She had grown graver, and leaned back in her chair with downcast eyes.
"I hardly know how to say it," she began slowly, "but you seem to me to be feeling rather morbidly about the virtue of personal discomfort. If you will pardon me, I can"t think that you really believe it to be any merit in the sight of heaven that a man should make himself needlessly uncomfortable."
"But if the mortification of the flesh helps us to"--
She put up her hand and interrupted him.
"I am a good churchwoman, but I am not able to believe in scoring off the sins of the soul by abusing the body. The old monks scourging themselves and the Hindus swinging by hooks in their backs seem to me both pathetically mistaken, and both to be moved by the same feelings."
"Then you do not believe in asceticism at all?"
"Mr. Fenton used to say that asceticism was the most insolent insult to Heaven that human vanity ever invented."
"But if we are to follow the devices and desires of our own hearts,"
Ashe broke out, his inner excitement bursting forth through his calmness, "if we are to give way to the joys of this life, if--Do you not see, Mrs. Fenton, that this covers so much? It goes down into the depths of a man"s heart. It comes almost at once, for instance, to the question of the marriage of priests."
She flushed, and her manner grew perceptibly colder.
"That is naturally not a subject that I care to go into," she said; "but I have no scruple against saying that I do not believe in a celibate priesthood. In our church and our time, it is out of place."
"But it is the supreme test whether a man is willing to give up all his earthly joy for the service of Heaven."
She frowned slightly, and he realized how significant his manner must have been.
"The marriage of the clergy is not a subject that it seems to me necessary for us to discuss," she said.
"Mrs. Fenton," Philip said, "I have given you too good a right to be offended with me once, but I must say something that I fear may offend you again. It is not about myself. It is about a better man."
She looked at him in evident surprise and disquiet.
"I asked what you think of the marriage of the clergy," he went on, "because it seems to me right to tell you that Mr. Candish loves you."
She flushed to her temples, starting impulsively in her seat.
"Mr. Ashe," she said vehemently, "what right have you to talk to me of such subjects at all?"
"None," he answered, "none at all,--unless--None that you would recognize; but I wish to atone for the wrong I did in speaking to you, and to say what he would never say. If it were possible that you cared for him, I should perhaps help you both."
"You forget, I think, that I have been married."
"I do not forget anything," Philip returned desperately. "It is only that he is a good man, a n.o.ble man, a man that would never have fallen under his weakness as I did, and if you cared for him, he is too fine to be allowed to suffer. He loved you long before I ever saw you."
"He has never given me any sign of it."
Her flushed cheeks and something in the way in which she said this seemed to him to indicate that she did love Candish. He had been moved by the most sincere desire to sacrifice his own will and happiness to the well-being of the woman he loved, and if it were that she loved his rival he had been ready to forget everything but that. Now by a quick revulsion it seemed to him that he could not endure the success of this man whose cause he had been pleading.
"Ah!" he cried, bending toward her, "you love him!"
She rose indignantly to her feet.
"Your impertinence is amazing!" she exclaimed. "It is time that somebody told you the truth. It is hard for me to say unkind things to one who has saved my life, but you ought to know how you appear. You have got yourself into a thoroughly unwholesome state of mind and body; and unless you get out of it you will ruin your whole career. Does it seem to you that a man who has so little control over himself is a fit leader for others? Can"t you see that you have brooded over this question of celibacy until you are completely morbid? Find some wholesome, right-minded woman, Mr. Ashe; love her and marry her, and be done with all this wretched, unwholesome mawkishness. As for me, when I married once, I married for life. My son will never be given a second father."
He had risen also, and his self-possession had returned to him.
"I have annoyed you," he said with a new dignity. "You are perhaps right in saying that I am morbid, but in what I said to-day I was trying to put self entirely out of the question. There is only one thing more that I want to say; and that is that it is not fair to judge our order by me. I know only too well how natural it is that you should think all the men at the Clergy House weak and despicable like me; but that is not so. They are sincere, self-forgetful fellows. You have seen my friend Wynne. He, for instance, is as manly and fine and honest as any man alive."
"I do not misjudge them or you, Mr. Ashe. I only feel that in these past weeks you have not been yourself. We will forget it all, and I hope that you will forgive me if I have hurt you."
"I have nothing to forgive. It is you who must do that. Good-by."
He went away with the remembrance of her beautiful eyes looking in pity into his, and once more the phrase of the Persian came into his mind like a refrain: "O thou, to the arch of whose eyebrow the new moon is a slave!"
XXV
WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED Comedy of Errors, i. I
Maurice soon heard from his lawyer that the missing desk had pa.s.sed into the hands of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Singleton, and that that lady was staying at Montfield as the guest of Mrs. Ashe. He determined to go down himself, feeling unwilling to trust business so important to any other. In order to leave the Clergy House, it was necessary to have permission from the Father Superior, and on Monday of Shrove week Wynne requested what the deacons jestingly called among themselves a dispensation. He did not think it honest to conceal the reason for his wishing leave of absence, and briefly related the story of his finding his old nurse and of her revelation.
"Poor old Norah is dead," he concluded, "but I had her affidavit taken, and if the will can be found there should be no difficulty in establishing it. The other witnesses are alive." They were sitting in the Father"s study, a room severely plain in its furnishings, like all the apartments in the Clergy House. The table by which the Superior sat was covered with papers and letters, the signs of the large correspondence which Wynne knew Frontford to keep up with members of his order in England and this country. The furniture was stiff and uncompromising, the windows covered only by plain shades, while the bookshelves took an austere air from the dull leather of the bindings of their tall, formal volumes. Father Frontford leaned back in his uncushioned chair and pressed together his thin finger-tips in the gesture which was habitual with him, regarding the young man with keen eyes.
"This property, if I understand you rightly, is now in the possession of the church?"
"It was given by the will that was found to the church and to missions.
Some of it went to the founding of a home for invalid priests. My aunt was the one of my relatives who was a churchwoman."
"And if you succeed in finding and establishing this new will, you mean to divert the money to your own use?"
"If the will is valid, is not the money mine?"
The Father looked at him a moment before he answered. Then he sighed.
"My son," he asked, "would you have put that question six months ago?"
Maurice flushed, but he did not wish to show that he understood.
"Why not?" he demanded.
"There was not then in your heart a wish to wrest property from the church that you might enjoy it yourself."
"I haven"t any wish now to take from the church anything which is not mine already."
"By divine right or by human?" the Father inquired with cold inflexibility.
Maurice began to be irritated. He felt that he was being treated with too high a hand.