Brother Bonaday's heart-attacks, sharp while they lasted, were soon over. Towards evening he had so far recovered that the Nurse saw no harm in his taking a short stroll, with Brother Copas forsocius.
The two old men made their way down to the river as usual, and there Brother Copas forced his friend to sit and rest on a bench beside the clear-running water.
"We had better not talk," he suggested, "but just sit quiet and let the fresh air do you good."
"But I wish to talk. I am quite strong enough."
"Talk about what?"
"About the child.… We must be getting her educated, I suppose."
"Why?"
Brother Bonaday, seated with palms crossed over the head of his staff, gazed in an absent-minded way at the water-weeds trailing in the current.
"She's an odd child; curiously shrewd in some ways and curiously innocent in others, and for ever asking questions. She put me a teaser yesterday. She can read pretty well, and I set her to read a chapter of the Bible. By and by she looked up and wanted to know why God lived apart from His wife!"
Brother Copas grunted his amusement.
"Did you tell her?"
"I invented some answer, of course. I don't believe it satisfied her—I am not good at explanation—but she took it quietly, as if she put it aside to think over." "The Athanasian Creed is not easily edited for children.… If she can read, the likelihood is she can also write. Does a girl need to learn much beyond that? No, I am not jesting. It's a question upon which I have never quite made up my mind."
"I had hoped to find you keener," said Brother Bonaday with a small sigh. "Now I see that you will probably laugh at what I am going to confess.… Last night, as I sat a while before going to bed, I found myself hearkening for the sound of her breathing in the next room. After a bit, when a minute or so went by and I could hear nothing, a sort of panic took me that some harm had happened to her: till I could stand it no longer, but picked up the lamp and crept in for a book. There she lay sleeping, healthy and sound, and prettier than you'd ever think.… I crept back to my chair, and a foolish sort of hope came over me that, with her health and wits, and being brought up unlike other children, she might come one day to be a little lady and the pride of the place, in a way of speaking—"
"A sort of Lady Jane Grey, in modest fashion—is that what you mean?" suggested Brother Copas—
'Like Her most gentle, most unfortunate,Crowned but to die—who in her chamber sateMusing with Plato, tho' the horn was blown,And every ear and every heart was won,And all in green array were chasing down the sun.'
'Like Her most gentle, most unfortunate,Crowned but to die—who in her chamber sateMusing with Plato, tho' the horn was blown,And every ear and every heart was won,And all in green array were chasing down the sun.'
'Like Her most gentle, most unfortunate,Crowned but to die—who in her chamber sateMusing with Plato, tho' the horn was blown,And every ear and every heart was won,And all in green array were chasing down the sun.'
—"Well, if she's willing, as unofficial godfather I might make a start with the Latin declensions. It would be an experiment: I've never tried teaching a girl. And I never had a child of my own, Brother; but I can understand just what you dreamed, and the Lord punish me if I feel like laughing."
He said it with an open glance at his friend. But it found no responsive one. Brother Bonaday's brow had contracted, as with a spasm of the old pain, and his eyes still scrutinised the trailing weeds in Mere river.
"If ever a man had warning to be done with life," said Brother Bonaday after a long pause, "I had it this forenoon. But it's wonderful what silly hopes a child will breed in a man."
Brother Copas nodded.
"Aye, we'll have a shot with her. But—Oh, good Lord! Here's the Chaplain coming."
"Ah, Copas—so here you are!" sung out Mr. Colt as he approached with his long stride up the tow-path. "Nurse Branscome told me I should find you here. Good evening, Bonaday!"
He nodded.
Copas stood up and inclined his body stiffly.
"I hope, sir," was his rebuke, "I have not wholly forfeited the title of Brother?"
The Chaplain flushed.
"I bring a message," he said. "The Master wishes to see you, at half-past six."
"That amounts to a command."
Brother Copas pulled out his watch.
"I may as well warn you," the Chaplain pursued. "You will be questioned on your share in that offensive Petition. As it appears, you were even responsible for composing it."
Brother Copas's eyebrows went up.
"Is it possible, sir, that you recognised the style?… Ah, no; the handwriting must have been your index. The Bishop showed it to you, then?"
"I—er—have been permitted to glance it over."
"Over his shoulder, if I may make a guess," murmured Brother Copas, putting his watch away and searching for his snuff-box.
"Anyway, you signed it: as Bon—as Brother Bonaday here was too sensible to do: though," added Mr. Colt, "hissignature one could at least have respected."
Brother Copas tapped his snuff-box, foreseeing comedy.
"And why not mine, sir?"
"Oh, come, come!" blurted the Chaplain. "I take you to be a man of some education."
"Is that indeed the reason?"
"A man of some education, I say."
"And I hear you, sir." Brother Copas bowed. "'Praise from Sir Richard Strahan is praise indeed'—though my poor friend here seems to get the backhand of the compliment."
"And it is incredible you should go with the ignorant herd and believe us Clergy of the Church of England to be heading for Rome, as your Petition asserts."
Brother Copas slowly inhaled a pinch.
"In England, Mr. Chaplain, the ignorant herd has, by the admission of other nations, a practical political sense, and a somewhat downright way with it. It sees you reverting to many doctrines and uses from which the Reformation cut us free—or, if you prefer it, cut us loose; doctrines and uses which the Church of Rome has taught and practised without a break. It says—this ignorant herd—'If these fellows are not heading for Rome, then where the dickensarethey heading?' Forgive this blunt way of putting it, but the question is not so blunt as it looks. It is on the contrary extremely shrewd; and until you High Anglicans answer it candidly, the ignorant herd will suspect—and you know, sir, the lower classes are incurably suspicious—either that yourselves do not know, or that you know and won't tell."
"You say," answered Mr. Colt, "that we revert to many doctrines and uses which, since the Romish clergy preach and practise them, are ignorantly supposed to belong to Rome. But 'many' is not 'all'; nor does it include the most radical doctrine of all. How can we intend Romanising while we deny the supreme authority of the Pope?—or Bishop of Rome, as I should prefer to call him."
"Fairly countered," replied Brother Copas, taking another pinch; "though the ignorant herd would have liked better an answer to its question. You deny the supreme authority of the Pope? Very well. Whose, then, do you accept?"
"The authority of Christ, committed to His Church."
"Oh, la, la, la!… I should have said, Whose authoritative interpretation of Christ's authority?"
"The Church's."
"Aye? Through whose mouth? We shall get at something definite in time.… I'll put it more simply. You, sir, are a plain priest in holy orders, and it's conceivable that on some point of use or doctrine you may be in error. Just conceivable, hey? At all events, you may be accused of it. To whom, then, do you appeal? To the King?—Parliament?—the Court of Arches, or any other Court? Not a bit of it. Well, let's try again. Is it to the Archbishop of Canterbury? Or to your own Diocesan?"
"I should appeal to the sanction of the Church Catholic as given in her ancient Councils."
"And again—as nowadays interpreted by whom? Let us pass a hundred possible points on which no Council bothered its head, and on which consequently it has left no decision. Who's the man, anywhere, to take you by the scruff of the neck and chastise you for an error?"
"Within the limits of conscience I should, of course, bow to my Diocesan."
"Elastic limits, Mr. Colt! and, substituting Brother Warboise's conscience for yours, precisely the limits within which Brother Warboise bows to you! Anarchy will obey anything 'within the limits of conscience'—that's precisely what anarchy means; and even so and to that extent will you obey Bishop or Archbishop. In your heart you deny their authority; in speech, in practice, you never lose an occasion of flouting them and showing them up for fools. Take this Education Squabble for an example. The successor to the Chair of Augustine, good man—he's, after all, your Metropolitan—runs around doing his best to discover a way out, to patch up a 'concordat,' as they call it? What's the effect, upon any Diocesan Conference? Up springs subaltern after subaltern, fired with zeal to give his commander away. 'Our beloved Archbishop, in his saintly trustfulness, is bargaining away our rights as Churchmen'—all the indiscipline of a middle-class private school (and I know what that is, Mr. Colt, having kept one) translated into the sentimental erotics of a young ladies' academy!"
Mr. Colt gasped.
"And so, believe me, sir," concluded Brother Copas, snapping down the lid of his snuff-box, "this country of ours did not get rid of the Pope in order to make room for a thousand and one Popelings, each in his separate parish practising what seems right in his own eyes. At any rate, let us say, remembering the parable of the room swept and garnished, it intended no such result. Let us agree, Mr. Chaplain, to economise in Popes, and to condemn that business of Avignon. So the ignorant herd comes back on you with two questions, which in effect are one: 'If not mere anarchists, what authority own you? And if not for Rome, for what in the worldareyou heading?' You ask Rome to recognise your Orders.—Mais, soyez consequent, monsieur."
It was Mr. Colt's turn to pull out his watch.
"Permit me to remind you," he said, "that you, at any rate, have to own an authority, and that the Master will be expecting you at six-thirty sharp. For the rest, sir, you cannot think that thoughtful Churchmen have no answer to these questions, if put by anyone with the right to put them. Butyou—not even a communicant! Will you dare to use these arguments to the Master, for instance?"
"He had the last word there," said Brother Copas, pocketing his snuff-box and gazing after the Chaplain's athletic figure as it swung away up the tow-path. "He gave me no time to answer that one suits an argument to the adversary. The Master? Could I present anything so crude to one who, though lazy, is yet a scholar?—who has certainly fought this thing through, after his lights, and would get me entangled in the Councils of Carthage and Constance, St. Cyprian and the rest?… Colt quotes the ignorant herd to me, and I put him the ignorant herd's question—without getting a reply."
"You did not allow him much time for one," said Brother Bonaday mildly.
Brother Copas stared at him, drew out his watch again, and chuckled.
"You're right. I lose count of time, defending my friends; and this is your battle I'm fighting, remember."
He offered his arm, and the two friends started to walk back towards St. Hospital. They had gone but a dozen yards when a childish voice hailed them, and Corona came skipping along the bank.
"Daddy! you are to come home at once! It's past six o'clock, and Branny says the river fog's bad for you."
"Home?" echoed Brother Bonaday inattentively. The word had been unfamiliar to him for some years, and his old brain did not grasp it for a moment. His eyes seemed to question the child as she stood before him panting, her hair dishevelled.
"Aye, Brother," said Copas with a glance at him, "you'll have to get used to it again, and good luck to you! What says the pessimist, that American fellow?—"
'Nowhere to go but out,Nowhere to come but back '—
'Nowhere to go but out,Nowhere to come but back '—
'Nowhere to go but out,Nowhere to come but back '—
"Missy don't agree with her fellow-countryman, eh?"
His eye held a twinkle of mischief.
"Heisn'tmy fellow-countryman!" Corona protested vehemently. "I'm English—amn't I, Daddy?"
"There, there—forgive me, little one! And you really don't want to leave us, just yet?"
"Leave you?" The child took Brother Bonaday's hand and hugged it close. "Uncle Copas, if you won't laugh I want to tell you something—what they call confessing." She hesitated for a moment. "Haven't you ever felt you've got something inside, and how awful good it is to confess and get it off your chest?"
Brother Copas gave a start, and eyed his fellow-Protestant.
"Well?" he said after a pause.
"Well, it's this way," confessed Corona. "I can't say my prayers yet in this place—not to get any heft on them; and that makes me feel bad, you know. I start along with 'Our Father, which art in heaven,' and it's like calling up a person on the 'phone when he's close at your elbow all the time. Then I say 'God bless St. Hospital,' and there I'm stuck; it don't seem I want to worry God to oblige beyond that. So I fetch back and start telling how glad I am to be home—as if God didn't know—and that bats me up to St. Hospital again. I got stone-walled that way five times last night. What's the sense of asking to go to heaven when you don't particularly want to?"
"Child," Brother Copas answered, "keep as honest as that and peg away. You'll find your prayers straighten themselves out all right."
"Sure?… Well, that's a comfort: because, of course, I don't want to go to hell either. It would never do.… But why are you puckering up your eyes so?"
"I was thinking," said Brother Copas, "that I might start teaching you Latin. Your father and I were discussing it just now."
"Would he like me to learn it?"
"It's the only way to find out all that St. Hospital means, including all it has meant for hundreds of years.… Bless me, is that the quarter chiming? Take your father's hand and lead him home, child.Venit Hesperus, ite capellae."
"What does that mean?"
"It's Latin," said Brother Copas. "It's a—a kind of absolution."
Although the month was June and the evening warm, Master Blanchminster sat huddled in his armchair before a bright fire. A table stood at his elbow, with some books upon it, his untasted glass of wine, and half a dozen letters—his evening's post. But the Master leaned forward, spreading his delicate fingers to the warmth and, between them, gazing into the core of the blaze.
The butler ushered in Brother Copas and withdrew, after a glance at the lights. Two wax candles burned upon the writing-table in the oriel, and on the side-table an electric lamp shaded with green silk faintly silhouetted the Master's features. Brother Copas, standing a little within the doorway, remarked to himself that the old gentleman had aged of late.
"Ah, Brother Copas? Yes, I sent for you," said the Master, rousing himself as if from a brown study. "Be seated, please."
He pointed to a chair on the opposite side of the hearth; and Brother Copas, seating himself with a bow, spread the worn skirt of his Beauchamp robe, and arranged its folds over his knees. The firelight sparkled upon the Beauchamp rose on his breast, and seemed to hold the Master's eye as he looked up after a pause.
"You guess, no doubt, why I sent for you?"
Brother Copas inclined his head.
"It concerns the Petition which Brother Warboise presented to the Bishop last Monday. I am not complaining just now of his fashion of procedure, which I may hazard was not of your suggesting."
"It was not, Master. I may say so much, having warned him that I should say it if questioned."
"Yet you wrote out and signed the Petition, and, if I may hazard again, composed it?"
"I did."
"I have," said Master Blanchminster, studying the back of his hands as he held his palms to the fire, "no right to force any man's conscience. But it seemed to me, if I may say so, that while all were forcibly put, certain of your arguments ignored—or, let me rather say, passed over—points which must have occurred to a man of your learning. Am I mistaken?"
"You understand, Master," said Brother Copas, slightly embarrassed, and slightly the more embarrassed because the Master, after asking the question, seemed inclined to relapse into his own thoughts, "the Petition was not mine only. I had to compose it for all the signatories; and that, in any public business, involves striking a mean."
"I understand even more," said the Master, rousing himself, and reaching for a copy of the Petition, which lay among his papers. "I understand that I have no right to cross-question a man on his share in a document which six or eight others have signed. Shall it be further understood"—he looked up with a quick smile of goodness, whereat Brother Copas felt ashamed—"that I sent for you as a friend, and that you may speak frankly, if you will so honour me, without fear of my remembering a word to your inconvenience?"
"And since you so honour me, Master," said Brother Copas, "I am ready to answer all you ask."
"Well, then, I have read with particular interest, what you have to say here about the practice of Confession. (This, by the way, is a typed copy, with which the Bishop has been kind enough to supply me.) You have, I assume, no belief in it or in the efficacy of the Absolution that follows it."
The Master, searching for a paragraph, did not perceive that Brother Copas flushed slightly.
"And," he continued, as he found the passage and laid his finger on it, "although you set out your arguments with point—with fairness, too, let me add—I am perhaps not very far wrong in guessing that you have for Confession an instinctive dislike which to your own mind means more than any argument you use."
The Master looked up with a smile; but by this time Brother Copas's flush had faded.
"You may say that, Master, of the whole document. I am an old man— far too old to have my beliefs and disbeliefs quickened by argument. They have long since hardened into prejudices; and, speaking generally, I have a prejudice against this setting of old men by the ears with a lot of Neo-Catholic stuff which irritates half of us while all are equally past being provoked to any vital good."
The Master sighed, for he understood.
"I, too, am old," he answered, "older even than you; and as death draws nearer I incline with you, to believe that the fewer our words on these questions that separate us the better. (There's a fine passage to that effect in one of Jowett's Introductions, you may remember—thePhædo, I think.) Least said is soonest mended, and good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than they know. Since we are opening our minds a little beyond our wont, let me tell you exactly what is my own prejudice, as you would call it. To me Confession has been a matter of happy experience—I am speaking now of younger days, at Cuddesdon—"
"Ah!" breathed Copas.
"And the desire to offer to others what has been a great blessing to myself, has at times been very strong. But I recognised that the general English mind—yes, I'll grant you, the generalhealthyEnglish mind—had its prejudice too; a prejudice so sturdy against Confession, that it seemed to me I should alienate more souls than I attracted and breed more ill-temper than charity to cover it. So—weakly perhaps—I never spoke of it in sermons, and by consequence no Brother of St. Hospital has ever sought from me that comfort which my conscience all the while would have approved of giving."
Brother Copas bowed his head for sign that he understood.
"But—excuse me, Master—you say that you found profit in Confession at Cuddesdon; that is, when I dare say your manhood was young and in ferment. Be it granted that just at such a crisis, Confession may be salutary. Have you found it profitable in later life?"
"I cannot," the Master answered, "honestly say more than that no doubt of it has ever occurred to me, and for the simple reason that I have not tried. But I see at what you are driving—that we of St. Hospital are too old to taste its benefit?… Yet I should have thought that even in age it might bring comfort to some; and, if so, why should the others complain?"
"For the offence it carries as an infraction of the reformed doctrine under which they supposed themselves to order their lives and worship. They contend, Master, that they are all members of one Society; and if the doctrine of that Society be infringed to comfort A or B, it is to that extent weakened injuriously for C and D, who have been building their everlasting and only hope on it, and have grown too old to change."
"But," answered Master Blanchminster, pinning his finger on the paragraph, "you admit here that even the reformed Church, in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, enjoins Confession and prescribes a form of Absolution. Now if a man be not too old for it when he is dying,a fortiorihe cannot be too old for it at any previous time."
Brother Copas rubbed his hands together softly, gleefully. He adored dialectic.
"With your leave, Master," he replied, "dying is a mighty singular business. The difference between it and growing old cannot be treated as a mere matter of degree. Now one of the points I make is that the Church, by expressly allowing Confession on this singular occasion, while saying nothing about it on any other, thereby inferentially excludes it on all others—or discountenances it, to say the least."
"There I join issue with you, maintaining that all such occasions are covered by the general authority bestowed at Ordination with the laying-on of hands—'Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven,' etc. To construe an open exhortation in one of her offices as a silent denunciation in all the rest seems to me—"
For the next few minutes the pair enjoyed themselves to the top of their bent; until, as the Master pushed aside some papers on the table to get at his Prayer Book—to prove that No. XXV of the Articles of Religion did not by its wording disparage Absolution—his eye fell on a letter which lay uppermost. He paused midway in a sentence, picked the thing up and held it for a moment disgustfully between forefinger and thumb.
"Brother Copas," he said with a change of voice, "we lose ourselves in logomachy, and I had rather hark back to a word you let drop a while ago about the Brotherhood. You spoke of 'setting old men by the ears.' Do you mean it seriously—that our Brethren, just now, are not dwelling in concord?"
"God bless your innocent old heart!" murmured Brother Copas under his breath. Aloud he said, "Men of the Brethren's age, Master, are not always amiable; and the tempers of their womenfolk are sometimes unlovely. We are, after all, failures in life, and to have lived night and day beside any one of us can be no joke."
The Master, with his body half-turned towards the reading-lamp, still held the letter and eyed it at arm's length.
"I observed," he said after a while, "that Brother Bonaday did not sign your Petition. Yet I had supposed him to be an Evangelical, and everyone knows you two to be close friends." The Master mused again. "Pardon me, but he has some reason, of course?"
"He has."
—"Which you are not at liberty to tell me?"
"That is so."
"Ah, well," said the Master, turning and facing about on Brother Copas with a sudden resolve. "I wonder if—to leave this matter of the Petition—you can tell me something else concerning your friend; something which, if you can answer it so as to help him, will also lift a sad weight off my mind. If you cannot, I shall equally forget that the question was ever put or the answer withheld.… To be candid, when you were shown in I was sitting here in great distress of mind."
"Surely not about Bonaday, Master?" said Brother Copas, wondering.
"About Bonaday, yes." The Master inclined his head. "Poison—it has been running through my thoughts all the while we have been talking. I suppose I ought not to show you this; the fire is its only proper receptacle—"
"Poison?" echoed Brother Copas. "And about Bonaday? who, good soul, never hurt a fly!"
"I rejoice to hear you say it," said the Master, plainly relieved, and he appeared half-minded to withdraw and pocket the scrap of paper for which Copas held out a hand. "It is an anonymous letter, and— er—evidently the product of a foul mind—"
Brother Copas took it and, fumbling for his glasses, gazed around in search of the handiest light by which to read it. Master Blanchminster hurried to catch up the electric lamp and set it on the mantel-shelf above his shoulder. Its coil of silk-braided wire dragging across the papers on the table, one or two dropped on the floor; and whilst the Master stooped to collect them Brother Copas read the letter, first noting at a glance that the paper was cheap and the handwriting, though fairly legible, at once uneducated and painfully disguised.
It ran—
"Master,—This is to warn you that you are too kind and anyone can take you in. It wasn't enough Bonaday should get the best rooms in S. Hospital but now you give him leave for this child which every one in S. Hospital knows is a bastard. If you want to find the mother, no need to go far. Why is Nurse B—hanging about his rooms now. Which they didn't carry it so far before, but they was acquainted years ago, as is common talk. God knows my reasons for writing this much are honest, but I hate to see your goodness put upon, and a scandal which the whole S. Hospital feels bitter about—such letchery and wickedness in our midst, and nobody knowing how to put a stop to it all.
"Yours obdtly.,
"A Well Wisher."
"The handwriting," said Brother Copas, "is a woman's, though disguised."
The Master, erect again, having collected his papers, eyed Brother Copas as if surprised by his calm tone.
"You make nothing of it, then?"
"P'st!"
"I—I was hoping so." The Master's voice was tremulous, apologetic. "It came by this evening's post, not half an hour ago.… I am not used to receive such things: yet I know what ought to be done with them—toss them into the fire at once and dismiss them from your mind. I make no doubt I should have burnt it within another ten minutes: as for cleansing one's mind of it so quickly, that must be a counsel of perfection. But you were shown in, and I—I made certain that you could contradict this disgraceful report and set my mind at rest. Forgive me."
"Ah, Master"—Brother Copas glanced up with a quick smile— "it almost looks as if you were right after all, and one is never too old to confess!" He bent and held the edge of the paper close to the blaze. "May I burn it?"
"By all means."
"Nay, then, I won't. But since you have freely parted with it, may I keep it?… I have had some little experience with manuscripts, and it is just possible I may trace this to the writer—who is assuredly a woman," added Brother Copas, studying the letter again. "You have my leave to do so." "And you ask no further question?"
The Master hesitated. At length he said firmly—
"None. I have no right. How can so foul a thing confer any right?"
Brother Copas was silent for a space.
"Nay, that is true, Master; it cannot.… Nevertheless, I will answer what was in your mind to ask. When I came into the room you were pondering this letter. The thought of it—pah!—mixed itself up with a thought of the appointment you had set for me—with the Petition; and the two harked back together upon a question you put to me just now. 'Why was not Brother Bonaday among the signatories?' Between them they turned that question into a suspicion. Guilty men are seldom bold: as the Scots say, 'Riven breeks sit still.'… Was not this, or something like it, in your mind, sir?"
"I confess that it was."
"Why then, Master, I too will confess—I that came to you to denounce the practice. Of what this letter hints Bonaday is innocent as—as you are. He approved of the Petition and was on the point of signing it; but he desired your good leave to make a home for his child. Between parent and Protestant my friend was torn, and moreover between conscience and loyalty. He could not sue for this favour from you, his soul weighted with an intention to go straightway and do what must offend you."
Master Blanchminster faced Brother Copas squarely, standing of a sudden erect. It seemed to add inches to his stature.
"Had he so poor a trust in me, after these years?"
"No, Master." Brother Copas bent his head. "That is where I come in. All this is but preparatory.… I am a fraud—as little Protestant as Catholic. I found my friend in straits, and made a bargain with those who were pressing him—"
"Do I understand, Brother Copas, that this Petition—of which all the strength lies in its scholarship and wording—is yours, and that on these terms only you have given me so much pain?"
"You may put it so, Master, and I can say no more than 'yes'—though I might yet plead that something is wrong with St. Hospital, and—"
"Something is very wrong with St. Hospital," interrupted the Master gravely. "This letter—if it come from within our walls—But I after all, as its Master, am ultimately to blame." He paused for a moment and looked up with a sudden winning smile. "We have both confessed some sins. Shall we say a prayer together, Brother?"
The two old men knelt by the hearth there. Together in silence they bowed their heads.
"You ought to write a play," said Mrs. Simeon.
Mr. Simeon looked up from his dinner and stared at his wife as though she had suddenly taken leave of her senses. She sat holding a fork erect and close to her mouth, with a morsel of potato ready to be popped in as soon as she should finish devouring a paragraph ofThe Peoplenewspaper, folded beside her plate. In a general way Mrs. Simeon was not a reader; but on Mondays (washing-days) she regularly had the loan of a creased copy ofThe Peoplefrom a neighbour who, having but a couple of children, could afford to buy and peruse it on the day of issue. There is much charity among the working poor.
"I—I beg your pardon, my dear?" Mr. Simeon murmured, after gently admonishing his second son (Eustace, aged 11, named after the Master) for flipping bread pills across the table. "I am afraid I did not catch—"
"I see there's a man has made forty thousand pounds by writing one. And he did it in three weeks, after beginning as a clerk in the stationery.… Forty thousand pounds, only think! That's what I call turning cleverness to account."
"But, my love, I don't happen to be clever," protested Mr. Simeon.
His wife swallowed her morsel of potato. She was a worn-looking blonde, peevish, not without traces of good looks. She wore the sleeves of her bodice rolled up to the elbows, and her wrists and forearms were bleached by her morning's work at the wash-tub.
"Then I'm sure I don't know what else you are!" said she, looking at him straight.
Mr. Simeon sighed. Ever on Mondays he returned at midday to a house filled with steam and the dank odour of soap-suds, and to the worst of the week's meagre meals. A hundred times he had reproached himself that he did ungratefully to let this affect him, for his wife (poor soul) had been living in it all day, whereas his morning had been spent amid books, rare prints, statuettes, soft carpets, all the delicate luxuries of Master Blanchminster's library. Yet he could not help feeling the contrast; and the children were always at their most fractious on Mondays, chafed by a morning in school after two days of freedom.
"Where are you going this afternoon?" his wife asked.
"To blow the organ for Windeatt."
Dr. Windeatt (Mus. Doc. Oxon.) was the Cathedral organist.
"Has he offered to pay you?"
"Well—it isn'tpayexactly. There was an understanding that if I blew for him this afternoon—old Brewer being laid up with the shingles—he would take me through that tenor part in the newVenite Exultemus. It's tricky, and yesterday morning I slurred it horribly."
"Tc'ht! A man of your education blowing an organ, and for nothing! If there was any money in it one wouldn't mind so much.… But you let yourself be put upon by anybody."
Mr. Simeon was silent. He knew that to defend himself would be to court a wrangle, reproaches, tears perhaps, all unseemly before the children; and, moreover, what his wife said was more than half deserved.
"Daddy, whydon'tyou write a play?" demanded the five-year-old Agatha. "And then mammy would have a carriage, and I'd go to a real boarding-school with canaries in the window like they have at Miss Dickinson's."
The meal over, Mr. Simeon stole away to the Cathedral. He was unhappy; and as he passed through Friars' Gateway into the Close, the sight of the minster, majestical above its green garth, for once gave no lift to his spirit. The great central tower rose against a sky of clearest blue, strong and foursquare as on the day when its Norman builders took down their scaffolding. White pigeons hovered or perched on niche and corbel. But fortitude and aspiration alike had deserted Mr. Simeon for the while. Life—hard life and poverty—had subdued him to be one of the petty, nameless crowd this Cathedral had seen creep to their end in its shadow.… "What should such creatures as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?" A thousand thousand such as Mr. Simeon had listened or lifted their voice to its anthems—had aspired for the wings of a dove, to fly away and be at rest. Where now were all their emotions? He entered by a side-door of the western porch. The immense, solemn nave, if it did not catch his thoughts aloft, at least hushed them in awe. To Mr. Simeon Merchester Cathedral was a passion, nearer, if not dearer, than wife or children.
He had arrived ten minutes ahead of the appointed time. As he walked towards the great organ he heard a child's voice, high-pitched and clear, talking behind the traceries of the choir screen. He supposed it the voice of some irreverent chorister, and stepping aside to rebuke it, discovered Corona and Brother Copas together gazing up at the coffins above the canopy.
"And is King Alfred really up there?—the one that burnt the cakes?— and if so, which?" Corona was asking, too eager to think of grammar.
Brother Copas shrugged his shoulders.
"What's left of him is up there somewhere."
'Here are sands, ignoble thingsDropped from the ruined sides of kings.'
'Here are sands, ignoble thingsDropped from the ruined sides of kings.'
'Here are sands, ignoble thingsDropped from the ruined sides of kings.'
"—But the Parliament troopers broke open the coffins and mixed the dust sadly. The Latin says so. 'In this and the neighbouring chests' (or caskets, as you say in America), 'confounded in a time of Civil Fury, reposes what dust is left of—' Ah, good afternoon, Mr. Simeon! This young lady has laid forcible hands on me to give her an object-lesson in English history. Do you, who know ten times more of the Cathedral than I, come to my aid."
"If you are looking for King Alfred," answered Mr. Simeon, beaming on Corona through his glasses, "there's a tradition that his dust lies in the second chest to the right… a tradition only. No one really knows."
Corona shifted her position some six paces to the right, and tilted her gaze up at the coffer as though she would crick her neck.
"Aye, missie"—Mr. Simeon still beamed—"they're up there, the royal ones—Dane and Norman and Angevin; and not one to match the great Anglo-Saxon that was father of us all."
Brother Copas grunted impatiently.
"My good Simeon, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! God forbid that one should decry such a man as Alfred was. But the pedantry of Freeman and his sect, who tried to make 'English' a conterminous name and substitute for 'Anglo-Saxon,' was only by one degree less offensive than the ignorance of your modern journalist who degrades Englishmen by writing them down (or up, the poor fool imagines) as Anglo-Saxons. In truth, King Alfred was a noble fellow. No one in history has struggled more pluckily to rekindle fire in an effete race or to put spirit into an effete literature by pretending that both were of the prime."
"Come, come," murmured Mr. Simeon, smiling. "I see you are off upon one of your hobbies.… But you will not tell me that the fine rugged epic ofBeowulf, to which the historians trace back all that is noblest in our poetry, had lost its generative impulse even so early as Alfred's time. That were too extravagant!"
"Brekekekèx, ten brink, ten brink!" snapped Brother Copas. "All the frogs in chorus around Charon's boat! Fine rugged fiddlestick—have you ever readBeowulf?"
"In translation only."
"You need not be ashamed of labour saved. I once spent a month or two in mastering Anglo-Saxon, having a suspicion of Germans when they talk about English literature, and a deeper suspicion of English critics who ape them. Then I tackledBeowulf, and found it to be what I guessed—no rugged national epic at all, but a blown-out bag of bookishness. Impulse? Generative impulse?—the thing is wind, I tell you, without sap or sinew, the production of some conscientious Anglo-Saxon whose blue eyes, no doubt, watered with the effort of inflating it. I'll swear it never drew a human tear otherwise.… That's what the whole Anglo-Saxon race had become when Alfred arose to galvanise 'em for a while—a herd of tall, flabby, pale-eyed men, who could neither fight, build, sing, nor enforce laws. And so our England—wise as Austria in mating—turned to other nuptials and married William the Norman. Behold then a new breed; the country covered with sturdy, bullet-headed, energetic fellows, who are no sooner born than they fly to work—hammers going, scaffolds climbing; cities, cathedrals springing up by magic; and all to a new song that came with some imported workmen from the Provence—"
'Quan la douss' aura ventaDeves vostre paÿs'—
'Quan la douss' aura ventaDeves vostre paÿs'—
'Quan la douss' aura ventaDeves vostre paÿs'—
"And so—pop!—down the wind goes your pricked bladder of aBeowulf: down the wind that blows from the Mediterranean, whence the arts and the best religions come."
Mr. Simeon rubbed the side of his jaw thoughtfully.
"Ah," said he, "I remember Master Blanchminster saying something of the sort the other day. He was talking of wine."
"Yes—the best religions and the best wine: they go together. Could ever an Anglo-Saxon have builtthat, think you?" demanded Brother Copas with a backward jerk of the head and glance up at the vaulted roof. "But to my moral.—All this talk of Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and the rest is rubbish. We are English by chemical action of a score of interfused bloods. That man is a fool who speaks as though, at this point of time, they could be separated: had he the power to put his nonsense into practice he would be a wicked fool. And so I say, Mr. Simeon, that the Roundheads—no pure Anglo-Saxon, by the way, ever had a round head—who mixed up the dead dust in the caskets aloft there, were really leaving us a sound historical lesson—"
But here Mr. Simeon turned at the sound of a brisk footstep. Dr. Windeatt had just entered by the western door.
"You'll excuse me? I promised the Doctor to blow the organ for him."
"Do people blow upon organs?" asked Corona, suddenly interested. "I thought they played upon them the same as pianos, only with little things that pulled out at the sides."
"Come and see," Mr. Simeon invited her, smiling.
The three went around to the back of the organ loft. By and by when Mr. Simeon began to pump, and after a minute, a quietadagio, rising upon a throb of air, stole along the aisles as though an angel spoke in it, or the very spirit of the building, tears sprang into the child's eyes and overflowed. She supposed that Mr. Simeon alone was working this miracle.… Blinking more tears away, she stared at him, meeting his mild, half-quizzical gaze as he stooped and rose and stooped again over the bellows.
Brother Copas, touching her elbow, signed to her to come away. She obeyed, very reluctantly. By a small doorway in the southern aisle she followed him out into the sunshine of the Cathedral Close.
"But how does he do it?" she demanded. "He doesn't look a bit as if he could do anything like that—not in repose."
Brother Copas eyed her and took snuff. "He and the like of him don't touch the stops, my dear. He and the like of him do better; they supply the afflatus."
O ye holy and humble Men of heart, bless ye the Lord: praise Him, and magnify Him for ever!
Mr. Simeon worked mechanically, heaving and pressing upon the bellows of the great organ. His mind ran upon Master Copas's disparagement ofBeowulfand the Anglo-Saxons. It was ever the trouble that he remembered an answer for Brother Copas after Brother Copas had gone. … Why had he not bethought him to cite Cædmon, at any rate, against that sweeping disparagement? How went the story?—
Cædmon was a lay brother, a tender of cattle at the Abbey of Whitby under the Abbess Hilda who founded it. Until somewhat spent in years he had never learnt any poems. Therefore at a feast, when all sang in turn, so soon as he saw the harp coming near him, he would rise and leave the table and go home. Once when he had gone thus from the feast to the stables, where he had night-charge of the beasts, as he yielded himself to sleep One stood over him and said, greeting him by name, "Caedmon, sing some song to me." "I cannot sing," he said, "and for this cause left I the feast." "But you shall sing to me," said the Vision. "Lord, what shall I sing?" "Sing the Creation," said the Vision. Caedmon sang, and in the morning remembered what he had sung…
"If this indeed happened to Caedmon, and late in life" (mused Mr. Simeon, heaving on the bellows of the great organ), "might not even some such miracle befall me?"
Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thy house, and the place where Thine honour dwelleth.
"I might even write a play," thought Mr. Simeon.