Chapter Nine.
Overwhelmed.
“I am a useless and an evil man,—
God planned my life, and let men spoil His plan.”
Isabella Fyvie Mayo.
Oakham was left behind; and to the surprise of the party—except the Countess, her Prime Minister, Father Miles, and her Foreign Secretary, Felicia—they found themselves lodged in Rochester Castle. Here the Countess shut herself up, and communicated with the outward world through her Cabinet only. All orders were brought to the ladies by Felicia, and were passed to Vivian by Father Miles. The latter was closeted with his lady for long periods, and rolls of writing appeared to be the result of these conferences.
The winter moved on with leaden feet, according to the ideas of the household, and of Ada more particularly.
“This sort of life is really something dreadful!” said that young lady. “If the frost would only break up, it would make something fresh to look at. There is nothing to be done!”
“Poor Ada!” responded Olympias, laughing. “Do get some needlework.”
“I am tired of needlework,” answered Ada. “I am tired of everything!”
Felicia came in as the words were spoken.
“I have permission to tell you something,” she said, with a light in her black eyes which Clarice felt sure meant mischief. “The Lady has appealed to the holy Father for a divorce from the Lord Earl.”
“Will she get it?” asked Olympias.
“No doubt of it,” replied Felicia dogmatically.
“And if so, what will she do then?” asked Ada.
“Her pious intention,” said Felicia, the black eyes dancing, “is to become a holy Sister of the Order of the blessed Saint Dominic.”
“Then what is to become of the Lord Earl?” queried Olympias. “I suppose he can marry somebody else. I hope he will.”
“That is no concern of the Lady’s,” said Felicia, in a tone of pious severity. “The religious do not trouble their holy repose about externs, except to offer prayers for their salvation.”
“Why, then, we shall all be turned out!” blankly cried Ada. “What is to become of us all?”
“What will become of me is already settled,” replied Felicia demurely. “I am about to make profession in the same convent with my mistress.”
“Thank the saints!” reached Clarice’s ears in a whisper from Olympias, and was deliberately echoed in the heart of the former.
“But that will never do for me!” exclaimed Ada. “I am sure I have no vocation. What am I to do?”
“The Lady proposes, in her goodness,” said the Countess’s mouthpiece, “to get thee an appointment in the household of one of the Ladies the King’s daughters.”
“Ha, jolife!” said Ada, and ceased her interjections.
“For you, Dames,” continued Felicia, turning to Clarice and Olympias, “she says that, being wedded, you are already provided for, and need no thought on her part.”
“Oh, then, I may go back to Oakham,” answered Olympias in a satisfied tone. “That is what I want.”
Clarice wondered sorrowfully what her lot would be—whether she might return to Oakham. She felt more at home there than anywhere else. The question was whether, Clarice being now at large, Vivian would continue in the Earl’s service; and even if he did, they might perhaps no longer live in the Castle. Clarice took this new trouble where she carried them all; but the Earl’s sorrow was more in her mind than her own. She was learning to cultivate:—
“A heart at leisure from itself,
To soothe and sympathise.”
She found that Vivian had already heard the news from Father Miles, and she timidly ventured to ask him what he intended to do.
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 God 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 God, 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 God, 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 passionate 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 nobody 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 constituted 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 passages 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 noble halls; when the hand of his fair Provençal 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 anticipation 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 God to bear his passion. (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 class 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 Dauphiné and Piedmont it had flowed fresh and pure, fed by the Word of God, 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 Homo, 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 circumstances 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 anticipated, 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 God 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 God’s dealings with me.”
“Did you expect to understand them?” was the reply.
“Thus far I did—that I thought He would finish what He had begun. But all my life—so far as this earthly life is concerned—I have been striving for one aim, and it has come to utter wreck. I set one object before me, and I thought—I thought it was God’s will that I should pursue it. If He, by some act of His own providence, had shown me the contrary, I could have understood it better. But He has let men step in and spoil all. It is not He, but they who have brought about this wreck. My barge is not shattered by the winds and waves of God, but scuttled by the violence of pirates. My life is spoiled, and I do not understand why. I have done nothing but what I thought He intended me to do: I have set my heart on one thing, but it was a thing that I believed He meant to give me. It is all mystery to me.”
“What is spoiled, my Lord? Is it what God meant you to do, or what you meant God to do?”
The sand grew to a larger heap in the hour-glass before another word was spoken.
“Father,” said the Prince at last, “have I been intent on following my own will, when I thought I was pursuing the Lord’s will for me? Father Bevis thinks so: he gave me some very hard words before I came here. He accuses me of idolatry; of loving the creature more than the Creator—nay, of setting up my will and aim, and caring nothing for those of the Lord. In his eyes, I ought to have perceived years ago that God called me to a life apart with Him, and to have detached my heart from all but Himself and His Church. Father, it is hard enough to realise the wreck of all a man hoped and longed for: yet it is harder to know that the very hope was sin, that the longing was contrary to the Divine purpose for me. Have I so misunderstood my life? Have I so misunderstood my Master?”
The expression of the Prior’s eyes was very pitying and full of tenderness. Hard words were not what he thought needed as the medicine for that patient. They were only to be expected from Father Bevis, who had never suffered the least pang of that description of pain.
“My Lord,” answered the Prior, gently, “it is written of the wicked man, ‘Thou hast removed Thy judgments from his eyes.’ They are not to be seen nor fathomed by him. And to a great extent it is equally true of the righteous man. Man must not look to be able to comprehend the ways of God—they are above him. It is enough for him if he can walk submissively in them.”
“I wonder,” said the Earl, still pursuing his own train of thought, “if I ought to have been a monk. I never imagined it, for I never felt any vocation. It seemed to me that Providence called me to a life entirely different. Have I made an utter blunder all my life? I cannot think it.”
“There is no need to think it, my Lord. We cannot all be monks, even if we would. And why should we? It might, perhaps, be better for you to think one other thing.”
“What?” asked the Earl, with more appearance of interest than he had hitherto shown.
“That what you suppose to be the spoiling of your life is just what God intended for you.”
The Earl’s face grew dark. “What! that all my life long He was leading me up to this?”
“It looks like it,” said the Prior, quietly.
“Oh! but why?”
“Now, my Lord, you go beyond me. Neither you nor I can guess that. But He knows.”
“Yes, I suppose He knows.” But the consideration did not seem to comfort him as it had done before when suggested by Father Bevis.
“Perhaps,” said the Prior again, softly, “there was no other way for your Lordship to the gate of the Holy City. He leads us by diverse ways; some through the flowery mead, and some over the desert sands where no water is. But of all it is written, ‘He led them forth by the right way, that they might reach the haven of their desire.’ Would your Lordship have preferred the mead and have missed the haven?”
“No,” answered the Earl, firmly.
“Remember that you hold God’s promise that when you awake up after His likeness you shall be satisfied with it. And he is not satisfied with his purchase who accounts it to have cost more than it was worth.”
“Will your figure hold if pressed further?” said the Earl, with a wintry smile. “The purchase may be worth a thousand marks, but if I have but five hundred in the world I shall starve to death before the gem is mine.”
“No, my Lord, it will not hold. For you cannot pay the price of that gem. The cost of it was His who will keep it safe for you, so that you cannot fling it away in mistake or folly. Figures must fail somewhere; and we want another in this case. My Lord, you are the gem, and the heavenly Graver is fashioning on you the King’s likeness. Will you stay His hand before it is perfect?”
“I would it were near perfection!” sighed the Earl.
“Perhaps it is,” said the Prior, gently. “Remember, it is your Father who is graving it.”
The Earl’s lip quivered. “If one could but know when it would be done! If one might know that in seven years—ten years—it would be complete, and one’s heart and brain might find rest! But to think of its going on for twenty, thirty, forty—”
“They will look short enough, my Lord, when they are over.”
“True. But not while they are passing.”
“Nay, ‘No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous.’ Yet ‘faint not when thou art rebuked of Him.’”
“It is the going on, that is so terrible!” said the Earl, almost under his breath. “If one might die when one’s hope dies! Father, do you know anything of that?”
“In this world, my Lord, I dug a grave in mine own heart for all my hopes, forty years ago.”
“And can you look back on that time calmly?”
“That depends on what you mean by calmness. Trustfully, yes; indifferently, no.”
“Yet the religious say that God requires their affections to be detached from the world. That must produce deadness of feeling.”
“My Lord, there is such a thing as being alive from the dead. That is what God requires. If we tarry at the dying, we shall stop short of His perfection. We are to be dead to sin; but I nowhere find in Scripture that we are to die to love and happiness. That is man’s gloss upon God’s precept.”
“Is that what you teach in your valleys?”
“We teach God’s Word,” said the Vaudois Prior. “Alas! for the men that have made it void through their tradition! ‘If they speak not according thereunto, it is because there is no light in them.’”
“And you learn—” suggested the Earl in a more interested tone.
“We learn that God requires of His servants that they shall overcome the world; and He has told us what He means by the world—‘The lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.’ Whatever has become that to me, that am I to overcome, if I would reign with Christ when He cometh.”
We Protestants can hardly understand the fearful extent to which Rome binds the souls of her votaries. When she goes so far—which she rarely does—as to hold out God’s Word with one hand, she carries in the other an antidote to it which she calls the interpretation of the Church, derived from the consent of the Fathers. That the Fathers scarcely ever consent to anything does not trouble her. According to this interpretation, all human affection comes for monk or nun under the head of the lusts of the flesh. (Note 3.) A daughter’s love for her mother, a father’s for his child, is thus branded. From his cradle Earl Edmund had been taught this; was it any marvel if he found it impossible to get rid of the idea? The Prior’s eyes were less blinded. He had come straight from those Piedmontese valleys where, from time immemorial, the Word of God has not been bound, and whosoever would has been free to slake his thirst at the pure fountain of the water of life. Love was not dead in his heart, and he was not ashamed of it.
“But then, Father, you must reckon all love a thing to be left behind?” very naturally queried the Earl.
“It will not be so in Heaven,” answered the Prior; “then why should it be on earth? Left behind! Think you I left behind me the one love of my life when I became a Bonus Homo? I trow not. My Lord, forty years ago this summer, I was a young man, just entering life, and betrothed to a maiden of the Val Pellice. God laid His hand upon my hopes of earthly happiness, and said, ‘Not so!’ But must I, therefore, sweep my Adelaide’s memory out of my heart as if I had never loved her, and hold it sin against God to bear her sweet face in tender remembrance? Nay, verily, I have not so learned Christ.”
“What happened?” said the Earl.
“God sent His angels for her,” answered the Prior in a low voice.
“Ah, but she loved you!” was the response, in a tone still lower. The Earl did not know how much, in those few words, he told the Prior of Ashridge.
“My Lord,” said the Prior, “did you ever purchase a gift for one you loved, and keep it by you, carefully wrapped up, not letting him know till the day came to produce it?”
The Earl looked up as if he did not see the object of the question; but he answered in the affirmative.
“It may be,” continued the Prior, “that God our Father does the same at times. I believe that many will find gifts on their Father’s table, at the great marriage-feast of the Lamb, which they never knew they were to have, and some which they fancied were lost irrevocably on earth. And if there be anything for which our hearts cry out that is not waiting for us, surely He can and will still the craving.”
The Prior scarcely realised the effect of his words. He saw afterwards that the most painful part of the Earl’s grief was lightened, that the terrible strain was gone from his eyes. He thanked God and took courage. He did not know that he had, to some extent, given him back the most precious thing he had lost—hope. He had only moved it further off—from earth to Heaven; and, if more distant, yet it was safer there.
The Prior left the Earl alone after that interview—alone with the Evangelisterium and the Psalter. The words of God were better for him than any words of men.
He stayed at Ashridge for about a fortnight, and then, to the ecstasy of Sir Reginald, issued orders for return to Berkhamsted. Only a few words passed between the Prior and his patron as they took leave of each other at the gate.
“Farewell, Father, and many thanks. You have done me good—as much good as man can do me now.”
“My Lord, that acknowledgment is trust money, which I will pay into the treasury of your Lord and mine.”
So they parted, to meet only once again. The Vaudois Prior was to go down with his friend to the river-side, to the last point where man can go with man.
Note 1. “Je vais seul avec mon Dieu souffrir ma passion.”—Bonnivard, Prior of Saint Victor.
Note 2. Vaudois is not really an accurate epithet, since the “Valley-Men” only acquired it when, in after years, ejected, from their old home, they sought shelter in the Pays de Vaud. But it has come to be regarded as a name expressive of certain doctrines.
Note 3. “They (the Jesuits) were cut off from family and friends. Their vow taught them to forget their father’s house, and to esteem themselves holy only when every affection and desire which nature had planted in their breasts had been plucked up by the roots.” (Jesuitism, by the Reverend J.A. Wylie, Ll.D.) This statement is simply a shade less true of the other monastic orders.