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Read Ebook: The New Abelard: A Romance Volume 3 (of 3) by Buchanan Robert Williams
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THE NEW ABELARD
A Romance
London: Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly
THE NEW ABELARD.
My dear Niece,-The receipt of your letter, dated 'Lucerne,' but bearing the post-mark of Geneva, has at last relieved my mind from the weight of anxiety which was oppressing it. Thank Heaven you are safe and well, and bear your suffering with Christian resignation. In a little time, I trust, you will have left this dark passage of your experience quite behind you, and return to us looking and feeling like your old self. George, who now, as always, shares my affectionate solicitude for you, joins me in expressing that wish. The poor boy is still sadly troubled at the remembrance of your misconception, and I sometimes think that his health is affected. Do, if you can, try to send him a line or a message, assuring him that your unhappy misunderstanding is over. Believe me, his one thought in life is to secure your good esteem.
There is no news--none, that is to say, of any importance. We have kept our promise to you, and your secret is still quite safe in our custody. The man to whom you owe all this misery is still here, and still, I am informed, prostituting the pulpit to his vicious heresies. If report is to be believed, his utterances have of late been more extraordinary than ever, and he is rapidly losing influence over his own congregation. Sometimes I can scarcely conquer my indignation, knowing as I do that with one word I could effectually silence his blasphemy, and drive him beyond the pale of society. But in crushing him I should disgrace you, and bring contempt upon our name; and these considerations, as well as my pledge to keep silence, make any kind of public action impossible. I must therefore wait patiently till the inevitable course of events, accelerated by an indignant Providence, destroys the destroyer of your peace.
In the mean time, my dear Alma, let me express my concern and regret that you should be wandering from place to place without a protector. I know your strength of mind, of course; but you are young and handsome, and the world is censorious. Only say the word, and although business of a rather important nature occupies me in London, I will put it aside at any cost, and join you. In the absence of my dear brother, I am your natural guardian. While legally your own mistress, you are morally under my care, and I would make any sacrifice to be with you, especially at this critical moment of your life.
I send this letter to the address you have given me at Lucerne. I hope it will reach you soon and safely, and that you will, on seeing it, fall in with my suggestion that I should come to you without delay.
With warmest love and sympathy, in which your cousin joins, believe me as ever,--Your affectionate uncle,
George Craik.
My dear Uncle,--I have just received your letter. Thank you for attending to my request. With regard to your suggestion that you should come to me, I know it is meant in all kindness, but as I told you before leaving London, I prefer at present to be quite alone, with the exception of my maid Hortense. I will let you know of my movements from time to time,--Your affectionate niece,
Alma Craik.
Your letter, together with one from my uncle, found me at Lucerne, and brought me at once grief and comfort: grief, that you still reproach yourself over what was inevitable; comfort, that you are, as you assure me, still endeavouring to pursue your religious work. Pray, pray, do not write to me in such a strain again. You have neither wrecked my life nor broken my heart, as you blame yourself for doing; I learned long ago from our Divine Example that the world is one of sorrow, and I am realising the truth in my own experience, that is all.
You ask me how and where I have spent my days, and whether I have at present any fixed destination. I have been wandering, so to speak, among the gravestones of the Catholic Church, visiting not only the great shrines and cathedrals, but lingering in every obscure roadside chapel, and halting at every Calvary, in southern and western France. Thence I have come on to Switzerland, where religion grows drearier, and life grows dismaller, in the shadow of the mountains. In a few days I shall follow in your own footsteps, and go on to Italy--to Rome.
Write to me when you feel impelled to write. You shall be apprised of my whereabouts from time to time.--Yours now as ever,
Alma.
P.S.--When I sat down to write the above, I thought I had so much to say to you; and I have said nothing! Something numbs expression, though my thoughts seem full to overflowing. I am like one who longs to speak, yet fears to utter a syllable, lest her voice should be clothed with tears and sobs. God help me! All the world is changed, and I can hardly realise it, yet!
Dearest Alma,--You tell me in your letter that you have said nothing of the thoughts that struggle within you for utterance; alas! your words are only too eloquent, less in what they say than in what they leave unsaid. If I required any reminder of the mischief I have wrought, of the beautiful dream that I have destroyed, it would come to me in the pathetic reticence of the letter I have just received. Would to God that you had never known me! Would to God that, having known me, you would have despised me as I deserved! I was unworthy even to touch the hem of your garment. I am like a wretch who has profaned the altar of a saint. Your patience and devotion are an eternal rebuke. I could bear your bitter blame; I cannot bear your forgiveness.
I am here as you left me; a guilty, conscience-stricken creature struggling in a world of nightmares. Nothing now seems substantial, permanent, or true. Every time that I stand up before my congregation I am like a shadow addressing shadows; thought and language both fail me, and I know not what platitudes flow from my lips; but when I am left alone again, I awaken as from a dream to the horrible reality of my guilt and my despair.
I have thought it all over again and again, trying to discover some course by which I might bring succour to myself and peace to her I love; and whichever way I look, I see but one path of escape, the rayless descent of death. For, so long as I live, I darken your sunshine. My very existence is a reminder to you of what I am, of what I might have been.
But there, I will not pain you with my penitence, and I will hush my self-reproaches in deference to your desire. Though the staff you placed in my hand has become a reed, and though I seem to have no longer any foothold on the solid ground of life, I will try to struggle on.
Ambrose Bradley.
Scoff not at Koine, or if thou scoff beware
Her vengeance waiting in the heaven and air;
Her love is blessing, and her hate, despair.
Yet see! how low the hoary mother lies,
Prone on her face beneath the lonely skies--
On her head ashes, dust upon her eyes.
Men smile and pass, but many pitying stand,
And some stoop down to kiss her withered hand,
Whose sceptre is a reed, whose crown is sand.
Think'st thou no pulse beats in that bounteous breast
Which once sent throbs of rapture east and west?
Nay, but she liveth, mighty tho' opprest.
Her arm could reach as low as hell, as high
As the white mountains and the starry sky;
She filled the empty heavens with her cry.
Wait but a space, and watch--her trance of pain
Shall dry away--her tears shall cease as rain--
Queen of the nations, she shall smile again!
The Ladder of St. Augustine.
Bradley's letter was fowarded from Lucerne after some little delay, and reached Miss Craik at Brieg, just as she was preparing to proceed by private conveyance to Domo d'Ossola. She had taken the carriage and pair for herself and her maid, a young Frenchwoman; and as the vehicle rounded its zigzag course towards the Klenenhorn she perused the epistle line by line, until she had learned almost every word by heart.
Then, with the letter lying in her lap, she gazed sadly, almost vacantly, around her on the gloomy forests and distant hills, the precipices spanned by aerial bridges, the quaint villages clinging like birds'-nests here and there, the dark vistas of mountain side gashed by torrents frozen by distance to dazzling white.
Dreary beyond measure, though the skies were blue and the air full of golden sunlight, seemed the wonderful scene:
We make the world we look on, and create
The summer or the winter with our seeing!
And cold and wintry indeed was all that Alma beheld that summer day.
Not even the glorious panorama unfolded beneath her gaze on passing the Second Refuge had any charms to please her saddened sight. Leaving the lovely valley of the Rhone, sparkling in sunlight, encircled by the snow-crowned Alps, with the Jungfrau towering paramount, crowned with glittering icy splendour and resting against a heaven of deep insufferable blue, she passed through avenues of larch and fir, over dizzy bridges, past the lovely glacier of the Kallwasser, till she reached the high ascent of the Fifth Refuge.
Here the coarse spirit of the age arose before her, in the shape of a party of English and American tourists crowding the diligence and descending noisily for refreshment.
A little later she passed the barrier toll, and came in sight of the Cross of 'Vantage. She arrested the carriage, and descended for a few minutes, standing as it were suspended in mid air, in full view of glacier upon glacier, closed in by the mighty chain of the Bernese Alps.
Never had she felt so utterly solitary. The beautiful world, the empty sky, swam before her in all the loveliness of desolation, and turning her face towards Aletsch, she wept bitterly.
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