The New Paul and Virginia Part 4

'Oh,' cried. Virginia, hysterically, 'I don't care two straws for truth.

What on earth is the good of it?'

'It is its own end,' said the Professor. 'It is its own exceeding great reward. I must be off at once in search of it. Good-bye for the present.

Seek truth on your own account, and be unspeakably happy also, because you know that I am seeking it.'

The Professor remained away for three days. For the first two of them Virginia was inconsolable. She wandered about mournfully with her head dejected. She very often sighed; she very often uttered the name of Paul. At last she surprised herself by exclaiming aloud to the irresponsive solitude, 'Oh, Paul, until you were gone, I never knew how pa.s.sionately I loved you.' No sooner were these words out of her mouth than she stood still, horror-stricken. 'Alas!' she cried, 'and have I really come to this? I am in a state of deadly sin, and there is no priest here to confess to! Alone, alone I must conquer my forbidden love as I may. But, ah me, what a guilty thing I am!'

As she uttered these words, her eyes fell on a tin box of the Professor's, marked 'Private,' which he always kept carefully locked, and which had before now excited her curiosity. Suddenly she became conscious of a new impulse. 'I will pursue truth!' she exclaimed. 'I will break that box open, and I will see what is inside it. Ah!' she added, as with the aid of the poker she at last wrenched off the padlock. 'Paul may be right, after all. There is more interest in the pursuit of truth than I thought there was.'

The box was full of papers, letters, and diaries, the greater part of which were marked 'Strictly private.' Seeing this, Virginia's appet.i.te for truth became keener than ever. She instantly began her researches.

The more she read, the more eager she became; and the more private appeared the nature of the doc.u.ments, the more insatiable did her thirst for truth grow. To her extreme surprise, she gathered that the Professor had begun life as a clergyman. There were several photographs of him in his surplice; and a number of devout prayers, apparently composed by himself for his own personal use. This discovery was the result of her labours.

'Certainly,' she said, 'it is one of extreme significance. If Paul was a priest once, he must be a priest now. Orders are indelible--at least in the Church of England I know they are.'

CHAPTER XV.

Paul came back, to Virginia's extreme relief, without the missing link.

But he was still radiant in spite of his failure; for he had discovered, he said, a place where the creature had apparently slept, and he had collected in a card-paper box a large number of its parasites.

'I am glad,' said Virginia, 'that you have not found the missing link: though as to thinking that we really came from monkeys, of course that is too absurd. Now if you could have brought me a nice monkey, I should really have liked that. The Bishop has promised that I shall have a darling one, if I ever reach him--ah me!--if----Paul,' continued Virginia, in a very solemn voice, after a long pause, 'do you know that whilst you have been away I have been pursuing truth? I rather liked it; and I found it very, very significant.'

'Oh, joy!' exclaimed the Professor. 'Oh, unspeakable radiance! Oh, holy, oh essentially dignified Humanity! it will very soon be perfect! Tell me, Virginia, what truths have you been discovering?'

'One truth about you, Paul,' said Virginia, very gravely, 'and one truth about me. I burn--oh, I burn to tell them to you!'

The Professor was enraptured to hear that one half of Humanity had been thus studying human nature; and he began asking Virginia if her discoveries belonged to the domain of historical or biological science.

Meanwhile Virginia had flung herself on her knees before him, and was exclaiming, in piteous accents--

'By my fault, by my own fault, by my very grievous fault, holy father, I confess to you----'

'Is the woman mad?' cried the Professor, starting up from his seat.

'You are a priest, Paul,' said Virginia; 'that is one of the things I have discovered. I am in a state of deadly sin; that is the other: and I must and will confess to you. Once a priest, always a priest. You cannot get rid of your orders, and you must and shall hear me.'

'I was once in orders, it is true,' said Paul, reluctantly; 'but how did you find out my miserable secret?'

'In my zeal for truth,' said Virginia, 'I broke open your tin box; I read all your letters; I looked at your early photographs; I saw all your beautiful prayers.'

'You broke open my box!' cried the Professor. 'You read my letters and my private papers! Oh, horrible! oh, immoral! What shall we do if one half of Humanity has no feeling of honour?'

'Oh!' said Virginia, 'it was all for the love of truth--of solemn and holy truth. I sacrificed every other feeling for that. But I have not told you my truth yet; and I am determined you shall hear it, or I must still remain in my sins. Paul, I am a married woman; and I discover, in spite of that, that I have fallen in love with you. My husband, it is true, is far away; and whatever we do, he could never possibly be the wiser. But I am in a state of mortal sin, nevertheless; and I would give anything in the world if you would only kiss me.'

'Woman!' exclaimed Paul, aghast with fright and horror, 'do you dare to abuse truth, by turning it to such base purposes?'

'Oh, you are so clever,' Virginia went on, 'and when the ends of your moustaches are waxed, you look positively handsome; and I love you so deeply and so tenderly, that I shall certainly go to h.e.l.l if you do not give me absolution.'

At this the Professor jumped up, and, staring very hard at Virginia, asked her if, after all that he had said on the s.h.i.+p, she really believed in such exploded fallacies as h.e.l.l, G.o.d, and priestcraft.

She reminded him that he had preached there without a surplice, and that she had therefore not thought it right to listen to a word he said.

'Ah!' cried the Professor, with a sigh of intense relief, 'I see it all now. How can Humanity ever be unspeakably holy so long as one half of it grovels in dreams of an unspeakably holy G.o.d? As Mr. Frederic Harrison truly says, a want of faith in "the essential dignity of man is one of the surest marks of the enervating influence of this dream of a celestial glory."' The Professor accordingly re-delivered to Virginia the entire substance of his lectures in the s.h.i.+p. He fully impressed on her that all the intellect of the world was on the side of Humanity; and that G.o.d's existence could be disproved with a box of chemicals. He was agreeably surprised at finding her not at all unwilling to be convinced, and extremely unexacting in her demands for proof. In a few days she had not a remnant of superst.i.tion left. 'At last!' exclaimed the Professor; 'it has come at last. Unspeakable happiness will surely begin now.'

CHAPTER XVI.

No one now could possibly be more emanc.i.p.ated than Virginia. She t.i.ttered all day long and whenever the Professor asked her why, she always told him she was thinking of 'an intelligent First Cause,' a conception which she said 'was really quite killing.' But when her first burst of intellectual excitement was over, she became more serious. 'All thought, Paul,' she said, 'is valuable mainly because it leads to action. Come, my love, my dove, my beauty, and let us kiss each other all daylong. Let us enjoy the charming license which exact thought shows us we shall never be punished for.'

This was a result of freedom that the Professor had never bargained for.

He could not understand it, 'because,' he argued, 'if people were to reason in that way, morality would at once cease to be possible.' But he had seen so much of the world lately, that he soon recovered himself, and recollecting that immorality was only ignorance, he began to show Virginia where her error lay---her one remaining error. 'I perceive,' he said, 'that you are ignorant of one of the greatest triumphs of exact thought--the distinction it has established between the lower and the higher pleasures. Philosophers, who have thought the whole thing over in their studies, have become sure that as soon as the latter are presented to men they will at once leave all and follow them.'

'They must be very nice pleasures,' said Virginia, 'if they would make me leave kissing you for the sake of them.'

'They _are_ nice,' said the Professor. 'They are the pleasures of the imagination, the intellect, and the glorious apprehension of truth.

Compared with these, kissing me would be quite insipid. Remain here for a moment, whilst I go to fetch something, and you shall then begin to taste them.'

In a few moments Paul came back again, and found Virginia in a state of intense expectancy.

'Now--,' he exclaimed triumphantly.

'Now--,' exclaimed Virginia, with a beating heart.

The Professor put his hand in his pocket, and drew slowly forth from it an object which Virginia knew well. It reminded her of the most innocent period of her life; but she hated the very sight of it none the less. It was a Colenso's Arithmetic.

'Come,' said the Professor, 'no truths are so pure and necessary as those of mathematics; you shall at once begin the glorious apprehension of them.'

'Oh, Paul,' cried Virginia, in an agony, 'but I really don't care for truth at all; and you know that when I broke your tin box open and read your private letters in my search for it, you were very angry with me.'

'Ah!' said Paul, holding up his finger, 'but those were not necessary truths. Truths about human action and character are not necessary truths; therefore men of science care nothing about them, and they have no place in scientific systems of ethics. Pure truths are of a very different character; and, however much you may misunderstand your own inclinations, you can really care for nothing so much as doing a few sums. I will set you some very easy ones to begin with, and you shall do them by yourself, whilst I magnify in the next room the parasites of the missing link.'

Virginia saw that there was no help for it. She did her sums by herself the whole morning, which, as at school she had been very good at arithmetic, was not a hard task for her, and Paul magnified parasites in the next room, and prepared slides for his microscope.

When they met again, Paul began skipping and dancing, as if he had gone quite out of his senses, and every now and then between the skips he gave a sepulchral groan. Virginia asked him in astonishment what on earth was the matter with him.

'Matter!' he exclaimed. 'Why, Humanity is at last perfect! All the evils of existence are removed; we neither of us believe in a G.o.d or a celestial future; and we are both in full enjoyment of the higher pleasures and the apprehension of scientific truth. And therefore I skip because Humanity is so unspeakably happy, and I groan because it is so unspeakably solemn.'

'Alas! alas!' cried Virginia, 'and would not you like to kiss me?'

'No,' said the Professor, sternly; 'and you would not like me to kiss you. It is impossible that one half of Humanity should prefer the pleasure of unlawful love to the pleasure of finding out scientific truths.'

'But,' pleaded Virginia, 'cannot we enjoy both?'

'No,' said the Professor, 'for if I began to kiss you I should soon not care two straws about the parasites of the missing link.'