Chapter XII: Part 12

"Armand, for God's sake!" cried Horatia, agonised at the tone. But he had closed his eyes again; perhaps he did not even hear her. And lying there helpless, broken, ghastly, he was suddenly once more all that he had ever been to her--the lover, triumphant and adorable, who had kissed her in the field of stubble, the married lover of those days in Brittany ... But it was too late now, she saw that; not only too late to save his body, but to make any appeal to the spirit that was leaving it. The time for that was past.

He spoke again, without opening his eyes, very faintly but just as politely. "That glass on the table ... if I might trouble you..." When she stooped over him with it she remembered the doctor's injunction, and, slipping her hand with all possible precaution under his head, raised it only a little way. Even at that movement a contraction passed over his face, and he shut his teeth on a groan. Then he drank, and she lowered his head to the pillow. She longed to touch his hair again, and dared not.

"Thank you," said Armand, and lay silent for a moment, the sweat gathering on his forehead. Then, with an effort, he began again. "I should like, ... while I can ... to speak about the boy.... Perhaps ... an English school ... I believe I put that ... in my will the other day ... but I cannot remember.... He will be like ... you ... when he grows up."

"Oh, I hope not!" was torn, in a whisper, from Horatia.

The expressive eyebrows lifted a fraction. "Mais ... you surely ... do not wish him ... like ... me ... And you ... will marry again, ma chere ... you might marry ce bon Tristan..."

Another pause; and his voice had grown almost inaudible when he added, "I would give you my ... benediction, the benediction ... of a ghost ... It is not long ago ... you told me I ... I did not exist ... you had the gift ... of prophecy..."

This time the pause was longer still. At the foot of the bed, where his last speech had cast her, Horatia was pressing a handful of the sheet against her mouth, lest she should cry out in her own pain. She did not know whether she was saying anything; only she was aware of the thought that these were perhaps the last words she should ever hear from him...

Suddenly, however, quite changed in tone, the voice said--and she was not sure whether it was addressing her or someone else, "Mais, voyez-vous, I am not at all content to be a ghost ... at my age ... except that it is the only way ... to be rid of these damnable bullets ... But if the cure tells you that I was resigned ... do not believe him..."

And with these words, in which youth and strength and the soul which had so lightly companioned them, made their last protest against the wrecking of their habitation, Armand de la Roche-Guyon's head rolled slowly over to one side.

*(2)*

The next thing that Horatia knew was that, somehow the surgeon was in the room again, bending over the bed. "I expected this," she heard him mutter. Then he turned to her abruptly.

"He has only fainted," he said. "He must have tried to move. I shall not revive him, Madame; it is cruel kindness." He stood a moment looking down at the unconscious face. "Poor boy," he added to himself, "he will not die easily.... Now, Madame, I think you had better come away. He will not know you again, I think, and I will stay with him."

"No, no!" exclaimed Horatia, clinging to the pillar of the bed as if she feared to be removed by force. "I will stay--I insist--it is my right! He is quite quiet; I will call you if I need you. Be outside the door! I must stay!"

So he went, and, sitting there, Horatia began her vigil. It was very still. Breaths of the scented June night, poignant of jasmine, came now and then through the open windows, and stirred the candle-flames. For a long time Armand lay without moving; she could only hear his difficult breathing. The screen by the bed was worked with landscapes in silk, autumn scenes of bright brown, amber and gold, like the trees under which they had first met ... But between that first meeting and this---- How could it be that life was so shorn across? She had pictured long years of estrangement, or, perhaps, years when after forgiving him she had tried with a heavy heart to do her duty--and there was this instead. O, if God would only give her those imagined years! And forgiveness--what had that word to do here....

And suddenly in the garden a nightingale began to sing, and that magic voice, with all its thrilling burden of pain and passion, the voice which can never be heard without a stirring of the heart, pierced her like a sword. Crouching down in the chair, her arms across her face to stifle the sound, she wept.

She did not weep for long. As if the bird, or her sobs, had roused him, Armand was drifting back to consciousness; she heard him moan. She sprang up. She would have given everything in the world to speak to him again, but she did not want him to come back to bodily anguish. "Armand, do not wake!" she whispered, the tears streaming down her face. "Sleep, my darling, sleep; do not wake again!" With all her will she strove to push him back; and since he was hers more certainly in unconsciousness, since he could not look at her now with eyes that held mockery and too much remembrance, she bent and kissed him many times, and her tears fell on his hair.

It was vain, for another phantom was flitting before him in the mists of death, drawing him from peace. In a little she knew it. "Laurence, why do you not come?" he began restlessly, and went on begging her at one moment to disregard her scruples, at another not to leave him to die alone, since he had give his life for her. And Horatia, kneeling, frozen, by the bed, learnt from the broken, pregnant sentences all the truth. Whatever his desires, he had never been Laurence's lover. She had to believe him now. Her own name was mingled in the stream. "Horatia does not believe me," said the failing voice. "Leave your scruples, Laurence; she does not believe me." And again, "Why do you send for Horatia? She would not care ... I am nothing to her now ... she told me so."

But chiefly, and with a growing and dangerous agitation, he implored Laurence to come to him, seeming to imagine that he was lying in the wood, that it was dark, and that she would not come. Hardly knowing what she said, stunned by the revelations which at the moment she was not able fully to grasp, Horatia tried to soothe him, calling upon him by all the names of their brief happiness; but to all her efforts he merely responded by crying more insistently for Laurence, Laurence, Laurence, till the name seemed to eat into her brain in letters of fire. At last, at the end of endurance, she got up from the bedside and went dizzily towards a window, towards the air. That Madame de Vigerie's presence might really have power to quiet him never occurred to her; she was too agonised for thought.

Until that moment Armand had not betrayed the slightest consciousness of her, looking always with haunted eyes beyond her for the figure which was not there. But directly she moved away a change came over him, and he seemed suddenly enveloped by a cloud from the past thicker than those in which he wandered. He began to struggle.

"Let me go to her--she is dying ... they have shut the door and will not let me in. Let me go, Emmanuel! I tell you she is dying ... and she was wearing my flowers..."

He tried, ineffectually, to raise himself in the bed, and as Horatia hurried towards him there sprang out on the white sheet, just over his breast, a little crimson patch. For the second or two that she stared at it, terrified, it grew larger, bright and menacing. Gasping, she ran to the door and flung it open, expecting to find the surgeon outside. There was no one there.

To get help, from any quarter, was the sole clamorous idea in Horatia's brain. Opposite her was a door; light streamed from beneath it. In an instant she was across the landing, and had opened it. Only then did she realise whose room she had entered.

Madame de Vigerie was sitting motionless, relaxed, in a chair by the elaborate bed. She had the air of having sat thus for hours. She was still in her riding-habit, stiff, in one place, with Armand's blood; her head was thrown back against the rose-coloured satin of the hangings.

"You must come at once!" cried Horatia. "He is dying!"

Madame de Vigerie rose stiffly, as if she were cramped; her face was absolutely colourless and almost without expression.

"Go back," she said dully. "It is your place. I have no right there."

Horatia fell on her knees, sobbing out, "For God's sake, come! You do not understand--I implore you, I, his wife ... I think a wound has opened ... blood..."

A noisy darkness came down on her; she sank sideways to the floor.

* * * * *

Did it really happen, or was it a vision? She seemed to be back in the room where Armand had taken his farewell of life. It was very quiet now. The oasis of candle-light at the far side of the bed was beginning to be flooded out by the cold waves of dawn; the first birds were already chirping. Armand was where he had craved to be, for Madame de Vigerie had him in her arms. She had lifted him away from the pillow, and his head was lying back on her shoulder. Laurence de Vigerie's own head was bent; she did not move either, but there was that in her attitude which was piercingly maternal--the mother, not the lover, with her dead. For that Armand was gone Horatia was instinctively sure. Billows of mist broke over her, and she seemed to fall...

*(3)*

Long, long afterwards--and yet she knew that it was only next morning--Horatia stood by Emmanuel's side and looked down at what had been Armand. She had shrunk a little from going in, remembering the gloomy catafalque at St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and fearing the sable French palls besprinkled with tears and skulls. It was hard to associate things like that with Armand. She need not have been afraid. The windows were closely curtained, and there were great candles burning at the foot of the bed, and between them a prie-dieu, but nothing of gloom. Even the conventional white flowers were not there; for Horatia slowly realised, with an under-current of wonder, that the spotless drapery of the bed was splashed with trails and mounds of crimson roses.

And Armand lay in the midst of them indifferent and serene, all the traces of his difficult dying smoothed away, the shadow of a smile round his mouth--but as far removed from the lover and husband she had known as from the tortured stranger of last night. The fingers of his uninjured right hand, which alone lay on his breast, held, not the usual crucifix, but a tiny sprig of laurel. Only she who had put it there, and she who now gazed at it, knew why.

The candles were blurred in tears. Emmanuel stooped and kissed the tranquillised dead face.

"Sleep well, my brother," he whispered, using the words he had uttered, with a different thought, not long ago.

Horatia slipped to her knees, and her head sank forward among the roses.

*BOOK III*

*BOOK III*

*LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT*

*CHAPTER I*

*(1)*

The strains of the violin lingered and died away in the October twilight, and the musician, sitting on the deep window-seat of Dormer's rooms at Oriel, took the instrument from under his chin.

"Go on," said his listener, who lay full length on the sofa. But the player shook his head.

"Music is the worst trade under the sun in a blow-up," he observed. "The lyre is only heard in feasts."

Dormer moved. "My dear fellow, you sound gloomy! The present is not a feast, granted, but neither is it a blow-up."

John Henry Newman said nothing, but, with a little sigh, laid the violin and the bow carefully on the window-seat. The fading light gleamed for a moment on his tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, and threw up, as he turned, the great nose and the rather prominent underlip of his lean face.

"I could wish, after all," he said, "that I had not fallen in with the Froudes' plan. I do not really want to leave England just now. I grudge the time, the expense, the trouble. Then suppose I were to fall ill, too. It is quite enough that Hurrell should be an invalid. And yet I suppose it may be a duty to consult for one's health, to enlarge one's ideas, to break one's studies, and to have the name of a travelled man."

"Yet a few weeks ago," commented Dormer, undisturbed, "you seemed pleased about it."

"So I was; in fact, the prospect fairly unsettled me. I remember feeling quite ashamed to be so excited, for it showed me how little real stability of mind I had yet attained.--But I shall go, of course, when term is over."

"It will do you good, now that the Arians are off your hands," said Dormer--"provided that you don't meet with a mishap like mine. Still more, must we hope, will it do Froude good."

"Indeed, we must hope that," answered Froude's friend very gravely, and in the darkening room the shadow of a great apprehension seemed to float for a moment between the two men.

"I wish I were not going to be away from England when the Reformed Parliament meets," resumed the silver-clear voice. "Reform apparently connoting nowadays change at any price, without regard to its direction, we need have no delusions that the threats against the Church which have been dinned into our ears for so long will not be put into execution. I know that Keble is preaching the duty of passivity for us clergy until the Liturgy itself is actually attacked, but if that is what he is waiting for, I don't think he will have to wait long. Revenues to-day, creeds to-morrow. I really incline to the hope that the Whig spirit will keep in, and the Church be set adrift. If this were the case we should be so very independent of things temporal, for we only, as individuals, should suffer."

"You will probably be confirmed in that hope, then," remarked his friend, "when you get abroad and see with your own eyes, as I did, the whole Western Catholic world suffering from the same lack of power because it has compromised with the State for the sake of its endowments."

"That was what struck you in Italy?"

"That, and the infidelity of most of the thinking laity."

"It seems sometimes," said Newman despondently, "as if the gift of truth once lost was lost for ever, and that, with so much infidelity and profaneness, the whole world is tending towards some dreadful crisis."

"Yes," said Dormer, "one is rather tempted to think so sometimes. But perhaps that feeling is an incentive, if we needed one, to set our own house in order."

Newman sighed. "I do believe what you say, in my heart, but there are times, as you know, when it looks as if the Almighty had forsaken His habitation."

Dormer got off the sofa, and came and sat down by him on the window-seat. "You know that you do not really think that, Neander. You are only tired and overworked. I will show you that you don't think it. What was it that you wrote to me in July when the cholera was at its worst here? You said, if I remember rightly, that one's time had come, or it had not come, and that in your case you were sure that it had not, because you felt you were destined for some work which you had not yet accomplished. Do you remember writing that?"

Looking at him, Newman seemed to rouse himself. "I do remember. It was a strong impression that I had just after the fatal case of cholera at Littlemore. I know that a strong impression is not a good argument, yet I have the feeling still at times. But why do you ask me?"

"Because what you feel about yourself--and feel, I am convinced, most rightly--I feel about the English Church. I think that God, instead of leaving His sanctuary, is about to come into it with power. I think that this will mean purgation and suffering for all of us, but that we have deserved. Do you remember the profession of faith that Bishop Ken made in his will?"

"No, I was not brought up on Ken; as I know you were."

"Well, I know it by heart," said Dormer. "'I die in the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Faith, professed by the whole Church before the disunion of East and West, more particularly I die in the communion of the Church of England as it stands distinguished from all papal and puritan innovations, and as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross.' That seems to me to be not only a profession of belief, but a vision of what the Church of England might be if she awoke to the knowledge of what it is really to possess the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Faith."

"Yes, it is a vision, and a 'vision splendid,'" assented Newman, "but--since I have used the phrase--you know how Mr. Wordsworth continues, how--

'At length the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day.'"

"It has not really faded; it cannot fade. It is our eyes that have forgotten how to look at it. No," went on Dormer with a sudden smile, "I would rather think that the vision seems to have faded because its guardians have shrouded it up, and then gone to sleep."

"You think, then," said Newman, with an answering smile, "that it is for us to wake them up?"

"Yes," confessed his friend, "or, if that is impossible, to break through ourselves and unveil the vision."

"Sometimes you remind me of Froude," said Newman musingly, "except that he has more of the schoolboy about him.... I think you have the real light, and I only a glimmer that comes and goes, and gives me just enough guidance for the day's journey and no more.... But as to these slumbering guardians," he continued, rousing himself from his own reflections, "have you ever thought any more about that idea of yours, the publishing something in a cheap short form--a sort of tracts--to stir people up?"

"No," said Dormer, "I made a present of it to you. In fact I have been wondering if you had thought of it again. It's not in my line, you know."

"My dear fellow, what nonsense! Yes, it did occur to me the other day how it would be exactly the kind of thing that a group of friends like ourselves might manage very well--sharpshooting, as it were. I will talk seriously of it to Froude when we meet. I have another scheme, however, that is more feasible at present. Now that Rose has started the 'British Magazine' I thought we might have a poetical section in it to rouse people to realise that there is a crisis. I am going to look for recruits. We will get Keble to write for it, of course, and you and I, and Isaac Williams, and I shall enlist Rogers if I can--and what about your friend Hungerford?"

"Tristram may have his faults," said Dormer, laughing, "but of the crime of writing verses he is, so far as I know, absolutely guiltless."

"Oh, anybody can write verses," pronounced Newman cheerfully, taking up his violin.

When Newman had gone Dormer lit a lamp and sat down to his translation of Andrewes (having the habit of forcing himself, regardless of his own inclinations, to work at stated hours). But he had not got very far before he suddenly pushed books and papers away, and flinging out his arms on the table, buried his face in them. How dared he think that he was worthy to set his hand to the unveiling of that shrouded vision! And yet, and yet...

Later, he was standing looking out of the window across the dark quadrangle, where, against a clear sky already pierced with one or two stars, Merton tower lifted its crown of pinnacles. He felt rather lonely, and wished that Tristram would come in. But Tristram was in London. Then he remembered, with pleasure, that they would meet to-morrow at Compton, where he himself was going over to preach for Mr. Grenville, and where Tristram also had arranged to spend a couple of nights on his homeward journey to Oxford.

He went back to his writing-table, but he was still thinking of the same person. Since Tristram, having yielded to Keble's and Newman's wish that he should not leave Oxford, was working in the parish of S. Thomas's he had taken his place naturally among the little group of Oriel friends. Yet, in spite of all this, Dormer felt that somehow or other he knew less about him. He could not but observe that he seemed happier and more settled, and when, after the death of Horatia's husband, he heard him discussing with Froude the idea of a college of unmarried priests he was not so very greatly surprised. He wished that Tristram would talk sometimes about his own affairs, but he would comfort himself with the thought that Tristram could always now, if he desired it, have access to that guide and inspiration of them all, John Keble.

*CHAPTER II*

*(1)*

A sort of holiday feeling not very difficult to account for enveloped Tristram Hungerford as he walked over the Downs this September afternoon with his face set towards Compton Regis. His short sojourn in London with relatives of his father's had made him feel, as usual, the gulf between himself and these good and pious people, which had sprung into existence when he was sent to a public school, had widened when he went to Oxford, and was fairly yawning now that he had become a High Churchman. It was not unnatural that he should look forward to his stay, with Dormer, in a more congenial atmosphere, rather as a schoolboy looks forward to an exeat, and it chimed with his mood that he must leave the coach at Lambourn and walk to Compton over the Downs. It was good to have the short springy grass once more underfoot, to breathe again that light intoxicating air, to see the great rolling distances which had been his inheritance since boyhood. Oxford and work were good, but this was good too.

Tristram had been rather happy these last months, for Keble had told him that, contrary to what he himself felt, he had much to offer, and so at his ordination as deacon he at last took the step from which only an obstinate humility had been holding him back, and, in his own mind, dedicated himself to the single life.

He had also been very busy. St. Thomas's, the most populous and the most degraded parish in Oxford, lay, a beggar full of sores, almost at the gates of Christ Church, in whose gift was the living. Its incumbent, who was also precentor of the Cathedral, did not reside in the parish; indeed it would have been hard to find, in that huddle of old houses, a suitable dwelling. Dirt, squalor, and vice reigned everywhere. The little twelfth century church, dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, was damp and in ill-repair, though it had recently been repewed; during the flood its aisle was often under water. It was opened only for service on Sundays. Tristram Hungerford resolved that there should be a parson in the parish, and, letting his house at Compton Parva, he took rooms in Hollybush Row, undismayed by the open ditch which ran along in front of his window. His coming was not looked upon with favour in a district given over to thieves and prostitutes. It was not without considerable personal risk that he visited the narrow winding passages between the dirty old seventeenth century houses; the men who lurked there regarded him as a spy, the women screamed abuse. He was more than once warned of plans to set on him some dark night. The warning had only the effect of making him more determined to remain where he was; he had no objection at all to the idea of a scuffle, and it may have been this evident readiness, joined to the appearance which he bore of being a man of his hands, which secured him against actual molestation.

He had also another ally, the cholera, which, starting in June with two fatal cases at the Castle gaol, in the parish of St. Thomas's itself, swept the south-west quarter of Oxford before it migrated to the north-west, and the suburb of St. Clement's. For the lost three months Tristram had been to the district doctor, nurse--and friend.

And was it, he sometimes wondered, because he moved daily in activity and peril, or was he so profoundly changed that the news of Armand's death--amazing in its sudden tragedy--had so little effect upon him? He was indeed deeply grieved for Horatia. He thought of her as heart-broken. For after he had seen her in Paris he had come definitely to the conclusion, already dawning on him there, that the change in her was not due in any way to Armand, but to her new relatives. He still had an uneasiness for which he could not account, but Mr. Grenville having, by the exercise of great discretion and self-restraint, kept Horatia's secret, there was nothing to make him suspect the real state of affairs. Hence when, only about a fortnight ago, the Rector had suddenly told him most of the truth about Armand he was divided between anger and pity, but the revelation did not seem to affect him personally. He was curiously absorbed in his work; since his services during the cholera he had been very differently received in the dens of St. Thomas's, and had even had a transient success when, (encouraged by the fact that during the epidemic the Senior Proctor had provided daily Morning and Evening Prayer in the House of Observation in St. Aldate's), he began to read it in the church, hoping that it might attract those who had escaped or recovered from the scourge. At first he had a sprinkling of people, then two or three, then he read the service in an echoing silence, but, having begun, he continued to read it.

He nourished indeed a hope that one day this little fast-closed church, named for an English saint and so typically English with its quiet graveyard and its ancient yew, might mean something to those who lived round it, that it might be a home to them, like the always-open churches he had seen in Italy. More, having now a practical experience of the bitter spiritual needs of the poor in a small neglected town parish, he indulged sometimes in what he felt to be an almost chimerical vision, of a church, spacious and beautiful as it might be, set in some great manufacturing town where life was thickly pent and had no hope or outlet--a church for the poor, served by the poor. When he was tired, which was not unseldom, he used to think of this dream structure of his, even picturing some of its architectural details. Of late he had admitted Dormer to the same occupation, and though to the latter the grimy surroundings of the imaginary fabric were clearly not an attraction, as they were to its original designer, the idea gained substance from his participation in it. Having ruled out galleries, family pews and the Royal arms, settled that the holy table should not only be fenced off from desecration, but that it should be restored to the position at present usurped by the pulpit, they--or rather Dormer--had even gone so far as to decide on the dedication. Hence at this very moment, while his eyes were fixed on a great white bastion of cloud rising exultant over the sky-line, Tristram was thinking that if his dining-room table at Compton, relic of the solid hospitality of Clapham days, was to be used in the refectory of the attached college of priests, the said college would have to be built on a more generous scale than Dormer seemed to think necessary; he should tell him so this evening. It would be a waste to sell that table.

He began to walk faster, exulting in the wind that resisted him, in the song of the larks above him, in the great cloud, in the wonderful feeling both of loneliness and of life at the highest pitch. Scraps of that incomparable Te Deum, the hundred and forty-eighth Psalm, came into his mind--"Praise the Lord upon earth, ye dragons and all deeps; fire and hail, snow and vapours; wind and storm, fulfilling his word; mountains and all hills, fruitful trees and all cedars..."

At this point he perceived, rather to his astonishment, that he was not alone upon the Downs. About a quarter of a mile off two people had emerged upon the smooth curve of the hill that rose before him, walking swiftly, a sheep-dog heralding their way. They must have come up by the old track in the hollow to have remained hidden until that moment, thought Tristram as he idly watched them. They were too far off for him to see anything distinctive; he could make no guess at their identity, only, by their movements, they were young, and they were man and woman. But as he looked a curious interest seized upon him. It seemed to him almost as if the pulsing life around had centred in these two figures, instinct with joy and youth.

They reached the summit of the hill. A lark rose in the sky, a tiny speck against the cloud; the wind fluttered the woman's dress. Suddenly they stopped, turned, and kissed each other. There was no trace of courting or of timidity in the action; it was beautiful and fitting, as though the sun and wind had met together and praised God for the fulness of joy. The dog leapt round them barking. In another instant they were walking on as quickly as before, till they were swallowed up in a dip of the Downs.

Tristram had stopped too. In less time than it takes a pebble to fall from a cliff, the sun, the wind, the clouds, the very grass were clothed in a new significance. This, the close of the great Psalm, this was the highest thing that existence had to offer, and he was putting it by--he was putting by deliberately, with the hand of a madman, the draught which it was no longer sin to contemplate. Those two figures! He flung himself down on the ground, the lark's song beating in his brain, and prayed passionately to know the same joy before life was done.

*(2)*

Two hours later, as he drew near Compton Rectory, he saw down the long road a horseman cantering towards him on the wayside grass. In all his life Tristram had known only two men who sat a horse with so supreme an ease; one was his friend, the other his rival. And at that moment he could have wished it were Armand risen, from his bloody grave.

Dormer came on; drew rein and bent down. "I thought it was you," he said as they shook hands. "I guess that you left the coach at Lambourn and walked over the Downs."

"I did," answered Tristram.

"That must have been delightful," remarked the other, and Tristram, without answering, opened the Rectory gate and watched him pass in.

There was no denying that the Rector had aged during the past year, but to-night he was quite rejuvenated.

"I am really not without hopes of having Horatia home for Christmas," he announced, as they sat down to dinner. "Of course you know, Mr. Dormer, that I lost my son-in-law last June under very tragic circumstances. He took part in the rising organised by that misguided woman the Duchesse de Berry, and was shot, poor boy, by the soldiers of the Government. A dreadful business; he died in my daughter's arms. The shock completely prostrated her, as you may imagine; she was ill for some time, then there were endless legal formalities, and it is only now that she talks of being able to come over and pay me a long visit at Christmas."

"Does she not intend to make her home in England?" asked Dormer.

"She wishes to, naturally," replied Mr. Grenville, "and by French law she can do as she likes, but whether poor Armand's relatives will bring pressure to bear to keep her in France I don't know. I try not to meet trouble half-way. At any rate she will be here for Christmas. There will be a child in the house again; Christmas seems to demand that. And to think that you have both seen my grandson since I have!"

Neither of the young men waxed communicative on the subject of the infant; Dormer, indeed, had suddenly become rather thoughtful.

"Tristram, you will have to come over here at Christmas-time," went on the Rector. "We must hang up a stocking for Maurice. They don't keep Christmas in France, I understand."

Tristram murmured something about being busy at Christmas, and that he would be taking his priest's orders just before that festival.

"Oh, I daresay you'll be able to manage it," said the Rector easily. "A few days in the country now and then would set you up, living as you do in that plague-spot. By the way, I hear you exposed yourself very unnecessarily in the cholera there--most laudable of course, but you young men are so rash. It's just the same with this foolish and shocking idea of throwing over the supremacy of the State which you have got into your heads. Church and State, to any right-thinking mind, are as inseparable as body and soul, and it will be a black day for England if they are ever torn apart. How you, Mr. Dormer, with your ultra-Tory ancestry ... but there, I suppose it is just because they _were_ Non-jurors that the idea is not as repugnant to you as it ought to be."

"Dormer's not a Tory, Rector," remarked Tristram. "He's a Radical, like me, now."

"Oh, indeed," returned Mr. Grenville, not much perturbed. "Well, I won't upset your convictions; but, Tories or Radicals, I don't fancy you will welcome this new Parliament of ours when we get it."

"Why not, Mr. Grenville?" asked Dormer.

"Because, if ever there was a middle-class measure, it is this Reform Act! You mark my words, it will be worse, not better, for the poor man now than under the old state of things."

"I fully agree with you," observed Dormer.

"It is quite pathetic," pursued the Rector, "to see how every class thinks the Millennium is coming because of the extension of the franchise. Wages are going to rise, and the price of corn is going to fall.... No, what is really wanted is Poor Law reform. Am I not right, Tristram?"

Tristram wearily agreed. It seemed to him that the evening would never end. He only desired one thing, to be alone. In the study after dinner the Rector rallied him once or twice on his silence, and he was half afraid to meet Dormer's eyes, which always saw so much. Yet when at last Mr. Grenville, taking up his own candlestick, had said paternally, "Now don't you young men stay talking here till the small hours," and himself departed to bed, Tristram sat down again by the fire, lest the abrupt exit which he longed to make should either wound his friend or give him cause for speculation. And he then embarked on such an unnecessarily detailed account of the pressing need of better drainage, not only in the parish of St. Thomas's but also in St. Clement's, in fact throughout the whole of Oxford, that his somewhat unresponsive listener came to the conclusion that he was thoroughly overdone oy the cholera, and suggested of his own accord that they should go to bed.

*CHAPTER III*

*(1)*

Great things were vouchsafed on Saturday, the 14th of December, 1832, to Mrs. Polly White, sister and correspondent of Mrs. Martha Kemblet, for, it being the day on which she went to "do" at the Rectory, she was enabled to combine the fine drawing of a tablecloth (an art in which she was proficient) with the sight of the arrival of Miss Horatia and the Rector, the precious babe and her own sister. Mr. Grenville had gone to Dover to meet the packet, and the party was expected from Oxford, by chaise, some time in the afternoon.

The village was all agog about Horatia's return, and some spirits, lacking delicacy rather than enthusiasm, had entertained the idea of an evergreen arch across the Rectory gate, to bear the words "Welcome Home," and to be adorned with such decorations as had survived from the Coronation festivities fifteen months before. The impropriety of so receiving a newly-made widow having been pointed out, gossip had then spent itself in speculations as to how Miss 'Ratia would look, not only in her weeds, poor dear, but in the status of a French countess, or whatever she was, for it was felt that in some way she would be a different person from the Miss 'Ratia they had known. One old man, however, dratting them all, announced his unalterable intention of putting a couple of lighted candles in his window, for if his darter had taken and married a Frenchy, and had come home again after so disastrous a step, widder or no widder, he should consider it a clear case of "This my darter wur dead, and be alive again; and wur lost and be found." Such was indeed the general feeling in Compton Regis, where only a few impressionable damsels were found to remark that Miss 'Ratia's husband had been a proper young man, and that 'twas a gurt pity he had been killed in them foreign wars.

Mrs. White deplored all this chatter though she would fain have contributed to it. When, therefore, about four o'clock, Ellen rushed into the room where she was working to say that the chaise was turning in at the gate, she flew with the rest of the domestics to the front door. And thus, curtseying like them, she was privileged to see the black and yellow post-chaise from the _Angel_ at Oxford draw up at the steps, to behold the Rector emerge and assist to alight, first a lady in the deepest mourning, a long crape veil such as Mrs. White had never seen covering her from head to foot, secondly, a foreign-looking nurse or nursemaid (disliked by Mrs. White on the spot, though bearing a priceless burden), and lastly her own dear comfortable, capable sister, not changed a bit. And she saw the Comtesse put back her long veil, and come up the steps on her father's arm, looking that sweet, but so sad! The Rector, poor dear gentleman, seemed moved, as who wouldn't be. Miss 'Ratia, when you saw her in the light, was older, a little, and thin in the cheeks, but the weeds set off her hair and complexion beautiful. As for the lovely infant, he was asleep, and Mrs. White preferred in any case to view him when Martha could act as show-woman. And so, as the party mounted the stairs, she returned to her napery, hoping that her sister would shortly appear.

But Martha was indeed unchanged, and it was not until things were "to her liking," the nurse properly installed, the child in bed, her mistress's trunks unpacked, and her mistress at table with his Reverence, that she permitted herself to seek out and to embrace her sister. Then, due greeting and inquiries having passed, Mrs. Kemblet, seated in a restful chair, began her desired narration.

"I wish I could have got my lamb to go to bed at once, and have her dinner there. However, she's a sight stronger than she was, and has stood the journey wonderful, considering. Rough it was, too, and the packet rolling something horrible. But here we all are safely, thanks to One Above, and the infant none the worse, though a trifle fractious, bless his heart!"

"Ah, but what _she_ must have been through, Martha!" said Mrs. White feelingly.

This was a whip to a willing horse. "You may well say that, Polly," responded her sister. "What with being fetched like that all sudden at night, to find the poor young gentleman weltering in an agony--for he was shot something terrible, they said--and him dying in her arms (all unprepared, too, I'm afraid), and then going back to Paris with his body, and the household off their heads, and the funeral--I don't know what we should have done without the elder one, the Marquis as they call him..."

"Dear, dear!" ejaculated Mrs. White, as the narrator paused for breath. "And where was the poor young man buried, then?"

"At the grand family place where we was during the cholera time.... Well, to go back to the dreadful occurrence" (impossible to deny that there was relish in Mrs. Kemblet's tone over these words) "when Miss Horatia gets this letter and rushes off to this place, St. Clair, without even telling me where she was going, we couldn't none of us do anything till the Marquis comes back next morning early. Off he goes then to St. Clair; then he comes back and says his brother is lying dead in the big house there, having been shot in the wood by the Government soldiers, and that he is going to have him brought away, and to fetch Miss Horatia too. And, by and by, they brought him, carrying him on a bier with a flag over him, not that red, white, and blue thing they use now in France, but the old one, the white one. And they laid him in the chapel at his own place, where we was, with candles all burning; hardly Christian in a way, not being in a coffin, but I must say he looked beautiful, and when I went in to see him, I cried like a baby; for though I always begrudged him having Miss Horatia, and never trusted him, it did seem dreadful him being cut off like that, so young; and I daresay he would have settled down if he had been spared."

Mrs. White wiped her sympathetic eyes, but caught at the last words. "He wasn't what you'd call a good husband to Miss Horatia then?"

"I don't say that," returned Martha, slightly stiffening. "All them young men over there are wild," she explained, with an air of profound acquaintance with Gallic youth. "The less said about it the better, that's my motto. And really I begun to wonder if I'd not been mistook, seeing the state my poor lamb was in after he was killed. For weeks after we got back to Paris she could not sleep without I was in the little room off hers--always seeing him in her dreams she was, and calling out that he was bleeding to death, and begging him to forgive her--the Lord knows why--and imploring someone to go to him. She fainted on the day of the funeral; a grand funeral it was, with a Bishop to bury him, and a sermon saying he was a martyr for the altar and the throne, whatever that meant. The old Madam nearly went out of her mind over it all, she was that fond of the Count. Then when she--the old one--was quieted down a bit nothing would serve but she must be having the child up in her nasty stuffy bedroom at all hours of the day, saying it was all that was left her, and things like that."

"But surely Miss Horatia had something to say to that?"

Martha leant forward very impressively. "You mark my words, Polly, there's going to be a tussle over that child! You and me thinks he's English, bless him, because he's Miss Horatia's, but by law he's French, and belongs over there, and you wouldn't believe the difficulty there's been about our leaving Paris. I've not been told, and it's not for me to ask, whether we're coming here on long visits, or whether my Lady will make her home here. But this I do say, they've got their eye on him, the poor innocent, and it'll be worse as he grows up."

"What a shame!" said Mrs. White indignantly. "And he no older than my Harriet's Willy!"

Mrs. Kemblet rose with majesty, and with majesty she replied, "That's as it may be, but I don't think you realise, Polly, that when the old Duke and his son dies, there'll be only one life between the Count asleep upstairs and the dukedom."

"Lor!" ejaculated Mrs. White.

And by the child upstairs there stood his grandfather and his mother, looking down at him in his rosy abandonment of slumber.

"Papa, he was very fond of him," said Horatia at last, and turning, she threw herself weeping into her father's arms.

*CHAPTER IV*

*(1)*

All through the falling of the leaves--the creeper leaves that dropped slowly, resplendent in death, from college walls, the narrow willow leaves that were whirled floating on to the streams, the leaves that made a carpet, the leaves that were like rain, the leaves that laughed as they fell, the leaves that fluttered to the ground like wounded birds--Tristram wrestled with the angel of bewilderment.

Not even Dormer could help him. He had known that from the night at the Rectory. The matter was too intimately between himself and God; he must struggle through alone. And though, when he was back in Oxford, Dormer had come and sought him out in his lodgings, in order to tell him that he thought he was overworking, and ought to spare himself a little more, Tristram merely said that he was quite well, and let him go without a sign.

He was in a mist of anguish and perplexity. If he could only see the path, he told himself, he was ready to follow it, however sharp its flints. But where lay his road? If that reawakened desire of his, hidden from his own eyes till the wind of the Downs had rent the curtain, were sin, then he would cut it from him, at whatever cost. For even then the self that prayed with such intensity for happiness was so much the captive of a surrendered will that at the last it had struggled towards obedience with _Non voluntas mea_....

But how could his desire be sin? He was not a Roman Catholic priest; he was a member of a body where marriage was almost expected. Even if, at his ordination, his intention had been plain to himself, he had taken no formal vow of celibacy. Newman, in spite of his ascetic views, thought that vows were foolish, and showed a lack of trust in Providence. Moreover, might not Horatia's sudden liberation be a sign that she was meant for him after all? And how could she hinder him in his work?--she would be a help to any man. He thought of what she might be as a companion, as an inspiration. And he wanted her for herself; he wanted the warm and ordered joys of home. Was that wrong? How could such desires be wrong, when God Himself had implanted them? Had not Jeremy Taylor called marriage "the nursery of heaven?"

But he knew now that this very exaltation of marriage by the Christian Church was only the other side of her exaltation of virginity. This lost truth, the heart of early asceticism--positive offence though it was even to persons who prided themselves on taking literally every other Gospel precept--he had learnt unwillingly enough. He too had found it a hard saying, but like his friends at Oriel, having once admitted it, he could not conveniently forget it. And though these men, because of their intense belief in the Divine plan for every individual life, would never presume to demand from him that he should not marry, yet, with their severe ideals, they would certainly expect that he should not go back on a line once chosen. And he had chosen; no use to deny that. He knew, if no other human being knew, how deeply he was committed to the idea of the life without ties. It was impossible for him to blink the fact that, had Horatia not become free, he would have gone on in the direction in which his mind was set. This present hesitation meant, then, that when, in his heart, he had made a dedication of his life to God, it was only because the one woman he wanted had been taken from him--an offering, as he had always felt, but little worth, though the best that he could bring. But now, now that the offering was to cost him more dear, he was desirous of taking it back again. And he reflected how such conduct would appear in worldly matters. It did not seem to him that its transference to another plane of values would render it any the more creditable.

Yes, said another voice, but you cannot set your relations with the Almighty on a sort of business footing. Do you imagine that the Architect of the Universe keeps a strict ledger account with the dust he has called into being, that he does not know the weak and childish heart of it, and accept its poor offerings, not like a merchant, but like a king?

To and fro went the warring armies in his soul, while his body carried him about his business among the poor of St. Thomas's. But all the time the tide of combat was setting in one direction, and at last he knew it.

There was a certain old woman in one of the courts to whom he used to read every day. Though dirty and illiterate she was methodical and self-willed, and, oblivious of the lessons of the day, selected what book of the Bible she pleased to be read straight through to her. In this way, after a course of Deuteronomy, she had pitched upon St. Mark.

"You was reading yesterday, Sir, how we should cut off our 'ands and feet and cast them into 'ell fire," she observed one morning as Tristram sat down in her little room. "It seems a 'ard thing to be told to do, don't it?"

Scarcely encouraged by this result of his ministrations, Tristram promptly turned to the end of the ninth chapter and re-read the passage, trying to explain as simply as possible its meaning. But the attitude of the old dame was that of one taking her stand on the rock of the Word--"the Good Book says so, and it don't become us to say otherwise"--and after a while, seeing that his exegesis was making no impression, he desisted, and went on to the tenth chapter. He was reading it, truth to tell, without attending much to the words, his mind occupied half unconsciously with the eternal conflict, when he found that he was in the midst of the story of the young ruler, and that his lips were repeating the familiar words, "One thing thou lackest ... sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor ... and come, take up the cross, and follow Me."

All the rest of the day the story kept running in his head. He could not quite think why, except that it was one of those scenes in the Gospel, dealing with an individual, which had always interested him. With his mother's charity he had often hoped that the young ruler came back after all. He remembered once having a talk with Dormer, who said that there was some sort of tradition that he returned, but that he, Dormer, thought there was very little ground for such a hope. On the same occasion he had enunciated a theory which Tristram had thought rather austere--that certain people, often good people, who had kept the commandments from their youth up, could only be saved at all by enduring hardness. Such people were constantly asked to make decisions involving sacrifice, and whereas others seemed able to compass the heavenly ascent by a tolerably easy road, they, if they were to reach the same summit, must climb by a very different path.