Hetty Wesley

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

The voice travelled down the great nave of Lincoln Cathedral, and, as it came, the few morning worshippers—it was a week-day—inclined their faces upwards: for it seemed to pause and float overhead and again be carried forward by its own impulse, a pure column of sound wavering awhile before it broke and spread and dissolved into whispers among the multitudinous arches. To a woman still kneeling by a pillar close within the western doorway it was as the voice of a seraph speaking with the dawn, fresh from his night-watch over earth. She had been kneeling for minutes, and still knelt, but she could not pray. She had no business to be there. To her the sentences carried no message; but the voice smiting, pure and cold, across the hot confusion in her brain, steadied her while it terrified.

Yet she knew the voice well enough. It was but John Romley's. The Dean and Chapter wanted a precentor, and among a score of candidates had selected Romley and two others for further trial. This was his chance and he was using it; making the most of it, too, to the mingled admiration and disgust of his rivals listening in the choir beside him.

And she had dressed early and climbed to the cathedral, not to pray, but to seek Romley because she had instant need of him; because, though she respected his character very little, he was the one man in the world who could help her. She had missed him at the door. Entering, she learned from a verger that he was already robing. Then the great organ sounded, and from habit she dropped on her knees.

John Romley, unseen in the choir, was something very different from John Romley in private life with his loose face and flabby handshake. Old Mr. Wesley had once dismissed him contemptuously as vox et praeterea nihil: but disembodied thus, almost a thing celestial, yet subtly recalling home to her and ties renounced, the voice shook Hetty's soul. For it came on her as the second shock of an ambush. She had climbed to the cathedral with but half of her senses awake, drowsed by love, by the long ride in the languorous night wind, by the exhaustion of a long struggle ended, by her wondering helplessness on arriving—the chill sunlight, the deserted street, the strange voice behind the lodging-house door, the unfamiliar passage and stairs. She had lived a lifetime in those hours, and for the while Wroote Parsonage lay remote as a painful daily round from the dream which follows it. Only the practical instinct, as it were a nerve in the centre of her brain, awake and refusing to be drugged, had kept sounding its alarm to rise and seek Romley; and though at length she obeyed in a panic, she went as one walking in sleep. The front of the cathedral, as she came beneath its shadow, overhung her as a phantom drawn upon the morning sky, its tall towers unsubstantial, trembling against the light, but harmless even should they fall upon her. She entered as one might pass through a paper screen.

The first shock came upon her then. She passed not out of sunlight into sunlight, but out of sunlight into a vast far-reaching, high-arching gloom, which was another world and another life; the solemn twilight which her upbringing had taught her to associate with God. Once before in her life, and once only, she had stood within the minster—on her confirmation day, when she had entered with her hand in her mother's. Her eyes sought and found the very place where she had sat then among the crowd of girl-candidates, and a ghost in a white frock sat there still with bowed head. She remembered the very texture and scent of that white frock: they came back with the awe, the fervour, the passionate desire to be good; and these memories cried all in her ears, "What have you to do with that child? Which of you is Hetty? You cannot both be real."

They sang in her ears while she questioned the verger about Romley. He had to repeat his answers before she thanked him and turned towards one of the lowest seats. She did not repent: she was not thinking of repentance. She loved, she had given all for love, and life was fuller of beautifying joy than ever it had been even on that day of confirmation: but beneath the joy awoke a small ache, and with the ache a certain knowledge that she might never sit beside the child in white, never so close as to touch her frock; that their places in this building, God's habitation, were eternally separate.

Then the organ ceased, and the voice began to speak. And the voice uttered promise of pardon, but Hetty heard nothing of the words—only the notes.

"And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and A dam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden."

Less terrible this voice was; a seraph's rather, at the lodge-gate, welcoming the morn. Yet Hetty crouched by her pillar, afraid. For the day he welcomed was not her day, the worship he offered was not her worship; for her a sword lay across the gate.

Her terror passed, and she straightened herself. After all, she did not repent. Why should she repent? She was loved; she loved in return, utterly and without guile, with a love which, centred upon one, yet embraced all living creatures. Nay, it embraced Heaven, if Heaven would accept it. And why not?