Chapter XI: Part II: I (4)

He had come prepared for explanation, reproaches, rupture even, but never in his life had he felt less ardor for battle, more doubt as to whether the cause were worthy the warfare. Hope deferred, neglect, dejection, had nearly done their work. He was beginning to doubt his own powers, inclining more each day to take the world's estimate of them as final. He had been writing a good deal lately, and to little purpose; it seemed unlikely that, years before, he had done better. No man endowed with the artist's temperament ever gained ease to himself by deliberately writing down to some imagined popular level. It is doubtful even whether the thing is to be done at all; probably every one that succeeds, even in the coarse acceptation of the term, succeeds by doing the best that is in him. The world may have no eye for genius, but it is quick to detect disrespect.

It was early in March: he had known her now nearly six months. To say that they had become better friends in that time would be inexact; it is juster to say that, from the high level of her first acclaim, he had never known her to descend. She had seemed to divine that he was already sick of beginnings that led nowhere, and lacked patience for the circumspect steps that friendship in the first degree requires. From the outset she showed him a full measure. She had a multitude of friends--much devotion, even, at her command. Here and there, amid the exotic sentimentality that for some reason or other was the dominant note in her circle, a graver, truer note vibrated; and yet, before he had known her a month, Paul must have been obtuse indeed not to have noticed a special appeal in her voice and a special significance in the hand-clasp that was kept for him. And if he was not precisely grateful, he was, at any rate, tremendously impressed. He had learnt her history, and no adventitious aid that riches, popularity, fine clothing or jewels--and none of these was wanting--could have lent her would so overwhelmingly have presented her to his imagination as this. That she should have emerged from such an ordeal at all was wonderful, but that she should have come through it beautiful still, gentle and plaintively wise, lent an almost spectral charm to her beauty, and the same significance to her lightest comment on men or things that one strives to read into a rapped-out message wrung from the dubious silence of the grave. The strange unreality which none who knew Althea well escaped noticing, though all did not call it by the same name, reached him, oppressed as he was by the burden of the material world, almost like a native air. In her house he breathed freely, forgot his chagrins, was enveloped in a formless sympathy that, by anticipating the unwelcome thought, spared him even the humiliation of uttering it.

Perhaps, without looking at him, she had guessed his thought now. At least there was a little conscious gaiety in her voice as she laid by her pen and packed the loose sheets square.

"_Voilà!_" said she. To speak French always carries the register a key higher. She switched off the light, and moved to the seat opposite him with a soft rustle of skirts. One finger-tip was marked with ink. She put it furtively to her lips and streaked it, schoolgirl fashion, down her black dress.

"Would you like to know who you are dining with?" she asked, taking a slip of paper from the mantelpiece. "We're very worldly indeed to-night. 'Marchesina d'Empoli, the Countess of Hatherley, Lady Claire Templeton, Mrs. Sidney Musgrave.' Here! see for yourself."

As Paul glanced over the list, she put one slender foot on the curb of the fender and pulled her skirt a few inches above her ankle.

"'Sir Bryan Lumsden?' Who's he?"

"A stock-broking baronet, sir, of my acquaintance."

"That's a lurid description."

"He's very good to my 'Sparrow Parties.' Do you know him, that you pick him out?"

"I've seen him once," said Ingram slowly, pulling at his beard. "His manners where women are concerned did not impress me."

She tapped the rail with her foot. "You are very unmannerly. Mustn't I ask the world and the flesh sometimes?"

"What about the devil?"

She gave a tentative and rather frightened glance at his sardonic face.

"I think _he_ comes the earliest."

There was no mistaking her meaning. Paul put the slip back on the mantelpiece.

"Don't you think," said he, speaking with equal intention, "that it's as well even the devil should be allowed to state a case at times?"

"Perhaps--I don't know," Althea faltered in reply.

"Excuse me if I bore you. I don't ask often. Is there any news of my luckless story?"

"Some one is reading it."

"Some publisher?"

"Not exactly. I--I wanted an opinion from some one who--from some one----"

"Some one quite impartial, you mean?"

"Not quite that, either. From some one who is able to take a very special point of view."

Ingram laughed grimly. "Why don't you get some of your worldly friends to teach you how to lie?"

"_Sir!_"

He regarded her from head to foot and back again. Her cheeks flamed--not altogether with anger. It was not unpleasant to be looked at hard by him.

"Althea," he said at last, "suppose I told you I had come to-night to quarrel with you?"

She turned with a strange, scared appeal in her eyes.

"Oh! I should beg you not to. Don't ever quarrel with me, Paul--please."

The artless speech was so unlike anything he had ever heard from her--her voice, as she uttered it, so uncomfortably reminiscent of another, whose vain pleading had only just ceased to vibrate in his heart, that Paul had what may be best described as a moment of sentimental vertigo.

He laid his hand lightly upon hers. "Dear Mrs. Hepworth, do you dream I could be harsh with you?"

She did not move her hand from under his, nor appear conscious that one chapter of their intimacy was irretrievably ended by the impulsive moment.

"I only know I dread your anger. I suspect it can be awful."

"You shall never be sure, then. But reproof at least you must bear. Althea, you have put me under an obligation that no man finds tolerable."

Now she snatched her hand away. "Oh!" with a catch in her voice, "that is unworthy of you."

"And you are keeping me from what is at least a chance to discharge it."

"It is not I who keeps you from it."

The blood rushed to Ingram's head. "Some occult tribunal, then--some inquisition against whose unwarrantable interference my whole soul protests."

"Hush!" for he had raised his voice. "I think I hear a ring. People are beginning to arrive, and I must fly. Come down in about five minutes--it will look better--and wait after the rest are gone. I think you had best understand my position in this matter clearly. That much is due you."

XII

A CATASTROPHE

Checked in mid-course, and with all his righteous indignation bottled up, Paul, I expect, hardly found the "worldly" dinner a diverting affair. He had reached the stage of mental development--a mid-way one, be it noted--where types interest more than persons, and none of those he met to-night aroused in him anything save a burning desire for their speedy effacement. Lumsden did not appear to remember him, which was hardly wonderful, considering the complete change of dress and environment. Besides which the baronet was a man very much occupied and in request throughout dinner. He was just back from the _Côte d'Azur_, and was primed with the true inwardness of the approaching Manby-Millett sensation. Lucy Millett was passing through Paris alone, and thought it civil to leave a card on the only Mrs. Manby at the _Superbe_ because she had sent her a wedding present. Mrs. Manby's reputation hadn't reached her, it seems, which was hardly wonderful, seeing Lucy was a daughter of the great Quaker sago-refining family, and rather out of things. She had left her own card and her husband's, and by a mistake of the clerk only the smaller card was handed to the gay lady on her return. Result: that Lucy found a _petit bleu_ waiting when she got back from a round of the shops, which gave everything away. "Most impassioned," Lumsden understood, on good authority, and quite up to Manby form.

"And if you put that in one of your books, Mrs. Hepworth, people would say there was too much--what d'you call it?--coincidence, wouldn't they, now?"

It happened that Lady Robert Millett had been the first woman Ingram had interviewed for the _Parthenon_. He remembered the sandy haired girl-wife at Isleworth, with her high teeth, awkward kindness and innocent pride, who had given him tea and, "as a special favor," shown him her white squirrels and blue-wattled Japanese fowl. Well--her happiness was destroyed. He did not join in the laughter when some one achieved a stammering, knock-kneed epigram in French; something about _sagou_ and _sagesse_.

Captain Templeton had just won a seat for his party in a three-cornered contest. He detailed with considerable verve the intrigues necessary to induce a labor candidate to run and split the vote. The Liberal's wife had social ambitions. "I hope we shall meet in town, Captain Templeton," she had said after the poll. "We're Liberal; but _naturally_ most of our friends are on your side of the house."

At the top of the table, with his noble old ivory-white face, silver hair, and limitless shirt-front, their host sat, a fine flower of democracy, and enjoyed his daughter's social success. His ponderous civilities failed to absorb the little Italian marchesina on his right (Gioconda, they say, of the _Fool's Errand_). Her heart was at the noisy end of the table; continually, at some new outburst, she would clap her tiny ringed hands autocratically for silence. "_What_ is this? _What_ is this? I have not heard well." Things had to be repeated, explained, for her benefit.

Paul was nearest the door, and rose to open it as the women passed out. His hostess, who had barely addressed a word to him during dinner, bent forward as she passed and reminded him of his promise. Lumsden was the only man who seemed to notice the incident; and Ingram thought he caught the tail end of a look of intelligence as he returned to the table. But it was gone instantly, and presently the men drew to the side next the fire and began to talk tariffs. Tongue-tied amidst the women's chatter, their host easily dominated the conversation now. He spoke of Republican prospects at the Mid-West conventions, their intimate association with business prosperity, discussed the new influences at Washington with good-natured banter, predicted worse times before a "banner-year," hinted what was worth watching meantime. The men listened to him intently--even Lumsden--carelessly, sipping their coffee or rolling their liqueurs round and round in tiny gilt glasses. Every word was golden now. Art, literature, philosophy, all the visions that visit an idle mood, blew off like mists when the sun mounts the sky. Paul, watching him in silence, felt an involuntary respect, a pride despite himself, in their common nationality.

"You're force," he was saying to himself, "blind Titanic force--that's what you are. And our business is with you and not with this trash that cumbers the ground and obscures the issue; these parasites, who imagine the things their own hearts covet were the incentive to men like yourself, who corrupt you because they fear you, and with grave, attentive faces are trying to make you believe now that there's great personal merit in what you've been doing. You've sucked up riches from a disorganized society that your energy took unawares, because you couldn't help it, and you spend it on yourselves because you don't know any better way. Well, we must show you one. The force that creates, the wisdom that could distribute--these two are groping for each other through a maze of laws, human and divine, that the world has outgrown. They must mingle, must come together, must interpenetrate, and if priests and judges hinder, then priests and judges must go. They were made for man, not man for them."

"... so if you've bought warrants at sixty-three merely on the report of divisions inside the amalgamation, you haven't done badly, Lumsden. And now, Lord Hatherley, what do you say? Shall we join the ladies upstairs?"

* * * * *

An hour later Ingram was alone with his host and hostess. His presence, _ami de maison_ as he had become, did not restrain Mr. Rees from a palpable yawn.

"You look tired, father," said Althea, putting her arm over his broad shoulder. "What are you going to do? Mr. Ingram and I have something to talk over."

"I think I shall read Lew Wallace for half an hour, honey, and then go to bed. Have my hot milk sent to the study."

"Let us go upstairs to my own room," said Althea, when he was gone. "I can always talk better there."

Ingram followed her, and, as she preceded him gracefully, something forlorn and lonely in her face and figure struck him, over-receptive of such impressions as he was. He thought she drooped. Once she stumbled slightly.

She often wrote till morning, and the fire was still burning brightly in her room. She took the strip of paper on which the names of her guests had been written and, reading it over again, crumpled it in her hand with a little gesture of disgust and weariness, and threw it into the glowing coals.

"_Ugh!_" she said.

"Why do you have them, then?" asked Paul, more reasonably than politely.

"Oh!" impatiently, "you don't understand." She hesitated a moment. "Don't you ever find such people strangely interesting yourself?"

"The least so of any class I've met," Paul replied, without hesitation.

"I mean--sit down, please--because they are so _free_."

"----of scruples?"

"Yes, of scruples, if you will. Don't you see as long as one has work to do, or an ideal to follow, or conscience to consider, or a heart even, one's life must, in a sense be incomplete, fettered, bound. One must leave off in unexpected places--never go quite to the logical end, never run the whole gamut."

"That's just as well, isn't it--for other people's sakes?"

"Perhaps. You don't read Newman, I suppose?"

"Never."

"He speaks, in one of his poems, of 'A secret joy that Hell is near.' Now, he was a great saint, Mr. Ingram; no Augustine, but one of the predestined of God's love, who never in the whole course of their lives commit a vile act, say a vile word, nor probably entertain an ill thought. And yet, you see, he felt it."

She had taken out her handkerchief, and was twisting it nervously into a rope.

"'_A secret joy that Hell is near!_' That's what I feel at times. That's what I've been feeling all to-night, as I listened to those people. It's wicked, I know. It's even a refinement of wickedness."

"I think it's nerves."

"Oh, no, you don't. I won't submit to that kind of talk from you--but I'm not keeping you from bed to discuss my temperament. About your story: I'm so sorry I can't help you to publish it."

"Owing, I gather, to its religious views?"

"Why deny it? Yes."

"As exemplified in the Rev. Mr. Ffoulkes, the Salvation Merchant?"

"Oh! don't laugh. It's terribly serious. You have--I don't know where you learnt it--such a terrifying plausibility in your case against Providence. Nothing strikes at faith like a perverted mysticism."

"Name one instance!"--a little bitterly. "I'm beginning to forget what I did say."

"Well, you say that the most obvious result of punishment is to destroy the sense of guilt."

"So it is."

"Yes--perhaps. But----"

"In short, one may bear witness for your God, but not against Him?"

"I know I must sound illogical to you. It is so hard to explain."

"Don't try, please."

She was silent awhile, staring into the fire. "Mr. Ingram, you've heard, perhaps, that my life has not been a happy one.

"A word here and there. _Que sais-je?_"

"Exactly. What do you know? What can any one know of it? Imagination even couldn't do justice to the whole truth. I came out of it not desolate, alone; not only sick of body and soul, but even degraded. Yes, I mean it. A degraded wretch--that's how I saw myself. The poor street-walker seemed a clean and honorable thing beside me."

"And so you became a Catholic. Is this the usual way into the fold?"

"It is, for many. Yes," she went on, with a strange glow in her eyes, "for those who have endured great wickedness as for those who have committed it, God be thanked, there is one respirable medium left on earth. Call it what you will--a hospital of sick souls, a home for moral convalescents."

"I call it nothing. I take your word for it. Does this account for the decrepitude of so much of your doctrine?"

"Ah! don't be clever, Paul. Cleverness is a little thing. At least I should be loyal to that in which I have found peace, self-respect, a new life."

"You misjudge me, Althea. I grudge you none of your comfort. God is true if He's true for you, and He's true, for you, if the thought of Him gives you peace."

There really seemed nothing more to say, and he got to his feet.

"Send along my manuscript," he said, "whenever it's convenient, and dismiss the matter from your mind. It makes no difference."

"Why are you in such a hurry to go?" she asked fretfully, and put her hand to her head. She seemed to sway.

"Are you ill?" Ingram asked, coming across and standing beside her.

"My head went queer suddenly," she said. "It does that lately. It's fatigue, I think. Listen to me, Paul Ingram. I want to strike a bargain with you."

"Well."

"I want to buy 'Sad Company' myself."

"In order to destroy it?"

No answer.

"And at what do you assess the damage, moral and material, to your creed that its suppression will avoid. Come, now! just for curiosity's sake."

"Five hundred pounds--a thousand if----"

He interrupted her brusquely. "You must have taken leave of your senses. Do you think I'm to be bought? Burn the thing yourself, if you like--burn it in the name of whatever god it offends--but don't impute dishonor ever again to a man, even to a man that doesn't believe in Him."

She caught at his sleeve. "Oh, but you must have some money for it," she said, incoherently. "You must--you must! Don't rob me of a pleasure. You've travelled the world over, but you don't know what poverty in London means. Why, only to-night, as I looked down the table and saw your face so--so proud and fine, and thought how little stood between you and--there! I won't even name it. But don't be stubborn--for my sake. Because you must have money; you must have money, dear."

At the last word he took her in his arms.

"Let me go!" she whispered, pushing him away with all the poor force of her bare arms. "I didn't mean this. Oh! believe me. Upon my honor I didn't--nothing like this, Paul."

Ingram only drew her closer. "Stop struggling," he said, with authority. "That's better. Now then--kiss me properly."

XIII

NEW WINE--OLD BOTTLE

When the Reverend Antony Vernon, on the very morrow of a controversy whose issue was hailed variously in various quarters--here as a triumph and as a scandal there--forsook his fellow's rooms in Wadham, his parish of St. Hedwige, and the Hernandes Ethical Lectureship, to take the old, old beaten track toward the City of the Seven Hills and intellectual disenfranchisement, beyond a languid wonder as to what might await him in the less indulgent fold his migration aroused little interest. Excommunication or a cardinal's hat? Either, it was felt, might be the crown of his new career. He took no disciples with him in his incontinent flight, and he left no spiritual orphans to bewail his loss. No vindication of the strange step was ever published by him, and it cannot be pretended that his reserve balked any very keen curiosity. After all, had not the question been worn threadbare--to rags--years ago? To the fervor of the 'forties a generation had succeeded too weary of dogmatic strife to account for its own actions, far less demand an account from others; satisfied, in short, since it saved time and trouble, to accept the plea of impulse in full extenuation. During the traditional nine days, it is true, his motives were guessed at idly in the Common Room. Intellectual despair, said one; another, a recoil from the abyss to which a will to believe with the minimum of revelation always leads; a third might hint at reasons more personal and intimate still. None knew; and, when a few weeks had passed, none cared. The Reverend Antony Vernon was absolved and forgotten.

After his ordination in Rome, Archbishop Manning, who had been an old Oxford friend of his father, gave him a curacy in the northeast of London, in a district which had not then acquired its present sinister reputation, but was beginning to earn it. The mission itself was an old one, founded in the days of captivity and bishops _in partibus_; so much the fabric witnessed, a square box-like structure of hard yellow brick, with a stucco portico, and on each side four round-headed, narrow-paned windows of pinky-white glass, obscured by a wooden galley, and, on the side that faced the street, still bearing traces of some sort of wash which had once discreetly veiled the mysteries within. And yet, in its unpretending ugliness, the humble fane did not lack a certain charm denied to the great Gothic barn that has replaced it. It had been built upon the site of what had been a city merchant's suburban estate in the days of hoop and powder. Upon the side furthest from the street, two or three of the old garden trees had been spared, which of a sunny afternoon, according as the season lay, stained the clear panes a tremulous green and gold, or fretted them with an uneasy tracery of tangled branches. One guessed that, within the memory of man, before the city had spilled its desolating overflow around and beyond, gardens had bloomed--orchards borne fruit beneath these weather-stained walls, the odors of the hayfield stolen in at times and mingled its incense with that of the altar. For with cities it is as with the generations of men--new buildings upon which the old have gazed carry on, when they themselves have grown gray, the tradition of all that has been demolished and displaced around them.

"I am sending you into great temptation, Vernon," Manning had said to him at parting. (He had opened his heart to his superior, and there were no secrets between the two men). "The mission is the most difficult in the whole archdiocese. Since the trams were built the East End is pouring its cramped population into it in thousands. The old respectable families are leaving, in absolute panic, as soon as they can sell or surrender their leases. There will be no better centre in three or four years' time for a great missionary effort; but until Swinton dies or retires nothing much can be done. You will have need of all your faith and of all your tact. Abroad you will encounter an animalism such as you cannot have conceived possible; at home, a creed almost without love, and to which only the darker side of the revelation seems to have been vouchsafed. Get to know your people quietly; watch your armor, and--pray! And, above all," he continued, laying a hand that was already ethereal upon the young don's shoulder, "above all, Vernon, never despair of the poor. Don't be appalled by anything you see or hear. The degradation is great, but it is my experience it seldom reaches down as far as the soul. A word will work conversion here--a week's illness make a saint. It is far, far easier to wash the filth off of them than it is to heal the ulcer of the rich, or purify the intellect of men like you and me. It is God's crowning mercy to his elect. 'Blessed are the poor!'"

Vernon quickly discovered that the difficulties had not been over-rated. Father Swinton, the missionary rector, was a scion of an old Northumbrian family. His eccentricity, probably congenital and the result of long continued intermarriage, had been heightened by a solitary life until it reached a pitch that was almost monomania. Beneath the outward uniformity which Catholic discipline imposes he concealed a fanatical Jansenist heart. He was perhaps the last of a generation of priests who took a perverse pride in the insular and secluded character which three centuries of persecution had impressed upon the Roman communion in England. He boasted of never having made a convert, and resented the new expansiveness as a personal grievance. He never returned to his "chapel"--you would have earned his resentment by calling it a church--from a visit to more pretentious missions without experiencing a stealthy joy in his own square, painted pews, his railed gallery and bare altar, flanked only by two small plaster statues which a great lady, stubborn as himself, had imposed upon him as the price of peace. Two of his many aversions he made no attempt to conceal: he hated Irish curates, and he hated the beautiful modern devotion of the Sacred Heart.

"God bless my soul, Vernon!" he cried, one evening, shortly after the arrival of the new curate, waddling into the dining-room after benediction. "Do you know what's just happened me? No? Well, sir, a woman came into my sanctuary just now--my very sanctuary, sir!--as I was covering the altar, and asked me to bless a piece of red flannel for her--a common piece of red household flannel, sir, cut into the shape of a heart. Called it her '_Badge_!' I said: 'Take your blasphemous piece of red flannel home, ma'am! It's too small for a chest-protector, so make a penwiper of it. God bless my soul! haven't you seven sacraments?'"

Far from being shocked, the archbishop laughed at the story until the tears ran out of his watery blue eyes.

"Dear old Swinton!" was all his comment; "last of the Gallicans!" Vernon was early struck by the gaiety and love of fun among his fellow-workers in the vineyard.

As for the curates: he discovered he was the successor to a long line whose misplaced fervor and attempts to familiarize the channels of grace had brought them into collision with the heady old man.

"_Four--times--a--year_, Mr. Vernon," his rector would assert, bringing the palm of his hand down on the table at each word. "Four times a year, sir, and no more, if I had my way. And the three months in between all too short to prepare for the reception of this tremendous"--at the word something that was almost ecstasy descended upon the foolish old face--"_tremendous_ Sacrament! Besides"--fretfully--"none of 'em knew how to eat like gentlemen."

Perhaps on account of his superior table manners, perhaps for other reasons, Vernon's enthusiasm--the enthusiasm of the proselyte--was condoned. Often during his strenuous later life he looked back upon those three years of curacy as perhaps the happiest he had known. If he might not sow the seed broadcast, at least he could sow and tend it in his own heart. He loved to read his breviary of an afternoon, pacing up and down between two green matted grass lawns, under the creeper-covered wall of the meek little house of God. The sun, filtering through the tender leaves of the plane trees, made a dappled puzzle-pattern on the broad flagged walk at his feet, or, if the season was late, he crisped their shed vesture beneath his low buckled shoes. Often, as his lips moved in the prayer that he had now got by heart, his eyes, wandering from the familiar page, would map out by the line, and square the foundation of his settlement--his bustling citadel of the friends of God--so soon to arise in the great wilderness, blotting out this selfish little oasis of peace and stillness forever. This very walk the vault of a chancel should cover--vast, imposing, lined with glowing chapels that pictured in fresco and mosaic the hard-won battles of the Church militant--draped with embroidered banners of guild and confraternity. Here, at the ivied presbytery gable, where a mob of sparrows, heedless of impending change, were repairing their frail tenements of straw, the gymnasium should stand, with a dining-hall above, where from henceforth his daily meals should be taken in the company of the starving and the outcast; of the workless man, hovering with amazement upon the brink of crime; of the felon, still sore from the stringent hand of earthly justice; guests gathered at his Master's bidding from highway and byway, and set down with the broad robe of charity over their bowed shoulders. And once a week at night, when chairs and benches had been cleared away, the piano should tinkle and the fiddle tune, and lads and lasses, in whose perverse minds guilt and gaiety had become convertible terms, should learn the religion of joy, and dance the devil out of their souls.

These were his dreams during three years. And yet, in his imagination, susceptible as a woman's to any influence of beauty and grace, and, like a woman's, sworn foe of all that is ugly and irrevocable in life, the quiet close was full of voices that reproached him for their outcasting. He used to pray against his weakness at night, when confessions were over and the church closed. Horse-cars jingled past the doors. The windows shook with raucous oaths; with cries of buyers and sellers in the market outside, from mouths furred with blasphemy and filthy talk; the naphtha flares threw strange, troubled shadows over the doomed pews and galleries.

Father Swinton fell ill in the middle of the third year, and after lingering a few months, died rather suddenly. At his death it was discovered that his private charities had been unbounded, and had eaten up all his inheritance. He left nothing of his own behind, save a family genealogy, in which the connection between the Swintons of Dimpleshall and the Swintons of Blacklash is clearly traced--a connection which, it would appear, Mackenzie, in his "View of the County of Northumberland," has been at pains to dispute, and a bound manuscript, much thumbed, of meditations on the Passion. The projected work had hardly waited on his death; indeed, Vernon was called to his superior's agony from a consultation with his architect. No man's dream is ever realized; but within two years a good deal of his was an accomplished fact. Vernon was a wealthy man, and, when his own money was spent, a consummate beggar. The dining-room, the schools, the gymnasium, the dispensary, and the old folks' hostel took shape one by one, amid discouragement, covert sarcasm, and abundant prophecy of failure. The trees fell, the chapel was gutted and torn down as completely as ever by Gordon rioters; the presbytery, with its panelled chambers, went the same way; the sparrows took to a dusty wing and, as covenanted servants, let us hope found sanctuary elsewhere. Last of all, the chancel, gaunt and bare as yet, a mere shell and outline of all it should be, but imposing if only by virtue of its bulk, with traceried windows, flying buttresses, clerestory and triforium, towered over the wet slate roofs that smoked sullenly all day, like a slaked furnace, beneath its feet. At the centre of the cross, where the long chancel met the truncated apse and aisles, an octagonal lead lantern, lit by eight round lunettes, took the place of tower and spire. It was at this lantern that men stood to stare; toward it that the whips of passing van and 'bus drivers inevitably were pointed for many a long day. For there, set up too high for any to escape His appeal--a symbol of hope to the hopeless, a fable to the scoffer, a source of irritation to the Pharisee, lit up at night by two coronals of electric light that encircled the pierced feet and haloed the drooping head--the Man of Sorrows watched the sorrowing city, and plucked His vesture aside to show the wounded and flaming breast--the Sacred Heart, beneath.

At fifty-eight Canon Vernon would have been a strange portent in the Common Room at Wadham. He had gained sanctity, but there is no denying he had lost polish. One cannot sit to table habitually with the outcast and not become either a little self-righteous or a little disreputable; and nothing could ever have made Antony Vernon self-righteous. He had a brown, seamed face, on which the lines of humor and pain crossed and intercrossed; the loose, mobile mouth of the great actor he might have been; piercing black eyes, an untidy thatch of dark hair whitening only at the temples, and thin, sensitive nostrils rimmed with snuff. Snuff also liberally besprinkled the breast of his shabby cassock. There had been, three hundred years back, an ancestor who wrote himself M. de Vernon, and, in reverting to the ancestral faith, Vernon seemed to have reverted a little to the ancestral type. He had no apparent austerities, was fond of a certain brand of white wine which grocers do not stock, and when his young men saw him in his private room, gave them, together with absolution, an Egyptian cigarette that was no part of their penance. His life is now matter for biography. In the district which is bounded roughly by Kingsland Road on the west and Hackney Road on the south, and which may be said to have London Fields--a rather tuberculous "lung"--for its centre and playground, it was even then matter for legend. Upon some of the legends his own comments were flippant, and we should probably err in attaching greater importance to them than he did himself. In speaking of his spiritual influence we are on safer ground. Very few--perhaps none quite--had ever withstood this. It was the old, old test. Power "went out" from him. Very unjustly, the worship of which he was the object did not extend to the hard-working curates with whom he surrounded himself. His delivery in the pulpit was bad, his writing all but illegible, and, as he never had time to prepare his sermons for the press, a good deal has perished that deserved to survive. We preserve a few fragments, however, as characteristic of his peculiar train of thought.

"_Of love_:

"There is no way to love God but through His creatures. It is
through admiration of the work that we must be brought to the
artist. But often the one condition upon which our love can stay
sinless is that it shall stay silent."

"_Of suffering_:

"There is a genius in suffering as in all else. The confessor may
labor with Christ, the martyr be crucified with Him; it is the
artist alone who can understand or share the agony of Olivet."

"_Of sacrifice_:

"The history of Cain and Abel is full of significance to us. It is
not of the things that renew themselves year by year that God would
have us make our offering. To be acceptable to Him the sacrifice
must be irreparable."

Despite his gaiety, his personal pessimism was unbounded. He was taken to task for it once by a burly and breezy Jesuit.

"After all, Vernon, God is Lord of life as well as of death."

"True," replied Vernon, as though speaking to himself. "But with a perceptible bias toward death."

* * * * *

He maintained that while it was our duty to resist all temptations, there were some so overwhelming that our responsibility was ended when we asked God to keep them out of our way.

* * * * *

He used to say that the crowning humiliation of the saints was to know their lives would be written by the devout.

* * * * *

Once upon his return from examining a school taught by religious, he was observed to be preoccupied, and was asked the reason.

"I was thinking," he said, "that few indeed are to be trusted with the credulity of childhood."

* * * * *

Of a noted atheist who was very charitable, he remarked: "G---- gives alms for the hatred of God."

* * * * *

After leaving Oxford his remarks seldom strayed beyond the sphere of his new duties. When they did, they were apt to be rarely illuminating. He said of France, for instance: "Four words give us her genius and her history--'Often conquered, never ashamed.'"

* * * * *

He used to declare that, in striking a balance between a man's happiness and unhappiness, time was not to be taken into account at all, because men live all their lives every day of their lives.

* * * * *

Religion, he observed, had an advantage that had not escaped the worldly mind. There is no other ideal which a man can live for and live on at the same time.

XIV

SOME THEORIES--AND A WAY OUT

He was sitting in his study late one windy March Saturday when Mrs. Hepworth was announced. He had been in his confessional all the evening. A half-finished letter lay on his blotting-pad, but he had turned away from it and was warming his stockinged feet at the fire. She was heavily veiled, but he divined a crisis at a glance.

"Are you very busy?" she asked, in a smothered voice.

"Very idle," he answered gaily. "The appearances of industry are deceitful. I was really--don't tell--toasting my toes. Are you in any trouble?" he asked in a graver tone, taking her hand in both his.

She nodded, but did not speak. He drew an arm-chair to the fire, and poked a great lump of coal into a blaze.

"There, there!" said he. "Sit down and have the cry out. I have a letter to finish and another to write. By the time they are both done you will be calmer."

He went on with his writing; re-read, sealed, and stamped the two letters, rang the bell, and, when it was answered by one of the mission lads, carried them to the door himself. When he turned to her again the worst was over. She was drying her eyes. He leaned forward and patted her hand.

"What a big baby we are!"

She returned him a spasmodic smile. She was conscious of a tear-stained face--possibly a red nose. But then, he was a priest. That made a difference.

"And now, what is the trouble? Has invention given out? No? Come, come then, everything else is bearable, isn't it? If I were an imaginative writer, that fear would never leave me, and would end by paralyzing my pen. I should have stage-fright every time I sat down opposite a sheet of paper. It has always been less of a marvel to me that a novel should be finished well than that it should be finished at all."

Althea hardly listened. She was wondering how she should express the things of this world in terms that a man of the other should understand; a necessity--let the prurient believe it or not--that makes confession a dry business for all parties.

"Father Vernon, has it ever occurred to you that I am a woman as well as a writer?"

"My dear, a very charming one."

"At least an honest one. Three years ago, you will remember, I came to you on quite an impersonal matter. You divined an inward trouble--saw that I had missed the peace which passes understanding, and offered me--how delicately, I shall never forget--your aid to attain it. I refused it. You never would guess what the refusal cost me."

"My dear----"

"Yes, yes; let me go on. I must have seemed churlish. But if principles are to be anything beyond mere idle words, they must be held to; and one of mine is that for a woman to invite sympathy is only a degree less shameful than for her to beg for love. The way of the devout woman with her director is hateful to me. This unseemly self-revelation from week to week is treachery--treachery to her own heart and to those whom she takes into it. Am I very heretical?"

"Oh, my child! How it would lighten my task were there more who thought like you."

"Before I left, you bade me, if ever I was in great trouble, to come to you again. And now----"

"Now the time has come?"

"Yes." She rubbed her hands nervously one over the other. "I am in great straits."

"Is the way growing dark or only hard?"

"Oh, _hard--hard_!" she moaned, rocking a little backward and forward.

She looked up in his face and saw her trouble was guessed. When the will to help and the powerlessness meet upon a face that regards us tenderly we read our fate written there in letters of fire.

"Yes," she went on, as though he had spoken. "I am a Catholic: I am a divorced woman whose husband lives, and I am in love--in love with all my heart, and soul, and strength."

"The man? Is he free?" Vernon asked, perhaps for something to say.

"Yes. I thank God, whose captive I am, that he at least is free."

"He understands your peculiar position?"

"He understands nothing."

"My dear child, you should let him know. In justice to him."

His words irritated Althea vaguely, as a little professional mannerism might irritate us in the surgeon fighting for our lives.

"Oh, have patience! I am going to tell you everything. It is the man whose book I sent you to read. Mr. Prentice, a friend of mine, a journalist, brought him to me last summer. He was quite unknown in London and was finding a difficulty in even getting it considered. He is not quite a stranger to us; at least, we know who he is. My father is a friend of some of the rich branch of his family in Connecticut. My publishers made difficulties, of course, but the thing was in a fair way of being settled--"

"But surely, my child, his opinions shocked you?"

"Not at all, Father!" Noticing his surprise: "You must take my word for that. It is so hard when one is leading two lives--the artist's and the other. There seems no contact between them--no common ground. I have had no temptation myself to such things, and so the question had never arisen for me personally. No, I was conscious of nothing but the joy, the privilege of helping a fellow-worker toward his reward."

"When did you first find it a matter of conscience?"

"Once when I went to confession to Father Mephan at the Priory. I mentioned it almost casually. To my surprise, he took the matter most seriously--said I was incurring a tremendous responsibility, and that if one soul was led by it to love God less, the sin would be at my door. I had to get the manuscript back from the publishers. Oh! it was weary work."

"Mephan pronounced against the book, of course."

"Yes. I told him that to my knowledge the writer was a good man--in his way almost saintly. I knew him well enough by then to say that. But he said it didn't matter--that Antichrist had his own prophets and confessors, and even martyrs. Is that so?"

"I fear it is."

"He said something else stranger still. He said the virtue that was outside the Church was a greater danger than the wickedness. Do you believe that?"

"No, I don't. I think virtue, of any sort, is quite secure from popularity. But go on. You have told me nothing of the man himself."

"He continued to visit us. He was lonely and embittered at first, but it wore off. He is very handsome. I was proud to be able to show such a fellow-countryman after some that have been at our house. The men liked him, and I know the women envied him to me. Oh! a woman can see. I got him to tell me some of his life. It's wonderful! He seems to have deliberately sought out pain and labor as though some inward need of his soul impelled him to it. He does not know God, but he has never lost the spiritual vision. His heart is as clean as a child's and as simple. He has his faults. He hates the rich; but there is not a trace of envy in his hatred. He is not even like Mill--led to the love of the many by the hatred of the few. It is simply the holy hunger and thirst after justice."

"My dear, you are painting a very good man. Did you never try to influence him toward the truth?"

"Father Vernon, do you believe in my sincerity or not?"

"I do, indeed."

"Then, believe me when I tell you it's not possible. Perhaps in years and years to come; but his heart will have to be broken first. No, his virtue is the virtue of Marcus Aurelius--of Julian. He has all the sadness of the old, stoical, pagan world. Will you think me exaggerated if I tell you how he affects me?"

"I think not."

"Well, I feel as though some great angel, neither of light nor darkness, neither fallen nor confirmed, to whom the test for or against God has never been offered, has folded his wings and dropped gently at my feet. I have but one fear--that he will spread them as quietly and take flight."

Two red spots glowed on her cheeks as she spoke. Vernon, considering her, suddenly realized how ill she was looking. There was even on her face an expression that, as a priest, it was part of his office to watch for.

"When did this thing happen--the thing that makes you so unhappy?"

"Last Thursday. He had dined with us. I had been feeling ill all day. Since the summer I have been frightened two or three times--it is my head I think--but I have put off getting any advice. He could not have asked for an explanation at a worse time; but I had no right to withhold it. I tried to explain, even offered him money, and then----"

"Yes, and then?"

"Oh, Father Vernon, he grew so big! He seemed to tower. Everything else was small. Yes--let me tell the truth--religion, priests, even God--we all seemed to be a little band of intriguers trying to pull him down. He told me to burn his book, turned on his heel. I knew he wouldn't come back, and so--and so--I'm only a woman: I babbled something or other that was in my heart, and he took me--in his--arms."

She leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and looked into the fire. The action was deliberate. One never would have guessed what a storm was rending her breast.

"He kissed me only once," she went on. "He was very gentle. Then we sat down, and I found out that, all the time while I had been condescending, advising, putting him at his ease, I was nothing to him but just a little, lonely, spoilt girl."

"Have you seen him since?"

"No."

"Nor written?"

"No."

"He has called, of course?"

"Yes. I have not been at home to him."

"Then--the thing is over."

"Read this!" She drew a letter from the bosom of her dress and handed it to him. She watched him narrowly as he read it, but his expression of grave concern did not alter.

"Are you alone in town?" he asked, when he had read it through.

"My father and most of the servants are at Hindhead. I should have gone with them on Saturday, but I waited because----Oh! I just waited----"

"Do you want this back?" said Vernon, still holding the letter between his fingers.

"Burn it, please. No, wait a minute! Tear me off the signature first. I want that."

She pressed the little shred of paper against her lips.

"Oh! I love him _so_, I love him _so_," she moaned.

Vernon crumpled the sheets of paper one by one and threw them all into the fire together. The flames caught them at once. The writing glowed red, then white. The draught from the chimney rustled the ashes to and fro in the grate.

"Well," she asked, almost roughly, "what am I to do?"

"There is but one thing--your duty. I cannot soften it."

"_Duty!_" she repeated, in a terrible voice. For a moment Vernon thought a nerve-crisis was at hand; but she fought it down. The wit that was almost the woman's second nature came uppermost.

"It's a pretty trap, isn't it? There ought to have been a notice-board on my narrow way, Father Vernon: 'Beware man-traps and canons.' God's ways are a little _impish_ at times, don't you think so? Can I see him?"

"I think not, dear child. It will only make it harder for you both."

"Pah! You say that, but you really don't trust me. You're only a man, after all. Can I write the letter here? It won't be very long."

Without a word he wheeled his writing-chair round for her, and pulled out unheaded note-paper and plain envelopes. She wrote a letter of six or eight pages quietly, without hesitating, except just at the end, when Vernon noticed her lips were pursed and her eyes swimming in tears. The second letter was a much shorter affair, and she enclosed in it the slip of paper which she had saved from the burnt letter. It lay on the top, and he noticed the address was that of a bank.

"I will leave these with you to post," she said; "then you will feel quite safe. I shall go down to Hindhead to-morrow and stay a good while, I think. I like watching the spring come. Good-bye; and remember it is by what you _didn't_ say to-night that I measure your sympathy. I don't think I could have stood platitudes."

"My child, I preach to those who are bearing their cross, not to those whom God has nailed to it. Before them I dare only kneel and pray."

"Oh, I felt it! I felt it! Something seemed to come out of you and break my will suddenly. Besides"--she hesitated--"besides, there's always something a woman keeps back, they say. I think, perhaps, he is saved from great unhappiness by what you have made me do to-night. I can't say more, even to you."

"My dear, love is never sent idly, never in vain. It is from our ignorant misuse, our blind misapprehension of its meaning, that the pity and the waste come about. Many a precious purpose is brought to nothing by the world's superstition of the happy ending. In love, as in life, those who seek selfishly forever seek vainly; even as they grasp it, the radiant vision turns a corpse within their arms. It is they who humbly and submissively--no matter how hard the law, how intolerable the accident--follow the inscrutable finger beckoning them from pleasant ways, to stumble upon the road that is narrow and steep and dark, who have their heart's desire given them in the end.... Yes! Who is it?"

There was a knock at the door.

"Please, farver, it's Mrs. Murnane come about Jimmy's charackter for the 'am-and-beef shop."

"Say I'm coming.... Would you like to spend a few minutes with me in the church before you go? We have the Forty Hours' devotion this week. I can let you out by the side door into the street. I suppose you have your car?"

She passed before him down the staircase and along a white-washed corridor, whose bluntly pointed windows and doorways were wreathed by texts in Gothic lettering. Mrs. Murnane, a woman with a commanding eye and great digestive capacity, was sitting on a long bench in the hall; the ham-and-beef aspirant, a knock-kneed lad who seemed to grow more uncertain and wavering of outline as he receded from his enormous boots to his cropped white head, sat by her side with an air of being in custody. Behind the bench successive sessions of unwashed heads had besmeared the wall with a grimy average of height.

The church was dark, and silent too; not with the mere absence of sound, but with a positive and penetrative stillness that seemed to radiate from one white disk, rimmed and rayed with gold, and enthroned, amid a phalanx of tapers and sweet waxen flowers, in one of the side chapels. A lad in a scarlet cassock and laced cotta was extinguishing a guttering candle, almost beyond his reach. As he rose on tiptoe the long pole trembled in his hands like a fishing-rod. Within the rails two men, their heads sunk beneath their shoulders, and without the rails two nuns, in broad white _cornichons_ and turned-back sleeves of serge, watched the host motionlessly. On a votive-wheel near by many tapers, some white, some red, were blazing and dripping. The smell of incense was everywhere.