For the Cause

by Stanley John Weyman

Mother Church, who in bygone ages sheltered all the learning of the land beneath her broad wings, and who, even after this monopoly had passed away from her, continued to provide for learners and learned in a munificent fashion, has in these latter times been sadly shorn of wealth and patronage by the relentless march of progress and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Yet there is balm in Gilead. Here and there a sinecure has been suffered to remain for the benefit of those whose work is not altogether of the tangible kind so dear to the nineteenth century; here and there a Reverend Jack Horner, putting his thumb into the diminished pie of Church preferment, can pull out a plum, and, sitting down under the shadow of some gray cathedral tower, can draw soothing deductions after the manner of his juvenile prototype. A bishopric may no longer be a post of dignified ease, archdeacons may be men doomed to perpetual hurry and worry, wealthy pluralists may have become an extinct class, but a Canon of Lichbury Cathedral is still a personage whose comfortable dwelling and comfortable income are rather the acknowledgment of past distinction than the equivalent of any present labor. Not, of course, that the Dean and Chapter of Lichbury are a body of worn-out pensioners. It is by no means in that light that they are accustomed to regard themselves; nor, indeed, are they so regarded by any, except the ignorant and irreverent. If repose and competence have been bestowed upon them, it is not only because they have already enriched the world with the results of literary research, but that they may have more leisure to continue doing so. Some of them have achieved renown as authors of theological treatises, others are deeply versed in classical lore; while some, like Canon Stanwick, hold university professorships.

The latter divine was understood to owe his canonry (which had been conferred upon him at a comparatively early age) to that celebrated work, "The Life and Times of the Emperor Julian," in which an interesting character and an interesting period of history had been so exhaustively and impartially treated of as to leave no room for further exploration of the same ground. Whether, as his admirers declared, the Professor had surpassed Gibbon as triumphantly in the handling of his subject as Gibbon surpassed Voltaire and other earlier writers, and whether in the course of his well-weighed observations he had made out as good a case for the church which he represented as was possible and desirable, are questions which need not be discussed here. One consequence, at all events, of his accomplished task had been to place him in the front rank of living historians, and another had been his appointment to a vacant stall in Lichbury Cathedral.

This last reward of merit should have been especially grateful to him, for he was a bachelor of retired habits, whose life had been spent among his books, and to whom life had little left to offer in the way of attractions save increased opportunities for study; and, in fact, he was, as a general thing, very well satisfied with his lot. Nevertheless, as he paced up and down his smooth lawn one morning in August, he was in a less contented frame of mind than usual. The whispering of the summer breeze in the old elms, the cawing of the rooks, the occasional deliberate ding-dong of the cathedral clock far overhead, checking off the slumberous quarters and half-hours--all these familiar sounds had failed to produce upon him that sense of calm which is so conducive of thought; he had been compelled to lay aside the opening chapter of his new work, "The Rise of the Papacy," and to take to walking to and fro in the garden, with his hands behind his back and his gray head sunk beneath shoulders which were somewhat prematurely bowed.

The truth was that the Professor, like other professors, had once been young, and that the days of his youth had been vividly and unexpectedly brought back to him the night before. This is always a disturbing thing to happen to a man; and what made it particularly so in Canon Stanwick's case was that his youth had been marked by a trouble which he had taken terribly to heart at the time of its occurrence. To be jilted is no such rare experience, and to get over it with great rapidity is the ordinary lot of the jilted one; but some few strangely constituted mortals there are who never get over it, and of these Canon Stanwick happened to be one. Certainly, at the age of fifty-five he had long ceased to think with any bitterness of the shallow-hearted Julia to whom he had become engaged immediately after taking orders, and who had thrown him over in favor of a man of much greater wealth and higher position; he had, indeed, ceased to think about her at all. But not the less was it her conduct which had shaped the course of his life. By it he had been driven into deep study, into an Oxford professorship, and finally into a canonry; by it also he had been driven out of society, and especially out of female society, for which the treachery of one member of the sex had imbued him with a strong repugnance. At Oxford, where he had resided up to the time of his recent preferment, the ladies had quite given him up. It had been understood there that he did not care for the relaxation of dinner-parties and tea-parties; and it was a somewhat singular coincidence that, having from a sense of duty consented to break through his long-standing rule and dine with the Dean of Lichbury, he should have found himself seated opposite to his old love, whom, by another odd coincidence, he had wooed, won, and lost in that very neighborhood so long before.

This chance meeting had upset the worthy man a good deal. In the gray-haired but vivacious Mrs. Annesley who had claimed acquaintance with him across the table, he had scarcely recognized the heroine of his buried romance, nor had he either the wish or the power to resuscitate the tender feelings with which he had once regarded her; but the sight of her had stirred up old memories within him, and these had haunted him through the night, had prevented the Papacy from rising satisfactorily in the morning, and finally, as aforesaid, had sent him out into the open air, a prey to vague regrets.

So that elderly lady was Julia Annesley! And she had grown-up sons and daughters, about whom she talked a great deal; and her husband was dead--the husband for whom she had never cared, and whom she made little pretence of regretting. To all appearance, she regretted nothing. Why should she, when she had all that a woman could wish to have? Perhaps, thought the Professor, it might be a better thing to be the father of sons and daughters, when one was growing old, than to be the author of an unrivalled monograph on the merits and demerits of Julian the Apostate. To be sure, there was no reason why one shouldn't be both. And then he fell to wondering whether that ambition which had been the chief cause of Julia's infidelity could have been satisfied with such fame and social standing as an historian, a professor, and a canon may lay claim to. Only, if he had married Julia, he would probably have begun and ended as a country parson. He smiled at himself for indulging in such nonsensical fancies at his time of life; but he went on dreaming all the same until he was startled by the opening of a gate which connected his house with the Precincts.

Somebody strode with a brisk, ringing step up the brick pathway to the front door, singing loudly,--

"I loved her, and she might have been

The happiest in the land;

But she fancied a foreigner who played the clarinet