"At the rule which bids me sleep with my chamber-window closed," I returned, with a laugh. And, indeed, it was a question you had reason to put during this hot spring, when from behind your stifling panes you looked out at night across Paris lying cool and spacious beneath a purple sky. But the truth is that all these regulations which were instituted to discipline the novice to a habit of obedience, were beginning to work me into a ferment of irritability; and through the months that followed, April, May, and June, the irritability increased in me to a spirit of rebellion. At times I felt a mad desire to rise in my seat and hurl defiance, and with that defiance my books, at my tutors' heads. The desire surged up within my veins, became active in every limb, and I had to set my teeth until my jaws ached to repress it. At times sick and dispirited, I counted up the years to come; I passed them through my thoughts even as I passed the beads of my rosary beneath my thumb, and even as the beads of my rosary, they were monotonously alike one to the other.
Doubtless, too, the recollection of the picture I had seen at the monastery of the Chartreux helped to intensify my unrest. For it abode vividly in my memory, and the menace I drew from it grew more and more urgent as the days slipped on. I should note, however, that a certain change took place in the manner in which it presented itself. I could still see, I could still hear the figure speaking. But it did not so much cry "Hypocrite!" as thunder out, in the very lines of the Carmelite preacher, "The Eve of St. Bartholomew—the Eve of St. Bartholomew."
Of course, as the rector had declared, I was under no vows or obligation to persist in my novitiate. But I felt the very knowledge that I was free to be in some way a chain about my ankle constraining me. I took a cast back to the period of my boyhood when enrolment amongst the priests of the Jesuit order had been the aim of a fervid ambition; when the thought of that body, twenty thousand in number, spread throughout the earth, in Japan, in the Indies, in Peru, and working one and all in a consonant vigilance for the glory of their order, had stirred me with its sublimity; and I sought—with what effort and despair!—to recreate those earlier visions. For to count them fanciful seemed treachery; to turn deliberately aside from them was evident instability.
So much I have deemed it necessary to set down concerning my perplexities at this time, since they throw, I think, a light upon the events which I am to relate. For I was shortly afterwards to depart from this safe corner, and wander astray just as I wandered when I lost myself in the labyrinth of Blackladies. And the explanation I take to be this—for it is merely in explanation and not at all in extenuation that I put this forward—I had clean broken from the one principle by which, however clumsily, I had hitherto guided my life, and had as yet grappled to no other with sufficient steadiness of faith to make it useful as a substitute.
It was on the Saturday of the first week of July that I left the Jesuit College. I was standing at my window about two of the afternoon, and looking down at the river and the bridge which crossed it. I had a clear view of the bridge from end to end betwixt the gables of a house, and I noticed that it was empty, save for one man, who jogged across on horseback—or rather, so it seemed at the height from which I looked, for when I saw the horse close at hand a short while afterwards, I found reason to believe that the man had galloped. I stood watching him idly until he crossed out on to the quay; and I remember that the refectory bell rang just as he turned the corner and passed out of my sight. Towards the end of dinner, a message was brought to me that the rector desired to see me in his study as soon as we were risen from table. This time, however, it was in no hesitancy or trepidation that I waited on him, but rather with a springing heart. For let him but dismiss me from the college, and here was an end to all the torture of my questionings—an unworthy thought, you will say, and, indeed, none knew that more surely than myself.
On the contrary, however, the rector received me with a benevolent eye. "I have strange news for you, my son," said he, with a glance towards a stranger who stood apart in the window; and the stranger stepped forward hurriedly, as though he would have the telling of the news himself. He was a man of middle height and very close-knit, though of no great bulk, dark in complexion, and possessed, as far as I could judge, of an honest countenance.
"Mr. Clavering," he began, with a certain deference, and after these months of "brother" and "my son" the manner of his address struck upon my ears with a very pleasant sound, "I was steward to your uncle, Sir John Rookley, at Blackladies in Cumberland."
"Was?" said I.
"Until Monday was se'nnight," says he.
"Then what may be your business with me?" I asked sharply. For there was throughout England such a division of allegiance as set even the members of a family on opposite sides the while they maintained to the world an appearance of concord, so that many a dismissed servant carried away with him secret knowledge wherewith to make his profit. I was therefore pretty sharp with the steward, and quickly repeated the question.