But while the county talked, the village listened, sagaciously incredulous of mere rumour, quiescent in itself and perfectly satisfied that whoever else was wrong, ‘Passon Walden’ in everything he did, said, or thought, was sure to be right. Wherefore, until they heard their ‘man o’ God’s’ version of the stories that were being so briskly circulated, they reserved their own opinions. The infallibility of the Supreme Pontiff was not more securely founded in the Roman Catholic Ritual than the faith of St. Rest in the ‘gospel according to John.’
XXVII
Meanwhile Walden himself, ignorant of all the ‘local’ excitement so suddenly stirred up in his tiny kingdom, had arrived on a three days’ visit at the house, or to put it more correctly, at the palace, of his friend Bishop Brent. It was, in strict reality a palace, having been in the old days one of the residences of Henry VII. Much of the building had been injured during the Cromwellian period, and certain modern repairs to its walls had been somewhat clumsily executed, but it still retained numerous fine old mullioned windows, and a cloistered court of many sculptured arches still eminently beautiful, though grey and crumbling under the touch of the melancholy vandal, Time. The Bishop’s study had formerly been King Henry’s audience chamber, and possessed a richly-wrought ceiling of interlaced oak rafters, and projecting beams smoothly polished at the ends and painted with royal emblems, from which projections no doubt, in early periods, many a banner of triumph had floated and many a knightly pennon. Bishop Brent was fond of this room, and carefully maintained its ancient character in the style of its furniture and general surroundings. The wide angle-nook and high carved chimney-piece, supported by two sculptured angel-figures of heroic size, was left unmodernised, and in winter the gaping recess was filled with great logs blazing cheerily as in olden times, but in summer, as now, it served as a picturesque setting for masses of rare flowers which, growing in pots, or cut freshly and set in crystal vases, were grouped together with the greatest taste and artistic selection of delicate colouring, forming, as it seemed, a kind of blossom-wreathed shrine, above which, against the carved chimney itself, hung a wonderfully impressive picture of the Virgin and Child. Placed below this, and slightly towarde the centre of the room, was the Bishop’s table-desk and chair, arranged so that whenever he raised his head from his work, the serene soft eyes of Mary, Blessed among Women, should mystically meet his own. And here just now he sat at evening, deep in conversation with John Walden, who with the perfect unselfishness which was an ingrained part of his own nature, had for the time put aside or forgotten all his own little troubles, in order to listen to the greater ones of his friend. He had been shocked at the change wrought in seven years on Brent’s form and features. Always thin, he had now become so attenuated as to have reached almost a point of emaciation, — his dark eyes, sunk far back under his shelving brows, blazed with a feverish brilliancy which gave an almost unearthly expression to his pale drawn features, and his hand, thin, long, and delicate as a woman’s, clenched and unclenched itself nervously when he spoke, with an involuntary force of which he was himself unconscious.
“You have not aged much, Walden!” he said, thoughtfully regarding his old college chum’s clear and open countenance with a somewhat sad smile— “Your eyes are the same blue eyes of the boy that linked his arm through mine so long ago and walked with me through the sleepy old streets of ‘Alma Mater!’ That time seems quite close to me sometimes — and again sometimes far away — dismally, appallingly, far away!”
He sighed. Walden looked at him a little anxiously, but for the moment said nothing.
“You give me no response,” — continued Brent, with sudden querulousness— “Since you arrived we have been talking nothing but generalities and Church matters. Heavens, how sick I am of Church matters! Yet I know you see a change in me. I am sure you do — and you will not say it. Now you never were secretive — you never said one thing and meant another — so speak the truth as you have always done! I AM changed, am I not?”
“You are,” — replied Walden, steadily— “But I cannot tell how, or in what way. You look ill and worn out. You are overworked and overwrought — but I think there is something else at the root of the evil; — something that has happened during the last seven years. You are not quite the man you were when you came to consecrate my church at St. Rest.”
“St. Rest!” repeated the Bishop, musingly— “What a sweet name it is- -what a still sweeter suggestion! Rest — rest! — and a saint’s rest too! — that perfect rest granted to all the martyrs for Christ! — how safe and peaceful! — how sure and glorious! Would that such rest were mine! But I see nothing ahead of me but storm and turmoil, and stress of anguish and heartbreak, ending in — Nothingness!”
Walden bent a little more forward and looked his friend full in the eyes.
“What is wrong, Harry?” he asked, with exceeding gentleness.
At the old schoolboy name of bygone years, Brent caught and pressed his hand with strong fervour. A smile lighted his eyes.
“John, my boy, everything is wrong!” he said— “As wrong as ever my work at college was, before you set it right. Do you think I forget! Everything is wrong, I tell you! I am wrong, — my thoughts are wrong, — and my conscience leaves me no peace day or night! I ought not to be a Bishop — for I feel that the Church itself is wrong!”
John sat quiet for a minute. Then he said —
“So it is in many ways. The Church is a human attempt to build humanity up on a Divine model, and it has its human limitations. But the Divine model endures!”
Brent threw himself back in his chair and closed his eyes.
“The Divine model endures — yes!” he murmured— “The Divine foundation remains firm, but the human building totters and is insecure to the point of utter falling and destruction!” Here, opening his eyes, he gazed dreamily at the pictured face of the Madonna above him. “Walden, it is useless to contend with facts, and the facts are, that the masses of mankind are as unregenerate at this day as ever they were before Christ came into the world! The Church is powerless to stem the swelling tide of human crime and misery. The Church in these days has become merely a harbour of refuge for hypocrites who think to win conventional repute with their neighbours, by affecting to believe in a religion not one of whose tenets they obey! Blasphemy, rank blasphemy, Walden! It is bad enough in all conscience to cheat one’s neighbour, but an open attempt to cheat the Creator of the Universe is the blackest crime of all, though it be unnamed in the criminal calendar!”
He uttered these words with intense passion, rising from his seat, and walking up and down the room as he spoke. Walden watched his restless passing to and fro, with a wistful look in his honest eyes. Presently he said, smiling a little —
“You are my Bishop — and I should not presume to differ from you, Brent! YOU must instruct ME, — not I you! Yet if I may speak from my own experience—”
“You may and you shall!” — replied Brent, swiftly— “But think for a moment, before you speak, of what that experience has been! One great grief has clouded your life — the loss of your sister. After that, what has been your lot? A handful of simple souls set under your charge, in the loveliest of little villages, — souls that love you, trust you and obey you. Compared to this, take MY daily life! An over-populated diocese — misery and starvation on all sides, — men working for mere pittances, — women prostituting themselves to obtain food — children starving — girls ruined in their teens — and over it all, my wretched self, a leading representative of the Church which can do nothing to remedy these evils! And worse than all, a Church in which some of the clergy themselves who come under my rule and dominance are more dishonourable and dissolute than many of the so- called ‘reprobates’ of society whom they are elected to admonish! I tell you, Walden, I have some men under my jurisdiction whom I should like to see soundly flogged! — only I am powerless to order the castigation — and some others who ought to be serving seven years in penal servitude i
nstead of preaching virtue to people a thousand times more virtuous than themselves!”
“I quite believe that!” said Walden, smiling— “I know one of them!”
The Bishop glanced at him, and laughed.
“You mean Putwood Leveson?” he said— “He seems a mischievous fool — but I don’t suppose there is any real harm in him, is there?”
“Real harm?” — and John flared up in a blaze of wrath— “He is the most pernicious scoundrel that ever masqueraded in the guise of a Christian!”
The Bishop paused in his walk up and down, and clasping his hands behind his back, an old habit of his, looked quizzically at his friend. A smile, kindly and almost boyish, lightened the grey pallor of his worn face.
“Why, John!” he said— “you are actually in a temper! Your mental attitude is evidently that of squared fists and ‘Come on!’ What has roused the slumbering lion, eh?”
“It doesn’t need a lion to spring at Leveson,” — said Walden, contemptuously— “A sheep would do it! The tamest cur that ever crawled would have spirit enough to make a dash for a creature so unutterably mean and false and petty! I may as well admit to you at once that I myself nearly struck him!”
“You did?” And Bishop Brent’s grave dark eyes flashed with a sudden suspicion of laughter.
“I did. I know it was not Churchman-like, — I know it was a case of ‘kicking against the pricks.’ But Leveson’s ‘pricks’ are too much like hog’s bristles for me to endure with patience!”
The Bishop assumed a serious demeanour.
“Come, come, let me hear this out!” he said— “Do you mean to tell me that you — YOU, John — actually struck a brother minister?”
“No — I do not mean to tell you anything of the kind, my Lord Bishop!” answered Walden, beginning to laugh. “I say that I ‘nearly’ struck him, — not quite! Someone else came on the scene at the critical moment, and did for me what I should certainly have done for myself had I been left to it. I cannot say I am sorry for the impulse!”
“It sounds like a tavern brawl,” — said the Bishop, shaking his head dubiously— “or a street fight. So unlike you, Walden! What was it all about?”
“The fellow was slandering a woman,” — replied Walden, hotly— “Poisoning her name with his foul tongue, and polluting it by his mere utterance — contemptible brute! I should like to have horsewhipped him—”
“Stop, stop!” interrupted the Bishop, stretching out his thin long white hand, on which one single amethyst set in a plain gold ring, shone with a pale violet fire— “I am not sure that I quite follow you, John! What woman is this?”
Despite himself, a rush of colour sprang to Walden’s brows. But he answered quite quietly.
“Miss Vancourt, — of Abbot’s Manor.”
“Miss Vancourt!” Bishop Brent looked, as he felt, utterly bewildered. “Miss Vancourt! My dear Walden, you surprise me! Did I not write to you — do you not know—”
“Oh, I know all that is reported of her,” — said John, quickly— “And I remember what you wrote. But it’s a mistake, Brent! In fact, if you will exonerate me for speaking bluntly, it’s a lie! There never was a gentler, sweeter woman than Maryllia Vancourt, — and perhaps there never was one more basely or more systematically calumniated!”
The Bishop took a turn up to the farther end of the room. Then he came back and confronted Walden with an authoritative yet kindly air.
“Look me straight in the face, John!”
John obeyed. There was a silence, while Brent scanned slowly and with appreciative affection the fine intellectual features, brave eyes, and firm, yet tender mouth of the man whom he had, since the days of their youth together, held dearest in his esteem among all other men he had ever known, while Walden, in his turn, bore the sad and searching gaze without flinching. Then the Bishop laid one hand gently on his shoulder.
“So it has come, John!” he said.
Then and then only the brave eyes fell, — then and then only the firm mouth trembled. But Walden was not the man to shirk any pain or confusion to himself in matters of conscience.
“I suppose it has!” he answered, simply.
The Bishop sat down, and, seemingly out of long habit, raised his eyes to the blandly smiling Virgin and Child above him.
“I am sorry!” — he murmured— “John, my dear old fellow, I am very sorry—”
“Why should you be sorry?” broke out Walden, impetuously, “There is nothing to be sorry for, except that I am a fool! But I knew THAT long ago, even if you did not!” — and he forced a smile— “Don’t be sorry for me, Brent! — I’m not in the least sorry for myself. Indeed, if I tell you the whole truth, I believe I rather like my own folly. It does nobody any harm! And after all it is not absolutely a world’s wonder that a decaying tree should, even in its decaying process, be aware of the touch of spring. It should not make the tree unhappy!”
The Bishop raised his eyes. They were full of a deep melancholy.
“We are not trees — we are men!” he said— “And as men, God has made us all aware of the love of woman, — the irresistible passion that at one time or another makes havoc or glory of our lives! It is the direst temptation on earth. Worst of all and bitterest it is when love comes too late, — too late, John! — I say in your case, it comes too late!”
John sighed and smiled.
“Love — if it has come to me at all — is never too late,” — he said with quiet patience,— “My dear Brent, don’t you understand? This little girl — this child — for she is nothing more than that to a man of my years — has slipped into my life by chance, as it were, like a stray sunbeam — no more! I feel her brightness — her warmth — her vitality — and my soul is conscious of an animation and gladness whenever she is near, of which she is the sole cause. But that is all. Her pretty ways — her utter loneliness, — are the facts of her existence which touch me to pity, and I would see her cared for and protected, — but I know myself to be too old and too unworthy to so care for and protect her. I want her to be happy, but I am fully conscious that I can never make her so. Would you call this kind of chill sentiment ‘love’?”
Brent regarded him steadfastly.
“Yes, John! I think I should! — yes, I certainly should call ‘this chill sentiment’ love! And tell me — have you never got out of your depth in the water of this ‘chill sentiment,’ or found yourself battling for dear life against an outbreak of volcanic fire?”
Walden was silent.
“I never thought,” — continued the Bishop, rather sorrowfully,— “when I wrote to you about the return of Robert Vancourt’s daughter to her childhood’s home, that she would in any serious way interfere with the peace of your life, John! I told you just what I had heard — no more. I have never seen the girl. I only know what people say of her. And that is not altogether pleasing.”
“Do you believe what people say?” interrupted Walden, suddenly,— “Is it not true that when a woman is pretty, intelligent, clean-souled and pure-minded, and as unlike the rest of ‘society’ women as she can well be, she is slandered for having the very virtues her rivals do not possess?”
“Quite true!” — said Brent— “and quite common. It is always the old story— ‘Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.’ Do not imagine for a moment, John, that I am going to run the risk of losing your friendship by repeating anything that may have been said against the reputation or the character of Miss Vancourt. I have always prayed that no woman might ever come between us,” — and here a faint tinge of colour warmed the pallor of his face— “And, so far, I fancy the prayer has been granted. And I do not think that this — this — shall we call it glamour, John? — this glamour, of the imagination and the senses, will overcome you in any detrimental way. I cannot picture you as the victim of a ‘society’ siren!”
John smiled. A vision rose up before his eyes of a little figure in sparkling white draperies — a figure that bent ap
pealingly towards him, while a soft childlike voice said— ‘I’m sorry! Will you forgive me?’ The tender lines round his mouth deepened and softened at the mental picture.
“She is not a society siren,” — he said, gently— “Poor little soul! She is a mere woman, needing what woman best thrives upon — love!”
“Well, she has been loved and sought in marriage for at least three years by Lord Roxmouth,” — said the Bishop.
“Has SHE been loved and sought, or her aunt’s millions?” queried Walden— “That is the point at issue. But my dear Brent, do not let us waste time in talking over this little folly of mine — for I grant you it is folly. I’m not sorry you have found it out, for in any case I had meant to make a clean breast of it before we parted,” — he hesitated — then looked up frankly— “I would rather you spoke no more of it, Harry! I’ve made my confession. I admit I nearly struck Leveson for slandering an innocent and defenseless woman, — and I believe you’ll forgive me for that. Next, I own that though I am getting into the sere and yellow leaf, I am still conscious of a heart, — and that I feel a regretful yearning at times for the joys I have missed out of my life — and you’ll forgive me for that too, — I know you will! For the rest, draw a curtain over this little weakness of mine, will you? I don’t want to speak of it — I want to fight it and conquer it.”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 637
