Delphi collected works o.., p.578
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 578
Richard Hawkins hid his face in his hands, not sobbing, but mute and horror-struck. Then he was an ape himself, and if he did as he ought to do on his own frequent showing, he should go straight upstairs, garden hatchet in hand, and dash out the brains of Mary and the children. Must he stultify himself before the faces of the Christian Young Men? Must he go back on his own oft-repeated philosophy?
Slowly he rose, after a long pause for thought, and lighted a huge fire in the study grate. His mind was made up now. He knew just what to do. Duty shone clear as a lamp before him. It was destroying the Evidence, to be sure. Well, never mind for that! There was no God. There was no Immortal Soul. But Heaven forbid the world should ever find it out through him. The words of Holy Scripture rang still in his ears — the words of that divine, that delusive Book on which he had pinned his life-long faith in vain— “It were better for that man that a millstone were fastened round his neck and he were cast into the sea.” Let the universe roll on down its godless course; let fortuitous atoms clash and clang for ever in unholy strife; but he at least, Richard Hawkins, would be guiltless of disclosing the loathsome secret. Not on his head would the blood of humanity rest. He would save society still from the demon of Atheism.
There was no God: but what of that? what of that? The world, the world could never get along without Him. We must believe in Him still, even though He be not. Why, he himself, Richard Hawkins, one solitary man, was left wholly rudderless before the blast by that accidental discovery. And how could the whole race survive the disillusion? Should he let loose rapine and uncleanness and massacre upon the earth, to go about like raging lions, seeking whom they might devour, by telling the hideous truth to babes and sucklings? Perish the thought! Far sooner than that, he would go down quick into the pit himself, and let the conscious earth close over him in silence.
One by one, he thrust the dry bones of the only specimen of Pliocene man into the fire, remorselessly. He stirred them with the poker, like the devils in some mediæval Italian hell. He watched them crumble. He gloated over their destruction. Those atheistical fossils, doubly damned, had destroyed his peace of mind, and would have destroyed the world’s, but for his own active and prompt intervention. In that burning fiery furnace, heated seven times hot, they mouldered away to ashes. As the last of them disappeared, he drew a deep breath. Religion was saved! The Bible might still be accounted true. Infidelity couldn’t stalk triumphant through the land. Our wives and daughters might yet live pure and good. He had deserved well of the State. He had rescued humanity.
It was all a vast Lie, a triumph of priest-craft. But they would believe it still. They wouldn’t stand out in the dark and cold as he did. Dark! why, the universe rolled black as pitch before him! Cold! why, not a ray of sunshine from heaven came to warm up anywhere its chilly expanse. He shuddered to realize it. There was no God; and the world was a vile cock-pit of jarring elements.
Well, well; he had done his duty to his kind, and after that he could go. “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.” Ah me, the irony of it! His eyes had beheld, not salvation, but the downfall of all hope, all faith, all charity. Profoundly religious to the core, as he understood religion, Richard Hawkins couldn’t consent to live any longer in a godless and polluted world. He had found it all out. Henceforth it was no fit home for him. Born an heir of the Kingdom, he couldn’t endure to abjure his birthright and dwell now for a brief space in the tents of iniquity.
But he had one more duty to perform before he went hence. The cobbler! Job Whittingham! For duty was still the pole-star of that wrecked and sinking bark. Like an honest man that he was, and a sincere Christian, Richard Hawkins must allow when he was fairly beaten. As soon as day broke, he rose once more from his chair, let himself silently out, and walked along the cold grey streets to the cobbler’s doorstep.
There, he knocked and waited. The cobbler, half-dressed, let him in, and yawned. Richard Hawkins’s face was as white as a sheet. “Good Lord, sir, what’s the matter?” the cobbler asked, half terrified.
“Matter enough,” Richard Hawkins answered in a hollow voice, sinking heavily into a seat. His coat was still damp, and his eyes were haggard. “Whittingham, I argued against you the other day at my lecture, that man couldn’t possibly be descended from an ape-like ancestor. Well, since then, I’ve had positive proof that’s not the truth. Man is descended after all from a monkey — a hideous, grinning, leering, horrible monkey. I know it. I’ve seen it. With my own very eyes I’ve found it all out.... You were right.... I was wrong.... As a Christian man, I’ve come to-day to acknowledge it.”
The cobbler stared hard at him. Was Dr. ‘Awkins mad? “Wy, wot’s made yer change yer mind?” he asked at last, much wondering.
“No matter,” Richard Hawkins answered, with lips like death. “I’ve had reason to change. That’s enough for us two. Whittingham, this morning I stand before you, an atheist like yourself. But not a contented one. I can’t live so, for long. It’s impossible, unhuman. I know now there’s no God. To-night in the long watches I’ve found God out. But I can’t do without Him. For in Him, as the apostle truly says, we live and move and have our being.”
The cobbler stared still harder. What strange mixture of faith and unbelief was this? His working-man mind couldn’t fathom it at all. The despair of a wrecked system was too deep for his plummet to sound. “I don’t see what you’re a-drivin’ at,” he blurted out bluntly.
Richard Hawkins drew his hand across his brow like one stunned. “I dare say not, my friend,” he answered, in the voice of a man who speaks in a dream. “I dare say not. But I mean it for all that. I mean it, every word of it. I couldn’t bear to die without coming to acknowledge my change of view to you. I feel I wronged you. And I ought to have recanted as openly as I spoke. I ought to have made you a public restitution. If I wrong any man in ought, I would wish, like Zacchæus, to repay him twofold. But I can’t, I can’t. For the sake of a groping world, of all those good innocent Christian souls who still believe, as I did, I haven’t the heart to do it. I haven’t the heart to disillusion them. And I ask you yet one thing, my friend. For God’s sake — though there is no God — but, there! one says it instinctively — for God’s sake, speak not a word of this episode to anybody. Whittingham, you don’t know what it costs me to make such a confession — to deny my God: to proclaim myself an atheist. Lock it up in your own soul! Say no syllable to any one.”
The cobbler, screwing up his small face, and peering eagerly out at him, took in by degrees the fact that his visitor’s heart was stirred to the profoundest depths, — and had pity upon him. “I will say not a word, sir,” he answered, after a moment’s hesitation.
Richard Hawkins grasped his hand, rose in solemn silence, and staggered out once more. At the door he paused again. “No God! No God!” he cried, nodding his head twice or thrice and half turning a second time to the astonished cobbler. Then he went out into the street, his hat in his hand, and walked hurriedly homeward. After all, why debate? All was well at home. Mary was provided for: the children wouldn’t want. Of what use was he now in the world — that godless world? He couldn’t bear the weight of such a secret for years and years. Any day he might blab. And ten drops of Prussic acid would end all so easily!
In his own study, he knelt down and prayed earnestly, fervently, to the God that never was, that never had been. You can’t conquer in a day the habits of a lifetime. Then he unlocked his medicine chest, and took from it a phial.
The jury brought it in “temporary insanity,” of course. People said, much learning had made him mad, like Paul. He had worked too hard at once at science and his profession.
THE GREAT RUBY ROBBERY.
A DETECTIVE STORY.
I.
Persis Remanet was an American heiress. As she justly remarked, this was a commonplace profession for a young woman nowadays; for almost everybody of late years has been an American and an heiress. A poor Californian, indeed, would be a charming novelty in London society. But London society, so far, has had to go without one.
Persis Remanet was on her way back from the Wilcoxes’ ball. She was stopping, of course, with Sir Everard and Lady Maclure at their house at Hampstead. I say “of course” advisedly; because if you or I go to see New York, we have to put up at our own expense (five dollars a day, without wine or extras) at the Windsor or the Fifth Avenue; but when the pretty American comes to London (and every American girl is ex officio pretty, in Europe at least; I suppose they keep their ugly ones at home for domestic consumption) she is invariably the guest either of a dowager duchess or of a Royal Academician, like Sir Everard, of the first distinction. Yankees visit Europe, in fact, to see, among other things, our art and our old nobility; and by dint of native persistence they get into places that you and I could never succeed in penetrating, unless we devoted all the energies of a long and blameless life to securing an invitation.
Persis hadn’t been to the Wilcoxes with Lady Maclure, however. The Maclures were too really great to know such people as the Wilcoxes, who were something tremendous in the City, but didn’t buy pictures; and Academicians, you know, don’t care to cultivate City people — unless they’re customers. (“Patrons,” the Academicians more usually call them; but I prefer the simple business word myself, as being a deal less patronizing.) So Persis had accepted an invitation from Mrs. Duncan Harrison, the wife of the well-known member for the Hackness Division of Elmetshire, to take a seat in her carriage to and from the Wilcoxes. Mrs. Harrison knew the habits and manners of American heiresses too well to offer to chaperon Persis; and indeed, Persis, as a free-born American citizen, was quite as well able to take care of herself, the wide world over, as any three ordinary married Englishwomen.
Now, Mrs. Harrison had a brother, an Irish baronet, Sir Justin O’Byrne, late of the Eighth Hussars, who had been with them to the Wilcoxes, and who accompanied them home to Hampstead on the back seat of the carriage. Sir Justin was one of those charming, ineffective, elusive Irishmen whom everybody likes and everybody disapproves of. He had been everywhere, and done everything — except to earn an honest livelihood. The total absence of rents during the sixties and seventies had never prevented his father, old Sir Terence O’Byrne, who sat so long for Connemara in the unreformed Parliament, from sending his son Justin in state to Eton, and afterwards to a fashionable college at Oxford. “He gave me the education of a gentleman,” Sir Justin was wont regretfully to observe; “but he omitted to give me also the income to keep it up with.”
Nevertheless, society felt O’Byrne was the sort of man who must be kept afloat somehow; and it kept him afloat accordingly in those mysterious ways that only society understands, and that you and I, who are not society, could never get to the bottom of if we tried for a century. Sir Justin himself had essayed Parliament, too, where he sat for a while behind the great Parnell without for a moment forfeiting society’s regard even in those earlier days when it was held as a prime article of faith by the world that no gentleman could possibly call himself a Home-Ruler. ’Twas only one of O’Byrne’s wild Irish tricks, society said, complacently, with that singular indulgence it always extends to special favourites, and which is, in fact, the correlative of that unsparing cruelty it shows in turn to those who happen to offend against its unwritten precepts. If Sir Justin had blown up a Czar or two in a fit of political exuberance, society would only have regarded the escapade as “one of O’Byrne’s eccentricities.” He had also held a commission for a while in a cavalry regiment, which he left, it was understood, owing to a difference of opinion about a lady with the colonel; and he was now a gentleman-at-large on London society, supposed by those who know more about every one than one knows about one’s self, to be on the look-out for a nice girl with a little money.
Sir Justin had paid Persis a great deal of attention that particular evening; in point of fact, he had paid her a great deal of attention from the very first, whenever he met her; and on the way home from the dance he had kept his eyes fixed on Persis’s face to an extent that was almost embarrassing. The pretty Californian leaned back in her place in the carriage and surveyed him languidly. She was looking her level best that night, in her pale-pink dress, with the famous Remanet rubies in a cascade of red light setting off that snowy neck of hers. ’Twas a neck for a painter. Sir Justin let his eyes fall regretfully more than once on the glittering rubies. He liked and admired Persis, oh! quite immensely. Your society man who has been through seven or eight London seasons could hardly be expected to go quite so far as falling in love with any woman; his habit is rather to look about him critically among all the nice girls trotted out by their mammas for his lordly inspection, and to reflect with a faint smile that this, that, or the other one might perhaps really suit him — if it were not for — and there comes in the inevitable But of all human commendation. Still, Sir Justin admitted with a sigh to himself that he liked Persis ever so much; she was so fresh and original! and she talked so cleverly! As for Persis, she would have given her eyes (like every other American girl) to be made “my lady”; and she had seen no man yet, with that auxiliary title in his gift, whom she liked half so well as this delightful wild Irishman.
At the Maclures’ door the carriage stopped. Sir Justin jumped out and gave his hand to Persis. You know the house well, of course; Sir Everard Maclure’s; it’s one of those large new artistic mansions, in red brick and old oak, on the top of the hill; and it stands a little way back from the road, discreetly retired, with a big wooden porch, very convenient for leave-taking. Sir Justin ran up the steps with Persis to ring the bell for her; he had too much of the irrepressible Irish blood in his veins to leave that pleasant task to his sister’s footman. But he didn’t ring it at once; at the risk of keeping Mrs. Harrison waiting outside for nothing, he stopped and talked a minute or so with the pretty American. “You looked charming to-night, Miss Remanet,” he said, as she threw back her light opera wrap for a moment in the porch and displayed a single flash of that snowy neck with the famous rubies; “those stones become you so.”
Persis looked at him and smiled. “You think so?” she said, a little tremulous, for even your American heiress, after all, is a woman. “Well, I’m glad you do. But it’s good-bye to-night, Sir Austin, for I go next week to Paris.”
Even in the gloom of the porch, just lighted by an artistic red and blue lantern in wrought iron, she could see a shade of disappointment pass quickly over his handsome face as he answered, with a little gulp, “No! you don’t mean that? Oh, Miss Remanet, I’m so sorry!” Then he paused and drew back: “And yet ... after all,” he continued, “perhaps —— ,” and there he checked himself.
Persis looked up at him hastily. “Yet, after all, what?” she asked, with evident interest.
The young man drew an almost inaudible sigh. “Yet, after all — nothing,” he answered, evasively.
“That might do for an Englishwoman,” Persis put in, with American frankness, “but it won’t do for me. You must tell me what you mean by it.” For she reflected sagely that the happiness of two lives might depend upon those two minutes; and how foolish to throw away the chance of a man you really like (with a my-ladyship to boot), all for the sake of a pure convention!
Sir Justin leaned against the woodwork of that retiring porch. She was a beautiful girl. He had hot Irish blood. ... Well, yes; just for once — he would say the plain truth to her.
“Miss Remanet,” he began, leaning forward, and bringing his face close to hers, “Miss Remanet — Persis — shall I tell you the reason why? Because I like you so much. I almost think I love you!”
Persis felt the blood quiver in her tingling cheeks. How handsome he was — and a baronet!
“And yet you’re not altogether sorry,” she said, reproachfully, “that I’m going to Paris!”
“No, not altogether sorry,” he answered, sticking to it; “and I’ll tell you why, too, Miss Remanet. I like you very much, and I think you like me. For a week or two, I’ve been saying to myself, ‘I really believe I must ask her to marry me.’ The temptation’s been so strong I could hardly resist it.”
“And why do you want to resist it?” Persis asked, all tremulous.
Sir Justin hesitated a second; then with a perfectly natural and instinctive movement (though only a gentleman would have ventured to make it) he lifted his hand and just touched with the tips of his fingers the ruby pendants on her necklet. “This is why,” he answered simply, and with manly frankness. “Persis, you’re so rich! I never dare ask you.”
“Perhaps you don’t know what my answer would be,” Persis murmured very low, just to preserve her own dignity.
“Oh yes, I think I do,” the young man replied, gazing deeply into her dark eyes. “It isn’t that; if it were only that, I wouldn’t so much mind it. But I think you’d take me.” There was moisture in her eye. He went on more boldly: “I know you’d take me, Persis, and that’s why I don’t ask you. “You’re a great deal too rich, and these make it impossible.”
“Sir Justin,” Persis answered, removing his hand gently, but with the moisture growing thicker, for she really liked him, “it’s most unkind of you to say so; either you oughtn’t to have told me at all, or else — if you did — —” She stopped short. Womanly shame overcame her.
