The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

by M. E. Braddon

  E-text prepared by Clare Graham & Marc D'Hooghe(https://www.freeliterature.org) from page images generously made availableby Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

  Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/infidelstoryofgr00brad

  THE INFIDEL

  A Story of the Great Revival

  by

  M. E. BRADDON

  Author of "Lady Audley's Secret," "Vixen,""London Pride," etc._

  LondonSimpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Ltd.1900

  CONTENTS.

  CHAPTER I. GRUB-STREET SCRIBBLERS

  CHAPTER II. MISS LESTER, OF THE PATENT THEATRES

  CHAPTER III. AT MRS. MANDALAY'S ROOMS

  CHAPTER IV. A MORNING CALL

  CHAPTER V. A SERIOUS FAMILY

  CHAPTER VI. A WOMAN WHO COULD SAY NO

  CHAPTER VII. PRIDE CONQUERS LOVE

  CHAPTER VIII. THE LOVE THAT FOLLOWS THE DEAD

  CHAPTER IX. THE SANDS RUN DOWN

  CHAPTER X. A DUTY VISIT

  CHAPTER XI. ANTONIA'S INITIATION

  CHAPTER XII. "SO RUN THAT YE MAY OBTAIN"

  CHAPTER XIII. IN ST. JAMES'S SQUARE

  CHAPTER XIV. "ONE THREAD IN LIFE WORTH SPINNING"

  CHAPTER XV. "MY LADY AND MY LOVE"

  CHAPTER XVI. DEATH AND VICTORY

  CHAPTER XVII. SWORD AND BIBLE

  CHAPTER XVIII. "AS A GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED"

  CHAPTER XIX. "CHOOSE OF TWO LOVERS"

  CHAPTER XX. "AND CLEAVE UNTO THE BEST"

  EPILOGUE.

  CHAPTER I.

  GRUB-STREET SCRIBBLERS.

  Father and daughter worked together at the trade of letters in the dayswhen George the Second was king and Grub Street was a reality. Forthem literature was indeed a trade, since William Thornton wrote onlywhat the booksellers wanted, and adjusted the supply to the demand. Nosudden inspirations, no freaks of a vagabond fancy ever distracted himfrom the question of bread and cheese; so many sides of letter-paperto produce so many pounds. He wrote everything. He contributed verseas well as prose to the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and had been thewinner of one of those prizes which the liberal Mr. Cave offered forthe best poem sent to him. Nothing came amiss to his facile pen. Inpolitics he was strong--on either side. He could write for or againstany measure, and had condemned and applauded the same politicians infiery articles above different aliases, anticipating by the vehemenceof his phrases the coming guineas. He wrote history or natural historyfor the instruction of youth, not so well as Goldsmith, but with aglib directness that served. He wrote philosophy for the sick-bed ofold age, and romance to feed the dreams of lovers. He stole from theFrench, the Spaniards, the Italians, and turned Latin epigrams intoEnglish jests. He burnt incense before any altar, and had written muchthat was base and unworthy when the fancy of the town set that way, anda ribald pen was at a premium. He had written for the theatres withfair success, and his manuscript sermons at a crown apiece found aready market.

  Yes, Mr. Thornton wrote sermons--he, the unfrocked priest, theaudacious infidel, who believed in nothing better than this earth uponwhich he and his kindred worms were crawling; nothing to come afterthe tolling bell, no recompense for sorrows here, no reunion with thebeloved dead--only the sexton and the spade, and the forgotten grave.

  It was eighteen years since his young wife had died and left him withan infant daughter--this very Antonia, his stay and comfort now, hisindefatigable helper, his Mercury, tripping with light foot between hislodgings and the booksellers or the newspaper offices, to carry hiscopy, or to sue for a guinea or two in advance for work to be done.

  When his wife died he was curate-in-charge of a remote Lincolnshireparish, not twenty miles from that watery region at the mouth of theHumber, that Epworth which John Wesley's renown had glorified. Here inthis lonely place, after two years of widowhood, a great trouble hadfallen upon him. He always recurred to it with the air of a martyr, andpitied himself profoundly, as one more sinned against than sinning.

  A farmer's daughter, a strapping wench of eighteen, had induced him toelope with her. This Adam ever described Eve as the initiator of hisfall.

  They went to London together, meaning to sail for Jersey in a tradingsmack, which left the docks for that fertile island twice in a month.The damsel was of years of discretion, and the elopement was no felony;but it happened awkwardly for the parson that she carried her father'scash-box with her, containing some two hundred pounds, upon which Mr.Thornton was to start a dairy farm. They were hotly pursued by theinfuriated father, and were arrested in London as they were stepping onboard the Jersey smack, and Thornton was caught with the cash on hisperson.

  He swore he believed it to be the girl's money; and she swore she hadearned it in her father's dairy--that, for saving, 'twas she had savedevery penny of it. This plea lightened the sentence, but did not acquiteither prisoner. The girl was sent to Bridewell for a year, and theparson was sentenced to five years' imprisonment; but by the advocacyof powerful friends, and by the help of a fine manner, an unctuouspiety, and general good conduct, was restored to the world at the endof the second year--a happy escape in an age when the gifted Dr. Dodddied for a single slip of the pen, and when the pettiest petty larcenymeant hanging.

  Having bored himself to death by an assumed sanctimony for two years,Thornton came out of the house of bondage a rank atheist, a scoffer atall things holy, a scorner of all men who called themselves Christians.To him they seemed as contemptible as he had felt himself in hishypocrisy. Did any of them believe? Yes, the imbeciles and hystericalwomen, the ignorant masses who fifty years ago had believed inwitchcraft and the ubiquitous devil as implicitly as they now believedin Justification by Faith and the New Birth. But that men of brains--anintellectual giant like Sam Johnson, for instance--could kneel in dustycity churches Sunday after Sunday and search the Scriptures for thepromise of life immortal! Pah! What could Voltaire, the enlightened,think of such a time-serving hypocrisy, except that the thing paid?

  "It pays, sir," said Thornton, when he and his little knot of friendsdiscussed the great dictionary-maker in a tavern parlour which theycalled "The Portico," and which they fondly hoped to make as famousas the Scribbler's Club, which Swift founded, and where he and Oxfordand Bolingbroke, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot talked grandly of abstractthings. The talk in "The Portico" was ever of persons, and mostlyscandalous, the gangrene of envy devouring the minds of men whose liveshad been failures.

  The wife of Thornton's advocate, who was well off and childless,had taken compassion on the sinner's three-year-old daughter, andhad carried the little Antonia to her cottage at Windsor, where thechild was well cared for by the old housekeeper who had charge of thebarrister's rural retreat. It was a cottage _orne_ in a spacious gardenadjoining Windsor Forest, and to-day, in her twentieth year, Antonialooked back upon that lost paradise with a fond longing. She had oftenurged her father to take her to see the kind friend whose bright youngface she sometimes saw in her dreams, the very colour of whose gownsshe remembered; but he always put her off with an excuse. The advocatehad risen to distinction; he and his wife were fine people now, and Mr.Thornton would not exhibit his shabby gentility in any such company.He had been grateful for so beneficent a service at the time of hiscaptivity, and had expatiated upon his thankfulness on three sides ofletter-paper, blotted with real tears; but his virtues were impulsesrather than qualities of the mind, and he had soon forgotten how muchhe owed the K.C.'s tender-hearted wife. Providence had been good toher, as to the m
other of Samuel, and she had sons and daughters of herown now.

  Antonia knew that her father had been in prison. He was tooself-compassionate to refrain from bewailing past sufferings, and toolazy-brained to originate and sustain any plausible fiction to accountfor those two years in which his child had not seen his face. But hehad been consistently reticent as to the offence which he had expiated,and Antonia supposed it to be of a political nature--some Jacobite plotin which he had got himself entangled.

  From her sixth year to her seventeenth she had been her father'scompanion, at first his charge--and rather an onerous one, as it seemedto the hack-scribbler--a charge to be shared with, and finally shuntedon to the shoulders of, any good-natured landlady who, in her ownparlance, took to the child.

  Thornton was so far considerate of parental duty that, having foundan honest and kindly matron in Rupert Buildings, St. Martin's Lane,he left off shifting his tent, and established himself for life, ashe told her, on her second floor, and confided the little girl almostwholly to her charge. She had one daughter five years older thanAntonia, who was at school all day, leaving the basement of the housesilent and empty of youthful company, and Mrs. Potter welcomed thelovely little face as a sunny presence in her dull parlour. She taughtAntonia--shortened to Tonia--her letters, and taught her to dust thepoor little cups and ornaments of willow-pattern Worcester china, andto keep the hearth trimly swept, and rub the brass fender--taught herall manner of little services which the child loved to perform. Shewas what people called an old-fashioned child; for, having never livedwith other children, she had no loud boisterous ways, and her voicewas never shrill and ear-piercing. All she had learnt or observed hadbeen the ways of grown-up people. From the time she was ten years oldshe was able to be of use to her father. She had gone on errands inthe immediate neighbourhood for Mrs. Potter. Thornton sent her furtherafield to carry copy to a printer, or a letter to a bookseller, withmany instructions as to how to ask her way at every turn, and to becareful in crossing the street. Mrs. Potter shuddered at these journeysto Fleet Street or St. Paul's Churchyard, and it seemed a wonder toher that the child came back alive, but she stood in too much awe ofher lodger's learning and importance to question his conduct; and whenAntonia entered her teens she had all the discretion of a woman, andwas able to take care of her father, and to copy his hurried scrawl inher own neat penmanship, when he had written against time in a kind ofshorthand of his own, with contractions which Antonia soon mastered.The education of his daughter was the one duty that Thornton had nevershirked. Hack-scribbler as he was, he loved books for their own sake,and he loved imparting knowledge to a child whose quick appreciationlightened the task and made it a relaxation. He gave her of his best,thinking that he did her a service in teaching her to despise thebeliefs that so many of her fellow-creatures cherished, ranking theChristian religion with every hideous superstition of the dark ages,as only a little better than the delusions of man-eating savages in anunexplored Africa, or the devil-dancers and fakirs of Hindostan.

  This man was, perhaps, a natural product of that dark age which wentbefore the Great Revival--the age when not to be a Deist and a scofferwas to be out of the fashion. He had been an ordained clergyman of theChurch of England, taking up that trade as he took up the trade ofletters, for bread and cheese. The younger son of a well-born Yorkshiresquire, he had been a profligate and a spendthrift at Oxford, but wasclever enough to get a degree, and to scrape through his ordination.As he had never troubled himself about spiritual questions, and knewno more theology than sufficed to satisfy an indulgent bishop, hehad hardly considered the depth of his hypocrisy when he tenderedhimself as a shepherd of souls. He had a fluent pen, and could writea telling sermon, when it was worth his while; but original eloquencewas wasted upon his bovine flock in Lincolnshire, and he generallyread them any old printed sermon that came to hand among the rubbishheap of his bookshelves. He migrated from one curacy to another, andfrom one farmhouse to another, drinking with the farmers, hunting withthe squires; diversified this dull round with a year or two on theContinent as bear-leader to a wealthy merchant's son and heir; broughthome an Italian wife, and while she lived was tolerably constant andtolerably sober. That brief span of wedded life, with a woman he fondlyloved, made the one stage in his life-journey to which he might havelooked back without self-reproach.

  He was delighted with his daughter's quick intellect and growing lovefor books. She began to help him almost as soon as she could write,and now in her twentieth year father and daughter seemed upon anintellectual level.

  "Nature has been generous to her," he told his chums at "The Portico.""She has her mother's beauty and my brains."

  "Let's hope she'll never have your swallow for gin-punch, Bill," wasthe retort, that being the favourite form of refreshment in "ThePortico" room at the Red Lion.

  "Nay, she inherits sobriety also from her mother, whose diet was astemperate as a wood-nymph's."

  His eyes grew dim as he thought of the wife long dead--the confidinggirl he had carried from her home among the vineyards and gardens ofthe sunny hillside above Bellagio to the dismal Lincolnshire parsonage,between grey marsh and sluggish river. He had brought her to drearinessand penury, and to a climate that killed her. Nothing but gin-punchcould ever drown those sorrowful memories; so 'twas no wonder Thorntontook more than his share of the bowl. His companions were his juniorsfor the most part, and his inferiors in education. He was the Socratesof this vulgar Academy, and his disciples looked up to him.

  The shabby second floor in Rupert Buildings was Antonia's only ideaof home. Her own eerie was on the floor above--a roomy garret, with acasement window in the sloping roof, a window that seemed to commandall London, for she could see Westminster Abbey, and the Houses ofParliament, and across the river to the more rustic-looking streetsand lanes on the southern shore. She loved her garret for the sake ofthat window, which had a broad stone sill where she kept her garden ofstocks and pansies, pinks and cowslips, maintained with the help of anoccasional shilling from her father.

  The sitting-room was furnished with things that had once been good,for Mrs. Potter was one of those many hermits in the great city whohad seen better days. She was above the common order of landladies,and kept her house as clean as a house in Rupert Buildings could bekept. Tidiness was out of the question in any room inhabited by WilliamThornton, whose books and papers accumulated upon every availabletable or ledge, and were never to be moved on pain of his severedispleasure. It was only by much coaxing that his daughter could securethe privilege of a writing-table to herself. He declared that thedestruction of a single printer's proof might be his ruin, or even theruin of the newspaper for which it was intended.

  Such as her home was, Antonia was content with it. Such as her lifewas, she bore it patiently, unsustained by any hope of a happier lifein a world to come--unsustained by the conviction that by her industryand cheerfulness she was pleasing God.

  She knew that there were homes in which life looked brighter than itcould in Rupert Buildings. She walked with her father in the eveningstreets sometimes, when his empty pockets and his score at the RedLion forbade the pleasures of "The Portico." She knew the aspect ofhouses in Pall Mall and St. James's Square, in Arlington Street andPiccadilly; heard the sound of fiddles and French horns through openwindows, light music and light laughter; caught glimpses of innersplendours through hall doors; saw coaches and chairs setting down gaycompany, a street crowded with link-boys and running footmen. She knewthat in this London, within a quarter of a mile of her garret, therewas a life to which she must ever remain a stranger--a life of luxuryand pleasure, led by the high-born and the wealthy.

  Sometimes when her father was in a sentimental mood he would tellher of his grandfather's magnificence at the family seat near York;would paint the glories of a country house with an acre and a half ofroof, the stacks of silver plate, and a perpetual flow of visitors,gargantuan hunt breakfasts, hunters and coach-horses without number. Heexceeded the limits of actual fact, per
haps, in these reminiscences.The magnificence had all vanished away, the land was sold, the platewas melted, not one of the immemorial oaks was left to show where thepark had been; but Tonia was never tired of hearing of those prosperousyears, and was glad to think she came of people who were magnates inthe land.