"Because I wished you to know the exact situation before I asked you, as a great favour to me, to Mr. Constable, to--to marry her in St.
John"s. Of course," she went on, controlling her rising agitation, and antic.i.p.ating a sign of protest, "we shouldn"t expect to have any people,---and Gertrude wasn"t married in St. John"s before; that wedding was at Pa.s.sumset our seash.o.r.e place. Oh, Mr. Hodder, before you answer, think of our feelings, Mr. Constable"s and mine! If you could see Mr.
Constable, you would know how he suffers--this thing has upset him more than the divorce. His family have such pride. I am so worried about him, and he doesn"t eat anything and looks so haggard. I told him I would see you and explain and that seemed to comfort him a little. She is, after all, our child, and we don"t want to feel, so far as our church is concerned, that she is an Ishmaelite; we don"t want to have the spectacle of her having to go around, outside, to find a clergyman--that would be too dreadful! I know how strict, how unflinching you are, and I admire you for it. But this is a special case."
She paused, breathing deeply, and Hodder gazed at her with pity. What he felt was more than pity; he was experiencing, indeed, but with a deeper emotion, something of that same confusion of values into which Eleanor Goodrich"s visit had thrown him. At the same time it had not escaped his logical mind that Mrs. Constable had made her final plea on the score of respectability.
"It gives me great pain to have to refuse you," he said gently.
"Oh, don"t," she said sharply, "don"t say that! I can"t have made the case clear. You are too big, too comprehending, Mr. Hodder, to have a hard-and-fast rule. There must be times--extenuating circ.u.mstances--and I believe the canons make it optional for a clergyman to marry the innocent person."
"Yes, it is optional, but I do, not believe it should be. The question is left to the clergyman"s" conscience. According to my view, Mrs.
Constable, the Church, as the agent of G.o.d, effects an indissoluble bond. And much as I should like to do anything in my power for you and Mr. Constable, you have asked the impossible,--believing as I do, there can be no special case, no extenuating circ.u.mstance. And it is my duty to tell you it is because people to-day are losing their beliefs that we have this lenient att.i.tude toward the sacred things. If they still held the conviction that marriage is of G.o.d, they would labour to make it a success, instead of flying apart at the first sign of what they choose to call incompatibility."
"But surely," she said, "we ought not to be punished for our mistakes! I cannot believe that Christ himself intended that his religion should be so inelastic, so hard and fast, so cruel as you imply. Surely there is enough unhappiness without making more. You speak of incompatibility--but is it in all cases such an insignificant matter?
We are beginning to realize in these days something of the effects of character on character,--deteriorating effects, in many instances. With certain persons we are lifted up, inspired to face the battle of life and overcome its difficulties. I have known fine men and women whose lives have been stultified or ruined because they were badly mated.
And I cannot see that the character of my own daughter has deteriorated because she has got a divorce from a man with whom she was profoundly out of sympathy--of harmony. On the contrary, she seems more of a person than she was; she has clearer, saner views of life; she has made her mistake and profited by it. Her views changed--Victor Warren"s did not.
She began to realize that some other woman might have an influence over his life--she had none, simply because he did not love her. And love is not a thing we can compel."
"You are making it very hard for me, Mrs. Constable," he said. "You are now advocating an individualism with which the Church can have no sympathy. Christianity teaches us that life is probationary, and if we seek to avoid the trials sent us, instead of overcoming them, we find ourselves farther than ever from any solution. We have to stand by our mistakes. If marriage is to be a mere trial of compatibility, why go through a ceremony than which there is none more binding in human and divine inst.i.tutions? One either believes in it, or one does not. And, if belief be lacking, the state provides for the legalization of marriages."
"Oh!" she exclaimed.
"If persons wish to be married in church in these days merely because it is respectable, if such be their only reason, they are committing a great wrong. They are taking an oath before G.o.d with reservations, knowing that public opinion will release them if the marriage does not fulfil their expectations."
For a moment she gazed at him with parted lips, and pressing her handkerchief to her eyes began silently to cry. The sudden spectacle, in this condition, of a self-controlled woman of the world was infinitely distressing to Hodder, whose sympathies were even more sensitive than (in her attempt to play upon them) she had suspected... She was aware that he had got to his feet, and was standing beside her, speaking with an oddly penetrating tenderness.
"I did not mean to be harsh," he said, "and it is not that I do not understand how you feel. You have made my duty peculiarly difficult."
She raised up to him a face from which the mask had fallen, from which the illusory look of youth had fled. He turned away... And presently she began to speak again; in disconnected sentences.
"I so want her to be happy--I cannot think, I will not think that she has wrecked her life--it would be too unjust, too cruel. You cannot know what it is to be a woman!"
Before this cry he was silent.
"I don"t ask anything of G.o.d except that she shall have a chance, and it seems to me that he is making the world better--less harsh for women."
He did not reply. And presently she looked up at him again, steadfastly now, searchingly. The barriers of the conventions were down, she had cast her pride to the winds. He seemed to read in her a certain relief.
"I am going to tell you something, Mr. Hodder, which you may think strange, but I have a reason for saying it. You are still a young man, and I feel instinctively that you have an unusual career before you.
You interested me the first time you stepped into the pulpit of St.
John"s--and it will do me good to talk to you, this once, frankly. You have reiterated to-day, in no uncertain terms, doctrines which I once believed, which I was brought up to think infallible. But I have lived since then, and life itself has made me doubt them.
"I recognize in you a humanity, a sympathy and breadth which you are yourself probably not aware of, all of which is greater than the rule which you so confidently apply to fit all cases. It seems to me that Christ did not intend us to have such rules. He went beyond them, into the spirit.
"Under the conditions of society--of civilization to-day, most marriages are merely a matter of chance. Even judgment cannot foresee the development of character brought about by circ.u.mstances, by environment.
And in many marriages I have known about intimately both the man and the woman have missed the most precious thing that life can give something I cannot but think--G.o.d intends us to have. You see,"--she smiled at him sadly--"I am still a little of an idealist.
"I missed--the thing I am talking about, and it has been the great sorrow of my life--not only on my account, but on my husband"s. And so far as I am concerned, I am telling you the truth when I say I should have been content to have lived in a log cabin if--if the gift had been mine. Not all the money in the world, nor the intellect, nor the philanthropy--the so-called interests of life, will satisfy me for its denial. I am a disappointed woman, I sometimes think a bitter woman. I can"t believe that life is meant to be so. Those energies have gone into ambition which should have been absorbed by--by something more worth while.
"And I can see so plainly now that my husband would have been far, far happier with another kind of woman. I drew him away from the only work he ever enjoyed--his painting. I do not say he ever could have been a great artist, but he had a little of the divine spark, in his enthusiasm at least--in his a.s.siduity. I shall never forget our first trip abroad, after we were married--he was like a boy in the galleries, in the studios. I could not understand it then. I had no real sympathy with art, but I tried to make sacrifices, what I thought were Christian sacrifices. The motive power was lacking, and no matter how hard I tried, I was only half-hearted, and he realized it instinctively--no amount of feigning could deceive him. Something deep in me, which was a part of my nature, was antagonistic, stultifying to the essentials of his own being. Of course neither of us saw that then, but the results were not long in developing. To him, art was a sacred thing, and it was impossible for me to regard it with equal seriousness. He drew into himself,--closed up, as it were,--no longer discussed it. I was hurt.
And when we came home he kept on in business--he still had his father"s affairs to look after--but he had a little workroom at the top of the house where he used to go in the afternoon....
"It was a question which one of us should be warped,--which personality should be annihilated, so to speak, and I was the stronger. And as I look back, Mr. Hodder, what occurred seems to me absolutely inevitable, given the ingredients, as inevitable as a chemical process. We were both striving against each other, and I won--at a tremendous cost.
The conflict, one might say, was subconscious, instinctive rather than deliberate. My att.i.tude forced him back into business, although we had enough to live on very comfortably, and then the scale of life began to increase, luxuries formerly unthought of seemed to become necessities.
And while it was still afar off I saw a great wave rolling toward us, the wave of that new prosperity which threatened to submerge us, and I seized the buoy fate had placed in our hands,--or rather, by suggestion, I induced my husband to seize it--his name.
"I recognized the genius, the future of Eldon Parr at a time when he was not yet independent and supreme, when a.s.sociation with a Constable meant much to him. Mr. Parr made us, as the saying goes. Needless to say; money has not brought happiness, but a host of hard, false ambitions which culminated in Gertrude"s marriage with Victor Warren. I set my heart on the match, helped it in every way, and until now nothing but sorrow has come of it. But my point--is this,--I see so clearly, now that it is too late, that two excellent persons may demoralize each other if they are ill-mated. It may be possible that I had the germs of false ambition in me when I was a girl, yet I was conscious only of the ideal which is in most women"s hearts....
"You must not think that I have laid my soul bare in the hope of changing your mind in regard to Gertrude. I recognize clearly, now, that that is impossible. Oh, I know you do not so misjudge me," she added, reading his quick protest in his face.
"Indeed, I cannot a.n.a.lyze my reasons for telling you something of which I have never spoken to any one else."
Mrs. Constable regarded him fixedly. "You are the strongest reason. You have somehow drawn it out of me.... And I suppose I wish some one to profit by it. You can, Mr. Hodder,--I feel sure of that. You may insist now that my argument against your present conviction of the indissolubility of marriage is mere individualism, but I want you to think of what I have told you, not to answer me now. I know your argument by heart, that Christian character develops by submission, by suffering, that it is the woman"s place to submit, to efface herself.
But the root of the matter goes deeper than that. I am far from deploring sacrifice, yet common-sense tells us that our sacrifice should be guided by judgment, that foolish sacrifices are worse than useless. And there are times when the very limitations of our individuality--necessary limitation"s for us--prevent our sacrifices from counting.
"I was wrong, I grant you, grievously wrong in the course I took, even though it were not consciously deliberate. But if my husband had been an artist I should always have remained separated from his real life by a limitation I had no power to remove. The more I tried, the more apparent my lack of insight became to him, the more irritated he grew. I studied his sketches, I studied masterpieces, but it was all hopeless. The thing wasn"t in me, and he knew it wasn"t. Every remark made him quiver.
"The Church, I think, will grow more liberal, must grow more liberal, if it wishes to keep in touch with people in an age when they are thinking out these questions for themselves. The law cannot fit all cases, I am sure the Gospel can. And sometimes women have an instinct, a kind of second sight into persons, Mr. Hodder. I cannot explain why I feel that you have in you elements of growth which will eventually bring you more into sympathy with the point of view I have set forth, but I do feel it."
Hodder did not attempt to refute her--she had, indeed, made discussion impossible. She knew his arguments, as she had declared, and he had the intelligence to realize that a repet.i.tion of them, on his part, would be useless. She brought home to him, as never before, a sense of the anomalistic position of the Church in these modern days, of its appallingly lessened weight even with its own members. As a successor of the Apostles, he had no power over this woman, or very little; he could neither rebuke her, nor sentence her to penance. She recognized his authority to marry her daughter, to baptize her daughter"s children, but not to interfere in any way with her spiritual life. It was as a personality he had moved her--a personality apparently not in harmony with his doctrine. Women had hinted at this before. And while Mrs.
Constable had not, as she perceived, shaken his conviction, the very vividness and unexpectedness of a confession from her--had stirred him to the marrow, had opened doors, perforce, which he, himself had marked forbidden, and given him a glimpse beyond before he could lower his eyes. Was there, after all, something in him that responded in spite of himself?
He sat gazing at her, his head bent, his strong hands on the arms of the chair.
"We never can foresee how we may change," he answered, a light in his eyes that was like a smile, yet having no suggestion of levity. And his voice--despite his disagreement--maintained the quality of his sympathy.
Neither felt the oddity, then, of the absence of a jarring note. "You may be sure, at least, of my confidence, and of my grat.i.tude for what you have told me."
His tone belied the formality of his speech. Mrs. Constable returned his gaze in silence, and before words came again to either, a step sounded on the threshold and Mr. Constable entered.
Hodder looked at him with a new vision. His face was indeed lined and worn, and dark circles here under his eyes. But at Mrs. Constable"s "Here"s Mr. Hodder, dear," he came forward briskly to welcome the clergyman.
"How do you do?" he said cordially. "We don"t see you very often."
"I have been telling Mr. Hodder that modern rectors of big parishes have far too many duties," said his wife.
And after a few minutes of desultory conversation, the rector left.
CHAPTER VI. "WATCHMAN, WHAT OF THE NIGHT?"
It was one of those moist nights of spring when the air is pungent with the odour of the softened earth, and the gentle breaths that stirred the curtains in Mr. Parr"s big dining-room wafted, from the garden, the perfumes of a revived creation,--delicious, hothouse smells. At intervals, showers might be heard pattering on the walk outside. The rector of St. John"s was dining with his great parishioner.
Here indeed were a subject for some modern master, a chance to picture for generations to come an aspect of a mighty age, an age that may some day be deemed but a grotesque and anomalistic survival of a more ancient logic; a gargoyle carved out of chaos, that bears on its features a resemblance to the past and the future.
Our scene might almost be mediaeval with its encircling gloom, through which the heavy tapestries and shadowy corners of the huge apartment may be dimly made out. In the center, the soft red glow of the candles, the gleaming silver, the shining cloth, the Church on one side--and what on the other? No name given it now, no royal name, but still Power. The two are still in apposition, not yet in opposition, but the discerning may perchance read a prophecy in the salient features of the priest.
The Man of Power of the beginning of the twentieth century demands a subtler a.n.a.lysis, presents an enigma to which the immortal portraits of forgotten Medicis and Capets give no clew. Imagine, if you can, a Lorenzo or a Grand Louis in a tightly-b.u.t.toned frock coat! There must be some logical connection between the habit and the age, since crimson velvet and gold brocade would have made Eldon Parr merely ridiculous.