Eleanor by Mary Augusta Ward

zealot, the old professor had brooded on the crimes and cruelties of persecuting Rome, till they became a madness in the blood. How well Lucy remembered his books—with their backs of faded grey or brown cloths, and their grim titles. Most of them she had never yet been allowed to read. When she looked for a book, she was wont to pass this shelf by in a vague horror. What Rome habitually did or permitted, what at any rate she had habitually done or permitted in the past, could not—it seemed—be known by a pure woman! And she would glance from the books to the engraving of her grandfather above them,—to the stern and yet delicate face of the old Calvinist, with its high-peaked brow, and white neckcloth supporting the sharp chin; lifting her heart to him in a passionate endorsement, a common fierce hatred of wrong and tyranny.
    She had grown older since then, and her country with her. New England Puritanism was no longer what it had been; and the Catholic Church had spread in the land. But in Uncle Ben’s quiet household, and in her own feeling, the changes had been but slight and subtle. Pity, perhaps, had insensibly taken the place of hatred. But those old words ‘priest’ and ‘mass’ still rung in her ears as symbols of all that man had devised to corrupt and deface the purity of Christ.
    And of what that purity might be, she had such tender, such positive traditions! Her mother had been a Christian mystic—a ‘sweet woman,’ meek as a dove in household life, yet capable of the fiercest ardours as a preacher and missionary, gathering rough labourers into barns and by the wayside, and dying before her time, worn out by the imperious energies of religion. Lucy had always before her the eyes that seemed to be shining through a mist, the large tremulous mouth, the gently furrowed brow. Those strange forces—‘grace’—and ‘the spirit’—had been the realities, the deciding powers of her childhood, whether in what concerned the great emotions of faith, or the most trivial incidents of ordinary life—writing a letter—inviting a guest—taking a journey. The soul bare before God, depending on no fleshly aid, distracted by no outward rite; sternly defending its own freedom as a divine trust:—she had been reared on these main thoughts of Puritanism, and they were still through all insensible transformation, the guiding forces of her own being.
    Already, in this Catholic country, she had been jarred and repelled on all sides. Yet she found herself living with two people for whom Catholicism was not indeed a personal faith—she could not think of that side of it without indignation—but a thing to be passionately admired and praised, like art, or music, or scenery. You might believe nothing, and yet write pages and pages in glorification of the Pope and the Mass, and in contempt of everything else!—in excuse too of every kind of tyranny so long as it served the Papacy and ‘the Church.’
    She leaned out to the sunset, remembering sentence after sentence from the talk on the terrace—hating or combating them all.
    Yet all the time a new excitement invaded her. For the man who had spoken thus was, in a sense, not a mere stranger to her. Somewhere in his being must be the capacity for those thoughts and feelings that had touched her so deeply in his book—for that magical insight and sweetness—
    Ah!—perhaps she had not understood his book—no more than she understood him now. The sense of her own ignorance oppressed her—and of all that
might
be said, with regard apparently to anything whatever. Was there nothing quite true—quite certain—in the world?
    So the girl’s intense and simple nature entered like all its fellows, upon the old inevitable struggle. As she stood there, with locked hands and flushed cheeks, conscious through every vein of the inrush and shock of new perceptions, new comparisons, she was like a ship that leaves the harbour for the open, and feels for the first time on all