Chapter XV: Part 15

"I should not be quite prepared to say that," replied Dormer, looking rather staggered, "but I am quite certain of one thing. If you have been able to forgive so wholeheartedly the irreparable injury done to you, I do not think that you will have long to wait for the assurance of your own forgiveness." He hesitated, as if he were not sure whether he should say more, and taking up one of the Christmas roses from the saucer, looked at it intently for a moment. Then he went on, "You understand, do you not, that the power of the keys is in the Church of England, and that those who cannot quiet their own consciences (as the Exhortation says) have a right to avail themselves of it. I think you should do so. That God has forgiven you I have no doubt, but even if after absolution you should have to wait for that conviction, you will be able to take it as your penance, remembering that the forgiven soul does not want to escape, it longs for the cleansing fires which alone can fit it for the presence of its Lord."

"I should deserve to wait for the feeling of forgiveness, but am I to think that this also is the penalty of sin, that God is pursuing me and tracking me down? He is taking Tristram from me; what more does He want?"

Dormer leant forward, and spoke very quietly, but with great intensity. "It is you yourself that He wants. He is stripping you of everything because by love or by fear He will save you. From all eternity you have belonged to the God Who died for you. Everything in your life and in your circumstances has existed in order to bring you nearer to Him. Even now, when you have misused His gifts, your sin and your suffering can be turned by His mercy into the means of bringing you back to Him. But it is on one condition. You must submit. You must give up your will to Him."

"But how can I give up my will, when all my life I have followed my own way?"

"Our Lord will show you how, if you ask Him. He will teach you by degrees, do not doubt that."

"I think I hardly understand what you mean," said Horatia with great hesitation, "but if I pray to be able to do this, will He--will our Lord save me from myself, and shall I in the end find rest?"

Dormer did not answer at once. He looked up (it seemed to Horatia unconsciously) at the print over the hearth, and she heard him sigh.

"Yes, He will save you, but it will be by the Cross; for it is only in the Cross that there is safety, and in the Cross that there is rest. If you go back to France, and bring up your son in the best traditions of his family, your life will be full, and not empty. That is where you must look for comfort. Think of what it means to have a child, your own child, to give back to God. It is a high vocation and peace waits for you. I think God has sent you a child to show you where to find it."

As he went to open the door for her she said, "Mr. Dormer, there is something else ... I should like you to feel that you can say anything--I mean that you can tell Tristram anything about me which you think can help him. It is worse for him than for me. I shall write to him, of course, but you will know what to say.... He will be so ... so hurt."

*CHAPTER XI*

*(1)*

The stone-rimmed basin in the old Physic Garden, fringed with a few yellowing reeds, held water that seemed as black as night, water that reflected, clear and blacker still, the bare interlaced boughs of a great tree beside it. And in this dark net, like a silver fish entangled in waterweeds, lay the shining half-moon, brilliant already, though it was only half-past four of a December afternoon. It was an afternoon, too, of extraordinary radiance, as if to mark that herald day of Christmas when the longing of the Church, no more to be suppressed, bursts through the monitory thoughts of Advent, in pure joy and expectation, with the first of the great antiphons of Magnificat, and hails as the Eternal Wisdom the Child so soon to come.

But there was nothing of this in the heart of the man who sat, his head in his hands, on a seat by the little pond. Reading, an hour ago, in his lodgings, the letter which he had just returned from Northamptonshire to find, he had felt that he must get out, away--anywhere--and pushing up the narrow, screaming High Street of St. Thomas's, past the Castle keep, had come, through St. Ebbe's, full on to the front of Christ Church, looking, in the golden light, like the battlements of an ethereal city. But he had gone blindly forward, and found himself, at last, in the old walled garden which had seen so many generations of flower and seed.

Horatia's letter had been quite ordinary, speaking of the child, of his future, the necessity of her care, the joy that he was to her. But, of course, she understood ... And three years ago he would willingly have died for her; now he could not even live for her! As for his own letter of last week, he could not think how he had ever brought himself to write it--and yet were it to write again, he must have said the same. He belonged, now, body and soul, to a force whose demands on some lives were so exorbitant as to come into mortal conflict even with the best and holiest human claims.

He ought never to have gone to Compton; he ought to have left Oxford, at whatever cost of unkindness. He could not say that it had been only pain to go and see her, and since he could not even now accuse himself of having done or said anything amiss, it must have been that his pleasure was visible.... He felt an outcast, a pariah. How deeply he had sinned against God he could not fathom, but he had sinned, it seemed to him irretrievably, against the code in which he had been brought up. For if he was a Christian and a priest he was a gentleman, too ... or had been.

The thought of Dormer came into his mind as he sat there. Dormer would understand--he would despise him, no doubt, but he would understand. He could never tell him. He was sitting among his books in that well-known room scarcely a quarter of a mile away, yet a thousand miles might be between them. He could never tell him, because of Horatia. Besides, he had lost the habit of close intercourse.

And in his misery he did not know that Dormer was at that moment standing on the other side of the basin, looking at him, across the drowned moon, with the profoundest tenderness, wondering whether he could speak to him now. Only, after a while, he was conscious of someone on the seat beside him, and felt an arm laid across his shoulders.

"Tristram, Tristram, don't sit here in the cold like this.... Come to my rooms.... I know all about it--she has told me; I have seen her and she wants me to tell you that she understands.... You must not take it so hardly; it is all quite simple, and ... and wonderful, it seems to me.... My dear, dear fellow, I don't want to pester you, but if you would only come away..." Dormer's voice, ordinarily so cool and restrained, broke suddenly.

There was a silence; Tristram did not move. A London coach rolled over the bridge; the chimes of Magdalen struck a quarter to five. Dormer slowly took away his arm.

And at that Tristram removed one of his hands from his face, and put it out gropingly towards him.

"Carissime..."

*(2)*

The actual writing of the letter to Tristram had not cost Horatia the effort that she had anticipated. She hardly felt, indeed, what she was renouncing, for everything was swallowed up in the sense of rest, a feeling that was partly a physical reaction, due to the intensity of the emotional strain of her interview with Dormer. She seemed to be floating in a sea of such mental and spiritual relief as she had not known for years. Such peace as she had compassed in the summer--she knew it now--had only been a drugged peace after all.

She had had to tell her father. That had not been easy. Yet she had, somehow, dominated his bitter disappointment. She did not show him Tristram's letter, but she did not keep from him the fact that she had been to Oriel. Perfectly calm, and not, apparently, in an exalted state, she yet produced on the Rector the impression of some change so profound as to make her seem another person. He was, if the truth be told, a little alarmed.

But it was the letter which, two days later, she was obliged to write to the Duchesse that really showed Horatia what she was losing. Madame de la Roche-Guyon had said that she should have her own establishment if she wished. It occurred to Horatia, rather bitterly, how much to be envied she would seem to her friends--young, titled, rich, her own mistress, with the entree to the most exclusive society in the world; and yet--and yet, even with the child, all these advantages were as a pinch of dust. Better to be by Tristram's side in some tiny parsonage, in some dull village...

And when this really came home to her she suddenly threw down the pen and covered her face, an action which was the cause of the straggling blot on the page which, later, drew forth from the Duchesse strictures on the untidiness of the English.

But Horatia, neglecting the blot, took up the pen again and went on without flinching to the end. In spite of the sense of suffering, she had something which she had not before. For the first time in her life she could really pray. And already, on this and the days that followed, she had some inkling of what Dormer had meant, some taste of the peace that truly comes to the resigned will. In this ocean of rest she lived for some days, thinking sometimes how wonderful it was that it should have enclosed her, with all her turbulent desires, in so sudden a gentleness, but not unconscious that its waves broke quietly over a rock of regret.

*(3)*

"Darling, what are you doing?" she exclaimed, coming suddenly into the study, and surprising her father on his hands and knees on the hearthrug, surrounded by a medley of objects, and trying to stuff something into a large stocking--trying also, with incomplete success, to hide from her both stocking and litter.

"Well, my dear, Christmas will be upon us before very long, and I thought I would try whether they will go in," said the Rector, attempting to pull out the bulky object, which, having refused to enter the stocking now equally refused to be extracted.

He looked ten years older than he had done at the time of their conversation in the night nursery a few days ago. Horatia's heart smote her as--not for the first time--she realised the change, and her eyes were full of tears when, kneeling down by him she put her arms round him and kissed the white hair by his temple.

"Dearest Papa, you can't be going to give him all those toys; it will be so bad for him! Keep some of them for next Christmas."

She had said it without thinking.

"And where ... where will he be then?" asked her father rather gulpily. A single tear splashed on to the drum which he had succeeded in pulling from the stocking. Horatia bit her lip hard.

"I think, dear, that we shall always come home for Christmas. Or else you will come to us. You will have a curate soon; you know we discussed it the other day, and then you will be so free.--What a splendid drum! Where did you get all these things, you secretive old Papa? Surely not in Oxford?"

"I bought them when I was in London the other day, at the Soho Bazaar. I was thinking that we should have such a pleasant Christmas...."

A stab went through Horatia's heart. That broken vision of his was in her mind too--the Christmas hearth, Tristram with the child in his arms, prefigurement of what should be henceforward ... and what would now never be.

"It will be Maurice's third Christmas," went on the Rector, with an attempt at cheerfulness, thinking from her silence and averted face that he had been too cruel. "I made up my mind last Christmas that he should have----"

A knock caused him to scramble hastily from his unwonted position. Horatia jumped up and went to the door. Martha stood there.

"Please, Mam, would you come to the nursery. I don't think Master Maurice seems quite himself."

Horatia was gone before the Rector had got to his chair. She was back in a few minutes.

"Papa, if I may I shall send Sam Dawes for the doctor. I don't think it is anything serious, at least I hope not, but he seems so drowsy and feverish, and he has been very sick, poor darling."

"He was quite well this morning," observed the Rector, astonished. "Indeed, he was making such a great noise in here that I could hardly get on with my sermon."

*(4)*

Maurice de la Roche-Guyon, who was to have a drum and many other delights on his third Christmas Day, did not seem likely to receive these now, though as he lay, flushed and brilliant-eyed, chattering to himself, his rambling talk ran sometimes on his small possessions.

"A child to give back to God." All through the two long agonising nights and days the words echoed in Horatia's head, with those others "He is stripping you of everything." Every few hours the doctor came, and there was never any change, except that Maurice's breathing seemed to get more and more rapid as his lungs consolidated. And Horatia could do nothing, for now she could not even pray.

"He is stripping you of everything." Then He wanted from her the last thing, the best thing, the thing incomparably the dearest, not the baby she had refused to look at, not the baby who had been a delightful toy at Plaisance, a growing interest in England, but her own child, her very own, to hold through the years against sorrow and change, to be, not her comfort but her existence, not a consolation for what she had lost, but life itself. And set against it all, inexorable, "a child to give back to God"--not hers at all, but only a treasure lent...

"O God, save Maurice--take the rest, take everything, I give it willingly, only save Maurice! I will give him back to You in the end, only leave him a little longer!" But she believed that her prayers could not pierce the thick cloud that hung now between her and the Christ she had so lately come to know, though she never doubted that prayer could reach Him--the prayer of a heart that prayed always...

Downstairs were the floods of toys, the half-filled stocking, the holly and the mistletoe; up here the gift of gifts was going away from her.

"O God, make me so that I can pray to You...."

But there was only Maurice asking, in his shrunk little voice of delirium, for something to drink.

*(5)*

It was always rather dark in St. Thomas's, and what daylight remained to the December afternoon hung nearly vanquished in the little church. It had been much lighter when Tristram, unlocking the door, had come in over the planks laid along the aisle for a causeway in time of flood, and, passing the disproportionate pulpit, had entered the chancel and knelt down at the altar rails.

Many hours had he spent there during the last two days, holding up before God not his own suffering but that of the woman who suffered for him. Now he could pray no more, but he still knelt, a suppliant at the door of the Divine Pity, a beggar at the Heavenly Gate.

But as the light withdrew itself more and more from the sanctuary, till at last the bare table itself was scarcely visible, he became gradually conscious that this church was not more still than that inner place into which he found himself somehow to have passed, a place of great quietness, of which he had never before possessed the key--the innermost room in the house of his soul. He did not know how he had gained entrance to it--perhaps because he had ceased to strive--he only knew that he was there, that he could never again lose the way thither, and that this chamber held for him that open vision which he had sought so often and never found.

As he left St. Thomas's he remembered that he must go to Christ Church and ask if the Precentor, who was indisposed, was likely to be well enough to preach the charity sermon on Christmas Day, or whether he wished him to do it. So he walked once more up the way of sorrows that he had traversed three or four days ago, and came out in just the same manner on the front of Christ Church. Lights were beginning to twinkle there, and down the narrow dusk of St. Aldate's, along which he had so often ridden. In Tom Quad he met Mr. Pusey, who responded to his salutation by wishing him a happy Christmas, passed on and then turned back.

"By the way, Mr. Hungerford," he said, "I am afraid the Grenvilles at Compton Regis are in sad trouble--but perhaps you know it? I heard from my brother this morning that the little boy, Madame de la Roche-Guyon's child, is very ill--dying, they fear."

The pain in his voice and eyes (his own little Katharine's death being only a year-old wound) was lost on Tristram who, after a moment's horror, forgetful alike of his errand and of himself, had turned and hurried back into St. Aldate's to the nearest livery-stable for a horse.

He probably galloped most of the fifteen miles on the hard December road, for he got there by half-past six. Anyhow the hack came down with him in the dark just outside Compton village, and Tristram, merciful man though he was, left it to the two or three yokels who had collected and hastened on, oblivious of a slightly wrenched knee. Sick at the thought of what he might hear he rang the bell at the Rectory. Mr. Grenville himself answered it.

"O, my dear Tristram!" he exclaimed, his eyes brimming with tears. "Have you heard--is that why you have come? ... No, the child is alive ... the doctor is here now.--Forgive me, come in...."

"Is that Tristram?" exclaimed a breathless voice, and behind her father suddenly appeared Horatia herself. She almost pushed the Rector aside, and seized Tristram by the wrist. "O, thank God, thank God that you have come!" And, the ghost of herself, she fairly dragged him across the hall into the drawing-room and shut the door.

"Tristram, our Lord has sent you! Listen, for you can save Maurice--only pray, pray as you never prayed before! It is the crisis. He will listen to you--I know He will!"

And, as suddenly as she had appeared, she was gone.

* * * * *

The stable clock struck nine. Steps came down the stairs, and voices; the outer door shut.

The Rector appeared at the drawing-room door, mopping his eyes. He beckoned and Tristram, with a sinking heart, followed him out of the room and up the stairs. Half-way up Mr. Grenville put away his handkerchief, and it was then obvious that his tears were tears of joy. He gripped Tristram's arm.

"He will live, my dear boy, he will live, thank God!"

He continued to ascend, and Tristram, hardly knowing why, went after him. They came to the nursery floor. A door was ajar. The Rector stood aside, but Tristram did not enter.

From the threshold he saw, as in a frame, part of the room within, and the little crib against the wall by which Horatia was kneeling, with bowed head. Over her shoulders was a shawl of Chinese silk, blue as lapis-lazuli, studded with the golden eyes of dragons, and glorified, like the shining auburn of her hair, by the mingled light of lamp and fire. For him the picture seemed to hold the love and pain of years, his own and hers, barren and fruitful both, and he did not know that he could look any more....

The child stirred. Horatia rose from her knees, and bending over him began very gently to rearrange a pillow. The change of position gave Tristram to her sight, and so he went softly in and stood by her side, looking down with her at him.

Maurice lay fast asleep, breathing quietly, and more natural of hue--a frail bark rejected by the great tide that washes so hungrily round the shores of the little island of life, and whose receding is nearly as full of awe as its oncoming. To the man and the woman looking at him the spray of that ocean seemed still wet in his curls.

"You have given him back to me," said Horatia in a voice less than a whisper, and, to herself, more faintly still, "God did not ask _all_."

For answer Tristram stooped and kissed her son.

In the doorway he looked back, and at last the toll levied on human nerves by days of so much strain and anguish was demanded of him. A momentary hallucination of the senses--nothing but that, he knew it--but all his life it was to remain with him, in mysterious consolation, that for one heart-beat he saw there, in Horatia's place, a Woman wrapped, like her, in a blue mantle glinting with light, kneeling in adoration of a Child.

*EPILOGUE*

*EPILOGUE*

The barrel-organ which was grinding out "Keemo Kimo" changed with a hiccough to "Bobbing Around," and the ring of tattered dancers likewise made some alteration in their steps. Five very dirty little girls composed the corps de ballet, and a small boy industriously kicking an empty can along the gutter added further orchestral harmony. This youth had already rejected the offer of his peers to "play at the Relief of Lucknow," having learnt by experience that the role of a Sepoy was unenviable, that it was vain ever to aspire to the part of Sir Colin Campbell, and still retaining, in this autumn of 1859, unpleasant recollections of the massacre of Cawnpore, as staged by the same players in a certain backyard two years ago.

Had it been daylight this long street of the great seaport town would have showed for what it was, a slum, but the evening darkness of the last day of October veiled some of its worst features, while it caused the radiance pouring from the _Dockers' Arms_, half-way along it, to gain tenfold in attraction. Outside this resort two sailors were engaged in a muddled argument, not sufficiently foreshadowing blows to recall the now scattered impersonators of the Indian Mutiny, but interesting enough to cause the pensive child with the can to direct his football towards them with a gleam of hope. He was rewarded otherwise than he had foreseen, and, after a moment's delighted gazing along the vista beyond the public-house, abandoned his tin and ran back towards the dancers.

"Victorier! Victorier! there's a swell coming! I seen 'im--coming this way!"

The conviction in her brother's tone detached Victorier from her pirouetting. She followed his finger and saw that his imagination had not betrayed him, as sometimes, into falsehood, for a figure answering indubitably to his description came at that moment into the light of the _Dockers' Arms_, the half-drunken sailors made way for it, and, in a moment or two, the organ, now ploughing mournfully through "Poor Dog Tray," had lost its fascination, and Victorier's fellow-artistes, were all standing at gaze.

The newcomer was a tall young man in a greatcoat, palpably a gentleman; to any instructed eye a soldier, but not--though this would have taken some discernment to detect--an Englishman. To the children he was merely a swell, and his passage heralded as such by cries that rang along the street, bringing a slatternly woman or two from an alley, and rousing occasional comment from male loungers. But the young man exhibited no sign of embarrassment at these attentions, and, stranger still, he seemed to know his way in his surroundings. Indeed, on the open-mouthed Victorier he bestowed, so she declared for days afterwards, "a lovely smile" and a "Time you were in bed, little girl," ere he passed out of sight into the ill-lighted gloom.

As the street left the _Dockers' Arms_ behind, it became slightly more respectable, and signs of some agency at work began to appear, for though the uninformed might not have known that a nondescript building on the left was a school, no one could have mistaken that it was a Sister of Mercy who suddenly emerged from one of the houses near. But the swell evidently did not need these tokens to guide him towards his objective, and, indeed, as the street turned a little, it was before him--a big church, lighted up. When he realised this latter fact the young man hesitated a moment; then he made his way, as one who knows his whereabouts, to a small door, and pushing it cautiously open, went through.

An intense, almost strained silence reigned within, so that for a moment it was difficult to realise how large a congregation was there, and how varied--clerks, dockers, women with shawls over their heads, women in fashionable bonnets, ragged boys, a few sailors. The great gilt cross suspended from the roof over the chancel steps glimmered faintly in the lowered lights. From the screened-off door by which he had entered, Maurice de la Roche-Guyon could have seen a section of the great raised choir, and half the altar, severe and simple, even on a festival, but it was not in this direction that he looked. He looked at the pulpit.

He saw there a spare, rather shrunken figure that rested both thin hands--and not without a suggestion of leaning for physical support--on the edge of the stone. Then he checked an exclamation. Not since the days after Balaclava had he seen anything like this. Across the preacher's forehead, from grey hair to eyebrow, ran a terrible scar, red and puckered, straight as a swordcut but not so clean-edged, showing the worn and thoughtful face to be as much that of a soldier as of a priest.

"_Children_," said the slow, very clear voice, "_I commend you from the bottom of my heart into the captivity of the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ._" The tension was lifted, the lights went up, and the voice that Maurice was waiting for gave out the first lines of a hymn;

"Spouse of Christ, in arms contending
O'er each clime beneath the sun..."

So he _was_ there! The young Frenchman slipped out, and went round to the clergy-house.

Mrs. Squire, the housekeeper, a small wiry lady of varied, and especially of conversational gifts, opened the door herself.

"Lor bless me!" she exclaimed exhibiting much surprise. "Well, I never! Fancy you poppin' in like this, Sir, and all the way from foreign parts, too, I suppose. They're all in the church, Sir; been at it this long time.--But come in; I hope you're well, Sir--your Grace, as I should say. You must be tired, and want some supper, I'm sure."

"Thank you, Mrs. Squire, I am very well, and I've had supper," responded the young man, following her into the narrow hall. "But I do want a bed for the night, and to-morrow night, too, if you have a room."

"You can't 'ave the guest-room, Sir," said Mrs. Squire, opening a door, "seein' as the Vicar's sleepin' there, because he would have Mr. Dormer put in _his_ room, but Mr. Johnson he's away, and I'll have 'is room ready in 'alf-an-hour. If you'll please to step in here, Sir."

A lamp was already burning in the study, but the fire demanded her attention. The visitor meanwhile began to divest himself of his greatcoat. The light showed him pleasant to look upon, fair rather than dark, with a small sunburnt moustache and a very lively expression, while the removal of his outer garment revealed a tiny scrap of red ribbon in his buttonhole.

"Now, Sir, you make yourself comfortable here, and I'll have a snack of something ready for you when they come in." At this point a thought appeared to strike Mrs. Squire, for she shut the door and advanced mysteriously on the young man.

"I think I ought to warn you, Sir, that when you see Mr. Dormer, you may have a shock."

"I've had it!" said Maurice with a little grimace. "I saw him in the church. Tell me about it quickly, before he comes in. It was an accident, I suppose? My mother heard that he had not been well, but no more than that."

Mrs. Squire sniffed. "That's what they told her Ladyship, no doubt, and that's what they told more than one! Mr. Dormer he hates to have it mentioned, but he'll carry the mark to his dying day. Nothing to be ashamed of, rather the opposite, I says, but you know what Mr. Dormer is. Nor I wouldn't say nothing about it to the Vicar, Sir, if I was you--Not well, indeed, and 'im unconscious for twenty-four hours, and the Vicar, when 'e 'eard about it, in such a taking as I've never seen 'im, and off up to London at once, and..."

"But what was it, Mrs. Squire?"

"A brick, Sir."

"A brick!" repeated Maurice, mystified. "Do you mean off a house?"

"Thrown at 'im, Sir, and cruel hard! Ah, there's wicked people in this world! In London it was, at one of them nasty places by the docks, St. George's-in-the-East. They've got what they calls a mission there, and there was dreadful disturbances going on all summer, even in the church itself, if you'll believe me, so that they could 'ardly 'old their services. A very low lot, Sir, and paid to do it, roughs 'ired by them as keeps bad 'ouses thereabouts and the like, so I've 'eard. Well, Mr. Dormer goes there in August to preach for them, and coming out of the church there was a terrible riot. Fancy 'im alone in an 'owlin' mob without so much as an umberella in 'is 'and!--not, I'm sure, that 'e'd 'ave used anything if 'e'd 'ad it. A pity you wasn't there, Sir, with them queer baggy soldiers of yours. Well, the end of it was one of these villains throws a brick at 'im--pretty near did for 'im altogether, I believe. This 'ere's the first time he've preached since." Mrs. Squire paused, and then added judicially, "Of course I don't deny we've 'ad trouble 'ere before now, as your Grace knows, though not for a long time, and I can't say as I approves of all the 'igh Church goings on. Not that I'm saying anything against the Vicar, for I wouldn't leave him not if he was to turn Papist to-morrow. Where 'e goes I goes, if it's to the Pope of Rome 'imself--the Lord forgive me for saying so."

She went to the windows and gave a twitch to the already drawn curtains, as Maurice digested this information, and also had a sudden little memory of a gory combat waged by him in boyish days with an urchin who asseverated that that ---- parson was a ---- Papist, the champion only remembering at its victorious close that he was a Papist himself.

"Between you and me, Sir," resumed Mrs. Squire confidentially, "I shan't be sorry when Mr. Dormer's gone back, for I shouldn't like a death in the 'ouse, and it's my belief 'e's not long for this world. Not fit for this preachin', any'ow, and don't eat 'ardly nothin'.... But 'ow I do run on. I daresay the Vicar won't be late, Mr. Dormer being 'ere, though sometimes, if you'll believe me, he ain't in from church till after compline. It gets worse, Sir; selfish, I calls it, keeping 'im out of bed with their sins, and then all this getting up early in the morning. The Vicar is strong, thanks be, but he ain't so young as he was, and it tells on him. Can't see, meself, as the Almighty asks so much of us. Where's your bag, if you please, Sir?"

The news that it was being brought up from the railway station and might arrive any moment, put a term to Mrs. Squire's volubility, and she departed.

Maurice de la Roche-Guyon looked round the room thus left to him with a smile of recognition. Of fair size, though somewhat choked up with furniture, much of which belonged to a past decade of the Mahogany Age, it was spotlessly clean and possessed a sort of shabby comfort. There was little to mark it as the room of a priest, since any person with a large correspondence might have had so littered a writing-table--the sight of whose contents filled the beholder with wonder and thankfulness that he should ever have received a reply to a letter--and the pictures were mostly views of Oxford, the High, Oriel, and a couple of Dighton's caricatures. Only in a corner of the room was a little water-colour drawing of average execution, representing the Madonna kneeling by the child Christ in the manger. On the window-sill were several flower-pots containing forlorn geranium stems, green tips with yellow leaves at the base. Maurice did not know if the pathetic hope of preserving geraniums through the winter had ever been realised, but he supposed that it had, since the pots persevered. They had been in exactly the same depressed condition when he was here a year ago.

He threw himself into one of the armchairs by the fire. The spring was broken, so he exchanged it for another. Tristram's chairs were given to broken springs. It was either the same chair, never mended, or else succeeding occupants were heavy. He stretched out his legs and smiled to himself, thinking of the great news he brought and of Tristram's pleasure in hearing it. Most important events in his life had been unfolded to Tristram, since the occasion on which he had first sat in a springless chair and waited for him. Not that he had smiled then....

It had been in dull quarters in the next street, before the clergy-house was built, that Maurice had first sat in a broken-springed chair and wished that chair and remaining springs and he might sink into the earth. He was in his first year at Eton, and his adored English grandfather having recently died he had begged to be allowed to spend Christmas (it was that of 1844) with Tristram, before going for the rest of the holidays to his mother's cousins in Cavendish Square. It was a curious preference for a small boy brought up in stately surroundings, to go into a dingy habitation in the neighbourhood of docks, but to Maurice it was an adventure of the wildest nature. Although he could not have explained it, to be with Tristram at all meant a feeling of freedom. There were so many things which, according to Tristram's code, did not seem to matter; but the fact that he was not punished for spilling ink and tearing his clothes only convinced him that really to transgress might be very uncomfortable indeed.

Maurice, though he was an only child, had been brought up by an almost military discipline to an exact obedience, even to the acceptance without question of those mixed ecclesiastical surroundings which had always puzzled him. Maman, though she prayed so much, never went with him to Mass. M. le Cure, in the country, when pressed would shake his head and say that Madame la Comtesse was Anglicane et tres devote, and although not a Catholic not quite a Protestant. As if to excuse this enlightened view he would add that she believed in the Real Presence, that she had a crucifix in her oratory, and that Mr. Dormer, for whose learning he had a great respect, was her director. Yet this very director (whose infrequent appearances were vaguely disliked by Maurice) seemed to be on the best of terms with his own kinsman Prosper de la Roche-Guyon, and though one was a Bishop of the Catholic Church and the other a Protestant pastor, they looked, to the son of Armand, very much alike--except that he was somewhat afraid of Mr. Dormer and not at all of His Grandeur. His mother herself would say, "Mon fils, you are a Catholic and a Frenchman. Monseigneur de Troyes will tell you what you ought to think." The Bishop's explanation, if painstaking, was unintelligible, and left Maurice with the responsibility of praying for the conversion of his mother, his grandfather Grenville, his "Uncle" Tristram Hungerford, Mr. Dormer, and a quantity of persons at Oxford of whom he had never heard. After this he abandoned for a time his pursuit of knowledge.

But Eton had revived and intensified his bewilderment, and it suddenly came to him that now was the chance of asking Uncle Tristram. He knew that Tristram was the cure of this great parish, that the church which could be seen from the windows would soon be finished, but he was forbidden to enter a Protestant temple, and an Anglican church was certainly not Catholic, so it must be Protestant. Partly because of the prohibition he had an enormous desire to see the inside of this edifice, and as there seemed no possibility of its being gratified, he added to his nightly petitions for the conversion of Tristram to the Roman obedience, the turning of the Church of the Passion into a Catholic place of worship.

Christmas Day came. Maurice set off, lonely, to the Catholic chapel not far away for Mass. As he came back he had to pass the Mission church, which was used until the completion of the permanent building. It was mid-day, and the bell stopped ringing a little before he reached the door. He listened; a harmonium was playing _Venite adoremus_. Why should he not peep inside; no one would see. He yielded to the temptation and slipped in, to find himself almost touching Uncle Tristram's surpliced back at the end of the procession which, with some difficulty, was squeezing round the small building. He decided to stay.

The church was decked with holly and flowers, and the tiny sanctuary was hung with red. Maurice was much interested, especially as his ideas of Protestant worship were extremely vague, so that he was surprised to see what was clearly an altar (though it seemed to him, with only two lighted candles and a cross, very bare), and to listen to a service which, for all its lack of Latin, of bells, and of inaudibility, was presumably some kind of a mass. But gradually his interest waned. He began to see clearly what he had done. He had not only been disobedient, but had dealt a wound to that implicit trust which he always felt that Tristram reposed in him, and the delicacy of Tristram's position was quite plain to the half-French boy. At the communion of the people he went out. The rest of Christmas Day, spent at the house of a churchwarden with a large family, lacked enjoyment. Nothing was said on his return, and he felt pretty sure that Tristram had not seen him. But next day, after breakfast, he waited for him in a broken-springed chair.

"I was at the Mass yesterday."

"I know," said Tristram.

"I mean I was at your Mass."

"I know," said Tristram again. "I've been waiting for you to tell me." There was a silence.

"You have my pocket-money," suggested a miserable voice, for Maurice always associated misdeeds with an immediate penalty, and anything was better than suspense. But he looked up from the floor to find that Tristram was smiling.

"My son," said the latter, "for your punishment I am going to explain to you the Anglican position. I have always disagreed with your mother in not trying to make this clear to you before."

It was not punishment to Maurice. Sin had brought him what had never been granted to virtuous behaviour. He listened with the most rapt attention, until Tristram, leaning back in his chair, said "Do you understand now, my boy, why you are forbidden to attend an Anglican service? It is for this reason that you must regard me as a heretic, though _I_ can believe myself and you to belong equally to the Catholic Church. Perhaps you can understand, too, how hard it has been for your mother, so ardently devoted to her own faith, to bring you up in a religion which must of necessity separate you from her. Not that she ever hesitated."

He got up. "Come with me, Maurice. I am going to show you something." And, leading him to a little room at the top of the house, he unlocked a chest. "I won't take them out, but you can see what they are--the full Eucharistic dress of a priest."

"Oh, Mass vestments," said Maurice, looking in.

"They have been given, but they cannot be worn yet." He unlocked another case and showed the boy the sacramental plate, still unconsecrated. One of the chalices was studded with large pearls, the other with different stones.

"What fine pearls!" observed Maurice. "I have never seen such large ones, except on a rope that Maman used to wear. Now she hardly wears any jewels."

"These were your mother's," said Tristram. "She wished to give all her personal jewels--all except those belonging to your family, which will come one day to your wife." (He always spoke to Maurice in a matter-of-fact way, as though Maurice were grown up.) "And here, you see, set in the paten, is a little old Anglo-Saxon brooch that she used to wear as a girl, and which she gave to me long ago.--Now I'll show you the church."

Maurice bore away from that visit an impression of surprising dignity, simplicity, and space. He had seen the raised chancel, the still more raised sanctuary, the stone altar, which it was doubtful if the Bishop would consecrate, and the beautiful marble font, a memorial to his grandfather Grenville, set in almost equal honour in the apse at the west end. He had been told that there would be no galleries or pews, that the church was to be quite free and always open, and that one day a great cross or crucifix would hang from the roof. As they left he caught sight of a little inscription on a stone let into the wall near the door--"Pray for the sinner who built this church."

Going through the porch he said, reflectively, "I suppose that as it is such a large church he was a very wicked man."

But Tristram gave no answer.

Maurice had looked forward to his next Christmas in the new clergy-house, and next Christmas had, indeed, found him there, but in company with Mr. Dormer and great gloom--unwelcome circumstances which it took him some time to connect with a certain notable conversion to his own communion in the previous October. But what mattered to Maurice was much less that the Church of England had lost John Henry Newman, than that the Church of the Passion was now offering a haven among its priests to its founder, and that the centre of interest at the clergy-house had shifted from him, Maurice, to the man who was mourning not only the defection of a leader but the loss of a friend.

But when next he came to scale the church roof and plague the curates, Mr. Dormer seemed to have gone, not to Oxford but to London, and careful cross-questioning of the new deacon elicited facts which, to Maurice's mind, could only mean that Mr. Dormer would perhaps one day become a monk. How this could be, even in the Church of England as explained by Tristram, was a mystery, but since such a calling presupposed a fixed abode, and, for the time being, Mr. Dormer was certainly settled in London, Maurice had got all the information that he wanted. There was no cloud now upon a visit to Uncle Tristram, and one delightful summer even brought his mother to stay at the hotel in the fashionable quarter of the town. By a coincidence, which Maurice was not able to appreciate, the arrival of the French comtesse was recorded in close proximity to "More Popish Practices of a Puseyite Priest."

A kind of sporting interest in the Tractarian Movement was a curious possession for a French soldier and a sound Catholic. Yet, just when the English newspapers were full of the battle of the Alma, the post bore to Tristram, recently inhibited for hearing confessions, a letter from the seat of war adjuring him to stick to his guns, and this from a young man who knew that an Anglican clergyman cannot bind or loose, whatever the opinions of his bishop.

At this moment, however, the writer of that epistle had some grounds for wishing that the inhibition had not been removed, or that Tristram's invalid absolutions were not sought at such a late hour. Looking round for something to occupy him, the Duc de la Roche-Guyon caught sight of a heap of _Punches_ in a corner. He guessed why they were there. Mr. Punch was strongly, even rabidly, "anti-Puseyite," and it was characteristic of Tristram cheerfully to preserve the numbers in which this guardian of public morals had also constituted himself Defender of the Faith. Here, for instance, was the succession of last year's cartoons dealing with the alleged Romanist tendencies of "Soapy Samuel," the Bishop of Oxford, and the Puseyite cleric being kicked downstairs by the united boots of Mr. Punch and John Bull. After what he had just heard about St. George's-in-the-East, Maurice was not greatly surprised to find Mr. Punch warning "reverend gents who think fit to make images, figures, or guys of themselves" to beware of an "iconoclastic spirit" which plainly had his approval. In the current number itself, the Rector of St. George's, in a notice headed "Nathan's Clerical Costumes," addressed to "sacristans, footmen of the superior Roman Catholic clergy and others," was made to express himself desirous of purchasing "any amount of the left-off vestments of priests" and to offer "a liberal allowance for holy candle ends and waste incense."

Maurice put down the paper with a shrug, but as he stooped to pick up a number which had fallen open on the floor, his eye was caught by the words "Margaret Street" and "All Saints":--

"The All Saints crows his Lordship pets,
And, hoping against hope, forgets
The many birds that thence have come,
Fled to the rookery of Rome.

* * * * *

"Can it be right to consecrate
The new church in Street Margaret,
Which looks more Puseyite by far
Than English churches elsewhere are?"

He read these lines with interest, because he knew that the famous Tractarian church had once been Margaret Chapel, where his mother had been married. Then he laughed, and threw the paper away.

What a devil of a time they were in coming! He got up and looked at the photograph of a young man in uniform on the mantelpiece, one of Tristram's lads. Five years ago, at Inkerman, after his regiment had carried, at the point of the bayonet, the seven times captured and recaptured Sandbag Battery, the young lieutenant of Zouaves had happened to address a word or two in English to one of the rescued men of the 95th, and thus, amid the carnage, had made the surprising discovery of a common friend in an English clergy-house...

Maurice put his elbows on the chimney-piece. Four years more of soldiering, encounters with Kabyles in Africa, even this summer's guns of Magenta and Solferino, had done little to efface the memory of Sebastopol, its horror and its glory. Still, in dreams, he led his men through the iron hail up to the Malakoff; still, sometimes, felt again the shock and blankness when that hail had scorched him too, and he fell, not knowing that he had outdone the daring even of his own most daring corps. More pleasant to dream of was the waking in hospital and the finding, pinned to the sheet, the red-ribboned, five-pointed star, the Cross of the Legion of Honour, which they had doubted if he would live to receive. Most pleasant of all, the putting it into his mother's hands.

The Crimea had won him that, and his step as captain. Last July had brought him more promotion; last month still more. But last week had given him---- he smiled and pulled at his ridiculous moustache. Grand Dieu! what had he done to deserve such happiness?

Here they were at last! The young man deliberately went out of the lamplight into a corner and stood with his back to any who should enter. The door opened.

"You know, Charles," the well-remembered voice was saying, "that unless you obey me in this I shan't allow you to preach at all to-morrow."

And the other voice, palpably tired, but very quiet and even, replied: "If I were you, Tristram, I would not utter threats before witnesses. Look there!"

Maurice turned slowly round and faced the two priests, but the blur of shadow hid the smile on his face.

"There is nothing the matter?" asked the taller, a note of sharp alarm in his tone. "Horatia--your mother is not ill?"

"No, no!" cried Maurice, instantly repenting of his jest. "No--there is nothing the matter--only good news!" And, flinging himself at Tristram Hungerford, he embraced him in French fashion.--"How do you do, Mr. Dormer? I heard your sermon--that is to say the end of it."

"I saw you," said Dormer, smiling, as he shook hands, and Tristram exclaimed, "Oh, were you there, my dear boy? Come and sit down, Charles, and then we must hear this good news. Supper will be up in a moment--but I hope you have had something more substantial, Maurice?" And, evidently torn between a desire to pilot his friend to the most comfortable chair and eagerness to hear the promised tidings, he accomplished the first before taking hold of Maurice and saying "Well?"

And then it burst out.

"Solange will marry me, and what is more, will marry me in three weeks' time!"

"At last!" exclaimed Tristram. "My boy, I am so glad! But why is it so very sudden?"

A sort of struggle between satisfaction and sadness was visible in the young soldier's manner as he replied, "Because I am ordered to Algeria next month, and must sail from Marseilles on the 25th. You see, they have made me lieutenant-colonel."

Tristram gave an exclamation, and Maurice went on quickly. "Solange is so wonderful; she has given up all idea of a great wedding. She said at once that if she was to marry a soldier she could be ready in three weeks."

"What did her mother say?" asked Tristram.

"Oh, Maman arranged all that," returned Maurice, sitting down astride a chair. "She is almost as pleased as I am that it has come all right."

"Or as I am," said Tristram. "How long can you stay, Maurice?"

"Only long enough to tell you all about it. I told Maman I might sleep here two nights if there was room. Will you let me, mon pere?"

"My dear boy, what a question! So you came all this way just to tell me--you left Mademoiselle Solange and your mother, who has you now for such a short time, for that?"

"Mademoiselle Solange sent you a message that she remembered you perfectly, that next time she would not allow me to leave her, and that she should come with me to visit you. As for Maman, when did she ever think of herself? Of course she wanted me to come and tell you. Besides, what a fuss about nothing! Who came over to see me when I was invalided home after the Crimea?"

"Hasn't this promotion followed very quickly on that which you got after the Italian campaign this summer?" asked Dormer, breaking in for the first time.

"You know I have always been luckier than my deserts!" explained the young man laughing. "Tiens! someone at the door!"