poohed the great new discovery.

"Tom," she said slowly, and with the manner of one who makes a very unpleasant suggestion, reluctantly putting forward an unwelcome thought, "suppose if, after all, we are like that man, and reject a grand discovery because we don't know and are too ignorant to understand! Tom, just suppose if, after all, Christianity should be true and we in the wrong!"

"Just suppose if, after all, the earth should be a flat plain with the sun moving round it!" replied Tom scornfully.

They were walking down the Strand; he did not speak for some minutes, in fact he was looking at the people who pa.s.sed by them. For the first time in his life a great contrast struck him. Disreputable vulgarity, wickedness, and vice stared him in the face, then involuntarily he turned to Erica and looked down at her scrutinizingly as he had never looked before. She was evidently wrapped in thought but it was not the intellect in her face which he thought of just then, though it was ever noticeable, nor was it the actual beauty of feature which struck him, it was rather an undefined consciousness that here was a purity which was adorable. From that moment he became no longer a boy, but a man with a high standard of womanhood. Instantly he thought with regret of his scornful little speech--it was contemptible.

"I beg your pardon," he said, abruptly, as if she had been following his whole train of thought. "Of course one is bound to study the question fairly, but we have done that, and all that remains for us is to live as usefully as we can and as creditably to the cause as may be."

They had turned down one of the dingy little streets leading to the river, and now stood outside Professor Gosse's door. Erica did not reply. It was true she had heard arguments for and against Christianity all her life, but had she ever studied it with strict impartiality? Had she not always been strongly biased in favor of secularism? Had not Mr.

Osmond gone unpleasantly near the mark when he warned her against being prejudiced by the wrong-doing of a few modern Christians against Christianity itself! She was coming now for special instruction in science from one who was best calculated to teach; she would not have dreamed of asking instruction from one who was a disbeliever in science.

Would the same apply in matters of religious belief? Was she bound actually to ask instruction from Charles Osmond, for instance, even though she believed that he taught error--harmful error? Yet who was to be the judge of what was error, except by perfectly fair consideration of both sides of the case. Had she been fair? What was perfect fairness?

But people must go on living, and must speak and act even though their minds are in a chaos of doubts and questionings. They had reached Professor Gosse's study, or as he himself called it, his workshop, and Erica turned with relief to the verifiable results of scientific inquiry.

CHAPTER XI. The Wheels Run Down

Great grace, as saith Sir Thomas More, To him must needs be given, Who heareth heresy, and leaves The heretic to Heaven. Whittier.