She went to the windows and gave a twitch to the already drawn curtains, as Maurice digested this information, and also had a sudden little memory of a gory combat waged by him in boyish days with an urchin who asseverated that that —— parson was a —— Papist, the champion only remembering at its victorious close that he was a Papist himself.
"Between you and me, Sir," resumed Mrs. Squire confidentially, "I shan't be sorry when Mr. Dormer's gone back, for I shouldn't like a death in the 'ouse, and it's my belief 'e's not long for this world. Not fit for this preachin', any'ow, and don't eat 'ardly nothin'.... But 'ow I do run on. I daresay the Vicar won't be late, Mr. Dormer being 'ere, though sometimes, if you'll believe me, he ain't in from church till after compline. It gets worse, Sir; selfish, I calls it, keeping 'im out of bed with their sins, and then all this getting up early in the morning. The Vicar is strong, thanks be, but he ain't so young as he was, and it tells on him. Can't see, meself, as the Almighty asks so much of us. Where's your bag, if you please, Sir?"
The news that it was being brought up from the railway station and might arrive any moment, put a term to Mrs. Squire's volubility, and she departed.
Maurice de la Roche-Guyon looked round the room thus left to him with a smile of recognition. Of fair size, though somewhat choked up with furniture, much of which belonged to a past decade of the Mahogany Age, it was spotlessly clean and possessed a sort of shabby comfort. There was little to mark it as the room of a priest, since any person with a large correspondence might have had so littered a writing-table—the sight of whose contents filled the beholder with wonder and thankfulness that he should ever have received a reply to a letter—and the pictures were mostly views of Oxford, the High, Oriel, and a couple of Dighton's caricatures. Only in a corner of the room was a little water-colour drawing of average execution, representing the Madonna kneeling by the child Christ in the manger. On the window-sill were several flower-pots containing forlorn geranium stems, green tips with yellow leaves at the base. Maurice did not know if the pathetic hope of preserving geraniums through the winter had ever been realised, but he supposed that it had, since the pots persevered. They had been in exactly the same depressed condition when he was here a year ago.
He threw himself into one of the armchairs by the fire. The spring was broken, so he exchanged it for another. Tristram's chairs were given to broken springs. It was either the same chair, never mended, or else succeeding occupants were heavy. He stretched out his legs and smiled to himself, thinking of the great news he brought and of Tristram's pleasure in hearing it. Most important events in his life had been unfolded to Tristram, since the occasion on which he had first sat in a springless chair and waited for him. Not that he had smiled then....
It had been in dull quarters in the next street, before the clergy-house was built, that Maurice had first sat in a broken-springed chair and wished that chair and remaining springs and he might sink into the earth. He was in his first year at Eton, and his adored English grandfather having recently died he had begged to be allowed to spend Christmas (it was that of 1844) with Tristram, before going for the rest of the holidays to his mother's cousins in Cavendish Square. It was a curious preference for a small boy brought up in stately surroundings, to go into a dingy habitation in the neighbourhood of docks, but to Maurice it was an adventure of the wildest nature. Although he could not have explained it, to be with Tristram at all meant a feeling of freedom. There were so many things which, according to Tristram's code, did not seem to matter; but the fact that he was not punished for spilling ink and tearing his clothes only convinced him that really to transgress might be very uncomfortable indeed.
Maurice, though he was an only child, had been brought up by an almost military discipline to an exact obedience, even to the acceptance without question of those mixed ecclesiastical surroundings which had always puzzled him. Maman, though she prayed so much, never went with him to Mass. M. le Curé, in the country, when pressed would shake his head and say that Madame la Comtesse was Anglicane et très dévote, and although not a Catholic not quite a Protestant. As if to excuse this enlightened view he would add that she believed in the Real Presence, that she had a crucifix in her oratory, and that Mr. Dormer, for whose learning he had a great respect, was her director. Yet this very director (whose infrequent appearances were vaguely disliked by Maurice) seemed to be on the best of terms with his own kinsman Prosper de la Roche-Guyon, and though one was a Bishop of the Catholic Church and the other a Protestant pastor, they looked, to the son of Armand, very much alike—except that he was somewhat afraid of Mr. Dormer and not at all of His Grandeur. His mother herself would say, "Mon fils, you are a Catholic and a Frenchman. Monseigneur de Troyes will tell you what you ought to think." The Bishop's explanation, if painstaking, was unintelligible, and left Maurice with the responsibility of praying for the conversion of his mother, his grandfather Grenville, his "Uncle" Tristram Hungerford, Mr. Dormer, and a quantity of persons at Oxford of whom he had never heard. After this he abandoned for a time his pursuit of knowledge.
But Eton had revived and intensified his bewilderment, and it suddenly came to him that now was the chance of asking Uncle Tristram. He knew that Tristram was the curé of this great parish, that the church which could be seen from the windows would soon be finished, but he was forbidden to enter a Protestant temple, and an Anglican church was certainly not Catholic, so it must be Protestant. Partly because of the prohibition he had an enormous desire to see the inside of this edifice, and as there seemed no possibility of its being gratified, he added to his nightly petitions for the conversion of Tristram to the Roman obedience, the turning of the Church of the Passion into a Catholic place of worship.
Christmas Day came. Maurice set off, lonely, to the Catholic chapel not far away for Mass. As he came back he had to pass the Mission church, which was used until the completion of the permanent building. It was mid-day, and the bell stopped ringing a little before he reached the door. He listened; a harmonium was playing Venite adoremus. Why should he not peep inside; no one would see. He yielded to the temptation and slipped in, to find himself almost touching Uncle Tristram's surpliced back at the end of the procession which, with some difficulty, was squeezing round the small building. He decided to stay.
The church was decked with holly and flowers, and the tiny sanctuary was hung with red. Maurice was much interested, especially as his ideas of Protestant worship were extremely vague, so that he was surprised to see what was clearly an altar (though it seemed to him, with only two lighted candles and a cross, very bare), and to listen to a service which, for all its lack of Latin, of bells, and of inaudibility, was presumably some kind of a mass. But gradually his interest waned. He began to see clearly what he had done. He had not only been disobedient, but had dealt a wound to that implicit trust which he always felt that Tristram reposed in him, and the delicacy of Tristram's position was quite plain to the half-French boy. At the communion of the people he went out. The rest of Christmas Day, spent at the house of a churchwarden with a large family, lacked enjoyment. Nothing was said on his return, and he felt pretty sure that Tristram had not seen him. But next day, after breakfast, he waited for him in a broken-springed chair.