CHAPTER VI
A JESUIT’S TASK
Of all armies on earth, there is none with a discipline so perfect as exists in the ranks of the Jesuits. No similar brotherhood embraces so extensive a scheme; no society spreads its ramifications so wide and deep. The soldier who enlists under that black banner abandons at once and for ever his own affections, his own opinions, his own responsibilities; nay, his very identity becomes fused in the general organisation of his order. Florian de St. Croix, with his warm, impulsive disposition, his tendency to self-sacrifice, and his romantic temperament, had better have hanged round his neck any other millstone than this.
As he walked rapidly down a long perspective of paved road, between two lofty rows of poplars, his head bent low, his hands clenched, his lips muttering, and his swift unequal strides denoting both impetuosity and agitation, he seemed strangely and sadly altered from the bright enthusiastic youth who sat with Abbé Malletort under the limes at Versailles.
His very name had been put off, with every other association that could connect the past life of the layman with the future labours of the priest. He was known as Brother Ambrose now in the muster-rolls of the order; though, out of it, he was still addressed as Florian by his former friends. It was supposed, perhaps, in the wisdom of his superiors, that the devoted knight could fight best under a plain shield on which no achievements might ever be emblazoned, but which, in theory at least, was to be preserved pure and stainless, until he was carried home on it from his last field.
For Florian, indeed, the battle had already commenced. He was fighting it now, fiercely, under that smiling summer sky, between those fragrant meadows, fringed with flowering hedges, amongst the clustering orchards and smiling farms, the green nooks, the gleaming waters, and the free, fresh range of wooded hill and dale in pleasant Normandy. Little thought the buxom peasant-woman, with her clean white cap, long earrings, and handsome weather-beaten face, as she crossed herself in passing, and humbly received the muttered benediction—how much of war was in his breast who proffered peace to her and hers; or the prosperous farmer riding by on his stamping grey stallion, with tail tied up, broad, well-fed back, huge brass-bound saddle, and red-fronted bridle—how enviable was his own contented ignorance compared with the learning and imagination and aspirations running riot in the brain of that wan hurrying priest. The fat curé, thinking of his dinner, his duties, and the stone-fruit ripening on his wall, greeted him with professional friendliness, tempered by profound respect; for in his person he beheld the principle of self-devotion which constitutes the advance, the vanguard, the very forlorn hope of an army in which he felt himself a mere suttler or camp-follower at the best; but his sleep that afternoon over a bottle of light wine in his leafy arbour would have been none the sounder could he have known the horror of doubt and darkness that weighed like lead on his brother’s spirit—the fears, the self-reproaches, the anxieties that tore at his brother’s heart.
Yet the same sun was shining on them all; the same glorious landscape of wood and water, waving corn and laughing upland—gold, and silver, and blue, and green, and purple—spread out for their enjoyment; the same wild-flowers blooming, the same wild-birds carolling, to delight their senses; the same heaven looking down in tender pity on the wilful blindness and reckless self-torture of mankind.
Florian had entered the order, believing that in so doing he adopted the noblest career of chivalry below, to end in the proudest triumph of victory above. Like the crusaders of the Middle Ages, he turned to his profession, and beheld in it a means of ambition, excitement, influence over his fellow-men, purchased—not at the sacrifice—but in the salvation of his soul. Like them, he was to have the best of it both for earth and heaven; like them, he was to submit to labour, privation, all the harassing exigencies of warfare; but, like them, he was upheld by the consciousness of power which springs from discipline and cohesion, by an unselfish sentiment of professional pride, not more peculiar to the soldier than the priest.
He took the vows of obedience—the blind, unreasoning, unhesitating obedience exacted by the order—with a thrill of exultation. As a Jesuit, he must henceforth know neither friendship nor affection; neither sentiment, passion, nor self-regard. His brain must be always clear, his eye keen, his hand ready; but brain must think, eye see, and hand strike only in conformity with the will of a superior. He was to preserve every faculty of nature except volition. He was to become a galvanised corpse rather than a living man.
And now these hideous vows, this impossible obedience, must be put to the test. Like the demoniacs of old, he writhed in torture as he walked. It seemed that the evil spirit rent and tore the man because it could not come out of him.