"Let me go!" she whispered, pushing him away with all the poor force of her bare arms. "I didn't mean this. Oh! believe me. Upon my honor I didn't—nothing like this, Paul."
Ingram only drew her closer. "Stop struggling," he said, with authority. "That's better. Now then—kiss me properly."
XIII
NEW WINE—OLD BOTTLE
When the Reverend Antony Vernon, on the very morrow of a controversy whose issue was hailed variously in various quarters—here as a triumph and as a scandal there—forsook his fellow's rooms in Wadham, his parish of St. Hedwige, and the Hernandes Ethical Lectureship, to take the old, old beaten track toward the City of the Seven Hills and intellectual disenfranchisement, beyond a languid wonder as to what might await him in the less indulgent fold his migration aroused little interest. Excommunication or a cardinal's hat? Either, it was felt, might be the crown of his new career. He took no disciples with him in his incontinent flight, and he left no spiritual orphans to bewail his loss. No vindication of the strange step was ever published by him, and it cannot be pretended that his reserve balked any very keen curiosity. After all, had not the question been worn threadbare—to rags—years ago? To the fervor of the 'forties a generation had succeeded too weary of dogmatic strife to account for its own actions, far less demand an account from others; satisfied, in short, since it saved time and trouble, to accept the plea of impulse in full extenuation. During the traditional nine days, it is true, his motives were guessed at idly in the Common Room. Intellectual despair, said one; another, a recoil from the abyss to which a will to believe with the minimum of revelation always leads; a third might hint at reasons more personal and intimate still. None knew; and, when a few weeks had passed, none cared. The Reverend Antony Vernon was absolved and forgotten.
After his ordination in Rome, Archbishop Manning, who had been an old Oxford friend of his father, gave him a curacy in the northeast of London, in a district which had not then acquired its present sinister reputation, but was beginning to earn it. The mission itself was an old one, founded in the days of captivity and bishops in partibus; so much the fabric witnessed, a square box-like structure of hard yellow brick, with a stucco portico, and on each side four round-headed, narrow-paned windows of pinky-white glass, obscured by a wooden galley, and, on the side that faced the street, still bearing traces of some sort of wash which had once discreetly veiled the mysteries within. And yet, in its unpretending ugliness, the humble fane did not lack a certain charm denied to the great Gothic barn that has replaced it. It had been built upon the site of what had been a city merchant's suburban estate in the days of hoop and powder. Upon the side furthest from the street, two or three of the old garden trees had been spared, which of a sunny afternoon, according as the season lay, stained the clear panes a tremulous green and gold, or fretted them with an uneasy tracery of tangled branches. One guessed that, within the memory of man, before the city had spilled its desolating overflow around and beyond, gardens had bloomed—orchards borne fruit beneath these weather-stained walls, the odors of the hayfield stolen in at times and mingled its incense with that of the altar. For with cities it is as with the generations of men—new buildings upon which the old have gazed carry on, when they themselves have grown gray, the tradition of all that has been demolished and displaced around them.
"I am sending you into great temptation, Vernon," Manning had said to him at parting. (He had opened his heart to his superior, and there were no secrets between the two men). "The mission is the most difficult in the whole archdiocese. Since the trams were built the East End is pouring its cramped population into it in thousands. The old respectable families are leaving, in absolute panic, as soon as they can sell or surrender their leases. There will be no better centre in three or four years' time for a great missionary effort; but until Swinton dies or retires nothing much can be done. You will have need of all your faith and of all your tact. Abroad you will encounter an animalism such as you cannot have conceived possible; at home, a creed almost without love, and to which only the darker side of the revelation seems to have been vouchsafed. Get to know your people quietly; watch your armor, and—pray! And, above all," he continued, laying a hand that was already ethereal upon the young don's shoulder, "above all, Vernon, never despair of the poor. Don't be appalled by anything you see or hear. The degradation is great, but it is my experience it seldom reaches down as far as the soul. A word will work conversion here—a week's illness make a saint. It is far, far easier to wash the filth off of them than it is to heal the ulcer of the rich, or purify the intellect of men like you and me. It is God's crowning mercy to his elect. 'Blessed are the poor!'"
Vernon quickly discovered that the difficulties had not been over-rated. Father Swinton, the missionary rector, was a scion of an old Northumbrian family. His eccentricity, probably congenital and the result of long continued intermarriage, had been heightened by a solitary life until it reached a pitch that was almost monomania. Beneath the outward uniformity which Catholic discipline imposes he concealed a fanatical Jansenist heart. He was perhaps the last of a generation of priests who took a perverse pride in the insular and secluded character which three centuries of persecution had impressed upon the Roman communion in England. He boasted of never having made a convert, and resented the new expansiveness as a personal grievance. He never returned to his "chapel"—you would have earned his resentment by calling it a church—from a visit to more pretentious missions without experiencing a stealthy joy in his own square, painted pews, his railed gallery and bare altar, flanked only by two small plaster statues which a great lady, stubborn as himself, had imposed upon him as the price of peace. Two of his many aversions he made no attempt to conceal: he hated Irish curates, and he hated the beautiful modern devotion of the Sacred Heart.
"God bless my soul, Vernon!" he cried, one evening, shortly after the arrival of the new curate, waddling into the dining-room after benediction. "Do you know what's just happened me? No? Well, sir, a woman came into my sanctuary just now—my very sanctuary, sir!—as I was covering the altar, and asked me to bless a piece of red flannel for her—a common piece of red household flannel, sir, cut into the shape of a heart. Called it her 'Badge!' I said: 'Take your blasphemous piece of red flannel home, ma'am! It's too small for a chest-protector, so make a penwiper of it. God bless my soul! haven't you seven sacraments?'"
Far from being shocked, the archbishop laughed at the story until the tears ran out of his watery blue eyes.