XV
HISTORY OF A CONVERSION
She first came into contact with Catholicism—I mean close personal contact, for, during her residence upon the Continent, such things had passed her like a painted show—during a stay she made in late autumn with the Mawhoods (pronounce "Maud," please!) in Norfolk. Harberhall, Sir Cuthbert Mawhood's seat, famous for its tapestries and formal gardens, is one of the great houses of England. It was also, for nigh upon two hundred years, while the Howards were tacking and trimming, the only important stronghold of the prescribed faith in East Anglia. It has been beset for weeks together by spies and pursuivants; its gray flint Tudor walls are honeycombed with secret stairways, sliding panels and "conveyances." Father Fitzsimon or Hopwell, the seventeenth-century Abelard, lay concealed there for six months during the Oates mystification, and a strip of sea-beach almost under the park walls, called Paces to-day, is said to preserve in its name the tradition of his restless night walks. Set upon a steep hill that overlooks the fowl-haunted levels of the Wash, there is everything in the position and associations of Harberhall to arouse a romantic enthusiasm, and to turn that enthusiasm toward the great central fact which has lifted a commonplace county family to the heights of heroism and self-sacrifice.
The chapel of the Mawhoods is a modern Gothic building of the elder Pugin, whose windows are filled with stained glass from a French abbey demolished in the Revolution, and is connected with the hall only by a long wing of palm-houses and vineries. It is also the parish church of the village below the hill. During the last hundred years a small congregation of the faith has grown up there, dependents and old servants' children's children. The Mawhoods have married much abroad, and little trace remains of the Jansenism with which so many of the old Catholic families were once tainted. On a hunt morning, which also happened to be a feast of the Church, Sir Cuthbert and his two tall sons in pink approached the sacred altar among their servants and laborers. The Confiteor was recited by the surpliced server—the tabernacle unveiled. Above each head the chaplain, a tall, curly haired young doctor, himself a scion of an old West of England cavalier family, and predestined to the purple, bent reverently and murmured some formula that Althea could not catch. All returned to their places with downcast eyes and clasped hands, but with the easiness of long habit as well. Mass went on with many genuflections—many salutations from the altar steps, with tinkling of crystal vessels against the gold chalice rim, and one ecstatic minute in which the bowed congregation seemed to hold its breath, while a bell trilled sharply six times. During the mass the pupils of a convent school outside the village, directed by a community of French refugee nuns, many of them cousins and kinsfolk to the hall, sang English hymns in sweet quavering voices—vapid, unmetrical compositions of the veiled cloister, though not without a certain sentimental charm of their own:
"O Sacred Heart: behold thy children kneeling...."
or
"Oh, turn to Jesus, Mother turn!
And call Him by His tenderest names...."
This blessed eau sucré brought tears to Althea's eyes. Harkening it, she seemed somehow to recover her own hapless, "ill-adventured youth." The spell of the old, wise religion, so guileless and yet so subtle, which never seeks to explain the inexplicable, and which is as tender to those who have lost their happiness as it is merciless to those who are seeking it, fell over her. The end was never in doubt.
I should like to have been near Althea while she was "under instruction." I don't mean on account of anything she would have said, for, like most original thinkers, she was capable of infinite docility; but just to have watched her face while the Catholic doctrine, say as to the relation between physical and moral evil, was explained for her benefit. For she was a child of revolt, if ever there was one; far more akin to Bruno than to Augustine, to Leopardi than to Newman. Innately sceptical, a scoffer in the grain, I suppose she discovered that beyond all negation a doubt persists, and decided to give God and the creed that speaks most confidently for Him the benefit of it. Even after her conversion she liked to play at heresy—to be enfant terrible—to have grave monsignori wag their fingers half reprovingly at her. Her religion remained intensely personal, and she was never impressed, as some worthy converts have been, by the spectacle of the Church as a "great going concern." Its dogma oppressed her: she was not strong enough physically or nervously to endure its elaborate ritual, and would often leave her seat in church, suffocating, in the very middle of high mass. What she liked best was to creep away at dusk, when the world is busied with shopping and tea, and, before some dimly lit side altar in Farm Street or Brompton, to set herself adrift upon an ocean of sentiment that, with a little more conviction and a little less self-consciousness, might almost have become ecstasy.