"I am a useless and an evil man,--
God planned my life, and let men spoil His plan."
_Isabella Fyvie Mayo_.
Oakham was left behind; and to the surprise of the party--except the
Countess, her Prime Minister, Father Miles, and her Foreign Secretary,
Felicia--they found themselves lodged in Rochester Castle. Here the
Countess shut herself up, and communicated with the outward world
through her Cabinet only. All orders were brought to the ladies by
Felicia, and were passed to Vivian by Father Miles. The latter was
closeted with his lady for long periods, and rolls of writing appeared
to be the result of these conferences.
The winter moved on with leaden feet, according to the ideas of the
household, and of Ada more particularly.
"This sort of life is really something dreadful!" said that young lady.
"If the frost would only break up, it would make something fresh to look
at. There is _nothing_ to be done!"
"Poor Ada!" responded Olympias, laughing. "Do get some needlework."
"I am tired of needlework," answered Ada. "I am tired of everything!"
Felicia came in as the words were spoken.
"I have permission to tell you something," she said, with a light in her
black eyes which Clarice felt sure meant mischief. "The Lady has
appealed to the holy Father for a divorce from the Lord Earl."
"Will she get it?" asked Olympias.
"No doubt of it," replied Felicia dogmatically.
"And if so, what will she do then?" asked Ada.
"Her pious intention," said Felicia, the black eyes dancing, "is to
become a holy Sister of the Order of the blessed Saint Dominic."
"Then what is to become of the Lord Earl?" queried Olympias. "I suppose
he can marry somebody else. I hope he will."
"That is no concern of the Lady's," said Felicia, in a tone of pious
severity. "The religious do not trouble their holy repose about
externs, except to offer prayers for their salvation."
"Why, then, we shall all be turned out!" blankly cried Ada. "What is to
become of us all?"
"What will become of me is already settled," replied Felicia demurely.
"I am about to make profession in the same convent with my mistress."
"Thank the saints!" reached Clarice's ears in a whisper from Olympias,
and was deliberately echoed in the heart of the former.
"But that will never do for me!" exclaimed Ada. "I am sure I have no
vocation. What am I to do?"
"The Lady proposes, in her goodness," said the Countess's mouthpiece,
"to get thee an appointment in the household of one of the Ladies the
King's daughters."
"_Ha, jolife_!" said Ada, and ceased her interjections.
"For you, Dames," continued Felicia, turning to Clarice and Olympias,
"she says that, being wedded, you are already provided for, and need no
thought on her part."
"Oh, then, I may go back to Oakham," answered Olympias in a satisfied
tone. "That is what I want."
Clarice wondered sorrowfully what her lot would be--whether she might
return to Oakham. She felt more at home there than anywhere else. The
question was whether, Clarice being now at large, Vivian would continue
in the Earl's service; and even if he did, they might perhaps no longer
live in the Castle. Clarice took this new trouble where she carried
them all; but the Earl's sorrow was more in her mind than her own. She
was learning to cultivate:--
"A heart at leisure from itself,
To soothe and sympathise."
She found that Vivian had already heard the news from Father Miles, and
she timidly ventured to ask him what he intended to do.
After a few flights of rhetoric concerning the extreme folly of the
Countess--to forsake an earldom for the cloister was a proceeding not in
Vivian's line at all--that gentleman condescended so far to answer his
wife as to observe that he was not fool enough not to know when he was
well off. Clarice thankfully conjectured that they would return to
Oakham. She thought it better, however, to ask the question point
blank; and she received a reply--of course accompanied by a snub.
"Why should we be such fools as to go to Oakham when my Lord is in
Bermondsey?"
"Bermondsey!" Clarice was surprised. "You never know anything!" said
Vivian. "Of course he is come to town."
Clarice received the snubbing in silence. "You are so taken up with
that everlasting brat of yours," added Rose's affectionate father, "that
you never know what anybody else is doing."
There had been a time when Clarice would have defended herself against
such accusations. She was learning now that she suffered least when she
received them in meek silence. The only way to deal with Vivian
Barkeworth was to let him alone.
Two long letters went to the Pope that February; one was from the
Countess, the other from the Earl. They are both yet extant, and they
show the character of each as no description could set it forth.
The Countess's letter is a mixture of pious demureness and querulous
selfishness. She tells the Pope that all her life she has intensely
desired to be a nun: that she is, unhappily, in the irreligious position
of a matron, and, moreover, is the suffering wife of an impious husband.
This sinful man requires of her--of her, a soul devoted to religion--
that she shall behave as if she belonged to the wicked world which holds
himself within its thrall, and shall sacrifice God to him. She humbly
and fervently entreats the holy Father to grant her a divorce from these
bonds of matrimony which so cruelly oppress her, and to set her soul
free that it may soar upwards unrestrained. It is the letter of a woman
who did wish to serve God, but who was incapable of recognising that it
was possible to do it without shutting herself up in stone walls, and
starving body and soul alike.
The Earl's letter is of an entirely different calibre. He tells the
Pope in his turn that he is wedded to a woman whom he dearly loves, and
who resolutely keeps him at arm's length. She will not make a friend of
him, nor behave as a good wife ought to do. This is all he asks of her;
he is as far as can be from wishing to be unkind to her or to cross her
wishes. He only wants her to live with him on reasonable and ordinary
terms. But she--and here the Earl's irrepressible humour breaks out; he
must see the comical side even of his own sorest trouble, and certainly
this had its comical side--she will not sit next to him at table, but
insists on putting her confessor between; she will not answer Yes or No
to his simplest question, but invariably returns the answer through a
third person. When she goes into her private apartments, she turns the
key in his face. Does the holy Father think this is the way that a
rational wife ought to behave to her own husband? and will he not
remonstrate with her, and induce her to use him a little more kindly and
reasonably than she does? The Earl's letter is that of an injured and
justly provoked man; of a man who loves his wife too well to coerce or
quarrel with her, and who thoroughly perceives the absurdity of his
position no less than its pain. Yet he does feel the pain bitterly, and
he would do anything to end it.
This letter to the Patriarch of Christendom was his last hope.
Entreaties, remonstrances, patient tenderness, loving kindness, all had
proved vain. Now:--
"He had set his life upon a cast,
And he must run the hazard of the die."
Weary and miserable weeks they were, during which Earl Edmund waited the
Pope's answer. It came at last. The Pope replied as only a Romish
priest could be expected to reply. For the human anguish of the one he
had no sympathy; for the quasi-religious sorrows of the other he had
very much. He decreed, in the name of God, a full divorce between
Edmund Earl of Cornwall, and Margaret his wife, coldly admonishing the
Earl to take the Lord's chastening in good part, and to let the griefs
of earth lift his soul towards Heaven.
But it was not there that this sorrow lifted it at first. The human
agony had to be lived through before the Divine calm and peace could
come to heal it. His last effort had been made in vain. The passionate
hope of twenty years, that the day would come when his long, patient
love should meet with its reward even on earth, was shattered to the
dust. Even if she wished to come back after this, she could never
retrace her steps. Compensation he might find in Heaven, but there
could be none left for him on earth now. Even hope was dead within him.
The fatal Bull fell from the Earl's hand, and dropped a dead weight on
the rushes at his feet. He was a heart-wrecked man, and life had to go
on.
Was this man--for his is no fancy picture--a poor weak creature, or was
he a strong, heroic soul? Many will write him down the weakling;
perhaps all but those who have themselves known much of that hope
deferred which maketh the heart sick, and drains away the moral
life-blood drop by drop. It may be that the registers of Heaven held
appended to his name a different epithet. It is harder to wait than to
work; hardest of all to awake after long suspense to the blank
conviction that all has been in vain, and then to take up the cross and
meekly follow the Crucified.
Two hours later, a page brought a message to Reginald de Echingham to
the effect that he was wanted by his master.
Reginald, in his own eyes, was a thoroughly miserable man. He had
nobody to talk with, and nothing to do. He missed Olympias sadly, for
as the Earl had once jestingly remarked, she burnt perpetual incense on
his altar, and flattery was a necessary of life to Reginald. Olympias
was the only person who admired him nearly as much as he did himself.
Like the old Romans, _partem et circenses_ constituted his list of
indispensables; and had it been inevitable to dispense with one of them
for a time, Reginald would have resigned the bread rather than the game.
On this particular morning, his basket of grievances was full. The
damp had put his moustache out of curl; he had found a poor breakfast
provided for him--and Reginald was by no means indifferent to his
breakfast--and, worst of all, the mirror was fixed so high up on the
wall that he could not see himself comfortably. The usual religious
rites of the morning before his own dear image had, therefore, to be
very imperfectly performed. Reginald grumbled sorely within himself as
he went through the cold stone passages which led to the Earl's chamber.
His master lifted very sad eyes to his face.
"De Echingham, I wish to set out for Ashridge to-morrow. Can you be
ready?"
Ashridge! De Echingham would as soon have received marching orders for
Spitzbergen. If there were one place in the world which he hated in his
inmost soul, it was that Priory in Buckinghamshire, which Earl Edmund
had himself founded. He would be worse off there than even in
Bermondsey Palace, with nothing around him but silent walls and almost
equally silent monks. De Echingham ventured on remonstrance.
"Would not your Lordship find Berkhamsted much more pleasurable,
especially at this season?"
"I do not want pleasure," answered the Earl wearily. "I want rest."
And he rose and began to walk aimlessly up and down the room, in that
restless manner which was well suited to emphasise his words.
"But--your Lordship's pardon granted--would you not find it far better
to seek for distraction and pleasance in the Court, than to shut
yourself up in a gloomy cell with those monks?"
Earl Edmund stopped in his walk and looked at Reginald, whose speech
touched his quick sense of humour.
"I would advise you to give thanks in your prayers to-night, De
Echingham."
"For what, my Lord?"
"That you have as yet no conception of a sorrow which is past
distraction by pleasance. `Vinegar upon nitre!' You never tasted it, I
should think."
"I thank your Lordship, I never did," said Reginald, who took the
allusion quite literally.
"Well, I have done, and I did not like it," rejoined his master. "I
prefer the monks' _soupe maigre_, if you please. Be so good as to make
ready, De Echingham."
Reginald obeyed, but grumbling bitterly within his disappointed soul.
Could there be any misery on earth worse than a cold stone bench, a bowl
of sorrel soup, and a chapter of Saint Augustine to flavour it? And
when they had only just touched the very edge of the London season!
Why, he would not get a single ball that spring. Poor Reginald!
They stayed but one night at Berkhamsted, though, to the Earl,
Berkhamsted was home. It was the scene of his birth, and of that
blessed unapprehensive childhood, when brothers and sisters had played
with him on the Castle green, and light, happy laughter had rung through
the noble halls; when the hand of his fair Provencal mother had fallen
softly in caresses on his head, and his generous, if extravagant, father
had been only too ready to shower gold ducats in anticipation of his
slightest wish. All was gone now but the cold gold--hard, silent,
unfeeling; a miserable comforter indeed. There was one brother left,
but he was far away--too far to recall in this desolate hour. Like a
sufferer of later date, he must go alone with his God to bear his
passion. [Note 1.]
The Priory of Ashridge--of the Order of Bonihomines--which Earl Edmund
had founded a few years before, was the only one of its class in
England. The Predicant Friars were an offshoot of the Dominican Order;
and the Boni-Homines were a special division of the Predicant Friars.
It is a singular fact that from this one source of Dominicans or Black
Monks, sprang the best and the worst issues that ever emanated from
monachism--the Bonihomines and the Inquisition.
The Boni-Homines were, in a word, the Protestants of the Middle Ages.
And--a remarkable feature--they were not, like all other seceders,
persons who had separated themselves from the corruptions of Rome. They
were better off, for they had never been tainted with them. From the
first ages of primitive Christianity, while on all sides the stream was
gradually growing sluggish and turbid, in the little nest of valleys
between Dauphine and Piedmont it had flowed fresh and pure, fed by the
Word of God, which the Vaudois [Note 2] mountaineers suffered no Pope
nor Church to wrench or shut up from them.
The oldest name by which we know these early Protestants is Paulikians,
probably having a reference to the Apostle Paul as either the exponent
of their doctrines, or the actual founder of their local church. A
little later we find them styled Cathari, or Pure Ones. Then we come on
their third name of Albigenses, derived from the neighbouring town of
Alby, where a Council was held which condemned them. But by whatever
name they are called they are the same people, living in the same
valleys, and holding unwaveringly and unadulterated the same faith.
It was by their fourth name of Boni-Homines, or Good Men, that they took
advantage of the preaching movement set up by the Dominicans in the
thirteenth century. They permeated their ranks, however, very gradually
and quietly--perhaps all the more surely. For shortly after the date of
this story, in the early part of the fourteenth century, it is said that
of every three Predicant Friars, two were Bonihomines.
The Boni-Homines were rife in France before they ever crept into
England; and the first man to introduce them into England was Edmund,
Earl of Cornwall. A hundred years later, when the Boni-Homines had
shown what they really were, and the leaven with which they had
saturated society had evolved itself in Lollardism, the monks of other
Orders did their best to bring both the movement and the men into
disrepute, and to paint in the blackest colours the name of the Prince
who had first introduced them into this country. In no monkish
chronicle, unless written by a Bonus Homo, will the name of Earl Edmund
be found recorded without some word of condemnation. And the
Boni-Homines, unfortunately for history, were not much given to writing
chronicles. Their business was saving souls.
Most important is it to remember, in forming just estimates of the
character of things--whether men or events--in the Middle Ages, that
with few exceptions monks were the only historians. Before we can
truthfully set down this man as good, or that man as bad, we must,
therefore, consult other sources--the chronicles of those few writers
who were not monks, the State papers, but above all, where accessible,
the personal accounts and private letters of the individuals in
question. It is pitiable to see well-meaning Protestant writers, even
in our _own_ day, repeating after each other the old monkish calumnies,
and never so much as pausing to inquire, Are these things so?
Late on the evening of the following day the Prior and monks of Ashridge
stood at the gate ready to receive their founder. The circumstances of
his coming were unknown to them, and they were prepared to make it a
triumphal occasion. But the first glance at his face altered all that.
The Prior quietly waved his monks back, and, going forward himself,
kissed his patron's hand, and led him silently into the monastery.
Poor Sir Reginald found himself condemned to all the sorrows he had
anticipated, down to the sorrel soup--for it was a vigil--and the straw
mattress, which, though considerably softer than the plank beds of the
monks, was barely endurable to his ease-loving limbs. He looked as he
felt--extremely uncomfortable and exceedingly cross.
The Prior wasted no attentions on him. Such troubles as these were not
worth a thought in his eyes; but his founder's face cost him many
thoughts. He saw too plainly that for him had come one of those dread
hours in life when the floods of deep waters overflow a man, and unless
God take him into the ark of His covenant mercy, he will go down in the
current. It was after some hours of prayer that the Prior tapped at the
door of the royal guest.
Earl Edmund's quiet voice bade him enter.
"How fares it with my Lord?"
"How is it likely to fare," was the sorrowful answer, "with one who hath
lost hope?"
The Prior sat down opposite his guest, where he might have the
opportunity of studying his countenance. He was himself the senior of
the Earl, being a man of about sixty years--a man in whom there had been
a great deal of fire, and in whose dark, gleaming eyes there were many
sparks left yet.
"Father," said the Earl, in a low, pained voice, "I am perplexed to
understand God's dealings with me."
"Did you expect to understand them?" was the reply.
"Thus far I did--that I thought He would finish what He had begun. But
all my life--so far as this earthly life is concerned--I have been
striving for one aim, and it has come to utter wreck. I set one object
before me, and I thought--I _thought_ it was God's will that I should
pursue it. If He, by some act of His own providence, had shown me the
contrary, I could have understood it better. But He has let men step in
and spoil all. It is not He, but they who have brought about this
wreck. My barge is not shattered by the winds and waves of God, but
scuttled by the violence of pirates. My life is spoiled, and I do not
understand why. I have done nothing but what I thought He intended me
to do: I have set my heart on one thing, but it was a thing that I
believed He meant to give me. It is all mystery to me."
"What is spoiled, my Lord? Is it what God meant you to do, or what you
meant God to do?"
The sand grew to a larger heap in the hour-glass before another word was
spoken.
"Father," said the Prince at last, "have I been intent on following my
own will, when I thought I was pursuing the Lord's will for me? Father
Bevis thinks so: he gave me some very hard words before I came here. He
accuses me of idolatry; of loving the creature more than the Creator--
nay, of setting up my will and aim, and caring nothing for those of the
Lord. In his eyes, I ought to have perceived years ago that God called
me to a life apart with Him, and to have detached my heart from all but
Himself and His Church. Father, it is hard enough to realise the wreck
of all a man hoped and longed for: yet it is harder to know that the
very hope was sin, that the longing was contrary to the Divine purpose
for me. Have I so misunderstood my life? Have I so misunderstood my
Master?"
The expression of the Prior's eyes was very pitying and full of
tenderness. Hard words were not what he thought needed as the medicine
for that patient. They were only to be expected from Father Bevis, who
had never suffered the least pang of that description of pain.
"My Lord," answered the Prior, gently, "it is written of the wicked man,
`Thou hast removed Thy judgments from his eyes.' They are not to be
seen nor fathomed by him. And to a great extent it is equally true of
the righteous man. Man must not look to be able to comprehend the ways
of God--they are above him. It is enough for him if he can walk
submissively in them."
"I wonder," said the Earl, still pursuing his own train of thought, "if
I ought to have been a monk. I never imagined it, for I never felt any
vocation. It seemed to me that Providence called me to a life entirely
different. Have I made an utter blunder all my life? I cannot think
it."
"There is no need to think it, my Lord. We cannot all be monks, even if
we would. And why should we? It might, perhaps, be better for you to
think one other thing."
"What?" asked the Earl, with more appearance of interest than he had
hitherto shown.
"That what you suppose to be the spoiling of your life is just what God
intended for you."
The Earl's face grew dark. "What! that all my life long He was leading
me up to _this_?"
"It looks like it," said the Prior, quietly.
"Oh! but why?"
"Now, my Lord, you go beyond me. Neither you nor I can guess that. But
He knows."
"Yes, I suppose He knows." But the consideration did not seem to
comfort him as it had done before when suggested by Father Bevis.
"Perhaps," said the Prior again, softly, "there was no other way for
your Lordship to the gate of the Holy City. He leads us by diverse
ways; some through the flowery mead, and some over the desert sands
where no water is. But of all it is written, `He led them forth by the
right way, that they might reach the haven of their desire.' Would your
Lordship have preferred the mead and have missed the haven?"
"No," answered the Earl, firmly.
"Remember that you hold God's promise that when you awake up after His
likeness you shall be satisfied with it. And he is not satisfied with
his purchase who accounts it to have cost more than it was worth."
"Will your figure hold if pressed further?" said the Earl, with a wintry
smile. "The purchase may be worth a thousand marks, but if I have but
five hundred in the world I shall starve to death before the gem is
mine."
"No, my Lord, it will not hold. For you cannot pay the price of that
gem. The cost of it was His who will keep it safe for you, so that you
cannot fling it away in mistake or folly. Figures must fail somewhere;
and we want another in this case. My Lord, you are the gem, and the
heavenly Graver is fashioning on you the King's likeness. Will you stay
His hand before it is perfect?"
"I would it were near perfection!" sighed the Earl.
"Perhaps it is," said the Prior, gently. "Remember, it is your Father
who is graving it."
The Earl's lip quivered. "If one could but know when it would be done!
If one might know that in seven years--ten years--it would be complete,
and one's heart and brain might find rest! But to think of its going on
for twenty, thirty, forty--"
"They will look short enough, my Lord, when they are over."
"True. But not while they are passing."
"Nay, `No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous.' Yet `faint
not when thou art rebuked of Him.'"
"It is the going on, that is so terrible!" said the Earl, almost under
his breath. "If one might die when one's hope dies! Father, do you
know anything of that?"
"In this world, my Lord, I dug a grave in mine own heart for all my
hopes, forty years ago."
"And can you look back on that time calmly?"
"That depends on what you mean by calmness. Trustfully, yes;
indifferently, no."
"Yet the religious say that God requires their affections to be detached
from the world. That must produce deadness of feeling."
"My Lord, there is such a thing as being alive from the dead. That is
what God requires. If we tarry at the dying, we shall stop short of His
perfection. We are to be dead to sin; but I nowhere find in Scripture
that we are to die to love and happiness. That is man's gloss upon
God's precept."
"Is that what you teach in your valleys?"
"We teach God's Word," said the Vaudois Prior. "Alas! for the men that
have made it void through their tradition! `If they speak not according
thereunto, it is because there is no light in them.'"
"And you learn--" suggested the Earl in a more interested tone.
"We learn that God requires of His servants that they shall overcome the
world; and He has told us what He means by the world--`The lust of the
flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.' Whatever has
become that to me, that am I to overcome, if I would reign with Christ
when He cometh."
We Protestants can hardly understand the fearful extent to which Rome
binds the souls of her votaries. When she goes so far--which she rarely
does--as to hold out God's Word with one hand, she carries in the other
an antidote to it which she calls the interpretation of the Church,
derived from the consent of the Fathers. That the Fathers scarcely ever
consent to anything does not trouble her. According to this
interpretation, all human affection comes for monk or nun under the head
of the lusts of the flesh. [Note 3.] A daughter's love for her mother,
a father's for his child, is thus branded. From his cradle Earl Edmund
had been taught this; was it any marvel if he found it impossible to get
rid of the idea? The Prior's eyes were less blinded. He had come
straight from those Piedmontese valleys where, from time immemorial, the
Word of God has not been bound, and whosoever would has been free to
slake his thirst at the pure fountain of the water of life. Love was
not dead in his heart, and he was not ashamed of it.
"But then, Father, you must reckon all love a thing to be left behind?"
very naturally queried the Earl.
"It will not be so in Heaven," answered the Prior; "then why should it
be on earth? Left behind! Think you I left behind me the one love of
my life when I became a Bonus Homo? I trow not. My Lord, forty years
ago this summer, I was a young man, just entering life, and betrothed to
a maiden of the Val Pellice. God laid His hand upon my hopes of earthly
happiness, and said, `Not so!' But must I, therefore, sweep my
Adelaide's memory out of my heart as if I had never loved her, and hold
it sin against God to bear her sweet face in tender remembrance? Nay,
verily, I have not so learned Christ."
"What happened?" said the Earl.
"God sent His angels for her," answered the Prior in a low voice.
"Ah, but she loved you!" was the response, in a tone still lower. The
Earl did not know how much, in those few words, he told the Prior of
Ashridge.
"My Lord," said the Prior, "did you ever purchase a gift for one you
loved, and keep it by you, carefully wrapped up, not letting him know
till the day came to produce it?"
The Earl looked up as if he did not see the object of the question; but
he answered in the affirmative.
"It may be," continued the Prior, "that God our Father does the same at
times. I believe that many will find gifts on their Father's table, at
the great marriage-feast of the Lamb, which they never knew they were to
have, and some which they fancied were lost irrevocably on earth. And
if there be anything for which our hearts cry out that is not waiting
for us, surely He can and will still the craving."
The Prior scarcely realised the effect of his words. He saw afterwards
that the most painful part of the Earl's grief was lightened, that the
terrible strain was gone from his eyes. He thanked God and took
courage. He did not know that he had, to some extent, given him back
the most precious thing he had lost--hope. He had only moved it further
off--from earth to Heaven; and, if more distant, yet it was safer there.
The Prior left the Earl alone after that interview--alone with the
Evangelisterium and the Psalter. The words of God were better for him
than any words of men.
He stayed at Ashridge for about a fortnight, and then, to the ecstasy of
Sir Reginald, issued orders for return to Berkhamsted. Only a few words
passed between the Prior and his patron as they took leave of each other
at the gate.
"Farewell, Father, and many thanks. You have done me good--as much good
as man can do me now."
"My Lord, that acknowledgment is trust money, which I will pay into the
treasury of your Lord and mine."
So they parted, to meet only once again. The Vaudois Prior was to go
down with his friend to the river-side, to the last point where man can
go with man.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note 1. "Je vais seul avec mon Dieu souffrir ma passion."--Bonnivard,
Prior of Saint Victor.
Note 2. Vaudois is not really an accurate epithet, since the
"Valley-Men" only acquired it when, in after years, ejected, from their
old home, they sought shelter in the Pays de Vaud. But it has come to
be regarded as a name expressive of certain doctrines.
Note 3. "They (the Jesuits) were cut off from family and friends.
Their vow taught them to forget their father's house, and to esteem
themselves holy only when every affection and desire which nature had
planted in their breasts had been plucked up by the roots."
(_Jesuitism_, by the Reverend J.A. Wylie, Ll.D.) This statement is
simply a shade less true of the other monastic orders.