A Forgotten Hero Part 19

After a few flights of rhetoric concerning the extreme folly of the Countess--to forsake an earldom for the cloister was a proceeding not in Vivian's line at all--that gentleman condescended so far to answer his wife as to observe that he was not fool enough not to know when he was well off. Clarice thankfully conjectured that they would return to Oakham. She thought it better, however, to ask the question point blank; and she received a reply--of course accompanied by a snub.

"Why should we be such fools as to go to Oakham when my Lord is in Bermondsey?"

"Bermondsey!" Clarice was surprised. "You never know anything!" said Vivian. "Of course he is come to town."

Clarice received the snubbing in silence. "You are so taken up with that everlasting brat of yours," added Rose's affectionate father, "that you never know what anybody else is doing."

There had been a time when Clarice would have defended herself against such accusations. She was learning now that she suffered least when she received them in meek silence. The only way to deal with Vivian Barkeworth was to let him alone.

Two long letters went to the Pope that February; one was from the Countess, the other from the Earl. They are both yet extant, and they show the character of each as no description could set it forth.

The Countess's letter is a mixture of pious demureness and querulous selfishness. She tells the Pope that all her life she has intensely desired to be a nun: that she is, unhappily, in the irreligious position of a matron, and, moreover, is the suffering wife of an impious husband.

This sinful man requires of her--of her, a soul devoted to religion-- that she shall behave as if she belonged to the wicked world which holds himself within its thrall, and shall sacrifice G.o.d to him. She humbly and fervently entreats the holy Father to grant her a divorce from these bonds of matrimony which so cruelly oppress her, and to set her soul free that it may soar upwards unrestrained. It is the letter of a woman who did wish to serve G.o.d, but who was incapable of recognising that it was possible to do it without shutting herself up in stone walls, and starving body and soul alike.

The Earl's letter is of an entirely different calibre. He tells the Pope in his turn that he is wedded to a woman whom he dearly loves, and who resolutely keeps him at arm's length. She will not make a friend of him, nor behave as a good wife ought to do. This is all he asks of her; he is as far as can be from wishing to be unkind to her or to cross her wishes. He only wants her to live with him on reasonable and ordinary terms. But she--and here the Earl's irrepressible humour breaks out; he must see the comical side even of his own sorest trouble, and certainly this had its comical side--she will not sit next to him at table, but insists on putting her confessor between; she will not answer Yes or No to his simplest question, but invariably returns the answer through a third person. When she goes into her private apartments, she turns the key in his face. Does the holy Father think this is the way that a rational wife ought to behave to her own husband? and will he not remonstrate with her, and induce her to use him a little more kindly and reasonably than she does? The Earl's letter is that of an injured and justly provoked man; of a man who loves his wife too well to coerce or quarrel with her, and who thoroughly perceives the absurdity of his position no less than its pain. Yet he does feel the pain bitterly, and he would do anything to end it.

This letter to the Patriarch of Christendom was his last hope.

Entreaties, remonstrances, patient tenderness, loving kindness, all had proved vain. Now:--

"He had set his life upon a cast, And he must run the hazard of the die."

Weary and miserable weeks they were, during which Earl Edmund waited the Pope's answer. It came at last. The Pope replied as only a Romish priest could be expected to reply. For the human anguish of the one he had no sympathy; for the quasi-religious sorrows of the other he had very much. He decreed, in the name of G.o.d, a full divorce between Edmund Earl of Cornwall, and Margaret his wife, coldly admonishing the Earl to take the Lord's chastening in good part, and to let the griefs of earth lift his soul towards Heaven.

But it was not there that this sorrow lifted it at first. The human agony had to be lived through before the Divine calm and peace could come to heal it. His last effort had been made in vain. The pa.s.sionate hope of twenty years, that the day would come when his long, patient love should meet with its reward even on earth, was shattered to the dust. Even if she wished to come back after this, she could never retrace her steps. Compensation he might find in Heaven, but there could be none left for him on earth now. Even hope was dead within him.

The fatal Bull fell from the Earl's hand, and dropped a dead weight on the rushes at his feet. He was a heart-wrecked man, and life had to go on.

Was this man--for his is no fancy picture--a poor weak creature, or was he a strong, heroic soul? Many will write him down the weakling; perhaps all but those who have themselves known much of that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, and drains away the moral life-blood drop by drop. It may be that the registers of Heaven held appended to his name a different epithet. It is harder to wait than to work; hardest of all to awake after long suspense to the blank conviction that all has been in vain, and then to take up the cross and meekly follow the Crucified.

Two hours later, a page brought a message to Reginald de Echingham to the effect that he was wanted by his master.

Reginald, in his own eyes, was a thoroughly miserable man. He had n.o.body to talk with, and nothing to do. He missed Olympias sadly, for as the Earl had once jestingly remarked, she burnt perpetual incense on his altar, and flattery was a necessary of life to Reginald. Olympias was the only person who admired him nearly as much as he did himself.

Like the old Romans, _partem et circenses_ const.i.tuted his list of indispensables; and had it been inevitable to dispense with one of them for a time, Reginald would have resigned the bread rather than the game.

On this particular morning, his basket of grievances was full. The damp had put his moustache out of curl; he had found a poor breakfast provided for him--and Reginald was by no means indifferent to his breakfast--and, worst of all, the mirror was fixed so high up on the wall that he could not see himself comfortably. The usual religious rites of the morning before his own dear image had, therefore, to be very imperfectly performed. Reginald grumbled sorely within himself as he went through the cold stone pa.s.sages which led to the Earl's chamber.

His master lifted very sad eyes to his face.

"De Echingham, I wish to set out for Ashridge to-morrow. Can you be ready?"

Ashridge! De Echingham would as soon have received marching orders for Spitzbergen. If there were one place in the world which he hated in his inmost soul, it was that Priory in Buckinghamshire, which Earl Edmund had himself founded. He would be worse off there than even in Bermondsey Palace, with nothing around him but silent walls and almost equally silent monks. De Echingham ventured on remonstrance.

"Would not your Lordship find Berkhamsted much more pleasurable, especially at this season?"

"I do not want pleasure," answered the Earl wearily. "I want rest."

And he rose and began to walk aimlessly up and down the room, in that restless manner which was well suited to emphasise his words.

"But--your Lordship's pardon granted--would you not find it far better to seek for distraction and pleasance in the Court, than to shut yourself up in a gloomy cell with those monks?"

Earl Edmund stopped in his walk and looked at Reginald, whose speech touched his quick sense of humour.

"I would advise you to give thanks in your prayers to-night, De Echingham."

"For what, my Lord?"

"That you have as yet no conception of a sorrow which is past distraction by pleasance. 'Vinegar upon nitre!' You never tasted it, I should think."

"I thank your Lordship, I never did," said Reginald, who took the allusion quite literally.

"Well, I have done, and I did not like it," rejoined his master. "I prefer the monks' _soupe maigre_, if you please. Be so good as to make ready, De Echingham."

Reginald obeyed, but grumbling bitterly within his disappointed soul.

Could there be any misery on earth worse than a cold stone bench, a bowl of sorrel soup, and a chapter of Saint Augustine to flavour it? And when they had only just touched the very edge of the London season!

Why, he would not get a single ball that spring. Poor Reginald!

They stayed but one night at Berkhamsted, though, to the Earl, Berkhamsted was home. It was the scene of his birth, and of that blessed unapprehensive childhood, when brothers and sisters had played with him on the Castle green, and light, happy laughter had rung through the n.o.ble halls; when the hand of his fair Provencal mother had fallen softly in caresses on his head, and his generous, if extravagant, father had been only too ready to shower gold ducats in antic.i.p.ation of his slightest wish. All was gone now but the cold gold--hard, silent, unfeeling; a miserable comforter indeed. There was one brother left, but he was far away--too far to recall in this desolate hour. Like a sufferer of later date, he must go alone with his G.o.d to bear his pa.s.sion. [Note 1.]

The Priory of Ashridge--of the Order of Bonihomines--which Earl Edmund had founded a few years before, was the only one of its cla.s.s in England. The Predicant Friars were an offshoot of the Dominican Order; and the Boni-Homines were a special division of the Predicant Friars.

It is a singular fact that from this one source of Dominicans or Black Monks, sprang the best and the worst issues that ever emanated from monachism--the Bonihomines and the Inquisition.

The Boni-Homines were, in a word, the Protestants of the Middle Ages.

And--a remarkable feature--they were not, like all other seceders, persons who had separated themselves from the corruptions of Rome. They were better off, for they had never been tainted with them. From the first ages of primitive Christianity, while on all sides the stream was gradually growing sluggish and turbid, in the little nest of valleys between Dauphine and Piedmont it had flowed fresh and pure, fed by the Word of G.o.d, which the Vaudois [Note 2] mountaineers suffered no Pope nor Church to wrench or shut up from them.

The oldest name by which we know these early Protestants is Paulikians, probably having a reference to the Apostle Paul as either the exponent of their doctrines, or the actual founder of their local church. A little later we find them styled Cathari, or Pure Ones. Then we come on their third name of Albigenses, derived from the neighbouring town of Alby, where a Council was held which condemned them. But by whatever name they are called they are the same people, living in the same valleys, and holding unwaveringly and unadulterated the same faith.

It was by their fourth name of Boni-Homines, or Good Men, that they took advantage of the preaching movement set up by the Dominicans in the thirteenth century. They permeated their ranks, however, very gradually and quietly--perhaps all the more surely. For shortly after the date of this story, in the early part of the fourteenth century, it is said that of every three Predicant Friars, two were Bonihomines.

The Boni-Homines were rife in France before they ever crept into England; and the first man to introduce them into England was Edmund, Earl of Cornwall. A hundred years later, when the Boni-Homines had shown what they really were, and the leaven with which they had saturated society had evolved itself in Lollardism, the monks of other Orders did their best to bring both the movement and the men into disrepute, and to paint in the blackest colours the name of the Prince who had first introduced them into this country. In no monkish chronicle, unless written by a Bonus h.o.m.o, will the name of Earl Edmund be found recorded without some word of condemnation. And the Boni-Homines, unfortunately for history, were not much given to writing chronicles. Their business was saving souls.

Most important is it to remember, in forming just estimates of the character of things--whether men or events--in the Middle Ages, that with few exceptions monks were the only historians. Before we can truthfully set down this man as good, or that man as bad, we must, therefore, consult other sources--the chronicles of those few writers who were not monks, the State papers, but above all, where accessible, the personal accounts and private letters of the individuals in question. It is pitiable to see well-meaning Protestant writers, even in our _own_ day, repeating after each other the old monkish calumnies, and never so much as pausing to inquire, Are these things so?

Late on the evening of the following day the Prior and monks of Ashridge stood at the gate ready to receive their founder. The circ.u.mstances of his coming were unknown to them, and they were prepared to make it a triumphal occasion. But the first glance at his face altered all that.

The Prior quietly waved his monks back, and, going forward himself, kissed his patron's hand, and led him silently into the monastery.

Poor Sir Reginald found himself condemned to all the sorrows he had antic.i.p.ated, down to the sorrel soup--for it was a vigil--and the straw mattress, which, though considerably softer than the plank beds of the monks, was barely endurable to his ease-loving limbs. He looked as he felt--extremely uncomfortable and exceedingly cross.

The Prior wasted no attentions on him. Such troubles as these were not worth a thought in his eyes; but his founder's face cost him many thoughts. He saw too plainly that for him had come one of those dread hours in life when the floods of deep waters overflow a man, and unless G.o.d take him into the ark of His covenant mercy, he will go down in the current. It was after some hours of prayer that the Prior tapped at the door of the royal guest.

Earl Edmund's quiet voice bade him enter.

"How fares it with my Lord?"

"How is it likely to fare," was the sorrowful answer, "with one who hath lost hope?"

The Prior sat down opposite his guest, where he might have the opportunity of studying his countenance. He was himself the senior of the Earl, being a man of about sixty years--a man in whom there had been a great deal of fire, and in whose dark, gleaming eyes there were many sparks left yet.

"Father," said the Earl, in a low, pained voice, "I am perplexed to understand G.o.d's dealings with me."

"Did you expect to understand them?" was the reply.