Chapter IV (1)
All through the falling of the leaves—the creeper leaves that dropped slowly, resplendent in death, from college walls, the narrow willow leaves that were whirled floating on to the streams, the leaves that made a carpet, the leaves that were like rain, the leaves that laughed as they fell, the leaves that fluttered to the ground like wounded birds—Tristram wrestled with the angel of bewilderment.
Not even Dormer could help him. He had known that from the night at the Rectory. The matter was too intimately between himself and God; he must struggle through alone. And though, when he was back in Oxford, Dormer had come and sought him out in his lodgings, in order to tell him that he thought he was overworking, and ought to spare himself a little more, Tristram merely said that he was quite well, and let him go without a sign.
He was in a mist of anguish and perplexity. If he could only see the path, he told himself, he was ready to follow it, however sharp its flints. But where lay his road? If that reawakened desire of his, hidden from his own eyes till the wind of the Downs had rent the curtain, were sin, then he would cut it from him, at whatever cost. For even then the self that prayed with such intensity for happiness was so much the captive of a surrendered will that at the last it had struggled towards obedience with Non voluntas mea....
But how could his desire be sin? He was not a Roman Catholic priest; he was a member of a body where marriage was almost expected. Even if, at his ordination, his intention had been plain to himself, he had taken no formal vow of celibacy. Newman, in spite of his ascetic views, thought that vows were foolish, and showed a lack of trust in Providence. Moreover, might not Horatia’s sudden liberation be a sign that she was meant for him after all? And how could she hinder him in his work?—she would be a help to any man. He thought of what she might be as a companion, as an inspiration. And he wanted her for herself; he wanted the warm and ordered joys of home. Was that wrong? How could such desires be wrong, when God Himself had implanted them? Had not Jeremy Taylor called marriage “the nursery of heaven?”
But he knew now that this very exaltation of marriage by the Christian Church was only the other side of her exaltation of virginity. This lost truth, the heart of early asceticism—positive offence though it was even to persons who prided themselves on taking literally every other Gospel precept—he had learnt unwillingly enough. He too had found it a hard saying, but like his friends at Oriel, having once admitted it, he could not conveniently forget it. And though these men, because of their intense belief in the Divine plan for every individual life, would never presume to demand from him that he should not marry, yet, with their severe ideals, they would certainly expect that he should not go back on a line once chosen. And he had chosen; no use to deny that. He knew, if no other human being knew, how deeply he was committed to the idea of the life without ties. It was impossible for him to blink the fact that, had Horatia not become free, he would have gone on in the direction in which his mind was set. This present hesitation meant, then, that when, in his heart, he had made a dedication of his life to God, it was only because the one woman he wanted had been taken from him—an offering, as he had always felt, but little worth, though the best that he could bring. But now, now that the offering was to cost him more dear, he was desirous of taking it back again. And he reflected how such conduct would appear in worldly matters. It did not seem to him that its transference to another plane of values would render it any the more creditable.
Yes, said another voice, but you cannot set your relations with the Almighty on a sort of business footing. Do you imagine that the Architect of the Universe keeps a strict ledger account with the dust he has called into being, that he does not know the weak and childish heart of it, and accept its poor offerings, not like a merchant, but like a king?
To and fro went the warring armies in his soul, while his body carried him about his business among the poor of St. Thomas’s. But all the time the tide of combat was setting in one direction, and at last he knew it.
There was a certain old woman in one of the courts to whom he used to read every day. Though dirty and illiterate she was methodical and self-willed, and, oblivious of the lessons of the day, selected what book of the Bible she pleased to be read straight through to her. In this way, after a course of Deuteronomy, she had pitched upon St. Mark.
“You was reading yesterday, Sir, how we should cut off our ’ands and feet and cast them into ’ell fire,” she observed one morning as Tristram sat down in her little room. “It seems a ’ard thing to be told to do, don’t it?”
Scarcely encouraged by this result of his ministrations, Tristram promptly turned to the end of the ninth chapter and re-read the passage, trying to explain as simply as possible its meaning. But the attitude of the old dame was that of one taking her stand on the rock of the Word—“the Good Book says so, and it don’t become us to say otherwise”—and after a while, seeing that his exegesis was making no impression, he desisted, and went on to the tenth chapter. He was reading it, truth to tell, without attending much to the words, his mind occupied half unconsciously with the eternal conflict, when he found that he was in the midst of the story of the young ruler, and that his lips were repeating the familiar words, “One thing thou lackest... sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor... and come, take up the cross, and follow Me.”
All the rest of the day the story kept running in his head. He could not quite think why, except that it was one of those scenes in the Gospel, dealing with an individual, which had always interested him. With his mother’s charity he had often hoped that the young ruler came back after all. He remembered once having a talk with Dormer, who said that there was some sort of tradition that he returned, but that he, Dormer, thought there was very little ground for such a hope. On the same occasion he had enunciated a theory which Tristram had thought rather austere—that certain people, often good people, who had kept the commandments from their youth up, could only be saved at all by enduring hardness. Such people were constantly asked to make decisions involving sacrifice, and whereas others seemed able to compass the heavenly ascent by a tolerably easy road, they, if they were to reach the same summit, must climb by a very different path.
And somehow Tristram began to apply these conditions to himself. He had kept the commandments, he had great possessions—friends, enough to live upon, perhaps the possession that he had coveted all these years. What if he were in the position of the young ruler, although he had already begun to obey the command. He had thought that God was perhaps calling him to the single life because he could serve the poor better in that state. He had found how happy he could be at St. Thomas’s, and experience had convinced him that for such work a man must be single. It was not just the fact of marrying Horatia. He would have responsibilities which would clash with what he hoped to do. He could not take her to live in the midst of dirt and poverty to risk her health, and the health of their children. If he married her he would be turning his back on his work. According to Dormer’s theory he might be turning his back on Christ.
And so, in no romantic surroundings but among the trying adornments of his little room in Hollybush Row—the waxen bouquets springing from woolwork mats and shrined under domes of glass, the very bad engraving of the entry of the Allies into Paris, the lustre jugs, the framed announcement of the Oxford coaches and the wall-paper that oppressed the very soul—he fought his way through to the conclusion that Horatia was not for him now any more than she had been two years ago. He must take the harder path, he must go on as he had begun.
The stuffed parrot in the centre of his mantelpiece, at which, unknowing, he had been staring fixedly for the last hour, regarded him with a cynical and leering eye. “So this is religion!” it seemed to say. “And this is a man!”
Tristram, though appreciating the taunt, got up and put the critic outside the door.
(2)
Three weeks later, at two o’clock in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, he was stepping into the post-chaise which was to take him out to Compton Regis to see Horatia for the first time since her return. He had been ordained priest only yesterday. The Rector had been in the Cathedral, and Tristram, touched by his presence, had accepted his urgent invitation to come over to Compton on the morrow, Christmas Eve though it was. For this summons he had, indeed, been preparing himself, since whatever course he should afterwards decide upon, he must at least go out and see Horatia once.
Yesterday afternoon, amid the frightful Christmas bustle outside the Mitre, in the clamour of departing coaches laden with geese and turkeys, he had said farewell to Dormer, who had stayed thus late in Oxford for his sake, and was posting to Whitchurch, where he would catch the London and Exeter mail in the morning. Even so his expectant nephews and nieces at Colyton would all be in bed long before he reached his brother’s house on Christmas Eve. Tristram had deprecated this sacrifice, but Dormer had insisted on staying to see him ordained.
Down past the front of Christ Church went the chaise, over the river, and towards the hill—ways so familiar. But the self that travelled them to-day was different. The tortures of indecision were over. Yesterday had put the seal on his dedication. Wonderfully, unbelievably, the choice had been offered to him after all—the reality of sacrifice, not mere acquiescence in past suffering, and because his attitude was no more that of a loveless obedience, he almost longed to feel the pain which he knew was before him. And, even if there was combat to come, he would know now on which side he fought, he would not go away sorrowful.
The drawing-room at Compton Rectory was not empty, as he had at first thought, for in a chair before the fire, with her back to him, was seated Horatia herself. On a fold of her black dress lay some immature woolly object which he could not identify, and in the crook of her right arm rested a little motionless head clothed, none too thickly, with curling rings of bronze-gold hair.
Tristram stopped in his advance. And at that she lifted her head and spoke.
“Tristram! Is that you already? He is asleep. Come round here, if you will.” He came to her other side, and his lips met the wedding ring on the hand which she tendered to him, smiling.
“Dear Tristram!” she said, in the same soft tones of welcome, looking up at him. “How kind of you to come! Will you get yourself a chair?”
He obeyed, still rather speechless, and when he had sat down she asked him if he had ridden or driven, whether the Rector knew that he was there, all in a quiet and unembarrassed manner. Then she suddenly bent her head and said, “Maurice, it is time that you woke up and spoke to this gentleman.”
Long lashes as black as night lay on the cheeks of Maurice-Victor-Stanislas de la Roche-Guyon, and one hand grasped firmly a string of jet beads hanging from his mother’s neck. His slumber was profound and determined. Tristram gazed at him, his mind in something of a whirl.
“He got tired, playing with his lamb,” vouchsafed Horatia, and as she looked down at the sleeping child a most divine little smile came over her face.
The revelation of that look, and the presence of her son somehow almost deprived Tristram of the power to ask her the thousand questions about herself that were on his lips. He got out a few, in a lowered tone, and then, with little warning but a sudden drowsy stretching, Maurice awoke, and out of Armand’s eyes: but bluer and more innocent, looked up straight at the visitor.
The effect was disconcerting to both. Tristram disguised his feelings, but the younger person, giving way to whatever emotion he may have felt, silently buried his head in his mother’s arm.
Horatia smiled that new smile of hers, and put a kiss on the curls.
“I was so sorry that I could not come to your ordination yesterday, Tristram,” she was beginning. “Papa would not let me take the long drive, but I wished very much to come...”
But just then the Rector entered, and the talk became general, even, on Horatia’s side, rather disjointed, for the Comte de la Roche-Guyon, demanding to be put down, crawled meanwhile with an extraordinary rapidity about the floor, addressing in obscure terms every object that he encountered on his route, footstools, hearthrug, even the flora of the carpet. Finally he embraced with fervour one of Tristram’s legs, and Tristram, after a moment or two, stooped and lifted him on to his knee. After all, he might as well accustom himself to children, though he would rather have gone to school with the child of someone else. Maurice smiled.
“Up!” he observed pertinently, and kicked out his feet with happy vigour, somewhat endangering his balance.
“He doesn’t often take to people like that!” observed his mother and grandfather simultaneously, and with the usual amount of truth...
It was over. And as the post-chaise jolted him back in the darkness to Oxford, Tristram’s whole heart was so swamped with the thought of Horatia, what she must have gone through, how miraculously she had changed, that there was little room for the contemplation of himself. She had now what she wanted; he was sure of it; she held it in her arms. The great surprise of it, after Paris, only made him the more convinced. God had given her compensation for what she had suffered. Yet the more he thought, with all a man’s touch of sentiment, about the little group in the firelight, the more that it seemed to him wonderful, beautiful, and, for Horatia, consummatory, the more did he realise the cost of selling that great possession which he might have had. Just as he had stood and looked on at mother and child this evening, so must he always stand now and look on—no more—at the sanctities of home.
And he had a sudden vision, too, of Dormer, surrounded to-morrow in church by the fair heads of his brother’s many children, kneeling in the midst of a bevy who were none of his. He had once told Tristram of the whispered communications that were wont to be made to him in service-time, of the happy terror in the eyes that would follow the small pointing finger up “Little Choke-a-bone Alley” to the tomb of the girl of royal lineage choked, hundreds of years ago, “by a fish-bone, Uncle Charles!”—to the effigy which had thrilled him himself as a boy.... There are veils which the hand of a close friend is the last to touch, and whether Dormer had ever suffered as he had suffered, or whether the vision which he had always followed shone with a light so effulgent that no other joys had radiance, Tristram could never pity him. But, remembering his long patience and hope, he desired suddenly to give him a Christmas gift, and though the letter could not reach him on the feast itself, and though it cost him something to do it, he sat down, when he got back, and told him what he had kept from him yesterday, that he had indeed, at last, sold whatsoever he had.
And, when he offered the Eucharist for the first time on Christmas morning, he made his own oblation, mingled of pain and joy.