THE ANONYMOUS LETTER.
Although the month was June and the evening warm, Master
Blanchminster sat huddled in his armchair before a bright fire.
A table stood at his elbow, with some books upon it, his untasted
glass of wine, and half a dozen letters--his evening's post.
But the Master leaned forward, spreading his delicate fingers to the
warmth and, between them, gazing into the core of the blaze.
The butler ushered in Brother Copas and withdrew, after a glance at
the lights. Two wax candles burned upon the writing-table in the
oriel, and on the side-table an electric lamp shaded with green silk
faintly silhouetted the Master's features. Brother Copas, standing a
little within the doorway, remarked to himself that the old gentleman
had aged of late.
"Ah, Brother Copas? Yes, I sent for you," said the Master, rousing
himself as if from a brown study. "Be seated, please."
He pointed to a chair on the opposite side of the hearth; and Brother
Copas, seating himself with a bow, spread the worn skirt of his
Beauchamp robe, and arranged its folds over his knees. The firelight
sparkled upon the Beauchamp rose on his breast, and seemed to hold
the Master's eye as he looked up after a pause.
"You guess, no doubt, why I sent for you?"
Brother Copas inclined his head.
"It concerns the Petition which Brother Warboise presented to the
Bishop last Monday. I am not complaining just now of his fashion of
procedure, which I may hazard was not of your suggesting."
"It was not, Master. I may say so much, having warned him that I
should say it if questioned."
"Yet you wrote out and signed the Petition, and, if I may hazard
again, composed it?"
"I did."
"I have," said Master Blanchminster, studying the back of his hands
as he held his palms to the fire, "no right to force any man's
conscience. But it seemed to me, if I may say so, that while all
were forcibly put, certain of your arguments ignored--or, let me
rather say, passed over--points which must have occurred to a man of
your learning. Am I mistaken?"
"You understand, Master," said Brother Copas, slightly embarrassed,
and slightly the more embarrassed because the Master, after asking
the question, seemed inclined to relapse into his own thoughts,
"the Petition was not mine only. I had to compose it for all the
signatories; and that, in any public business, involves striking a
mean."
"I understand even more," said the Master, rousing himself, and
reaching for a copy of the Petition, which lay among his papers.
"I understand that I have no right to cross-question a man on his
share in a document which six or eight others have signed.
Shall it be further understood"--he looked up with a quick smile of
goodness, whereat Brother Copas felt ashamed--"that I sent for you as
a friend, and that you may speak frankly, if you will so honour me,
without fear of my remembering a word to your inconvenience?"
"And since you so honour me, Master," said Brother Copas, "I am ready
to answer all you ask."
"Well, then, I have read with particular interest, what you have to
say here about the practice of Confession. (This, by the way, is a
typed copy, with which the Bishop has been kind enough to supply me.)
You have, I assume, no belief in it or in the efficacy of the
Absolution that follows it."
The Master, searching for a paragraph, did not perceive that Brother
Copas flushed slightly.
"And," he continued, as he found the passage and laid his finger on
it, "although you set out your arguments with point--with fairness,
too, let me add--I am perhaps not very far wrong in guessing that you
have for Confession an instinctive dislike which to your own mind
means more than any argument you use."
The Master looked up with a smile; but by this time Brother Copas's
flush had faded.
"You may say that, Master, of the whole document. I am an old man--
far too old to have my beliefs and disbeliefs quickened by argument.
They have long since hardened into prejudices; and, speaking
generally, I have a prejudice against this setting of old men by the
ears with a lot of Neo-Catholic stuff which irritates half of us
while all are equally past being provoked to any vital good."
The Master sighed, for he understood.
"I, too, am old," he answered, "older even than you; and as death
draws nearer I incline with you, to believe that the fewer our words
on these questions that separate us the better. (There's a fine
passage to that effect in one of Jowett's Introductions, you may
remember--the _Phaedo_, I think.) Least said is soonest mended, and
good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than
they know. Since we are opening our minds a little beyond our wont,
let me tell you exactly what is my own prejudice, as you would call
it. To me Confession has been a matter of happy experience--I am
speaking now of younger days, at Cuddesdon--"
"Ah!" breathed Copas.
"And the desire to offer to others what has been a great blessing to
myself, has at times been very strong. But I recognised that the
general English mind--yes, I'll grant you, the general _healthy_
English mind--had its prejudice too; a prejudice so sturdy against
Confession, that it seemed to me I should alienate more souls than I
attracted and breed more ill-temper than charity to cover it.
So--weakly perhaps--I never spoke of it in sermons, and by
consequence no Brother of St. Hospital has ever sought from me that
comfort which my conscience all the while would have approved of
giving."
Brother Copas bowed his head for sign that he understood.
"But--excuse me, Master--you say that you found profit in Confession
at Cuddesdon; that is, when I dare say your manhood was young and in
ferment. Be it granted that just at such a crisis, Confession may be
salutary. Have you found it profitable in later life?"
"I cannot," the Master answered, "honestly say more than that no
doubt of it has ever occurred to me, and for the simple reason that I
have not tried. But I see at what you are driving--that we of St.
Hospital are too old to taste its benefit? . . . Yet I should have
thought that even in age it might bring comfort to some; and, if so,
why should the others complain?"
"For the offence it carries as an infraction of the reformed doctrine
under which they supposed themselves to order their lives and
worship. They contend, Master, that they are all members of one
Society; and if the doctrine of that Society be infringed to comfort
A or B, it is to that extent weakened injuriously for C and D, who
have been building their everlasting and only hope on it, and have
grown too old to change."
"But," answered Master Blanchminster, pinning his finger on the
paragraph, "you admit here that even the reformed Church, in the
Order for the Visitation of the Sick, enjoins Confession and
prescribes a form of Absolution. Now if a man be not too old for it
when he is dying, _a fortiori_ he cannot be too old for it at any
previous time."
Brother Copas rubbed his hands together softly, gleefully. He adored
dialectic.
"With your leave, Master," he replied, "dying is a mighty singular
business. The difference between it and growing old cannot be
treated as a mere matter of degree. Now one of the points I make is
that the Church, by expressly allowing Confession on this singular
occasion, while saying nothing about it on any other, thereby
inferentially excludes it on all others--or discountenances it, to
say the least."
"There I join issue with you, maintaining that all such occasions are
covered by the general authority bestowed at Ordination with the
laying-on of hands--'Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven,'
etc. To construe an open exhortation in one of her offices as a
silent denunciation in all the rest seems to me--"
For the next few minutes the pair enjoyed themselves to the top of
their bent; until, as the Master pushed aside some papers on the
table to get at his Prayer Book--to prove that No. XXV of the
Articles of Religion did not by its wording disparage Absolution--his
eye fell on a letter which lay uppermost. He paused midway in a
sentence, picked the thing up and held it for a moment disgustfully
between forefinger and thumb.
"Brother Copas," he said with a change of voice, "we lose ourselves
in logomachy, and I had rather hark back to a word you let drop a
while ago about the Brotherhood. You spoke of 'setting old men by
the ears.' Do you mean it seriously--that our Brethren, just now,
are not dwelling in concord?"
"God bless your innocent old heart!" murmured Brother Copas under his
breath. Aloud he said, "Men of the Brethren's age, Master, are not
always amiable; and the tempers of their womenfolk are sometimes
unlovely. We are, after all, failures in life, and to have lived
night and day beside any one of us can be no joke."
The Master, with his body half-turned towards the reading-lamp, still
held the letter and eyed it at arm's length.
"I observed," he said after a while, "that Brother Bonaday did not
sign your Petition. Yet I had supposed him to be an Evangelical, and
everyone knows you two to be close friends." The Master mused again.
"Pardon me, but he has some reason, of course?"
"He has."
--"Which you are not at liberty to tell me?"
"That is so."
"Ah, well," said the Master, turning and facing about on Brother
Copas with a sudden resolve. "I wonder if--to leave this matter of
the Petition--you can tell me something else concerning your friend;
something which, if you can answer it so as to help him, will also
lift a sad weight off my mind. If you cannot, I shall equally forget
that the question was ever put or the answer withheld. . . . To be
candid, when you were shown in I was sitting here in great distress
of mind."
"Surely not about Bonaday, Master?" said Brother Copas, wondering.
"About Bonaday, yes." The Master inclined his head. "Poison--it has
been running through my thoughts all the while we have been talking.
I suppose I ought not to show you this; the fire is its only proper
receptacle--"
"Poison?" echoed Brother Copas. "And about Bonaday? who, good soul,
never hurt a fly!"
"I rejoice to hear you say it," said the Master, plainly relieved,
and he appeared half-minded to withdraw and pocket the scrap of paper
for which Copas held out a hand. "It is an anonymous letter, and--
er--evidently the product of a foul mind--"
Brother Copas took it and, fumbling for his glasses, gazed
around in search of the handiest light by which to read it.
Master Blanchminster hurried to catch up the electric lamp and set it
on the mantel-shelf above his shoulder. Its coil of silk-braided
wire dragging across the papers on the table, one or two dropped on
the floor; and whilst the Master stooped to collect them Brother
Copas read the letter, first noting at a glance that the paper was
cheap and the handwriting, though fairly legible, at once uneducated
and painfully disguised.
It ran--
"Master,--This is to warn you that you are too kind and anyone
can take you in. It wasn't enough Bonaday should get the best
rooms in S. Hospital but now you give him leave for this child
which every one in S. Hospital knows is a bastard. If you want
to find the mother, no need to go far. Why is Nurse B--hanging
about his rooms now. Which they didn't carry it so far before,
but they was acquainted years ago, as is common talk.
God knows my reasons for writing this much are honest, but I
hate to see your goodness put upon, and a scandal which the
whole S. Hospital feels bitter about--such letchery and
wickedness in our midst, and nobody knowing how to put a stop to
it all.
"Yours obdtly.,
"A Well Wisher."
"The handwriting," said Brother Copas, "is a woman's, though
disguised."
The Master, erect again, having collected his papers, eyed Brother
Copas as if surprised by his calm tone.
"You make nothing of it, then?"
"P'st!"
"I--I was hoping so." The Master's voice was tremulous, apologetic.
"It came by this evening's post, not half an hour ago. . . . I am not
used to receive such things: yet I know what ought to be done with
them--toss them into the fire at once and dismiss them from your
mind. I make no doubt I should have burnt it within another ten
minutes: as for cleansing one's mind of it so quickly, that must be a
counsel of perfection. But you were shown in, and I--I made certain
that you could contradict this disgraceful report and set my mind at
rest. Forgive me."
"Ah, Master"--Brother Copas glanced up with a quick smile--
"it almost looks as if you were right after all, and one is never too
old to confess!" He bent and held the edge of the paper close to the
blaze. "May I burn it?"
"By all means."
"Nay, then, I won't. But since you have freely parted with it, may I
keep it? . . . I have had some little experience with manuscripts,
and it is just possible I may trace this to the writer--who is
assuredly a woman," added Brother Copas, studying the letter again.
"You have my leave to do so."
"And you ask no further question?"
The Master hesitated. At length he said firmly--
"None. I have no right. How can so foul a thing confer any right?"
Brother Copas was silent for a space.
"Nay, that is true, Master; it cannot. . . . Nevertheless, I will
answer what was in your mind to ask. When I came into the room you
were pondering this letter. The thought of it--pah!--mixed itself up
with a thought of the appointment you had set for me--with the
Petition; and the two harked back together upon a question you put to
me just now. 'Why was not Brother Bonaday among the signatories?'
Between them they turned that question into a suspicion. Guilty men
are seldom bold: as the Scots say, 'Riven breeks sit still.' . . .
Was not this, or something like it, in your mind, sir?"
"I confess that it was."
"Why then, Master, I too will confess--I that came to you to denounce
the practice. Of what this letter hints Bonaday is innocent as--as
you are. He approved of the Petition and was on the point of signing
it; but he desired your good leave to make a home for his child.
Between parent and Protestant my friend was torn, and moreover
between conscience and loyalty. He could not sue for this favour
from you, his soul weighted with an intention to go straightway and
do what must offend you."
Master Blanchminster faced Brother Copas squarely, standing of a
sudden erect. It seemed to add inches to his stature.
"Had he so poor a trust in me, after these years?"
"No, Master." Brother Copas bent his head. "That is where I come in.
All this is but preparatory. . . . I am a fraud--as little Protestant
as Catholic. I found my friend in straits, and made a bargain with
those who were pressing him--"
"Do I understand, Brother Copas, that this Petition--of which all the
strength lies in its scholarship and wording--is yours, and that on
these terms only you have given me so much pain?"
"You may put it so, Master, and I can say no more than 'yes'--though
I might yet plead that something is wrong with St. Hospital, and--"
"Something is very wrong with St. Hospital," interrupted the Master
gravely. "This letter--if it come from within our walls--But I after
all, as its Master, am ultimately to blame." He paused for a moment
and looked up with a sudden winning smile. "We have both confessed
some sins. Shall we say a prayer together, Brother?"
The two old men knelt by the hearth there. Together in silence they
bowed their heads.