The man who stood beside her in the archway was as unlike her as it was possible to be.
If Hero Vanbrugh might have been taken as a type of all that was best in English humanity, the same could scarcely have been said of her companion. Big and bull-necked, with coarse, flushed features, small, deep-set eyes, and a round fleshy chin, he might have passed, in a different dress, for a comrade of Mike Finigan himself. His costume would have marked him out in any other country as a Roman priest. He wore the shovel hat, with a long brim projecting before and behind, which is associated with the stage priest of comic opera, and his whole figure, from the neck to the ankles, was enveloped in a long black robe of design similar to that worn by Noah and his family in the toy arks. The priests of Rome in this country being in the habit of adopting a dress corresponding with the character of that worn by the people among whom they live, this outlandish disguise served to indicate that the wearer was in Anglican Orders. He was, in fact, the Rev. Aloysius Grimes, curate of St. Jermyn’s parish.
The Rev. Aloysius was one of that class which has flowed into the ranks of the clergy of late years in increasing numbers, to fill the gap created by the falling off in the supply of graduates from the Universities, a falling off due as much to the decline in the value of the Church’s preferments, perhaps, as to the decline of belief in her doctrines. The son of a small tradesman in the suburbs, he had passed from a higher-grade Board School into a theological college. He had entered the college an ordinary sharp London lad of the lower orders, and left it the social equal of dukes.
Such a youth, strongly conscious of the importance of the step he had gained, was not likely to listen with reluctant ears to any doctrine which exaggerated the dignity of his profession. The Rev. Aloysius came out into the world firmly impressed that he was a priest, commissioned by the Maker of the Universe to teach and to rule mankind, endowed with power to bestow the absolution and remission of sins, and supernaturally enabled to work the awful miracle of Transubstantiation.
Between the Duchess of Trent and Mr. Grimes there was an instinctive antagonism, which each strove to veil beneath the outward forms of courtesy, the Duchess because she respected the curate’s cloth, the curate because he respected her Grace’s rank. To the Duchess the doctrines held and taught by the Rev. Aloysius were simply and literally blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits. She supposed that they had been abandoned as such at the Reformation, and she understood them so to be condemned by the Articles of the English Church. Yet she perceived that they were now freely tolerated within its pale by those to whom the government of the Church was committed, and she shrank with real pain from setting up her own judgment against that of the Episcopal Bench.
What added to her distress was the fact that she was unable to credit the head of that Bench with any belief in what she had always regarded as the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. That doctrine in her mind was the Atonement. The great truth which Catholicism images in the crucifix seemed to her the central one of Christianity, and those who doubted it became in her view mere Deists, with a reverence for Jesus of Nazareth. Such a Deist she believed Dr. Dresden, the then Primate, to be, and, believing it, she regarded even the Rev. Aloysius as more worthy of his place in the Church than the Archbishop.
Mr. Grimes glided in front, fawning over the hand of the Duchess, before Hero could come up.
“I am so delighted to meet you here, Duchess. It is so good of you to do so much for our poor people. They are always singing your praises.”
The Duchess made the briefest response to these compliments as she turned to greet Hero.
“My dear, how well you are looking! One would think that St. Jermyn’s was a health-resort, to see you. Now I wonder whether you will take compassion on a poor old woman, and let me carry you home to lunch with me presently?”