THE MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE
June, in Nevilton, that summer, seemed debarred by some strange
interdiction from regaining its normal dampness and rainy discomfort.
It continued unnaturally hot and dry--so dry, that though the
hay-harvest was still in full session, the farmers were growing
seriously anxious and impatient for the long-delayed showers. It had
been, as we have already noted, an unusual season. Not only were there
so many blue-bells lingering in the shadowy places in the woods, but
among the later flowers there were curious over-lappings.
The little milk-wort blossoms, for instance, on Leo’s Hill, were
overtaken, before they perished, by premature out-croppings of yellow
trefoil and purple thyme.
The walnut-trees had still something left of their spring freshness,
while in the hedges along the roads, covered, all of them, with a soft
coating of thin white dust, the wild-roses and the feathery grasses
suggested the heart of the year’s prime.
It was about eight o’clock, in the evening of a day towards the end of
the second week in this unusual month, that Mr. Hugh Clavering emerged
from the entrance of the Old Vicarage with a concentrated and brooding
expression. His heart was indeed rent and torn within him by opposite
and contrary emotions. With one portion of his sensitive nature he
was craving desperately for the next day’s interview with Gladys;
with the other portion he was making firm and drastic resolutions to
avoid it and escape from it. She was due to come to his house in the
afternoon--less than twenty-four hours’ time from this actual moment!
But the more rigorous half of his being had formed the austere plan of
sending her a note in the morning begging her to appear, along with
the other candidates, at a later hour. He had written the note and it
still remained, propped up against the little Arundel print of the
Transfiguration, on the mantelpiece of his room.
He went up the street with bowed, absorbed head, hardly noticing
the salutations of the easy loiterers gathered outside the door of
the Goat and Boy,--the one of Nevilton’s two taverns which just at
present attracted the most custom. Passing between the tavern and
the churchyard wall, he pushed open the gate leading into the priory
farm-yard, and striding hurriedly through it began the ascent of the
grassy slope at the base of Nevilton Mount.
The wind had sunk with the sinking of the sun, and an immense quietness
lay like a catafalque of sacred interposition on the fields and roofs
and orchards of the valley. A delicious smell of new-mown grass blent
itself with the heavy perfume of the great white blossoms of the elder
bushes--held out, like so many consecrated chalices to catch the last
drops of soft-lingering light, before it faded away.
Hugh Clavering went over the impending situation again and again;
first from one point of view, then from another. The devil whispered
to him--if it were the devil--that he had no right to sacrifice his
spiritual influence over this disconcerting pupil, out of a mere
personal embarrassment. If he gave her her lesson along with the rest,
all that special effort he had bestowed upon her thought, her reading,
her understanding, might so easily be thrown away! She was different,
obviously different, from the simple village maids, and to put her
now, at this late hour, with the confirmation only a few weeks off,
into the common class, would be to undo the work of several months.
He could not alter his method with the others for her sake, and she
would be forced to listen to teaching which to her would be elementary
and platitudinous. He would be throwing her back in her spiritual
development. He would be forcing her to return to the mere alphabet of
theology at the moment when she had just begun to grow interested in
its subtle and beautiful literature. She would no doubt be both bored
and teased. Her nerves would be ruffled, her interest diminished, her
curiosity dulled. She would be angry, too, at being treated exactly as
were these rustic maidens--and anger was not a desirable attribute in a
gentle catechumen.
Besides, her case was different from theirs on quite technical grounds.
She was preparing for baptism as well as confirmation, and he, as her
priest, was bound to make this, the most essential of all Christian
sacraments, the head and front of his instruction. It was hardly to
the point to say that the other girls knew quite as little of the
importance of this sacred rite as she did. His explanations of it to
them, his emphasis upon the blessing it had already been to them,
would be necessarily too simple and childish for her quicker, maturer
understanding.
As he reached the actual beginning of the woody eminence and turned
for a moment to inhale the magical softness of the invading twilight,
it occurred to him that from a logically ecclesiastical standpoint
it was a monstrous thing that he should be serenely and coldly
debating the cutting off of his spiritual assistance from this poor
thirsty flower of the heathen desert. She was unbaptized--and to be
unbaptized, according to true doctrine, meant, with all our Christian
opportunities, a definite peril, a grave and assured peril, to her
immortal soul. Who was he that he should play with such a formidable
risk--such a risk to such a lamb of the Great Shepherd? It was quite
probable--he knew it was probable--that, angry with him for deserting
her so causelessly and unreasonably, she would refuse to go further
in the sacred business. She would say, and say justly, that since the
affair seemed of so little importance to him she would make it of
little importance to herself. Suppose he were to call in some colleague
from Yeoborough, and make over this too exciting neophyte to some other
pastor of souls--would she agree to such a casual transference? He knew
well enough that she would not.
How unfortunate it was that the peculiar constitution of his English
Church made these things so difficult! The individual personality of
the priest mattered so much in Anglican circles! The nobler self in
him envied bitterly at that moment the stricter and yet more malleable
organization of the Mother Church. How easy it would be were he a Roman
priest. A word to his superior in office, and all would arrange itself!
It was impossible to imagine himself speaking such a word to the Right
Reverend the Bishop of Glastonbury. The mere idea of such a thing, in
our England of discreet propriety, made him smile in the midst of his
distress.
The thought of the Roman Church brought into his mind the plausible
figure of Mr. Taxater. How that profound and subtle humanist would
chuckle over his present dilemma! He would probably regard it as a
proper and ironical punishment upon him for his heretical assumption of
this traditional office.
Tradition! That was the thing. Tradition and organization. After all,
it was only to Hugh Clavering, as a nameless impersonal priest of God,
that this lovely outcast lamb came begging to be enfolded. He had no
right to dally with the question at all. There _was_ no question. As
the priest of Nevilton it was his clear pastoral duty to give every
possible spiritual assistance to every person in his flock. What if the
pursuit of this duty did throw temptation--intolerable temptation--in
his way? His business was not to try and escape from such a struggle;
but to face it, to wrestle with it, to overcome it! He was like a
sentinel at his post in a great war. Was he to leave his post and
retreat to the rear because the shells were bursting so thickly round
him?
He sat down on the grass with his back to an ancient thorn-tree and
gazed upon the tower of his beloved church. Would he not be false to
that Church--false to his vows of ordination--if he were now to draw
back from the firing-line of the battle and give up the struggle by
a cowardly retreat? Even supposing the temptation were more than he
could endure--even supposing that he fell--would not God prefer his
suffering such a fall with his face to the foe, sword in hand, rather
than that he should be saved, his consecrated weapon dropped from his
fingers, in squalid ignoble flight?
So much for the arguments whispered in his ear by the angel of
darkness! But he had lately been visited by another angel--surely not
of darkness--and he recalled the plausible reasonings of the great
champion of the papacy, as he sat in that pleasant window sipping his
wine. Why should he agitate himself so furiously over this little
matter? After all, why not enjoy the pleasure of this exquisite being’s
society? He was in no danger of doing her any harm--he knew Gladys at
least well enough by now to know that!--and what harm could she do
him? There was no harm in being attracted irresistibly to something so
surpassingly attractive! Suppose he fell really in love with her? Well!
There was no religious rule--certainly none in the church he belonged
to--against falling in love with a lovable and desirable girl. But it
was not a matter of falling in love. He knew that well enough. There
was very little of the romantic or the sentimental about the feelings
she aroused in him. It was just a simple, sensuous, amorous attraction
to a provocative and alluring daughter of Eve. Just a simple sensuous
attraction--so simple, so natural, as to be almost “innocent,” as Mr.
Taxater would put it.
So he argued with himself; but the Tower of the Church opposite seemed
to invade the mists of these subtle reasonings with a stern emphasis of
clear-cut protest. He knew well enough that his peculiar nature was
not of the kind that might be called “sensuous” or “amorous,” but of
quite a different sort. The feelings that had lately been excited in
him were as concentrated and passionate as his feelings for the altar
he served. They were indeed a sort of temporal inversion of this sacred
ardour; or, as the cynical Mr. Quincunx in his blunt manner would have
expressed it, this sacred fire itself was only a form taken by the more
earthly flame. But a “flame” it was,--not any gentle toying with soft
sensation,--a flame, a madness, a vice, an obsession.
In no ideal sense could he be said to be “in love” with Gladys. He
was intoxicated with her. His senses craved for her as they might
have craved for some sort of maddening drug. In his heart of hearts
he knew well that the emotion he felt was closely allied to a curious
kind of antagonism. He thought of her with little tenderness, with no
gentle, responsible consideration. Her warm insidious charm maddened
and perturbed him. It did not diffuse itself through his senses like
a tender fragrance. It provoked, disturbed, and tantalized. She
was no Rose of Sharon, to be worshipped forever. She was a Rose of
Shiraz, to be seized, pressed against his face, and flung aside! The
appeal she made to him was an appeal to what was perverse, vicious,
dangerous devastating, in his nature. To call his attraction to her
beauty “innocent”--in Mr. Taxater’s phrase--was a mere hypercritical
white-washing of the brutal fact.
His mind, in its whirling agitation, conjured up the image of himself
as married to her, as legally and absolutely possessed of her. The
image was like fuel to his flame, but it brought no solution of the
problem. Marriage, though permitted by his church, was as directly
contrary to his own interpretation of his duty as a priest, as any
mortal sin might be. To him it would have been a mortal sin--the
betrayal of his profoundest ideal. In the perversity--if you will--of
his ecclesiastical conscience, he felt towards such a solution the
feeling a man might have if the selling of his soul were to be a thing
transacted in cold blood, rather than in the tempest of the moment. To
marry Gladys would be to summon the very sacraments of his church to
bless with a blasphemous consecration his treachery to their appeal.
Rent and torn by all these conflicting thoughts, the poor clergyman
scrambled once more to his feet, pushed his way recklessly through
the intervening fence, and began ascending the steep side of the
pyramidal hill. As he struggled upward, through burdocks, nettles, tall
grasses, red-campion, and newly planted firs, his soul felt within
him as if it were something fleeing from an invincible pursuer. The
rank aromatic smell of torn elder-boughs and the pungent odour of
trodden ground-ivy filled his nostrils. His clothes were sprinkled with
feathery seed-dust. Closely-sticking burs clung to his legs and arms.
Outstretched branches switched his face with their leaves. His feet
stumbled over young fern-fronds, bent earthwards in their elaborate
unsheathing.
He vaguely associated with his thoughts, as he struggled on,
certain queer purple markings which he noticed on the stalks of the
thickly-grown hemlocks, and the bind-weed, which entwined itself round
many of the slenderer tree-stems, became a symbol of the power that
assailed him. To escape--to be free! This was the burden of his soul’s
crying as he plunged forward through all these dim leafy obstructions.
Gradually, as he drew nearer the hill’s summit, there formed in his
mind the only real sanctuary of refuge, the only genuine deliverance.
He must obey his innate conscience; and let the result be as God
willed. At all costs he must shake himself clear of this hot, sweet,
luscious bind-weed, that was choking the growth of his soul. His own
soul--that, after all, was his first care, his predominant concern.
To keep _that_, pure and undefiled, and let all else go! Confused by
the subtle arguments of the serpent, he would cling only the more
passionately to the actual figure of the God-Man, and obey his profound
command in its literal simplicity. Ecclesiastical casuistry might
say what it pleased about the danger he plunged Gladys into, in thus
neglecting her. The matter had gone deeper than casuistry, deeper,
far deeper, than points of doctrine. It had become a direct personal
struggle between his own soul and Satan; a struggle in which, as he
well knew, the only victory lay in flight. On other fields he might be
commanded by his celestial Captain to hold his post to the last; but
in the arena of this temptation, to hold the field was to desert the
field; to escape from it, to win it.
He paused breathlessly under a clump of larches, and stretching out
his arms, seized--like Samson in the temple of Dagon--two of the
slender-growing trunks. “Let all this insidious growth of Nature,” he
thought, “all this teeming and prolific exuberance of godless life,
be thrust into oblivion, as long as the great translunar Secret be
kept inviolable!” Exhausted by the struggle within him he sank down in
the green twilight of that leafy security, and crossed his hands over
his knees. Through a gap in the foliage he could perceive the valley
below; he could even perceive the outline of the roof of Nevilton
House. But against the magic of those carved pinnacles he had found a
counter-charm. In the hushed stillness about him, he seemed conscious
of the power of all these entangled growing things as a sinister
heathen influence pulling him earthward.
Men differ curiously from one another in this respect. To some among
them the influences of what we call Nature are in harmony with all
that is good in them, and have a soothing and mystical effect. Others
seem to disentangle themselves from every natural surrounding, and to
stand out, against the background of their own spiritual horizons,
clear-edged, opaque, and resistant.
Clavering was entirely of this latter type. Nature to him was always
full of hidden dangers and secret perils. He found her power a
magical, not a mystical, one. He resented the spell she cast over
him. It seemed to lend itself, all too willingly, to the vicious
demons that delighted to waylay his unguarded hours. His instinctive
attitude to these enchanting natural forces was that of a mediæval
monk. Their bewitching shapes, their lovely colours, their penetrating
odours, were all permeated for him by a subtle diffusion of something
evil there; something capable of leading one’s spirit desperately,
miserably far--if one allowed it the smallest welcome. Against all
these siren-voices rumouring and whispering so treacherously around
us, against all this shifting and flitting wizardry, one defence alone
availed;--the clear-cut, absolute authority, of Him who makes the
clouds his chariot and the earth his footstool.
As Clavering sat crouching there under his tent of larches, the spirit
of the Christ he served seemed to pass surging through him like a
passionate flood. He drew deep breaths of exquisite relief and comfort.
The problem was solved,--was indeed no problem at all; for he had
nothing to do but to obey the absolute authority, the soul-piercing
word. Who was he to question results? The same God who commanded him
to flee from temptation was able--beyond the mystery of his own divine
method--to save her who tempted him, whether baptized or unbaptized!
He leapt to his feet, and no more like one pursued, but rather like one
pursuing, pushed his way to the summit of the Mount. The space at the
top was flat and circular; not unlike, in its smooth level surface, the
top of the mountain in that very Transfiguration picture which was now
overshadowing his letter to his enchantress. In the centre of this open
space rose the thin Thyrsus-shaped tower. He advanced to the eastern
edge of the hill and looked down over the wide-spread landscape.
The flat elm-fringed meadows of the great mid-Somerset plain stretched
softly away, till they lost themselves in a purple mist. Never had the
formidable outline of the Leonian promontory looked more emphatic and
sinister than it looked in this deepening twilight. The sky above it
was of a pale green tint, flecked here and there by feathery streaks
of carmine. The whole sky-dome was still lit by the pallid reflection
of the dead sunset; and on the far northern horizon, where the Mendip
hills rise above the plain, a livid whitish glimmer touched the rim of
an enormous range of sombre clouds.
The priest stood, hushed, and motionless as a statue, contemplating
this suggestive panorama. But little of its transparent beauty passed
the surface of his consciousness. He was absorbed, rapt, intent. But
the cause of his abstraction was not the diaphanous air-spaces above
him or the dark earth beneath him; it was the pouring of the waves of
divine love through his inmost being; it was his fusion with that great
Spirit of the Beyond which renders its votaries independent of space
and time.
After long exquisite moments of this high exultation, his mind
gradually resumed its normal functioning. A cynical interpreter of this
sublime experience would doubtless have attributed the whole phenomenon
to a natural reaction of the priest, back to his habitual moral temper,
from the turbulent perturbations of the recent days. Would such a one
have found it a mere coincidence that at the moment of regaining his
natural vision the clergyman’s attention was arrested by the slow
passage of a huge white cloud towards the Leonian promontory, a cloud
that assumed, as it moved, gigantic and almost human lineaments?
Coincidence or not, Clavering’s attention was not allowed to remain
fixed upon this interesting spectacle. It seemed as though his return
to ordinary human consciousness was destined to be attended by the
reappearance of ordinary humanity. He perceived in the great sloping
field on the eastern side of the mount the white figure of a woman,
walking alone. For the moment his heart stood still; but a second
glance reassured him. He knew that figure, even in the dying light. It
was little Vennie Seldom. Simultaneously with this discovery he was
suddenly aware that he was no longer the only frequenter of the woody
solitudes of Nevilton Hill. On a sort of terrace, about a hundred
yards below him, there suddenly moved into sight a boy and a girl,
walking closely interlinked and whispering softly. Acting mechanically,
and as if impelled by an impulse from an external power, he sank
down upon his knees and spied upon them. They too slipped into a
semi-recumbent posture, apparently upon the branches of a fallen tree,
and proceeded, in blissful unconsciousness of any spectator, to indulge
in a long and passionate embrace. From where he crouched Clavering
could actually discern these innocents’ kisses, and catch the little
pathetic murmurings of their amorous happiness. His heart beat wildly
and strangely. In his fingers he clutched great handfuls of earth. His
thoughts played him satyrish and fantastic tricks. Suddenly he leapt to
his feet and stumbled away, like an animal that has been wounded. He
encountered the Thyrsus-shaped tower--that queer fancy of eighteenth
century leisure--and beat with his hands upon its hard smooth surface.
After a second or two, however, he recovered his self-control; and to
afford some excuse to his own mind for his mad behaviour, he walked
deliberately round the edifice, looking for its entrance. This he
presently found, and stood observing it, with scowling interest, in
the growing darkness. He had recognized the lovers down there. They
were both youngsters of his parish. He made a detached mental resolve
to talk tomorrow to the girl’s mother. These flirtations during the
hay-harvest often led to trouble.
There was just enough light left for him to remark some obscure
lettering above the little locked door of this fanciful erection.
It annoyed him that he could not read it. With trembling hand he
fumbled in his pocket--produced a match-box and lit a match. There
was no difficulty now in reading what it had been the humour of some
eighteenth century Seldom to have carved on this site of the discovery
of the Holy Rood. “Carpe Diem” he spelt out, before the flutterings
of an agitated moth extinguished the light he held. This then was the
oracle he had climbed the sacred Mount to hear!
With quick steps, steps over which his mind seemed no longer to have
control, he returned to his point of observation. The boy and girl
had disappeared, but Vennie Seldom was still visible in her white
dress, pacing up and down the meadow. What was she doing there?--he
wondered. Did she often slip away, after the little formal dinner
with her mother, and wander at large through the evening shadows? An
unaccountable rage against her besieged his heart. He felt he should
soon begin to hate her if he watched her much longer; so, with a more
collected and calm step and a sigh that rose from the depths of his
soul he moved away to where the path descended.
As it happened, however, the path he had to follow now, for it was too
dark to return as he had come, emerged, after many windings round the
circle of the hill, precisely into the very field, in which Vennie was
walking. He moved straight towards her. She gave a little start when
she saw him, but waited passively, in that patient drooping pose so
natural to her, till he was by her side.
“You too,” she said, touching his hand, “feel the necessity of being
alone a little while before the day ends. I always do. Mother sometimes
protests. But it is no good. There are certain little pleasures that we
have a right to enjoy--haven’t we?”
They moved together along the base of the hill following its circuit
in the northerly direction. Clavering felt as though, after a backward
plunge into the Inferno, he had encountered a reproachful angel of
light. He half expected her to say to him, in the crushing austerity
of Beatrice, “Lift up your chin and answer me face to face.” The
gentle power of her pure spirit over him was so persuasive that in the
after-ebb of this second turbulent reaction he could not refrain from
striking the confessional note.
“I wish I were as good as you, Miss Seldom,” he said. “I fear the power
of evil in me goes beyond anything you could possibly conceive.”
“There are few things I cannot conceive, Mr. Clavering,” the girl
answered, with that helpless droop of her little head that had so
winning a pathos. “We people who live such secluded lives are not as
ignorant of the great storms as you may imagine.”
Clavering’s voice shook as he responded to this.
“I wish I could talk quite freely to you. This convention that forbids
friends such as we are from being frank with one another, seems to me
sometimes an invention of the devil.”
The girl lifted her head. He could not see in the darkness that had now
fallen upon them, how her mouth quivered and her cheeks grew scarlet.
“I think I can guess at what is worrying you, my friend,” she murmured
gently.
He trembled from head to foot with a curious shame. “You think it is
about Gladys Romer,” he burst out. “Well it is! I find her one of the
greatest difficulties I have ever had in my life.”
“I am afraid,” said Vennie timidly, “she intends to be a difficulty to
you. It is wrong to say so, but I have always been suspicious of her
motives in this desire to enter our church.”
“God knows what her motives are!” sighed the priest, “I only know she
makes it as hard for me as she can.”
As soon as he had uttered these words a queer observing sense of having
been treacherous to Gladys rose in his heart. Once more he had to
suppress an emotion of hatred for the little saint by his side.
“I know,” murmured Vennie, “I know. She tries to play upon your
good-nature. She tries to make you over-fond of her. I suppose”--she
paused for a moment--“I suppose she is like that. It is not her fault.
It is her--her character. She has a mad craving for admiration and is
ready to play it off on anybody.”
“It makes it very difficult to help her,” said the priest evasively.
Vennie peered anxiously at his face. “It is not as though she really
was fond of _you_,” she boldly added. “I doubt whether she is fond of
anyone. She loves troubling people’s minds and making them unhappy.”
“Don’t mistake me, Miss Seldom,” cried Clavering. “I am not in the
least sentimental about her--it is only--only”--Vennie smoothed his
path for him.
“It is only that she makes it impossible for you to teach her,” she
hazarded, following his lead. “I know something of that difficulty
myself. These wayward pleasure-loving people make it very hard for us
all sometimes.”
Mr. Clavering shook his stick defiantly into the darkness, whether as
a movement directed against the powers of evil or against the powers
of good, he would himself have found it hard to say. Queer thoughts
of a humourous frivolity passed through his mind. Something in the
girl’s grave tone had an irritating effect upon him. It is always a
little annoying, even to the best of men, to feel themselves being
guided and directed by women, unless they are in love with them.
Clavering was certainly not in love with Vennie; and though in his
emotional agitation he had gone so far in confiding in her, he was by
no means unconscious of something incongruous and even ridiculous in
the situation. This queer new frivolity in him, which now peered forth
from some twisted corner of his nature, like a rat out of a hole,
found this whole interview intolerably absurd. He suddenly experienced
the sensation of being led along at Vennie’s side like a convicted
school-boy. He found himself rebelling against all women in his heart,
both good and bad, and recalling, humorously and sadly, the old sweet
scandalous attitude of contempt for the whole sex, of his irresponsible
Cambridge days. Perhaps, dimly and unconsciously, he was reacting
now, after all this interval, to the subtle influence of Mr. Taxater.
He knew perfectly well that the very idea of a man--not to speak of a
priest--confiding his amorous weaknesses to a woman, would have excited
that epicurean sage to voluble fury. Everything that was mediæval and
monkish in him rose up too, in support of this interior outburst of
Rabelaisean spleen.
It would be interesting to know if Vennie had any inkling, as she
walked in the darkness by his side, of this new and unexpected veering
of his mood. Certainly she refrained from pressing him for any further
confessions. Perhaps with the genuine clairvoyance of a saint she
was conscious of her danger. At any rate she began speaking to him
of herself, of her difficulties with her mother and her mother’s
friends, of her desire to be of more use to Lacrima Traffio, and of the
obstacles in the way of that.
Conversing with friendly familiarity on these less poignant topics they
arrived at last at the gates of the Priory farm and the entrance to
the church. Mr. Clavering was proceeding to escort her home, when she
suddenly stopped in the road, and said in a quick hurried whisper, “I
should dearly love to walk once round the churchyard before I go back.”
The cheerful light from the windows of the Goat and Boy showed, as
it shone upon his face, his surprise as well as his disinclination.
The truth is, that by a subtle reversion of logic he had now reached
the idea that it was at once absurd and unkind to send that letter to
Gladys. He was trembling to tear it in pieces, and burn the pieces in
his kitchen-fire! Vennie however, did not look at his face. She looked
at the solemn tower of St. Catharine’s church.
“Please get the key,” she said, “and let us walk once round.”
He was compelled to obey her, and knocking at the door of the clerk’s
cottage aroused that astonished and scandalized official into throwing
the object required out of his bedroom window. Once inside the
churchyard however, the strange and mystical power of the spot brought
his mood into nearer conformity with his companion’s.
They stopped, as everyone who visits Nevilton churchyard is induced to
stop, before the extraordinary tomb of Gideon and Naomi Andersen. The
thing had been constructed from the eccentric old carver’s own design,
and had proved one of the keenest pleasures of his last hours.
Like the whimsical poet Donne, he had derived a sardonic and not
altogether holy delight in contemplating before his end the actual
slab of earthly consistence that was to make his bodily resurrection
so emphatically miraculous. Clavering and Vennie stood for several
minutes in mute contemplation before this strange monument. It was
composed of a huge, solid block of Leonian stone, carved at the top
into the likeness of an enormous human skull, and ornamented, below the
skull, by a deeply cut cross surrounded by a circle. This last addition
gave to the sacred symbol within it a certain heathen and ungodly
look, making it seem as though it were no cross at all, but a pagan
hieroglyph from some remote unconsecrated antiquity. The girl laid her
fragile hand on the monstrous image of death, which the gloom around
them made all the more threatening.
“It is wonderful,” she said, “how the power of Christ can change even
the darkest objects into beauty. I like to think of Him striking His
hand straight through the clumsy half-laws of Man and Nature, and
holding out to us the promise of things far beyond all this morbid
dissolution.”
“You are right, my friend,” answered the priest.
“I think the world is really a dark and dreadful place,” she went
on. “I cannot help saying so. I know there are people who only see
its beauty and joy. I cannot feel like that. If it wasn’t for Him I
should be utterly miserable. I think I should go mad. There is too much
unhappiness--too much to be borne! But this strong hand of His, struck
clean down to us from outside the whole wretched confusion,--I cling
to that; and it saves me. I know there are lots of happy people, but I
cannot forget the others! I think of them in the night. I think of them
always. They are so many--so many!”
“Dear child!” murmured the priest, his interlude of casual frivolity
melting away like mist under the flame of her conviction.
“Do you think,” she continued, “that if we were able to hear the
weeping of all those who suffer and have suffered since the beginning
of the world, we could endure the idea of going on living? It would be
too much! The burden of those tears would darken the sun and hide the
moon. It is only His presence in the midst of us,--His presence, coming
in from outside, that makes it possible for us to endure and have
patience.”
“Yes, He must come in from _outside_,” murmured the priest, “or He
cannot help us. He must be able to break every law and custom and rule
of nature and man. He must strike at the whole miserable entanglement
from outside it--from outside it!”
Clavering’s voice rose almost to a shout as he uttered these last
words. He felt as though he were refuting in one tremendous cry of
passionate certainty all those “modernistic” theories with which he
loved sometimes to play. He was completely under Vennie’s influence now.
“And we must help Him,” said the girl, “by entering into His Sacrifice.
Only by sacrifice--by the sacrifice of everything--can we enable Him to
work the miracle which He would accomplish!”
Clavering could do nothing but echo her words.
“The sacrifice of everything,” he whispered, and abstractedly laid
_his_ hand upon the image of death carved by the old artist. Moved
apparently by an unexpected impulse, Vennie seized, with her own, the
hand thus extended.
“I have thought,” she cried, “of a way out of your difficulty. Give her
her lessons in the church! That will not hurt her feelings, and it will
save you. It will prevent her from distracting your mind, and it will
concentrate her attention upon your teaching. It will save you both!”
Clavering held the little hand, thus innocently given him, tenderly and
solemnly in both of his.
“You are right, my friend,” he said, and then, gravely and emphatically
as if repeating a vow,--“I will take her in the church. That will
settle everything.”
Vennie seemed thrilled with spiritual joy at his acquiescence in
her happy inspiration. She walked so rapidly as they recrossed the
churchyard that he could hardly keep pace with her. She seemed to
long to escape, to the solitude of her own home, of her own room, in
order to give full vent to her feelings. He locked the gate of the
porch behind them, and put the key in his pocket. Very quickly and in
complete silence they made their way up the road to the entrance of the
Vicarage garden.
Here they separated, with one more significant and solemn hand-clasp.
It was as if the spirit of St. Catharine herself was in the girl, so
ethereal did she look, so transported by unearthly emotion, as the gate
swung behind her.
As for the vicar of Nevilton, he strode back impetuously to his
own house, and there, from its place beneath the print of the
transfiguration, he took the letter, and tore it into many pieces; but
he tore it with a different intention from that which, an hour before,
had ruled his brain; and the sleep which awaited him, as soon as his
head touched his pillow, was the soundest and sweetest he had known
since first he came to the village.