The World's Greatest Books - Volume 5 Part 1

The World's Greatest Books.

Volume V.

by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

MAXWELL GRAY

The Silence of Dean Maitland

Mary Gleed Tuttiett, the gifted lady who writes under the pseudonym of "Maxwell Gray," was born at Newport, Isle of Wight. The daughter of Mr. F.B. Tuttiett, M.R.C.S., she began her literary career by contributing essays, poems, articles, and short stones to various periodicals. With the appearance of "The Silence of Dean Maitland," in 1886, Maxwell Gray's name was immediately and permanently established in the front rank of living novelists. The story and its problem, dramatically set forth, and with rare literary art, became one of the most discussed themes of the day. Since that time Maxwell Gray has produced a number of stories, among them being "The Reproach of Annesley" (1888), "The Last Sentence"

(1893), "The House of Hidden Treasure" (1898), and "The Great Refusal" (1906), and also several volumes of poems. This little version of "The Silence of Dean Maitland" has been prepared by Miss Tuttiett herself.

_I.--Impending Tragedy_

The story opens on a grey October afternoon in the Isle of Wight, in the 'sixties. Alma Lee, the coachman's handsome young daughter, is toiling up a steep hill overlooking Chalkburne, tired and laden with parcels from the town. As she leans on a gate, Judkins, a fellow-servant of her father's, drives up in a smart dog-cart, and offers her a lift home. She refuses scornfully, to the young groom's mortification; he drives off, hurt by her coquetry and prophesying that pride goes before a fall.

Then a sound of bells is heard--a waggon drawn by a fine bell-team climbs the hill, and stops by Alma. She accepts the waggoner's offer of a lift, and on reaching the gate of her home in the dusk, is distressed by his insistence on a kiss in payment, when out of the tree-shadows steps Cyril Maitland, the graceful and gifted son of the rector of Malbourne, newly ordained deacon.

He rebukes the waggoner, rescues Alma, and escorts her across a field to her father's cottage. There he is welcomed with respectful affection as the rector's son and Alma's former playmate. Afterwards she lights him to the gate, where a chance word of his evokes from her an innocent and unconscious betrayal of her secret love, kindling such strong response in him as he cannot conquer except by touching a letter in his breast- pocket. This letter is from Marion Everard, to whom he has been a year engaged.

He walks through the dark to Malbourne Rectory, where, by the fire, he finds his invalid mother, his twin sister, Lilian, and two younger children. Here he appears the idol of the hearth--genial, graceful, gifted, beautiful, and warm-hearted. But he betrays ambition, sudden and great haste to be married, and some selfishness. He walks to his lodging in a neighbouring village, where trifling circ.u.mstances point to a refined sensuousness, self-indulgence, and sophistry in his character, leading to the neglect of serious duty. The shadow of impending tragedy is hinted at from the first line of the book.

December in the following year. Cyril now an East End curate, and Henry Everard, M.D., going by rail to Malbourne. Everard asleep; manly, cheerful, intellectual, healthy in body and mind. Cyril awake; consumed by unspeakable sorrow. Everard wakes; Cyril suddenly becomes gay in response to his friend's high spirits. They chaff each other. Cyril preaches to Everard, when Henry scolds him for fasting, and his laxity of faith and practice. They pa.s.s Belminster, when Cyril betrays unconscious ambition at Everard's jesting prophecy that he would preach as bishop in the cathedral. Asceticism is defended by Cyril and condemned by Everard. Cyril speaks of the discipline of sorrow, and presses a spiked cross under his clothes into his side. Everard exalts the discipline of joy. The friends have been privately educated together, and were together at Cambridge. Henry admires Cyril's character and mental brilliance; Cyril regards Henry with condescending affection. Everard is silently in love with Lilian.

Cyril and Everard in the meantime have arrived at Malbourne Rectory.

Cyril and Marion, who have not met since a quarrel, are alone together.

She wonders that he makes so much of the little tiff. He talks of his unworthiness, and makes her promise to cleave to him through good and _evil_ report. At dinner, Everard asks for all the villagers, and gathers that Alma Lee is disgraced. "Alma, little Alma, the child we used to play with!" he cries afterwards to the men Maitlands. "Who is the scoundrel?" Cyril grows impatient under the discussion that follows.

"After all, _she is not the first!_" he says at last, to Everard's indignation.

Sunday. All cla.s.ses meeting on the way to church, when Cyril preaches for the first time to his friends and neighbours, who throng to hear him. He preaches with pa.s.sionate earnestness upon the beauty of innocence and the agony of losing it. "That once lost," he says, "the old careless joy of youth never returns."

The village parliament in the moonlit churchyard after service comment with humour on the sermon, and on Cyril's eloquence, learning, and good heart. Granfer, the village oracle, prophesies that the queen will make a bishop of him. Ben Lee, talking with Judkins by the harness-room fire, supposes that Cyril was thinking of Alma in his sermon. "He always had a kind heart." But Judkins speaks of his suspicions of Everard as Alma's betrayer, alludes to his frequent visits to Mrs.

Lee during her illness some months ago, and his constant meeting with Alma. Lee is convinced of Everard's guilt. "I'll kill him!" he cries furiously.

_II.--Sin-Engendered Sin_

It is a lovely winter's day, and Cyril, Lilian, and Everard are walking through the woods at the back of Lee's cottage. Cyril puts something into a hollow tree, and intimates a chaffinch's call. Another bird replies. Cyril walks on to Oldport, leaving Everard and Lilian, between whom there follows a warm love scene and betrothal. During this episode Mrs. Lee, Alma's stepmother, tells her husband that Alma is gone to meet her unknown lover in the wood at the signal of a chaffinch's call. Lee follows, and finds Alma there _alone_. He picks up a paper she had torn and dropped; it contains an a.s.signation for that evening at dusk. Before luncheon Everard changes the grey suit he was wearing, and had stained in a muddy ditch. He goes to a lonely cottage on the downs in the afternoon; returning in the evening, he gets a black eye while romping with little Winnie Maitland. After bathing the eye, he sponges the stained suit, and is surprised to find blood on it. Cyril has been absent in Oldport all day, and on his return goes to bed with a headache, speaking to n.o.body. A man in Henry's grey suit pa.s.ses through the hall at dusk, followed by the cat, who never runs after anyone but Lilian and Cyril.

That evening, New Year's eve, there is a gay party of rustics at the wheelwright's house. In the midst of Granfer's best story in rushes Grove, the waggoner, crying that Ben Lee had just been found murdered in the wood. The same night Alma gives birth to a son.

Next day, Cyril, in great mental anguish, goes to Admiral Everard's house, and incidentally puts to a brother clergyman there a case of conscience: Should a man who has acted unwisely, and is guilty of unintentional homicide, imperil a useful and brilliant career by confession? Not if he had such great gifts and opportunities of doing good as Cyril has, he is told. By this p.r.o.nouncement and a love scene with Marion, Cyril is much comforted.

In the meantime, Ben Lee's death is by many being imputed to Everard, who is quite unconscious of these suspicions. He is much surprised at the appearance of policemen at the rectory that afternoon, and still more so at being arrested on the charge of murdering Lee.

After due examination, Everard is committed for trial on the charge of murder. His best witness, Granfer, who had seen and spoken with him in the village at the moment of the alleged murder, greatly discredited his evidence by his circ.u.mlocution and stupidity, purposely affected to set the court in a roar. He admitted that Everard gave him money and tobacco. Judkins swore that at three o'clock Lee told him Everard had asked Alma to meet him at dusk that evening in the wood, and that he--Lee--meant to follow Everard there and exact reparation from him; that Alma and Everard were known to be together in the wood on the morning of Lee's death (when Everard was with Lilian), and that he himself had seen them meet often clandestinely in the spring during Mrs.

Lee's illness, when letters, books, and flowers had pa.s.sed between them.

On the eve of Lee's death he had seen Everard go into the copse at dusk carrying a heavy stick.

Ingram Swaynestone, Grove, the waggoner, and Stevens, the s.e.xton, all saw Everard going on the upland path to Swaynestone. But the blacksmith swore to seeing him in the village street at the same hour. A keeper saw him going to the copse at the same time that a shepherd met him on the down going in another direction. At five o'clock two rectory maids saw Everard run in by the back door and upstairs, followed by the cat; he made no reply when Miss Maitland spoke to him. An hour later, Everard asked the cook for raw meat for a black eye, which he said he got by running against a tree in the dark. Blood was found in a basin in his room, and on the grey suit, which was much stained and torn, as if by a struggle. A handkerchief of Everard's was found in the wood, also a stick he had been seen with in the morning.

Everard's evidence at the inquest was that he left Malbourne Rectory about four, wearing a black coat, met the blacksmith in the village, and the shepherd on the down, and finding the cottage on the down empty, returned, seeing no one till he met Granfer at Malbourne Cross, and reached the rectory at six, where a romp with Winnie Maitland gave him the black eye, that he promised her not to speak about. He could not account for the blood found on his clothes.

Cyril is much shocked by the verdict and committal of Everard, but is sure that he will be cleared. "He must be cleared," he says, "_at any cost_." Pending the a.s.size trial, he baptises three unknown babes in Malbourne Church. When asking the name of one of the children in his arms, he is told "Benjamin Lee." His evident deep emotion at this evokes sympathy from all present. During the trial at Belminster he has a great spiritual conflict in the cathedral while a fugue of Bach's is played on the organ, suggesting a combat between the powers of evil and good. But he feels that he _cannot_ renounce his brilliant prospects. Coming out, he hears that Alma has declared Everard is the man who was with her father when he met his death in the struggle she heard while outside the copse.

Cyril at once rushes to the court, which he had only left for an hour, just in time to hear the verdict, "Manslaughter."

"Stop!" he cries. "I have evidence--the prisoner is innocent!"

The judge, not understanding what he says, orders his removal; his friends, thinking him distracted, persuade him to be quiet while the utmost sentence--twenty years--is given. On hearing this, Cyril, with a loud cry, falls senseless. He remains in delirium many weeks. A pathetic farewell between Henry and Lilian, who is the only believer in his innocence, and who renews her promise to him, closes the first part.

The tragedy, faintly foreshadowed from the first line, and gradually developed from Cyril's self-righteousness and irrepressible joy in Alma's unguarded betrayal of unconscious pa.s.sion, has darkened the whole story. Sin has engendered sin. Cyril's n.o.ble purpose to devote himself entirely to his high calling, and be worthy of it, has become pitiless ambition.

His self-respect, spiritual pride and egoism; his ready tact, social charm, and power of psychological a.n.a.lysis, subtle sophistry and self-deception; his warmest affection, disguised self-love; his finest qualities perverted lead to his lowest fall.

His weak and belated attempt to right Alma's wrong has killed her father. Alma's desecrated love has turned to fierce idolatry, laying waste Lilian's happiness, and working Henry's complete ruin. Cyril's cowardice has delayed clearing his friend till it is too late to save him.

Not poppy, not mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world

will ever medicine again to him that sweet sleep he had before his guilt.

_III.--The Darkness of a Prison_

A summer Sunday two years later. Alma and her child in a cornfield, listening to bells ringing for Cyril's homecoming with his bride. All the softness and youth gone from Alma's tragic face, and the last gleams of penitence from her heart, since her perjury. Jealousy is prompting her to go and tell Marion all. But Judkins comes and interrupts these wild thoughts. He offers marriage, rehabilitation, and a home in America. She hesitates. She is shunned by all, and can get no work in Malbourne, but has not been dest.i.tute; money has found its way mysteriously to her cottage. So for the child's sake she accepts.

Tea on the rectory lawn. Lilian is thinking of the prisoner, Lennie wondering aloud, "How does Alma _like_ having to go to h.e.l.l for lying about Henry?" Cyril is terribly agitated at this. He has scarcely yet recovered from his long mental illness after Henry's sentence. Marion is _not happy_--she may never allude to Henry. The slightest reference to him makes Cyril ill. Later, in the moonlight, Ingram Swaynestone asks Lilian, whom he has always loved, to marry him. He cannot believe that she is secretly engaged to Henry. She points towards Henry's prison. "I am all that man has on earth, and I love him!" she says.

Nine years later. Convicts pulling down the old walls of Portsmouth. An officer's funeral pa.s.ses by. No. 62--Henry--overhears people speaking of the manner of the officer's death, and his name, Major Everard. Tears fall on the convict's hands as he works. No. 62's father is port admiral. Alma's perjury in court had revealed all to Henry, and reduced him to apathetic despair. "There is no G.o.d--no good anywhere!" he cried.

But in time Lilian's periodic letters gave him heart and hope, and he had accepted his fate bravely, trying to lift up and cheer his fellow- prisoners. In the darkness and uproar of a thunderstorm he escapes from the guarded works. His adventures, during which he comes accidentally and unrecognized in contact with his brother's widow, his sister, and her children, who prattle of family matters in his hearing, and, after a few weeks' wandering, by his being recaptured while lying on the roadside unconscious from hunger and exhaustion. This part of the story concludes with the reception of this news by Lilian and Cyril, whose unintentional neglect has caused the miscarriage of a letter that would have enabled Henry to escape.

_IV.--"I Will Confess my Wickedness"_

Everard is free, and, wearing the grey suit of a discharged prisoner, is travelling from Dartmoor to London by train. Marion, his brother, Leslie, Mrs. Maitland, and the admiral are all dead. Everything is strange and changed to him. Liberty is sweet and bitter. He is prematurely aged and broken down; the great future that had been before him is now for ever impossible. His still undeveloped scientific theories and discoveries have been antic.i.p.ated by others. He feels the prison taint upon him; he will not see Lilian until it is removed, and he has become accustomed to the bewilderment of freedom.

After a few days' pause he starts from London for Malbourne, stopping at Belminster, through which he had made his last free journey with Cyril, when he told him that "an ascetic is a rake turned monk." Pa.s.sing the gaol in which he had suffered so much, he goes to the cathedral. He asks who is now Dean of Belminster.

The verger is surprised. "Where have you been, sir, not to have heard of the celebrated Dean Maitland?" The great dean! The books he has written, the things he has done! All the world knows Dean Maitland, the greatest preacher in the Church of England.

The deanery interior. Cyril, charming and adored as ever, is considering whether he shall accept the historic bishopric of Warham. A strange youth from America is announced, and asks the dean to give him a university education--"because I am your son." "Since when," returns the dean tranquilly, "have you been suffering from this distressing illusion?" The youth bears a letter from Alma. She is dying in Belminster, and implores him to come to her. She cannot die, she writes, till she has cleared Everard. After this terrible scene Cyril is in agony, and nearly commits suicide. "But one sin in a life so spotless!"