XIV
SOME THEORIES—AND A WAY OUT
He was sitting in his study late one windy March Saturday when Mrs. Hepworth was announced. He had been in his confessional all the evening. A half-finished letter lay on his blotting-pad, but he had turned away from it and was warming his stockinged feet at the fire. She was heavily veiled, but he divined a crisis at a glance.
"Are you very busy?" she asked, in a smothered voice.
"Very idle," he answered gaily. "The appearances of industry are deceitful. I was really—don't tell—toasting my toes. Are you in any trouble?" he asked in a graver tone, taking her hand in both his.
She nodded, but did not speak. He drew an arm-chair to the fire, and poked a great lump of coal into a blaze.
"There, there!" said he. "Sit down and have the cry out. I have a letter to finish and another to write. By the time they are both done you will be calmer."
He went on with his writing; re-read, sealed, and stamped the two letters, rang the bell, and, when it was answered by one of the mission lads, carried them to the door himself. When he turned to her again the worst was over. She was drying her eyes. He leaned forward and patted her hand.
"What a big baby we are!"
She returned him a spasmodic smile. She was conscious of a tear-stained face—possibly a red nose. But then, he was a priest. That made a difference.
"And now, what is the trouble? Has invention given out? No? Come, come then, everything else is bearable, isn't it? If I were an imaginative writer, that fear would never leave me, and would end by paralyzing my pen. I should have stage-fright every time I sat down opposite a sheet of paper. It has always been less of a marvel to me that a novel should be finished well than that it should be finished at all."
Althea hardly listened. She was wondering how she should express the things of this world in terms that a man of the other should understand; a necessity—let the prurient believe it or not—that makes confession a dry business for all parties.
"Father Vernon, has it ever occurred to you that I am a woman as well as a writer?"
"My dear, a very charming one."
"At least an honest one. Three years ago, you will remember, I came to you on quite an impersonal matter. You divined an inward trouble—saw that I had missed the peace which passes understanding, and offered me—how delicately, I shall never forget—your aid to attain it. I refused it. You never would guess what the refusal cost me."
"My dear——"
"Yes, yes; let me go on. I must have seemed churlish. But if principles are to be anything beyond mere idle words, they must be held to; and one of mine is that for a woman to invite sympathy is only a degree less shameful than for her to beg for love. The way of the devout woman with her director is hateful to me. This unseemly self-revelation from week to week is treachery—treachery to her own heart and to those whom she takes into it. Am I very heretical?"
"Oh, my child! How it would lighten my task were there more who thought like you."
"Before I left, you bade me, if ever I was in great trouble, to come to you again. And now——"
"Now the time has come?"
"Yes." She rubbed her hands nervously one over the other. "I am in great straits."
"Is the way growing dark or only hard?"
"Oh,hard—hard!" she moaned, rocking a little backward and forward.
She looked up in his face and saw her trouble was guessed. When the will to help and the powerlessness meet upon a face that regards us tenderly we read our fate written there in letters of fire.
"Yes," she went on, as though he had spoken. "I am a Catholic: I am a divorced woman whose husband lives, and I am in love—in love with all my heart, and soul, and strength."
"The man? Is he free?" Vernon asked, perhaps for something to say.
"Yes. I thank God, whose captive I am, that he at least is free."
"He understands your peculiar position?"
"He understands nothing."
"My dear child, you should let him know. In justice to him."
His words irritated Althea vaguely, as a little professional mannerism might irritate us in the surgeon fighting for our lives.
"Oh, have patience! I am going to tell you everything. It is the man whose book I sent you to read. Mr. Prentice, a friend of mine, a journalist, brought him to me last summer. He was quite unknown in London and was finding a difficulty in even getting it considered. He is not quite a stranger to us; at least, we know who he is. My father is a friend of some of the rich branch of his family in Connecticut. My publishers made difficulties, of course, but the thing was in a fair way of being settled—"
"But surely, my child, his opinions shocked you?"
"Not at all, Father!" Noticing his surprise: "You must take my word for that. It is so hard when one is leading two lives—the artist's and the other. There seems no contact between them—no common ground. I have had no temptation myself to such things, and so the question had never arisen for me personally. No, I was conscious of nothing but the joy, the privilege of helping a fellow-worker toward his reward."
"When did you first find it a matter of conscience?"
"Once when I went to confession to Father Mephan at the Priory. I mentioned it almost casually. To my surprise, he took the matter most seriously—said I was incurring a tremendous responsibility, and that if one soul was led by it to love God less, the sin would be at my door. I had to get the manuscript back from the publishers. Oh! it was weary work."
"Mephan pronounced against the book, of course."
"Yes. I told him that to my knowledge the writer was a good man—in his way almost saintly. I knew him well enough by then to say that. But he said it didn't matter—that Antichrist had his own prophets and confessors, and even martyrs. Is that so?"
"I fear it is."
"He said something else stranger still. He said the virtue that was outside the Church was a greater danger than the wickedness. Do you believe that?"
"No, I don't. I think virtue, of any sort, is quite secure from popularity. But go on. You have told me nothing of the man himself."
"He continued to visit us. He was lonely and embittered at first, but it wore off. He is very handsome. I was proud to be able to show such a fellow-countryman after some that have been at our house. The men liked him, and I know the women envied him to me. Oh! a woman can see. I got him to tell me some of his life. It's wonderful! He seems to have deliberately sought out pain and labor as though some inward need of his soul impelled him to it. He does not know God, but he has never lost the spiritual vision. His heart is as clean as a child's and as simple. He has his faults. He hates the rich; but there is not a trace of envy in his hatred. He is not even like Mill—led to the love of the many by the hatred of the few. It is simply the holy hunger and thirst after justice."
"My dear, you are painting a very good man. Did you never try to influence him toward the truth?"
"Father Vernon, do you believe in my sincerity or not?"
"I do, indeed."
"Then, believe me when I tell you it's not possible. Perhaps in years and years to come; but his heart will have to be broken first. No, his virtue is the virtue of Marcus Aurelius—of Julian. He has all the sadness of the old, stoical, pagan world. Will you think me exaggerated if I tell you how he affects me?"
"I think not."
"Well, I feel as though some great angel, neither of light nor darkness, neither fallen nor confirmed, to whom the test for or against God has never been offered, has folded his wings and dropped gently at my feet. I have but one fear—that he will spread them as quietly and take flight."
Two red spots glowed on her cheeks as she spoke. Vernon, considering her, suddenly realized how ill she was looking. There was even on her face an expression that, as a priest, it was part of his office to watch for.
"When did this thing happen—the thing that makes you so unhappy?"
"Last Thursday. He had dined with us. I had been feeling ill all day. Since the summer I have been frightened two or three times—it is my head I think—but I have put off getting any advice. He could not have asked for an explanation at a worse time; but I had no right to withhold it. I tried to explain, even offered him money, and then——"
"Yes, and then?"
"Oh, Father Vernon, he grew so big! He seemed to tower. Everything else was small. Yes—let me tell the truth—religion, priests, even God—we all seemed to be a little band of intriguers trying to pull him down. He told me to burn his book, turned on his heel. I knew he wouldn't come back, and so—and so—I'm only a woman: I babbled something or other that was in my heart, and he took me—in his—arms."
She leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and looked into the fire. The action was deliberate. One never would have guessed what a storm was rending her breast.
"He kissed me only once," she went on. "He was very gentle. Then we sat down, and I found out that, all the time while I had been condescending, advising, putting him at his ease, I was nothing to him but just a little, lonely, spoilt girl."
"Have you seen him since?"
"No."
"Nor written?"
"No."
"He has called, of course?"
"Yes. I have not been at home to him."
"Then—the thing is over."
"Read this!" She drew a letter from the bosom of her dress and handed it to him. She watched him narrowly as he read it, but his expression of grave concern did not alter.
"Are you alone in town?" he asked, when he had read it through.
"My father and most of the servants are at Hindhead. I should have gone with them on Saturday, but I waited because——Oh! I just waited——"
"Do you want this back?" said Vernon, still holding the letter between his fingers.
"Burn it, please. No, wait a minute! Tear me off the signature first. I want that."
She pressed the little shred of paper against her lips.
"Oh! I love himso, I love himso," she moaned.
Vernon crumpled the sheets of paper one by one and threw them all into the fire together. The flames caught them at once. The writing glowed red, then white. The draught from the chimney rustled the ashes to and fro in the grate.
"Well," she asked, almost roughly, "what am I to do?"
"There is but one thing—your duty. I cannot soften it."
"Duty!" she repeated, in a terrible voice. For a moment Vernon thought a nerve-crisis was at hand; but she fought it down. The wit that was almost the woman's second nature came uppermost.
"It's a pretty trap, isn't it? There ought to have been a notice-board on my narrow way, Father Vernon: 'Beware man-traps and canons.' God's ways are a littleimpishat times, don't you think so? Can I see him?"
"I think not, dear child. It will only make it harder for you both."
"Pah! You say that, but you really don't trust me. You're only a man, after all. Can I write the letter here? It won't be very long."
Without a word he wheeled his writing-chair round for her, and pulled out unheaded note-paper and plain envelopes. She wrote a letter of six or eight pages quietly, without hesitating, except just at the end, when Vernon noticed her lips were pursed and her eyes swimming in tears. The second letter was a much shorter affair, and she enclosed in it the slip of paper which she had saved from the burnt letter. It lay on the top, and he noticed the address was that of a bank.
"I will leave these with you to post," she said; "then you will feel quite safe. I shall go down to Hindhead to-morrow and stay a good while, I think. I like watching the spring come. Good-bye; and remember it is by what youdidn'tsay to-night that I measure your sympathy. I don't think I could have stood platitudes."
"My child, I preach to those who are bearing their cross, not to those whom God has nailed to it. Before them I dare only kneel and pray."
"Oh, I felt it! I felt it! Something seemed to come out of you and break my will suddenly. Besides"—she hesitated—"besides, there's always something a woman keeps back, they say. I think, perhaps, he is saved from great unhappiness by what you have made me do to-night. I can't say more, even to you."
"My dear, love is never sent idly, never in vain. It is from our ignorant misuse, our blind misapprehension of its meaning, that the pity and the waste come about. Many a precious purpose is brought to nothing by the world's superstition of the happy ending. In love, as in life, those who seek selfishly forever seek vainly; even as they grasp it, the radiant vision turns a corpse within their arms. It is they who humbly and submissively—no matter how hard the law, how intolerable the accident—follow the inscrutable finger beckoning them from pleasant ways, to stumble upon the road that is narrow and steep and dark, who have their heart's desire given them in the end.... Yes! Who is it?"
There was a knock at the door.
"Please, farver, it's Mrs. Murnane come about Jimmy's charackter for the 'am-and-beef shop."
"Say I'm coming.... Would you like to spend a few minutes with me in the church before you go? We have the Forty Hours' devotion this week. I can let you out by the side door into the street. I suppose you have your car?"
She passed before him down the staircase and along a white-washed corridor, whose bluntly pointed windows and doorways were wreathed by texts in Gothic lettering. Mrs. Murnane, a woman with a commanding eye and great digestive capacity, was sitting on a long bench in the hall; the ham-and-beef aspirant, a knock-kneed lad who seemed to grow more uncertain and wavering of outline as he receded from his enormous boots to his cropped white head, sat by her side with an air of being in custody. Behind the bench successive sessions of unwashed heads had besmeared the wall with a grimy average of height.
The church was dark, and silent too; not with the mere absence of sound, but with a positive and penetrative stillness that seemed to radiate from one white disk, rimmed and rayed with gold, and enthroned, amid a phalanx of tapers and sweet waxen flowers, in one of the side chapels. A lad in a scarlet cassock and laced cotta was extinguishing a guttering candle, almost beyond his reach. As he rose on tiptoe the long pole trembled in his hands like a fishing-rod. Within the rails two men, their heads sunk beneath their shoulders, and without the rails two nuns, in broad whitecornichonsand turned-back sleeves of serge, watched the host motionlessly. On a votive-wheel near by many tapers, some white, some red, were blazing and dripping. The smell of incense was everywhere.
She knelt upon a rush-seatedprie-dieuin the same posture of absorbed devotion as the others, but her thoughts strayed, like a child's brought to church by an elder sister. She tried to count the tapers—how many red? how many white?—wondered what the nuns' faces were like behind the flapped white caps. The scene took shape in her head in little biting phrases, just as another kind of artist would have seen it in tone and composition. She was rather restless, wanted to be gone, and even said to herself that this last move of Father Vernon's was in doubtful taste. After going through so much——!
But the silence, the stillness, the enervating loaded atmosphere gained her little by little. She had an access of devotion: tapers, flowers, prostrate fellow-worshippers were all part of some intimate rite of which there were two protagonists—that white sphere toward which, from time to time, she stole an awed glance, and she—a white host herself, with tired, folded pinions, submissive, only waiting for fire from heaven to complete the sacrifice....
... Oh, God—the pain! the pain in her head! She wanted to scream, to faint, but her horror, the refined woman's horror of any "scene," kept her dumb and almost still. She prayed, wildly and incoherently—pressed her gloved fingers into her temples; her forehead was damp with perspiration....
It was going now. Yes. In wave after wave, each less poignant than the one before, the pain left her. She lifted her head, wet her lips—wiped her forehead with the handkerchief still damp from her tears. Her eyes were tired and dim; the altar swam mistily. She looked across to Father Vernon, and he, noting her restlessness at last, rose and, with a low genuflection on both knees, beckoned her, and passed before her from the church.
In the open air she revived, and even began to doubt the reality of what she had just undergone. There is a dream-like quality about intense pain that makes it hard to estimate it truly afterward. The car was waiting, in a dark slum that had once been a walled country lane smelling of mould and verdure. Even now the warm restlessness of spring could be felt in its fetid air. The chauffeur sat sideways upon his seat, reading some strange by-product of literature in a green cover. A dozen or so of ragged children, shock-headed and sore of face, clustered round the headlights like so many poor scorched flies. She shared the coppers in her purse between them.
"Write me from Hindhead," Vernon said, at the door of the car; "and come to see me again when you get back. Be sure, my dear, God has some great mercy for you after this. And if I were you, I should see some one about the headaches. Nerves? Oh, yes! but it never does harm to have good advice. Good-bye, good-bye! God bless you, my dear. Now then, babies, why aren't the lot of you in bed?"
The car rolled, smoothly and swiftly, southward and westward. Through brawling, chaffering Saturday night markets; through the old "Square Mile," deserted now, its mysterious lanes coiling away to left and right in tortuous perspective; across the Circus, in whose midst the bronze archer poises himself, choosing his prey and aiming his unseen arrow day and night at the spinning wheel of pleasure; round the sweep of the Quadrant—and home. Two and two, two and two; the men leaning over the women, the women leaning toward the men. Nature, after all, was slightly vulgar. To be placed—by circumstances—out of reach of its allurement had compensations—lent dignity to the point of view. It was almost enough to make one turn to virtue to have to share vice with so many....
There she went again! Phrases, phrases! Well, it was just as well, since, after all, there wasn't much else left for her now. How tired she was of it all! And what was the great mercy that Father Vernon had predicted so confidently?... Home, at last.
"Three hours, probably more," the doctor said. It was Pemmer-Lloyd, the great cancer specialist from Weymouth Street, just round the corner. He was in golfing tweeds, and felt justly aggrieved that, with so many general practitioners in the neighborhood, he should have been called away from breakfast, for this. The nine forty-five to Amersham was out of the question now.
One window-blind had been drawn up, crookedly and hurriedly, and through the rhomboidal opening a sinister light fell upon the disorder of the room. Two frightened maids and a housekeeper stood at the foot of the bed, watching the doctor, with inane hope upon their faces. One of the maids was crying, but looking about her curiously at the same time.
"Done? No! of course nothing can be done. Am I not telling you she has been dead over three hours. Had any doctor been attending her lately?"
"Not to our knowledge, sir."
"There may have to be an inquest, then. In that case you must see that nothing is touched. Have the family been advised?"
"No, doctor. I thought first——"
"Wire and 'phone them immediately!immediately!and the police as well. Here is my card for the inspector. I shall have to stay at home all day now. In a case like this, you should always call a general practitioner."
They say she must have been reading a great part of the night. Two books were on the table near her bed—"Madame Bovary," and "The Imitation of Christ." Flaubert and à Kempis! Poor Althea! It was almost your life's epitome.