The Missionary
George Chetwynd Griffith (1902)
Country of origin: UK
Available texts by the same author here
Chapter XIV
It was the morning of Trinity Sunday, and Worcester Cathedral was crowded by a congregation which, if it had been an audience in an unconsecrated building, could have been justly described as brilliant.Trinity Sunday is usually what may, without irreverence, be called more or less of a show Sunday in all churches. To-day all the clerical light and learning of the diocese was gathered together in the grand old Cathedral. The various portions of the service were to be conducted by clergy of high rank and notable social position. No one under the rank of a Canon, at least, would take any part in the proceedings.
The first lesson would be read by the Vicar of Bedminster, who was also a Canon of the Cathedral, and the second by Canon Thornton-Moore, whose acquaintance the reader has already made at Garthorne Abbey. Both of them were men of dignified presence, and both possessed good voices and a careful elocutionary training.
The Epistle and Gospel would be read by the Archdeacon and the Dean. Organ and choir were tuned to a perfection of harmony. And finally the Bishop would preach. After that would come the administration of the Sacrament to those who had not received it at the early service, for Trinity Sunday is accredited one of those three days on which, at least, the faithful member of the Anglican Church shall communicate. Then, the communion over, the Bishop would hold an Ordination, in consideration of which he had thoughtfully and thankfully curtailed his eloquence in the pulpit.
At this ordination Mark Ernshaw, who had already won fame both as an earnest and utterly self-sacrificing missionary, in the moral and spiritual wilds of East and South London, and also as a preacher who could fill any West End Church to suffocation, was to be admitted to full orders in company with his friend, Vane Maxwell, who was so far unknown to fame save for the fact that he was locally known as one of the dwellers in the Retreat among the hills, and, therefore, as one who had sat at the feet of the far-famed Father Philip, who himself had to-day made one of his rare appearances in the world, and was occupying one of the Canons' stalls in the chancel.
All the Clergy at the Retreat were popularly supposed to have "a past" of some sort, and as Vane had come from there and was also credited with being young and exceedingly good-looking—some of the lady visitors to the Retreat had described him as possessing "an almost saintlike beauty, my dear"—he also was a focus of interest. Moreover, he was known to have taken a brilliant degree at Oxford, and to have had equally brilliant worldly prospects which he had suddenly and unaccountably relinquished to go into the Church.
Thus it came to pass that a very different and much more numerous congregation witnessed this ceremonial than the one which had taken place at the same altar rails a little more than a twelvemonth before.
Of course, all the party from the Abbey were present, including Sir Reginald, who had come down for a few days from town. Enid and her husband had communicated. It was their first communion since their marriage. Then they had gone back to their places to await the ordination.
In one of the front rows of the transept seats there was a tall, well-dressed girl, very pretty, with dark, deep, serious eyes which, in the intervals of the service she had several times raised and turned on Enid and her husband, who were sitting on the same side towards the front, in the body of the Cathedral. She was the very last person in the world, saving only, perhaps, Carol herself, whom Garthorne would have wished to see just then and there, and as soon as he had made sure that Dora Murray really was sitting within a few yards of him he began to be haunted by ugly fears of blackmail and exposure—which showed how very little he had learnt of Dora's character during the time that Carol had shared the flat with her.
But Dora's thoughts were very different, for they were all of fear, mingled with something like horror. She looked at the sweet-faced girl sitting beside Reginald Garthorne, and thought of the ruin and desolation that would fall upon her young life, with all its brilliant outward promise, if she only knew what she could have told her. She looked at her husband and wondered what all these good people—most of whom would have given almost anything for an invitation to his home—what these grave-faced, decorous clergy, too, would think if they could see him as she had seen him only a few months before. There was Sir Arthur Maxwell, too, sitting a little farther on, and beside him Sir Godfrey and Lady Raleigh, though, of course, she did not know them, but she guessed who they were, and close to Sir Arthur sat Sir Reginald, his host for the time being.
The whole of the Abbey party had communicated together. What would happen if she were to go to Sir Arthur after the service, and tell him what Carol had told her, if he were to learn that he had been kneeling at the altar rails beside the betrayer of his wife and the dishonourer of his name?
When she had seen Sir Reginald rise from his seat and go with the rest of the party across the centre transept to the chancel, she needed all her self-control to shut her teeth and clench her hands and prevent herself from leaving her seat and accusing him of his infamy before clergy and congregation. She thought thankfully how good a thing it was that Carol, with her fierce impetuosity and sense of bitter wrong, was not there too. There was no telling what disaster might have happened, how many lives might have been wrecked by the words which she might have flung out at him, red-hot from her angry heart.
In her way Dora was a really religious girl, as many of her class are. So religious, indeed, that she would not have dared to have approached the altar herself; because she knew that for her, wedded as she was to the pleasant careless life she led, repentance and reform were quite out of the question.
She saw no incongruity at all in this. She went to church regularly in London, offered up as simple and as earnest prayers as anyone; lifted up her beautiful voice in the hymns and psalms and responses in honest forgetfulness of the things of yesterday and to-morrow, and, for the time being at least, took the lessons of the sermon to heart with a simple faith which many of her respectable sisters in the congregation were far from feeling.
In short, though the circumstances were different, she was very much in the position of the average respectable, well-to-do church-going Christian who will strive all the week, often by quite questionable methods, to lay up for himself and his wife and family treasures upon earth, and then on Sunday go to church and listen with the most perfect honesty and the most undisturbed equanimity to the reading of the Sermon on the Mount.
But when she saw Sir Reginald go with his son and his daughter-in-law, with her parents and Vane's father up through the chancel where Vane was sitting, her heart turned sick in her breast. The sacrilege, the blasphemy of it all seemed horrible beyond belief. Again and again the words rose to her lips. Again and again an almost irresistible impulse impelled her to get up, and she was only saved from doing what all that was best in her nature urged her to do, by the knowledge that, after all, she might only be expelled from the Cathedral by the Vergers, and perhaps prosecuted afterwards for brawling. Then her real story would come out.
She was visiting her parents who lived in Worcester, and who believed that she was conducting a little millinery business in London. She had great natural skill in designing head-gear—her own hat, for instance, had been gazed on by many an envious eye since the service began—and she would have bitten her tongue through, rather than say a word which would have undeceived them. And so for this reason as well she held her peace.
Then she had heard the sonorous voice of the officiating priest rolling down the chancel:
"Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbours and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God and walking from henceforth in His holy way, draw near with faith and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort."Then came the general confession, and as she followed it in her prayer-book she thought of that unconfessed, though, perhaps, not unrepented sin of which she alone, save Sir Reginald, in all that great congregation knew. How could this man kneel there and say these solemn words, before he had confessed his sin to the man he had wronged, to the husband from whom he had stolen a wife, to the son he had deprived of a mother? What horrible mockery and blasphemy it all was! Surely some day some terrible retribution must fall on him for this.
After the Eucharist followed, as usual on such occasions, the Ordination Service. She had never seen Vane before, but when some of the congregation had left after the Communion Service, she left her seat and took a vacant one in front of the chancel, and then, even at some distance, she recognised him immediately by his likeness to Carol. It seemed to her that she had never seen anything so beautiful in human shape when he rose in his surplice and stole and hood to take his place before the Bishop at the altar-rail. And yet how different must her thoughts have been from Enid's, as they both looked upon the kneeling figure and listened to the words which were the actual fulfilment of the vow that he had taken to take up his cross and follow Him who said: "Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple."
Then, in due course, came the fateful words, more full of fate, so far as they concerned Vane, than any who knew him in the congregation had any idea of.
"Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the Imposition of our hands from God. Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain they are retained. And be thou a faithful dispenser of the word of God and of his Holy Sacraments; in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen!"
"Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained!"
Saving only Vane himself, these words had a deeper meaning for Dora, the Magdalen, the sinner, and the outcast, than they had for anyone else in the congregation, and in one sense they meant even more to her than they could do to him. When he rose from his knees before the altar rails, he would rise invested, as she believed, by the authority of God through the Church, with a power infinitely greater than that of any earthly judge. It was his to forgive or retain, his to pardon or to damn. That, to her simple reasoning, was the absolute meaning of the words as the Bishop had spoken them.
Some day it might happen that Carol would be confronted with the man whom she believed to be her father. What if she were to bring Vane face to face with him and he knew him for what he was, what would he do, not as man, but as priest—forgive or retain, absolve or damn?
When the ordination service was over and the congregation was moving out of the Cathedral, Sir Arthur caught sight of Dora for the first time. They were only a few feet apart, and recognition was inevitable. She looked at him as though she had never seen him before, although she had been present at more than one interview between him and Carol at Melville Gardens, but Sir Arthur at once edged his way towards her, shook hands in that decorous fashion which is usual among departing congregations, and said, in an equally decorous whisper:
"Good morning, Miss Murray! I hope you have not come here by accident, and that you will be able to give me some news of Carol. We have looked for you everywhere."
"Except perhaps in the right place," she murmured, putting her hand into his, "and if you had found us I don't think it would have been of any use. Carol's mind was quite made up. My address is 15, Stonebridge Street, if you wish to write to me. Good morning."
And then they parted, he to go his way and she to go hers, and each with an infinite pity for the other, and yet with what different reasons? It was only a chance meeting, the accidental crossing of two widely diverging life-paths; only one of those instances in which romance delights to mock the commonplace, and yet how much it meant—and how much might it mean when the future had become the present.
Fortunately, Garthorne and Enid had been pressing on in front, and so he had not noticed the meeting between Sir Arthur and Dora, whereby the second possible catastrophe of the day was averted.
Sir Arthur was one of the house-party at the Abbey, for he and Sir Reginald had been to a certain extent colleagues in India, and had kept up their acquaintance, and now that Sir Reginald's son had married the girl whom Sir Arthur had always looked upon as a prospective daughter-in-law, the intimacy had become somewhat closer. Sir Arthur had said frankly at the first that he thought Vane had done an exceedingly foolish thing; but since he had done it and meant to stick to it, there was an end of the matter, and if Vane couldn't or wouldn't marry Enid, he would, after all, rather see her the wife of his old friend's son than anybody else's. He had, therefore, willingly accepted Sir Reginald's invitation to spend a few days at the Abbey and witness his son's admission to the full orders of the priesthood.
Vane and Ernshaw, after exchanging greetings and receiving congratulations, declined Sir Reginald's invitation to dine and sleep at the Abbey, and went straight back to the Retreat with Father Philip.
It happened that, somewhat late that night after their guests had gone to bed, Reginald Garthorne had a couple of rather important letters to write, and sat up to get them finished. When he had sealed and stamped them, he took them to the post-box in the hall. The postman's lock-up bag was standing on the hall table, and, as he knew there wouldn't be any more letters that night, he thought he might as well put what there were there into the bag and lock it with his own key. He took them out in a handful, but before he could put them into the bag they slipped and scattered on to the table. He bent down to gather them up, and there, right under his eyes, was an envelope addressed in Sir Arthur Maxwell's handwriting to Miss Dora Murray, 15 Stonebridge Street, Worcester. He would have given a thousand pounds to know what that thin paper cover concealed. The thought half entered his mind to take it away and steam it, read the letter, and then put it back again; but he was not without his own notions of honour, and he dismissed the thought before it was fully formed. He contented himself with taking out his pencil and copying the address, and as he put the letters into the bag and locked it he said to himself:
"Well, I was wondering at service what in the name of all that's unlucky brought that girl down here just now, and I suppose I shall have to find out. But what the deuce does the old man want writing to her? A nice thing if they were to discover the lost Miss Carol and present her to the world as Vane's half-sister, and then the rest of the story came out. What an almighty fool I was to do that. If I'd only known that Enid really would have me—but it's no use grizzling over that. I shall have to find out what that young woman wants down in this part of the world, and why Sir Arthur should be writing to her, that's quite certain."