“Robin,” said Rosamund, “would you like to go and live in the country?”
Robin looked very serious and, after a moment of silent consideration, remarked:
“Where there’s no houses?”
“Some houses, but not nearly so many as here.”
“Would Mr. Thrush be there?”
“Well no, I’m afraid he wouldn’t.”
Robin began to look decidedly adverse to the proposition.
“You see Mr. Thrush has always lived in London,” began Rosamund explanatorily.
“But so’ve we,” interrupted Robin.
“But we aren’t as old as Mr. Thrush.”
“Is he very old, mummie? How old is he?”
“I don’t know, but he’s a very great deal older than you are.”
“I s’poses,” observed Robin meditatively, slightly wrinkling his little nose where the freckles were. “Well, mummie?”
“Old people don’t generally like to move about much, but I think it would be very good for you and me to go into the country while father’s away.”
And taking Robin on her knees, and putting her arms round him, Rosamund began to tell him about the country, developing enthusiasm as she talked, bending over the little fair head that was so dear to her—the little fair head which contained Robin’s dear little thoughts, funny and very touching, but every one of them dear.
She described to Robin the Spring as it is in the English country, frail and fragrant, washed by showers that come and go with a waywardness that seems very conscious, warmed by sunbeams not fully grown up and therefore not able to do the work of the sunbeams of summer. She told him of the rainbow that is set in the clouds like a promise made from a very great distance, and of the pale and innocent flowers of Spring: primroses, periwinkles, violets, cowslips, flowers of dells in the budding woods, and of clearings round which the trees stand on guard about the safe little daisies and wild hyacinths and wild crocuses; flowers of the sloping meadows that go down to the streams of Spring. And all along the streams the twigs are budding; the yellow “lambs’ tails” swing in the breeze, as if answering to the white lambs’ tails that are wagging in the fields. The thrush sings in the copse, and in his piercing sweet note is the sound of Spring.
Bending over Robin, Rosamund imitated the note of the thrush, and Robin stared up at her with ardent eyes.
“Does Mr. Thrush ever do that?”
“I’ve never heard him do it.”
And she went on talking about the Spring.
How she loved that hour talking of Spring in the country with her human Spring in her arms. What was the war to her just then? Robin abolished war. While she had him there was always the rainbow, the perfect rainbow, rising from the world to the heavens and falling from the heavens to the world. The showers were fleeting Spring showers, and the clouds were fleecy and showed the blue.
“Robin, Robin, Robin!” she breathed over her child, when they had lived in the Spring together, the pure and exquisite Spring.
And Robin, all glowing with the ardor he had caught from her, declared for the country.
A few days later Rosamund wrote to Canon Wilton, who happened to be in residence at Welsley out of his usual time, and asked him if he knew of any pretty small house, with a garden, in the neighborhood, where she and Robin could settle down till Dion came back from the war. In answer she got a letter from the Canon inviting her to spend a night or two at his house in the Precincts. In a P.S. he wrote:
“If you can come next week I think I can arrange with Mr. Soames, our precentor, for Wesley’s ‘Wilderness’ to be sung at one of the afternoon services; but let me know by return what days you will be here.”
Rosamund replied by telegraph. Aunt Beatrice was installed in Little Market Street for a couple of nights as Robin’s protector, and Rosamund went down to Welsley, and spent two days with the Canon.
She had never been alone with him before, except now and then for a few minutes, but he was such a sincere and plain-spoken man that she had always felt she genuinely knew him. To every one with whom he spoke he gave himself as he was. This unusual sincerity in Rosamund’s eyes was a great attraction. She often said that she could never feel at home with pretense even if the intention behind it was kindly. Perhaps, however, she did not always detect it, although she possessed the great gift of feminine intuition.
She arrived by the express, which reached Welsley Station in the evening, and found Canon Wilton at the station to meet her. His greeting was:
“The ‘Wilderness,’ Wesley, at the afternoon service to-morrow.”
“That’s good of you!” she exclaimed, with the warm and radiant cordiality that won her so many friends. “I shall revel in my little visit here. It’s an unexpected treat.”
The Canon seemed for a moment almost surprised by her buoyant anticipation, and a look that was sad flitted across his face; but she did not notice it.
As they drove in a fly to his house in the Precincts she looked out at the busy provincial life in the narrow streets of the old country town, and enjoyed the intimate concentration of it all.
“I should like to poke about here,” she said. “I should feel at home as I never do in London. I believe I’m thoroughly provincial at heart.”
In the highest tower of the Cathedral, which stood in the heart of the town, the melodious chimes lifted up their crystalline voices, and “Great John” boomed out the hour in a voice of large authority.
“Seven o’clock,” said the Canon. “Dinner is at eight. You’ll be all alone with me this evening.”
“To-morrow too, I hope,” Rosamund said, with a smile.
“No, to-morrow we shall be the awkward number—three. Mr. Robertson, from Liverpool, is coming to stay with me for a few days. He preaches here next Sunday evening.”
Rosamund’s thought was carried back to a foggy night in London, when she had heard a sermon on egoism, and a quotation she had never forgotten: “Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat.”
“Can you manage with two clergymen?” said Canon Wilton.
“I’ll try. I don’t think they’ll frighten me, and I’ve been wishing to meet Mr. Robertson for a long time.”
“He’s a good man,” said Canon Wilton very simply. But the statement as he made it was like an accolade.
Rosamund enjoyed her quiet evening with the Canon in the house with the high green gate, the elm trees and the gray gables. As they talked, at first in the oak-paneled dining-room, later in the Canon’s library by a big wood fire, she was always pleasantly conscious of being enclosed, of being closely sheltered in the arms of the Precincts, which held also the mighty Cathedral with its cloisters, its subterranean passages, its ancient tombs, its mysterious courts, its staircases, its towers hidden in the night. The ecclesiastical flavor which she tasted was pleasant to her palate. She loved the nearness of those stones which had been pressed by the knees of pilgrims, of those walls between which so many prayers had been uttered, so many praises had been sung. A cosiness of religion enwrapped her. She had a delicious feeling of safety. They could hear the chimes where they sat encompassed by a silence which was not like ordinary silences, but which to Rosamund seemed impregnated with the peace of long meditations and of communings with the unseen.
“This rests me,” she said to her host. “Don’t you love your time here?”
“I’m fond of Welsley, but I don’t think I should like to pass all my year in it. I don’t believe in sinking down into religion, or into practises connected with it, as a soft old man sinks down into a feather bed. And that’s what some people do.”
“Do they?” said Rosamund abstractedly.
Just then a large and murmurous sound, apparently from very far off, had begun to steal upon her ears, level and deep, suggestive almost of the vast slumber of a world and of the underthings that are sleepless but keep at a distance.
“Is it the organ?” she asked, in a listening voice.
Canon Wilton nodded.
“Dickinson practising.”
They sat in silence for a long time listening. In that silence the Canon was watching Rosamund. He thought how beautiful she was and how good, but he almost disliked the joy which he discerned in her expression, in her complete repose. He rebuked himself for this approach to dislike, but his rebuke was not efficacious. In this enclosed calm of the precincts of Welsley where, pacing within the walls by the edge of the velvety lawns, the watchman would presently cry out the hour Canon Wilton was conscious of a life at a distance, the life of a man he had met first in St. James’s Square. The beautiful woman in the chair by the fire had surely forgotten that man.
Presently the distant sound of the organ ceased.
“I love Welsley,” said Rosamund, on a little sigh. “I just love it. I should like to live in the Precincts.”
That brought them to a discussion of plans in which Dion was talked of with warm affection and admiration by Rosamund; and all the time she was talking, Canon Wilton saw the beautiful woman in the chair listening to the distant organ. He knew of a house that was to be let in the Precincts, but that night he did not mention it. Something prevented him from doing so—something against which he struggled, but which he failed to overcome.
When they separated it was nearly eleven o’clock. As Rosamund took her silver candlestick from the Canon at the foot of the shallow oak staircase she said:
“I’ve had such a happy evening!”
It was a very sweet compliment very sweetly paid. No man could have been quite indifferent to it. Canon Wilton was not. As he looked at Rosamund a voice within him said:
“That’s a very dear woman.”
It spoke undeniable truth. Yet another voice whispered:
“Oh, if I could change her!”
But that was impossible. The Canon knew that, for he was very sincere with himself; and he realized that the change he wanted to see could only come from within, could never be imposed by him from without upon the mysterious dweller in the Temple of Rosamund.
That night Rosamund undressed very slowly and “pottered about” in her room, doing dreamily unnecessary things. She heard the chimes, and she heard the watchman calling the midnight hour near her window as “Great John” lifted up his voice. In the drawers where her clothes were laid the Canon’s housekeeper had put lavender. She smelt it as she listened to the watchman’s voice, shutting her eyes. Presently she drew aside curtain and blind and looked out of the window. She saw the outline of part of the great Cathedral with the principal tower, the home of “Great John”; she felt the embracing arms of the Precincts; and when she knelt down to say her prayers she thought:
“Here is a place where I can really pray.”
Nuns surely are helped by their convents and monks by the peace of their whitewashed cells.
“It is only in sweet places of retirement that one can pray as one ought to pray,” thought Rosamund that night as she lay in bed.
She forgot that the greatest prayer ever offered up was uttered on a cross in the midst of a shrieking crowd.
On the following day she went to the morning service in the Cathedral, and afterwards heard something which filled her with joyful anticipation. Canon Wilton told her there was a house to let in the Precincts.
“I’ll take it,” said Rosamund at once. “Esme Darlington has found me a tenant for No. 5, an old friend of his, or rather two old friends, Sir John and Lady Tenby. Where is it?”
He took her to see it.
The house in question had been occupied by the widow of a Dean, who had recently been driven by her health to “relapse upon Bournemouth.” It was a small old house with two very large rooms—one was the drawing-room, the other a bed-room.
The house stood at right angles to the east end of the Cathedral, from which it was only divided by a strip of turf broken up by fragments of old gray ruins, and edged by an iron railing, and by a paved passage-way, which led through the Dark Entry from the “Green Court,” where the Deanery and Minor Canons’ houses were situated, to the pleasaunce immediately around the Cathedral. To the green lawns of this wide pleasaunce the houses of the residentiary Canons gave access. One projecting latticed window of the drawing-room of Mrs. Browning’s house, another of the big bedroom above it, and the windows of the kitchen and the servants’ quarters looked on to the passage-way and the Cathedral; all the other windows looked into an old garden surrounded by a very high brick wall, a garden of green turf like moss, of elm trees, and, in summer, of gay herbaceous borders, a garden to which the voices of the chimes dropped down, and to which the Cathedral organ sent its message, as if to a place that knew how to keep safely all things that were precious. Even the pure and chill voices of the boy choristers found a way to this hidden garden, in which there were straight and narrow paths, where nuns might have loved to walk unseen of the eyes of men.
The Dean’s widow had left behind all her furniture, and was now adorning a Bournemouth hotel, in which her sprightly invalidism and close knowledge of the investments of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and of the habits and customs of the lesser clergy, were greatly appreciated. Some of the furniture did not wholly commend itself to Rosamund. There were certain settees and back-to-backs, certain whatnots and occasional tables, which seemed to stamp the character of the Dean’s widow as meretricious. But these could easily be “managed.” Rosamund was enchanted with the house, and went from room to room with Canon Wilton radiantly curious, and almost as excited as a joyous schoolgirl.
“I must poke my nose into everything!” she exclaimed.
And she did it, and made the Canon poke his too.
Presently, opening the lattice of the second window in the big, low-ceiled drawing-room, she leaned out to the moist and secluded garden. She was sitting sideways on the window-seat, of which she had just said, “I won’t have this dreadful boudoir color on my cushions!” Canon Wilton was standing behind her, and presently heard her sigh gently, and almost voluptuously, as if she prolonged the sigh and did not want to let it go.
“Yes?” he said, with a half-humorous inflection of the voice.
Rosamund looked round gravely.
“Did you say something?”
“Only—yes?—in answer to your sigh.”
“Did I? Yes, I must have. I was thinking——”
She hesitated, while he stood looking at her with his strong, steady gray-blue eyes.
“I was thinking of a life I shall never live.”
He came up to the window-seat.
“Some of it might have been passed in just such a garden as this within sound of bells.”
With a change of voice she added:
“How Robin will love it!”
“The life you will never live?” said the Canon, smiling gravely.
“No, the garden.”
“Then you haven’t a doubt?”
“Oh no. When I know a thing there’s no room in me for hesitation. I shall love being here with Robin as I have never loved anything yet.”
The quarter struck in the Cathedral tower.
“Very different from South Africa!” said Canon Wilton.
Rosamund knitted her brows for a moment.
“I wonder whether Dion will come back altered,” she said.
“D’you wish him to?”
She got up from the window-seat, put out her hand, and softly pulled the lattice towards her.
“Not in most ways. He’s so dear as he is. It would all depend on the alteration.”
She latched the window gently, and again looked at the garden through it.
“I may be altered, too, by living here!” she said. “All alone with Robin. I think I shall be.”
Canon Wilton made no comment. He was thinking:
“And when the two, altered, come together again, if they ever do, what then?”
He had noticed that Rosamund never seemed to think of Dion’s death in South Africa as a possibility. When she spoke of him she assumed his return as a matter of course. Did she never think of death, then? Did she, under the spell of her radiant and splendidly healthy youth, forget all the tragic possibilities? He wondered, but he did not ask.
Mr. Robertson arrived at the Canon’s house just in time for the afternoon service—“my Wilderness service,” as Rosamund called it. The bells were ringing as he drove up with his modest luggage, and Rosamund had already gone to the Cathedral and was seated in a stall.
“I should like to have half an hour’s quiet meditation in church before the service begins,” she had remarked to Canon Wilton. And the Canon had put her in a stall close to where he would presently be sitting, and had then hurried back to meet Father Robertson.
“My Welsley!” was Rosamund’s thought as she sat in her stall, quite alone, looking up at the old jeweled glass in the narrow Gothic windows, at the wonderful somber oak, age-colored, of the return stalls and canopy beneath which Canon Wilton, as Canon-in-Residence, would soon be sitting at right angles to her, at the distant altar lifted on high and backed by a delicate marble screen, beyond which stretched a further, tranquilly obscure vista of the great church. The sound of the bells ringing far above her head in the gray central tower was heard by her, but only just heard, as we hear the voices of the past murmuring of old memories and of deeds which are almost forgotten. Distant footsteps echoed among the great tombs of stone and of marble, which commemorated the dead who had served God in that place in the gray years gone by. In her nostrils there seemed to be a perfume, like an essence of concentrated prayers sent up among these stone traceries, these pointed arches, these delicate columns, by generations of believers. She felt wrapped in a robe never woven by hands, in a robe that gave warmth to her spirit.
A few people began stealing quietly in through the narrow archway in the great screen which shut out the raised choir from the nave. Only one bell sounded now in the gray tower. A faint noise, like an oncoming sigh, above Rosamund’s head heralded the organ’s awakening, and was followed by the whisper of its most distant voice, a voice which made her think—she knew not why—of the sea whispering about a coral reef in an isle of the Southern Seas, part of God’s world, mysteriously linked to “my Welsley.” She shut her eyes, seeking to feel more strongly the sensation of unity. When she opened them she saw, sitting close to her in the return stalls, Father Robertson. His softly glowing eyes were looking at her, and did not turn away immediately. She felt that he knew she was his fellow-guest, and was conscious of a delicious sensation of sympathy, of giving and taking, of cross currents of sympathy between the Father and herself.
“I love this hour—I love all this!” she said to herself.
If only little Robin were submerged in the stall beside her!
The feet of the slow procession were heard, and the silver wand of the chief verger shone out of the delicate gloom.
When the anthem was given out Rosamund looked across at Canon Wilton, and her eyes said to him, “Thank you.” Then she stood up, folded her hands on the great cushion in front of her, and looked at the gray vistas and at the dim sparkle of the ancient glass in the narrow windows.
“The wilderness and the solitary places . . .”
She had spoken of this to Dion as they looked at Zante together, before little Robin had come, and she had said that if she had committed a great sin she would like to take her sin into the Wilderness, because purification might be found there. And she had meant what she said, had spoken out of her heart sincerely. But now, as she listened to this anthem, she saw a walled-in garden, with green turf like moss, old elm trees and straight narrow paths. Perhaps she had been mistaken when she had spoken of the sin and the Wilderness, perhaps she would find purification with fewer tears and less agony in the cloister, within the sound of the bells which called men to the service of God, and of the human voices which sang His praises. Saints had fled into the Wilderness to seek God there, but was He not in the Garden between the sheltering walls, ready there, as in the farthest desert, to receive the submission of the soul, to listen to the cry, “I have sinned”?
As in Elis the spell of the green wild had been upon Rosamund, so now the spell of these old Precincts was upon her, and spoke to her innermost being, and as in Elis Dion had been woven into her dream of the Wilderness, so now in Welsley Robin was woven into it. But Dion had seemed a forerunner, and little Robin seemed That for which she had long waited, the fulfilment of the root desire of her whole being as applied to human life.
When the service was over and the procession had gone out Rosamund sat very still listening to the organ. She believed that Canon Wilton had given the organist a hint that he would have an attentive hearer, for he was playing one of Bach’s greatest preludes and fugues. Father Robertson stayed on in his place. All the rest of the small congregation drifted away through the archway in the rood-screen and down the steps to the nave. The fugue was a glorious, sturdy thing, like a great solid body inhabited by a big, noble, unquestioning soul—a soul free from hesitations, that knew its way to God and would not be hindered from taking it. A straight course to the predestined end—that was good, that was glorious! The splendid clamor of the organ above her, growing in sonorous force, filled Rosamund with exultation. She longed to open her mouth and sing; the blood came to her cheeks; her eyes shone; she mounted on the waves of sound; she was wound up with the great fugue, and felt herself part of it. The gradual working up thrilled her whole being; she was physically and spiritually seized hold of and carried along towards a great and satisfying end. At last came the trumpet with its sound of triumphant flame, and the roar of the pedals was like the roaring of the sea. Already the end was there, grandly inherent in the music, inevitably, desired by all the voices of the organ. All the powers of the organ thundered towards it, straining to be there.
It came, like something on the top of the world.
“If I were a man that’s the way I should like to go to God!” said Rosamund to herself, springing up. “That’s the way, in a chariot of fire.”
Unconscious of what she was doing she stretched out her hands with a big gesture and opened her lips to let out a breath; then, in the gray silence of the now empty Cathedral, she saw Father Robertson’s eyes.
He stepped down from his stall and went out through the archway, and she followed him. On the steps, just beyond the rood-screen, she met a small, determined-looking man with hot cheeks and shining eyes. She guessed at once that he was the organist, went up to him and thanked him enthusiastically.
The organist was the first person she captivated in Welsley, where she was to have so many warm adherents very soon.
Father Robertson went back to Canon Wilton’s house while Rosamund talked to the organist, with whom she walked as far as a high wooden gate labeled “Mr. Dickinson.”
“You’ve got a walled garden too!” she remarked, as her companion took off his hat with an “I live here.”
The organist looked inquiring. Rosamund laughed.
“How could you know? It’s only that I’ve been visiting a delicious old house, with a walled garden, to-day. It’s to let.”
“Oh, Mrs. Duncan Browning’s!” said Mr. Dickinson. “I—I’m sure I hope you’re going to take it.”
“I may!” said Rosamund. “Good-by, and thank you again for your splendid music. It’s done me good.”
“My dear!” exclaimed Mr. Dickinson, about a minute later, bursting—rather than going—into his wife’s small drawing-room, “I’ve just met the most delightful woman, a goddess to look at, and as charming as a siren brought up to be a saint.”
“More epigrams, Henry!” murmured Mrs. Dickinson.
“She’s staying with Canon Wilton. She’s a thorough musician such as one seldom comes across. There’s a chance—I hope it materializes—of her taking—”
“Your tea is nearly cold, Henry.”
“Her name is Mrs. Dion Leith. If she really does come here we must be sure to—”
“Scones, Henry?”
Thus urged, Mr. Dickinson’s body for the moment took precedence of his soul.
Rosamund knew she was going to like Mr. Robertson as she liked very few people. She felt as if already she was his friend, and when they shook hands in Canon Wilton’s drawing-room she cordially told him so, and referred to the Sunday evening when she had heard him preach. The rooks were cawing among the elms in the Canon’s garden. She could hear their voices in the treetops while she was speaking. A wind was stirring as the afternoon waned, and there came a patter of rain on the lofty windows. And the voices of the rooks, in the windy treetops, the patter of the rain, and the sigh of the wind were delightful to Rosamund, because she was safely within the Precincts, like a bird surrounded by the warmth of its nest.
“I’m coming to live here,” she said to Mr. Robertson, as she poured out tea for the two clergymen. “My husband has gone to South Africa with the City Imperial Volunteers. He’s in business, so we live in London. But while he’s away I mean to stay here.”
And eagerly almost as a child, she told him about the house of the Dean’s widow, and described to him the garden.
“It’s like a convent garden, isn’t it?” she asked Canon Wilton, who assented. “That’s why I love it. It gives me the feeling of enclosed peace that must be so dear to nuns.”
Something in her voice and look as she said this evidently struck Mr. Robertson, and when she presently left the room he said to Canon Wilton:
“If I didn’t know that sweet woman had a husband I should say she was born with the vocation for a religious life. From the first moment I spoke to her, looked at her, I felt that, and the feeling grows upon me. Can’t one see her among sisters?”
“I don’t wish to,” said Canon Wilton bluntly. “Shall we go to my study?”
With the composed gentleness that was characteristic of him Father Robertson assented, and they went downstairs. When they were safely shut up in the big room, guarded by multitudes of soberly bound volumes, Canon Wilton said:
“Robertson, I want to talk to you in confidence about my guest, who, as you say, is a very sweet woman. You could do something for her which I couldn’t do. I have none of your impelling gentleness. You know how to stir that which dwells in the inner sanctuary, to start it working for itself; I’m more apt to try to work for it, or at it. Perhaps I can rouse up a sinner and make him think. I’ve got a good bit of the instinct of the missioner. But my dear guest there isn’t a sinner, except as we all are! She’s a very good woman who doesn’t quite understand. I think perhaps you might help her to understand. She possesses a great love, and she doesn’t know quite how to handle it, or even to value it.”
The clock struck seven when they stopped talking.
That evening, after dinner, Canon Wilton asked Rosamund to sing. Almost eagerly she agreed.
“I shall love to sing in the Precincts,” she said, as she went to the piano.
Father Robertson, who had been sitting with his back to the piano, moved to the other side of the room. While Rosamund sang he watched her closely. He saw that she was quite unconscious of being watched, and her unconsciousness of herself made him almost love her. Her great talent he appreciated fully, for he was devoted to music; but he appreciated much more the moral qualities she showed in her singing. He was a man who could not forbear from searching for the soul, from following its workings. He had met all sorts and conditions of men, and with few he had not been friends. He had known, knew now, scientists for whose characters and lives he had strong admiration, and who felt positive that the so-called soul of man was merely the product of the brain, resided in the brain, and must cease with the dispersal of the brain at death. He was not able to prove the contrary. That did not trouble him at all. It was not within the power of anything or of any one to trouble this man’s faith. He did not mind being thought a fool. Indeed, being without conceit, and even very modest, he believed himself to be sometimes very foolish. But he knew he was not a fool in his faith, which transcended forms, and swore instinctively brotherhood with all honest beliefs, and even with all honest disbeliefs. In his gentle, sometimes slightly whimsical way, he was as sincere as Canon Wilton; but whereas the Canon showed the blunt side of sincerity, he usually showed the tender and winning side. He found good in others as easily and as surely as the diviner finds the spring hidden under the hard earth’s surface. His hazel twig twisted if there was present only one drop of the holy water.
He discerned many drops in Rosamund. In nothing of her was her enthusiasm for what was noble and clean and sane and beautiful more apparent than in her singing. Her voice and her talent were in service when she sang, in service to the good. Music can be evil, neurotic, decadent and even utterly base. She never touched musical filth, which she recognized as swiftly as dirt on a body or corruption in a soul.
“We must have Bach’s ‘Heart ever faithful,’” said Canon Wilton strongly, when Rosamund, after much singing, was about to get up from the piano.
Almost joyfully she obeyed his smiling command. When at last she shut the piano she said to Father Robertson:
“That’s Dion’s—my husband’s—best-loved melody.”
“I should like to know your husband,” said Father Robertson.
“You must, when he comes back.”
“You have no idea, I suppose, how long he will be away?”
“No, nor has he.”
“Then what are you going to do about Mrs. Browning’s house?” said the Canon’s bass.
“Oh—well——”
Two lines appeared in her forehead.
“I thought of taking it for six months, and then I can see. My little house in Westminster is let for six months from the first of March.” She had turned to Father Robertson: “I’m only afraid——” She paused. She looked almost disturbed.
“What are you afraid of?” asked Canon Wilton.
“I’m afraid of getting too fond of Welsley.”
The Canon looked across at Father Robertson on the other side of the fireplace.
Rosamund went back to Robin and London on the following afternoon. In the morning she took Father Robertson to see Mrs. Browning’s house. Canon Wilton was busy. After the morning service in the Cathedral he had to go to a meeting of the Chapter, and later on to a meeting in the City about something connected with education.
“I shall be in bonds till lunch,” he said, “unless I burst them, as I’m afraid I sometimes feel inclined to do when people talk at great length on subjects they know nothing about.”
“Perhaps Mrs. Leith will kindly take me to see her house and garden,” observed Father Robertson.
Rosamund was frankly delighted.
“Bless you for calling them mine!” she said. “That’s just what I’m longing to do.”
The wind and the rain were till hanging about in a fashion rather undecided. It was a morning of gusts and of showers. The rooks swayed in the elm tops, or flew up under the scudding clouds of a treacherous sky. There was a strong smell of damp earth, and the turf of the wide spreading lawns looked spongy.
“Oh, how English this is!” said Rosamund enthusiastically to the Father as they set forth together. “It’s like the smell of the soul of England. I love it. I should like to lie on the grass and feel the rain on my face.”
“You know nothing of rheumatism evidently,” said Father Robertson, in a voice that was smiling.
“No, but I suppose I should if I gave way to my impulse. And the rooks would be shocked.”
“Do you mean the Cathedral dignitaries?”
They were gently gay as they walked along, but very soon Rosamund, in her very human but wholly unconscious way, put her hand on Father Robertson’s arm.
“There it is!”
“Your house?”
“Yes. Isn’t it sweet? Doesn’t it look peacefully old? I should like to grow old like that, calmly, unafraid and unrepining. I knew you’d love it.”
He had not said so, but that did not matter.
“There’s a dear old caretaker, with only one tooth in front and such nice eyes, who’ll let us in. Not an electric bell!”
She gave him a look half confidential, half humorous, and wholly girlish.
“We have to pull it. That’s so much nicer!”
She pulled, and the dear old caretaker, a woman in Cathedral black, with the look of a verger’s widow all over her, showed the tooth in a smile as she peeped round the door.
“And now the garden!” said Rosamund, in the withdrawn voice of an intense anticipation, half an hour later, when Father Robertson had seen, and been consulted, about everything from kitchen to attic.
She turned round to Mrs. Soper, as the verger’s widow—indeed she was that!—was called.
“Shall you mind if we stay a good while in the garden, Mrs. Soper? It’s so delightful there. Will it bother you?”
“Most pleased, ma’am! I couldn’t wish for anything else. You do hear the chimes most beautiful from there. But it’s very damp. That we must allow.”
“Are you afraid of the damp, Father?”
“Not a bit.”
“I knew you wouldn’t be,” she said, almost exultantly.
Mrs. Soper took her stand by the drawing-room window and gazed through the lattice with the deep interest which seems peculiar to provincial towns, and which is seldom manifested in capitals, where the curiosity is rather of the surface than of the very entrails of humanity. She showed the tooth as she stood, but not in a smile. She was far too interested in the lady and the white-haired clergyman to smile.
“I shouldn’t wonder but what they’re going to be married!” was her feminine thought, as she watched them walking about the garden, and presently pacing up and down one of the narrow paths, to the far-off wall that bordered one end of the Bishop’s Palace, and back again to the wall near the Dark Entry. Canon Wilton had not mentioned Rosamund’s name to the verger’s widow, who had no evil thoughts of bigamy. Presently the chimes sounded in the tower, and Mrs. Soper saw the two visitors pause in their walk to listen. They both looked upwards towards the Cathedral, and on the lady’s face there was a rapt expression which was remarked by Mrs. Soper.
“She do look religious,” murmured that lady to the tooth. “She might be a bishop’s lady when she a-stands like that.”
The chimes died away, the visitors resumed their pacing walk, and Mrs. Soper presently retired to the kitchen, which looked out on the passage-way, to cook herself “a bit of something” for the midday staying of her stomach.
In the garden that morning Rosamund and Father Robertson became friends. Rosamund had never had an Anglican confessor, though she had sometimes wished to confess, not because she was specially conscious of a burden of sin, but rather because she longed to speak to some one of those inmost thoughts which men and women seldom care to discuss with those who are always in their lives. In Father Robertson she had found the exceptional man with whom she would not mind being perfectly frank about matters which were not for Dion, not for Beattie, not for godfather—matters which she could never have hinted at even to Canon Wilton, whose strong serenity she deeply admired. Had any of her nearest and dearest heard Rosamund’s talk with Father Robertson that day, they would have realized, perhaps with astonishment, how strong was the reserve which underlay her forthcoming manner and capacious frankness about the ordinary matters of everyday existence.
“Father, a sermon from you changed my life, I think,” she said, when they had paced up and down the path only two or three times; and, without any self-consciousness, she told him of Dion’s proposal on that foggy afternoon in London, of her visit to St. Mary’s, Welby Street, and of the impression the sermon had made upon her. She described her return home, and the painful sensation which had beset her when she lost herself in the fog—the sensation of desertion, of a horror of loneliness.
“The next day I accepted my husband,” she said. “I resolved to take the path of life along which I could walk with another. I decided to share. Do you remember?”
She looked at him gently, earnestly, and he understood the allusion to his sermon.
“Yes, I remember. But,”—his question came very gently—“in coming to that decision, were you making a sacrifice?”
“Yes, I was.”
And then Rosamund made a confession such as she had never yet made to any one, though once she had allowed Dion to know a little of what was in her heart. She told Father Robertson of the something almost imperious within her which had longed for the religious life. He listened to the story of a vocation; and he was able to understand it as certainly Canon Wilton could not have understood it. For Rosamund’s creeping hunger had been not for the life of hard work among the poor in religion, not for the dedication of all her energies to the lost and unreclaimed, who are sunk in the mire of the world, but for that peculiar life of the mystic who leaves the court of the outer things for the court of the mysteries, the inner things, who enters into prayer as into a dark shell filled with the vast and unceasing murmur of the voice which is not human.
“I wished to sing in public for a time. Something made me long to use my voice, to express myself in singing noble music, in helping on its message. But I meant to retire while I was still quite young. And always at the back of my mind there was the thought—‘then I’ll leave the world, I’ll give myself up to God.’ I longed for the enclosed life of perpetual devotion. I didn’t know whether there was any community in our Church which I could join, and in which I could find what I thought I needed. I didn’t get so far as that. You see I meant to be a singer at first.”
“Yes, I quite understand. And the giving up of this mystical dream was a great sacrifice?”
“Really it was. I had a sort of absolute hunger in me to do eventually what I have told you.”
“I understand that hunger,” said Father Robertson.
Just then the chimes sounded in the Cathedral, and they stopped on the narrow path to listen, looking up at the great gray tower which held the voices sweet to their souls.
“I understand that hunger,” he repeated, when the chimes died away. “It can be fierce as any hunger after a sin. In your case you felt it was not free from egoism, this strong desire?”
“Your sermon made me look into my heart, and I did think that perhaps I was an egoist in my religious feeling, that I was selfishly intent on my own soul, that in my religion, if I did what I longed presently to do, I should be thinking almost solely of myself.”
Rather abruptly Father Robertson put a question:
“There was nothing else which drew you towards marriage?”
“I liked and admired Dion very much. I thought him an exceptional sort of man. I knew he cared for me in a beautiful sort of way. That touched me. And”—she slightly hesitated, and a soft flush came to her cheeks—“I felt that he was a good man in a way—I believe, I am almost sure, that very few young men are good in the particular way I mean. Of all the things in Dion that was the one which most strongly called to me.”
Father Robertson understood her allusion to physical purity.
“I couldn’t have married him but for that,” she added.
“If I had known you when you were a girl I believe I should not have expected you to marry,” said Father Robertson.
Afterwards, when he had seen Rosamund with Robin, he thought he had been very blind when he had said that.
“You understand me,” she said, very simply. “But I knew you would.”
“You have given up something. Many people, perhaps most people, would deny that. But I know how difficult it is”—his voice became lower—“to give up retirement, to give up that food which the soul instinctively longs to find, thinks perhaps it only can find, in silence, perpetual meditation, perpetual prayer, in the world that is purged of the insistent clamor of human voices. But”—he straightened himself with a quick movement, and his voice became firmer—“a man may wish to draw near to God in the Wilderness, or in the desert, and may find Him most surely in”—and here he hesitated slightly, almost as a few minutes before Rosamund had hesitated—“in the Liverpool slums. What a blessing it is, what an unspeakable blessing it is, when one has learnt the lesson that God is everywhere. But how difficult it is to learn!”
They walked together for a long time in the garden, and Rosamund felt strangely at ease, like one who has entered a haven and has found the desired peace. She had given up something, but how much had been given to her! In the shelter of the gray towers, and within the enclosing walls, she would go again to some of her dreams, while the chimes marked the passing of the quiet hours, and the watchman’s voice was lifted up to the stars which looked down on Welsley.
And Robin would be with her.