A far wiser woman than she seemed, Mrs. Caspar recognized her mistake, desisted from her original line of attack, and let her husband go his own way for a time without protest—as the cat permits the mouse a little liberty.
When she began to take the children to chapel with her, she said—and Anne Caspar could be beautiful upon occasion—
"Ned, I wish you'd come along with me and the boys sometimes. I do feel it so that we never worship in common."
That was the beginning of the end of his resistance.
He became an occasional attendant at the chapel, if he could never bring his aesthetic spirit, seeking everywhere for colour, harmony and form, to become a professed member of the rather dreary little community.
And later, for quite other reasons, he dropped St. Michael's entirely.
But for twenty years after he had ceased to call himself a member of the Church of England, often of Sunday afternoons in the spring and summer he would take the train to London Bridge, and wander East on the top of a dawdling bus, to find himself, about the time most churches close their doors, outside St. Jude's in Commercial Street, the "chuckers in" already busy at their work among the street-roughs and fighting factory girls. Edward Caspar was not a "chucker-in" himself; but when the quiet doorkeeper of the House of the Lord opened it at 8.30 he was of the first to enter the lighted church, the side-aisles of which were darkened that tramp and prostitute might sit there unnoticed and unashamed. And in that motley assembly of hooligans from the East End, of respectable artisans from streets drab as their inmates, of intellectuals from Toynbee Hall, and occasional visitors from the West End, he would join in that irregular and beautiful Hour of Worship, of song, silent meditation, solos on organ or violin, extempore prayer, readings from Mazzini, Maurice, Ruskin, and Carlyle, that made him and others dream of that Society of the Redeemed which in days to come should gather thus, without priest or ceremonial, simply to rejoice together in the blessing of a common life and universal Father.
CHAPTER X
OLD AND NEW
Edward Caspar went occasionally to chapel in order to gratify his wife. He ceased attending church because his always growing spirit, intensely modern and aspiring in spite of its inherent weakness, no longer found satisfaction in the ornate ritual, the quaint mediæval formulæ, the iterations and reiterations of the sacerdotalism which had held his mother in its grip.