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CHAPTER 28.

NOEL wrote to Maynard a full account of his interview with the President, dismissed the greater part of his escort, and sent to the officers who had brought introductions from Mr. Tresham

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an invitation to visit him in the capital. He then set to work exploring the neighbourhood and its antiquities, his mind meanwhile being much pre-occupied by meditations on the position in which he stood toward his friends at Dolóres.

He had thought much over Sophia Bevan’s letter, and he confessed to himself, though by no means willingly, that however disagreeable might be the sting of the goad of her keen insight and unflinching conscientiousness, there was yet a compensating value in the possession of so wise and faithful a monitor. If her warnings failed to have full weight with him, it was owing to what he considered the undue regard paid by her to conventional requirements. Probably the most essential difference between the guiding principles of their natures, consisted in the difference of value they respectively attached to the dictates of Society and those of individual feeling.

Never until Noel knew and loved Margaret had he realised the full extent of the surrender of the affections demanded by social ordinances. ‘It is to Society,’ he remembered Sophia saying to him, ‘that we owe all our pleasures; and we should not grudge some sacrifice in return.’ But now it seemed to him that it was to Society he owed all his misery, inasmuch as it was the creator of arbitrary barriers to the fulfilment of human affection.

Looking at the position from what might be Margaret’s point of view, had she been other than she was, he rebelled against the law that makes marriage an abjuration of love and all its joys, save only on the success of a doubtful experiment, and one of which it virtually forbids the repetition. With all other objects of difficult quest, is it not man’s highest privilege and praise to try and try again until he succeed? And in this the most important of all quests, the quest for the highest happiness to be found in the fulfilment of his nature, and to succeed in which man would gladly sacrifice all other ambitions, can it be right that all should depend en the success of the very first attempt?

‘Oh, my poor love!’ exclaimed Noel to himself in anguish, ‘hard as was your lot before, I –– I have made it worse. I have raised you from the gloom of the night wherein you dwelt, only to show you the glorious day for a moment, and then to let you fall back into deeper darkness. The angel of love has roused you from your sleep only to whisper the charm in your ear, and has passed on, leaving you bewildered and hopeless.

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Ah, me: if God indeed be love, why hath he made despair. It cannot be so. Despair is of human manufacture, the work of a world that knows not God, and in its ignorant Atheism sets up the cruel deity of Convenience, and sacrifices to it its dearest and its best. Oh, Social Exigency, thou art a worse demon, and exactest crueller human sacrifices than ever were offered to the old gods of Mexico.’

He remembered that Juarez had made a like comparison between the old religious system of the country and that by which it had been supplanted; and he pursued the train of thought until he fancied he found the root of all the social evils under which humanity ever groaned in the institution of priesthoods. It was they who had imposed restrictions grievous to be borne, and riveted them by sanctions which had no basis in the nature of things. It might thus well be in the pursuance of the loftiest spirit of real religion, that Juarez had adopted the career which had gained for him from the priests his appellation of the Archdestroyer.

It was characteristic in Edmund Noel thus to adapt that which occupied him in the external world to his own inner mood. At once engaged in politics, absorbed in his passion, and endeavouring to explore the traces of man’s ancient history scattered over the plains of Anahuac, he unconsciously mingled all in his imagination. Little as there was in his own reflections to please him, there was even less in that by ‘which he was surrounded. He was not in the humour to enjoy the society of the capital. Everything connected with man there struck him as unutterably frivolous and repulsive; save only the momentary gleam of enthusiasm that had warmed the cold eye of Juarez as he spoke of the possibilities of the regeneration of his race; saving, also, the pleasant little Court presided over by the fair wife and daughters of the President. For Noel, the existing city of Mexico was a ruin sinking into a cesspool, morally as well as physically. Man had neglected nature, and nature was taking her revenge. The ancient indigenous civilisation, under which alone the country had ever thriven, had been supplanted by the Spanish, and to no good purpose. It had done little for man that the Catholic cathedral had been built upon the site of the Teocalli, the great pyramidal temple of the Aztec war-god: or that the banqueting-hall of the man-eating priests of Huitxilopotchli had been superseded by the man-torturing, soul-devouring Inquisition. A religion of open barbarity

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had only yielded to one of secret cruelty. The conquering race had sunk to the level of the conquered, and sought to sustain its unjust sway by foreign aid. And now an aboriginal son of the soil had arisen to complete the destruction of the oppressors of his brethren, and had commenced by destroying in his turn the very structures which had been used to convert the superstitious fears of his countrymen into instruments for their own subjugation.

Certainly the priests had good reason to hate Juarez. The revolution of 1824, while following the United States in its general political system, had placed the Church on the same footing that it occupies in France. The ecclesiastical revenues had been resumed by the State, and the maintenance of religious worship was made an annual charge in the Budget. There remained, however, an enormous mortmain property; and of this the clergy were deprived by a law brought in by Juarez in 1859.

There was a volcanic abruptness, strongly savouring of the country, in the manner in which Juarez set himself to complete his mission of ‘disendowment and disestablishment,’ that was anything but conciliatory to the clerigos. Not twelve months before Noel’s present visit, it had been his practice to make the round of the churches, escorted by troops, and superintend in person the work of demolition. The pulling down of a church promoted the double economy of saving money by rendering an appropriation for its maintenance unnecessary, and of making money by the sale of its materials and site. It, clearly, was Juarez’s view that it was the duty of the State to transfer wealth which was used for the detriment of the State, to those who might turn it to account in the interests of humanity and civilisation.

Noel, smarting under the restrictions imposed by social law upon the exercise of his affections, as he supposed himself to be, thus found himself regarding with satisfaction the destruction of the artificial, and the symptoms of a return to the original basis of nature.

‘How long will man’s teachers, affecting the name of religious, prefer warring against nature to working with it? And when will the deeper and holier human feelings be accepted as the best indicators and arbiters of man’s duty?’

Thus chafing and moralising in turn, Noel found himself at length asking of himself what would be his course if he really

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possessed the freedom for which he was pining. Would he incur the rebuke of another Nathan by depriving his friend of his one ewe-lamb, when he had all the world to choose from?

Here, again, there rose to his lips a reproach against the ordinance which tends to produce in people the notion of absolute and perpetual ownership in each other; and he found himself condemning the irrevocability of the marriage-bond as being essentially immoral, inasmuch as it is a rebellion against nature, and a treason to the indefeasible right of the affections. ‘Were people brought up and habituated to regard such connection as dependent on the corresponding feelings, there would be no plea for the amazement and agony which men now feel on discovering that their homes are no longer to abode of the love that originally filled them. The habit of regarding marriage as irrevocable, produces negligence concerning the maintenance of the affections at the right pitch. The bird safely caged, no bond of mutuality is needed to ensure its detention.’

Soon Noel passed out of this phase of reflection into a more practical one. ‘Whatever be the cause, or the propriety,’ he said to himself, ‘the fact is indubitable that James is bound up in his idolatry; and to rob him of his idol would be to destroy him soul and body. All that I have been thinking might have some application in the case of a villain, – an enemy, – or, perhaps, a stranger. But here is my friend, esteemed and honoured of me, and more than esteemed and honoured of her. She would die rather than cause him a grief, and I would die rather than cause her an humiliation. Any conduct whereby I might indicate the possession of a lower nature than that for which she gives me credit, would cause her humiliation, for it would show her that her love was unworthily placed; so should I cause her the bitterest mortification a noble nature can feel. To such an one as Margaret the discovery that se loves unworthily would be for more painful than any failure to win love. Not only up to my own best, but up to her best, must I act if I would retain her regard, and spare her this pain. Thus does human feeling rise in support of conformity to the letter of social convention, even when most in conflict with its spirit.

‘Yet, again, supposing I do act so as to incur the forfeiture and withdrawal of her respect and affection, may she not then learn to bestow all upon him; and at last, by means of my voluntary degradation, come to achieve a happiness now deemed unattainable? Could I, moreover, bear to witness their happiness,

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thus purchased at the cost of their regard for me, I all the time knowing that I only deserve that regard the more? Is a loftier self-sacrifice possible to man than through such motive to court the appearance of evil while shunning the reality. And would it not be evil to do so?

‘Here, again, putting aside all thought of self, the higher morality seems to declare against any such abdication of one’s true place in the scale of being. I fear that even such self-sacrifice as this is forbidden me by the very terms of the higher law to which I am appealing; for he who, being esteemed good, allows or makes himself to appear as bad, thereby lessens men’s faith in goodness, and lowers human nature from its just rank. And no amount of individual gain in happiness can balance the general loss in faith.

‘The last solver of problems is Death. My death is welcome would it but, make her happy, – and him. In no case could I live to see their happiness. Thank heaven, I am not as far removed from ordinary humanity as to approach such degree of self-abnegation as that would involve. But my death would not make them happy. They were even more miserable before I came upon the scene. Margaret longed for death, until she learnt what love meant. Her death would indeed free her from the hated bondage, but it would leave both him and me wretched. Alas, it is but too clear. The sole death whereby any might gain is his; and from that I rejoice that I have been the means of once saving him. None know this but myself. They think it was only capture and ransom that I rescued him from; but it is certain to me that, bound and dragged as he was, life must in a few moments have been extinguished.

‘But I did not know it was he whom I was saving. True: but of this I am quite certain, that had I known it, I should have been still more eager in the rescue.

‘How will it end? how will it end? Poor Margaret has already disproved her favourite doctrine, that

“All life needs for life is possible to will.”

And I, – I have no will for that which will leave her hapless. Thought is vain, and action flies me. It seems as if I can only wait, and watch, and live the best: and if the slow sweet hours bring me all things good, I will bless them; or if the slow sad hours bring me all things evil, – well, I will try to bless them also; or, at least, not to curse them. His was a happy philosophy who said that whenever he found himself in a dilemma,

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he looked around to see how he could make the issue most conducive to his credit, and thus was enabled to count it a joy when he fell into divers temptations.’

Thus probing himself, Noel came to distrust the accuracy of his earlier conclusions, which had led him to ascribe his own sufferings to the exigencies of a superfluous social law. For in seeking and finding the sole basis of his philosophy in his own sensations, he discovered that he owned no law of action or limitation out of himself. His own nature alone provided him with his prompter, his standard, and his guide. His own individuality asserted itself as a law, transcending that of mere social convenience. He aimed at a civilisation which would supersede organisation.

So, passing out of the phase in which conventions were hateful to him, if only for the reason that they were conventions, he came to admit to himself that there might be a degree of truth in Sophia Bevan’s favourite dictum, that conventional law is only the result of an attempt to formulate the popular view of higher law: – even of that higher law to which alone he accorded his respect.

Calling to mind the quaint saying by which some one has expressed a doubt of the separate and personal existence of the Evil Spirit, – ‘that he had never heard of any wickedness which, man was not capable of committing of himself,’ – Noel did not see why a similar remark should not be made in respect of man’s capacity for goodness. If, thus controlled, his every thought could be for the supremest good of those with whom he had to do, might he not fairly regard Nature as the sole divine organism, and Love as the disposition alone necessary to conduct it towards the highest harmony; and so, rightly repudiate with indignation the notion that man requires for the guidance of life a rule that is external to, independent of, or opposed to, Nature? ‘If it were merely an external law enacted without reference to my nature,’ he said to himself, ‘I should be justified in repudiating its claim to authority. But how if it be the law of my own nature that is governing me? I cannot rebel against that.’

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