A FORETASTE OF PEACE
It was not until the party was riding home the next day that Sir
Nicholas Maxwell and his wife were informed of Chris’ decision.
* * * * *
They had had a fair day’s sport in the two estates that marched with one
another between Overfield and Great Keynes, and about fifteen stags had
been killed as well as a quantity of smaller game.
Ralph had ridden out after the party had left, and had found Sir
Nicholas at the close of the afternoon just as the last drive was about
to take place; and had stepped into his shelter to watch the finish. It
was a still, hot afternoon, and the air over the open space between the
copse in which they stood and the dense forest eighty yards away danced
in the heat.
Ralph nodded to his brother-in-law, who was flushed and sunburnt, and
then stood behind, running his eyes up and down that sturdy figure with
the tightly-gaitered legs set well apart and the little feathered cap
that moved this way and that as the sportsman peered through the
branches before him. Once he turned fierce eyes backwards at the whine
of one of the hounds, and then again thrust his hot dripping face into
the greenery.
Then very far away came a shout, and a chorus of taps and cries followed
it, sounding from a couple of miles away as the beaters after sweeping
a wide circle entered the thick undergrowth on the opposite side of the
wood. Sir Nicholas’ legs trembled, and he shifted his position a little,
half lifting his strong spliced hunting bow as he did so.
For a few minutes there was silence about them except for the distant
cries, and once for the stamp of a horse behind them. Then Sir Nicholas
made a quick movement, and dropped his hands again; a single rabbit had
cantered out from the growth opposite, and sat up with cocked ears
staring straight at the deadly shelter. Then another followed; and again
in a sudden panic the two little furry bodies whisked back into cover.
Ralph marvelled at this strange passion that could set a reasonable man
twitching and panting like the figure in front of him. He himself was a
good rider, and a sufficiently keen hunter when his blood was up; but
this brother-in-law of his seemed to live for little else. Day after
day, as Ralph knew, from the beginning of the season to the end he was
out with his men and hounds, and the rest of the year he seemed to spend
in talking about the sport, fingering and oiling his weapons through
long mornings, and elaborating future campaigns, in which the quarries’
chances should be reduced to a minimum.
* * * * *
On a sudden Sir Nicholas’s figure stiffened and then relaxed. A doe had
stepped out noiselessly from the cover, head up and feet close together,
sniffing up wind--and they were shooting no does this month. Then again
she moved along against the thick undergrowth, stepping delicately and
silently, and vanished without a sound a hundred yards along to the
left.
The cries and taps were sounding nearer now, and at any moment the game
might appear. Sir Nicholas shifted his position again a little, and
simultaneously the scolding voice of a blackbird rang out in front, and
he stopped again. At the same moment a hare, mad with fright, burst out
of the cover, making straight for the shelter. Sir Nicholas’ hands rose,
steady now the crisis had come; and Ralph leaning forward touched him on
the shoulder and pointed.
A great stag was standing in the green gloom within the wood eighty
yards away, with a couple of does at his flank. Then as a shout sounded
out near at hand, he bolted towards the shelter in a line that would
bring him close to it. Ralph crouched down, for he had left his bow with
his man an hour earlier, and one of the hounds gave a stifled yelp as
Nicholas straightened himself and threw out his left foot. Either the
sound or the movement startled the great brown beast in front, and as
the arrow twanged from the string he checked and wheeled round, and went
off like the wind, untouched. A furious hiss of the breath broke from
Nicholas, and he made a swift sign as he turned to his horse; and in a
moment the two lithe hounds had leapt from the shelter and were flying
in long noiseless leaps after the disappearing quarry; the does,
confused by the change of direction, had whisked back into cover. A
moment later Nicholas too was after the hounds, his shoulders working
and his head thrust forward, and a stirrup clashed and jingled against
the saddle.
Ralph sat down on the ground smiling. It gave him a certain pleasure to
see such a complete discomfiture; Nicholas was always so amusingly angry
when he failed, and so full of reasons.
The forest was full of noises now; a crowd of starlings were protesting
wildly overhead, there were shouts far away and the throb of hoofs, and
the ground game was pouring out of the undergrowth and dispersing in
all directions. Once a boar ran past, grumbling as he went, turning a
wicked and resentful eye on the placid gentleman in green who sat on the
ground, but who felt for his long dirk as he saw the fury on the brute’s
face and the foam on the tusks. But the pig thought discretion was best,
and hurried on complaining. More than one troop of deer flew past, the
does gathered round their lord to protect him, all swerving together
like a string of geese as they turned the corner of the shelter and
caught sight of Ralph; but the beaters were coming out now, whistling
and talking as they came, and gathering into groups of two or three on
the ground, for the work was done, and it had been hot going.
Mary Maxwell appeared presently on her grey horse, looking slender and
dignified in her green riding-suit with the great plume shading her
face, and rode up to Ralph whom she had seen earlier in the afternoon.
“My husband?” she enquired looking down at Ralph who was lying with his
hat over his eyes.
“He left me just now,” said her brother, “very hot and red, after a stag
which he missed. That will mean some conversation to-night, Minnie.”
She smiled down at him.
“I shall agree with him, you know,” she said.
“Of course you will; it is but right. And I suppose I shall too.”
“Will you wait for him? Tell him we are going home by the mill. It is
all over now.”
Ralph nodded, and Mary moved off down the glade to join the others.
Ralph began to wonder how Nicholas would take the news of Chris’
decision. Mary, he knew very well, would assent to it quietly as she
did to all normal events, even though they were not what she would have
wished; and probably her husband would assent too, for he had a great
respect for a churchman. For himself his opinions were divided and he
scarcely knew what he thought. From the temporal point of view Chris’
step would be an advantage to him, for the vow of poverty would put an
end to any claims upon the estate on the part of the younger son; but
Ralph was sufficiently generous not to pay much attention to this. From
the social point of view, no great difference would be made; it was as
respectable to have a monk for a brother as a small squire, and Chris
could never be more than this unless he made a good marriage. From the
spiritual point of view--and here Ralph stopped and wondered whether it
was very seriously worth considering. It was the normal thing of course
to believe in the sublimity of the religious life and its peculiar
dignity; but the new learning was beginning to put questions on the
subject that had very considerably affected the normal view in Ralph’s
eyes. In that section of society where new ideas are generated and to
which Ralph himself belonged, there were very odd tales being told; and
it was beginning to be thought possible that monasticism had
over-reached itself, and that in trying to convert the world it had
itself been converted by the world. Ralph was proud enough of the honour
of his family to wonder whether it was an unmixed gain that his own
brother should join such ranks as these. And lastly there were the facts
that he had learnt from his association with Cromwell that made him
hesitate more than ever in giving Chris his sympathy. He had been
thinking these points over in the parlour the night before when the
others had left him, and during the day in the intervals of the sport;
and he was beginning to come to the conclusion that all things
considered he had better just acquiesce in the situation, and neither
praise nor blame overmuch.
It was a sleepy afternoon. The servants had all gone by now, and the
horn-blowings and noises had died away in the direction of the mill;
there was no leisure for stags to bray, as they crouched now far away in
the bracken, listening large-eyed and trumpet-eared for the sounds of
pursuit; only the hum of insect life in the hot evening sunshine filled
the air; and Ralph began to fall asleep, his back against a fallen
trunk.
Then he suddenly awakened and saw his brother-in-law, black against the
sky, looking down at him, from the saddle.
“Well?” said Ralph, not moving.
Nicholas began to explain. There were a hundred reasons, it seemed, for
his coming home empty-handed; and where were his men?
“They are all gone home,” said Ralph, getting up and stretching himself.
“I waited for you. It is all over.”
“You understand,” said Nicholas, putting his horse into motion, and
beginning to explain all over again, “you understand that it had not
been for that foul hound yelping, I should have had him here. I never
miss such a shot; and then when we went after him--”
“I understand perfectly, Nick,” said Ralph. “You missed him because you
did not shoot straight, and you did not catch him because you did not go
fast enough. A lawyer could say no more.”
Nicholas threw back his head and laughed loudly, for the two were good
friends.
“Well, if you will have it,” he said, “I was a damned fool. There! A
lawyer dare not say as much--not to me, at any rate.”
Ralph found his man half a mile further on coming to meet him with his
horse, and he mounted and rode on with Nicholas towards the mill.
“I have something to tell you,” he said presently. “Chris is to be a
monk.”
“Mother of God!” cried Nicholas, half checking his horse, “and when was
that arranged?”
“Last night,” went on Ralph. “He went to see the Holy Maid at St.
Sepulchre’s, and it seems that she told him he had a vocation; so there
is an end of it.”
“And what do you all think of it?” asked the other.
“Oh! I suppose he knows his business.”
Nicholas asked a number of questions, and was informed that Chris
proposed to go to Lewes in a month’s time. He was already twenty-three,
the Prior had given his conditional consent before, and there was no
need for waiting. Yes, they were Cluniacs; but Ralph believed that they
were far from strict just at present. It need not be the end of Chris so
far as this world was concerned.
“But you must not say that to him,” he went on, “he thinks it is heaven
itself between four walls, and we shall have a great scene of farewell.
I think I must go back to town before it takes place: I cannot do that
kind of thing.”
Nicholas was not attending, and rode on in silence for a few yards,
sucking in his lower lip.
“We are lucky fellows, you and I,” he said at last, “to have a monk to
pray for us.”
Ralph glanced at him, for he was perfectly grave, and a rather intent
and awed look was in his eyes.
“I think a deal of that,” he went on, “though I cannot talk to a
churchman as I should. I had a terrible time with my Lord of Canterbury
last year, at Oxford. He was not a hunter like this one, and I knew not
what else to speak of.”
Ralph’s eyes narrowed with amusement.
“What did you say to him?” he asked.
“I forget,” said Nicholas, “and I hope my lord did. Mary told me I
behaved like a fool. But this one is better, I hear. He is at Ashford
now with his hounds.”
They talked a little more about Chris, and Ralph soon saw on which side
Nicholas ranged himself. It was an unfeigned pleasure to this hunting
squire to have a monk for a brother-in-law; there was no knowing how
short purgatory might not be for them all under the circumstances.
It was evident, too, when they came up with the others a couple of miles
further on, that Nicholas’s attitude towards the young man had undergone
a change. He looked at him with a deep respect, refrained from
criticising his bloodless hands, and was soon riding on in front beside
him, talking eagerly and deferentially, while Ralph followed with Mary
and his father.
“You have heard?” he said to her presently.
“Father has just told me,” she said. “We are very much pleased--dear
Chris!”
“And then there is Meg,” put in her father.
“Oh! Meg; yes, I knew she would. She is made for a nun.”
Sir James edged his horse in presently close to Ralph, as Mary went in
front through a narrow opening in the wood.
“Be good to him,” he said. “He thinks so much of you.”
Ralph glanced up and smiled into the tender keen eyes that were looking
into his own.
“Why, of course, sir,” he said.
* * * * *
It was an immense pleasure to Chris to notice the difference in
Nicholas’s behaviour towards him. There was none of that loud and
cheerful rallying that stood for humour, no criticisms of his riding or
his costume. The squire asked him a hundred questions, almost nervously,
about the Holy Maid and himself, and what had passed between them.
“They say the Host was carried to her through the air from Calais,
Chris, when the King was there. Did you hear her speak of that?”
Chris shook his head.
“There was not time,” he said.
“And then there was the matter of the divorce--” Nicholas turned his
head slightly; “Ralph cannot hear us, can he? Well--the matter of the
divorce--I hear she denounced that, and would have none of it, and has
written to the Pope, too.”
“They were saying something of the kind,” said Chris, “but I thought it
best not to meddle.”
“And what did she say to you?”
Chris told him the story, and Nicholas’s eyes grew round and fixed as he
listened; his mouth was a little open, and he murmured inarticulate
comments as they rode together up from the mill.
“Lord!” he said at last, “and she said all that about hell. God save us!
And her tongue out of her mouth all the while! And did you see anything
yourself? No devils or angels?”
“I saw nothing,” said Chris. “I just listened, but she saw them.”
“Lord!” said Nicholas again, and rode on in profound silence.
The Maxwells were to stay to supper at the Court; and drive home
afterwards; so there was no opportunity for Chris to go down and bathe
in the lake as he usually did in summer after a day’s hunting, for
supper was at seven o’clock, and he had scarcely more than time to
dress.
Nicholas was very talkative at supper, and poured out all that Chris had
told him, with his usual lack of discretion; for the other had already
told the others once all the details that he thought would interest
them.
“They were talking about the divorce,” he broke out, and then stopped
and eyed Ralph craftily; “but I had better not speak of that here--eh,
Chris?”
Ralph looked blandly at his plate.
“Chris did not mention that,” he said. “Tell us, Nick.”
“No, no,” cried Nicholas. “I do not want you to go with tales to town.
Your ears are too quick, my friend. Then there was that about the Host
flying from Calais, eh, Chris? No, no; you said you had heard nothing of
that.”
Chris looked up and his face was a little flushed.
“No, Nick,” he said.
“There seems to have been a great deal that Chris did not tell us--”
began Ralph.
Sir James glanced swiftly from his seat under the canopy.
“He told us all that was needed,” he said.
“Aha!” broke out Nicholas again, “but the Holy Maid said that the King
would not live six months if he--”
Chris’s face was full of despair and misery, and his father interrupted
once more.
“We had better not speak of that, my son,” he said to Nicholas. “It is
best to leave such things alone.”
Ralph was smiling broadly with tight lips by now.
“By my soul, Nick, you are the maddest wind-bag I have ever heard. All
our heads might go for what you have said to-night. Thank God the
servants are gone.”
“Nick,” cried Mary imploringly, “do hold your tongue.”
Lady Torridon looked from one to the other with serene amusement, and
there was an odd pause such as generally fell when she showed signs of
speaking. Her lips moved but she said nothing, and ran her eyes over the
silver flagons before her.
When the Maxwells had gone at last, and prayers were over, Chris slipped
across the Court with a towel, and went up to the priest’s room over the
sacristy. Mr. Carleton looked up from his lamp and rose.
“Yes, Chris,” he said, “I will come. The moon will be up soon.”
They went down together through the sacristy door on to the level
plateaux of lawns that stretched step after step down to the dark lake.
The sky was ablaze with stars, and in the East there was a growing light
in the quarter where the moon was at its rising. The woods beyond the
water were blotted masses against the sky; and the air was full of the
rich fragrance of the summer night. The two said very little, and the
priest stopped on the bank as Chris stepped out along the little boarded
pier that ran out among the rushes into deep water. There was a scurry
and a cry, and a moor-hen dashed out from under cover, and sped across
the pond, scattering the silver points that hung there motionless,
reflected from the heaven overhead.
Chris was soon ready, and stood there a moment, a pale figure in the
gloom, watching the shining dots rock back again in the ripples to
motionlessness. Then he lifted his hands and plunged.
It seemed to him, as he rose to the surface again, as if he were
swimming between two sides. As he moved softly out across the middle,
and a little ripple moved before him, the water was invisible. There was
only a fathomless gulf, as deep below as the sky was high above, pricked
with stars. As he turned his head this way and that the great trees,
high overhead, seemed less real than those two immeasurable spaces above
and beneath. There was a dead silence everywhere, only broken by the
faint suck of the water over his shoulder, and an indescribably sweet
coolness that thrilled him like a strain of music. Under its influence,
again, as last night, the tangible, irritating world seemed to sink out
of his soul; here he was, a living creature alone in a great silence
with God, and nothing else was of any importance.
He turned on his back, and there was the dark figure on the bank
watching him, and above it the great towered house, with its half-dozen
lighted windows along its eastern side, telling him of the world of men
and passion.
“Look,” came the priest’s voice, and he turned again, and over the
further bank, between two tall trees, shone a great silver rim of the
rising moon. A path of glory was struck now across the black water, and
he pleased himself by travelling up it towards the remote splendour,
noticing as he went how shadows had sprung into being in that moment,
and how the same light that made the glory made the dark as well. His
soul seemed to emerge a stage higher yet from the limits in which the
hot day and the shouting and the horns and the crowded woods had
fettered it. How remote and little seemed Ralph’s sneers and Nicholas’s
indiscretions and Mary’s pity! Here he moved round in a cooler and
serener mood. That keen mood, whether physical or spiritual he did not
care to ask, made him inarticulate as he walked up with the priest ten
minutes later. But Mr. Carleton seemed to understand.
“There are some things besides the divorce best not talked about,” he
said, “and I think bathing by starlight is one of them.”
They passed under the chapel window presently, and Chris noticed with an
odd sensation of pleasure the little translucent patch of colour between
the slender mullions thrown by the lamp within--a kind of reflex or
anti-type of the broad light shining over the water.
“Come up for a while,” went on the priest, as they reached the
side-entrance, “if you are not too tired.”
The two went through the sacristy-door, locking it behind them, and up
the winding stairs in the turret at the corner to the priest’s chamber.
Chris threw himself down, relaxed and happy, in the tall chair by the
window, where he could look out and see the moon, clear of the trees
now, riding high in heaven.
“That was a pity at supper,” said the priest presently, as he sat at the
table. “I love Sir Nicholas and think him a good Christian, but he is
scarcely a discreet one.”
“Tell me, father,” broke out Chris, “what is going to happen?”
Mr. Carleton looked at him smiling. He had a pleasant ugly face, with
little kind eyes and sensitive mouth.
“You must ask Mr. Ralph,” he said, “or rather you must not. But he knows
more than any of us.”
“I wish he would not speak like that.”
“Dear lad,” said the priest, “you must not feel it like that. Remember
our Lord bore contempt as well as pain.”
There was silence a moment, and then Chris began again. “Tell me about
Lewes, father. What will it be like?”
“It will be bitterly hard,” said the priest deliberately. “Christ Church
was too bitter for me, as you know. I came out after six months, and the
Cluniacs are harder. I do not know if I lost my vocation or found it;
but I am not the man to advise you in either case.”
“Ralph thinks it is easy enough. He told me last night in the carriage
that I need not trouble myself, and that monks had a very pleasant time.
He began to tell me some tale about Glastonbury, but I would not hear
it.”
“Ah,” said the chaplain regretfully, “the world’s standard for monks is
always high. But you will find it hard enough, especially in the first
year. But, as I said, I am not the man to advise you--I failed.”
Chris looked at him with something of pity in his heart, as the priest
fingered the iron pen on the table, and stared with pursed lips and
frowning forehead. The chaplain was extraordinarily silent in public,
just carrying on sufficient conversation not to be peculiar or to seem
morose, but he spoke more freely to Chris, and would often spend an hour
or two in mysterious talk with Sir James. Chris’s father had a very
marked respect for the priest, and had had more than one sharp word with
his wife, ten years before when he had first come to the house, and had
found Lady Torridon prepared to treat her chaplain with the kind of
respect that she gave to her butler. But the chaplain’s position was
secured by now, owing in a large measure to his own tact and
unobtrusiveness, and he went about the house a quiet, sedate figure of
considerable dignity and impressiveness, performing his duties
punctually and keeping his counsel. He had been tutor to both the sons
for a while, to Ralph only for a few months, but to Chris since his
twelfth birthday, and the latter had formed with him a kind of peaceful
confederacy, often looking in on him at unusual hours, always finding
him genial, although very rarely confidential. It was to Mr. Carleton,
too, that Chris owed his first drawings to the mystical life of prayer;
there was a shelf of little books in the corner by the window of the
priest’s room, from which he would read to the boy aloud, first
translating them into English as he went, and then, as studies
progressed, reading the Latin as it stood; and that mysteriously
fascinating world in which great souls saw and heard eternal things and
talked familiarly with the Saviour and His Blessed Mother had first
dawned on the boy there. New little books, too, appeared from time to
time, and the volumes had overflowed their original home; and from that
fact Christopher gathered that the priest, though he had left the
external life of Religion, still followed after the elusive spirit that
was its soul.
“But tell me,” he said again, as the priest laid the pen down and sat
back in his chair, crossing his buckled feet beneath the cassock; “tell
me, why is it so hard? I am not afraid of the discipline or the food.”
“It is the silence,” said the priest, looking at him.
“I love silence,” said Chris eagerly.
“Yes, you love an hour or two, or there would be no hope of a vocation
for you. But I do not think you will love a year. However, I may be
wrong. But it is the day after day that is difficult. And there is no
relaxation; not even in the infirmary. You will have to learn signs in
your novitiate; that is almost the first exercise.”
The priest got up and fetched a little book from the corner cupboard.
“Listen,” he said, and then began to read aloud the instructions laid
down for the sign-language of novices; how they were to make a circle in
the air for bread since it was round, a motion of drinking for water,
and so forth.
“You see,” he said, “you are not even allowed to speak when you ask for
necessaries. And, you know, silence has its peculiar temptations as well
as its joys. There is accidie and scrupulousness and contempt of
others, and a host of snares that you know little of now.”
“But--” began Chris.
“Oh, yes; it has its joys, and gives a peculiar strength.”
Chris knew, of course, well enough by now in an abstract way what the
Religious discipline would mean, but he wished to have it made more
concrete by examples, and he sat long with the chaplain asking him
questions. Mr. Carleton had been, as he said, in the novitiate at
Canterbury for a few months, and was able to tell him a good deal about
the life there; but the differences between the Augustinians and the
Cluniacs made it impossible for him to go with any minuteness into the
life of the Priory at Lewes. He warned him, however, of the tendency
that every soul found in silence to think itself different from others,
and of so peculiar a constitution that ordinary rules did not apply to
it. He laid so much stress on this that the other was astonished.
“But it is true,” said Chris, “no two souls are the same.”
The priest smiled.
“Yes, that is true, too; no two sheep are the same, but the sheep nature
is one, and you will have to learn that for yourself. A Religious rule
is drawn up for many, not for one; and each must learn to conform
himself. It was through that I failed myself; I remembered that I was
different from others, and forgot that I was the same.”
Mr. Carleton seemed to take a kind of melancholy pleasure in returning
to what he considered his own failure, and Chris began to wonder whether
the thought of it was not the secret of that slight indication to
moroseness that he had noticed in him.
The moon was high and clear by now, and Chris often leaned his cheek on
the sash as the priest talked, and watched that steady shining shield
go up the sky, and the familiar view of lawns and water and trees,
ghostly and mystical now in the pale light.
The Court was silent as he passed through it near midnight, as the
household had been long in bed; the flaring link had been extinguished
two hours before, and the shadows of the tall chimneys lay black and
precise at his feet across the great whiteness on the western side of
the yard. Again the sense of the smallness of himself and his
surroundings, of the vastness of all else, poured over his soul; these
little piled bricks and stones, the lawns and woods round about, even
England and the world itself, he thought, as his mind shot out towards
the stars and the unfathomable spaces--all these were but very tiny
things, negligeable quantities, when he looked at them in the eternal
light. It was this thought, after all, that was calling him out of the
world, and had been calling him fitfully ever since his soul awoke eight
years ago, and knew herself and her God: and his heart expanded and grew
tremulous as he remembered once more that his vocation had been sealed
by a divine messenger, and that he would soon be gone out of this little
cell into the wide silent liberty of the most dear children of God.