John Daunt, in the midst of a life of service to God and man, found, in a time of darkness and dismay, that his faith, in any orthodox sense, had deserted him. His was not the mind that could combine Christian ethics with a genial scepticism as to the Articles of the Church he belonged to. With sad and tender dignity he opened his heart to his wife. He accepted her amazed indignation. Mrs. Daunt would as little have dreamed of questioning the Articles of the Christian faith as of thinking about them--they were part of the ecclesiastical machinery that one accepted as one accepted the other probably irrational bases of life. He bowed before her scorn of his weakness; but he was not prepared for her absolute refusal to further his intention of leaving the Church.
How were they to live, pray? The Rev. John had hardly thought of that. His own private income was barely sufficient for his lesser charities. His wife owned a small property, and when the practical question was put before him, he supposed that they could manage to live on that, and he would find something to do.
"Find something to do? You? You will merely sink in the world, and we will all sink with you. What of Geoffrey?" Mrs. Daunt's eyes flashed fire as she asked this stinging question. Geoffrey was just entering the University, the honours of Eton thick upon him. He wished to ruin their child, then? The questions lashed him. He adored their child. She swept on: He, forsooth, would seek downfall for some morbid whim when men of ten times his significance managed to keep the peace between their conscience and their vows. And Mrs. Daunt was too clever to use the lash only; she turned to the ethical side of the question, the side on which alone he had looked, with such self-tormenting indecision. His influence; the love of his people for him; the light he held up among them;--what difference did the lamp make that held the flame?--the wrecking of others' faiths involved in his abandonment of a leaking ship--she would not say that it did leak; but if it did, was it the place of a captain to desert his crew because he could not see through the storm? And he yielded, as much to his own self-doubt as to her; yielded, and yet afterwards, in an undercurrent of anguish beneath the flow of unchanged life, felt himself a traitor.