The church was dim, and because I came into it out of the April sunshine, it struck upon my senses as dank besides.
The voices of the choir beat upwards through an air blue and heavy with incense; the tapers burning on the altar at the far end of the nave over against us shone blurred and vague as though down some misty tunnel; and from the painted windows on the right the sunshine streamed in slanting rods of light, vari-coloured, disparting the mist.
At the first, I had an impious thought, due partly may be to my unfamiliarity with the bustle of the streets, and partly no doubt to the companionship of my kinsman, who ever brought with him, as it were, a breath of that wide world wherein he lived and schemed, that I was returning to a narrow hemisphere wherein men had no manner of business. But after a little a Carmelite monk began to preach, and the fire of his discourse, as it rose and fell, now harsh with pa.s.sion, now musical with tenderness, roused me to a consciousness of the holy ground on which I stood. I bent forward, not so much listening as watching those who listened. I noted how the sermon gained upon them, how their faces grew expectant. Even Lord Bolingbroke lost his indifference; he moved a step or two nearer to the preacher. His att.i.tude lost the lazy grace he was wont to affect; he stood satisfied, and I knew that there was no man on earth so critical in his judgment of an orator.
I was a.s.sured then of the sway which the monk a.s.serted over his congregation, and the a.s.surance pierced to my very soul.
For I knew the cause of his power; one had not to listen long to realise that. The man was sincere. This was no pleasurable discourse waved delicately like a scented handkerchief to tease the senses of his auditors. Sincerity burnt like a clear flame kindling his words, and compelled belief. Of the matter of his sermon I took no note. Once or twice "the Eve of St. Bartholomew" came thundering at my ears, but for the most part it seemed that he cried "hypocrite" at me, until I feared that the congregation would rise in their seats in that dim church, and a mob of white faces gibber and mow the accusation. I stood fascinated, unable to move, until at last Bolingbroke came back to me, and, taking my arm, led me out of church.
"You study late of nights?" he asked, looking into my face.
"The preacher wrought on me."
"He has eloquence," he agreed; "but it was a dead man speaking."
I stopped in the street, and stared at him.
"Yes," he continued; "he warns, he exhorts, like the figure in the picture there, but the man himself--what of him, Lawrence? He is the mere instrument of his eloquence--its servant, not its master. He is the priest--dead to the world in which he has his being, a shadow with a voice, a dead man speaking."
"Nay," I broke in, "the words were born at his heart. He was sincere, and therefore he lives. The dead man speaking is the hypocrite."
I cried the words in a very pa.s.sion of self-reproach, and without thought of the man I addressed them to.
"Well, well," said he, indulgently, "he has, at all events, a live advocate. I did not gather you were so devoted to the vocation;" and he laughed a little to belie the words, and so we parted company.
It was in no complacent mood, as you may guess, that I returned to the college, and, indeed, I loitered some while before the gates or ever I could make up my mind to enter them. The picture weighed upon my conscience, and seemed like to effect my Lord Bolingbroke"s evident purpose, though by means of a very different argument. It was not the priest, but myself, the hypocrite, who was the dead man speaking; and thus, strangely enough, as I had reason to think it afterwards, I came to imagine the picture with myself as its central figure. I would see it at nights as I lay awake in my bed, painted with fire upon the dark s.p.a.ces of the room, and the face that bore the shame of hypocrisy discovered, and with that shame the agony of punishment was mine. Or, again, a word of reproof; the mere sight of my Marco Polo was sufficient to bring it into view, and for the rest of that day it would bear me company, hanging before my eyes when I sat down to my books, and moving in front of me when I walked, as it had moved in front of me through the streets of Paris on that first and only occasion of my seeing it. For, though many a time I pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed the monastery of the Chartreux, I never sought admittance. I saw the picture no more than once; but, indeed, I was in no danger of forgetting it, and within the compa.s.s of a few months events befell me which fixed it for ever in my memory. I have but to shut my eyes, and I see it after this long inters.p.a.ce of years, definite in every detail. I have but to open them, and, sitting at this table at which I write, I behold, actually painted, the second picture into which my imagination then transformed the first--the picture of myself as the dead man speaking.
CHAPTER III.
MY KINSMAN AND I RIDE DIFFERENT WAYS.
Two days later, being deputed upon some errand, the import of which I have forgotten, I chanced to-pa.s.s by the barrier of the Rue de Grenelle, and a travelling-carriage drew up at my side. My eyes were bent upon the ground, so that I took no heed of it until I heard my name cried. I looked up, and there was my Lord Bolingbroke at the window.
"You see, Lawrence," he said, "I leave Paris as I promised Stair, and I travel into Dauphine."
"But by a roundabout road," I answered eagerly. "It is possible that you might take St. Germains on the way;" for it had reached my ears that Queen Mary of Modena was desirous to try her persuasions upon him.
"No," he returned, with a shake of the head; "I have my poor friends in England to consider. I should provide a fine excuse for ill-using them if I made common cause with the Chevalier. They have served me; it is my turn to serve them; and I shall be better employed that way than in weaving fairy-stories with Queen Abdicate.--But what"s the trouble?" he continued, with a change of tone. "You walked as though the world had withered at your feet."
"Nay," I answered, with a laugh, "there is no trouble. I was merely wondering----" and I hesitated.
"At what?" he asked curiously.
"At the rule which bids me sleep with my chamber-window closed," I returned, with a laugh. And, indeed, it was a question you had reason to put during this hot spring, when from behind your stifling panes you looked out at night across Paris lying cool and s.p.a.cious beneath a purple sky. But the truth is that all these regulations which were inst.i.tuted to discipline the novice to a habit of obedience, were beginning to work me into a ferment of irritability; and through the months that followed, April, May, and June, the irritability increased in me to a spirit of rebellion. At times I felt a mad desire to rise in my seat and hurl defiance, and with that defiance my books, at my tutors" heads. The desire surged up within my veins, became active in every limb, and I had to set my teeth until my jaws ached to repress it. At times sick and dispirited, I counted up the years to come; I pa.s.sed them through my thoughts even as I pa.s.sed the beads of my rosary beneath my thumb, and even as the beads of my rosary, they were monotonously alike one to the other.
Doubtless, too, the recollection of the picture I had seen at the monastery of the Chartreux helped to intensify my unrest. For it abode vividly in my memory, and the menace I drew from it grew more and more urgent as the days slipped on. I should note, however, that a certain change took place in the manner in which it presented itself. I could still see, I could still hear the figure speaking. But it did not so much cry "Hypocrite!" as thunder out, in the very lines of the Carmelite preacher, "The Eve of St. Bartholomew--the Eve of St.
Bartholomew."
Of course, as the rector had declared, I was under no vows or obligation to persist in my novitiate. But I felt the very knowledge that I was free to be in some way a chain about my ankle constraining me. I took a cast back to the period of my boyhood when enrolment amongst the priests of the Jesuit order had been the aim of a fervid ambition; when the thought of that body, twenty thousand in number, spread throughout the earth, in j.a.pan, in the Indies, in Peru, and working one and all in a consonant vigilance for the glory of their order, had stirred me with its sublimity; and I sought--with what effort and despair!--to recreate those earlier visions. For to count them fanciful seemed treachery; to turn deliberately aside from them was evident instability.
So much I have deemed it necessary to set down concerning my perplexities at this time, since they throw, I think, a light upon the events which I am to relate. For I was shortly afterwards to depart from this safe corner, and wander astray just as I wandered when I lost myself in the labyrinth of Blackladies. And the explanation I take to be this--for it is merely in explanation and not at all in extenuation that I put this forward--I had clean broken from the one principle by which, however clumsily, I had hitherto guided my life, and had as yet grappled to no other with sufficient steadiness of faith to make it useful as a subst.i.tute.
It was on the Sat.u.r.day of the first week of July that I left the Jesuit College. I was standing at my window about two of the afternoon, and looking down at the river and the bridge which crossed it. I had a clear view of the bridge from end to end betwixt the gables of a house, and I noticed that it was empty, save for one man, who jogged across on horseback--or rather, so it seemed at the height from which I looked, for when I saw the horse close at hand a short while afterwards, I found reason to believe that the man had galloped.
I stood watching him idly until he crossed out on to the quay; and I remember that the refectory bell rang just as he turned the corner and pa.s.sed out of my sight. Towards the end of dinner, a message was brought to me that the rector desired to see me in his study as soon as we were risen from table. This time, however, it was in no hesitancy or trepidation that I waited on him, but rather with a springing heart. For let him but dismiss me from the college, and here was an end to all the torture of my questionings--an unworthy thought, you will say, and, indeed, none knew that more surely than myself.
On the contrary, however, the rector received me with a benevolent eye. "I have strange news for you, my son," said he, with a glance towards a stranger who stood apart in the window; and the stranger stepped forward hurriedly, as though he would have the telling of the news himself. He was a man of middle height and very close-knit, though of no great bulk, dark in complexion, and possessed, as far as I could judge, of an honest countenance.
"Mr. Clavering," he began, with a certain deference, and after these months of "brother" and "my son" the manner of his address struck upon my ears with a very pleasant sound, "I was steward to your uncle, Sir John Rookley, at Blackladies in c.u.mberland."
"Was?" said I.
"Until Monday was se"nnight," says he.
"Then what may be your business with me?" I asked sharply. For there was throughout England such a division of allegiance as set even the members of a family on opposite sides the while they maintained to the world an appearance of concord, so that many a dismissed servant carried away with him secret knowledge wherewith to make his profit. I was therefore pretty sharp with the steward, and quickly repeated the question.
"Then what may you have to ask of me?"
"That you will be pleased to continue me in the office," he returned humbly.
I stood cluttered out of my senses, looking from the servant to the rector, and from the rector again to the servant, with I know not what wild fancies choking at my throat.
"It is true," said the rector. "Your uncle died of an apoplexy a fortnight back."
"But he has a son," I gasped out
"Sir John quarrelled with Mr. Jervas two days before he died,"
answered the steward. "Blackladies comes to you, Mr. Clavering, and I have travelled from c.u.mberland to acquaint you of the fact."
It was true! My heart so throbbed and beat that I could not utter a word. I could not so much as think, no, not even of my uncle or my cousin. It is true that I had seldom seen the one, and never the other. I was conscious only of an enlarging world. But my eyes chanced at the moment to meet the rector"s. His gaze was fixed intently upon my face, and with a sudden feeling of shame I dropped my eyes to the ground.
"My son," he said, drawing me a little on one side and speaking with all kindliness, as though in answer to my unspoken apology, "it may be well that you can do better service as the master of Blackladies. You will have the power and the means to help effectually, and such help we need in England;" and as I still continued silent, "If you become a priest, by the laws of your country you lose that power, and surely the Church will share in the loss. And are you fitted for a priest?"
He looked at me keenly. "I spoke my doubts to you some while back, and I do not think they went much astray."
I did not answer him, nor did he wait for an answer, but took me by the arm and led me back to the steward.
"My cousin quarrelled with his father. Then what has become of him?" I asked, still in an indecision.
"I do not know, sir. Most like he is in France."
"In France?" I cried with a start. For the answer flashed a suspicion into my mind which--prove it true, and it was out of my power to accept the inheritance! "In France? And the substance of the quarrel?"
"It is not for me, sir, to meddle in the right or wrong of it," he began.
"Nor did I ask you to," I cut him short "I ask you for the bare fact."