A Lost Cause Part 8

"He has been awfully good about it," Blantyre said. "He was down here on Tuesday morning going into the matter. A man named Hamlyn, the editor of a little local paper, threw the church into a miserable state of confusion during Ma.s.s last Sunday, just after I had said the Prayer of Consecration. He read a doc.u.ment protesting against the Blessed Sacrament. We had him ejected, and yesterday he was fined ten shillings in the local police court. The magistrate, who is a p.r.o.nounced Protestant in his sympathies, said that though the defendant had doubtless acted with the best intentions, one must not combat one illegality with another, and that the law provided methods for the regulation of worship other than protests during its process!"

"Pompous old a.s.s!" said Stephens.

"Well, I'm glad they fined him," Lucy said.

"'All's well that ends well!' You won't have the services disturbed again."

"On the contrary, dear, we are all very much afraid that this is the first spark of a big fire. We hear rumours of an organised movement which may be widely taken up by the enemies of the Church. All through the ranks there's a feeling of uneasiness. Lord Huddersfield is working night and day to warn the clergy and prepare them. We cannot say how it will end."

He spoke with gravity and seriousness. Lucy, who privately thought the whole thing a ridiculous storm in a teacup, and was utterly ignorant of the points at issue, looked sympathetic, but said nothing. She was not in a flippant mood; she realised she was quite an outsider in the matter, which seemed so momentous to the three intelligent men she was with, and, unwilling to betray her lack of comprehension or to say anything that would jar, she kept a discreet silence.

"We all get shouted after already, when we go into the worst parts of the parish," said Stephens cheerfully. "They've been rousing the hooligan element. It's an old trick. Lazy bounders, who don't know a Christian from a Jew and have never been in a church in their lives, shout 'papist' after us as we go into the houses. Just before I came in, I was walking up the street when a small and very filthy urchin put his head round the corner of a house and squeaked out, 'Oo kissed ve Pope's toe?' Then he turned and ran for dear life. As yet, I haven't been a.s.saulted, but King has! Haven't you, King?"

Mr. King looked rather like a bashful bulldog, and endeavoured to change the subject.

"Do you mean any one actually struck you, Mr. King?" Lucy said, absolutely bewildered. "How awful! But why should any one want to do that?"

The vicar broke in with a broad grin that made his likeness to a comedian more apparent than ever.

"Oh, King was splendid!" he said with a chuckle. "That ended very well.

A big navvy chap was coming out of a public-house just as King was pa.s.sing. He looked round at his friends and called out something to the effect that here was another monkey in petticoats--we wear our ca.s.socks in the streets--and see how he'd do for um! So he gave poor King a clout on the side of the head."

"Oh, I _am_ sorry," Lucy said, looking with interest upon the priest, and realising dimly that to be a clergyman in Hornham apparently ranked as one of the dangerous trades. "What did you do, Mr. King?"

King flushed a little and looked singularly foolish. He was a bashful man with ladies,--they did not come much into his pastoral way.

Lucy thought that the poor fellow had probably run away and wished that she had not asked such an awkward question.

"Oh, he won't tell ye, my dear!" Blantyre said, "but I will. When the gentleman smacked um on the cheek, he turned the other to him and kept's hands behind's back. Then the hero smacked that cheek too. 'Hurroo!'

says King, or words to that effect, 'now I've fulfilled me duty to me religion and kept to the words of Scripture. And now, me friend, I'm going to do me duty to me neighbour and thrash ye till ye can't see out of your eyes.' With that he stepped up to um and knocked um down, and when he got up, he knocked um down again!"

Mr. King fidgeted uneasily in his seat. "I thought it was the wisest thing to do," he said, apologetically. "You see, it would stop anything of the sort for the future!"

"And the fun of the whole thing, Miss Blantyre," Stephens broke in, "was that I came along soon after and found the poor wretch senseless--King's got a fist like a hammer. So we got him up and refused to charge him to the policeman who turned up after it was all over, and we brought him here. We sponged him and mended him and fed him, and he turned out no end of a good sort when the drink was out of him. Poor chap gets work when he can, hasn't a friend in the world; hadn't any clothes or possessions but what he stood up in, and was utterly a waster and uncared for. We asked him if he knew what a papist was, and found he hadn't an idea, only he thought that they made love to workingmen's wives when their husbands were at work! He'd been listening to our friend, Mr. Hamlyn, who called a ma.s.s-meeting after the police-court proceedings and lectured on the three men of sin at the vicarage!"

A flood of strange and startling ideas poured into the girl's brain. A new side of life, a fourth dimension, was beginning to be revealed to her. She looked wonderingly at the three men in their long ca.s.socks; she felt she was in the presence of power. She had felt that when James Poyntz was talking to her in the train, in the fresh, sunlit morning, which seemed a thing of the remotest past now. Yet this afternoon she felt it more poignantly than before. Things were going on down here, in this odd corner of London, that were startling in their newness.

"And what happened to the poor man?" she said at length.

"Oh," answered the vicar, "very fortunately we are without a man of all work just now, so we took him on. He carried your trunk up-stairs. He's wearing Stephen's trousers, which are much too tight for um! and an old flannel tennis coat of King's--till we can get his new clothes made. He was in rags!"

"But surely that's rather risky," Lucy said in some alarm. "And what about the other servants? I shouldn't think Miss Ca.s.s liked it much!"

Miss Ca.s.s was the housekeeper, the woman with the face like a horse. She always repelled Lucy, who, for no reason than the old, stupid "Dr. Fell"

reason, disliked her heartily.

To her great surprise, she saw three faces turned towards her suddenly.

On each was an expression of blank surprise, exactly the same expression. Lucy wanted to laugh; the three men were as alike as children are when a conjuror has just made the pudding in the hat or triumphantly demonstrated the disappearing egg.

The taciturn King spoke first. "I forgot," he said; "of course you don't know anything about Miss Ca.s.s. How should you, indeed! Miss Ca.s.s is a saint."

He said it quite simply, with a little pride, possibly, that the vicarage which housed him housed a saint, too, but that was all.

"Yes," the vicar said, his brogue dropping away from him, as it always did when he was serious, "Miss Ca.s.s is a saint. I'll tell you her story some time while you're here, dear. It is a n.o.ble story. But don't you be alarmed about our new importation. Bob will be all right. We know what we are doing here."

"It's wonderful, Miss Blantyre," Stephens broke out, his boyish face all lighted up with enthusiasm. "You know, Bob'd actually never been in church before yesterday morning, when he came to Ma.s.s."

He stopped for a moment, out of breath in his eagerness. Lucy saw that he--indeed, all of them--took it quite for granted that these things they spoke of had supreme interest for her as for them. There was such absolute _conviction_ that these things were the only important things, that no excuse or apology was necessary in speaking of them. She found she liked that, she liked it already. There was a magnetism in these men that drew her within their circle. She saw that, whatever else they were, they were absolutely consistent. They did not have one eye on convention and the world, like the West End clergymen she knew,--some of them at least. These men lived for one aim, one end, with tremendous force and purpose. They simply disregarded everything else. Nothing else occurred! Yes, this was a fourth dimension indeed. She bent herself to listen to the boy's story, marking, with a pleasure that had something maternal in it, the vividness and reality of his interest and hopes.

"Before he went," the young man said, "I explained the Church's teaching exactly to him. Don't forget that the poor chap hadn't the slightest idea of anything of the sort. He was astounded. A mystery that I could not explain to him, a mystery for which there were no _material_ evidences at all, came home to him at once. _I saw faith born._ And they say this is not an age of miracles! Think of the tremendous revolution in the man's mind. He talked to me after the service. It was all wonderfully real to him. He was absolutely convinced of the coming of our Lord. There isn't a rationalist in London that could shake the man's belief. I asked him why he was so sure--was it merely because I had told him, because I believed in it? His answer was singularly touching. 'Nah,' he said, scratching his head,--they all do when they try to think,--'It wasn't wot you said, guvnor, it was wot I _felt_. I _knowed_ as 'E wos there. Why, I ses to myself, _It's true!_'"

"It is very wonderful," Lucy said. "It's more wonderful by far than a man at a Salvation Army meeting or a revival. One can understand that the sudden shouts and the trumpets and banners and things would influence any one. But that a service which is inexplicable even to the people who conduct it should influence this poor uneducated man is strange."

"Now, I don't think it strange, Lucy, dear," the vicar said; "it's far more natural to me than the other. The wonderful power of the Church lies in this, _that her mysteries appeal to quite simple people whose minds are a blank on religious questions. They appeal to the simple instantly and triumphantly._ They feel the power of the Blessed Sacrament. And _only_ Catholicism can do this in full and satisfying measure. We find that over and over again. The jam-and-glory teas, the kiss-in-the-ring revivals, have a momentary and hysterical influence with the irreligious. But it doesn't last, there is no system or discipline, and above all, _there is no dignity_. Only priests realise thoroughly how the poorer and less-educated cla.s.ses crave for the proper dignity and beauty of worship. It has always been so. It is the secret of the power that the Roman Church has over the minds of men."

"Then why are there so many Salvationists and Dissenters?" Lucy asked.

"For a mult.i.tude of reasons. A dislike to discipline chiefly. People don't go to church because the novelties of thirty or forty years ago have filtered down into the omnibuses and people who are naturally irreligious prefer to make a comfortable little code for themselves. The Church says you _must not_ do this or that; its rules are thoroughly well defined. Folk are afraid to come as near to G.o.d as the Church brings them. Their cry is always that the Church comes between them and G.o.d. Often that is a malevolent cry, and more often still it's pure ignorance. The silly people haven't an idea what they're talking about.

It would be just as reasonable for me to say, 'I hate and abominate Nicaragua, which is a pernicious and soul-destroying place,' when I've never been nearer to Nicaragua than Penzance."

"There is one thing that we do see," King continued in his slow, powerful way. "Whenever we have open-minded men or women come to church to pray and find help, they find it. Dozens and dozens of people have come to me after they have become members of the Church and said that they could not understand the anti-Church nonsense they themselves had joined in before. '_We never knew_,' that is the cry always."

"The thunder's beginning!" Father Blantyre said suddenly, realising apparently that the talk was straying into channels somewhat alien to a young society lady presiding at afternoon tea.

"Lucy, me dear, it's tired you'll be of sitting with three blathering old priests talking shop in a thunderstorm--there's a flash for ye!"

A sheet of brilliant steel-blue had flashed into the room as he spoke, showing every detail of it clear and distinct as in some lurid day of the underworld. The books, the writing table, the faces of the three clergymen, and the tall silver crucifix between the candles, which had momentarily faded to a dull and muddy yellow, all made a sudden tableau which burned itself upon the retina. Then came darkness once more and the giant stammer of the thunder far overhead.

The thunder ceased and they waited, expectant of the next explosion, when the penetrating and regular beating of an adjacent bell was heard.

"There's the bell for evensong!" Blantyre said; "I did not know it was so late." He put on his berretta and left the room, the other men following him. Lucy rose also. She felt that she would make one of them, and going up-stairs to get a hat, she presently found herself in the long, covered pa.s.sage that connected the vicarage with the church.

The idea of a house which was but an appanage of the church was new to her. The pa.s.sage had been built since her last visit. And as she entered the huge, dim building, she saw clearly how powerful in the minds of her brother and his friends its nearness must be. All their life, their whole life, centred in this church. Its services were as frequent and natural as their daily food. How strangely different it all was to the life of the outside world! She herself had not been to church for six weeks or more. Even people who "called themselves Christians" only entered a pew and enjoyed a hebdomadal siesta in church. But these men could not get on without it. Every thought and action was in communion with the Unseen. And she was forced to acknowledge it to herself,--if one actually did believe in a future life, in eternity, then this was the only logical way in which to prepare for it. If life was really like a sojourn of one night in an inn, then the traveller who made no preparation for the journey, and spent the night in careless disregard of the day, was an utter fool. But no one called worldly people fools!--it was all very puzzling and worrying, and common-sense did not seem like common-sense in Hornham.

And was James Poyntz a fool?

It was the last question she asked herself as she turned into the side chapel where evensong was to be said. Some twenty kneeling figures were there. The place was dimly lighted save for the tall gas standards by the priests' seats in front of the altar.

High up before the painted reredos hung a single lamp that burned with a dull red glow. There were many sick folk in the parish of St. Elwyn's: at all hours of the day and night, the clergy were sent for to help a departing soul upon its way hence, and the Blessed Sacrament was reserved upon this altar in the side chapel.

The simple and stately service was nearly over. The girl had listened to the sonorous words as if she heard them now for the first time. As she knelt, her heart seemed empty of the hopes, fears, and interests of daily life. It seemed as a vessel into which something was steadily flowing. And the fancy came to her that all she experienced was flowing to her from the dim tabernacle upon the altar. It was almost a _physical_ sense, it was full of awe and sweetness. She trembled exceedingly as the service ended and her brother prayed for the fellowship of the Holy Ghost.

For a time after the echoing footsteps of the clergy had died away, she remained upon her knees. She was praying, but without words; all her thoughts were caught up into one voiceless, wordless, pa.s.sionate e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n.

When at length she bowed low,--it was the first time she had ever done such a thing,--before the altar, and left the church, it was by the west door.

She had a fancy for the street, and she found that the thunder had all pa.s.sed away and that a painted summer's evening sky hung over the garish town.