CHAPTER VII.
Frederick Walcheren did not rest satisfied with the ultimatum which Father Tasker had passed on his conduct, with regard to what he had learned in the confessional. He had no hope of obtaining a different opinion, but he considered it right, before he acted on his own responsibility, to leave no stone unturned to vindicate his idea of what was just and right. As soon as Father Henniker was sufficiently recovered to be able to resume his duties, he sought an audience with him, and told him the whole story, carefully withholding any details that might lead to the identification of the parties concerned.
The older priest was very much shocked by the recital. He felt for his young brother keenly, so he said, but he had no further consolation to give him. It wasa terrible trial for him—sent by Almighty God to test his faith and endurance of suffering. It was a high honour conferred on him by Heaven; he was called upon to take up the cross in imitation of the Saviour of Mankind, and to carry it, maybe, through life. But there was no remedy except the medicines which had been already prescribed for him—Prayer and Patience, and rejoicing in Suffering!
And he was a man with a burning, aching heart, bowed down beneath a sense of an irreparable loss, brought on him by a fellow-man, and he writhed under these recommendations to inactivity like a strong man would writhe and chafe to rend apart the cords that bound him, whilst what he loved best was being cruelly tortured under his very eyes.
He did not answer the father for a few minutes, but sat with his head bowed down and his eyes fixed upon the ground.
‘I fear you do not see this matter in its proper light, brother,’ said Father Henniker, after a long pause.
‘If yours is the proper light, I cannot!’ replied Frederick.
‘It is not my light. It is the light of the Church,’ said his companion.
‘But it has not shined on me,’ retorted Frederick, quickly. ‘You make me feel I am unfit for our holy office! I am a man still, not a neutral creature, without feelings, or passions, or warm, human blood running through my veins. If I imagined that ordination would cure me of all this, I was mistaken! It has failed to do so. On every side I receive the same advice. Don’t feel—don’t think—don’t remember! Be patient—be calm—be silent! Act, live, do your duty as if such things had never been, as if everything were right within you, and God had not taken the only thing which made your life worth living from you at one cruel blow!’
‘Hush! hush!’ interposed the priest. ‘When you compare the love you conceived for a sinful woman, whose charms only appealed to the lust of the eye, to the dutywhich you owe to the Almighty, you are uttering blasphemy.’
‘A sinful woman!’ echoed Frederick. ‘Who presumes to call her so? You forget she was my wife, father! No one shall ever call her “sinful” in my hearing, were it the Holy Father himself!’
‘I will not listen to such talk any longer,’ exclaimed Father Henniker, indignantly. ‘You are right when you say you have mistaken your vocation, Brother Walcheren! Leave my presence, and never enter it again whilst such feelings obtain the mastery over you!’
Frederick did as he was desired, biting his lips with indignation at the rebuff, and, retreating to his own room, did not speak to his superior for some days to come.
It was while he was still warring with the human passions which had been raised in his breast, that he was informed one evening that a gentleman desired to speak with him, and on demanding his name, received the card of Henry Hindes. A close observer might have seen FatherWalcheren’s hands clench as he read the name on the card, but he told the man to admit the visitor to his private sanctum, in as calm a voice as he could muster. Whilst Henry Hindes was being conducted through the long stone passages, Frederick tried to make up his mind how he should address him, but his thoughts were all chaos. He stood like a statue, with his mind a blank, to receive—the murderer of his wife.
Hindes entered, looking very cringing and humiliated. He glanced round the small, bare chamber on entering, to see if there was any third person present to listen to their conversation, but perceiving they were alone, he plucked up courage to advance a little nearer. He had made up his mind to learn the worst, for he could wrestle no longer with his agony of suspense. As he advanced, Frederick Walcheren retreated till the distance of the room lay between them.
‘Not a step nearer, Mr Hindes,’ he ejaculated; ‘give me some chance of remainingmaster of myself! Now, what have you to say to me?’
‘Are you sure we are quite alone?’ inquired his visitor, glancing around him fearfully; ‘that we shall not be overheard?’
‘No one will hear you,’ replied Frederick.
‘I know you—you recognised my voice the other day,’ commenced Hindes, ‘and I felt I must speak to you on the subject. I have understood that every word uttered in the confessional is sacred—that a priest dare not reveal it, even if he would. Is that true?’
‘It is true!’ replied the other.
‘And that a priest’s word would not be taken, even if he did repeat what he heard as a confessor—that he would be disgraced and stripped of his cloth in consequence, so that the secrets told in confession are as inviolate as the grave!’
‘You have been informed aright. Were it not so, the sacrament of confession would be at a discount. Penitents would be afraid to tell of their sins, the greatest of whichthey confide to the ears of their confessor without the slightest fear.’
‘I wanted to make sure I had been informed aright,’ continued Hindes, with the sweat of fear and agitation standing thick upon his brow, ‘so I thought I would come and ask you straight. You must be aware that I did not know I was addressing you last week, Mr Walcheren; in fact, I had not heard that you had entered the Church. Naturally, you would have been the last person I should have chosen for such a confidence.’
‘Naturally!’ repeated Frederick.
‘It was an awful thing to have to say,’ said Hindes, trembling; ‘but you assure me it will go no further. I will do anything to ensure this. Become a Catholic to-morrow, or leave the country and promise not to return to it. I am truly penitent, Mr Walcheren, indeed I am, and ready to prove my sincerity in any way you may choose to point out to me!’
‘I have already told you, sir, that the secrets of the confessional are inviolate, andthe Church demands no penance except such as shall be pleasing to Almighty God! Since you say you are penitent, you have, doubtless, said the same to Him.’
‘Yes, indeed! I have tried to pray, but heaven seems so far off for such as I. But it was hardly a crime. It was more an accident than anything else. If I could only make you believe this.’
‘I always did believe it, until your own lips told me otherwise.’
‘Yes, yes! but in confession I wished to make the worst of my error, in order to see if I should have absolution for the worst. But it reallywasan accident! I assure you, on my honour.’
‘Mr Hindes,’ said Father Walcheren, sternly, ‘let us have no fooling, if you please! I cannot listen to two stories. Last week you said, distinctly, that you did it by design. Now you want to make out it was an accident. But I shall choose to believe that what you said in the confessional, when you thought you werespeaking to a stranger, was the true version of the story.’
‘It was, it was; but it is safe with you!’ cried Hindes, as though he felt himself beaten, and declined to fight any longer. ‘I will tell you the whole truth, indeed I will! It will be a comfort to get it clean off my soul.’
At this critical moment it flashed through Father Walcheren’s mind that he should warn his penitent that he was not in the confessional, but he could not. Jenny—his murdered Jenny, seemed to flit before him, with her beautiful features all soiled with the damps of death and almost indistinguishable through corruption, crying aloud for justice on her assassin, and, right or wrong, he could not, and he did not, speak.
‘It happened just as I told you the other day,’ continued Henry Hindes. ‘I loved her—don’t be angry with me, it is all over now, you know—and I would not have harmed her for the world, but I loved her long before she ever knew you, and hermarriage made me jealous as well as angry. Mr Crampton deputed me to follow her down to Dover and make her an offer to return home, on the condition that she gave you up and allowed her father to annul the marriage, on a plea that you took a false oath concerning her age. When I arrived at the hotel she had gone out, and I wandered on the cliffs to beguile the time, and there I met her.’
‘Go on!’ said Frederick, curtly.
‘I told you the rest,’ replied Hindes, beginning to feel uneasy at the other’s manner.
‘I wish to hear it again. Whilst you are about it, you had better tell all.’
‘I had no intention of injuring her, Mr Walcheren; indeed, you must believe that! I told her all her father had commissioned me to say, and she laughed in my face at the idea. She wanted to know what business it was of mine to interfere in her affairs, and why her father had not gone down himself to make his proposals in person. And then, I was mad enough to tell her thereason that I took such an interest in all that concerned her. I told her how long I had loved her.’
‘You insulted her, in fact,’ exclaimed Frederick, making a step forward.
‘No, Mr Walcheren, no,’ cried the coward, cringing before him; ‘I did not, upon my honour.’
‘Your honour,’ sneered the other.
‘I did not insult her; indeed I thought too highly of her for that. But she goaded me on to saying what I did. And then she turned round on me with such bitter scorn that she drove me beside myself. She almost spurned me from her in her mocking pride, and I saw she was perilously near the edge of the cliff. I stretched out my hand and laid it on her arm to save her from falling backward. But she wrenched her wrist from my grasp, crying out, “You brute! You want to push me over the cliffs now, I suppose.” Upon my soul, Mr Walcheren, I had never dreamt of such an awful thing before. But, as she said the words, I suppose the devil enteredinto me,—something did, at any rate—and I thought, “And if I do, no one will have you evermore. IfIcan never hope to call you mine, I can prevent Walcheren doing so.” I was mad—I must have been mad—for I had loved her so dearly, ever since she was a little child, and yet, at that moment, I seemed to have but one wish—to see her out of the reach of everybody, even myself—to know she would be unable ever again to taunt me, or despise me, or laugh over my infatuation. So, without thinking of the consequences, I gave her a push backwards instead of a pull forwards, and you know the rest. She fell—and I have never known a happy hour since. I don’t think I shall ever have a happy hour again.’
‘Not if I can help it!’ replied Frederick, with emphasis.
Hindes started, and changed colour.
‘But you cannot betray me. My revelation is sacred. You said yourself that the secrets of the confessional are inviolate.’
‘I know I did. Butthisis not a confessional, Mr Hindes.’
The wretched man glared round him like a rat who has been trapped.
‘Do you mean to say that you are not bound to keep secrets toldoutof the church?’
‘A priest is bound to maintain utter silence on all matters revealed under the seal of confession, whether in the church or out of it, but you and I are in the position of two private individuals. You came to call on me like any other person; therefore, it lies in my discretionary power to keep what you have told me this evening to myself, or not.’
‘My God!’ cried Hindes, ‘I am lost!’
Then the nerve which he had ruined by the use of morphia entirely forsook him, and he fell on his knees and crawled to the feet of the man he had so sorely wronged, like an abject animal.
‘Mercy! mercy!’ he groaned, ‘don’t visit my crime upon my head, for the sake of my poor wife and children. I loved her.’
‘Silence, sir!’ thundered Frederick, ‘remember you are speaking ofmy wife! Mercy!’ he continued, after a pause, ‘what mercy did you have on me, when you cut my dream of love so cruelly short, and in so devilish a manner? What mercy had you on her, my sweet, innocent, loving Jenny, when your accursed hand hurled her over those awful rocks? My love! my darling!’ he continued, pacing the floor of his room in his agitation, ‘why was I not by your side at that fatal moment, that I might have made this fiend pay the penalty of his crime by sharing your fate? My wife—my wife—and he asks me to show mercy upon him!’
‘Mr Walcheren! I will do anything—anything—if you will only keep my secret now. It can do you no good to publish it, norhereither. Let me go free and I will pay any penalty you like. I am a rich man. If your Church demands it, I will pay half my fortune into her coffers, or, if you wish it, I will sign a paper, promising to leave England at once—to-morrow,if you insist upon it—and never show my face in the country again; I will perform any penance you may put upon me, only don’t make the matter public property after this length of time.’
He had forgotten, in his cowardly fear, that Walcheren had no witness against him, that his crime had been committed in secret, and that an English jury had acquitted him, and all men, from blame. His conscience had turned him into such a sorry poltroon that his memory had departed with his manliness. He grovelled before his opponent on the ground—he even attempted to kiss his feet, but Frederick Walcheren spurned him from him with his boot.
‘Don’t touch me, you brute!’ he exclaimed, using involuntarily the very words poor Jenny had blurted forth in her indignation, ‘your very lips are contamination! Once for all, I willnotspare you. If you escape to the uttermost ends of the earth, I will pursue you there! You shall walk no longer among your fellow-men like awhited sepulchre. If I unfrock myself in order to obtain it, I will have my revenge!’
‘I have tried to make amends,’ groaned Henry Hindes, who was still upon his knees. ‘I have not used the money Mr Crampton left to my son. It is all there; I intend to endow a church or an hospital with it. But it washers. It more justly belongs to you; you shall have it, every farthing, with double interest, if you will only consider your intention again and contemplate how little good you will do yourself and others by carrying it out.’
‘You would bribe me with money, you miserable cur!’ replied Frederick, witheringly—‘pay me for my wife’s murder—satisfy my craving for revenge by so many pounds, shillings and pence! But you will find I am not such an usurer as you imagine. I have not been brought up to trade, and if I had, I should not trade in my heart’s affections. Be silent! I will listen to no more from your accursed lips. You have said enough! Leave my presence;but don’t think to hide yourself from me. I will leave the priesthood to-morrow—I will leave the Church itself—I will resign my hopes of salvation, if need be, but you shall not go unpunished for this hideous crime!’
So speaking, Frederick Walcheren left the room suddenly, slamming the door after him, whilst Henry Hindes remained on the floor, with the tears running down his cheeks. When he found himself alone, he rose from his knees and slowly quitted the apartment, not knowing what to do or where to go, or whom to consult, on the unhappy position in which he found himself.
The young priest was still pacing the floor of his dormitory, in the greatest disquietude, when a lay brother appeared, to tell him that a lady wished to speak to him in the common parlour, where the clergy usually receive their female visitors. Frederick tried to calm himself as he went down to meet her, but he felt very unequal to administering comfort, or giving advice to anyone. But what was his relief, on enteringthe parlour, to find that his visitor was Rhoda Berry. She was robed all in black, and looked so quiet and graceful that he was not surprised that the brother had called her a lady. Half his care seemed to fall off his shoulders as he recognised her.
‘Oh! Rhoda,’ he exclaimed, coming forward eagerly to greet her, ‘how good it is of you to answer my appeal so soon. Were you surprised that I should wish to see you again? I am in great trouble, and I long for your advice and counsel. You were always giving me good advice in the old days, Rhoda, so you must do the same now.’
‘Certainly, if I can,’ replied the girl, in an astonished tone; ‘but what advice of mine can benefit you, now that you are a priest, so high above me and so far, far away?’
‘Do you think I must necessarily be so high above you, Rhoda, just because I have been ordained,’ said Frederick, sadly. ‘I, on the contrary, have but lately found out that I am lower than I even believed myself to be; full of the old worldliness, the old envy, malice and all uncharitableness.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ replied Rhoda, stoutly, ‘you were never anything like that, Fred—I beg your pardon, I meant Mr Walcheren—’
‘Nonsense! call me Fred, Rhoda. What else should I be to you than that?’
‘Butnow—’ said Rhoda, dubiously, ‘it sounds so disrespectful.’
‘Does it? Never mind. It eases my heart to hear it. I feel very much alone sometimes, Rhoda, and as if I had isolated myself from all who loved me.’
‘I suppose you do, but perhaps the feeling will wear off with time. But I do not like to hear you accuse yourself of faults of which you were never guilty. I am sure you were never either envious or malicious. You were always the most kind-hearted and generous of men, at least to me. So I am sure you cannot have become uncharitable now.’
‘Perhaps I have had more cause lately to bring my bad qualities into play. I have had a great shock, the last week, Rhoda! I have discovered that my dear wife did notmeet her death by an accident, but was foully murdered.’
The girl sprung from her seat with a genuine exclamation of horror.
The dead woman had been more than her rival. She had actually ousted her from her lover’s affections, and she had had many bitter and envious thoughts about them both. But, when she heard that she had been murdered, all her resentment vanished in a flood of pity so vast, that she felt, at that moment, as if she would have laid down her own life to bring her back again. And how she pitiedhimtoo—her poor lover, whose infidelity to herself had met with so terrible an ending.
‘Oh! my poor, poor boy!’ she cried, forgetful of his priesthood and everything, except that once he had been her own; ‘how sorry I am for you. How did you hear it? Who did the awful deed? What reason could anyone have had to injure you so fearfully?’
And then the tender-hearted girl sat down in her chair again and burst intotears—partly for poor dead Jenny, and partly for herself.
‘I knew you would feel for me,’ replied Frederick. ‘You have been a good friend to me all along. I cannot answer all your questions. If I could, I should not have need of your advice. But listen to me, and I will tell you the whole story.’
He drew a chair opposite to her on the other side of the table, and leaned his arms across it.
‘You have heard of the confessional, Rhoda, where Catholics tell their sins to a priest, and, when truly penitent, receive absolution. Last Saturday week, Father Henniker, one of our priests, was ill, and I was ordered to take his place in the confessional, and as the people who confess cannot see the face of the confessor, no one knew but that Father Henniker was in his usual place. Do you understand?’
‘Perfectly!’
‘Whilst I was engaged thus, a man entered the confessional, and, to my horror and amazement, told me the whole historyof my darling wife’s—You don’t mind my calling her that before you, do you, Rhoda?’
‘No, no; call her just what you like. I should not love you—I mean, I should nothaveloved you—Fred, if you had married her without caring for her.’
‘I did you an injustice by the question. You are too true-hearted a woman to mind it. Well, this man related the whole dreadful story to me, and told me that he had killed her himself—that she had not fallen over the cliffs by mistake, but that he had pushed her over—the villain!—on purpose, and with the design of killing her!’
‘Oh, Fred, what did you do?’ exclaimed Rhoda, with her blue eyes opened to their widest extent.
‘My dear, I could do nothing. That was the terrible part of it. I had to sit there and listen to the account of his villainy and make no sign. But, as he left the confessional, I opened the half door on my side and showed my face, and he looked as though the heavens had opened to rain down judgment on him.’
‘You knew the man, then, and he knew you,’ said Rhoda.
‘Yes! but I am bound by the most solemn oaths not to tell the name nor communications of any penitent who confesses to me. Oh! Rhoda, pity me! You can fancy what I felt, cooped up there, and compelled to listen to perhaps a dozen more confessions, without the slightest idea of what they were all saying. I think some of them must have been rather astonished to have been let off so easily, for I absolved the whole lot without a murmur. All I could think of was how I could escape and take counsel of someone. My head and my heart were on fire! Had I followed my natural inclination, I should have rushed down the aisle after the brute and seized him by the throat, and squeezed his life out of him then and there. But I had to wait till I was set at liberty, and then I rushed to Father Tasker, an old friend of mine, and asked him what I ought to do about it.’
‘And he told you—?’
‘That I could do nothing, that, by reason of my office, I must sit down like a dummy, and let this murderer walk about the world scot-free. That I must pray and hope, and trust that someone else might bring him to justice, or try and persuade him to confess his crime to the law, but failing this, I could do nothing but be patient under my heinous wrongs.Patient!when my beautiful girl lies in her grave, murdered, in the spring-time of her youth, by a jealous brute who could not bear to see our happiness; when my married bliss has been cut short, and all my earthly hopes shattered for ever; when I have pledged myself, in my despair, to be quiescent and forego my revenge. Rhoda! it has nearly driven me mad! I feel like that poor husband, of whom we read during the Indian mutinies, who was bound with cords whilst his lovely young wife was outraged and murdered before his eyes, the while the foam and blood dropped from his mouth in his rage and agony. Here am I, chained—bound—helpless, and all throughmy own folly. I cannot bear it! I cannot—I cannot!’
‘Hush! hush, dear Fred, someone will hear you!’ exclaimed the girl, cautiously, as she rose and listened at the door. ‘I believe there is somebody in the passage now. Cannot I see you somewhere else, in order to talk over this unhappy business? May you not leave this place?’
‘Certainly! I am free to go and come as I choose. Where are you staying in town?’
‘At my old address. The landlady knows me, and is very kind. I do not intend to remain over to-morrow, unless you want me. You see, I have to leave the—the—little one with mother, and he is getting rather troublesome now.’
‘Is he quite well?’ inquired Frederick, wistfully.
‘Yes; but can you come and see me to-night?’
‘I can, and I will, at seven o’clock. Till then, good-bye.’
And he let her cautiously out of the front door.