Father Cyprian Hammond returned to his comfortable rooms in the
north-west region one rainy autumn evening after a long day in the
dreariest abodes of East London. He was almost worn out by the bodily
fatigue of tramping those dismal streets with one of his friends
and allies, a priest from the Cathedral at Moorfields; and by the
mental strain that comes from facing the inscrutable problem of human
suffering--the mystery of sorrow and pain, inevitable, unceasing,
beyond man's power to help or cure.
He had visited the poor in great hospitals where every detail
testified to the beneficence of the rich; yet he knew that the comfort
and cleanliness of the hospital must needs accentuate the dirt and
squalor of the slum to which the patient must return.
He sank into his armchair, with a sigh of relief, and was sorry to hear
of a visitor, who had called twice that afternoon and would call again
after nine o'clock.
"Did he leave his card?"
Yes, the card was there on the table.
"Mr. Claude Rutherford."
Father Cyprian had not seen Claude since the opening day of that
inquest which had been so often adjourned, only to close in an open
verdict, and a mystery still unsolved. He had not seen Claude; but he
had seen Mrs. Rutherford more than once in that quiet month when life
in West End London seems to come to a stand-still. She had talked about
her son as she talked only to him, opening her heart to the friend
who knew all its secrets, the best and the worst of her. Hitherto she
had never failed to find him interested and sympathetic; but in those
recent interviews it had seemed to her as if the close friend of long
years had changed; as if he was talking to her from a distance; as if
some mysterious barrier had arisen between them.
She had told him of that conversation with her son, in which he had
promised to confide in this old and trusted friend. That had happened
more than a month ago, and the confidence had not yet come. Perhaps it
was coming to-night.
"I will see Mr. Rutherford at whatever time he calls," Father Cyprian
told his servant.
His dinner was short and temperate, but not ill-cooked or ill-served.
He drank barley water, but the jug that held it was of old cut-glass,
picked up at a broker's shop in a back street for seven shillings, and
worth as many pounds. His silver was old family plate, his napery of
the finest.
It was past nine when Claude Rutherford appeared, and the first thing
Father Cyprian observed was that he was physically exhausted. He
dropped into a chair with a long sigh of fatigue, and it was three or
four minutes before he was able to speak.
"I knew you would have finished your Spartan dinner by this time," he
said, "but I hope I am not spoiling your evening."
"You ought to know that I have nothing better to do with my evening
than to talk with anybody who wants me," answered the priest in the
low, grave voice that was like the sound of Hollmann's bow in an adagio
passage, "and I think you must want me, or you would not come to this
house a third time. What have you been doing since six o'clock? You
look horribly fagged."
"I have been to Hampstead. It is a fine night, and I wanted a walk."
"You have walked too far. You are ill, Claude."
"A little under the weather. The modern complaint, neuritis, and its
concomitant, insomnia."
"You ought to go to one of my neighbours in Harley Street."
"No. I want you--the physician of souls. This corporal frame of mine
will mend itself when I get out of London; a thousand miles or so. Do
you remember the night we walked home together from Portland Place? You
pressed me very hard that evening. You tried to bring me back to the
fold--but the time had not come."
"And now the time has come?" questioned the priest, pushing aside the
book that he had been reading, and bending forward to look into a page
of human life, bringing his searching eyes nearer to the haggard face
in front of him.
"Yes, the time has come."
"What is the matter?"
"Oh, only the old disease--in a more acute phase. The disgust of
life--satiety, weariness of the world outside me, loathing of the world
inside; the old disease in a virulent form. I want you to help me to
the cure. It must be heroic treatment. Half measures will be no use.
I want you to help me to enter one of the orders that mean death to
the world. Dominicans, Benedictines, La Trappe, anything you like; the
harder the rule the better it may be for my soul."
"This is strangely sudden."
"Perhaps it is an inspiration. But no, my dear friend, it is not
sudden. The complaint is chronic, and has been growing upon me for
the last ten years, ever since I found that I was a failure. That
discovery is a crisis in a man's life. He looks inside himself one
day, and finds that the fire has gone out. It must all come to that.
Life, mind, heart, all are contained in that central fire which is the
soul of a man. While the fire burns he has hope, he has ambitions, he
has a future; when the fire goes out, he has nothing but the past; the
memory of things that were sweet and things that were bitter; nothing
but memory to live upon in all the years that are to come: and he may
live to be ninety, a haunted man! I have done with the world, Father
Cyprian. Am I to walk about like a dead man for ten or twenty or thirty
years? I have done with the world. I want to give the rest of my life
to the God you and my mother believe in."
"You would not want to do that if you were not a believer."
"I was reared in the true faith. Yes, I believe. Help thou mine
unbelief."
"I will help you with all my heart; but I do not think you are of the
stuff that Benedictine monks are made of; and it is a foolish thing
to put your hand to the plough, unless you have the force of mind to
finish your furrow."
"I will finish my furrow."
"And break your mother's heart, perhaps. Your love is all she has in
this life, except her religion."
"Her religion is no less a force than her love. My neglect of my duties
has been a grief to her. She has never ceased to remonstrate with me,
to remind me of my boyish ardour, my days of implicit faith."
"She wants to see you return to the faith, and the obedience, of those
days; but it would distress her if you took a step that would mean
separation from her."
"That would be inconsistent, after all her sermons."
"Women are apt to be inconsistent--even the best of them."
"In any case, even if my mother should object, which I think unlikely,
I have made up my mind. I had time to commune with my soul in that
three hours' walk through the darkness. I came to you this night fully
resolved not to ask your advice as to the step, but your help in taking
it. Where can I go? To whom can I submit myself?"
"Frankly, Claude, I am too much in the dark to help you. Come to me at
my church to-morrow morning after mass, with your mind more at rest,
and make your confession. Let me see into the bottom of your heart. I
cannot talk to a man behind a mask. I can say nothing till I know all."
"No, I cannot do that. I must have time. I want solitude and a cell.
I want to shake off the husk of the world I have lived in too long. I
want to be done with earthly desires. I shall have a new mind when I am
in my woollen gown."
"Alas, Claude, I doubt, I doubt. Do you remember all we talked about
when you were last in this room--a long time ago?"
"Yes, I remember."
"You remember how I tried to awaken you to the danger of your relations
with Mario Provana's wife."
"Those are things a man does not forget."
"You denied the danger; but you did not deny your love. You gave me
your assurance, not as to a priest, but between man and man, that no
evil should ever come of that love."
"Yes, I remember. I was not afraid of myself. I belong to the great
army of triflers and dilettanti--I am not of the stuff that passionate
lovers are made of."
"But now Death has intervened, and the situation is changed. Two years
hence you might marry your cousin without shame to either, without
disrespect to the dead. Are you capable of renouncing that hope by
burying yourself in a cloister? Are you equal to the sacrifice? Would
there be no looking back, no repentance?"
"I shall never marry my cousin Vera."
"Because she does not love you? Is that the reason?"
"No need to enter into details, or to count the cost. I have made up my
mind. For once in my life I have a purpose and a will."
"You seem in earnest."
The words came slowly, like a spoken doubt, and the priest's searching
eyes were on the pale face in front of him. The countenance where the
refinement of race--a long line of well-born men and women, showed in
every lineament.
"This sudden resolve of yours is inexplicable," the priest continued
in a troubled voice, after a silence that seemed long. "It is not in
your temperament or your manner of life, since you came into a man's
inheritance, to cut yourself off from all that makes life pleasant to a
young man with talent, attractiveness, and independence. I would give
much to know your reason for such a step."
"Haven't I told you, my dear friend? _Welt Schmerz._ Isn't that enough?"
"No, it is not enough. _Welt Schmerz_ is the chronic disease of a
decadent age. If every sufferer from _Welt Schmerz_ were to turn monk,
this world would be a monastery. It is a phase in every man's life--or
a pose. I know it is not that with you. There is something behind,
Claude--something at the back of your mind. Something that you must
tell me, before I can be of any real help to you. But you are your
mother's son, and were you steeped in sin, I would do my uttermost to
help you. Come to me the day after to-morrow. I shall have had time to
think over your case, and you will be in a better mood for considering
the situation: to surrender this worldly life and all it holds is not a
light thing that a man should do in a fit of the blues, a man still on
the sunward side of forty. I, who have entered my seventh decade, have
no yearnings for a woollen gown."
"I have made up my mind," Claude repeated, in a dull, dead voice, the
voice of an obstinate man. "Good night."