Eleanor (45 page)

A veil descended also on the pure intense gaze of the priest, yet he bent it steadily upon her.

‘Madame—God has done you a great honour.’

The words were just breathed, but they did not falter. Mutely, with parted lips, she seemed to search for his meaning.

‘There are very few of whom God condescends to ask, as plainly, as generously, as He now asks of you. What does it matter, Madame, whether God speaks to us amid the thorns or the flowers? But I do not remember that He ever spoke among the flowers, but often—often, amongst deserts and wildernesses. And when He speaks—Madame! the condescension, the gift is that He should speak at all; that He, our Maker and Lord, should plead with, should as it were humble Himself to, our souls. Oh! how we should hasten to answer, how we should hurry to throw ourselves and all that we have into His hands!’

Eleanor turned away. Unconsciously she began to strip the moss from a tree beside her. The tears dropped upon her lap.

But the appeal was to religious emotion, not to the moral judgment, and she rallied her forces.

‘You speak, Father, as a priest—as a Christian. I understand of course that that is the Christian language, the Christian point of view.’

‘My daughter,’ he said simply, ‘I can speak no other language.’

There was a pause. Then he resumed: ‘But consider it for a moment from another point of view. You say that for yourself you have renounced the expectation of happiness. What, then, do you desire? Merely the pain, the humiliation of others? But is that an end that any man or woman may lawfully pursue—Pagan or Christian? It was not a Christian who said, “Men exist for the sake of one another.” Yet when two other human beings—your friends—have innocently—unwittingly—done you a wrong—’

She shook her head silently.

The priest observed her.

‘One at least, you said, was kind and good—showed you a compassionate spirit—and intended you no harm. Yet you will punish her—for the sake of your own pride. And she is young. You who are older, and better able to control passion, ought you not to feel towards her as a tender elder sister—a mother—rather than a rival?’

He spoke with a calm and even power, the protesting force of his own soul mounting all the time like a tide.

Eleanor rose again in revolt.

‘It is no use,’ she said despairingly. ‘Do you understand, Father, what I said to you at first?—that I have probably not many months—a year perhaps—to live? And that to give these two to each other would embitter all my last days and hours—would make it impossible for me to believe, to hope, anything?’

‘No, no, poor soul!’ he said, deeply moved. ‘It would be with you as with St. John: “Now we know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.”’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘I have no faith—and no hope.’

His look kindled, took a new aspect almost of command.

‘You do yourself wrong. Could you have brought yourself to ask this counsel of me, if God had not been already at work in your soul—if your sin were not already half conquered?’

She recoiled as though from a blow. Her cheek burnt.

‘Sin!’ she repeated bitterly, with a kind of scorn, not able to bear the word.

But he did not quail.

‘All selfish desire is sin—desire that defies God and wills the hurt of man. But you will cast it out. The travail is already begun in you that will form the Christ.’

‘Father, creeds and dogmas mean nothing to me!’

‘Perhaps,’ he said calmly. ‘Does religion also mean nothing to you?’

‘Oh! I am a weak woman,’ she said with a quivering lip. ‘I throw myself on all that promises consolation. When I see the nuns from down below pass up and down this road, I often think that theirs is the only way out; that the Catholic Church and a convent are perhaps the solution to which I must come—for the little while that remains.’

‘In other words,’ he said after a pause, ‘God offers you one discipline, and you would choose another. Well, the Lord gave the choice to David of what rod he would be scourged with; but it always has seemed to me that the choice was an added punishment. I would not have chosen. I would have left all to His Divine Majesty! This cross is not of your own making; it comes to you from God. Is it not the most signal proof of His love? He asks of you what only the strongest can bear; gives you just time to serve Him with the best. As I said before, is it not His way of honouring His creature?’

Eleanor sat without speaking, her delicate head drooping.

‘And, Madame,’ the priest continued with a changed voice, ‘you say that creeds and dogmas mean nothing to you. How can I, who am now cast out from the Visible Church, uphold them to you—attempt to bind them on your conscience? But one thing I can do, whether as man or priest; I can bid you ask yourself whether in truth
Christ
means nothing to you—and Calvary nothing?’

He paused, staring at her with his bright and yet unseeing eyes, the wave of feeling rising within him to a force and power born of recent storm, of the personal wrestling with a personal anguish.

‘Why is it’—he resumed, each word low and pleading,—‘that this divine figure is enshrined, if not in all our affections—at least in all our imaginations? Why is it that at the heart of this modern world, with all its love of gold, its thirst for knowledge, its desire for pleasure, there still lives and burns ‘—

—He held out his two strong clenched hands, quivering, as though he held in them the vibrating heart of man—

—‘this strange madness of sacrifice, this foolishness of the Cross? Why is it that in these polite and civilised races which lead the world, while creeds and Churches divide us, what still touches us most deeply, what still binds us together most surely, is this story of a hideous death, which the spectators said was voluntary—which the innocent Victim embraced with joy as the ransom of His brethren—from which those who saw it received in very truth the communication of a new life—a life, a Divine Mystery, renewed amongst us now, day after day, in thousands of human beings? What does it mean, Madame? Ask yourself! How has our world of lust and iron produced such a thing? How, except as the clue to the world’s secret, is man to explain it to himself? Ah! my daughter, think what you will of the nature and dignity of the Crucified—but turn your eyes to the Cross! Trouble yourself with no creeds—I speak this to your weakness—but sink yourself in the story of the Passion and its work upon the world! Then bring it to bear upon your own case. There is in you a root of evil mind—an angry desire—a
cupido
which keeps you from God. Lay it down before the Crucified, and rejoice—rejoice!—that you have something to give to your God—before He gives you Himself!’

The old man’s voice sank and trembled.

Eleanor made no reply. Her capacity for emotion was suddenly exhausted. Nerve and brain were tired out.

After a minute or two she rose to her feet and held out her hand.

‘I thank you with all my heart. Your words touch me very much, but they seem to me somehow remote—impossible. Let me think of them. I am not strong enough to talk more now.’

She bade him good-night, and left him. With her feeble step she slowly mounted the Sassetto path, and it was some little time before her slender form and white dress disappeared among the trees.

Father Benecke remained alone—a prey to many conflicting currents of thought.

For him too the hour had been strangely troubling and revolutionary. On the recognised lines of Catholic confession and direction, all that had been asked of him would have been easy to give. As it was, he had been obliged to deal with the moral emergency as he best could; by methods which, now that the crisis was over, filled him with a sudden load of scrupulous anguish.

The support of a great system had been withdrawn from him. He still felt himself neither man nor priest—wavering in the dark.

This poor woman! He was conscious that her statement of her case had roused in him a kind of anger; so passionate and unblushing had been the egotism of her manner. Even after his long experience he felt in it something monstrous. Had he been tender, patient enough?

What troubled him was this consciousness of the
woman
, as apart from the penitent, which had overtaken him; the woman with her frail physical health, possibly her terror of death, her broken heart. New perplexities and compunctions, not to be felt within the strong dykes of Catholic practice, rushed upon him as he sat thinking under the falling night. The human fate became more bewildering, more torturing. The clear landscape of Catholic thought upon which he had once looked out was wrapping itself in clouds, falling into new aspects and relations. How marvellous are the chances of human history! The outward ministry had been withdrawn; in its stead this purely spiritual ministry had been offered to him. ‘
Domine, in caelo misericordia tua—judicia tua abyssus multa!
’

Recalling what he knew of Mrs. Burgoyne’s history and of Manisty’s, his mind trained in the subtleties of moral divination soon reconstructed the whole story. Clearly the American lady now staying with Mrs. Burgoyne—who had showed towards himself such a young and graceful pity—was the other woman.

He felt instinctively that Mrs. Burgoyne would approach him again, coldly as she had parted from him. She had betrayed to him all the sick confusion of soul that existed beneath her intellectual competence and vigour. The situation between them, indeed, had radically changed. He laid aside deference and humility; he took up the natural mastery of the priest as the moral expert. She had no faith; and faith would save her. She was wandering in darkness, making shipwreck of herself and others. And she had appealed to him. With an extraordinary eagerness the old man threw himself into the task she had so strangely set him. He longed to conquer and heal her; to bring her to faith, to sacrifice, to God. The mingled innocence and despotism of his nature were both concerned. And was there something else?—the eagerness of the soldier who retrieves disobedience by some special and arduous service? To be allowed to attempt it is a grace; to succeed in it is pardon.

Was she dying—poor lady!—or was it a delusion on her part, one of the devices of self-pity? Yet he recalled the emaciated face and form, the cough, the trailing step, Miss Foster’s anxiety, some comments overheard in the village.—

And if she died unreconciled, unhappy? Could nothing be done to help her, from outside,—to brace her to action—and in time?

He pondered the matter with all the keenness of the casuist, all the
naivete
of the recluse. In the tragical uprooting of established habit through which he was passing, even those ways of thinking and acting which become the second nature of the priest were somewhat shaken. Had Eleanor’s confidence been given him in Catholic confession he might not even by word or look have ever reminded herself of what had passed between them; still less have acted upon it in any way. Nor under the weight of tradition which binds the Catholic priest, would he ever have been conscious of the remotest temptation to what his Church regards as one of the deadliest of sins.

And further. If as his penitent, yet outside confession,—in a letter or conversation—Eleanor had told him her story, his passionately scrupulous sense of the priestly function would have bound him precisely in the same way. Here, all Catholic opinion would not have agreed with him; but his own conviction would have been clear.

But now in the general shifting of his life from the standpoint of authority, to the standpoint of conscience, new aspects of the case appeared to him. He recalled certain questions of moral theology, with which as a student he was familiar. The modern discipline of the confessional ‘seal’ is generally more stringent than that of the middle ages. Benecke remembered that in the view of St. Thomas, it is sometimes lawful for a confessor to take account of what he hears in confession so far as to endeavour afterwards to remove some obstacle to the spiritual progress of his penitent, which has been revealed to him under the seal. The modern theologian denies altogether the legitimacy of such an act, which for him is a violation of the Sacrament.

But for Benecke, at this moment, the tender argument of St. Thomas suddenly attained a new beauty and compulsion.

He considered it long. He thought of Manisty, his friend, to whom his affectionate heart owed a debt of gratitude, wandering about Italy, in a blind quest of the girl who had been snatched away from him. He thought of the girl herself, and the love that not all Mrs. Burgoyne’s jealous anguish had been able to deny. And then his mind returned to Mrs. Burgoyne, and the arid misery of her struggle.—

The darkness was falling. As he reached the last of the many windings of the road, he saw his tiny house by the riverside, with a light in the window.

He leant upon his stick, conscious of inward excitement, feeling suddenly on his old shoulders the burden of those three lives of which Mrs. Burgoyne had spoken.

‘My God, give them to me!’—he cried, with a sudden leap of the heart that was at once humble and audacious. Not a word to Mr. Manisty, or to any other human being, clearly, as to Mrs. Burgoyne’s presence at Torre Amiata. To that he was bound.

But—

‘May I not entertain a wayfarer, a guest?’—he thought, trembling, ‘like any other solitary?’

CHAPTER
XX

The hot evening was passing into night. Eleanor and Lucy were on the
loggia
together.

Through the opening in the parapet wall made by the stairway to what had once been the enclosed monastery garden, Eleanor could see the fire-flies flashing against the distant trees; further, above the darkness of the forest, ethereal terraces of dimmest azure lost in the starlight; and where the mountains dropped to the south-west a heaven still fiery and streaked with threats of storm. Had she raised herself a little she could have traced far away, beyond the forest slopes, the course of those white mists that rise at night out of the wide bosom of Bolsena.

Outside, the country-folk were streaming home from their work; the men riding their donkeys or mules, the women walking, often with burdens on their heads, and children dragging at their hands; dim purplish figures, in the evening blue, charged with the eternal grace of the old Virgilian life of Italy, the life of corn and vine, of chestnut and olive. Lucy hung over the balcony, looking at the cavalcades, sometimes waving her hand to a child or a mother that she recognised through the gathering darkness. It was an evening spectacle of which she never tired. Her feeling clung to these labouring people, whom she idealised with the optimism of her clean youth. Secretly her young strength envied them their primal, necessary toils. She would not have shrunk from their hardships; their fare would have been no grievance to her. Sickness, old age, sin, cruelty, violence, death,—that these dark things entered into their lives, she knew vaguely. Her heart shrank from what her mind sometimes divined; all the more perhaps that there was in her the promise of a wide and rare human sympathy, which must some day find its appointed tasks and suffer much in the finding. Now, when she stumbled on the horrors of the world, she would cry to herself, ‘God knows!’—with a catching breath, and the feeling of a child that runs from darkness to protecting arms; and so escape her pain.