Candish did not answer, and they went into the study in silence. The host sat down in the well-worn chair by his writing-table, while Philip took a seat facing him.
"What a foolish thing for me to say," Ashe broke out; then surprised at the querulousness of his tone he stopped abruptly.
"Mr. Ashe," Candish said gravely, "if there is anything I can do for you will you tell me what it is?"
Philip rose quickly, and took a step towards him, leaning down over the thin, homely face.
"I have found you out!" he cried with exultation. "I came to confess my sin to you, and I find that you love her too!"
"Don"t be hysterical and melodramatic," was the cool response. "Sit down, and let us talk rationally if we are to talk at all."
The manner of Candish recalled Philip to himself. He sat down heavily.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "Since that fight I have been half beside myself. I am like a hysterical girl."
The other regarded him compa.s.sionately.
"Mr. Ashe," responded he, "there is no good in my pretending that I didn"t understand what you meant just now. You and I are both given to the priesthood. If we both love a woman"--
"I love her," burst in Philip, half defiantly, half remorsefully, "and I have told her so! I have condemned myself"--
"Stop," Candish interrupted. "First you have to think of her."
Philip stared in silence. It came over him how entirely he had been thinking of himself, and how little he had considered Mrs. Fenton in his reflections upon the events of the previous evening. Here was a man who could love her so well as to think of her first and himself last.
"But I have given her up," Philip stammered.
"Was she yours to give up?"
There was nothing bitter or sneering in the words; they were said simply and dispa.s.sionately.
"No," Philip answered, dropping his voice; "she was not mine."
The older man rose and walked to the fire, where he stood looking down at the flaming coals.
"After all," he said, "we are pretty much in the same plight. I knew her when her husband brought her here a bride, the loveliest creature alive. Arthur Fenton was a clever, selfish, wholly irreligious man; and I could not help seeing how completely he failed to understand or appreciate his wife. She was kind to me, and when her trouble came she turned to me for comfort and sympathy. It is my weakness that I love her; but she will never know it."
"And does she love n.o.body?" demanded Ashe jealously.
Candish turned upon him a look of rebuke.
"What right have you or I to ask that question?" he retorted sternly.
"I do penance for loving her, and G.o.d is my witness how carefully I have hidden it. It is not for me to question her right to love if she please."
Philip rose, and went to the other, holding out his hand.
"Mr. Candish," said he earnestly, "you have taught me my lesson. I have been a weak fool, and worse. I will pray for strength to lay my pa.s.sion on the altar and forget it."
The rector took the extended hand, looking into Philip"s eyes with a glance so wistful, so humble, and so tender that the remembrance went with Ashe long.
"And forget it?" he repeated. "I do not know that I could do that!"
He dropped the hand of Ashe, and shook himself as if he would shake off the mood which had taken possession of him.
"Come," he declared resolutely, "this will not do. This is not the sort of mood that makes men. Let me give you a single piece of advice,--I am older, you know; don"t pity yourself, whatever else you do. In the first place, that would be equivalent to saying that Providence doesn"t know what is best for you; and in the second, it spoils all one"s sense of values."
As Ashe that afternoon journeyed down to Montfield, he recalled all the details of this interview. The more he considered the more he respected Candish and the less satisfaction he found in his own conduct. Yet perhaps the human mind cannot cease self-justification at any point short of annihilation, and Philip still had in his secret thought a deep feeling that the church should more absolutely settle the question of the celibacy of its clergy, so that there might be no more doubts.
He honored the att.i.tude of Candish, and he resolved to imitate it. He who has never shaken hands with the devil, however, can have little idea how hard it is to loose his grasp; and Philip groaned at the thought of how far he was even from wishing to put his love out of its high place in his heart.
His mind was calmer as he sat that evening talking with his mother.
Mrs. Ashe was a plain, sweet-faced woman, with gray hair brushed smoothly under her cap of black lace. There was in her pale, faded face little beauty of feature or coloring; yet the light of her kindly and delicate spirit shone through. Maurice Wynne had once said that she was like a sweet-pea,--born with wings, but tethered so that she might not fly away. Philip, with his exquisite sensitiveness, found an unspeakable comfort in her presence; a soothing sense of rest and peace so blissful that it seemed almost wrong. There are even in this worldly age many women who hide under the covering of uneventful, commonplace lives existences full of spiritual richness,--women who find in religion not the mechanical acceptance of form, not a mere superst.i.tion which encrusts an outworn creed, but a vital, uplifting force; a power which fills their souls with imaginative warmth and fervor. The worth of an experience is to be estimated by the emotional fire which it kindles; and to the lives of such women the dull, colorless round of their daily existence gives no real clue. Theirs is the life of the spirit, and for them the inner is the only true life. It is when the sunken eye shines with a glow from deep within; when the thin cheeks faintly warm with the ghost of a flush and the blue veins swell from the throbbing of a heart stirred by a spiritual vision, that the observer gets a hint of the realities of such a life.
Mrs. Ashe was a type of the saintly woman that the spirit of Puritanism bred in rural New England. Such women are the living embodiment of the power which has inspired whatever is best in the nation; the power which has been a living force amid the worldliness, the materialism, the crudity that have threatened to overwhelm the people of this yet young land, so prematurely old. In her face was a look of high unworldliness that marks the mystic, the inheritance from ancestors bred in a faith impossible without mysticism in the very fibres of the race. The heroic self-denial, the persistent belief, the n.o.ble fidelity to the ideal which is the salvation of a nation, shine in such a countenance, and make real the high deeds of a past generation the narrowness of whose creeds too often blinds us to-day to the greatness of their character.
She smiled a little on hearing the object of her son"s visit.
"I am glad to see you on any terms," she observed, "but I cannot say that I think your coming very wise."
"But, mother," he urged, "don"t you see that it is a matter of so much importance that we ought not to neglect any chance?"
"My dear boy," questioned she, "do you really think that it is of so much importance who is bishop?"
"It is of the greatest possible importance," he returned earnestly. "Of course you don"t agree with me as to the importance of forms of worship, but suppose that it were your own church, and the question were of having a man put into a place so influential. Wouldn"t you be troubled if one were likely to be chosen who taught what you regarded as heresy?"
She smiled on him still, but he saw the seriousness in her eyes.
"Yes," she said, "I suppose I should; but doesn"t it ever occur to you, Philip, that we are all too much inclined to feel that everything is going wrong if Providence doesn"t work in our way? We can"t help, I suppose, the habit of regarding our plans as somehow essential to the proper management of the universe."
He laughed and shook his head.
"You always had a most effective way of taking down my conceit," he responded. "I don"t mean that it is necessary that Father Frontford shall be bishop because I want him, but"--
"But because you believe in him," his mother interrupted with a little twinkle in her eye. "Well, we cannot do better than to follow our convictions, I suppose."
She ended with a sigh, and Philip knew that it was because into her mind came the sadness she felt at his defection from the faith of his fathers.
"Yes, you trained me from the cradle to do what I thought right without considering the consequences."
They fell into more general talk after that; and after the news of the family and the neighborhood had been pretty well exhausted, Mrs. Ashe said:--
"I have asked Alice Singleton to make me a visit."
"Alice Singleton! Why, mother, I cannot think of a person I should have supposed it less likely you would want to stay with you."
"I"m afraid that I don"t want her very much; but she wrote me that she was very lonely, that she hadn"t any plans, and that Boston seemed to her a very homesick place. Her mother was my nearest friend, you know; and if Alice needs friendship it"s very little for me to do for her."
"I didn"t know she"d been in Boston," Philip commented thoughtfully.
"She never seemed to me honest, mother. I never could be charitable to her at all."