Shadows of a November twilight are gathering in the two great
drawing-rooms of the largest house in Portland Place, rooms that
have the grandeur of space, and a certain gloomy splendour that has
nothing in common with the caprices and elegances of a modern London
drawing-room. The furniture is large and massive. There are tables in
Florentine mosaic; cabinets of ebony inlaid with ivory; dower-chests
painted by Paul Veronese or his pupils; the richness of arts that are
dead; walls hung with Italian tapestry, the work of cloistered nuns
whose fingers have been lying in the dust for three centuries; silver
lamps suggestive of mortuary chapels.
"I love the Provana drawing-rooms because they are romantic, and I hate
them because they give me the horrors," little Lady Susan Amphlett told
people.
Romantic was one of her pet words. Her vocabulary was made up of pet
words, a jargon of divers tongues, and she used them without mercy.
She was very small, very whimsical and pretty, as neat and dainty as
a Dresden shepherdess; but she got upon some people's nerves, and was
occasionally accused of posing, though she was actually as spontaneous
as a tropical parasite in a South American forest, a little egotist,
who thought, spoke, and acted only on the impulse of the moment, and
whose mind had no room for the idea of an external world, except as
its people and scenery were of consequence to herself. The people she
did not know or care about were non-existent. Romantic was her word
for Madame Provana. She adored Madame Provana, with whom she had some
thin thread of affinity, the kind of distant connection that pervades
the peerage, and makes it perilous for an outsider to talk of any
recent scandal in high life, lest he should fall upon a cousin of the
delinquent's.
"Vera and I are connections. Her grandmother was a Disbrowe," Lady
Susan told people. "But it is not on that account I adore her. I love
her because she is romantic; and so few of the people one knows are
romantic."
If asked where the romance came in, Susan was ready with her reasons.
"Can there be anything more romantic than the idea of a lovely,
ethereal creature, who looks as if a zephyr might blow her off her
feet, married to an ugly giant whose sole thought and business in this
life is to heap up riches, a man who cares for nothing but money, whose
brain is a ledger, and whose heart is a cheque-book? Can anything be
more romantic, when one considers the woman she is and the man he is,
and that they absolutely dote upon each other?"
"Provana may dote," someone would say; "but I question the lady's
feelings. That an impassioned Italian should be fond of a pretty woman,
young enough to be his daughter, and whom he married without a penny
for the sake of her sweet looks, all the world can understand. But
that Madame Provana worships her money-merchant is another story."
"Did not Desdemona dote upon Othello?" cried Susan. "At least Provana
is not black, and adoration such as his would melt a statue. To be
worshipped by a case-hardened money-dealer, a man who trades in
millions, and holds the sinews of war when nations are spoiling for
a fight, a man who is a greater master of finance than half the
Chancellors of the Exchequer who have helped to make history! To see
how he worships that child-wife of his! It is absolutely pathetic."
"Pathetic" was the pretty Susie's word for Mario Provana. She used the
adjective at the slightest provocation. "You are absolute pathetic,"
she said, when he brought his wife a necklet of priceless cat's
eyes set with brilliants, and handed her the velvet case across the
tea-table as carelessly as if it had been a box of bonbons.
He was pathetic, _impayable_, _stupendo_, all the big adjectives in
little Lady Susie's vocabulary.
Susan Amphlett was Susie, or Lady Susie, for everybody who knew her
socially; and for a good many people who had never seen her little
_minois chiffoné_ nearer than in a photograph. People who spelled
over the society papers in their snug suburban drawing-rooms, and
loved to follow the flight of those migratory birds, the Mr. and Mrs.
Willies and Jimmies, and Lady Bettys and Lord Tommys, who were always
flitting from branch to branch, in the only world that seemed worth
living in, when one read the Society papers--those shining-surfaced,
richly-illustrated sixpennies, which brought the flavour of that other
world across the muffin dishes and savoury sandwiches of suburban
tea-tables.
Mr. Amphlett was something in the City! Or that was his description
when people wanted to describe him. He was briefly described as
"rolling," and yet a pauper, if you weighed him against that mountain
of gold, Mario Provana, the international money-dealer.
"If ever Provana goes under, half Europe will have to go under with
him," Susie's cousin, Claude Rutherford, ex-guardsman, ex-traveller,
ex-artist, ex-lion-shooter, said, when he discussed the great financier
with inquisitive outsiders.
Claude was in the Portland Place drawing-room this afternoon, lounging
against the mantelpiece, near the lamp-lit tea-tables, at one of which
Madame Provana presided, his tall, slender figure half lost in a
deepening gloom, above that island of bright light made by the lamps on
the tea-table.
It was easy for Claude to be lost in shadow, since there was so
little of him to lose. Euclid's definition of a line, length without
breadth, was his description; but his slender figure was a line that
showed race in every inch. His scientific acquaintance called him
a crystallisation. "Everything that was ever in the Disbrowes and
the Rutherfords, good or bad, he has in its quintessence," the poet
Eustace Lyon said of him. "Whatever the worst of the Rutherfords or the
Disbrowes, from King Stephen downwards, ever did, Claude is capable of
doing. Whatever the best of them ever accomplished he could do, if he
had a mind to."
* * * * *
Unhappily, Claude had a mind to do nothing more with his life than
lounge through it in placid idleness. He had done so much with
life, that it seemed to him that the inconsiderable remnant at his
disposal was not enough for action, and so nothing mattered. He had
been a soldier, and had seen active service, not without a certain
distinction. He had hunted lions and shot harmless elephants, with
still more distinction; indeed, in the exploring, lion-annihilating
line he had made himself almost a celebrity. He had painted and
exhibited pictures that had pleased the public and the critics, and
had been told that he might excel in the world of art; but though he
loved art, he had not tried to excel. The success of a season satisfied
him. Nothing pleased or interested him long. He had no staying power.
He painted occasionally to distract himself, but in an amateurish way,
and he no longer exhibited. His pictures had not work enough in them
to be shown; and, indeed, rarely went beyond the impression of an
hour; but the impression was vivid and vigorous, and always suggested
how much the painter might have done, if he had cared. He had not
long passed the third milestone on the road of life; but he had left
off caring for things before his thirtieth birthday. Languor, light
sarcasm, and unfailing good temper, were among the qualities that had
made him everybody's favourite young man, the very first a smart
hostess thought of when she was counting heads for a dinner-party.
One incentive that has helped some indolent young men to success was
wanting in this case. He was not obliged to earn his daily bread. The
Rutherfords had coal-mines on the Scottish border, and were rich enough
to provide for indolent scions of the family tree.
Six or seven years ago, before he left the Army, Claude Rutherford had
been an arbiter of fashion among the men of his age. In those days
he had taken the business of his outer clothing more seriously than
the cultivation of a mind in which fancy had ever predominated over
thought; and in those days that element of fancy had entered even into
his transactions with tailor and bootmaker, and he had allowed himself
some flights of imagination in form and colour. Of all the names given
to golden youth the old-fashioned name of "exquisite" was the one that
fitted Captain Rutherford. It seemed to have been invented for him. He
was exquisite in everything, in his habiliments and his surroundings,
in speech, and manner, in every detail of his butterfly life. But when
he left the Grenadiers--to the infinite regret of his brother officers,
who were all his fast friends--he flung foppery from him as it were a
cast-off garment; and from the time he worked seriously at his easel,
and began to exhibit his pictures, he had become remarkable for the
careless grace of clothes that were scrupulously unoriginal, and in the
rear rather than in the van of fashion, the sleeves and coat-tails and
checks and stripes of the year before last. But he was still exquisite.
The grace and the charm were in his own slender form, and not in the
stuff that clothed him.
He was not handsome. He was not like David, ruddy and fair to see. He
had very little colour, and his pale grey eyes were only brilliant
in moments of mirth or strong feeling. He had a long, thin nose, and
thin, flexible lips, and his mouth, which was supposed to be the
Disbrowe mouth, and a speciality of that ancient race, was strong in
character and expressiveness. His hair was light brown, with a natural
wave in that small portion which modern barbers allow to remain on the
masculine head. A rippling line above his brow indicated that Claude
Rutherford might have been as curly as Absalom if he had let his hair
grow.
In the afternoon shadows that small head and slim form contrasted
curiously with the spacious brow of the tall and commanding figure
at the other end of the mantelpiece, the imposing presence of Father
Cyprian Hammond, at that time a famous personage in London society, the
morals and manners whereof he had of late made it his chief business
to satirise and denounce. But the people of pleasure and leisure, the
butterflies and humming-birds of the world, the creatures of light and
colour, have a keen relish for reproof and denunciation, though they
may wince under the lash of irony. For them anything is better than not
being talked about.
It had been asked of Father Cyprian why he, who was so scathing a
critic of the follies and general worthlessness of the idle rich, was
yet not infrequently to be met in their houses.
"If I did not go among my flock, I could not put my finger upon the
festering spot," he said. "I am a student of humanity. If Lord Avebury
could devote his days to watching bees and wasps, do you wonder that I
am interested in watching my fellow-creatures? A professional beauty
affords a nobler scope for observation than a queen bee; a gambler on
the stock exchange offers more points of interest than the industrious
ant. If insects are wonderful, is not the man or the woman who hazards
eternal bliss for the trivial pleasures of a London season a creature
infinitely more incomprehensible? And if, while I watch and listen, I
can discover where these creatures are assailable, if I can find some
penetrable spot in their armour of pride, I may be able to preach to
them with better chance of being heard."
Father Cyprian was a conspicuous figure in that crowd of pretty
women and "nice boys." Tall, even among guardsmen, he held himself
like a soldier. He had a fair complexion, light brown hair, and blue
eyes. A Saxon of the finest Saxon type, and coming of a family whose
genealogical tree had put forth its earliest branches before the
Heptarchy. It was the consciousness of superior race, perhaps, that
made his fashionable flock tolerant of his stinging denunciation and
unmeasured scorn of vice and folly in high places. Everything relating
to him was superior. His vestments were superb, his chapel was a thing
of beauty. The genius of a Bossuet would hardly have persuaded that
world of the successful rich to listen to a withering analysis of its
vices and pettinesses from the lips of some little Irish priest, reared
in a hovel and nourished on potatoes and potheen; but it bowed the neck
before Father Cyprian's good birth and grand manner.
Anglicans who met him in society, mostly in the houses of the powerful
or the rich, talked of him as a worldling; but his own flock knew
better. They knew that wherever the brilliant Jesuit might be seen,
however light his manner or trivial his conversation, one deeply-seated
purpose was at the back of his mind, the making of proselytes, the
aggrandisement of his Church, that Invincible, Indestructible,
Incomparable, Supreme, and Unquestionable Power, to which he had given
the service and the devotion of his whole being. If he went much among
statesmen and rulers it was because his Church wanted influence;
if he cultivated the friendship of millionaires it was because his
Church wanted money. For himself he wanted nothing, for he had been
born to independence; and though he had given much of his fortune to
the necessities of his Order, his income was still ample for the only
scheme of life that was possible for him. He was not a man who could
have lived in sordid surroundings, though he could go down into the
nethermost depths of East-End poverty, and give his days and nights to
carrying the lamp of Faith into dark places. He had a refinement of
sense that would have made squalor, or even shabby-genteel ugliness,
unbearable; and he had an ardent and artistic imagination which made
some touch of beauty in his surroundings as needful to him as fresh air
and cold water.
The attention of both these men, the priest and the man-about-town,
was concentrated upon the lady of the house, who, just at this moment,
was taking very little notice of either of them. She was surrounded by
the smartest and prettiest women in the room, chief amongst them Lady
Susan Amphlett, who was always to be found near Vera at these friendly
tea-parties.
Vera let Lady Susan and the other women do almost all the talking. She
sat looking straight before her, dreamily silent, amidst the animated
chatter about trivialities that had ceased to interest her.
She was still as delicately slender as she had been six years ago
at San Marco, when the parsons had called her ethereal, and the
spinsters had called her half-starved; but those six years had made a
transformation, and she was not the same Vera.
She had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. She had enjoyed all the
amusements and excitements that great cities can give to rich and
beautiful women. She had been flattered and followed in Rome and Paris
and London, had been written about in the _New York Herald_, and had
been the fashion everywhere; a person whom not to know was to confess
oneself as knowing nobody and going nowhere. Indeed, it was a kind of
confession of outsiderism not to be able to talk of Madame Provana as
"Vera."
She had accepted the position with a kind of languid acquiescence,
taking all things for granted, after the first year, when everything
amused her. In this sixth year of marriage, and wealth without limit,
she was tired of everything, except the society of authors and painters
and actors and musicians--the people who appealed to her imagination.
She had inherited from her father the yearning for things that earth
cannot give--the _au delà_, the light that never was on sea or land.
"The glory and the dream."
She admired and respected Father Cyprian Hammond, and she liked him
to talk to her, though she could divine that steadfast purpose at the
back of his head, the determination to bring her into the Papal fold.
She argued with him from her Anglican standpoint, and pleaded for that
_via media_ that might reconcile old things with new; and she felt
the weakness of her struggle against that skilled dialectician; but
she refused to be converted. Half the pleasure of her intimacy with
this Eagle of Monk Street would be lost if she surrendered, and had to
exchange the struggle for the attitude of passive submission.
His arguments sometimes went near to convincing her; but the Faith he
offered did not satisfy those vague longings for the something beyond.
It was too simple, too matter-of-fact to arrest her imagination. It
offered little more than she had already in the ritual of her own
Church. The change did not seem worth while.
She looked up suddenly in the midst of the silvery treble talk about
theatres and frocks.
"Claude, do you ever keep a promise?" she asked.
"Always, I hope."
"You promised to bring Mr. Symeon to see me."
"Did I?"
"Indeed you did. Ages ago."
"Ages?"
"Well, nearly three weeks. It was at the Helstones' dinner."
"Three weeks. Mr. Symeon is not at the call of the first comer."
There was a little cry from the women, who had left off talking in
order to listen.
"He calls Madame Provana the first comer!" exclaimed the youngest and
pertest of the circle.
"I call myself the first comer where Symeon is concerned. I am not
one of his initiated. I belong to the outer herd of wretches who eat
butcher's meat and attach importance to dinner. Mr. Symeon condescends
when he gives me half an hour of a life that is spent mostly in the
clouds."
"I would give worlds to know him," said Lady Susan. "I have taken his
quarterly, _The Unseen_, from the beginning, His articles upon the
spiritual life are adorable, but I am not conceited enough to pretend
to understand him."
"If people understood him, he would be less admired," said Rutherford.
"What does he do?" asked the youngest and flippantest. "I am always
hearing of Mr. Symeon and his spook magazine; but what does he do?
Is it thought-reading, slate-writing, materialisation? Does he float
up to the ceiling, as Home did? My Grannie swears she saw him, yes,
positively floating, in that large house by the Marble Arch."
"Mr. Symeon does nothing," replied Claude. "He is the high priest of
the Transcendental. He talks."
"How disappointing!"
"Most people find that enough."
"They are bored?"
"No; they are fascinated. Mr. Symeon is more magnetic than Gladstone
was. He must have stolen those green eyes of his from a mermaid. His
disciples get nothing but his eyes and his talk; and they believe in
him as Orientals believe in Buddha. I have heard people say he _is_
Buddha--Gautama's latest incarnation."
"That's rather lovely!" exclaimed Miss Flippant. "I would give worlds
to see him."
"We'll excuse you the worlds, even if you owned them," said Claude in
his lazy voice. "You may see him within the next ten minutes, unless he
is a promise-breaker. I had not forgotten your commands, Vera. I spent
half a day in hunting Symeon, and did not leave him till he promised to
come to tea with you. I believe tea is the most material refreshment he
takes."
"You are ever so much better than I thought you," said Vera, with one
look up at Rutherford, before she turned to gaze at the distant door,
heedless of the talk that went on round her, until after some minutes a
servant announced "Mr. Symeon."
Claude Rutherford left his station by the mantelpiece and went to meet
the visitor.
The spacious rooms were mostly in shadow by this time, all the lamps
being so tempered by artistic shades in sea-green silk that they gave
faint patches of colour rather than light, and some people started at
the sound of Mr. Symeon's name, almost as if they had seen a ghost.
It was a name that all cultured people knew, even when they did not
know the man. Francis Symeon was a leader in the spiritual world,
and there were no depths in the mysteries of occultism, from ancient
Egypt to modern India, that he had not sounded. He was the editor and
proprietor of _The Unseen_, a quarterly magazine, to which only the
most advanced thinkers were allowed to contribute--a magazine which
the subscriber opened with a thrill of anticipation, wondering what
new revelation of the "life beyond" he was to find in those shining,
hot-pressed pages, where the matter was often more dazzling than the
gloss on the paper.
Vera watched with eager interest and a faint flush of pleasure as
Rutherford and Symeon came through the shadows towards her.
"You see I have kept my promise, and here is Mr. Symeon, to answer some
of those far-reaching questions with which you often bewilder my poor
brain."
Vera left her table, where there had come a sudden lull in the soprano
voices as Mr. Symeon drew near--a pause in the discussion of frocks
and hats in the new comedy at the St. James's. She stood up to talk to
Mr. Symeon, telling him how she had been reading the last number of
_The Unseen_, and more especially his own contribution, an essay on the
other life, as understood by Tennyson and Browning.
In that half-light which makes all beautiful things more beautiful,
she had a spirit look, and might have seemed the materialisation of
Mr. Symeon's thought, as she stood before him, fragile and slender,
with glimmering lamplight on her cloud of brown hair, and on the simple
white gown, of some transparent fabric, loosely draped over satin that
flashed through its fleecy whiteness. Her only ornament was a necklace
of _aqua marina_ in a Tiffany setting.
"She wears that thing when she wants to look like a mermaid," Miss Pert
whispered to her pal.
"No; she wears it to remind us that she has some of the finest jewels
in London, and that she despises them," said the pal, who had reached
that critical age which is described as "getting on," and was inclined
to take a sour view of a young woman who had married millions.
Symeon and Vera talked for some time, she with a suppressed
eagerness--earnest, almost impassioned; Symeon grave and reserved, yet
obviously interested.
"We cannot talk of these things in a crowd," he said. "If I had known
you had a party----"
"It is not a party. People come every afternoon in the winter, when
there is not much for them to do; but if you will be so kind as to come
early some day, at three o'clock, for instance, I will not be at home
to anybody, unless it were Claude, who loves to hear you talk."
"I will come to-morrow," said Symeon; and then, with briefest adieu,
he walked slowly through the crowd, acknowledging the greetings of a
few intimates with a distant bend of his iron-grey head, and walking
amongst the pretty faces and smart frocks as he might have done through
so many sparrows pecking on a lawn.
Lady Susan came to Vera, excited and eager.
"Why didn't you keep him? I wanted you to introduce him to me. I
have been pining to know him. I read every line of his Review. He is
wonderful! I believe he has secrets that ward off age. You must ask me
to meet him--at luncheon--a party of four, with Claude. Claude has been
horrid about him."
"I value his friendship too much to introduce him to Tom, Dick, and
Harry," said Claude. "Vera and he are elective affinities."
* * * * *
Father Cyprian and Claude Rutherford left the house together.
"May I walk with you as far as your lodgings?" Claude asked.
"By all means, and come in with me, if you can. It is early yet, and I
have long wanted a talk with you."
"Serious?"
"Yes, even serious. When one cares as much for a young man as I do for
you, there is always room for seriousness. You look alarmed, but there
is no occasion. I don't preach long sermons, especially not to young
men."
They walked to the end of the street in silence. They were old friends;
and though Claude was the most lax among Papists, Cyprian Hammond had
never lost hope of bringing him back to the fold. He was emotional and
imaginative, and he had a heart. Sooner or later there would come a day
when he would want the utmost the Church could do for him.
"You can't wonder if I am a little afraid," Claude said presently.
"There has been some hard hitting from your pulpit within the last
year."
"You have heard my moralities--I won't call them sermons?"
"Yes, I have heard; but I doubt if I have enjoyed your diatribes as
much as the other sinners, especially the women of your flock. They
love to be told they are a shade worse than Semiramis, if you will only
imply that they are as fascinating as Cleopatra."
"Poor worms," said the priest with a long-drawn sigh. "They are such
very poor creatures. Even their sins are petty."
"Would you prefer them if they were poisoners, like the Borgia?"
"No; but I might despise them less. And I should have more hope of
their repentance. These creatures don't know they are sinners. They
gamble, they squander their husbands' fortunes, shipwreck their sons'
inheritance; and when the domestic ship goes down they are injured
innocents, surprised to find that 'things are so expensive.' I have
talked with them--not in the confessional--and I have sounded the
shallows of their silly minds--there are no depths, unless it were a
depth of self-love. They come to Mass, and sit fanning themselves and
sniffing eau-de-Cologne, while I expostulate with them and try to turn
their thoughts into new channels. And then they get tired of the creed
in which they were brought up; tired of hearing hard things, and of
tasting wormwood instead of honey."
"Is modern London so like Babylon?"
"I doubt if the city with a hundred gates was much worse. And
your substitutes for the Church you have deserted--your Christian
Science, Pragmatism, Humanism, your letters from the dead, your
philanthropy--expressed in oranges and buns for workhouse children, and
in fashionable bazaars; charities that overlap each other and pauperise
more than they relieve; and all for want of that one tremendous Central
Power that could harmonise every effort, bring every man and woman's
work into line and rule. In the history of God's chosen people, the one
unpardonable sin was the worship of strange gods. Their Creator knew
that religion was the only basis of conduct, and that the worshippers
of evil gods must themselves become infamous. But this is the age of
strange gods. You all have your groves and high places, your Baal and
Astarte, your Kali or your Siva, your shrines upon mountain tops and
under green trees, your Buddha, your Nietzsche, your Spinoza, your
Comte. You run after the teachers of fantastic things, the high priests
of materialism. You worship anywhere but in your church; you believe
anything but the faith of your forefathers."
They were at Father Cyprian's door by this time, in one of those wide
streets west of Portland Place, and north of the world of fashion.
Streets that may still be described as quiet, save for the ceaseless
roar of traffic in the Marylebone Road, a sound diminished by distance,
the ebb and flow of life in an artery of the great city. It was in a
street parallel with this that the great Cardinal who defied the law of
England had lived and died half a century before.
They had been walking slowly through the thickening mist of a fine
November evening, a grey vapour, across which street lamps and lighted
windows glimmered in faint flashes of gold, an atmosphere that Claude
Rutherford loved, all the more, perhaps, because he had never been able
to satisfy himself in painting it.
"What is the good of trying, when one must always fall short of
Turner?" he had said to himself in those younger and more eager days
when he still tried to do things.
Father Cyprian had talked with a kind of suppressed passion as they
walked through solitary streets, and now he laughed lightly, as he
turned the key in his door.
"You have had the sermon after all," he said.
"It didn't touch me. I am not an extravagant, bridge-playing woman, and
I worship no strange god."
"I shall touch you presently; your withers are not unwrung."
"Suppose I say good night and give you the slip."
"You won't do that. I was your father's friend."
That was enough. Claude bent his head a little, as if at a sacred name,
and followed the priest up the uncarpeted stone staircase to a large
room on the first floor--the conventional London drawing-room, with its
three long windows and chilling white linen blinds.
But, except the shape of the room and the white blinds, there was
nothing to offend the eye that looked for beauty. The floor was cheaply
covered with sea-blue felt, which echoed the colouring of the sea-blue
walls, and the central space was occupied by a massive knee-hole desk
of ebony, inlaid with ivory, evidently of Italian workmanship, and
picturesque enough to please without being a _chef d'oeuvre_. There
were only two objects of art in the spacious room, but each was supreme
after its kind. A carved ivory crucifix of considerable size, mounted
on black velvet, was centred on the wall facing the windows; and over
the marble mantelpiece there hung a Holy Family by Fra Angelico. These,
which were exquisite, were the only ornaments that Father Cyprian had
given himself, in his ten years' residence in this house, where this
spacious sitting-room, with a large bedroom for himself and a small
room for his servant, comprised all his accommodation.
Six high-backed arm-chairs, covered with old stamped leather, and a
massive gate-legged table, black with age, on which he dined, completed
his furniture. To some visitors the sparsely-furnished room might
have seemed cold and cheerless; but there was an air of repose in
its simplicity that satisfied the artistic mind. It looked like a
room designed for prayer and meditation; not a room for study, for
the one bookcase, with its neat range of theological works, would not
have sufficed for the poorest student. It looked like a room meant
for solitude and thought, and for only the most serious, the most
confidential conversation.
"I have always a sense of rest when I come into this room," Rutherford
said, while Father Cyprian was lighting the candles in a bronze
candelabrum on his desk.
"You should come here oftener, Claude. You might make a retreat here
once or twice a week. Sit on the bank for a few hours, and let that
tumultuous river of modern life go by you, while you think of the land
where there is no tumult, only a divine repose, or an agony of regret.
When did you make your last confession, Claude?"
"I have a bad memory, Father. Don't tax it too severely."
The priest was not to be satisfied by a flippant answer. He pressed the
question with authority.
"What have I to confess? An empty, dissatisfied soul, a useless life;
no positive wickedness, only negative worthlessness. I am not an
infidel," Claude added eagerly. "If I were an unbeliever, I would not
presume to claim your friendship. I should think it an insolence to
cross your threshold. I have been slack, I have fallen into a languid
acceptance of my own shortcomings."
"You have fallen in love with another man's wife," said the priest
gravely. "That is the name of your sin."
The thin face paled ever so slightly, but there was no indignant
protest; indeed, the head drooped a little, as if the sinner had
whispered _mea culpa_.
"I have never made love to her," he said in a low voice. "But I am
human, and can't help loving her."
"You can help going to her house. You can help hanging over her as she
sits among her friends. When it comes to making love the Rubicon is
passed, and the chances of retreat are as one in fifty. You are on the
downward slope, Claude. Every time you enter that house you go there at
the hazard of your soul."
"She has so few real friends. She is alone among a crowd. She and I
were friends as children, or at least when she was a child. I should
be a cur if I kept away from her, when she needs my friendship, just
because of the risk to myself. I am too fond of her ever to hazard a
situation that would mean danger for her. I know how much a woman in
her position has to lose. She is not the kind of woman who could pass
through the furnace of the divorce court, and hold up her head and be
happy afterwards. She is a creature of spirit, not of flesh. Passion
would never make amends to her for shame."
"Yet, knowing this, you make yourself her intimate companion!"
"I shall never betray myself. She will never know what you know. For
her I am a feather-brained amateur of life; interested in many things,
caring for nothing, a saunterer through the world, without much heart,
and without any serious purpose. She often scolds me for my frivolity."
"I admit that she has a certain childlike innocence which might keep
her unconscious of your feelings, till the fatal moment in which
you will fling principle, prudence, honour to the winds and declare
yourself her lover----"
"That moment will never come. The day I feel myself in danger I
shall leave her for ever. In the meantime, if I am essential to her
happiness, I shall stop."
"How can you be essential? She has crowds of friends, and a husband who
adores her."
"A husband of fifty years of age, grave, silent, with his mind
concentrated upon international finance; a man who is thinking of
another Turkish loan while he sits opposite her, with his stony eyes
fixed upon space--a man whose brain is a calculating machine and his
heart a handful of ashes."
"Has she complained of him?"
"Never; but things have leaked out. She was not eighteen--little more
than a child--when she married him. She gave herself to him in a
romantic impulse, admiring his force of character, her heart touched
by his affection for a dying daughter. To be so loved by that strong
nature seemed to her enough for happiness. But that was six years ago,
and she has lived six years in the world. The romance has gone out of
her love. What can she have in common with such a man?"
"The bond of marriage--his love, and her sense of duty," answered the
priest.
"She has a keen sense of a wife's duty: she preaches sermons upon her
husband's goodness of heart, his fine character; and she ends with a
sigh, and regrets that for some mysterious reason she has not been able
to make him happy."
"She is too rich and too much indulged, and she is without a saving
creed. Poor child, I would give much to save her from herself and from
you."
"Don't be afraid of me, Father. Men of my stamp may be trusted. We
are too feather-brained to be intense, even in sin. Good night. I
hear the jingle of glass and silver, and I think it must be near your
dinner-time. Good night!"
The priest gave him his hand, but not his blessing. That was withheld
for a better moment.