Hypatia - Charles Kingsley (best books to read for students txt) 📗

is neither truth nor reason under the sun. What better is there for a man, than to follow the example of his people, and to turn usurer, and money-getter, and cajoler of fools in his turn, even as his father was before him?”’

Synesius remained a while in deep thought, and at last-

‘And yet you came to me?’

‘I did, because you have loved and married; because you have stood out manfully against this strange modern insanity, and refused to give up, when you were made a bishop, the wife whom God had given you. You, I thought, could solve the riddle for me, if any man could.’

‘Alas, friend! I have begun to distrust, of late, my power of solving riddles. After all, why should they be solved? What matters one more mystery in a world of mysteries? “If thou marry, thou hast not sinned,” are St. Paul’s own words; and let them be enough for us. Do not ask me to argue with you, but to help you. Instead of puzzling me with deep questions, and tempting me to set up my private judgment, as I have done too often already, against the opinion of the Church, tell me your story, and test my sympathy rather than my intellect. I shall feel with you and work for you, doubt not, even though I am unable to explain to myself why I do it.’

‘Then you cannot solve my riddle?’

‘Let me help you,’ said Synesius with a sweet smile, ‘to solve it for yourself. You need not try to deceive me. You have a love, an undefiled, who is but one. When you possess her, you will be able to judge better whether your interpretation of the Song is the true one; and if you still think that it is, Synesius, at least, will have no quarrel against you. He has always claimed for himself the right of philosophising in private, and he will allow the same liberty to you’ whether the mob do or not.’

‘Then you agree with me? Of course you do!’

‘Is it fair to ask me whether I accept a novel interpretation, which I have only heard five minutes ago, delivered in a somewhat hasty and rhetorical form?’

‘You are shirking the question,’ said Raphael peevishly.

‘And what if I am? Tell me, point-blank, most self-tormenting of men, can I help you in practice, even though I choose to leave you to yourself in speculation?’

‘Well, then, if you will have my story, take it, and judge for yourself of Christian common sense.’

And hurriedly, as if ashamed of his own confession, and yet compelled, in spite of himself, to unbosom it, he told Synesius all, from his first meeting with Victoria to his escape from her at Berenice.

The good bishop, to Aben-Ezra’s surprise, seemed to treat the whole matter as infinitely amusing. He chuckled, smote his hand on his thigh, and nodded approval at every pause—perhaps to give the speaker courage—perhaps because he really thought that Raphael’s prospects were considerably less desperate than he fancied….

‘If you laugh at me, Synesius, I am silent. It is quite enough to endure the humiliation of telling you that I am—confound it!—like any boy of sixteen.’

‘Laugh at you?—with you, you mean. A convent? Pooh, pooh! The old Prefect has enough sense, I will warrant him, not to refuse a good match for his child.’

‘You forget that I have not the honour of being a Christian.’

‘Then we’ll make you one. You won’t let me convert you, I know; you always used to gibe and jeer at my philosophy. But Augustine comes to-morrow.

‘Augustine?’

‘He does indeed; and we must be off by daybreak, with all the armed men we can muster, to meet and escort him, and to hunt, of course, going and coming; for we have had no food this fortnight, but what our own dogs and bows have furnished us. He shall take you in hand, and cure you of all your Judaism in a week; and then just leave the rest to me; I will manage it somehow or other. It is sure to come right. No; do not be bashful. It will be real amusement to a poor wretch who can find nothing else to do—Heigho! And as for lying under an obligation to me, why we can square that by your lending me three or four thousand gold pieces—Heaven knows I want them!—on the certainty of never seeing them again.’

Raphael could not help laughing in his turn.

‘Synesius is himself still, I see, and not unworthy of his ancestor Hercules; and though he shrinks from cleansing the Augean stable of my soul, paws like the war-horse in the valley at the hope of undertaking any lesser labours in my behalf. But, my dear generous bishop, this matter is more serious, and I, the subject of it, have become more serious also, than you fancy. Consider: by the uncorrupt honour of your Spartan forefathers, Agis, Brasidas, and the rest of them, don’t you think that you are, in your hasty kindness, tempting me to behave in a way which they would have called somewhat rascally?’

‘How then, my dear man! You have a very honourable and praiseworthy desire; and I am willing to help you to compass it.’

‘Do you think that I have not cast about before now for more than one method of compassing it for myself? My good man, I have been tempted a dozen times already to turn Christian: but there has risen up in me the strangest fancy about conscience and honour …. I never was scrupulous before, Heaven knows—I am not over-scrupulous now—except about her. I cannot dissemble before her. I dare not look in her face when I had a lie in my right hand …. She looks through one-into one-like a clear-eyed awful goddess …. I never was ashamed in my life till my eyes met hers….’

‘But if you really became a Christian?’

‘I cannot. I should suspect my own motives. Here is another of these absurd soul-anatomising scruples which have risen up in me. I should suspect that I had changed my creed because I wished to change it—that if I was not deceiving her I was deceiving myself. If I had not loved her it might have been different: but now—just because I do love her, I will not, I dare not, listen to Augustine’s arguments, or my own thoughts on the matter.’

‘Most wayward of men!’ cried Synesius, half peevishly; ‘you seem to take some perverse pleasure in throwing yourself into the waves again, the instant you have climbed a rock of refuge!’

‘Pleasure? Is there any pleasure in feeling oneself at death-grips with the devil? I bad given up believing in him for many a year …. And behold, the moment that I awaken to anything noble and right, I find the old serpent alive and strong at my throat! No wonder that I suspect him, you, myself—I, who have been tempted, every hour in the last week, temptations to become a devil. Ay,’ he went on, raising his voice, as all the fire of his intense Eastern nature flashed from his black eyes, ‘to be a devil! From my childhood till now never have I known what it was to desire and not to possess. It is not often that I have had to trouble any poor Naboth for his vineyard: but when I have taken a fancy to it, Naboth has always found it wiser to give way. And now …. Do you fancy that I have not had a dozen hellish plots flashing across me in the last week? Look here! This is the mortgage of her father’s whole estate. I bought it—whether by the instigation of Satan or of God—of a banker in Berenice, the very day I left them; and now they, and every straw which they possess, are in my power. I can ruin them— sell them as slaves—betray them to death as rebels—and last, but not least, cannot I hire a dozen worthy men to carry her off, and cut the Gordian knot most simply and summarily? And yet I dare not. I must be pure to approach the pure; and righteous, to kiss the feet of the righteous. Whence came this new conscience to me I know not, but come it has; and I dare no more do a base thing toward her, than I dare toward a God, if there be one. This very mortgage—I hate it, curse it, now that I possess it—the tempting devil!’

‘Burn it,’ said Synesius quietly.

‘Perhaps I may. At least, used it never shall be. Compel her? I am too proud, or too honourable, or something or other, even to solicit her. She must come to me; tell me with her own lips that she loves me, that she will take me, and make me worthy of her. She must have mercy on me, of her own free will, or—let her pine and die in that accursed prison; and then a scratch with the trusty old dagger for her father, and another for myself, will save him from any more superstitions, and me from any more philosophic doubts, for a few aeons of ages, till we start again in new lives—he, I suppose, as a jackass, and I as a baboon. What matter? but unless I possess her by fair means, God do so to me, and more also, if I attempt base ones!’

‘God be with you, my son, in the noble warfare!’ said Synesius, his eyes filling with kindly tears.

‘It is no noble warfare at all. It is a base coward fear, in one who never before feared man or devil, and is now fallen low enough to be afraid of a helpless girl!’

‘Not so,’ cried Synesius, in his turn; ‘it is a noble and a holy fear. You fear her goodness. Could you see her goodness, much less fear it, were there not a Divine Light within you which showed you what, and how awful, goodness was? Tell me no more, Raphael Aben- Ezra, that you do not fear God; for he who fears Virtue, fears Him whose likeness Virtue is. Go on—go on …. Be brave, and His strength will be made manifest in your weakness.’

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It was late that night before Synesius compelled his guest to retire, after having warned him not to disturb himself if he heard the alarm-bell ring, as the house was well garrisoned, and having set the water-clock by which he and his servants measured their respective watches. And then the good bishop, having disposed his sentinels, took his station on the top of his tower, close by the warning-bell; and as he looked out over the broad lands of his forefathers, and prayed that their desolation might come to an end at last, he did not forget to pray for the desolation of the guest who slept below, a happier and more healthy slumber than he had known for many a week. For before Raphael lay down that night, he had torn to shreds Majoricus’s mortgage, and felt a lighter and a better man as he saw the cunning temptation consuming scrap by scrap in the lamp-flame. And then, wearied out with fatigue of body and mind, he forgot Synesius, Victoria, and the rest, and seemed to himself to wander all night among the vine-clad glens of Lebanon, amid the gardens of lilies, and the beds of spices; while