Father Cyprian Hammond sat alone in the winter gloaming after a hard
day's work in his parish, which was a large one, covering several of
those obscure little slums that lie hidden behind handsome streets in
north-western London. The table had been cleared after his short and
simple dinner, and he was half reclining in his deep arm-chair while
Sabatier's "Life of St. Francis of Assisi" lay open on the table under
the candles that made only a spot of light in the lofty room. It was
one of the books which he opened often on an evening of fatigue and
depression. The "Life" or the "Fioretti" were books that rested his
brain and soothed his spirits.
He lay back in his chair with his eyes closed, not asleep, but resting,
and listening with a kind of sensuous pleasure to the light fall of
wood ashes on the hearth. His winter fire of old ship logs was one of
the few luxuries he allowed himself.
"I told you I would see no one to-night," he said, as his servant came
into the room.
"It is Mr. Rutherford, Father, only just back from Italy. He said he
was sure you would see him."
"Very good, I will see Mr. Rutherford. You can light the lamp. Come in,
Claude," he called to the figure standing outside the door.
Claude came into the room, while the servant lighted a standard lamp
of considerable power, that shone full upon a face from which all
natural carnation had changed to an ashen greyness, the face of a man
in the last stage of a bad illness.
"You look dead-beat," said the priest, as they clasped hands. "You have
been travelling night and day, I suppose."
"I came straight from her grave, from their grave. She lies in the
cemetery at San Marco, beside her husband and his daughter, the girl
who loved her, and whose love brought those two together."
"It was her wish, I conclude."
"There was a letter found--a letter written half a year ago, at the
beginning of her illness, in which she begged that I would lay her
there--in his grave--nowhere else. It was he that she loved best,
always, always. Her real, her only perfect love was for him."
"May that absolve her of her sins. I would have done much, striven long
and late to bring her into the fold, if she would have let me, but she
would not. Well, she shall not want for an intercessor while I live and
pray."
And then, looking up at his visitor, who stood before him, a tragical
figure in the bright, hard light of the lamp, his face haggard and wan
against the rich darkness of his sable collar:
"Sit down, Claude," he said gently, in a tone of ineffable compassion,
the voice that day by day had spoken to sorrow and to sin. "I see you
have come to tell me your troubles. Take off that heavy coat and draw
your chair to the fire, and open your heart to me, unless indeed you
will come to my confessional to-morrow and let me hear you there. I
would much rather you did that."
"_Selon les règles._ No! Be kind, Father, and let me talk to you here.
I will keep nothing back this time. There shall be no more secrets--no
surprises. I have come to the end of my book. She is dead, and I have
nothing left to care about--nothing left to hide. There is not a joy
this world can offer to man for which I would hold up a finger now she
is gone."
"What do you want me to do for you?"
"What you did for me six years ago. Open the gate of a refuge where a
sinner may hide the remnant of a worthless life, where I may spend the
last dregs in the cup, drop by drop, where I may die day by day, on my
knees, in penitential prayer."
"I opened that gate. You were safe in such a refuge; and you broke out
again and came back to the world, twenty times worse than you were
before. The life you have been leading since you married Provana's
widow is about the most worthless, the most abject life that a
reasonable being could lead, the life of empty pleasure, of sensuality
and self-indulgence, a life that debases the man himself, and corrupts
and ruins his associates."
"I had to forget. If all that the world calls pleasure could have been
distilled into one little drug that would have blotted out remembrance,
I should have wanted no more race-horses, no more racing yachts, no
more flying-machines, no more cards or dice, only that one little drug.
Father, when I stood before you six years ago in this room, a miserable
wretch, I had to keep my secret for her sake. I have nothing to hide
now. It was I who killed Mario Provana."
"I knew."
"You knew?"
"Yes, I knew that night as much as I know now. I knew the guilt you
wanted to hide in a cloister. I knew your sin and your remorse; but I
doubted your perseverance; a doubt that was too speedily justified by
the event."
"It was the fatal course my mother took. She brought Vera to the place
where I thought that I and my sin were buried. I did not yield without
a struggle; in long days of depression, in long nights of fever, I
wrestled with Satan for my soul. I called upon my manhood, my honour,
my will-power, and I even thought that I had conquered; and then, in an
instant, my passionate heart gave way, and I walked out of that house
of rest, a fallen spirit. But, oh, the rapture of the moment when I
held her in my arms, and told her that I renounced all--the hope of
heaven, the certainty of peace--for her love."
"Oh, the pity of it, my unhappy Claude!"
"You ask me no questions, Father?"
"To what end? You are not in the confessional. There may be details
that would in some degree mitigate your guilt; but murder is a heinous
sin, and I fear in your case it had been led up to by guilt almost
as dark, the spoiling of a pure woman's soul. If the murder was not
deliberate you cannot urge the same excuse for the sin of seduction,
that sin which includes every abomination--hypocrisy, the falsehood
that betrays a trusting fellow-creature, the calculating cruelty that
sets a man's strength of will against a woman's yielding love."
"No, no, no. Father, have you forgotten those two lost souls Dante
saw, driven through the malignant air; they who had stained the earth
with blood? Sorrow and sin had been theirs; but Francesca's lover was
not a deliberate seducer, and even in that world of pain the love that
linked those two who never could be parted more was no base or selfish
passion. No man ever fought a harder battle than I fought for her sake.
I loved her when we were boy and girl together, when she was a child, a
lovely, innocent child, who gave me her heart in that happy morning of
life, who had been shut out from all the affection that makes childhood
beautiful, the caresses, the praise of an adoring mother, the love of
father, brothers, sisters. She had known nothing better than the tepid
kindness of a peevish old woman, and she gave her heart to me in the
first joyous days of her life, I taught her what youth and happiness
meant; and that spring-time of our lives was never forgotten. Vera was
the romance of my boyhood. I carried her image in my heart for all the
years in which we were strangers; and when Fate brought us together
again our hearts went out to each other, as if the years had never
parted us, as if she had been still as unconscious of passion as the
child who clambered on my knee and flung her arms round my neck on the
rocks at Disbrowe."
"But with a certain difference," said the priest. "She was Mario
Provana's wife."
"I did not forget that. I told myself that I need never forget it. She
was the centre of a selfish clan, who meant to run her for all she was
worth. I knew to what account the Disbrowes would turn a millionaire
cousin; and I took upon myself to stand between her and a herd of
cold-hearted relations, who only valued her as a counter in the social
game. Except Susan Amphlett, who is a fool, and Lady Okehampton, who is
not much wiser, there was not one of the crew that had a spark of real
regard for her."
"And you thought your affection was pure enough to save her from all
the pitfalls of Society."
"I thought that I was strong enough to take a brother's place. I had
lived my life; I had been a failure. I had sinned, and paid forfeit
for my sin. I thought I had done with passionate feeling; and that
I could trust myself as fully as Vera trusted me, in her absolute
unconsciousness of danger. I was deceived. The fire still burned in the
grey ashes of a wasted life, and the time came when it burst into flame
and consumed us."
"You were with her that night when Provana came home unexpectedly?"
"I was with her. No matter how that came about. The die had been cast
weeks before, when she and I were at the Okehamptons' river villa.
We were alone there as if we had been in a wood, and our secret was
told and our promise was exchanged. Nothing was to matter any more
in our lives except our love. We were to go to the other side of the
world and cruise about in the South Seas till we found an island, as
Stevenson did, a paradise of love and peace, to end our days in. The
yacht was waiting for us at Plymouth, manned and found for an ocean
voyage--almost as fine a vessel as the _Gloriana_. We were to start
by an early train that morning. I wrung a promise from her at Lady
Fulham's ball; and we met a few hours earlier than we had intended."
"And he found you together, and you killed him?"
"It was her life or his. We faced each other at the door of his
dressing-room. The other door was open and the lights were on. I saw
death in his face as he stood for a moment looking into her room, the
white, dumb rage that means bloodshed. He gave me only one contemptuous
glance as he dashed past me to the desk where his pistol case was ready
for him. He had the pistol in his hand and had cocked it in what had
seemed an instant, and was on his way to her room while I snatched the
second pistol from the case. For me he could bide his time. For her,
doom was to be swift. I think I read him right even in those fierce
moments. His fury was measured by the love he had given her. His foot
was on the threshold when I fired. I could hear her stifled sobs as she
lay on the floor, where she had fallen at the sound of his footsteps
on the landing, half unconscious, in her agony of shame. She told me
afterwards that strange lights were in her eyes, a roar of waters in
her ears. She was lying in a world of red light."
"Well, what do you want of me now?"
"Open the door of my cell, the Benedictines, the Carthusians, La
Trappe--in France or Spain, any order where the rule is iron, and where
my days will be short. I have lived the sinner's life, and it has not
brought me happiness. Let me live the saint's life, and see if it can
bring me peace. I am not a much blacker sinner than some of the fathers
of your Church who wear the aureole. Let the rest of my life be one
long act of expiation, one dark night of penitential prayer."
"My dear Claude, my son, all shall be done for you. The path of peace
shall be made smooth; but this time there must be no turning back."
"To what should I come back? The light of my life has gone out."
EPILOGUE
A month later, when Christmas was over, and the people who had done
with their guns, and did not mean hunting, were making a little season
in London on their way to Egypt or the Riviera, Lady Susan Amphlett as
Chorus was in her best form at cosy dinners.
"_Now_ will you believe that Claude Rutherford was a devoted husband,
and that he broke his heart when his wife died?" she asked triumphantly.
"I believe that he was nearly as much of a crank as his pretty wife.
She was a disciple of Francis Symeon, and he was under Father Hammond's
thumb. The dark room in the Albany, or a cell in La Trappe! There's not
much difference."
"From a racing stable to a cloister is a bit of a leap in the dark."
"Claude was always a bold rider. I've seen him skylarking over a hedge,
on his way home, without knowing where he was to land."
"I think he is rather lucky to land in a cloister," said the lady who
had refused to tell people her theory of the Provana murder. "But I
wonder what they think of it all in Scotland Yard!"
THE END
_Printed at The Chapel River Press, Kingston, Surrey._
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