house almost terrified me by its beauty and its simplicity and its air
of corruption. And yet there was nothing to account for it. There was
not a picture in it, as far as I could see, that had anything in it to
which even a priest could object. There was a long gallery leading from
the front door, floored, ceiled, and walled with oak in little panels,
with pictures in each along the two sides, chiefly, I should suppose
now, of that same French school of which I have spoken. There was an
exquisite crucifix at the end, and yet, in some strange way, even that
seemed to be tainted. I felt, I suppose, in the manner that Father
Stein described to us when he mentioned Benares; and yet there, I have
heard, the pictures and carving correspond with the sensation, and here
they did not.
“He received me in his studio at the end of the passage. There was a
great painting on an easel, on which he was working, a painting of Our
Lady going to the well at Nazareth--most exquisite and yet terrible. I
could hardly keep my eyes off it. It was nearly finished, he told me.
And there was his grand piano against the wall.
“Well, we sat and talked; and before I left that evening I knew
everything. He did not tell me in confession, and the story became
notorious after his death five years later; but yet I can tell you
no more now than that all I had felt about him was justified by what
I heard. Part of what the world did not hear would not have seemed
important to any but a priest; it was just the history of his own soul,
apart from his deeds, the history of his wanton contempt of light and
warnings. And I heard more besides, too, that I cannot bear to think of
even now.”
The priest stopped again; and I could see his lips were trembling with
emotion. We were all very quiet ourselves; the effect on my mind, at
least, was extraordinary. Presently he went on:
“Before I left I persuaded him to go to confession. The man had not
really lost faith for a moment, so far as I could gather. I learned
from details that I cannot even hint at that he had known it all to be
true, pitilessly clear in his worst moments. Grace had been prevailing
especially of late, and he was sick of his life. Of course, he had
tried to stifle conscience, but by the mercy of God he had failed. I
cannot imagine why, except that there is no end to the loving kindness
of God; but I have known many souls, not half so evil as his, lose
their faith and their whole spiritual sense beyond all human hope of
recovery.”
The priest stopped again, turned over several pages of his diary, and
as he did so I saw him stop once or twice and read silently to himself,
his lips moving.
“I must miss out a great deal here. He did not come to confession to
me, but to a Carthusian, after a retreat. I need not go into all the
details of that, so far as I knew them, and I will skip another six
months.
“During that time I wrote to him more than once, and just got a line or
two back. Then I was ordered abroad, and when we touched at Brindisi I
received a letter from him.”
The priest lifted his diary again near his eyes.
“Here is one sentence,” he said; “listen.
“‘I know I am forgiven; but the punishment is driving me mad. What
would you say if you knew all! I cannot write it. I wonder if we shall
meet again. I wonder what you would say.’
“There was more that I cannot read; but it offers no explanation of
this sentence. I wrote, of course, at once, and said I would be home in
four months, and asked for an explanation. I did not hear again, though
I wrote three or four times; and after three or four months in Malta I
went back to England.
“My first visit was to Mr. Farquharson, when I had written to prepare
him for my coming.”
The old man stopped again, and I could see he was finding it more and
more difficult to speak. He looked at the diary again once or twice,
but I could see that it was only to give himself time to recover. Then
he lowered it once more, leaned his elbow on the chair arm and his head
on his hand, and went on in a slow voice full of effort.
“The first change was in the gallery; its pictures were all gone, and
in their place hung others--engravings and portraits of no interest or
beauty that I could see. The crucifix was gone, and in its place stood
another very simple and common--a plaster figure on a black cross. It
was all very commonplace--such a room as you might see in any house.
The man took me through as before, but instead of opening the studio
door as I expected, turned up the stairs on the right, and I followed.
He stopped at a little door at the end of a short passage, tapped, and
threw it open. He announced my name and I went in.”
He paused once more.
“There was a Japanese screen in front of me, and I went round it,
wondering what I should find. I caught a sight of a simple, commonplace
room with a window looking out on my left, and then I saw an old man
sitting in a high chair over the fire, on which boiled a saucepan,
warming his hands, with a rug over his knees. His face was turned to
me, but it was that of a stranger.
“There was a table between us, and I stood hesitating, on the point of
apologizing, and the old man looked at me, smiling.
“‘You do not know me,’ he said.
“Then I saw he bore an odd sort of resemblance to Mr. Farquharson;
and I supposed it was his father. That would account for the mistake,
too, I thought in a moment. My letter must have been delivered to him
instead.
“‘I came to see Mr. Farquharson,’ I said. ‘I beg your pardon if--’ Then
he interrupted me. Well, you will guess--this was the man I had come to
see.
“It took a minute or two before I could realize it. I swear to you
that the man looked not ten, nor twenty, nor thirty, but fifty years
older.
“I went and took his hand and sat down, but I could not say a word.
Then he told me his story; and as he told it I watched him. I looked at
his face; it had been full and generous in its lines, now the skin was
drawn tightly over his cheeks and great square jaw. His hair, so much
of it as escaped under his stuff cap, was snow white and like silk. His
hands, stretched over the fire, were gnarled and veined and tremulous.
And all this had come to him in less than one year.
“Well, this was his story: His health had failed abruptly within a
month of my last sight of him. He had noticed weakness coming on soon
after his reconciliation, and the failure of his powers had increased
like lightning.
“I will tell you what first flashed into my mind--that it was merely a
sudden, unprecedented breakdown that had first given room for grace to
reassert itself, and had then normally gone forward. The life he had
led--well, you understand.
“Then he told me a few more facts that soon put that thought out of my
head. All his artistic powers had gone, too. He gave me an example.
“‘Look round this room,’ he said in his old man’s voice, ‘and tell me
frankly what you think of it--the pictures, the furniture.’
“I did so, and was astonished at their ugliness. There were a couple of
hideous oleographs on the wall opposite the window; perhaps you know
them--of the tombs of our Lord and His Blessed Mother, with yellow
candlesticks standing upon them. There were green baize curtains by the
windows; an Axminster carpet of vivid colors on the floor; a mahogany
table in the centre with a breviary upon it and a portfolio open. It
was the kind of a room that you might find in twenty houses in a row on
the outskirts of a colliery town.
“I supposed, of course, that he had furnished his room like this out of
a morbid kind of mortification, and I hinted this to him.
“He smiled again, but he looked puzzled.
“‘No,’ he said; ‘indeed not. Then you do think them ugly, too? Well,
well; it is that I do not care. Will you believe me when I tell you
that? There is no asceticism in the matter. Those pictures seem to me
as good as any others. I have sold the others.’
“‘But you know they are not good,’ I said.
“‘My friends tell me so, and I remember I used to think so once, too.
But that has all gone. Besides, I like them.’
“He turned in his chair and opened the portfolio that lay by him.
“‘Look,’ he said, and pushed it over to me, watching my face as I took
it.
“It was full of sheets of paper scrawled with such pictures as a stupid
child might draw. There was not the faintest trace of any power in
them. Here is one of them that he gave me.” (He drew out a paper from
his diary and held it up.) “I will show it you presently.
“As I looked at them it suddenly struck me that all this was an
elaborate pose. I suppose I showed the thought in the way I glanced up
at him. At any rate, he knew it. He smiled again pitifully.
“‘No,’ he said; ‘it is not a pose. I have posed for forty years, but I
have forgotten how to do it now. It does not seem to me worth while,
either.’
“‘Are you happy?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, I suppose so,’ he said.
“I sat there bewildered.
“‘And music?’ I said.
“He made a little gesture with his old hands.
“‘Tell Jackson to let you see the piano in the studio,’ he said, ‘as
you go downstairs. And you might look at the picture of Our Lady at
Nazareth at the same time. You will see how I tried to go on with it.
My friends tell me it is all wrong, and asked me to stop. I supposed
they knew, so I have stopped.’
“Well, we talked a while, and I learned how all was with him. He
believed with his whole being, and that was all. He received the
sacraments once a week, and he was happy in a subdued kind of way.
There was no ecstasy of happiness; there was no torment from the
imagination, such as is usual in these cases of conversion. He had
suffered agonies at first from the loss of his powers, as he realized
that his natural perceptions were gone, and it was then that he had
written to me.”
The Rector stopped again a moment, fingering the paper.
“I saw his doctor, of course, and----”
Monsignor broke in. I noticed that he had been listening intently.
“The piano and the picture,” he said.
“Ah, yes. Well, the piano was just a box of strings; many of the notes
were broken, and the other wires were hopelessly out of tune. They were
broken, the man told me, within a week or two of his master’s change of
life. He spoke quite frankly to me. Mr. Farquharson had tried to play,
it seemed, and could scarcely play a right note, and in a passion of
anger it was supposed he had smashed the notes with his fists. And the
picture--well, it was a miserable sight. There was a tawdry sort of
crown, ill drawn and ill colored, on her head, and a terrible sort of
cherub was painted all across the sky. Some one else, it seemed, had
tried to paint these out, which increased the confusion.
“The doctor told me it was softening of the brain. I asked him honestly
to tell me whether he had ever come across such a case before, and he
confessed he had not.
“It took me a week or two, and another conversation with Mr.
Farquharson, before I understood what it all meant. It was not natural,
the doctor assured me, and it could scarcely be that Almighty God
had arbitrarily inflicted such a punishment. And then I thought I
understood, as no doubt you have all done before this.”
The old priest’s voice had an air of finality in his last sentence, and
he handed the scrap of paper to Father Bianchi, who sat beside him.
“One moment, Father,” I said; “I do not understand at all.”
The priest turned to me, and his eyes were full of tears.
“Why, this is my reading of it,” he said; “the man had been one mass of
corruption, body, mind, and soul. Every power of his had been nurtured
on evil for thirty years. Then he made his effort and the evil was
withdrawn, and--and--well, he fell to pieces. The only thing that was
alive in him was the life of grace. There was nothing else to live. He
died, too, three months later, tolerably happy, I think.”
* * * * *
As I pondered this the paper was handed to me, and I looked at it in
bewildered silence. It was a head grotesque in its feebleness and lack
of art. There was a crown of thorns about it, and an inscription in a
child’s handwriting below:
_Deus in virtute tua salvum me fac!_
* * * * *
Then my own eyes were full of tears, too.
V
_Father Girdlestone’s Tale_
I
“I have found another _raconteur_ for this evening,” said Monsignor as
he came in to dinner on the following day, “but he cannot be here till
late.”
The Rector looked up questioningly.
“Yes, I know,” said Monsignor unfolding his napkin. “But it is a long
story; it will take at least two nights; but--but it is a beauty,
reverend Fathers.”
We murmured appreciatively.
“I heard him tell it twenty years ago,” proceeded the priest. “I was a
boy then.... I had a bad night after it, I remember. But the first part
is rather dull.”
The appreciative murmur was even louder.
“Well, then, is that settled?”
We assented.
* * * * *
The entrance of Father Girdlestone that evening was somewhat dramatic.
We were all talking briskly together in our wide semicircle when Father
Brent uttered an exclamation. The talk died, and I, turning from my
corner, saw a very little old man standing behind the Rector’s chair,
motionless and smiling. He was one of the smallest men, not actually
deformed, I have ever seen; small and very delicate looking. His white,
silky hair was thin on his head, but abundant over his ears; his face
was like thin ivory, transparent and exquisitely carved; his eyes so
overhung that I could see nothing of them but two patches of shadow
with a diamond in each. And there he stood, as if materialized from
air, beneath the folds of his ample Roman cloak.
“I beg your pardon, reverend Fathers,” he said, and his voice was as
delicate as his complexion. “I tapped, but no one seemed to hear me.”
The Rector bustled up from his chair.
“My dear Father,” he began; but Monsignor interrupted.
“A most appropriate entry, Father Girdlestone,” he said. “You could
not have made a more effective beginning.” He waved his hand--“Father
Girdlestone,” he said, introducing us. “And this is the Father Rector.”
We were all standing up by now, looking at this tranquil little old
man, and we bowed and murmured deferentially. There was something very
dignified about this priest.
Then chairs were re-sorted. I got my own again, moving it against the
wall, watching him as with almost foreign manners he bowed this way and
that before seating himself in the centre. Then we all sat down; and
after a word or two of talk he began.
* * * * *
“I understand from my friend, Monsignor Maxwell,” he said, “that you
gentlemen would like to hear my story. I am very willing indeed to tell
it. No possible harm can follow from it, and, perhaps, even good may
be the result, if ever any one who shall hear it is afflicted with the
same visitation. But it is a long story, gentlemen, and I am an old
man and shall no doubt make it longer.”
He was reassured, I think, by our faces, and without further apology he
began his tale.
* * * * *
“My first and only curacy,” he said, “was in the town of Cardiff. I was
sent there after my ordination, four years before the re-establishment
of the hierarchy in England; and the year after our bishops were given
us I was sent to found a mission inland. Now, gentlemen, I shall not
tell you where that was, though no doubt you will be able to find out
if you desire to do so. It will be enough now to describe to you the
circumstances and the place.
“It was a little colliery village to which I went--we will call it
Abergwyll. There was a number of Irish Catholics there, who are, as you
know, the most devout persons on the face of the earth. They begged
very hard for a priest, and I expect, gentlemen, there was collusion in
the matter. The Bishop’s chaplain had Irish blood in his veins.”
He smiled pleasantly.
“At least, there I was sent, with a stipend of £40 and a letter of
commendation and permission to beg. My parishioners set at my disposal
a four-roomed house standing at the outskirts of the village, removed,
I should say, forty yards from any other house. Behind my house was
open country--a kind of moor--stretching over hill and dale to the
mountains of Brecon. The colliery itself stood on the further side of
the village and beneath it, half a mile away. Of the four rooms, I used
one as a chapel on the ground floor; that at the back was the kitchen.
I slept over the kitchen, and used as my sitting-room and sacristy that
over the chapel.
“I will not detain you with my first experiences. They were most
edifying. I have never seen such devotion and fervor. My own devotion
was sensibly increased by all that I heard and saw. The shepherd in
this case, at least, was taught many lessons by his sheep.
“Now, the first ambition of every young priest who is worthy of
the name is to build a great church to God’s glory. Even I had this
ambition. I had not a great deal of work to do--in fact, I may say that
there was really nothing to do except to say mass and office and to
conduct evening devotions, as I did every night in the chapel; and that
little chapel, gentlemen, was full every night.
“Much of the day, therefore, I spent in walking and dreaming. In the
morning, as summer came on, I was accustomed to take my office-book
out with me and to go over the moor, perhaps three hundred yards away,
to a little ravine where a stream went down into the valley. There I
would sit in the shade of a rock, listening to the voice of the water
and saying my prayers. When I had done I would lie on my back, looking
up at the rock and the sky, and dreaming--well, as every young priest
dreams.
“I do not know when it was that I first understood what God intended
me to do. I began by thinking of a great town where my church should
stand--Cardiff, or perhaps Newport. I even arranged its architecture;
it was to be a primitive Roman basilica, large and plain, with a great
apse with a Christ in glory frescoed there. On His right were to be
the redeemed, on His left the lost--no, more than that, with a pair
of great angels behind the throne. That, gentlemen, without text or
comment, has always seemed to me the greatest sermon on earth.”
He paused and looked round at us an instant.
“Well, gentlemen, you know what day-dreaming is. I even occupied my
time--I, with £40 a year and twenty colliery parishioners--in drawing
designs for my church. And then suddenly on a summer’s day a new
thought came to me, and something else with it.
“I was lying on my back on the short grass, looking up at the rock
against the sky, when the thought came to me that here my basilica
should stand. The rock should be levelled, I thought, to a platform.
The foundations should be blasted out, and here my church should
stand, alone on the moor, to witness that the demands of God’s glory
were dominant and sovereign.... Yes, gentlemen, most unpractical and
fantastic....
“I sat up at the thought. It came to me as a revelation. In that
instant I no more doubted that it should be accomplished than that God
reigned. I looked below me at the stream. Yes; I saw it all; there the
stream should dash and chatter; all about me were the solemn moors; and
here on the rock behind me should stand my basilica, and the Blessed
Sacrament within it.
“I was just about to turn to look at my rock again when something
happened.”
The old man stopped dead.
“Now, gentlemen, I do not know if I can make this plain to you. What
happened to me happened only interiorly; but it was as real as a
thunderclap or a vision. It was this: It was an absolute conviction
that something was looking at me from over the top of the rock behind.
“My first thought was that I had heard a sound. Then simultaneously
the horn blew from the colliery a mile away, and--and”--he
hesitated--“I was aware that this external sound was on a different
plane. I do not know how to make that plain to you; but it was as when
one’s imagination is full of some remembered melody and a real sound
breaks upon it. The horn ceased and there was silence again. Then after
a moment my interior experience ceased, too, as abruptly as it had
begun.
“All that time, three or four seconds, at least, I had sat still and
rigid without turning my head. I must describe to you as well as I
can my sensations during those seconds. You must forgive me for being
verbose about it.
“Those who have attained to Saint Teresa’s Prayer of Quiet tell us
that it is a new world into which they consciously penetrate--a world
with objects, sounds and all the rest--but that these are almost
incommunicable even to the brain of the percipient. No adequate image
or analogy can be found for those intentions; still less can they be
expressed in words. I suppose that this is an illustration of the
truth that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us....
“Well, gentlemen, I was aware during those seconds that I was in that
state that I had, as it were, slipped through the crust of the world of
sense and even of intellectual thought. What I perceived of a person
watching me was not on this plane at all. It was not One who in any
sense had a human existence, who had ever had one, or ever would. It
did not in the least resemble, therefore, an apparition of the dead.
But the perception of this was gradual, as also of the nature of the
visitation, of which I shall speak in a moment. At first there was only
the act of the entrance into my neighborhood, as of one entering a
room; then gradually, although with great speed, I perceived the nature
of the visitation and the character of the visitant.
“And again that sound, if I may call it so, was not that of a material
object; it was not a cry or a word or a movement. Yet it was in
some way the expression of a personality. Shall we say”--he stopped
again--“well, do you know what the sound of a flame is? There is not
exactly a vibration--not a note--not a roar nor a--nor anything. Well,
I do not think I can express it more clearly than by saying that that
is the nearest analogy I can name in the world of sense. It was as the
note of a vivid and intense personality, and it continued during that
period and died noiselessly at the end like a sudden singing in the
ears.
“Now, I have taken the sense of hearing as the one which best expresses
my experience; but it was not really hearing any more than seeing or
tasting or feeling. It seemed to me that if it was true, as scientists
tell us, that we have but one common sense expressing itself in five
ways, that common sense was indirectly affected in this intense and
piercing way only beneath its own plane, if I may say so.
“And one thing more. Although this presence seemed to bring on me a
kind of paralysis, so that I did not move or even objectively think,
yet beneath, my soul was aware of a repulsion and a hatred that I am
entirely unable to describe. As God is Absolute Goodness and Love,
so this presence affected me with precisely the opposite instinct....
There, I must leave it at that. I must just ask you to take my word
for it that there was present to me during those few seconds a kind
of distilled quintessence of all that is not God, under the aspect
of a person, and of a person, as I have said, quite apart from human
existence.”
The priest’s quiet little voice, speaking now even lower than when he
began, yet perfectly articulate and unmoved, ceased, and I leaned back
in my chair, drawing a long breath. Again I will speak only for myself,
and say that he had seemed to be putting into words for the first
time in my experience something which I had never undergone and which
yet I recognized as simply true. I doubted it no more than if he had
described a walk he had taken in Rome.
He looked round at the motionless faces; then he lifted one knee on to
the other and began to nurse it.
“Well, gentlemen, it would be about ten minutes, I suppose, before I
stood up. I looked over my shoulder before that, yet knowing I should
see nothing; and, indeed, there was nothing to see but the old rock and
the sky and the silhouette of the grasses against it. I continued to
sit there, because I felt too tired to move. It was a kind of complete
languor that took possession of me. I had no actual fear now; I knew
that the thing, whatever it was, had withdrawn itself--it had whisked,
if I may say so, out of my range as swift as a lizard who knows himself
observed. I knew perfectly well that it would approach more cautiously
if it should ever approach me again, but that for the present I need
not fear.
“There was another curious detail, too. I had--and have now--no
reflex horror when I think of it. You see that it had not taken
place before my senses; not even, indeed, before my intellect or
my conscious powers. It was completely in the transcendent sphere,
and, therefore--at least I can only suppose that this is the
reason--therefore when the door was shut and I was returned to my
human existence, I had no associations or even direct memory of the
horror. I knew that it had taken place, but my objective imagination
was not tarnished by it. Later it was different; but I shall come to
that presently. There was the languor, taking its rise, I suppose,
in the very essence of my being where I had experienced and resisted
the assault, and this languor communicated itself to my mind, just as
weariness of mind communicates itself to the body. Then, after a little
rest, I got up and went home. It was curious also that after dining
the languor had risen even higher; I felt intolerably tired, and slept
dreamlessly in my chair the whole afternoon.