Books: The Master Christian

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"Nothing!" exclaimed the Abbe, "YOU say this?"

"I say it!" And Bonpre's thin worn features grew transfigured with
the fervour of his thought. "I am a priest of the Church--but I am
also a man!--with reason, with brain, and with a love of truth;--and
I can faithfully say I have an almost jealous honour for my Master--
but I repeat, heresy against the Church is nothing,--it is heresy
against Christ which is the crime of the age,--and in that, the very
Church is heretic! Heresy against Christ!--Heresy against Christ! A
whole system of heresy! 'I never knew you,--depart from me, ye
workers of iniquity,' will be our Lord's words at the Last
Judgment!"

The Abbe's wonderment increased. He looked down a moment, then
looked up, and a quizzical, half-melancholy expression filled his
eyes.

"Well, I am very much concerned in all this," he said, "I wanted to
have a private talk with you on my own account, principally because
I know you to be a good man, while I am a bad one. I have a trouble
here,--" and he touched the region of his heart, "which the wise
doctors say may end my days at any moment; two years at the utmost
is the ultimatum of my life, so I want to know from you, whom I know
to be intelligent and honest, whether you believe I am going to
another existence,--and if so, what sort of a one you think is in
prospect for such a man as I am? Now don't pity me, my dear Bonpre,-
-don't pity me!--" and he laughed a little huskily as the Cardinal
took his hand and pressed it with a silent sympathy more eloquent
than words, "We must all die,--and if I am to go somewhat sooner
than I expected, that is nothing to compassionate me for. But there
is just a little uncertainty in my mind,--I am not at all sure that
death is the end--I wish I could be quite positive of the fact. I
was once--quite positive. But science, instead of giving me this
absolute comfort has in its later progress upset all my former
calculations, and I am afraid I must own that there is indubitably
Something Else,--which to my mind seems distinctly disagreeable!"

Though the Abbe spoke lightly, the troubled look remained in his
eyes and the Cardinal saw it.

"My dear Vergniaud," he began gently, "I am grieved at what you tell
me--"

"No, don't be grieved," interrupted Vergniaud, "because that is not
it. Talk to me! Tell me what you truly think. That this life is only
a schoolroom where we do our lessons more or less badly?--That death
is but the name for another life? Now do not FORCE your faith for
me. Tell me your own honest conviction. Do we end?--or do we begin
again? Be frank and fair and true; according to the very latest
science, remember!--not according to the latest hocus-pocus of
twelfth-century mandate issued from Rome. You see how frank I am,
and how entirely I go with you. But I am going further than you,--I
am bound for the last voyage--so you must not offer me the wrong
pass-word to the shore!"

"No, I will give you the right pass-word," said the cardinal, a
fervid glow of enthusiasm lighting up his features. "It is CHRIST in
all, and through all! Christ only;--Christ, the friend and brother
of man;--the only Divine Teacher this world has ever had, or ever
will have!"

"You believe in Him really,--truly,--then?" exclaimed the Abbe
wonderingly.

"Really--truly, and with all my heart and soul!" responded the
Cardinal firmly,--"Surely, you too, believe?"

"No," said the Abbe firmly, "I do not! I would as soon believe that
the lad you have just rescued from the streets of Rouen is divine,
as that there is any divinity in the Man of Nazareth!"

He rose up as he spoke in a kind of petulance,--then started
slightly as he found himself face to face with Manuel. The boy had
entered noiselessly and stood for a moment glancing from one priest
of the Church to the other. A faint smile was on his face,--his blue
eyes were full of light.

"Did you call me, my lord Cardinal?" he asked.

The Cardinal looked up.

"No, my child!"

"I thought I heard you. If you should need me, I am close at hand."

He went away as quietly as he had entered; and the same silence
followed his departure as before,--a silence which was only
disturbed by the occasional solemn and sweet vibrations of the
distant music from the studio.

VIII.

"A strange lad!" said Abbe Vergniaud, abruptly.

"Strange? In what way do you find him so?" asked the Cardinal with a
touch of anxiety.

The Abbe knitted his brows perplexedly, and took a short turn up and
down the room. Then he laughed.

"Upon my word, I cannot tell you!" he declared, with one of those
inimitable gestures common to Frenchmen, a gesture which may mean
anything or nothing,--"But he speaks too well, and, surely, thinks
too much for his years. Is there nothing further to tell of him save
what you have already said? Nothing that you know of him, beyond the
plain bare fact of having found him weeping alone outside the doors
of the Cathedral?"

"Nothing indeed!" replied the Cardinal bewildered. "What else should
there be?"

The Abbe hesitated a moment, and when he spoke again it was in a
softer and graver tone. "Forgive me! Of course there could be
nothing else with you. You are so different to all other Churchmen I
have ever known. Still, the story of your foundling is exceptional;-
-you will own that it is somewhat out of the common course of
things, for a Cardinal to suddenly constitute himself the protector
and guardian of a small tramp--for this boy is nothing else. Now, if
it were any other Cardinal-Archbishop than yourself, I should at
once say that His Eminence knew exactly where to find the mother of
his protege!"

"Vergniaud!" exclaimed the Cardinal.

"Forgive me! I said 'forgive me' as a prelude to my remarks,"
resumed Vergniaud, "I am talking profanely, sceptically, and
cynically,--I am talking precisely as the world talks, and as it
always will talk."

"The world may talk itself out of existence, before it can hinder me
from doing what I conceive to be my duty," said Felix Bonpre,
calmly, "The lad is alone and absolutely friendless,--it is but
fitting and right that I should do what I can for him."

Abbe Vergniaud sat down, and for a moment appeared absorbed in
thought.

"You are a curious man;" he at length observed, "And a more than
curious priest! Here you are, assuming the guardianship of a boy
concerning whom you know nothing,--when you might as well have
handed him over to one of the orphanages for the poor, or have paid
for his care and education with some of the monastic brethren
established near Rouen,--but no!--you being eccentric, feel as if
you were personally responsible to God for the child, simply because
you found him lost and alone, and therefore you have him with you.
It is very good of you,--we will call it great of you--but it is not
usual. People will say you have a private motive;--you must remember
that the world never gives you credit for doing a good action simply
for the pure sake of doing it,--'There must be something behind it
all,' they say. When the worst cocotte of the age begins to lose her
beauty, the prospect is so alarming that she thinks there may be a
possible hell, after all, and she straightway becomes charitable and
renowned for good works;--precisely in the same way as our famous
stage 'stars', knowing their lives to be less clean than the lives
of their horses and their dogs, give subscriptions and altar-cloths
and organs to the clergy. It is all very amusing!--I assure you I
have often laughed at it. It is as if they took Heaven by its
private ear in confidence, and said, 'See now, I want to put things
straight with you if I can!--and if a few church-ornaments, and
candlesticks will pacify you, why, take them and hold your tongue!'"

He paused, but the Cardinal was silent.

"I know," went on the Abbe, "that you think I am indulging in the
worst kind of levity to talk in this way. It sounds horrible to you.
And you perhaps think I cannot be serious. My dear Saint Felix,
there never was a more serious man than I. I would give worlds--
universes--to believe as you do! I have written books of religious
discussion,--not because I wanted the notice of the world for them,-
-for that I do not care about,--but for the sake of wrestling out
the subject for myself, and making my pen my confidant. I tell you I
envy the woman who can say her rosary with the simple belief that
the Virgin Mary hears and takes delight in all those repetitions.
Nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have composed a
volume of prayers,--a 'Garland of Flowers'--such as an innocent girl
could hold in her hands, and bend her sweet eyes over. It would have
been a taste of the sensual-spiritual, or the spiritual-sensual,--
which is the most exquisite of all human sensations."

"There is no taint of sensuality in the purely spiritual," said the
Cardinal reprovingly.

"Not for your nature,--no! You have made your body like a
transparent scabbard through which the glitter of the soul-sword is
almost visible. But I am different. I am so much of a materialist
that I like to pull down Heaven to the warm bosom of Earth and make
them mingle. You would lift up Earth to Heaven! Ah, that is
difficult! Even Christ came down! It is the chief thing I admire in
Him, that He 'descended from Heaven and was made Man'. TRES CHER
Felix, I shall bewilder you to death with my specious and frivolous
reasoning,--and after all, I had much better come to the main fact
of what I intended to tell you,--a sort of confession out of church.
You know I have already told you I am going to die soon, and that I
am a bad man confessedly and hopelessly,--but among other things is
this, (and if you can give me any advice upon it I will take it,)
that for the last four or five years I have been dodging about to
escape being murdered,--not because I particularly mind being
murdered, because I probably deserve it,--and one way of exit is as
good as another,--but because I want to save the would-be murderer
from committing his crime. Is not that a good motive?"

Cardinal Bonpre gazed at him in astonishment. Vergniaud appeared to
him in an entirely new light. He had always known him as a careless,
cynical-tempered man;--a close thinker,--a clever writer, and a
brilliant talker,--and he had been inclined to consider him as a
"society" priest,--one of those amiable yet hypocritical personages,
who, by the most jesuitical flatteries and studied delicacies of
manner, succeed in influencing weak-minded persons of wealth,
(especially women) to the end of securing vast sums of money to the
Church,--obtaining by these means such rank and favour for
themselves as would otherwise never have been granted to them. But
now the Abbe's frank admission of his own sins and failings seemed a
proof of his inherent sincerity,--and sincerity, whether found in
orthodoxy or heterodoxy, always commanded the Cardinal's respect.

"Are you speaking in parables or in grave earnest?" he asked. "Do
you really mean that you are shadowed by some would-be assassin? An
assassin, too, whom you actually wish to protect?"

"Exactly!" And Vergniaud smiled with the air of one who admits the
position to be curious but by no means alarming. "I want to save him
from the guillotine; and if he murders me I cannot! It is a question
of natural instinct merely. The would-be assassin is my son!"

Cardinal Bonpre raised his clear blue eyes and fixed them full on
the Abbe.

"This is a very serious matter," he said gently, "Surely it is best
to treat it seriously?"

"Oh, I am serious enough, God knows!" returned Vergniaud, with a
heavy but impatient sigh, "I suppose there is, there must be, some
terribly exact Mathematician concerned in the working of things,
else a man's past sins and failings being done with and over, would
not turn up any more. But they DO turn up,--the unseen Mathematician
counts every figure;--and of course trouble ensues. My story is
simply this;--Some twenty-five years ago I was in Touraine;--I was a
priest as I am now--Oh, yes!--the sin is as black as the Church can
make it!--and one mid-summer evening I strolled into a certain
quaint old church of a certain quaint old town,--I need not name it-
-and saw there a girl, as sweet as an apple blossom, kneeling in
front of the altar. I watched her,--I see her now!--the late
sunlight through the stained glass window fell like a glory on her
pretty hair, and on the little white kerchief folded so daintily
across her bosom, and on her small hands and the brown rosary that
was twisted round her fingers. She was praying, so she told me
afterwards, to her guardian angel,--I wonder what that personage was
about just then, Bonpre! Anyhow, to her petition came no answer but
a devil,--a devil personified in me,--I made her love me,--I tempted
her by ever subtle and hellish persuasion I could think of,--I can
never even now think of that time without wondering where all the
eloquent evil of my tongue came from--and--well!--she never was able
to ask the guardian angel any more favours! And I?--I think I loved
her for a while,--but no, I am not sure;--I believe there is no such
good thing as absolute love in my composition. Anyway, I soon left
Touraine, and had almost forgotten her when she wrote to tell me of
the birth of her child--a son. I gave her no reply, and then she
wrote again,--such a letter!--such words! At the moment they burnt
me,--stabbed me--positively hurt me,--and I was not then easily
hurt. She swore she would bring the boy up to curse his father,--
and, to put it quite briefly,--she did. She died when he was twenty,
and it now appears the lad took an oath by her death-bed that he
would never rest till he had killed the man who had dishonoured his
mother, and broken her heart, and brought him into the world with a
stigma on his name. No filial respect, you see!" And Vergniaud tried
to force a smile. "To do the boy justice, he apparently means to
keep his oath,--he has not rested; he has been at infinite pains to
discover me; he has even been at the trouble to write me a warning
letter, and is now in Paris watching me. I, in my turn, take care to
protect myself;--I am followed by detectives, and am at enormous
pains to guard my life; not for my own sake but for his. An odd
complication of circumstances, is it not? I cannot have him arrested
because he would at once relate his history, and my name would be
ruined. And that would be quite as good a vengeance for him as the
other thing. You will admit that it is a very dramatic situation!"

"It is a retribution!" said the Cardinal in a low voice, "And a
terrible one!"

"Yes, I suppose it is. I imagined you would consider it in that
light," and Vergniaud half closed his eyes, leaning back in his
chair languidly, "But here I am, willing to set things as straight
as I can, and it really seems impossible to arrange matters. I am to
die soon, according to the doctors;--and so I have made my
willleaving everything I possess to this ridiculous boy who wishes
to kill me; and it is more than probable that he,--considering how
he has been brought up and educated--will cast all the money into
the dirt, and kick at my grave. But what can I do?"

"Nothing," said the Cardinal, "You can do nothing, Vergniaud! That
is the worst of having inflicted a wrong upon the innocent,--you can
never by any means retrieve it. You can repent,--and it is probable
that your very repentance ensures your forgiveness at a higher
tribunal than that of earth's judgment,--but the results of wrong
cannot be wiped out or done away with in this life;--they continue
to exist, and alas!--often multiply. Even the harsh or unjust word
cannot be recalled, and however much we may regret having uttered
it, somehow it is never forgotten. But--" here leaning forward, he
laid one hand gently on Vergniaud's arm, "My dear friend--my dear
brother--you have told me of your sin;--it is a great sin,--but God
forbid that I should presume to judge you harshly when our Lord
Himself declared that 'He came not to call the righteous but sinners
to repentance'. It may be that I can find a way to help you. Arrange
for me to see this misguided son of yours,--and I will endeavour to
find a means of restitution to him and to the memory of his mother
before you pass away from us,--if indeed you are to pass away so
soon. Under the levity you assume I perceive you have deep feeling
on this matter;--you shall not die with a wrong on your soul,
Vergniaud!--you shall not if I can prevent it! For there undoubtedly
is another life; you must go into it as purely as prayer and
penitence can make you."

"I thought," said the Abbe, speaking somewhat unsteadily, "that you
might when you heard all, hurl some of Rome's thunderous
denunciations upon me . . ."

"What am I, and what is Rome, compared with the Master's own word?"
said the Cardinal gently. "If our brothers sin against us seventy
times seven we are still to forgive, and they are still our
brothers! Denunciations, judgments and condemnations of one another
are not any part of our Lord's commands."

Vergniaud rose up and held out his hand.

"Will you take it," he said, "as a pledge that I will faithfully do
whatever you may see fitting and right to retrieve the past?--and to
clear my son's soul from the thirst of vengeance which is consuming
it?"

Cardinal Bonpre clasped the extended hand warmly.

"There is your answer!" he said, with a smile which irradiated his
fine countenance with an almost supernatural beauty and tenderness,
"You have sinned against Heaven, and you have sinned against the
Church and your own calling,--but the greatest sinner can do no more
than repent and strive to make amends. For I see you fully know and
comprehend the extent of your sin."

"Yes, I know it," and Vergniaud's eyes were clouded and his brows
knitted, "I know it only too well! Greater than any fault of Church-
discipline is a wrong to human life,--and I wronged and betrayed an
innocent woman who loved me! Her soul was as sweet as the honey-cup
of a flower,--I poisoned it. That was as bad as poisoning the
Sacrament! I should have kept it sweet and pure; I should have let
the Church go, and been honest! I should have seen to it that the
child of my love grew up to honour his father,--not to merely live
for the murder of him! Yes!--I know what I should have done--I know
what I have not done--and I am afraid I shall always know! Unless I
can do something to atone I have a strange feeling that I shall pass
from this world to the next--and that the first thing I shall see
will be her face! Her face as I saw it when the sunshine made a halo
round her hair, and she prayed to her guardian angel."

He shuddered slightly, and his voice died away in a half whisper.
The Cardinal pressed his hand again warmly and tenderly.

"Courage, courage!" he said. "It is true we cannot do away with our
memories,--but we can try and make them sweet. And who knows how
much God may help us in the task? Never forget the words that tell
us how 'the angels rejoice more over one sinner that repenteth than
over ninety and nine just persons.'"

"Ah!" and the Abbe smiled, recovering somewhat of his usual manner,
"And that is so faithfully enforced upon us, is it not? The Churches
are all so lenient? And Society is so kind?--so gentle in its
estimate of its friends? Our Church, for example, has never
persecuted a sinner?--has never tortured an unbeliever? It has been
so patient, and so unwearying in searching for stray sheep and
bringing them back with love and tenderness and pity to the fold?
And Churchmen never say anything which is slanderous or cruel? And
we all follow Christ's teaching so accurately? Yes!--Ah well--I
wonder! I wonder what will be the end! I wonder why we came into
life at all--I wonder why we go! Fortunately for me, by and by,
there will be an end of all wondering, and you can write above my
tomb, 'Implora pace'! The idea of commencing a new life is to me,
horrible,--I prefer 'Nirvana' or nothingness. Never have I read
truer words than those of Byron,

'Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not to be.'"

"I cannot think that is either true or good philosophy," said the
Cardinal, "It is merely the utterance of a disappointed man in a
misanthropic mood. There is no 'not to be' in creation. Each morning
that lights the world is an expression of 'to be'! And however much
we may regret the fact, my dear Vergniaud, we find ourselves in a
state of BEING and we must make the best of it,--not the worst. Is
that not so?"

His look was gentle and commanding,--his voice soft yet firm,--and
the worldly Abbe felt somewhat like a chidden child as he met the
gaze of those clear true eyes that were undarkened by any furtive
hypocrisies or specious meanings.

"I suppose it is, but unfortunately I have made the worst of it," he
answered, "and having made the worst I see no best. Who is that
singing?"

He lifted his hand with a gesture of attention as a rich mezzo-
soprano rang out towards them,--

"Per carita
Mostrami il cielo;
Tulto e un velo,
E non si sa
Dove e il cielo.
Se si sta
Cosi cola,
Non si sa
Se non si va
Ahi me lontano!
Tulto e in vano!
Prendimi in mano
Per carita!"

"It is Angela," said the Cardinal, "She has a wonderfully sweet
voice."

"Prendimi in mano,
Per carita!"

murmured Abbe Vergniaud, still listening, "It is like the cry of a
lost soul!"

"Or a strayed one," interposed the Cardinal gently, and rising, he
took Vergniaud's arm, and leaned upon it with a kindly and familiar
grace, an action which implied much more than the mere outward
expression of confidence,--"Nothing is utterly lost, my dear friend.
'The very hairs of our head are numbered,'--not a drop of dew
escapes to waste,--how much more precious than a drop of dew is the
spirit of a man!"

"It is not so unsullied," declared Vergniaud, who loved
controversy,--"Personally, I think the dew is more valuable than the
soul, because so absolutely clean!"

"You must not bring every line of discussion to a pin's point," said
Bonpre smiling, as he walked slowly across the room still leaning on
the Abbe's arm. "We can reduce our very selves to the bodiless
condition of a dream if we take sufficient pains first to advance a
theory, and then to wear it threadbare. Nothing is so deceptive as
human reasoning,--nothing so slippery and reversible as what we have
decided to call 'logic.' The truest compass of life is spiritual
instinct."

"And what of those who have no spiritual instinct?" demanded
Vergniaud.

"I do not think there are any such. To us it certainly often seems
as if there were masses of human beings whose sole idea of living is
to gratify their bodily needs,--but I fancy it is only because we do
not know them sufficiently that we judge them thus. Few, if any, are
so utterly materialistic as never to have had some fleeting
intuition of the Higher existence. They may lack the force to
comprehend it, or to follow its teaching,--but in my opinion, the
Divine is revealed to all men once at least in their lives."

They had by this time passed out of the drawing-room, and now,
ascending three steps, they went through a curtained recess into
Angela Sovrani's studio,--a large and lofty apartment made beautiful
by the picturesque disorder and charm common to a great artist's
surroundings. Here, at a grand piano sat Angela herself, her song
finished, her white hands straying idly over the keys,--and near her
stood the gentleman whom the Abbe Vergniaud had called "a terrible
reformer and Socialist" and who was generally admitted to be
something of a remarkable character in Europe. Tall and fair, with
very bright flashing eyes, and a wonderfully high bred air of
concentrated pride and resolution, united to a grace and courtesy
which exhaled from him, so to speak, with his every movement and
gesture, he was not a man to pass by without comment, even in a
crowd. A peculiar distinctiveness marked him,--out of a marching
regiment one would have naturally selected him as the commanding
officer, and in any crisis of particular social importance or
interest his very appearance would have distinguished him as the
leading spirit of the whole. On perceiving the Cardinal he advanced
at once to be presented, and as Angela performed the ceremony of
introduction he slightly bent one knee, and bowed over the venerable
prelate's extended hand with a reverence which had in it something
of tenderness. His greeting of Abbe Vergniaud was, while perfectly
courteous, not quite so marked by the grace of a strong man's
submission.

"Ah, Mr. Leigh! So you have not left Paris as soon as you
determined?" queried the Abbe with a smile, "I thought you were
bound for Florence in haste?"

"I go to Florence to-morrow," answered Leigh briefly.

"So soon! I am indeed glad not to have missed you," said Cardinal
Bonpre cordially. "Angela, my child, let me see what you have been
doing. All your canvases are covered, or turned with their faces to
the wall;--are we not permitted to look at any of them?"