Read Ebook: Lawrence Clavering by Mason A E W Alfred Edward Woodley

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Ebook has 2104 lines and 103539 words, and 43 pages

"That is very true," he replied immediately; and he glanced at the cover of it. "The hand is strange to me. Perchance you recognize it;" and he frankly held it out to me.

"No," I replied; "but I recognized the servant who brought it. Marshall Berwick has sent him more than once with messages to the rector of my college."

"Oh," said he, with a start of surprise, "Marshall Berwick, the Chevalier's minister?" He opened the letter with a fine show of indifference. "I think I mentioned to you that I had already been invited by the Chevalier to Bar. Doubtless this is to second the invitation." He read it through carelessly, and tore it up. "Yes. But I travel south, not east, Lawrence. I go to Dauphin?, not Lorraine;" and as if to dismiss the subject, he diverted his speech from the Chevalier to myself.

"And so, Lawrence," he said, "it is to be the soutane, and not the red-coat; the rosary, and not the sword."

It seemed to me that there was a hint of wonder and disappointment in his voice; but, maybe, I was over-ready at that time to detect a slight, and I answered quickly--

"I have to thank you for the cornetcy. The offer was a-piece with the rest of your kindness; but I was constrained to refuse it."

"And what constrained you? Your devotion to the priesthood?"

He glanced at me shrewdly as he spoke, and I knew that my face was hot beneath his gaze. Then he laughed. The laugh was kindly enough; but it bantered me, and if my face was hot before, now it was a-flame.

"You come of an obstinate stock, Lawrence," he continued; "but I was misled to believe that you had missed the inheritance."

"It was out of my power to accept the cornetcy," I returned, "even had I wished it For I am a Papist."

"You would not have found yourself alone," he said, with a laugh. "The Duke of Ormond prefers Papists for his officers. He showed me a list not so long ago of twenty-seven colonels whom he had a mind to break, and strangely enough they were all Protestants, with never a fault besides to their names."

"Moreover," I went on, "I was too poor;" and there I think I hit the true and chief reason, though I would not acknowledge it as such even to myself.

"But you have an uncle in Cumberland," said Bolingbroke.

"He is a Whig and a Protestant," I replied. "He can hardly hold me in that esteem which would give me warrant to approach him."

My kinsman nodded his head as though he approved the argument, and sat for a little silent over his wine, while my fancies went straying over imagined battle-fields. It is strange how a man will glorify this business of cutting throats, the more particularly if he be of a sedentary life. Most like it is for that very reason. I have seen something of a war's realities since then; I have seen men turned to beasts by hunger and thirst, and the lust of carnage; I have seen the dead stripped and naked upon the hillside of Clifton moor white like a flock of sheep. But at the time of which I write I thought only of a battlefield as of a place where life throbbed at its fullest to a sound of resonant trumpets and victorious shouts; and the smoke of cannon hid the trampled victims, even from my imaginings.

"Come!" said Lord Bolingbroke, breaking in upon my reflections of a sudden; "if your afternoon is not disposed of, I would gladly take a turn with you. I have it in my mind to show you a picture."

I agreed willingly enough to the proposal, and together we went down into the street.

"This will be our way," he said; and we walked to the monastery of the Chartreux. Then he stopped.

"Perhaps you know the picture."

"No," I replied. "This is the first time that ever I came hither."

He took me forthwith to the wonderful frescoes of Le Soeur, and, walking quickly along them, stopped at length before the most horrid and ghastly picture that ever I set my eyes on. It was the picture of a dead man who spoke at his burial, and painted with such cunning suggestion and power that, gazing at it, I felt a veritable fear invade me. It was not merely that his face expressed all the horror, the impotent rage, the pain of his damnation, but there was also conveyed by the subtlest skill a certain consciousness in the sufferer that he received no more than his merits. It was as though you looked at a hypocrite, who knew that his hypocrisy was discovered.

"Well, what think you of it?" asked my companion. "It does credit to the painter's craftsmanship;" and his voice startled me, for, in my contemplation of the picture, I had clean forgotten his presence. The painting was indeed so vivid that it had raised up alert and active within my breast a thought which I had up till now, though not without effort, kept resolutely aloof from me.

"But yet more to his imagination," I replied perfunctorily, and moved away. Lord Bolingbroke followed me, and we quitted the monastery, and walked for some way in silence.

I had no mind for talk, and doubtless showed my disinclination, for my companion, though now and again he would glance at me with an air of curiosity, refrained from questions. To speak the truth, I was fulfilled--nay, I overbrimmed with shame. The picture lived before my eyes, receding in front of me through the streets of Paris. It seemed to complete and illustrate the rebuke which the rector had addressed to me that morning; it pointed a scornful commentary at my musings on the glory of arms. For the figure in the picture cried "hypocrite," and cried the word at me; and so insistently did the recollection of it besiege me that I came near to thinking it no finished painting limned upon the wall, and fixed so until such time as the colours should fade, but rather a living scene. I began almost to expect that the figures would change their order and disposition, that the dead man speaking would swerve from his attitude, and, as he spoke, and spoke "hypocrite," would reach out a bony and menacing finger towards me. So far had my fancies carried me when my kinsman touched me on the arm.

"It is as you say, Lawrence," he said, as though there had been no interval of silence since my last words--"it is the imagination, not the craftsmanship, which fixes the attention. It is the idea of a dead man speaking--no matter what he speaks."

There was a certain significance in his tone which I did not comprehend.

I stopped in the street.

"You were anxious to show me the picture," I said.

"Yes," he replied.

"Why?"

"Does it tell you nothing concerning yourself?"

I was positively startled by the question. It seemed incredible that he could have foreseen the effect which it would produce on me.

"What do you mean?" I exclaimed.

He gave an easy laugh, and pointed across my shoulder.

"There is a church," said he, "and moult and moult people entering it. Let us go in too."

I looked at him in increased surprise, for I had not believed him very prone to religious exercises. However, he crossed the road, with me at his heels, and went up the steps in the throng.

The church was dim, and because I came into it out of the April sunshine, it struck upon my senses as dank besides.

The voices of the choir beat upwards through an air blue and heavy with incense; the tapers burning on the altar at the far end of the nave over against us shone blurred and vague as though down some misty tunnel; and from the painted windows on the right the sunshine streamed in slanting rods of light, vari-coloured, disparting the mist.

At the first, I had an impious thought, due partly may be to my unfamiliarity with the bustle of the streets, and partly no doubt to the companionship of my kinsman, who ever brought with him, as it were, a breath of that wide world wherein he lived and schemed, that I was returning to a narrow hemisphere wherein men had no manner of business. But after a little a Carmelite monk began to preach, and the fire of his discourse, as it rose and fell, now harsh with passion, now musical with tenderness, roused me to a consciousness of the holy ground on which I stood. I bent forward, not so much listening as watching those who listened. I noted how the sermon gained upon them, how their faces grew expectant. Even Lord Bolingbroke lost his indifference; he moved a step or two nearer to the preacher. His attitude lost the lazy grace he was wont to affect; he stood satisfied, and I knew that there was no man on earth so critical in his judgment of an orator.

I was assured then of the sway which the monk asserted over his congregation, and the assurance pierced to my very soul.

For I knew the cause of his power; one had not to listen long to realise that. The man was sincere. This was no pleasurable discourse waved delicately like a scented handkerchief to tease the senses of his auditors. Sincerity burnt like a clear flame kindling his words, and compelled belief. Of the matter of his sermon I took no note. Once or twice "the Eve of St. Bartholomew" came thundering at my ears, but for the most part it seemed that he cried "hypocrite" at me, until I feared that the congregation would rise in their seats in that dim church, and a mob of white faces gibber and mow the accusation. I stood fascinated, unable to move, until at last Bolingbroke came back to me, and, taking my arm, led me out of church.

"You study late of nights?" he asked, looking into my face.

"The preacher wrought on me."

"He has eloquence," he agreed; "but it was a dead man speaking."

I stopped in the street, and stared at him.

"Yes," he continued; "he warns, he exhorts, like the figure in the picture there, but the man himself--what of him, Lawrence? He is the mere instrument of his eloquence--its servant, not its master. He is the priest--dead to the world in which he has his being, a shadow with a voice, a dead man speaking."

"Nay," I broke in, "the words were born at his heart. He was sincere, and therefore he lives. The dead man speaking is the hypocrite."

I cried the words in a very passion of self-reproach, and without thought of the man I addressed them to.

"Well, well," said he, indulgently, "he has, at all events, a live advocate. I did not gather you were so devoted to the vocation;" and he laughed a little to belie the words, and so we parted company.

It was in no complacent mood, as you may guess, that I returned to the college, and, indeed, I loitered some while before the gates or ever I could make up my mind to enter them. The picture weighed upon my conscience, and seemed like to effect my Lord Bolingbroke's evident purpose, though by means of a very different argument. It was not the priest, but myself, the hypocrite, who was the dead man speaking; and thus, strangely enough, as I had reason to think it afterwards, I came to imagine the picture with myself as its central figure. I would see it at nights as I lay awake in my bed, painted with fire upon the dark spaces of the room, and the face that bore the shame of hypocrisy discovered, and with that shame the agony of punishment was mine. Or, again, a word of reproof; the mere sight of my Marco Polo was sufficient to bring it into view, and for the rest of that day it would bear me company, hanging before my eyes when I sat down to my books, and moving in front of me when I walked, as it had moved in front of me through the streets of Paris on that first and only occasion of my seeing it. For, though many a time I passed and repassed the monastery of the Chartreux, I never sought admittance. I saw the picture no more than once; but, indeed, I was in no danger of forgetting it, and within the compass of a few months events befell me which fixed it for ever in my memory. I have but to shut my eyes, and I see it after this long interspace of years, definite in every detail. I have but to open them, and, sitting at this table at which I write, I behold, actually painted, the second picture into which my imagination then transformed the first--the picture of myself as the dead man speaking.

MY KINSMAN AND I RIDE DIFFERENT WAYS.

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