There was something in this beautiful legend that entirely captivated the heart of the boy, and a vague sense of its hidden meaning seemed at times to seize him and control him. Later in life it became more and more evident to him, and remained forever in his mind as a lovely allegory of active charity and a willingness to serve. Like the giant’s staff, it blossomed and bore fruit.
But the time at length came, when his father decreed that he must be sent away to school. It was not meet that his son should be educated as a girl. He must go to the Jesuit college in Canada. Accordingly, one bright Summer morning, he departed with his father, on horseback, through those majestic forests that stretch with almost unbroken shadows from the sea to the St. Lawrence, leaving behind him all the endearments of home, and a wound in his mother’s heart that never ceased to ache,—a longing, unsatisfied and insatiable, for her absent Arthur, who had gone from her perhaps for ever.
At college he distinguished himself by his zeal for study, by the docility, gentleness, and generosity of his nature. There he was thoroughly trained in the classics, and in the dogmas of that august faith, whose turrets gleam with such crystalline light, and whose dungeons are so deep, and dark, and terrible. The study of philosophy and theology was congenial to his mind. Indeed, he often laid aside Homer for Parmenides, and turned from the odes of Pindar and Horace to the mystic hymns of Cleanthes and Synesius.
The uniformity of college life was broken only by the annual visit home in the Summer vacation; the joyous meeting, the bitter parting; the long journey to and fro through the grand, solitary, mysterious forest. To his mother these visits were even more precious than to himself; for ever more and more they added to her boundless affection the feeling of pride and confidence and satisfaction,—the joy and beauty of a youth unspotted from the world, and glowing with the enthusiasm of virtue.
At length his college days were ended. He returned home full of youth, full of joy and hope; but it was only to receive the dying blessings of his mother, who expired in peace, having seen his face once more. Then the house became empty to him. Solitary was the sea-shore, solitary were the woodland walks. But the spiritual world seemed nearer and more real. For affairs he had no aptitude; and he betook himself again to his philosophic and theological studies. He pondered with fond enthusiasm on the rapturous pages of Molinos and Madame Guyon; and in a spirit akin to that which wrote, he read the writings of Santa Theresa, which he found among his mother’s books,—the Meditations, the Road to Perfection, and the Moradas, or Castle of the Soul. She, too, had lingered over those pages with delight, and there were many passages marked by her own hand. Among them was this, which he often repeated to himself in his lonely walks: “O, Life, Life! how canst thou sustain thyself, being absent from thy Life? In so great a solitude, in what shalt thou employ thyself? What shalt thou do, since all thy deeds are faulty and imperfect?”
In such meditations passed many weeks and months. But mingled with them, continually and ever with more distinctness, arose in his memory from the days of childhood the old tradition of Saint Christopher,—the beautiful allegory of humility and labor. He and his service had been accepted, though he would not fast, and had not learned to pray! It became more and more clear to him, that the life of man consists not in seeing visions, and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and willing service.
Moreover, the study of ecclesiastical history awoke within him many strange and dubious thoughts. The books taught him more than their writers meant to teach. It was impossible to read of Athanasius without reading also of Arian; it was impossible to hear of Calvin without hearing of Servetus. Reason began more energetically to vindicate itself; that Reason, which is a light in darkness, not that which is “a thorn in Revelation’s side.” The search after Truth and Freedom, both intellectual and spiritual, became a passion in his soul; and he pursued it until he had left far behind him many dusky dogmas, many antique superstitions, many time-honored observances, which the lips of her alone, who first taught them to him in his childhood, had invested with solemnity and sanctity.
By slow degrees, and not by violent spiritual conflicts, he became a Protestant. He had but passed from one chapel to another in the same vast cathedral. He was still beneath the same ample roof, still heard the same divine service chanted in a different dialect of the same universal language. Out of his old faith he brought with him all he had found in it that was holy and pure and of good report. Not its bigotry, and fanaticism, and intolerance; but its zeal, its self-devotion, its heavenly aspirations, its human sympathies, its endless deeds of charity. Not till after his father’s death, however, did he become a clergyman. Then his vocation was manifest to him. He no longer hesitated, but entered upon its many duties and responsibilities, its many trials and discouragements, with the zeal of Peter and the gentleness of John.
XIX.
A week later, and Kavanagh was installed in his little room in the church-tower. A week later, and the carrier-pigeon was on the wing. A week later, and Martha Amelia’s anonymous epistolary eulogies of her relative had ceased for ever.
Swiftly and silently the Summer advanced, and the following announcement in the Fairmeadow Advertiser proclaimed the hot weather and its alleviations:—
“I have the pleasure of announcing to the Ladies and Gentlemen of Fairmeadow and its vicinity, that my Bath House is now completed, and ready for the reception of those who are disposed to regale themselves in a luxury peculiar to the once polished Greek and noble Roman.
“To the Ladies I will say, that Tuesday of each week will be appropriated to their exclusive benefit; the white flag will be the signal; and I assure the Ladies, that due respect shall be scrupulously observed, and that they shall be guarded from each vagrant foot and each licentious eye.
Edward Dimple.” Moreover, the village was enlivened by the usual travelling shows,—the wax-work figures representing Eliza Wharton and the Salem Tragedy, to which clergymen and their families were “respectfully invited, free on presenting their cards”; a stuffed shark, that had eaten the exhibitor’s father in Lynn bay; the menagerie, with its loud music and its roars of rage; the circus, with its tan and tinsel,—its faded columbine and melancholy clown; and, finally, the standard drama, in which Elder Evans, like an ancient Spanish Bululú, impersonated all the principal male characters, and was particularly imposing in Iago and the Moor, having half his face lamp-blacked, and turning now the luminous, now the eclipsed side to the audience, as the exigencies of the dialogue demanded.
There was also a great Temperance Jubilee, with a procession, in which was conspicuous a large horse, whose shaven tail was adorned with gay ribbons, and whose rider bore a banner with the device, “Shaved in the Cause”! Moreover, the Grand Junction Railroad was opened through the town, running in one direction to the city, and in the other into unknown northern regions, stringing the white villages like pearls upon its black thread. By this, the town lost much of its rural quiet and seclusion. The inhabitants became restless and ambitious. They were in constant excitement and alarm, like children in story-books hidden away somewhere by an ogre, who visits them regularly every day and night, and occasionally devours one of them for a meal.
Nevertheless, most of the inhabitants considered the railroad a great advantage to the village. Several ladies were heard to say that Fairmeadow had grown quite metropolitan; and Mrs. Wilmerdings, who suffered under a chronic suspension of the mental faculties, had a vague notion, probably connected with the profession of her son, that it was soon to become a sea-port.
In the fields and woods, meanwhile, there were other signs and signals of the Summer. The darkening foliage; the embrowning grain; the golden dragon-fly haunting the blackberry-bushes; the cawing crows, that looked down from the mountain on the corn-field, and waited day after day for the scarecrow to finish his work and depart; and the smoke of far-off burning woods, that pervaded the air and hung in purple haze about the summits of the mountains,—these were the avant-couriers and attenda
nts of the hot August.
Kavanagh had now completed the first great cycle of parochial visits. He had seen the Vaughans, the Archers, the Churchills, and also the Hawkinses and the Wilmerdingses, and many more. With Mr. Churchill he had become intimate. They had many points of contact and sympathy. They walked together on leisure afternoons; they sat together through long Summer evenings; they discoursed with friendly zeal on various topics of literature, religion, and morals.
Moreover, he worked assiduously at his sermons. He preached the doctrines of Christ. He preached holiness, self-denial, love; and his hearers remarked that he almost invariably took his texts from the Evangelists, as much as possible from the words of Christ, and seldom from Paul, or the Old Testament. He did not so much denounce vice, as inculcate virtue; he did not deny, but affirm; he did not lacerate the hearts of his hearers with doubt and disbelief, but consoled, and comforted, and healed them with faith.
The only danger was that he might advance too far, and leave his congregation behind him; as a piping shepherd, who, charmed with his own music, walks over the flowery mead, not perceiving that his tardy flock is lingering far behind, more intent upon cropping the thymy food around them, than upon listening to the celestial harmonies that are gradually dying away in the distance.
His words were always kindly; he brought no railing accusation against any man; he dealt in no exaggerations nor over-statements. But while he was gentle, he was firm. He did not refrain from reprobating intemperance because one of his deacons owned a distillery; nor war, because another had a contract for supplying the army with muskets; nor slavery, because one of the great men of the village slammed his pew-door, and left the church with a grand air, as much as to say, that all that sort of thing would not do, and the clergy had better confine itself to abusing the sins of the Hindoos, and let our domestic institutions alone.
In affairs ecclesiastical he had not suggested many changes. One that he had much at heart was, that the partition wall between parish and church should be quietly taken down, so that all should sit together at the Supper of the Lord. He also desired that the organist should relinquish the old and pernicious habit of preluding with triumphal marches, and running his fingers at random over the keys of his instrument, playing scraps of secular music very slowly to make them sacred, and substitute instead some of the beautiful symphonies of Pergolesi, Palestrina, and Sebastian Bach.
He held that sacred melodies were becoming to sacred themes; and did not wish, that, in his church, as in some of the French Canadian churches, the holy profession of religion should be sung to the air of “When one is dead ’t is for a long time,”—the commandments, aspirations for heaven, and the necessity of thinking of one’s salvation, to “The Follies of Spain,” “Louisa was sleeping in a grove,” or a grand “March of the French Cavalry.”
The study in the tower was delightful. There sat the young apostle, and meditated the great design and purpose of his life, the removal of all prejudice, and uncharitableness, and persecution, and the union of all sects into one church universal. Sects themselves he would not destroy, but sectarianism; for sects were to him only as separate converging roads, leading all to the same celestial city of peace. As he sat alone, and thought of these things, he heard the great bell boom above him, and remembered the ages when in all Christendom there was but one Church; when bells were anointed, baptized, and prayed for, that, wheresoever those holy bells should sound, all deceits of Satan, all danger of whirlwinds, thunders, lightnings, and tempests, might be driven away,—that devotion might increase in every Christian when he heard them,— and that the Lord would sanctify them with his Holy Spirit, and infuse into them the heavenly dew of the Holy Ghost. He thought of the great bell Guthlac, which an abbot of Croyland gave to his monastery, and of the six others given by his successor,—so musical, that, when they all rang together, as Ingulphus affirms, there was no ringing in England equal to it. As he listened, the bell seemed to breathe upon the air such clangorous sentences as,
“Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum,
Defunctos ploro, nimbum fugo, festaque honoro.”
Possibly, also, at times, it interrupted his studies and meditations with other words than these. Possibly it sang into his ears, as did the bells of Varennes into the ears of Panurge,—“Marry thee, marry thee, marry, marry; if thou shouldst marry, marry, marry, thou shalt find good therein, therein, therein, so marry, marry.” From this tower of contemplation he looked down with mingled emotions of joy and sorrow on the toiling world below. The wide prospect seemed to enlarge his sympathies and his charities; and he often thought of the words of Plato: “When we consider human life, we should view as from a high tower all things terrestrial; such as herds, armies, men employed in agriculture, in marriages, divorces, births, deaths; the tumults of courts of justice; desolate lands; various barbarous nations; feasts, wailings, markets; a medley of all things, in a system adorned by contrarieties.”
On the outside of the door Kavanagh had written the vigorous line of Dante,
“Think that To-day shall never dawn again!”
that it might always serve as a salutation and memento to him as he entered. On the inside, the no less striking lines of a more modern bard,— “Lose this day loitering, ’t will be the same story
To-morrow, and the next more dilatory.
The indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost, lamenting o’er lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute!
What you can do or think you can, begin it!
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated:
Begin it, and the work will be completed.”
Once, as he sat in this retreat near noon, enjoying the silence, and the fresh air that visited him through the oval windows, his attention was arrested by a cloud of dust, rolling along the road, out of which soon emerged a white horse, and then a very singular, round-shouldered, old-fashioned chaise, containing an elderly couple, both in black. What particularly struck him was the gait of the horse, who had a very disdainful fling to his hind legs. The slow equipage passed, and would have been for ever forgotten, had not Kavanagh seen it again at sunset, stationary at Mr. Churchill’s door, towards which he was directing his steps.
As he entered, he met Mr. Churchill, just taking leave of an elderly lady and gentleman in black, whom he recognized as the travellers in the old chaise. Mr. Churchill looked a little flushed and disturbed, and bade his guests farewell with a constrained air. On seeing Kavanagh, he saluted him, and called him by name; whereupon the lady pursed up her mouth, and, after a quick glance, turned away her face; and the gentleman passed with a lofty look, in which curiosity, reproof, and pious indignation were strangely mingled. They got into the chaise, with some such feelings as Noah and his wife may be supposed to have had on entering the ark; the whip descended upon the old horse with unusual vigor, accompanied by a jerk of the reins that caused him to say within himself, “What is the matter now?” He then moved off at his usual pace, and with that peculiar motion of the hind legs which Kavanagh had perceived in the morning.
Kavanagh found his friend not a little disturbed, and evidently by the conversation of the departed guests.
“That old gentleman,” said Mr. Churchill, “is your predecessor, Mr. Pendexter. He thinks we are in a bad way since he left us. He considers your liberality as nothing better than rank Arianism and infidelity. The fact is, the old gentleman is a little soured; the vinous fermentation in his veins is now over, and the acetous has commenced.”
Kavanagh smiled, but made no answer.
“I, of course, defended you stoutly,” continued Mr. Churchill; “but if he goes about the village sowing such seed, there will be tares growing with the wheat.”
“I have no fears,” said Kavanagh, very quietly.
Mr. Churchill’s apprehensions were not, however, groundless; for in the course of the wee
k it came out that doubts, surmises, and suspicions of Kavanagh’s orthodoxy were springing up in many weak but worthy minds. And it was ever after observed, that, whenever that fatal, apocalyptic white horse and antediluvian chaise appeared in town, many parishioners were harassed with doubts and perplexed with theological difficulties and uncertainties.
Nevertheless, the main current of opinion was with him; and the parish showed their grateful acknowledgment of his zeal and sympathy, by requesting him to sit for his portrait to a great artist from the city, who was passing the Summer months in the village for recreation, using his pencil only on rarest occasions and as a particular favor. To this martyrdom the meek Kavanagh submitted without a murmur. During the progress of this work of art, he was seldom left alone; some one of his parishioners was there to enliven him; and most frequently it was Miss Martha Amelia Hawkins, who had become very devout of late, being zealous in the Sunday School, and requesting her relative not to walk between churches any more. She took a very lively interest in the portrait, and favored with many suggestions the distinguished artist, who found it difficult to obtain an expression which would satisfy the parish, some wishing to have it grave, if not severe, and others with “Mr. Kavanagh’s peculiar smile.” Kavanagh himself was quite indifferent about the matter, and met his fate with Christian fortitude, in a white cravat and sacerdotal robes, with one hand hanging down from the back of his chair, and the other holding a large book with the fore-finger between its leaves, reminding Mr. Churchill of Milo with his fingers in the oak. The expression of the face was exceedingly bland and resigned; perhaps a little wanting in strength, but on the whole satisfactory to the parish. So was the artist’s price; nay, it was even held by some persons to be cheap, considering the quantity of back-ground he had put in.
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