It was the morning of Trinity Sunday, and Worcester Cathedral was
crowded by a congregation which, if it had been an audience in an
unconsecrated building, could have been justly described as brilliant.
Trinity Sunday is usually what may, without irreverence, be called more
or less of a show Sunday in all churches. To-day all the clerical light
and learning of the diocese was gathered together in the grand old
Cathedral. The various portions of the service were to be conducted by
clergy of high rank and notable social position. No one under the rank
of a Canon, at least, would take any part in the proceedings.
The first lesson would be read by the Vicar of Bedminster, who was also
a Canon of the Cathedral, and the second by Canon Thornton-Moore, whose
acquaintance the reader has already made at Garthorne Abbey. Both of
them were men of dignified presence, and both possessed good voices and
a careful elocutionary training.
The Epistle and Gospel would be read by the Archdeacon and the Dean.
Organ and choir were tuned to a perfection of harmony. And finally the
Bishop would preach. After that would come the administration of the
Sacrament to those who had not received it at the early service, for
Trinity Sunday is accredited one of those three days on which, at least,
the faithful member of the Anglican Church shall communicate. Then, the
communion over, the Bishop would hold an Ordination, in consideration of
which he had thoughtfully and thankfully curtailed his eloquence in the
pulpit.
At this ordination Mark Ernshaw, who had already won fame both as an
earnest and utterly self-sacrificing missionary, in the moral and
spiritual wilds of East and South London, and also as a preacher who
could fill any West End Church to suffocation, was to be admitted to
full orders in company with his friend, Vane Maxwell, who was so far
unknown to fame save for the fact that he was locally known as one of
the dwellers in the Retreat among the hills, and, therefore, as one who
had sat at the feet of the far-famed Father Philip, who himself had
to-day made one of his rare appearances in the world, and was occupying
one of the Canons' stalls in the chancel.
All the Clergy at the Retreat were popularly supposed to have "a past"
of some sort, and as Vane had come from there and was also credited with
being young and exceedingly good-looking--some of the lady visitors to
the Retreat had described him as possessing "an almost saintlike beauty,
my dear"--he also was a focus of interest. Moreover, he was known to
have taken a brilliant degree at Oxford, and to have had equally
brilliant worldly prospects which he had suddenly and unaccountably
relinquished to go into the Church.
Thus it came to pass that a very different and much more numerous
congregation witnessed this ceremonial than the one which had taken
place at the same altar rails a little more than a twelvemonth before.
Of course, all the party from the Abbey were present, including Sir
Reginald, who had come down for a few days from town. Enid and her
husband had communicated. It was their first communion since their
marriage. Then they had gone back to their places to await the
ordination.
In one of the front rows of the transept seats there was a tall,
well-dressed girl, very pretty, with dark, deep, serious eyes which, in
the intervals of the service she had several times raised and turned on
Enid and her husband, who were sitting on the same side towards the
front, in the body of the Cathedral. She was the very last person in the
world, saving only, perhaps, Carol herself, whom Garthorne would have
wished to see just then and there, and as soon as he had made sure that
Dora Murray really was sitting within a few yards of him he began to be
haunted by ugly fears of blackmail and exposure--which showed how very
little he had learnt of Dora's character during the time that Carol had
shared the flat with her.
But Dora's thoughts were very different, for they were all of fear,
mingled with something like horror. She looked at the sweet-faced girl
sitting beside Reginald Garthorne, and thought of the ruin and
desolation that would fall upon her young life, with all its brilliant
outward promise, if she only knew what she could have told her. She
looked at her husband and wondered what all these good people--most of
whom would have given almost anything for an invitation to his
home--what these grave-faced, decorous clergy, too, would think if they
could see him as she had seen him only a few months before. There was
Sir Arthur Maxwell, too, sitting a little farther on, and beside him Sir
Godfrey and Lady Raleigh, though, of course, she did not know them, but
she guessed who they were, and close to Sir Arthur sat Sir Reginald, his
host for the time being.
The whole of the Abbey party had communicated together. What would
happen if she were to go to Sir Arthur after the service, and tell him
what Carol had told her, if he were to learn that he had been kneeling
at the altar rails beside the betrayer of his wife and the dishonourer
of his name?
When she had seen Sir Reginald rise from his seat and go with the rest
of the party across the centre transept to the chancel, she needed all
her self-control to shut her teeth and clench her hands and prevent
herself from leaving her seat and accusing him of his infamy before
clergy and congregation. She thought thankfully how good a thing it was
that Carol, with her fierce impetuosity and sense of bitter wrong, was
not there too. There was no telling what disaster might have happened,
how many lives might have been wrecked by the words which she might have
flung out at him, red-hot from her angry heart.
In her way Dora was a really religious girl, as many of her class are.
So religious, indeed, that she would not have dared to have approached
the altar herself; because she knew that for her, wedded as she was to
the pleasant careless life she led, repentance and reform were quite out
of the question.
She saw no incongruity at all in this. She went to church regularly in
London, offered up as simple and as earnest prayers as anyone; lifted up
her beautiful voice in the hymns and psalms and responses in honest
forgetfulness of the things of yesterday and to-morrow, and, for the
time being at least, took the lessons of the sermon to heart with a
simple faith which many of her respectable sisters in the congregation
were far from feeling.
In short, though the circumstances were different, she was very much in
the position of the average respectable, well-to-do church-going
Christian who will strive all the week, often by quite questionable
methods, to lay up for himself and his wife and family treasures upon
earth, and then on Sunday go to church and listen with the most perfect
honesty and the most undisturbed equanimity to the reading of the Sermon
on the Mount.
But when she saw Sir Reginald go with his son and his daughter-in-law,
with her parents and Vane's father up through the chancel where Vane was
sitting, her heart turned sick in her breast. The sacrilege, the
blasphemy of it all seemed horrible beyond belief. Again and again the
words rose to her lips. Again and again an almost irresistible impulse
impelled her to get up, and she was only saved from doing what all that
was best in her nature urged her to do, by the knowledge that, after
all, she might only be expelled from the Cathedral by the Vergers, and
perhaps prosecuted afterwards for brawling. Then her real story would
come out.
She was visiting her parents who lived in Worcester, and who believed
that she was conducting a little millinery business in London. She had
great natural skill in designing head-gear--her own hat, for instance,
had been gazed on by many an envious eye since the service began--and
she would have bitten her tongue through, rather than say a word which
would have undeceived them. And so for this reason as well she held her
peace.
Then she had heard the sonorous voice of the officiating priest rolling
down the chancel:
"Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in
love and charity with your neighbours and intend to lead a new
life, following the commandments of God and walking from henceforth
in His holy way, draw near with faith and take this Holy Sacrament
to your comfort."
Then came the general confession, and as she followed it in her
prayer-book she thought of that unconfessed, though, perhaps, not
unrepented sin of which she alone, save Sir Reginald, in all that great
congregation knew. How could this man kneel there and say these solemn
words, before he had confessed his sin to the man he had wronged, to the
husband from whom he had stolen a wife, to the son he had deprived of a
mother? What horrible mockery and blasphemy it all was! Surely some day
some terrible retribution must fall on him for this.
After the Eucharist followed, as usual on such occasions, the Ordination
Service. She had never seen Vane before, but when some of the
congregation had left after the Communion Service, she left her seat and
took a vacant one in front of the chancel, and then, even at some
distance, she recognised him immediately by his likeness to Carol. It
seemed to her that she had never seen anything so beautiful in human
shape when he rose in his surplice and stole and hood to take his place
before the Bishop at the altar-rail. And yet how different must her
thoughts have been from Enid's, as they both looked upon the kneeling
figure and listened to the words which were the actual fulfilment of the
vow that he had taken to take up his cross and follow Him who said:
"Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot
be my disciple."
Then, in due course, came the fateful words, more full of fate, so far
as they concerned Vane, than any who knew him in the congregation had
any idea of.
"Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the
Church of God, now committed unto thee by the Imposition of our hands
from God. Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins
thou dost retain they are retained. And be thou a faithful dispenser of
the word of God and of his Holy Sacraments; in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen!"
"Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou
dost retain, they are retained!"
Saving only Vane himself, these words had a deeper meaning for Dora, the
Magdalen, the sinner, and the outcast, than they had for anyone else in
the congregation, and in one sense they meant even more to her than they
could do to him. When he rose from his knees before the altar rails, he
would rise invested, as she believed, by the authority of God through
the Church, with a power infinitely greater than that of any earthly
judge. It was his to forgive or retain, his to pardon or to damn. That,
to her simple reasoning, was the absolute meaning of the words as the
Bishop had spoken them.
Some day it might happen that Carol would be confronted with the man
whom she believed to be her father. What if she were to bring Vane face
to face with him and he knew him for what he was, what would he do, not
as man, but as priest--forgive or retain, absolve or damn?
When the ordination service was over and the congregation was moving out
of the Cathedral, Sir Arthur caught sight of Dora for the first time.
They were only a few feet apart, and recognition was inevitable. She
looked at him as though she had never seen him before, although she had
been present at more than one interview between him and Carol at
Melville Gardens, but Sir Arthur at once edged his way towards her,
shook hands in that decorous fashion which is usual among departing
congregations, and said, in an equally decorous whisper:
"Good morning, Miss Murray! I hope you have not come here by accident,
and that you will be able to give me some news of Carol. We have looked
for you everywhere."
"Except perhaps in the right place," she murmured, putting her hand into
his, "and if you had found us I don't think it would have been of any
use. Carol's mind was quite made up. My address is 15, Stonebridge
Street, if you wish to write to me. Good morning."
And then they parted, he to go his way and she to go hers, and each with
an infinite pity for the other, and yet with what different reasons? It
was only a chance meeting, the accidental crossing of two widely
diverging life-paths; only one of those instances in which romance
delights to mock the commonplace, and yet how much it meant--and how
much might it mean when the future had become the present.
Fortunately, Garthorne and Enid had been pressing on in front, and so he
had not noticed the meeting between Sir Arthur and Dora, whereby the
second possible catastrophe of the day was averted.
Sir Arthur was one of the house-party at the Abbey, for he and Sir
Reginald had been to a certain extent colleagues in India, and had kept
up their acquaintance, and now that Sir Reginald's son had married the
girl whom Sir Arthur had always looked upon as a prospective
daughter-in-law, the intimacy had become somewhat closer. Sir Arthur had
said frankly at the first that he thought Vane had done an exceedingly
foolish thing; but since he had done it and meant to stick to it, there
was an end of the matter, and if Vane couldn't or wouldn't marry Enid,
he would, after all, rather see her the wife of his old friend's son
than anybody else's. He had, therefore, willingly accepted Sir
Reginald's invitation to spend a few days at the Abbey and witness his
son's admission to the full orders of the priesthood.
Vane and Ernshaw, after exchanging greetings and receiving
congratulations, declined Sir Reginald's invitation to dine and sleep at
the Abbey, and went straight back to the Retreat with Father Philip.
It happened that, somewhat late that night after their guests had gone
to bed, Reginald Garthorne had a couple of rather important letters to
write, and sat up to get them finished. When he had sealed and stamped
them, he took them to the post-box in the hall. The postman's lock-up
bag was standing on the hall table, and, as he knew there wouldn't be
any more letters that night, he thought he might as well put what there
were there into the bag and lock it with his own key. He took them out
in a handful, but before he could put them into the bag they slipped and
scattered on to the table. He bent down to gather them up, and there,
right under his eyes, was an envelope addressed in Sir Arthur Maxwell's
handwriting to Miss Dora Murray, 15 Stonebridge Street, Worcester. He
would have given a thousand pounds to know what that thin paper cover
concealed. The thought half entered his mind to take it away and steam
it, read the letter, and then put it back again; but he was not without
his own notions of honour, and he dismissed the thought before it was
fully formed. He contented himself with taking out his pencil and
copying the address, and as he put the letters into the bag and locked
it he said to himself:
"Well, I was wondering at service what in the name of all that's unlucky
brought that girl down here just now, and I suppose I shall have to find
out. But what the deuce does the old man want writing to her? A nice
thing if they were to discover the lost Miss Carol and present her to
the world as Vane's half-sister, and then the rest of the story came
out. What an almighty fool I was to do that. If I'd only known that Enid
really would have me--but it's no use grizzling over that. I shall have
to find out what that young woman wants down in this part of the world,
and why Sir Arthur should be writing to her, that's quite certain."