THE CATHEDRAL.
Ledwith was dying in profound depression, like most brave souls, whose
success has been partial, or whose failure has been absolute. This
mournful ending to a brave, unselfish life seemed to Arthur pitiful and
monstrous. A mere breathing-machine like himself had enjoyed a
stimulating vengeance for the failure of one part of his life. Oh, how
sweet had been that vengeance! The draught had not yet reached the
bottom of the cup! His cause for the moment a ruin, dragged down with
Fenianism; his great enemy stronger, more glorious, and more pitiless
than when he had first raised his hand against her injustice; now the
night had closed in upon Ledwith, not merely the bitter night of
sickness and death and failure, but that more savage night of
despondency, which steeps all human sorrow in the black, polluted
atmosphere of hell. For such a sufferer the heart of Arthur Dillon
opened as wide as the gates of heaven. Oh, had he not known what it is
to suffer so, without consolation!
He was like a son to Owen Ledwith.
Every plan born in the poetic and fertile brain of the patriot he took
oath to carry out; he vowed his whole life to the cause of Ireland; and
he consoled Owen for apparent failure by showing him that he had not
altogether failed, since a man, young, earnest, determined, and wealthy
should take up the great work just where he dropped it. Could any worker
ask more of life? A hero should go to his eternity with lofty joy,
leaving his noble example to the mean world, a reproach to the
despicable among rulers, a star in the night to the warriors of justice.
In Honora her father did not find the greatest comfort. His soul was of
the earth and human liberty was his day-star; her soul rose above that
great human good to the freedom of heaven. Her heart ached for him,
that he should be going out of life with only human consolation. The
father stood in awe of an affection, which at the same time humbled and
exalted him; she had never loved man or woman like him; he was next to
God in that virginal heart, for with all her love of country, the father
had the stronger hold on her. Too spiritual for him, her sublime faith
did not cheer him. Yet when they looked straight into each other's eyes
with the consciousness of what was coming, mutual anguish terribly
probed their love. He had no worry for her.
"She has the best of friends," he said to Arthur, "she is capable, and
trained to take care of herself handsomely; but these things will not be
of any use. She will go to the convent."
"Not if Lord Constantine can hinder it," Arthur said bluntly.
"I would like to see her in so exalted and happy a sphere as Lord
Constantine could give her. But I am convinced that the man is not born
who can win the love of this child of mine. Sir Galahad might, but not
the stuff of which you and I are made."
"I believe you," said Arthur.
Honora herself told him of her future plans, as they sat with the sick
man after a trying evening, when for some hours the end seemed near. The
hour invited confidences, and like brother and sister at the sick-bed of
a beloved parent they exchanged them. When she had finished telling him
how she had tried to do her duty to her father, and to her country, and
how she had laid aside her idea of the convent for their sake, but would
now take up her whole duty to God by entering a sisterhood, he said
casually:
"It seems to me these three duties work together; and when you were
busiest with your father and your country, then were you most faithful
to God."
"Very true," she replied, looking up with surprise. "Obedience is better
than sacrifice."
"Take care that you are not deceiving yourself, Honora. Which would
cause more pain, to give up your art and your cause, or to give up the
convent?"
"To give up the convent," she replied promptly.
"That looks to me like selfishness," he said gently. "There are many
nuns in the convents working for the wretched and helping the poor and
praying for the oppressed, while only a few women are devoted directly
to the cause of freedom. It strikes me that you descend when you retire
from a field of larger scope to one which narrows your circle and
diminishes your opportunities. I am not criticizing the nun's life, but
simply your personal scheme."
"And you think I descend?" she murmured with a little gasp of pain.
"Why, how can that be?"
"You are giving up the work, the necessary work, which few women are
doing, to take up a work in which many women are engaged," he answered,
uncertain of his argument, but quite sure of his intention. "You lose
great opportunities to gain small ones, purely personal. That's the way
it looks to me."
With wonderful cunning he unfolded his arguments in the next few weeks.
He appealed to her love for her father, her wish to see his work
continued; he described his own helplessness, very vaguely though, in
carrying out schemes with which he was unacquainted, and to which he was
vowed; he mourned over the helpless peoples of the world, for whom a new
community was needed to fight, as the Knights of St. John fought for
Christendom; and he painted with delicate satire that love of ease which
leads heroes to desert the greater work for the lesser on the plea of
the higher life. Selfishly she sought rest, relief for the taxing
labors, anxieties, and journeys of fifteen years, and not the will of
God, as she imagined. Was he conscious of his own motives? Did he
discover therein any selfishness? Who can say?
He discoursed at the same time to Owen, and in the same fashion. Ledwith
felt that his dreams were patch work beside the rainbow visions of this
California miner, who had the mines which make the wildest dreams come
true sometimes. The wealthy enthusiast might fall, however, into the
hands of the professional patriot, who would bleed him to death in
behalf of paper schemes. To whom could he confide him? Honora! It had
always been Honora with him, who could do nothing without her. He did
not wish to hamper her in the last moment, as he had hampered her since
she had first planned her own life.
It was even a pleasant thought for him, to think of his faithful child
living her beautiful, quiet, convent life, after the fatigues and
pilgrimages of years, devoted to his memory, mingling his name with her
prayers, innocent of any other love than for him and her Creator. Yes,
she must be free as the air after he died. However, the sick are not
masters of their emotions. A great dread and a great anguish filled him.
Would it be his fate to lose Arthur to Ireland by consideration for
others? But he loved her so! How could he bind her in bonds at the very
moment of their bitter separation? He would not do it! He would not do
it! He fought down his own longing until he woke up in a sweat of terror
one night, and called to her loudly, fearing that he would die before he
exacted from her the last promise. He must sacrifice all for his
country, even the freedom of his child.
"Honora," he cried, "was I ever faithless to Erin? Did I ever hesitate
when it was a question of money, or life, or danger, or suffering for
her sake?"
"Never, father dear," she said, soothing him like a child.
"I have sinned now, then. For your sake I have sinned. I wished to leave
you free when I am gone, although I saw you were still necessary to
Eire. Promise me, my child, that you will delay a little after I am
gone, before entering the convent; that you will make sure beforehand
that Erin has no great need of you ... just a month or a year ... any
delay----"
"As long as you please, father," she said quietly. "Make it five years
if you will----"
"No, no," he interrupted with anguish in his throat. "I shall never
demand again from you the sacrifices of the past. What may seem just to
you will be enough. I die almost happy in leaving Arthur Dillon to carry
on with his talent and his money the schemes of which I only dreamed.
But I fear the money patriots will get hold of him and cheat him of his
enthusiasm and his money together. If you were by to let him know what
was best to be done--that is all I ask of you----"
"A year at least then, father dear! What is time to you and me that we
should be stingy of the only thing we ever really possessed."
"And now I lose even that," with a long sigh.
Thus gently and naturally Arthur gained his point.
Monsignor came often, and then oftener when Owen's strength began to
fail rapidly. The two friends in Irish politics had little agreement,
but in the gloom of approaching death they remembered only their
friendship. The priest worked vainly to put Owen into a proper frame of
mind before his departure for judgment. He had made his peace with the
Church, and received the last rites like a believer, but with the
coldness of him who receives necessities from one who has wronged him.
He was dying, not like a Christian, but like the pagan patriot who has
failed: only the shades awaited him when he fled from the darkness of
earthly shame. They sat together one March afternoon facing the window
and the declining sun. To the right another window gave them a good view
of the beautiful cathedral, whose twin spires, many turrets, and noble
walls shone blue and golden in the brilliant light.
"I love to look at it from this elevation," said Monsignor, who had just
been discoursing on the work of his life. "In two years, just think, the
most beautiful temple in the western continent will be dedicated."
"The money that has gone into it would have struck a great blow for
Erin," said Ledwith with a bitter sigh.
"So much of it as escaped the yawning pockets of the numberless
patriots," retorted Monsignor dispassionately. "The money would not have
been lost in so good a cause, but its present use has done more for your
people than a score of the blows which you aim at England."
"Claim everything in sight while you are at it," said Owen. "In God's
name what connection has your gorgeous cathedral with any one's
freedom?"
"Father dear, you are exciting yourself," Honora broke in, but neither
heeded her.
"Christ brought us true freedom," said Monsignor, "and the Church alone
teaches, practises, and maintains it."
"A fine example is provided by Ireland, where to a dead certainty
freedom was lost because the Church had too unnatural a hold upon the
people."
"What was lost on account of the faith will be given back again with
compound interest. Political and military movements have done much for
Ireland in fifty years; but the only real triumphs, universal,
brilliant, enduring, significant, leading surely up to greater things,
have been won by the Irish faith, of which that cathedral, shining so
gloriously in the sun this afternoon, is both a result and a symbol."
"I believe you will die with that conviction," Ledwith said in wonder.
"I wish you could die with the same, Owen," replied Monsignor tenderly.
They fell silent for a little under the stress of sudden feeling.
"How do men reason themselves into such absurdities?" Owen asked
himself.
"You ought to know. You have done it often enough," said the priest
tartly.
Then both laughed together, as they always did when the argument became
personal.
"Do you know what Livingstone and Bradford and the people whom they
represent think of that temple?" said Monsignor impressively.
"Oh, their opinions!" Owen snorted.
"They are significant," replied the priest. "These two leaders would
give the price of the building to have kept down or destroyed the spirit
which undertook and carried out the scheme. They have said to themselves
many times in the last twenty years, while that temple rose slowly but
gloriously into being, what sort of a race is this, so despised and
ill-treated, so poor and ignorant, that in a brief time on our shores
can build the finest temple to God which this country has yet seen? What
will the people, to whom we have described this race as sunk in
papistical stupidity, debased, unenterprising, think, when they gaze on
this absolute proof of our mendacity?"
Ledwith, in silence, took a second look at the shining walls and towers.
"Owen, your generous but short-sighted crowd have fought England briefly
and unsuccessfully a few times on the soil of Ireland ... but the
children of the faith have fought her with church, and school, and
catechism around the globe. Their banner, around which they fought, was
not the banner of the Fenians but the banner of Christ. What did you do
for the scattered children of the household? Nothing, but collect their
moneys. While the great Church followed them everywhere with her
priests, centered them about the temple, and made them the bulwark of
the faith, the advance-guard, in many lands. Here in America, and in all
the colonies of England, in Scotland, even in England itself, wherever
the Irish settled, the faith took root and flourished; the faith which
means death to the English heresy, and to English power as far as it
rests upon the heresy."
"The faith kept the people together, scattered all over the world. It
organized them, it trained them, it kept them true to the Christ
preached by St. Patrick; it built the fortress of the temple, and the
rampart of the school; it kept them a people apart, it kept them
civilized, saved them from inevitable apostasy, and founded a force from
which you collect your revenues for battle with your enemies; a force
which fights England all over the earth night and day, in legislatures,
in literature and journalism, in social and commercial life ... why,
man, you are a fragment, a mere fragment, you and your warriors, of that
great fight which has the world for an audience and the English earths
for its stage."
"When did you evolve this new fallacy?" said Ledwith hoarsely.
"You have all been affected with the spirit of the anti-Catholic
revolution in Europe, whose cry is that the Church is the enemy of
liberty; yours, that it has been no friend to Irish liberty. Take
another look at that cathedral. When you are dead, and many others that
will live longer, that church will deliver its message to the people who
pass: 'I am the child of the Catholic faith and the Irish; the broad
shoulders of America waited for a simple, poor, cast-out people, to dig
me from the earth and shape me into a thing of beauty, a glory of the
new continent; I myself am not new; I am of that race which in Europe
speaks in divine language to you pigmies of the giants that lived in
ancient days; I am a new bond between the old continent and the new,
between the old order and the new; I speak for the faith of the past; I
voice the faith of the hour; the hands that raised me are not unskilled
and untrained; from what I am judge, ye people, of what stuff my
builders are made.' And around the world, in all the capitals, in the
great cities, of the English-speaking peoples, temples of lesser worth
and beauty, are speaking in the same strain."
Honora anxiously watched her father. A new light shone upon him, a new
emotion disturbed him; perhaps that old hardness within was giving way.
Ledwith had the poetic temperament, and the philosopher's power of
generalization. A hint could open a grand horizon before him, and the
cathedral in its solemn beauty was the hint. Of course, he could see it
all, blind as he had been before. The Irish revolution worked fitfully,
and exploded in a night, its achievement measured by the period of a
month; but this temple and its thousand sisters lived on doing their
good work in silence, fighting for the truth without noise or
conspiracy.
"And this is the glory of the Irish," Monsignor continued, "this is the
fact which fills me with pride, American as I am, in the race whose
blood I own; they have preserved the faith for the great
English-speaking world. Already the new principle peculiar to that faith
has begun its work in literature, in art, in education, in social life.
Heresy allowed the Christ to be banished from all the departments of
human activity, except the home and the temple. Christ is not in the
schools of the children, nor in the books we read, nor in the pictures
and sculptures of our studios, nor in our architecture, even of the
churches, nor in our journalism, any more than in the market-place and
in the government. These things are purely pagan, or worthless
composites. It looks as if the historian of these times, a century or
two hence, will have hard work to fitly describe the Gesta Hibernicorum,
when this principle of Christianity will have conquered the American
world as it conquered ancient Europe. I tell you, Owen," and he strode
to the window with hands outstretched to the great building, "in spite
of all the shame and suffering endured for His sake, God has been very
good to your people, He is heaping them with honors. As wide as is the
power of England, it is no wider than the influence of the Irish faith.
Stubborn heresy is doomed to fall before the truth which alone can set
men free and keep them so."
Ledwith had begun to tremble, but he said never a word.
"I am prouder to have had a share in the building of that temple,"
Monsignor continued, "than to have won a campaign against the English.
This is a victory, not of one race over another, but of the faith over
heresy, truth over untruth. It will be the Christ-like glory of Ireland
to give back to England one day the faith which a corrupt king
destroyed, for which we have suffered crucifixion. No soul ever loses by
climbing the cross with Christ."
Ledwith gave a sudden cry, and raised his hands to heaven, but grew
quiet at once.
The priest watched contentedly the spires of his cathedral.
"You have touched heart and reason together," Honora whispered.
Ledwith remained a long time silent, struggling with a new spirit. At
last he turned the wide, frank eyes on his friend and victor.
"I am conquered, Monsignor."
"Not wholly yet, Owen."
"I have been a fool, a foolish fool,--not to have seen and understood."
"And your folly is not yet dead. You are dying in sadness and despair
almost, when you should go to eternity in triumph."
"I go in triumph! Alas! if I could only be blotted out with my last
breath, and leave neither grave nor memory, it would be happiness. Why
do you say, 'triumph'?"
"Because you have been true to your country with the fidelity of a
saint. That's enough. Besides you leave behind you the son born of your
fidelity to carry on your work----"
"God bless that noble son," Owen cried.
"And a daughter whose prayers will mount from the nun's cell, to bless
your cause. If you could but go from her resigned!"
"How I wish that I might. I ought to be happy, just for leaving two such
heirs, two noble hostages to Ireland. I see my error. Christ is the
King, and no man can better His plans for men. I surrender to Him."
"But your submission is only in part. You are not wholly conquered."
"Twice have you said that," Owen complained, raising his heavy eyes in
reproach.
"Love of country is not the greatest love."
"No, love of the race, of humanity, is more."
"And the love of God is more than either. With all their beauty, what do
these abstract loves bring us? The country we love can give us a grave
and a stone. Humanity crucifies its redeemers. Wolsey summed up the
matter: 'Had I but served my God with half the zeal with which I served
my king, He would not in mine age, have left me naked to mine enemies.'"
He paused to let his words sink into Ledwith's mind.
"Owen, you are leaving the world oppressed by the hate of a lifetime,
the hate ingrained in your nature, the fatal gift of persecutor and
persecuted from the past."
"And I shall never give that up," Owen declared, sitting up and fixing
his hardest look on the priest. "I shall never forget Erin's wrongs, nor
Albion's crimes. I shall carry that just and honorable hate beyond the
grave. Oh, you priests!"
"I said you were not conquered. You may hate injustice, but not the
unjust. You will find no hate in heaven, only justice. The persecutors
and their victims have long been dead, and judged. The welcome of the
wretched into heaven, the home of justice and love, wiped out all memory
of suffering here, as it will for us all. The justice measured out to
their tyrants even you would be satisfied with. Can your hate add
anything to the joy of the blessed, or the woe of the lost?"
"Nothing," murmured Owen from the pillow, as his eyes looked afar,
wondering at that justice so soon to be measured out to him. "You are
again right. Oh, but we are feeble ... but we are foolish ... to think
it. What is our hate any more than our justice ... both impotent and
ridiculous."
There followed a long pause, then, for Monsignor had finished his
argument, and only waited to control his own emotion before saying
good-by.
"I die content," said Ledwith with a long restful sigh, coming back to
earth, after a deep look into divine power and human littleness. "Bring
me to-morrow, and often, the Lord of Justice. I never knew till now that
in desiring Justice so ardently, it was He I desired. Monsignor, I die
content, without hate, and without despair."
If ever a human creature had a foretaste of heaven it was Honora during
the few weeks that followed this happy day. The bitterness in the soul
of Owen vanished like a dream, and with it went regret, and vain
longing, and the madness which at odd moments sprang from these
emotions. His martyrdom, so long and ferocious, would end in the glory
of a beautiful sunset, the light of heaven in his heart, shining in his
face. He lay forever beyond the fire of time and injustice.
Every morning Honora prepared the little altar in the sick-room, and
Monsignor brought the Blessed Sacrament. Arthur answered the prayers and
gazed with awe upon the glorified face of the father, with something
like anger upon the exalted face of the daughter; for the two were gone
suddenly beyond him. Every day certain books provided by Monsignor were
read to the dying man by the daughter or the son; describing the
migration of the Irish all over the English-speaking world, their growth
to consequence and power. Owen had to hear the figures of this growth,
see and touch the journals printed by the scattered race, and to hear
the editorials which spoke their success, their assurance, their
convictions, their pride.
Then he laughed so sweetly, so naturally, chuckled so mirthfully that
Honora had to weep and thank God for this holy mirthfulness, which
sounded like the spontaneous, careless, healthy mirth of a boy.
Monsignor came evenings to explain, interpret, put flesh and life into
the reading of the day with his vivid and pointed comment. Ledwith
walked in wonderland. "The hand of God is surely there," was his one
saying. The last day of his pilgrimage he had a long private talk with
Arthur. They had indeed become father and son, and their mutual
tenderness was deep.
Honora knew from the expression of the two men that a new element had
entered into her father's happiness.
"I free you from your promise, my child," said Ledwith, "my most
faithful, most tender child. It is the glory of men that the race is
never without such children as you. You are free from any bond. It is my
wish that you accept your release."
She accepted smiling, to save him from the stress of emotion. Then he
wished to see the cathedral in the light of the afternoon sun, and
Arthur opened the door of the sick-room. The dying man could see from
his pillow the golden spires, and the shining roof, that spoke to him so
wonderfully of the triumph of his race in a new land, the triumph which
had been built up in the night, unseen, uncared for, unnoticed.
"God alone has the future," he said.
Once he looked at Honora, once more, with burning eyes, that never could
look enough on that loved child. With his eyes on the great temple,
smiling, he died. They thought he had fallen asleep in his weakness.
Honora took his head in her arms, and Arthur Dillon stood beside her and
wept.