Mary Gleed Tuttiett, the gifted lady who writes under the
pseudonym of "Maxwell Gray," was born at Newport, Isle of
Wight. The daughter of Mr. F.B. Tuttiett, M.R.C.S., she began
her literary career by contributing essays, poems, articles,
and short stones to various periodicals. With the appearance
of "The Silence of Dean Maitland," in 1886, Maxwell Gray's
name was immediately and permanently established in the front
rank of living novelists. The story and its problem,
dramatically set forth, and with rare literary art, became one
of the most discussed themes of the day. Since that time
Maxwell Gray has produced a number of stories, among them
being "The Reproach of Annesley" (1888), "The Last Sentence"
(1893), "The House of Hidden Treasure" (1898), and "The Great
Refusal" (1906), and also several volumes of poems. This
little version of "The Silence of Dean Maitland" has been
prepared by Miss Tuttiett herself.
_I.--Impending Tragedy_
The story opens on a grey October afternoon in the Isle of Wight, in the
'sixties. Alma Lee, the coachman's handsome young daughter, is toiling
up a steep hill overlooking Chalkburne, tired and laden with parcels
from the town. As she leans on a gate, Judkins, a fellow-servant of her
father's, drives up in a smart dog-cart, and offers her a lift home. She
refuses scornfully, to the young groom's mortification; he drives off,
hurt by her coquetry and prophesying that pride goes before a fall.
Then a sound of bells is heard--a waggon drawn by a fine bell-team
climbs the hill, and stops by Alma. She accepts the waggoner's offer of
a lift, and on reaching the gate of her home in the dusk, is distressed
by his insistence on a kiss in payment, when out of the tree-shadows
steps Cyril Maitland, the graceful and gifted son of the rector of
Malbourne, newly ordained deacon.
He rebukes the waggoner, rescues Alma, and escorts her across a field to
her father's cottage. There he is welcomed with respectful affection as
the rector's son and Alma's former playmate. Afterwards she lights him
to the gate, where a chance word of his evokes from her an innocent and
unconscious betrayal of her secret love, kindling such strong response
in him as he cannot conquer except by touching a letter in his breast-
pocket. This letter is from Marion Everard, to whom he has been a year
engaged.
He walks through the dark to Malbourne Rectory, where, by the fire, he
finds his invalid mother, his twin sister, Lilian, and two younger
children. Here he appears the idol of the hearth--genial, graceful,
gifted, beautiful, and warm-hearted. But he betrays ambition, sudden and
great haste to be married, and some selfishness. He walks to his lodging
in a neighbouring village, where trifling circumstances point to a
refined sensuousness, self-indulgence, and sophistry in his character,
leading to the neglect of serious duty. The shadow of impending tragedy
is hinted at from the first line of the book.
December in the following year. Cyril now an East End curate, and Henry
Everard, M.D., going by rail to Malbourne. Everard asleep; manly,
cheerful, intellectual, healthy in body and mind. Cyril awake; consumed
by unspeakable sorrow. Everard wakes; Cyril suddenly becomes gay in
response to his friend's high spirits. They chaff each other. Cyril
preaches to Everard, when Henry scolds him for fasting, and his laxity
of faith and practice. They pass Belminster, when Cyril betrays
unconscious ambition at Everard's jesting prophecy that he would preach
as bishop in the cathedral. Asceticism is defended by Cyril and
condemned by Everard. Cyril speaks of the discipline of sorrow, and
presses a spiked cross under his clothes into his side. Everard exalts
the discipline of joy. The friends have been privately educated
together, and were together at Cambridge. Henry admires Cyril's
character and mental brilliance; Cyril regards Henry with condescending
affection. Everard is silently in love with Lilian.
Cyril and Everard in the meantime have arrived at Malbourne Rectory.
Cyril and Marion, who have not met since a quarrel, are alone together.
She wonders that he makes so much of the little tiff. He talks of his
unworthiness, and makes her promise to cleave to him through good and
_evil_ report. At dinner, Everard asks for all the villagers, and
gathers that Alma Lee is disgraced. "Alma, little Alma, the child we
used to play with!" he cries afterwards to the men Maitlands. "Who is
the scoundrel?" Cyril grows impatient under the discussion that follows.
"After all, _she is not the first!_" he says at last, to Everard's
indignation.
Sunday. All classes meeting on the way to church, when Cyril preaches
for the first time to his friends and neighbours, who throng to hear
him. He preaches with passionate earnestness upon the beauty of
innocence and the agony of losing it. "That once lost," he says, "the
old careless joy of youth never returns."
The village parliament in the moonlit churchyard after service comment
with humour on the sermon, and on Cyril's eloquence, learning, and good
heart. Granfer, the village oracle, prophesies that the queen will make
a bishop of him. Ben Lee, talking with Judkins by the harness-room fire,
supposes that Cyril was thinking of Alma in his sermon. "He always had a
kind heart." But Judkins speaks of his suspicions of Everard as Alma's
betrayer, alludes to his frequent visits to Mrs.
Lee during her illness some months ago, and his constant meeting with
Alma. Lee is convinced of Everard's guilt. "I'll kill him!" he cries
furiously.
_II.--Sin-Engendered Sin_
It is a lovely winter's day, and Cyril, Lilian, and Everard are walking
through the woods at the back of Lee's cottage. Cyril puts something
into a hollow tree, and intimates a chaffinch's call. Another bird
replies. Cyril walks on to Oldport, leaving Everard and Lilian, between
whom there follows a warm love scene and betrothal. During this episode
Mrs. Lee, Alma's stepmother, tells her husband that Alma is gone to meet
her unknown lover in the wood at the signal of a chaffinch's call. Lee
follows, and finds Alma there _alone_. He picks up a paper she had torn
and dropped; it contains an assignation for that evening at dusk. Before
luncheon Everard changes the grey suit he was wearing, and had stained
in a muddy ditch. He goes to a lonely cottage on the downs in the
afternoon; returning in the evening, he gets a black eye while romping
with little Winnie Maitland. After bathing the eye, he sponges the
stained suit, and is surprised to find blood on it. Cyril has been
absent in Oldport all day, and on his return goes to bed with a
headache, speaking to nobody. A man in Henry's grey suit passes through
the hall at dusk, followed by the cat, who never runs after anyone but
Lilian and Cyril.
That evening, New Year's eve, there is a gay party of rustics at the
wheelwright's house. In the midst of Granfer's best story in rushes
Grove, the waggoner, crying that Ben Lee had just been found murdered in
the wood. The same night Alma gives birth to a son.
Next day, Cyril, in great mental anguish, goes to Admiral Everard's
house, and incidentally puts to a brother clergyman there a case of
conscience: Should a man who has acted unwisely, and is guilty of
unintentional homicide, imperil a useful and brilliant career by
confession? Not if he had such great gifts and opportunities of doing
good as Cyril has, he is told. By this pronouncement and a love scene
with Marion, Cyril is much comforted.
In the meantime, Ben Lee's death is by many being imputed to Everard,
who is quite unconscious of these suspicions. He is much surprised at
the appearance of policemen at the rectory that afternoon, and still
more so at being arrested on the charge of murdering Lee.
After due examination, Everard is committed for trial on the charge of
murder. His best witness, Granfer, who had seen and spoken with him in
the village at the moment of the alleged murder, greatly discredited his
evidence by his circumlocution and stupidity, purposely affected to set
the court in a roar. He admitted that Everard gave him money and
tobacco. Judkins swore that at three o'clock Lee told him Everard had
asked Alma to meet him at dusk that evening in the wood, and that
he--Lee--meant to follow Everard there and exact reparation from him;
that Alma and Everard were known to be together in the wood on the
morning of Lee's death (when Everard was with Lilian), and that he
himself had seen them meet often clandestinely in the spring during Mrs.
Lee's illness, when letters, books, and flowers had passed between them.
On the eve of Lee's death he had seen Everard go into the copse at dusk
carrying a heavy stick.
Ingram Swaynestone, Grove, the waggoner, and Stevens, the Sexton, all
saw Everard going on the upland path to Swaynestone. But the blacksmith
swore to seeing him in the village street at the same hour. A keeper saw
him going to the copse at the same time that a shepherd met him on the
down going in another direction. At five o'clock two rectory maids saw
Everard run in by the back door and upstairs, followed by the cat; he
made no reply when Miss Maitland spoke to him. An hour later, Everard
asked the cook for raw meat for a black eye, which he said he got by
running against a tree in the dark. Blood was found in a basin in his
room, and on the grey suit, which was much stained and torn, as if by a
struggle. A handkerchief of Everard's was found in the wood, also a
stick he had been seen with in the morning.
Everard's evidence at the inquest was that he left Malbourne Rectory
about four, wearing a black coat, met the blacksmith in the village, and
the shepherd on the down, and finding the cottage on the down empty,
returned, seeing no one till he met Granfer at Malbourne Cross, and
reached the rectory at six, where a romp with Winnie Maitland gave him
the black eye, that he promised her not to speak about. He could not
account for the blood found on his clothes.
Cyril is much shocked by the verdict and committal of Everard, but is
sure that he will be cleared. "He must be cleared," he says, "_at any
cost_." Pending the assize trial, he baptises three unknown babes in
Malbourne Church. When asking the name of one of the children in his
arms, he is told "Benjamin Lee." His evident deep emotion at this evokes
sympathy from all present. During the trial at Belminster he has a great
spiritual conflict in the cathedral while a fugue of Bach's is played on
the organ, suggesting a combat between the powers of evil and good. But
he feels that he _cannot_ renounce his brilliant prospects. Coming out,
he hears that Alma has declared Everard is the man who was with her
father when he met his death in the struggle she heard while outside the
copse.
Cyril at once rushes to the court, which he had only left for an hour,
just in time to hear the verdict, "Manslaughter."
"Stop!" he cries. "I have evidence--the prisoner is innocent!"
The judge, not understanding what he says, orders his removal; his
friends, thinking him distracted, persuade him to be quiet while the
utmost sentence--twenty years--is given. On hearing this, Cyril, with a
loud cry, falls senseless. He remains in delirium many weeks. A pathetic
farewell between Henry and Lilian, who is the only believer in his
innocence, and who renews her promise to him, closes the first part.
The tragedy, faintly foreshadowed from the first line, and gradually
developed from Cyril's self-righteousness and irrepressible joy in
Alma's unguarded betrayal of unconscious passion, has darkened the whole
story. Sin has engendered sin. Cyril's noble purpose to devote himself
entirely to his high calling, and be worthy of it, has become pitiless
ambition.
His self-respect, spiritual pride and egoism; his ready tact, social
charm, and power of psychological analysis, subtle sophistry and
self-deception; his warmest affection, disguised self-love; his finest
qualities perverted lead to his lowest fall.
His weak and belated attempt to right Alma's wrong has killed her
father. Alma's desecrated love has turned to fierce idolatry, laying
waste Lilian's happiness, and working Henry's complete ruin. Cyril's
cowardice has delayed clearing his friend till it is too late to save
him.
Not poppy, not mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world
will ever medicine again to him that sweet sleep he had before his
guilt.
_III.--The Darkness of a Prison_
A summer Sunday two years later. Alma and her child in a cornfield,
listening to bells ringing for Cyril's homecoming with his bride. All
the softness and youth gone from Alma's tragic face, and the last gleams
of penitence from her heart, since her perjury. Jealousy is prompting
her to go and tell Marion all. But Judkins comes and interrupts these
wild thoughts. He offers marriage, rehabilitation, and a home in
America. She hesitates. She is shunned by all, and can get no work in
Malbourne, but has not been destitute; money has found its way
mysteriously to her cottage. So for the child's sake she accepts.
Tea on the rectory lawn. Lilian is thinking of the prisoner, Lennie
wondering aloud, "How does Alma _like_ having to go to hell for lying
about Henry?" Cyril is terribly agitated at this. He has scarcely yet
recovered from his long mental illness after Henry's sentence. Marion is
_not happy_--she may never allude to Henry. The slightest reference to
him makes Cyril ill. Later, in the moonlight, Ingram Swaynestone asks
Lilian, whom he has always loved, to marry him. He cannot believe that
she is secretly engaged to Henry. She points towards Henry's prison. "I
am all that man has on earth, and I love him!" she says.
Nine years later. Convicts pulling down the old walls of Portsmouth. An
officer's funeral passes by. No. 62--Henry--overhears people speaking of
the manner of the officer's death, and his name, Major Everard. Tears
fall on the convict's hands as he works. No. 62's father is port
admiral. Alma's perjury in court had revealed all to Henry, and reduced
him to apathetic despair. "There is no God--no good anywhere!" he cried.
But in time Lilian's periodic letters gave him heart and hope, and he
had accepted his fate bravely, trying to lift up and cheer his fellow-
prisoners. In the darkness and uproar of a thunderstorm he escapes from
the guarded works. His adventures, during which he comes accidentally
and unrecognized in contact with his brother's widow, his sister, and
her children, who prattle of family matters in his hearing, and, after a
few weeks' wandering, by his being recaptured while lying on the
roadside unconscious from hunger and exhaustion. This part of the story
concludes with the reception of this news by Lilian and Cyril, whose
unintentional neglect has caused the miscarriage of a letter that would
have enabled Henry to escape.
_IV.--"I Will Confess my Wickedness"_
Everard is free, and, wearing the grey suit of a discharged prisoner, is
travelling from Dartmoor to London by train. Marion, his brother,
Leslie, Mrs. Maitland, and the admiral are all dead. Everything is
strange and changed to him. Liberty is sweet and bitter. He is
prematurely aged and broken down; the great future that had been before
him is now for ever impossible. His still undeveloped scientific
theories and discoveries have been anticipated by others. He feels the
prison taint upon him; he will not see Lilian until it is removed, and
he has become accustomed to the bewilderment of freedom.
After a few days' pause he starts from London for Malbourne, stopping at
Belminster, through which he had made his last free journey with Cyril,
when he told him that "an ascetic is a rake turned monk." Passing the
gaol in which he had suffered so much, he goes to the cathedral. He asks
who is now Dean of Belminster.
The verger is surprised. "Where have you been, sir, not to have heard of
the celebrated Dean Maitland?" The great dean! The books he has written,
the things he has done! All the world knows Dean Maitland, the greatest
preacher in the Church of England.
The deanery interior. Cyril, charming and adored as ever, is considering
whether he shall accept the historic bishopric of Warham. A strange
youth from America is announced, and asks the dean to give him a
university education--"because I am your son." "Since when," returns the
dean tranquilly, "have you been suffering from this distressing
illusion?" The youth bears a letter from Alma. She is dying in
Belminster, and implores him to come to her. She cannot die, she writes,
till she has cleared Everard. After this terrible scene Cyril is in
agony, and nearly commits suicide. "But one sin in a life so spotless!"
he moans. The same evening Everard, overwhelmed with accounts of Cyril's
good deeds and spiritual counsels, and examining with mingled awe and
pity the numerous books he has written, goes to hear one of the Anglican
Chrysostom's lectures to working men in the cathedral.
The music heard by Cyril during his mental conflict there years before
is being played. Cyril thinks Lee's death and Henry's suffering the work
of Fate, since in wearing Everard's clothes he had no thought of
impersonating him, but only of avoiding the publicity of clerical dress;
nor had he dreamed of meeting or of struggling with Ben Lee. Meaning to
go to Alma, who is already dead, later on that night, Cyril preaches
upon the sin of Judas, with great power and passion. "I charge you, my
brothers, beware of _self-deception!_" Everard pities him; he feels that
his own eighteen years' sufferings were nothing in comparison with
Cyril's secret tortures. Suddenly the preacher stops with a low cry of
agony. He has caught Everard's eye. He wishes the cathedral would fall
and crush him. "I am not well," he says, leaving the pulpit. Everard
writes him a letter that night, saying he has long known and forgiven
all; he asks Cyril to use his own secret repentance and unspoken agony
for the spiritual help of others.
The dean receives and reads the letter at breakfast next morning. He
then shuts himself alone in his study for several hours. Then he takes
leave of his blind son and only surviving daughter--all the other
children died in infancy--and sends them away to a relative. Everard,
after waiting vainly for Cyril's answer, goes to Malbourne. He travels
in the same carriage as the judge who had sentenced him, and tells him
that he was innocent, but is unable to clear himself. Nobody recognises
him at Malbourne. He hears his case discussed at the village inn, where
he stops an hour, too much agitated to go to the rectory. "He never done
it," is the general verdict.
Then follows the pathetic meeting of Henry and Lilian. Mr. Maitland had
gradually ceased to believe in his guilt. "But I could never forgive the
man who let you suffer in his stead," he says. Lilian shudders at this.
Cyril is discussed. "Our dear Chrysostom; our golden-mouth!"
Next day, Sunday, old friends welcome Everard. He has a great reception
from the villagers. Lilian presses him to say who was the guilty man.
Mark Antony, the cat, is still alive. "Only once did Mark make a
mistake," she says, "when he ran after _that grey figure in the dusk_.
Else he never ran after any but myself and Cyril. Henry, you _know_ who
killed Ben Lee. Tell me," she sobs, "oh, tell me it was not _he!_" Henry
cannot tell her. Lilian is deeply distressed. "His burden was heavier
than mine," Henry says. He comforts her.
The same day, at morning prayer, Cyril enters the cathedral. The organ
is playing Mendelssohn's "O Lord, have mercy upon me!" The cathedral is
packed with people of all degrees, known and unknown, friends and
strangers. The thought that all these will soon know his shame turns
Cyril sick. The faces of all those he has injured rise and reproach him.
He goes through another great spiritual conflict, but his soul emerges
at last, stripped of all pretence, in the awful presence of his Maker,
shuddering with the shame of its uncovered sin, and alone. He nerves
himself to an effort beyond his strength, as he stands in the pulpit
before the innumerable gaze of the vast congregation, by holding Henry's
letter as a talisman in his hand. Thus he preaches his last and greatest
sermon. "I will confess my wickedness, and be sorry for my sin." This he
does literally. He tells the whole story in detail, but without names,
sometimes unable to go on for agony and shame, sometimes with tears
streaming from his eyes. He tells it there that all may take warning
from him. He intends to give himself up to justice as soon as possible.
He does not spare himself. Since his first sin, he says, "I have not had
one happy hour." He never repented, though always consumed with remorse,
until his friend forgave him. "That broke my stony heart," he says. The
congregation are deeply moved and horrified. Many think he is under a
delusion caused by sorrow for his friend, and mental strain. Having
finished in the usual way, he sat down in the pulpit, and neither spoke
nor moved again. There he was found later, dead.
Next day Henry, who deeply moved, has watched by the dead body of the
dean in his library, has to break the news of Cyril's death to Mr.
Maitland, in the very room in which Mr. Maitland had accused him of
Cyril's crime and given him up to the police. The adoring father's mind
gives way under the blow, his memory is permanently confused, and he
lives tranquilly on for some years in the belief that Cyril has only
gone away for a few days.
The story ends with a family scene by Lake Leman, where Henry and
Lilian, happily married, are living for a time with Mr. Maitland and
Cyril's children, whom Henry has kept from knowing their father's guilt.
* * * * *