I followed him down the stairs, not without a guilty apprehension as to the nature of the interview in store for me, and found the rector pacing backwards and forwards across one end of the hall, with his hands folded behind his back. As I made my reverence, he stopped and eyed me for a moment thoughtfully.
“Twelve months since,” said he, “you received from the Duke of Ormond in England the offer of a cornetcy in the Horse Guards.”
“Yes, Father,” I replied, taken aback by his unexpected commencement; and I replied hastily, “I refused it.”
“You refused it!” he repeated very deliberately; And then, suddenly bending his eyebrows, “And without reluctance?”
I felt my face flush as he asked the question. “Father,” I stammered, “I refused it;” and so came to a stop.
He nodded his head once or twice, but pressed me no further upon the point. Instead
“You know at whose instance the commission was offered to you?” he asked.
“I have no certain knowledge,” I replied, with considerable relief; “but I can think of but one person in the world with the power and inclination to do me that service.”
“Ah,” broke in the rector, sharply, “you count it a service, then? “
“He would count it a service,” I answered, with a clumsy effort to retrieve the mistake. “For my part, Father, I refused it.”
“Precisely,” said he. “He would count it a service he was doing you. There are no fine feathers in our army, and there is no leisure to parade them were there any. Yes, Lord Bolingbroke would count it a service he was doing you.”
Now, although the relationship between Lord Bolingbroke and myself was the merest thread my father having married a niece of Lady Joanna St. John—I was well enough acquainted with his diligence to know that the sneer was unjust; and I was preparing to make some rejoinder in a proper spirit of humility when the rector continued—
“It is of Lord Bolingbroke that I wish to speak to you. He is in Paris.”
“In Paris, Father!” I exclaimed incredulously.
“In Paris. He came last night, and asks permission of me this morning that you should wait on him.”
“Father,” I cried, “you will give that permission?”
He shook his head over my eagerness and resumed his walk.
“Very well,” he said at length, and he gave me Lord Bolingbroke’s address. “You can go now,” he added.
I waited no longer than sufficed to utter a brief word of thanks, and hurried towards the door.
“My son.”
I turned back towards the rector, with a doleful thought that he would revoke his permission. But as I approached him reluctantly enough, I saw something of a smile brighten upon his rigorous face.
“My son,” he said, without a trace of his former severity, “you have taken no vows as yet, and will not for eight months to come. Think, and think humbly, during those months! Our Order, thank God, is not so poor in service that we need to reckon obstinacy as devotion.”
I stood abashed and shamefaced at his words. “Father,” I said, “I have chosen.”
“But it is for us to ratify the choice,” he answered, with a cast back to his former sternness, “or to annul it as unworthy.” With that he dismissed me; but this time, being somewhat stung by his warning, I retired with a more decorous step. Once in the street, however, I made up for the delay. For, in truth, I was at some trouble to account for my kinsman’s sudden arrival in France; for, although Walpole had publicly declared his intention of bringing both Bolingbroke and the Earl of Oxford to trial for their work in compassing the Peace of Utrecht, it was common rumour that Bolingbroke and his colleague awaited the impeachment in all confidence as to its issue. This hasty departure, however, bore to my thinking all the appearance of a desperate flight, and I hurried to his lodging in no small anxiety of spirit. My Lord Bolingbroke makes but a slight figure in this story of my picture, compared with that he made upon the wider field of a nation’s chronicle; and it is very well for me that this is so. For, indeed, I never understood him; although I held him in a great liking and esteem, and considered him to have confronted more adversity and mischance than commonly falls to any one, I never understood him. He was compacted of so many contradictions, and in all of them was so seemingly sincere that a plain man like Lawrence Clavering was completely at a loss to discover the inward truth of him. But as he was a riddle to my speculations, so was he a cherished object to my affections. For even during those last years of Queen Anne’s rule, when his life was at its busiest and his fortunes at their climax, he still found time to show kindness to one whose insignificance was only rivalled by his poverty. He was “Harry St. John” to me as to his equals and my betters, and in spite of the difference of our years; and when I found myself in company with Dr. Swift and Mr. Congreve and Mr. Prior and the little crook-back poet whose “Windsor Castle” had brought him into a sudden reputation, he was ever at pains to distinguish me in his conversation, so that I might suffer no shame from my inferiority. Doubtless it was to the natural courtesy of the man rather than to any special inclination that his behaviour was due, but I was none the less grateful to him on that account
He had just finished dinner, and was still at the table over his wine, when his footman introduced me into his apartment.
“Ah,” said he, “I expected you would come;” and he drew a chair to the table, and filled a second glass, “It is not the welcome you have had from me at Bucklersbury, but philosophers”—and he made a polite flourish of the hand to include me in the phrase—“will ever be content with a makeshift. For my part,” he continued, “I do not know but what the makeshift is the better. A few trustworthy friends, a few honest books and leisure wherein to savour their merits—it is what I have chiefly longed for these last five years;” and he threw up his arms with a long breath of relief, as though he had been unexpectedly lightened of some burdensome load. I had heard him talk often enough in this way before, and was disinclined to set great value upon his contentment.
“What brought you in this scurry to Paris?” I asked.
“They meant to pursue me to the scaffold,” he returned. “I had sure information of that. No testimony would have helped me or thwarted them. It was my blood they needed—Marlborough told me so—my blood and Oxford’s.” And he flashed out into a sudden passion. “There’s the point. Alone I would have faced them. These whimsical Tories are the frailest of reeds, the Whigs the most factious and vindictive opponents. Still, I would have faced them had I stood alone. But to make common cause with Oxford! No, I abhor him to that degree, I cannot. It were worse than death. However, let’s talk no more of it!” and he recovered himself with an effort, and sat for a little, silent, fingering his glass. “Oxford!” he exclaimed again with a bitter laugh of contempt. “Soft words, and never a thing done! To live till to-morrow was the ultimate of policy to him. And jealous, too! The bubble of his own jealousy! Had he cared to act, or had he been dismissed but a few weeks earlier, I tell you, Lawrence, the Tories would now be cemented to such a solidity of power that——” He stopped abruptly, and leaned over to me: “For whom are you?” he asked, “the Hanoverian, or the”—and he paused for the briefest space—“the Chevalier de St. George?”
“I am for King James the Third,” I replied promptly.
“Oh,” says he; and, rising from his chair, he took a turn across the room. “I rather fancied,” he resumed, with a queer smile, “that discretion was amongst the lessons taught at the Jesuit Colleges.”
“We are taught besides,” I answered, “to distinguish between the occasion for discretion and the occasion for plain speaking.”
“Then,” said he, “I fear me, Lawrence, the teaching is faulty, if I am to judge from the instance you have given me. I had some talk with my Lord Stair this morning, and the talk was of the friendliest.”
“Lord Stair?” I cried, rising in some confusion, for I knew the Chevalier to possess no more redoubtable opponent than the English ambassador.
“Yes,” replied Bolingbroke. “And I leave Paris for the Dauphiné—mark that, Lawrence—not for Lorraine, though I have been invited thither. But, in truth, I have had my surfeit of politics.” Even while he spoke, however, a serving-man was ushered into the room with a letter to deliver.
“I was bidden, my lord, to give it into your hands,” he explained.
“Very well,” replied Lord Bolingbroke, something hastily; and I noticed that he dropped his hand over the superscription of the letter. “I will send the answer;” and he added, correcting himself, “if one be needed.”
The servant bowed, and went out of the room. I began to laugh, and Bolingbroke turned an inquiring glance at me.
“There is some jest?”
“It is of your making, my lord. I fancy those few honest books will not be opened yet awhile.”
He flushed a little. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“That is because you cover so closely the handwriting of your letter that you have not as yet perceived from whom it comes.”
“That is very true,” he replied immediately; and he glanced at the cover of it. “The hand is strange to me. Perchance you recognize it; “ and he frankly held it out to me.
“No,” I replied; “but I recognized the servant who brought it. Marshall Berwick has sent him more than once with messages to the rector of my college.”
“Oh,” said he, with a start of surprise, “Marshall Berwick, the Chevalier’s minister?” He opened the letter with a fine show of indifference. “I think I mentioned to you that I had already been invited by the Chevalier to Bar. Doubtless this is to second the invitation.” He read it through carelessly, and tore it up. “Yes. But I travel south, not east, Lawrence. I go to Dauphiné, not Lorraine;” and as if to dismiss the subject, he diverted his speech from the Chevalier to myself.
“And so, Lawrence,” he said, “it is to be the soutane, and not the red-coat; the rosary, and not the sword.”
It seemed to me that there was a hint of wonder and disappointment in his voice; but, maybe, I was over-ready at that time to detect a slight, and I answered quickly—
“I have to thank you for the cornetcy. The offer was a-piece with the rest of your kindness; but I was constrained to refuse it.”
“And what constrained you? Your devotion to the priesthood?”
He glanced at me shrewdly as he spoke, and I knew that my face was hot beneath his gaze. Then he laughed. The laugh was kindly enough; but it bantered me, and if my face was hot before, now it was a-flame.
“You come of an obstinate stock, Lawrence,” he continued; “but I was misled to believe that you had missed the inheritance.”
“It was out of my power to accept the cornetcy,” I returned, “even had I wished it For I am a Papist.”
“You would not have found yourself alone,” he said, with a laugh. “The Duke of Ormond prefers Papists for his officers. He showed me a list not so long ago of twenty-seven colonels whom he had a mind to break, and strangely enough they were all Protestants, with never a fault besides to their names.”
“Moreover,” I went on, “I was too poor;” and there I think I hit the true and chief reason, though I would not acknowledge it as such even to myself.
“But you have an uncle in Cumberland,” said Bolingbroke.
“He is a Whig and a Protestant,” I replied. “He can hardly hold me in that esteem which would give me warrant to approach him.”
My kinsman nodded his head as though he approved the argument, and sat for a little silent over his wine, while my fancies went straying over imagined battle-fields. It is strange how a man will glorify this business of cutting throats, the more particularly if he be of a sedentary life. Most like it is for that very reason. I have seen something of a war’s realities since then; I have seen men turned to beasts by hunger and thirst, and the lust of carnage; I have seen the dead stripped and naked upon the hill-side of Clifton moor white like a flock of sheep. But at the time of which I write I thought only of a battlefield as of a place where life throbbed at its fullest to a sound of resonant trumpets and victorious shouts; and the smoke of cannon hid the trampled victims, even from my imaginings.
“Come!” said Lord Bolingbroke, breaking in upon my reflections of a sudden; “if your afternoon is not disposed of, I would gladly take a turn with you. I have it in my mind to show you a picture.”
I agreed willingly enough to the proposal, and together we went down into the street.
“This will be our way,” he said; and we walked to the monastery of the Chartreux. Then he stopped.
“Perhaps you know the picture.”
“No,” I replied. “This is the first time that ever I came hither.”
He took me forthwith to the wonderful frescoes of Le Sœur, and, walking quickly along them, stopped at length before the most horrid and ghastly picture that ever I set my eyes on. It was the picture of a dead man who spoke at his burial, and painted with such cunning suggestion and power that, gazing at it, I felt a veritable fear invade me. It was not merely that his face expressed all the horror, the impotent rage, the pain of his damnation, but there was also conveyed by the subtlest skill a certain consciousness in the sufferer that he received no more than his merits. It was as though you looked at a hypocrite, who knew that his hypocrisy was discovered.
“Well, what think you of it?” asked my companion. “It does credit to the painter’s craftsmanship;” and his voice startled me, for, in my contemplation of the picture, I had clean forgotten his presence. The painting was indeed so vivid that it had raised up alert and active within my breast a thought which I had up till now, though not without effort, kept resolutely aloof from me.
“But yet more to his imagination,” I replied perfunctorily, and moved away. Lord Bolingbroke followed me, and we quitted the monastery, and walked for some way in silence.
I had no mind for talk, and doubtless showed my disinclination, for my companion, though now and again he would glance at me with an air of curiosity, refrained from questions. To speak the truth, I was fulfilled—nay, I overbrimmed with shame. The picture lived before my eyes, receding in front of me through the streets of Paris. It seemed to complete and illustrate the rebuke which the rector had addressed to me that morning; it pointed a scornful commentary at my musings on the glory of arms. For the figure in the picture cried “hypocrite,” and cried the word at me; and so insistently did the recollection of it besiege me that I came near to thinking it no finished painting limned upon the wall, and fixed so until such time as the colours should fade, but rather a living scene. I began almost to expect that the figures would change their order and disposition, that the dead man speaking would swerve from his attitude, and, as he spoke, and spoke “hypocrite,” would reach out a bony and menacing finger towards me. So far had my fancies carried me when my kinsman touched me on the arm.
“It is as you say, Lawrence,” he said, as though there had been no interval of silence since my last words “it is the imagination, not the craftsmanship, which fixes the attention. It is the idea of a dead man speaking no matter what he speaks.”
There was a certain significance in his tone which I did not comprehend.
I stopped in the street.
“You were anxious to show me the picture,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Why?”
“Does it tell you nothing concerning yourself?”
I was positively startled by the question. It seemed incredible that he could have foreseen the effect which it would produce on me.
“What do you mean?” I exclaimed.
He gave an easy laugh, and pointed across my shoulder.
“There is a church,” said he, “and moult and moult people entering it. Let us go in too.”
I looked at him in increased surprise, for I had not believed him very prone to religious exercises. However, he crossed the road, with me at his heels, and went up the steps in the throng.
The church was dim, and because I came into it out of the April sunshine, it struck upon my senses as dank besides.
The voices of the choir beat upwards through an air blue and heavy with incense; the tapers burning on the altar at the far end of the nave over against us shone blurred and vague as though down some misty tunnel; and from the painted windows on the right the sunshine streamed in slanting rods of light, vari-coloured, disparting the mist.
At the first, I had an impious thought, due partly may be to my unfamiliarity with the bustle of the streets, and partly no doubt to the companionship of my kinsman, who ever brought with him, as it were, a breath of that wide world wherein he lived and schemed, that I was returning to a narrow hemisphere wherein men had no manner of business. But after a little a Carmelite monk began to preach, and the fire of his discourse, as it rose and fell, now harsh with passion, now musical with tenderness, roused me to a consciousness of the holy ground on which I stood. I bent forward, not so much listening as watching those who listened. I noted how the sermon gained upon them, how their faces grew expectant. Even Lord Bolingbroke lost his indifference; he moved a step or two nearer to the preacher. His attitude lost the lazy grace he was wont to affect; he stood satisfied, and I knew that there was no man on earth so critical in his judgment of an orator.
I was assured then of the sway which the monk asserted over his congregation, and the assurance pierced to my very soul.
For I knew the cause of his power; one had not to listen long to realise that. The man was sincere. This was no pleasurable discourse waved delicately like a scented handkerchief to tease the senses of his auditors. Sincerity burnt like a clear flame kindling his words, and compelled belief. Of the matter of his sermon I took no note. Once or twice “the Eve of St. Bartholomew” came thundering at my ears, but for the most part it seemed that he cried “hypocrite” at me, until I feared that the congregation would rise in their seats in that dim church, and a mob of white faces gibber and mow the accusation. I stood fascinated, unable to move, until at last Bolingbroke came back to me, and, taking my arm, led me out of church.
“You study late of nights?” he asked, looking into my face.
“The preacher wrought on me.”
“He has eloquence,” he agreed; “but it was a dead man speaking.”
I stopped in the street, and stared at him.
“Yes,” he continued; “he warns, he exhorts, like the figure in the picture there, but the man himself—what of him, Lawrence? He is the mere instrument of his eloquence—its servant, not its master. He is the priest—dead to the world in which he has his being, a shadow with a voice, a dead man speaking.”
“Nay,” I broke in, “the words were born at his heart. He was sincere, and therefore he lives. The dead man speaking is the hypocrite.”
I cried the words in a very passion of self-reproach, and without thought of the man I addressed them to.
“Well, well,” said he, indulgently, “he has, at all events, a live advocate. I did not gather you were so devoted to the vocation;” and he laughed a little to belie the words, and so we parted company.
It was in no complacent mood, as you may guess, that I returned to the college, and, indeed, I loitered some while before the gates or ever I could make up my mind to enter them. The picture weighed upon my conscience, and seemed like to effect my Lord Bolingbroke’s evident purpose, though by means of a very different argument. It was not the priest, but myself, the hypocrite, who was the dead man speaking; and thus, strangely enough, as I had reason to think it afterwards, I came to imagine the picture with myself as its central figure. I would see it at nights as I lay awake in my bed, painted with fire upon the dark spaces of the room, and the face that bore the shame of hypocrisy discovered, and with that shame the agony of punishment was mine. Or, again, a word of reproof; the mere sight of my Marco Polo was sufficient to bring it into view, and for the rest of that day it would bear me company, hanging before my eyes when I sat down to my books, and moving in front of me when I walked, as it had moved in front of me through the streets of Paris on that first and only occasion of my seeing it. For, though many a time I passed and repassed the monastery of the Chartreux, I never sought admittance. I saw the picture no more than once; but, indeed, I was in no danger of forgetting it, and within the compass of a few months events befell me which fixed it for ever in my memory. I have but to shut my eyes, and I see it after this long interspace of years, definite in every detail. I have but to open them, and, sitting at this table at which I write, I behold, actually painted, the second picture into which my imagination then transformed the first—the picture of myself as the dead man speaking.