Here he turned towards the font, which was a very ancient one, circular in shape and supported on a single column in the center, with small auxiliary corner columns round it bearing curious devices of sculptured animals and flowers.
“This is good!” he said— “This is of the old faith time! And it recalls to me a leetle story of baptism. In the place where I have been in Warwickshire, there came to me one poor woman very brown and dirty — a geep-sy — with a very small girl bébé. She says to me: ‘I have no money — I am poor geep-sy — will you give the name to my leetle bébé?’ I ask her if she is Catholique and she say yes. So I take the leetle bébé and I baptize it with so very curious name—”
He paused reflectively— “Let me see! — yes — Ar — ar — yes! — Arminellia! Imagine! For a geep-sy! Arminellia! C’est drôle! Then the poor geep-sy thank me and beg of me two shillings — she is so poor, she say — but you laugh? Why?”
For Everton’s face expressed the most whimsical merriment, and his blue eyes danced with fun.
“I know that gypsy!” he said— “And I wonder how many times and in how many churches her helpless infant will be baptized! I baptized it myself the other day — gave it the same name — Arminellia — and gave the mother the same requested two shillings! She was a Church of England woman then!”
Their glances met, and they both smiled.
“We are what you English call ‘done’!” said Douay gayly, “But the leetle Arminellia is quite safe! Safe for this world and also for the next. If she go to one gate of Heaven she will find St. Peter — he say—’ Are you Catholique?’
‘Yes,’ she say—’ le père Douay has baptize me true Catholique.’ So she pass St. Peter. If she go to another gate she meet St. Paul. ‘Are you Protestant?’ he say—’ Yes — the clergyman of Shadbrook, Mistaire Everton, has baptize me true Protestant.’- So she pass St. Paul! My friend, we have been careful for Arminellia! Shake hands upon it!”
Everton laughed gently, and entering into the spirit of the thing, clasped Douay’s outstretched hand with ready cordiality.
“After all,” continued Douay— “we are the same poor servants together — trying to perform our Master’s orders without always comprehending them!”
Everton made no reply, and they presently left the church. Douay was interested in everything he saw, — he admired the landscape, now looking fresh and radiant in the unobscured glory of the noon-day sun — he paused to listen to a thrush singing, — and his amiable round face expressed so much contentment, good-humor and affability, that more than once Everton was sorely tempted to trespass against his wife’s injunction and ask his visitor to stay to luncheon, despite the humiliating prospect of cold mutton. But he feared that Azalea might be really put out in her housekeeping arrangements if he did this after the urgent request she had made to him, for even the sweetest of wives may be apt to suffer from a little flurry of temper over unexpected domestic difficulties, just as the prettiest rose may have a crumpled petal. Moved by these considerations he paused at the entrance gate of the Vicarage garden to bid his visitor farewell.
“Are you staying in the village?” he asked.
“Not so very far away,” — replied Douay— “I have an apartment in a cottage on the hill, — near a very big ugly house which they tell me is the house of one Monsieur Minchin, the brewer. Ah, how fortunate it is to brew the beer in England! To make the poor people drunk and to live on the profits! Excellent!”
“I wish I could talk to you about that!” said Everton, with quick earnestness— “I know that drink is the curse of our country, and yet I deny with all my soul that we are an intemperate people! We are not,’ We are by nature a steady, sober, God-fearing people. But we permit ourselves to be duped and cheated. Our easy-going goodnature gives us into the hands of fraudulent scoundrels, and our Government freely licenses the poisoners of our brains and bodies, so that they may continue to poison us for their own advantage and yet go scot free. There is nothing I feel more acutely than the hopeless position of the unhappy wretches who are classed as ‘drunkards.’ They are simply poisoned! — and the drinking of poison sets up a poisonous craving which is fostered — nay pampered — by the very laws of the country. We clergy can do nothing, because there has been so much cant and humbug talked about ‘temperance’ by certain of our cloth who, while preaching against drink, actually invest their savings in brewery and distillery shares, that very naturally the ‘drunkards’ themselves despise such hypocrisy and double-dealing! I say, and I will always maintain, that there would be few ‘drunkards’ if honest liquors were sold to the people instead of noxious drugs.”
Sebastien Douay heard him attentively.
“That is your theory,” — he said— “You may be right. Again — you may be wrong! I know men — and women too — who love poison! It is to them what you call ambrosia. No one can do anything to stop this craving. All the kings — all the popes — all the preaching — all the prayer — no use! No use, my friend!” and he laid one hand kindly on Everton’s arm, “Once upon a time the leetle priest — like myself — could do something. The Church Catholique had its terrors. It could frighten the bad man. Hell on one side — Heaven on the other! Now — all no use! No one believes any more in Hell or Heaven! Each poor ignorant man makes his ‘new theology’ to his own liking. The only God that is served in to-day’s Church, press and politique is — Self!”
His voice quivered — and his features grew dark with a shadow of stern sorrow.
“Mistaire Everton,” he continued, raising his eyes with an almost pathetic wistfulness— “I have know what it is to love my little parish — my small village in France, to which I shall return no more. I loved the men and women — the leetle children, — my heart opened over them like the wings of a bird that would shelter its young. I prayed day and night that I might help to make them as God would have them to be, — the men noble, the women pure, — the maidens innocent, — the children happy! See how my prayer is answered! I am turned away from them altogether — I wander here in England where I am told the Catholique faith will again rule as of old — but I much doubt it! — and maybe they will give me a leetle church presently. But it will not be my home — and they will not be my people. And I have no more hopes of doing good — no, none at all! I will not expect to reform the drunkard — my good sir, that is imposs-eeble! Nor will I expect to make the brewers and the spirit distillers honest men — that is more imposs-eeble still! I have tried many ways of serving the people — all no use! — now I am content to do very little — scarcely nothing at all — I say my prayers — I look at nature — I hear the birds sing — and I have pity — ah, mon Dieu! — what pity I have for every living soul!”
There was something quite thrilling in the intense melancholy of his tone as he spoke — and Everton was strangely moved. —
“Yet we must believe,” — he said, slowly— “that all will be well!”
“Yes — we must believe!” — and Douay’s face brightened once more into a kindly smile— “We must believe — you in your way, and I in mine! And not till some great sorrow breaks our hearts shall we know how much our belief is worth, my friend! Good-by! We must meet again!”
“We must indeed!” replied Everton eagerly— “I shall call and see you—”
“Do! You will always find me in at the hour of the Angelus — for then I say a prayer for my little parish in France, — so far away!”
He smiled again, but there was a suspicious gleam of something like tears in his eyes. Another cordial pressure of Everton’s hand and he had gone, — walking briskly down the road into the village between a double row of leafless elms which made Gothic cathedral arches of their brown branches against the now cloudless blue of the quiet sky. Everton looked after his retreating figure for some minutes, absorbed in thought. A curious sudden sense of desolation oppressed him, — a dreary conviction of the futility of things — of the waste of honest effort; of the vanity and folly of trying to
do good when good was so often swept away and overcome.
“Now there is a man,” — he said to himself, reverting to the disappearing Douay,— “who evidently loved the work he had to do in his own country. He was satisfied with his little parish — he was not for ever asking, as I am, whether a little parish was wide enough for his energies; — he loved his people, and he was no doubt a friend to them — and yet — apparently his efforts are all so much lost time! And I — am I any better than he? Suppose I were to wear out my heart and brain to shreds in trying to purge this one village of its besetting evil, drink — I should never do it — never! I am no worker of miracles, and all the odds are against me. What use am I? Will God ever give sufficient power into my hands to save a single human creature? Almost I doubt it!”
He turned and walked slowly back to the Vicarage, and as he entered the hall, his wife tripped forward to meet him.
“Oh, Dick, what a funny looking little foreigner that man was!” she exclaimed— “I saw him gesticulating beside you in the churchyard. Is he a clergyman?”
“Yes — but not one of our faith,” — Everton replied— “He is a Roman Catholic priest.”
“And whatever is he doing here?” queried Azalea, slipping a coaxing hand through her husband’s arm— “I don’t believe there’s a single Roman Catholic in Shadbrook.”
Richard smiled.
“Well, it’s not likely he came to look after any stray sheep on the Cotswolds,” — he answered— “They’re too scattered for that. He had some interest in seeing the church — which, of course, used to be a Roman Catholic one. He is-exiled from France — or at any rate he seems to consider himself exiled — he has lost his living out there, and I suppose he is, like so many ‘vagrant’ priests in England just now, waiting orders from his superiors. He’s a very good chap — and really, Azalea, if you had not made such a point of my not doing so, I should have asked him to luncheon.”
Azalea made a round O of her pretty mouth.
“A Roman Catholic priest!” she echoed wonderingly— “Would you really, Dick?”
“Why, of course I should!” and he laughed— “A Roman Catholic priest wants his midday meal as much as any Protestant parson, doesn’t he? This man interested me very much — I should have liked a good long talk with him.”
Azalea made no remark. She knew that her husband’s lack of companionship with his own sex was one of the great drawbacks to his position as Vicar of Shadbrook, — and there was a little twinge of self-reproach in her heart, as she thought that had it not been for her remark on what she considered to be the deficiencies of the prospective luncheon, he would have had some slight relaxation from the monotonous routine of his daily life in exchanging ideas with a possibly amusing and intelligent stranger. And she watched him with an odd expression of childish penitence as he glanced at the clock.
“Half an hour yet before we sit down to the cold mutton!” he said cheerily— “Just time to write a few letters. No more news of the Kiernans, I suppose?”
“No — none,” — she replied, conscious of a certain inward thankfulness that her domestic peace had not, so far, been again fluttered by the worrying complaints and demands of troublesome or refractory parishioners.
Thereupon he went into his study, shutting the door gently behind him, as a sign that he wished to be left alone and undisturbed.
CHAPTER VI
WITHIN the solitude of his own room Everton gave himself up to a spell of quiet thinking. There was time, as he had said to his wife, to write a few letters, — but he did not so much as take pen in hand to commence them. Seated in his desk chair, he looked almost unseeingly out on the fair garden prospect in front of his windows, and began wondering, as lately he had often wondered, what had come over the spirit of the Church of Christ, that it should apparently find itself unequal to stand against the storm of materialism and atheism which, with shock upon shock, had of recent years begun to batter down the formerly strong citadel of Faith. With an acute morbidity of memory he counted up the dozens of modern ‘sects’ and ‘societies’ and ‘theologies’ which nowadays assume to be the most reliable and accurate expositions of the ‘Truth,’ — and with a deep sigh, wrung from his very heart’s core, he realized that Pilate’s famous question to the Divine Crucified, was not yet answered.
“We are a thousand times less devout and less earnest than the early Christians,” — he said, speaking half aloud, as though to some invisible companion of his meditations— “Instead of growing stronger, we have grown weaker; — instead of keeping Christ’s teaching pure and undefiled, we have overloaded it with our own foolish systems till it is like a grain of gold lost in a million tons of clay. Happy were those who in the past could suffer for Christ’s sake, and testify their love to Him by the witness of their lives laid down for the honor and glory of His Holy Name!” He rose and paced the room slowly. How few there were, he thought, in the present times, who would endure the slightest personal pain or inconvenience with joy because they believed Christ had ordained it! Like a visionary pageant passing before the eyes of his fancy, he saw the proud and self-confident Heads of the Church — both Roman Catholic and Protestant — arrogating to themselves something of Divine authority, — elated with their own importance in the world of politics and society, — eager to obtain as much money as possible for the furtherance of their own several systems, and heedless whether such money were wrested from the pockets of the poor or the coffers of the rich, — indiscriminately using for their own purposes the supernatural terrors of hells and heavens of their own invention to scare the ignorant or flatter the vain — and he asked himself with a kind of passion in the demand— “Is this Christ? Is it what He came to teach — what He died to emphasize and enforce?” And the answer came ringing clear and true from the innermost depths of his conscience.
“No! The Creed of the Churches is not the Creed of Christ! It is man’s work, formulated to suit the craving of man’s egotism — and from it spring a thousand weed-like sprouts of mysticism and so called ‘scientific catechisms’ which merely confuse the poor human soul and lead it deeper and ever deeper into the mire. We have deserted the plain and simple teaching of Our Lord for a tangle of perplexing and opposing doctrines, — and instead of helping to guide us out of the various misrepresentations that tend to disguise His Divine command, our bishops and archbishops sit silent and inert amid the clamor of conflicting argument, and not one of them has the courage to pronounce in his own person one straight convincing word which might silence the un-Christian uproar. Surely the days are upon us of which our Saviour spoke when He said:—’ He that is an hireling and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep and fleeth, and the wolf catcheth them and scattereth the sheep.’ And in this sense our archbishops and bishops are ‘hirelings’; for the wolf is devouring the fold!”
He threw himself again into his chair, and his mind reverted to the little priest, Sebastien Douay, who had said so lightly that the name of Christ nowadays was “une convenance — c’est tout!”
“He must think it, — he must know it — or else he would not say it,” — murmured Everton— “For he seems a simple-hearted man who seeks to do his best, and who probably has -done his best in his service to his own Church. And it is evident that he feels the futility of it all, — the impotence of his own efforts — as keenly as I do!”
Here the flitting memory of a girl’s face floated before him; the brilliant, beautiful face of Jacynth Miller, with her mutinous eyes and curved red mouth — and he gave an impatient gesture as he asked himself whether he could, as the Vicar of the parish, honestly say that she was a lover of and believer in Christ. He knew he could not. Yet she attended church regularly, — and in outward Sunday observance at least, she was a follower of the Christian faith. But in her inward nature she was a positive pagan, whose ‘creed’ was that of beauty, sensuality, and the purely animal enjoyment of life. How many of his parishioners were, a
ccording to their several tastes and inclinations, in a precisely similar condition? How many, if put to the test, would be willing to suffer for Christ’s sake? Nay — how many — to put it quite roughly — would be ready to forego even a glass of beer, if asked to do so for the honor and dignity of their religion as Christians? Probably not one! He smiled rather drearily at the thought. For his difficult task was to be the minister of the most noble and perfect Gospel ever enunciated for the needs of man, to a village community whose dearest aims in life were high wages for as little labor as possible and as much drink as could conveniently be swallowed in the twenty-four hours of the day!
“I shall never move them to a higher view of things,” — he said— “Nor will any one. Not only in Shadbrook, but all over the Christian world, the same indifference prevails — and unless the ‘hirelings’ rouse themselves from their shameful lethargy to give some sort of an honest warning cry, the wolves will have their way. Oh for the power of a far-reaching eloquence! — a fiery tongue of the first Pentecost such as should not only warn, but most convincingly persuade! — and oh, that God would only help me in my task and let me understand to the full the meaning of His ‘Holy Orders’!”
His eyes flashed and his face grew warm with the light of a sudden hope and inspiration, — then, as was usually the custom whenever he yielded to any touch of exalted or impersonal emotion, the Commonplace asserted itself in the ringing of the luncheon bell. It made such an incongruous clashing with his thoughts that he laughed at himself for having, just for one moment, dreamed of great things that might be done were he only given the chance to do them. And then with a serene step and cheerful countenance, he went to his cold mutton refection and listened patiently for more than an hour to his wife’s light chatter about various domestic affairs which to her were the principal aim and end of existence. For she made no secret of her dislike to what she called ‘soul talks.’
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 709