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The Christian, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Book 2. The Religious Life - Chapter 15 |
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_ SECOND BOOK. THE RELIGIOUS LIFE CHAPTER XV Toward the middle of Lent the Society of the Holy Gethsemane was visited by its ecclesiastical Visitor. This was the Bishop of the diocese, a liberal-minded man and not a very rigid ecclesiastic, abrupt, brusque, businesslike, and a good administrator. When the brothers had gathered in the community room, he took from the Superior the leathern-bound volume containing the rule of the Brotherhood and read aloud the text of it. "And now, gentlemen," he said, "whether I approve of your rule or not is a matter with which we have no concern at present. My sole duty is to see that it is lawfully administered. Are you satisfied with the administration of it and willing to remain under its control?" There was only one response from the brothers--they were entirely satisfied. The Bishop rose with a smile and bowed to the brothers, and they began to leave the room. "There are two of my people whom you have not yet seen," said the Father. "Where are they?" "In their cells." "Why in their cells?" "One of them is ill; the other is under the rule of silence and solitude." "Let us visit them," said the Bishop, and they began to ascend the stairs. "I may not agree with your theory of the religious life, Father, but when I see your people giving up the world and its comforts, its joys and possessions, its ties of blood and affection----" They had reached the topmost story, and the Father had paused to recover breath. "This cell to the right," said he, "is occupied by a lay brother who was tempted by the Evil One to a grievous act of disobedience, and the wrath of God has fallen on him. But Satan has overreached himself for once, and by that very act grace has triumphed. Not a member of our community rejoices more in the blessed sacrament, and when I place the body of our Lord----" "May we go in to him?" "Certainly; he is dying of lung disease, but you shall see with what patience he possesses his soul." Brother Paul was sitting before a small fire in an arm-chair padded with pillows, holding in his dried-up hands a heavy crucifix which was suspended from his heck. "How lightsome and cosy we are up here!" said the Bishop. "A long way up, certainly, but no doubt you get everything you require." "Everything," said Paul. "I dare say the brothers are very good to you--they usually are so to the weak and ailing in a monastery." "Too good, my lord." "Of course you see a doctor occasionally?" "Three times a week, and if he would only let me escape from an evil and troublesome world----" "Hush! It's not right to talk like that, my son. Whatever happens, it is our duty to live, you know." "I've lost all there was to live for, and besides----" "Then there is nothing you wish for?" said the Bishop. "Nothing but death," said Paul, and lifting the crucifix he carried it to his lips. "Thank God we are born to die!" said the Bishop, and they stepped back to the corridor and closed the door. "This next cell," said the Father, "is occupied by such a one as you were thinking of--one who was born to possess the world and to achieve its sounding triumphs, but----" "Has he given it up entirely?" "Entirely." "Is he young?" "Quite young, and he has left the world, not as Augustine did, after learning by bitter experience the deceitfulness of sin----" "Then why is he here?" "He can not trust himself yet. He feels the inward strivings and struggles of our rebellious nature and----" "Then his solitude and silence are voluntary?" "Now they are. See," said the Father, and stooping to the floor he picked up a key that lay at his feet. "What does that mean?" "He locks himself in and pushes the key under the door." When they entered the cell John Storm was standing by the window in a stream of morning sunlight, looking out on the world below with fixed and yearning eyes. "This is our Visitor," said the Father. "The rule of silence is relaxed in his case." "Have I not seen you before?" said the Bishop. "I think not, Father," said John. "What is your name, and where did you live before you came here?" John told him. "Then I have both seen and heard you. But I perceive that the world has gone on a little since you left it--your canon is an archdeacon now, and one of the chaplains to the Queen as well. How long have you been in the Brotherhood?" "Since the 14th of August." "And how long have you kept your cell?" "Since the octave of Epiphany." "But this is Lent--rather a long penance, Father." "I have often urged our dear brother----" began the Father. "You carry your fastings and prayers too far, Mr. Storm," said the Bishop. He was picking up one by one some black-letter books that were lying on the table and on the bed. "I know that divines in all ages tell us that the body is evil, and that its desires and appetites must be eradicated. But they also teach us that the perfect Christian character is the blending of the two lives, the life of Nature and the life of grace. Don't despise your humanity, my son. Your Master did not despise it. He came down from heaven that he might live and work among the sinful brotherhood of man. And don't pray for death, or fast as if you wished for it. You would have no right to do that even if you were like your poor neighbour next door, whom Death smiles on and beckons to repose. But you are young and you are strong. Who knows what good work your heavenly Father keeps waiting for you yet?" John had returned to the window and was looking out with vacant eyes. "But all this is beside my present business," said the Bishop. "There is nothing you wish to complain of?" "Nothing whatever." "You are content to live in this house, under the laws and statutes of this society and in voluntary obedience to its Superior?" "Yes." "That is enough." The Bishop was leaving the cell, when his eye was arrested by some writing in pencil on the wall. It ran, "9th of November--Lord Mayor's Day"; and under it were short lines such as a prisoner makes when he keeps a reckoning. "What is the meaning of this date?" said the Bishop. John was silent, but the Father answered with a smile: "That is the date of his vow, my lord. It is part of the discipline of his life of grace to keep count of the days of his novitiate, so eager is he for the time when he may dedicate his whole life to God." Back at the head of the stairs the Father paused again and said, "Listen!" There was the sound as of a trembling hand turning the key in the lock of the door they had shut behind them, and at the next moment the key itself came out of the aperture under it. When the door closed on the Bishop and John Storm was alone in his cell, one idea was left with him--the idea of work. He had tried everything else, and everything had failed. He had tried solitude. On asking to be shut up in a cell, he had said to himself: "The thought of Glory is a temptation of my unquickened and unspiritual nature. It has already betrayed me into an act of cowardice and inhumanity, and it will drive me out into the world and fling me back again, as it drove out and flung back Brother Paul." But the result of his solitude was specious and deceitful. As pictures seem to float before the eyes after the eyelids are closed, so his past life, now that it was over, seemed to rise up before him with awful distinctness. Sitting alone in his cell, every event of his life with Glory passed before him in review, and harassed him with pitiless condemnation. Why had he failed to realize the essential difference of temperament between himself and that joyous creature? Why had he hesitated to gratify her natural and innocent love of mere life? Why had he done this? Why had he not done that? If Glory were lost, if the wicked and merciless world had betrayed her, the fault was his, and God would surely punish him. Thus did solitude enervate his soul by frightening it, and the temptation he had hoped to vanquish became the more strong and tyrannical. He had tried reading. The Fathers told him that God allowed ascetics to keep the keys of their nature in their own hands; that they had only to think of woman as more bitter than death, and of her beauty as a cause of perdition, and that if any woman's face tormented them they were to picture it to the eye of the mind as old and wrinkled, defaced by disease, and even the prey of the worm. He tried to think of Glory as the Fathers directed, but when darkness fell and he lay on his bed, with the first dream of the night the strong powers of Nature that had no mind to surrender swept down the pitiful bulwarks of religion, and Glory was smiling upon him in her youth, her beauty, her sweetness, her humour, and all the grace of her countless gifts. He had tried fasting. Three times a day Brother Andrew brought him his food, and twice a day, when the lay brother had left him, he opened the window and spread the food on the sill for the birds to take. But the results of his fasting were the reverse of his expectations. At one moment he was uplifted by strong emotions, at the next moment he was in collapse. Visions began to pass before him. His father's face tormented him constantly, and sometimes he was conscious of the face of his mother, though he had never known her. But above all and through all there came the face of Glory. Fasting had only extended his dreams about her. He was dreaming both by day and by night now, and Glory was with him always. He had tried prayer. Hitherto he had said his Offices regularly, but now he would say special prayers as well. To get the victory over his lawless and rebellious nature he would turn his eyes to the mother of the Lord. But when he tried to fix his mind on Mary there was nothing to answer to it. All was shadowy and impalpable. There was only a vague, empty cloud before his eyes, until suddenly a luminous face glided into the vacant place, and it was full of tenderness, of sweetness, of charm, of pity and womanly love--but it was the face of Glory. Despair laid hold of him. His attempts to overcome Nature were clearly rejected by the Almighty. Winter passed with its foggy days. The Father wished him to return to the ordinary life of the community, yet he begged to be allowed to remain. But the spring came and diffused its joy throughout all Nature. He listened to the leaves, he watched the birds threading their way in the clear air, he caught glimpses of the yellow flowers, and strained his eyes for the green country beyond. The young birds began to take wing, and one little sparrow came hopping into his room as often as he opened his window in the morning and played about his feet like a mouse, and then was gone to the mother bird that called to it from the tree. Little by little hope grew to impatience, and impatience rose to fever heat; but he remembered his vow, and, to put himself out of temptation, he locked the door of his cell and pushed the key through the aperture under it. But he could not lock the door of his soul, and his old trouble came up again with the throb of a stronger and fresher life. Every morning when he awoke he thought of Glory. Where was she now? What had become of her by this time? He wrote on the wall the date of her disappearance from the hospital--"9th of November; Lord Mayor's Day"--and tried to keep pace in his mind with the chances of her fate. "I am guilty of a folly," he thought. The pride of his reason revolted against what he was doing. Nevertheless, he knew full well it would be the same to-morrow, and the next day, and the next year, for his human passions would not yield, and his vow still clutched him as with fangs. He was standing one morning by the window looking through an opening between high buildings to the river, with its hay barges gliding down the glistening water-way, and its little steamers with their spirals of smoke ascending, when everything in the world began in a moment to bear another moral interpretation. The lesson of life was work. Man could not exist without it. If he departed from that condition, no matter how much he fasted and meditated and prayed, he was useless and miserable and depraved. Then the lock turned in the door of his cell and the Father and the Bishop entered. When they were gone he felt suffocated by their praises of his piety, and asked himself, "What am I doing here?" He was a hypocrite. Ten thousand other men whom the Church called saints had been hypocrites before him, and as they paced their cloisters they had asked themselves the same question. But the mighty hand of the Church was over him still, and with trembling fingers he turned the key again and pushed it under the door. Then he knew that he was a coward also, and that religion had deprived him of his will, of his manhood, and enervated his soul itself. Brother Paul was moving about in the adjoining cell. The lay brother had become very weak; his step was slow, his feet dragged along the floor; his breath was audible and sometimes his cough was long and raucous. John had heard these sounds every day and had tried not to listen, but now he strained his ears to hear. A new thought had come to him: he would ask to be allowed to nurse Brother Paul; that should be his work, for work alone could save him. Next morning he leaped up from sleep at the first syllable of "Benedicamus Domino," and cried, "Father!" But when the door opened in answer to his call it was the Father Minister who entered. The Superior had gone to give a Retreat to a sisterhood in York, and would be absent until the end of Lent. John looked at the hard face of the deputy, the very mirror of its closed and frozen soul, and he could say nothing. "Is it anything that I can do for you?" said the Father Minister. "No--that is to say--no, no," said John. When he opened his window that day he could hear the Lenten services in the church. The prayers, the responses, the psalms, and the hymns woke to fresh life the memory of things long past, and for the first time he became oppressed with a great loneliness. The near neighbourhood of Brother Paul intensified that loneliness, and at length he asked for an indulgence and spoke to the Father Minister again. "Brother Paul is ill; let me attend to him," he said. The Father Minister shook his head. "The brother gets all he wants. He does not wish for constant attendance." "But he is a dying man, and somebody should be with him always." "The doctor says nothing can be done for him. He may live months. But if he is dying, let us leave him to meditate on the happiness and glory of another world." John made no further struggle. Another door had closed on him. But it was not necessary to go to Brother Paul that he might be with him always. The spiritual eye could see everything. Listening to the sounds in the adjoining cell, it was the same at length as if the wall between them had fallen down and the two rooms were one. Whatever Brother Paul did John seemed to see, whatever he said in his hours of pain John seemed to hear, and when he lifted his scuttle of coal from the place at the door where the lay brother left it, John's hand seemed to bear up the weight. It was a poor, pathetic folly, but it brought the comfort of company, and John thought with a pang of the time when he had wished to be separated from Paul, and had all but asked for a cell elsewhere. Paul had a fire, and John could hear him build and light and stir it; and sometimes when this was done he could sit down himself before his own empty grate on his own side of the wall and fancy they were good comrades sitting side by side. As the day passed he thought that Brother Paul on his part also was touched by the same sense of company. His silence at certain moments, his half-articulate salutations, his repetition of the sounds that John himself made, seemed to be the dumb expression of a sense that, in spite of the wall that divided them, and the rule of silence and solitude that separated them on John's side, they were, nevertheless, together. Brother Paul's cough grew rapidly worse, and at last it burst into a fit so long and violent as to seem as if it would never end. John held his breath and listened. "He'll suffocate," he thought; "he'll never live through it!" But the spasm passed, and there was a prolonged hush, a dead stillness, that was not broken by so much as the sound of a breath. Was he gone? By a sudden impulse, in the agony of his suspense, John stretched out his hand and knocked three times on the wall. There was a short silence, and then faintly, slowly, and irregularly three other knocks came back to him. Paul had understood, and John shouted in his joy. But even on top of his relief came his religious fears. Had he broken the rule of silence? Were they guilty of a sin? Nevertheless, for many days thereafter, though they knew it was a fault, in this vague and dumb and feeble fashion they communicated constantly. On going to bed they rapped "Good-night": on rising for the day they rapped "Good-morning." They rapped when the bell rang for midday service, and again when the singing came up through the courtyard. And sometimes they rapped from sympathy and sometimes from pity, and sometimes from mere human loneliness and the love of company. Thus did these exiles from life, struggling to live under the eye of God in obedience to their earthly vow, try to cheer their crushed and fettered souls, and to comfort each other like imprisoned children. _ |
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