He paused. The cardinal evaded his glance; and intently gazed at the under-side of well-manicured pink-onyx finger-nails.
“And about your Vocation, Mr. Rose. What is your present opinion?”
George wrenched himself from retrospection. “My opinion, Eminency, as I already have had the honour of telling you, is the same as it always has been.”
“That is to say?”
“That I have a Divine Vocation to the Priesthood.”
“You persist?”
“Eminency, I am not one of your low Erse or pseudo Gaels, flippertigibbets of frothy flighty fervour, whom you can blow hither and thither with a sixpence for a fan. Thank The Lord I’m English, born under Cancer, tenacious, slow and sure. Naturally I persist.”
Cardinalitial eyebrows re-ascended. “The man, to whom Divine Providence vouchsafes a Vocation, is bound to prosecute it.”
“I am prosecuting it. I never for one moment have ceased from prosecuting it.”
“But now you have attained a position as an author.”
“Yes; in the teeth of you all; and no thanks to anyone but myself. However that is only the means to an end.”
“In what way?”
“In this way. When I shall have earned enough to pay certain debts, which I incurred on the strength of my faith in the honour of a parcel of archiepiscopal and episcopal and clerical sharpers, and also a sum sufficient to produce a small and certain annuity, then I shall go straight to Rome and square the rector of St. Andrew’s College.”
“Sh-h!” the bishop sibilated. The cardinal threw up delicate hands.
“Yrmnts mustn’t be offended by Mr. Rose’s satirical way of putting it,” the bishop hastily put in. “He’s a regular phrase-maker. It’s his trade, you know. But at the bottom of his good heart I’m sure he means nothing but what is right and proper. And, George, you’re not the man to smite the fallen. Monsignor Cateran was deposed seven years ago and more.”
“I beg Your Eminency’s pardon if I have spoken inurbanely; and I thank Your Lordship for interpreting me so generously. I didn’t know that Cateran had come to his Cannae. Really I’m sorry: but, I’ve been stabbed and stung so many years that, now I am able to retaliate, I am as touchy as a hornet with a brank-new sting. I can’t help it. I seem to take an impish delight in making my brother-Catholics, especially clerks, smart and wince and squirm as I myself have squirmed and winced and smarted. I’m sorry. I simply meant to say that, when I have made myself free and independent, then I will try again to give you evidence of my Vocation.”
“Have you approached your diocesan recently?” the cardinal inquired.
“His Grace died soon after my expulsion from St. Andrew’s College. I approached his successor, who refused to hear me; and is dead. I never have approached the present archbishop, beyond giving him notice of my existence and persistence; for I certainly will not come before him with chains on my hands.”
“Chains?”
“Debts.”
“Have you any special reason for belonging to the archdiocese of Agneda?”
“There is a certain fascination in the idea of administering to a horde of unspeakable barbarians, ‘the horrible and ultimate Britons, ferocious to strangers.’ Otherwise I have no special reason. I had no choice. I happen to have been made an ecclesiastical subject of Agneda at the instance of Mr. George Semphill and at the invitation of the late Archbishop Smithson. That is all.”
“Would you be inclined to offer your services to another bishop now?”
“Eminency, ‘it is not I who have lost the Athenians: it is the Athenians who have lost me.’ I would say that in Greek if I thought you would understand me. When the Athenians want me, they will not have much difficulty in finding me. But to tell you the truth, I find these bishop-johnnies excessively tiresome. As I said just now, when Agneda silently relieved himself of his obligations to me, I offered my services to half-a-dozen of them, more or less, plainly telling them my history and my circumstances. What a fool they must have thought me,—or what a brazen and dangerous scoundrel! Yes, I do believe they thought me that. I was astonishingly unsophisticate then. I didn’t know a tithe of what I know now; and I solemnly assever that I believe those owl-like hierarchs to have been completely flabbergasted because I neither whimpered penitence, nor whined for mercy, but actually had the effrontery to tell them the blind and naked truth about myself. Truth nude and unadorned, is such a rare commodity among Catholics, as you know, and especially among the clergy; and I suppose, as long as we continue to draw the majority of our spiritual pastors from the hooligan class, from the scum of the gutter, that the man who tells the truth in his own despite always emphatically will be condemned as mad, or bad, or both.”
“Really, Mr. Rose!” the cardinal interjected.
“Yes, Eminency: we teach little children that there are three kinds of lies; and that the Officiose Lie, which is told to excuse oneself or another—the meanest lie of the lot, I say—is only a Venial Sin. It’s in the catechism. Well, naturally enough the miserable little wretches, who can’t possibly grasp the subtilty of a distinguo, put undue importance on that abominable world ‘only’; and they grow up as the most despicable of all liars. Ouf! I learned all this from a thin thing named Danielson, just after my return to the faith of my forefathers. He lied to me. In my innocence I took his word. Then I found him out; and preached on the enormity of his crime. ‘Well, sir,’ says he as bold as brass, ‘it’s only a Venial Sin!’ ”
“George, you’re beside the point,” the bishop said.
“His Eminency will indulge me. What was I saying? Oh,—that I had had enough of being rebuffed by bishops. I came to that conclusion when His Lordship of Chadsee blandly told me that I never would get a bishop to accept my services as long as I continued to tell the truth about my experiences. I stopped competing for rebuffs then. I do not propose to begin again until I am the possessor of a cheque-book.”
The cardinal was gazing through the leaves of an india-rubber plant out of the window; his magnificent eyes were drained of all expression. When the nervose deliberately-hardened and pathetic voice of the speaker ceased, he brought the argument to a focus with these words, “George Arthur Rose, I summon you to offer yourself to me.”
“I am not ready to offer myself to Your Eminency.”
“Not ready?”
“I hoped that I had made it clear to you that, in regard to my Vocation, I am ‘marking time,’ until I shall have earned enough to pay my debts incurred on the strength of my faith in the honour of a parcel of archiepiscopal and episcopal and clerical sharpers, and also a sum sufficient to produce me a small and certain annuity——”
“You keep harping upon that string,” the cardinal complained.
“It is the only string which you have left unbroken on my lute.”
“I see you are a very sensitive subject, Mr. Rose. I think that long brooding over your wrongs has fixed in you some such pagan and erroneous idea as that which Juvenal expresses in the verse where he says that poverty makes a man ridiculous.”
“Nothing of the kind,” George retorted with all his claws out. “On the contrary, it is I—the creature of you, my Lord Cardinal, and your Catholics—who make Holy Poverty look ridiculous!”
“A clever paradox!” The cardinal let a tinge of his normal sneer affect his voice.
“Not even a paradox. A poor thing: but mine own,” George flung in, glaring through his great-great-grandfather’s silver spectacles which he used indoors.
“Well, well: the money-question need not trouble you,” said the cardinal, turning again to the window. Indifference was his pose.
“But it does trouble me. It vitally troubles me. And your amazing summons troubles me as well—now. Why do you come to me after all these years?”
“Precisely, Mr. Rose, after all these years, as you say. It has been suggested to me, and I am bound to say that I agree with the suggestion, that we ought to take your singular persistency during all th
ese years—how many years?”
“Say twenty.”
“That we must take your singular persistency during twenty years as a proof of the genuineness of your Vocation.”
George turned his face to the little yellow cat, who had climbed to and was nestling on his shoulder.
“And therefore,” the cardinal continued, “I am here to-day to summon you to accept Holy Order with no delay beyond the canonical intervals.”
“I will respond to that summons within two years.”
“Within two years? Life is uncertain, Mr. Rose. We who are here to-day may be in our graves by then. I myself am an old man.”
“I know. Your Eminency is an old man. I, by the grace of God, the virtue of my ancestors, and my own attention to my physique, am still a young man; and younger by far than my years. I have not been preserved in the vigour and freshness of youth by miracle after miracle during twenty years for nothing. And, when I shall have published three more books, I will respond to your summons. Not till then.”
“I told you that the money-question need not hinder you.”
“Yes, Eminency; and my late diocesan said the same thing several years ago.”
“You are suspicious, Mr. Rose.”
“I have reason to be suspicacious, Eminency.”
The cardinal threw up his hands. The gesture wedded irritation to despair. “You doubt me?” he all but gasped.
“I trusted Your Eminency in 1894; and——”
The bishop intervened: for cardinalitial human nature burst out in vermilion flames.
“George,” he said, “I am witness of Zmnts’s words.”
“What’s the good of that? Suppose that I take His Eminency’s word! Suppose that in a couple of months he alters his mind, determines to mistake the large for the great and to perpetrate another pea-soup-and-streaky-bacon-coloured caricature of an electric-light-station! What then would be my remedy? Where would be my contract again? And could I hale a prince of the church before a secular tribunal? Would I? Could I subpoena Your Lordship to testify against your Metropolitan and Provincial? Would I? Would you? My Lord Cardinal, I must speak, and you must hear me, as man to man. You are offering me Holy Orders on good grounds, on right and legitimate grounds, on grounds which I knew would be conceded sooner or later. I thank God for conceding them now. . . . You also are offering something in the shape of money.” In his agitation, he suddenly rose, to Flavio’s supreme discomfiture; and began to roll a cigarette from dottels in a tray on the mantelpiece. “If I correctly interpret you, you are offering to me, who will be no man’s pensioner, who will accept no man’s gifts, a gift, a pension——”
“No,” the cardinal very mildly interjected: “but restitution.”
“Oh!” George ejaculated, suddenly sitting down, and staring like the martyr who, while yet the pagan pincers were at work upon his tenderest internals, beheld the angel-bearers of his amaranthine coronal.
“Amends and restitution,” the cardinal repeated.
“What am I to say?” George addressed his cat and the bishop.
“You are simply to say in what form you will accept this act of justice from us,” the cardinal responded, taking the question to himself.
“Oh, I must have time to think. You must afford me time to think.”
“No, George,” said the bishop: “take no time at all. Speak your mind now. Do make an effort to believe that we are sincerely in earnest; and that in this matter we are in your hands. I may say that, Yrmnts?” he inquired.
“Certainly: we place ourselves in Mr. Rose’s hands—unreservedly—ha!” the cardinal affirmed, and gasped with the exertion.
George concentrated his faculties; and recited, rather than spoke, demurely and deliberately and dynamically. “I must have a written expression of regret for the wrongs which have been done to me both by Your Eminency and by others who have followed your advice, command, or example.”
“It is here,” the cardinal said, taking a folded paper from the fascicule of his breviary. “We knew that you would want that. I may point out that I have written in my own name, and also as the mouthpiece of the Catholic body.”
George took the paper and carefully read it two or three times, with some flickering of his thin fastidious lips. It certainly was very handsome. Then he said, “I thank Your Eminency and my brother-Catholics,” and put the document in the fire, where in a moment it was burned to ash.
“Man alive!” cried the bishop.
“I do not care to preserve a record of my superiors’ humiliation,” said George, again in his didactic recitative.
“I see that Mr. Rose knows how to behave nobly, as you said, Frank,” the cardinal commented.
“Only now and then, Eminency. One cannot be always posing. But I long ago had arranged to do that, if you ever should give me the opportunity. And now,” he paused—and continued, “you concede my facts?”
“We may not deny them, Mr. Rose.”
“Then, now that I in my turn have placed myself in your hands” (again he was reciting), “I must have a sum of money”—(that paradoxical “must” was quite in his best manner)—“I must have a sum of money equal to the value of all the work which I have done since 1892, and of which I have been—for which I have not been paid. I must have five thousand pounds.”
“And the amount of your debts, and a solatium for the sufferings——”
“You no more can solace me for my sufferings than you can revest me with ability to love my neighbour. The paltry amount of my debts concerns me and my creditors, and no one else. If I had been paid for my work I should have had no debts. When I am paid, I shall pay.”
“The five thousand pounds are yours, Mr. Rose.”
“But who is being robbed——”
“My dear child!” from the cardinal; and “George!” from the bishop.
“Robbed, Eminency. Don’t we all know the Catholic manner of robbing Peter to pay Paul? I repeat, who is being robbed that I may be paid? For I refuse to touch a farthing diverted from religious funds, or extracted from the innocuous devout.”
“You need not be alarmed on that score. Your history is well-known to many of us, as you know: latterly it has deeply concerned some of us, as perhaps you do not know. And one who used to call himself your friend who—ha—promised never to let you sink—and let you sink,—one who acquiesced when others wronged you, has now been moved to place ten thousand pounds at my disposal, in retribution, as a sort of sin-offering. I intend to use it for your rehabilitation, Mr. Rose,—well then for your enfranchisement. Now that we understand each other, I shall open an account—have you a banking account though?—very good: I will open an account in your name at Coutts’s on my way back to Pimlico.”
“I must know the name of that penitent sinner: for quite a score have said as much as Your Eminency has quoted.”
“Edward Lancaster.”
“I might have guessed it. Well, he never will miss it—it’s just a drop of his ocean—I think I can do as much with it as he can.—Eminency, give him my love and say that I will take five thousand pounds: not more. The rest—oh, I know: I hand it to Your Eminency to give to converted clergymen who are harassed with wives, or to a sensible secular home for working boys, or to the Bishop of Caerleon for his dreadful diocese. Yes, divide it between them.”
The prelates stood up to go. George kneeled; and received benedictions.
“We shall see you at Archbishop’s House, Mr. Rose,” said the cardinal on the doorstep.
“If Your Eminency will telegraph to Agneda at once, you will be able to get my dimissorials to your archdiocese by to-morrow morning’s post. I will be at Archbishop’s House at half-past seven to confess to the Bishop of Caerleon. Your Eminency says Mass at eight, and will admit me to Holy Communion. At half-past eight the post will be in; and you will give me the four minor orders. Then—well, then, Eminency” (with a dear smile.) “You see I am not anxious for delay now. And, meanwhile, I will go and have a Turkish Bath, an
d buy a Roman collar, and think myself back into my new—no—my old life.”
* * * * *
“What does Yrmnts make of him?” the bishop inquired as the shabby brougham moved away.
“God knows! God only knows!” the cardinal responded. “I hope—— Well we’ve done what we set out to do: haven’t we? What a most extraordinary, what a most incomprehensible creature to be sure! I don’t of course like his paganism, nor his flippancy, nor his slang, nor his readiness to dictate; and he is certainly sadly lacking in humility. He treated both of us with scant respect, you must admit, Frank. What was it he called us—ha—‘bishop-johnnies’—now you can’t defend that. And ‘owl-like hierarchs’ too!”
“Indeed no. I believe he hasn’t a scrap of reverence for any of us. After all I don’t exactly see that we can expect it. But it may come in time.”
“Do you really think so?” said the cardinal; and the four eyes in the carriage turned together, met, and struck the spark of a recondite and mutual smile.
“For my part,” the younger prelate continued, “I’m going to try to make amends for the immense wrong I did him by neglecting him. I can’t get over the feeling of distrust I have of him yet. But I confess I’m strangely drawn to him. It is such a treat to come across a man who’s not above treating a bishop as his equal.”
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