"You are perfectly right, Monseigneur! It IS shame to me!—and to the priesthood of France! I am no worse than the rest of my class,—but I am certainly no better! Your reproach is grand,—and just! I accept it, and ask your pardon!"
He bent one knee, touched the Cardinal's ring with his lips, and then without another word turned and left the room. The Cardinal gazed after his retreating figure like a man in a dream, then he said gently,
"Angela, go after him!—Call him back!—"
But it was too late. Vergniaud had left the house before Angela could overtake him. She came back hurriedly to say so, with a pale face and troubled look. Her uncle patted her kindly on the shoulder.
"Well, well!—It will not hurt him to have seen me angry," he said smiling, "Anger in a just cause is permitted. I seem to have frightened you, Angela? Of a truth I have rather frightened myself! There, we will not talk any more of the evils of Paris. Mr. Leigh perhaps thinks me an intolerant Christian?"
"On the contrary I think you are one of the few 'faithful' that I have ever met," said Leigh, "Of course I am out of it in a way, because I do not belong to the Roman Church. I am supposed—I say 'supposed' advisedly—to be a Church of England man, or to put it more comprehensively, a Protestant, and I certainly am so much of the latter that I protest against all our systems altogether!"
"Is that quite just?" asked Bonpre gently.
"Perhaps not!—but what is one to do? I am not alone in my ideas! One of our English bishops has been latterly deploring the fact that out of a thousand lads in a certain parish nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine of them never go to church! Well, what can you expect? I do not blame those nine-hundred and-ninety-nine at all. I am one with them. I never go to church."
"Why?"
"Simply because I never find any touch of the true Spirit of Christ there—and the whole tone of the place makes me feel distinctly un-Christian. The nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine youths possibly would sympathise with me. A church is a building more or less beautiful or ugly as the case may be, and in the building there is generally a man who reads prayers in a sing-song tone of voice, and perhaps another man who preaches without eloquence on some text which he utterly fails to see the true symbolical meaning of. There are no Charles Kingsleys nowadays,—if there were, I should call myself a 'Kingsleyite'. But as matters stand I am not moved by the church to feel religious. I would rather sit quietly in the fields and hear the gentle leaves whispering their joys and thanksgivings above my head, than listen to a human creature who has not even the education to comprehend the simplest teachings of nature, daring to assert himself as a teacher of the Divine. My own chief object in life has been and still is to speak on this and similar subjects to the people who are groping after lost Christianity. They need helping, and I want to try in my way to help them."