“He must have been a great genius,” said Pamela, with girlish fervour.
“Alas! no, he just missed greatness, and he just missed genius. He was a highly-gifted man—various—capricious—volatile—and he married a woman with just enough money to ruin him. Had he been obliged to earn his bread, he might have been great. Who can say? Hunger is the slave-driver, with his whip of steel, who peoples the Valhalla of nations. If Homer had not been a beggar—as well as blind—we might have had no story of Troy. Good-bye, Mrs. Greswold. Good-bye,” shaking hands with Pamela. “I may bring my hostess to-morrow?”
“I—I—suppose so,” Mildred answered feebly, wondering what her husband would think of such an invasion.
Yet, if Clement Cancellor, who to Mildred’s mind had always seemed the ideal Christian priest, if he could tolerate and consort with her, could she, Mildred Greswold, persist in the Pharisee’s part, and hold herself aloof from this neighbour, to whose good works and kindly disposition many voices had testified in her hearing?
CHAPTER XIII.
SHALL SHE BE LESS THAN ANOTHER?
It was in all good faith that Clement Cancellor had gone to Riverdale. He had not gone there for the fleshpots of Egypt. He was a man of severely ascetic habits, who ate and drank as temperately as a disciple of that old faith of the East which is gaining a curious influence upon our new life of the West. For him the gratification of the senses, soft raiment, artistic furniture, thoroughbred horses and luxurious carriages, palm-houses and orchid-houses, offered no temptation. He stayed in Mrs. Hillersdon’s house because he was her friend, her friend upon the broadest and soundest basis on which friendship could be built. He knew all that was to be known about her. He knew her frailties of the past, her virtues in the present, her exalted hope in the future. From her own lips he had heard the story of Louise Lorraine’s life. She had extenuated nothing. She had not withheld from him either the foulness of her sins or their number—nay, it may be that she had in somewise exaggerated the blackness of those devils whom he, Clement Cancellor, had cast out from her, enhancing by just so much the magnitude of the miracle he had wrought. She had held back nothing; but over every revelation she had contrived to spread that gloss which a clever woman knows how to give to the tale of her own wrong-doing. In every incident of that evil career she had contrived to show herself more sinned against than sinning; the fragile victim of overmastering wickedness in others; the martyr of man’s treachery and man’s passion; the sport of fate and circumstance. Had Mr. Cancellor known the world he lived in half as well as he knew the world beyond he would hardly have believed so readily in the lady who had been Louise Lorraine: but he was too single-minded to doubt a repentant sinner whose conversion from the ways of evil had been made manifest by so many good works, and such unflagging zeal in the exercises of the Anglican Church.
Parchment Street, Grosvenor Square, is one of the fashionable streets of London, and St. Elizabeth’s, Parchment Street, had gradually developed, in Clement Cancellor’s incumbency, into one of the most popular tabernacles at the West End. He whose life-desire had been to carry the lamp of the faith into dark places, to be the friend and teacher of the friendless and the untaught, found himself almost in spite of himself a fashionable preacher, and the delight of the cultured, the wealthy, and the aristocratic. In his parish of St. Elizabeth’s there was plenty of work for him to do—plenty of that work which he had chosen as the mission that had been given to him to fulfil. Behind those patrician streets where only the best-appointed carriages drew up, where only the best-dressed footmen ever pulled the bells or rattled long peals on high-art knockers, there were some of the worst slums in London, and it was in those slums that half Mr. Cancellor’s life was spent. In narrow alleys between Oxford and Wigmore Streets, and in the intricate purlieus of Marylebone Lane, the Anglican priest had ample scope for his labour, a vineyard waiting for the husbandman. And in the labyrinth hidden in the heart of West End London Mr. Cancellor’s chief coadjutor for the last twenty years had been Louise Hillersdon. Thoroughness was the supreme quality of Mrs. Hillersdon’s mind. Nothing stopped her. It was this temper which had given her distinction in the days when princes were her cupbearers and diamonds her daily tribute. There had been other women as beautiful, other women as fascinating; but there was not one who with beauty and fascination combined the audacity and resolution of Louise Lorraine. When Louise Lorraine took possession of a man’s wits and a man’s fortune that man was doomed. He was as completely gone as the lemon in the iron squeezer. A twist of the machine, and there is nothing left but broken rind and crushed pulp. A season of infatuation, and there was nothing left of Mrs. Lorraine’s admirer but shattered health and an overdrawn banking account. Estates, houses, friends, position, good name, all dropped away from the man whom Louise Lorraine brayed in her mortar. She spoke of him next season with half contemptuous pity. “Did I know Sir Theodore Barrymore? Yes; he used to come to my parties sometimes. A nice fellow enough, but such a terrible fool.”
When Louise Lorraine married Tom Hillersdon, and took it into her head to break away altogether from her past career, and to pose before the world as a beautiful Magdalen, she was clever enough to know that, to achieve any place in society, she must have a very powerful influence to help her. She was clever enough to discover that the one influence which a woman in her position could count upon was the influence of the Church. She was beautiful enough and refined enough to win friends among the clergy by the charm of her personality. She was rich enough to secure such friends, and bind them to herself by the splendour of her gifts, by her substantial aid in those good works which are to the priest as the very breath of his life. One man she could win by an organ; another lived only to complete a steeple; the third had been yearning for a decade for that golden hour when the cracked tintinabulation which now summoned his flock should be exchanged for a fine peal of bells. Such men as these were only too easily won, and the drawing-rooms of Mr. Hillersdon’s house in Park Lane were rarely without the grace of some clerical figure in long frock-coat and Roman collar.
Clement Cancellor was of a sterner stuff, and not to be bought by bell or reredos, rood-screen or pulpit. Him Louise Hillersdon won by larger measures: to him she offered all that was spiritual in her nature: and this woman of strange memories was not without spiritual aspirations and real striving after godliness. Clement Cancellor was no pious simpleton, to be won by sentimental cant and crocodile tears. He knew truth from falsehood, had never in his life been duped by the jingle of false coin. He knew that Mrs. Hillersdon’s repentance had the true ring, albeit she was in some things still of the earth earthy. She had worked for him and with him in that wilderness of London as not one other woman in his congregation had ever worked. To the lost of her own sex she had been as a redeeming angel. Wretched women had blessed her with their expiring breath, had died full of hopes that might never have been awakened had not Louise Lorraine sat beside their beds. Few other women had ever so influenced the erring of her sex. She who had waded deep in the slough of sin knew how to talk to sinners.
Mr. Cancellor never forgot her as he had seen her by the bed of death and in the haunts of iniquity. She could never be to him as the herd of women. To the mind of the preacher she had a higher value than one in twenty of those women of his flock whose unstained lives had never needed the cleansing of self-sacrifice and difficult works.