CHAPTER III

TOUCHING MATTERS CLERICAL AND CONTROVERSIAL

Brockhurst had rarely appeared more blessed by spacious sunshine and

stately cheerfulness than during the remaining weeks of that summer. A

spirit of unclouded serenity possessed the place, both indoors and out.

If rain fell, it was only at night. And this, as so much else, Julius

March noted duly in his diary.

For that was the period of elaborate private chronicles, when persons

of intelligence and position still took themselves, their doings and

their emotions with most admired seriousness. Natural science, the

great leveler, had hardly stepped in as yet. Therefore it was, that

already, Julius's diary ran into many stout manuscript volumes; each in

turn soberly but richly bound, with silver clasp and lock complete, so

soon as its final page was written. Begun when he first went up to

Oxford, some thirteen years earlier, it formed an intimate history of

the influences of the Tractarian Movement upon a scholarly mind and

delicately spiritual nature. At the commencement of his Oxford career

he had come into close relations with some of the leaders of the

movement. And the conception of an historic church, endowed with mystic

powers--conveyed through an unbroken line of priests from the age of

the apostles--the orderly round of vigil, fast, and festival, the

secret, introspective joys of penance and confession, the fascinations

of the strictly religious life, as set before him in eloquent public

discourse or persuasive private conversation,--had combined to kindle

an imagination very insufficiently satisfied by the lean spiritual

meats offered it during an Evangelical childhood and youth. Julius

yielded himself up to his instructors with passionate self-abandon. He

took orders, and remained on at Oxford--being a fellow of his

college--working earnestly for the cause he had so at heart. Eventually

he became a member of the select band of disciples that dwelt,

uncomfortably, supported by visions of reactionary reform at once

austere and beneficent, in the range of disused stable buildings at

Littlemore.

Of the storm and stress of this religious war, its triumphs, its

defeats, its many agitations, Julius's diaries told with a deep, if

chastened, enthusiasm. His was a singularly pure nature, unmoved by the

primitive desires which usually inflame young blood. Ideas heated him;

while the lust of the eye and the pride of life left him almost

scornfully cold. He strove earnestly, of course, to bring the flesh

into subjection to the spirit; which was, calmly considered, a slight

waste of time, since the said flesh showed the least possible

inclination of revolt. The earlier diaries contain pathetic

exaggerations of the slightest indiscretion. Innocent and virtuous

persons have ever been prone to such little manias of self-accusation!

Later, the flesh did assert itself, though in a hardly licentious

manner. Oxford fogs and damp, along with plain living and high

thinking, acting upon a constitution naturally far from robust,

produced a commonplace but most disabling nemesis in the form of colds,

coughs, and chronic asthma. Julius did not greatly care. He was in that

exalted frame of mind in which martyrdom, even by phthisis or bronchial

affections, is immeasurably preferable to no martyrdom at all. Perhaps

fortunately his relations, and even his Oxford friends, took a quite

other view of the matter, and insisted upon his using all legitimate

means to prolong his life.

Julius left Oxford with intense regret. It was the Holy City of the

Tractarian Movement; and at this moment the progress of that Movement

was the one thing worth living for, if live indeed he must. He went

forth bewailing his exile and enforced idleness, as a man bewails the

loss of the love of his youth. For a time he traveled in Italy and in

the south of France. On his return to England he went to stay with his

friend and cousin, Sir Richard Calmady. Brockhurst House had always

been extremely congenial to him. Its suites of handsome rooms, the

inlaid marble chimneypieces of which reach up to the frieze of the

heavily moulded ceilings, its wide passages and stairways, their carved

balusters and newel-posts, the treasures of its library--now

overflowing the capacity of the two rooms originally designed for them,

and filling ranges of bookcases between the bay windows of the Long

Gallery running the whole length of the first floor from east to

west,--the chapel in the southern wing, its richly furnished altar and

the glories of its famous, stained-glass windows, all these were very

grateful to his taste. While the light, dry, upland air and near

neighbourhood of the fir forest eased the physical discomforts from

which, at times, he still suffered shrewdly.

He found the atmosphere of the place both soothing and steadying. And

of precisely this he stood sorely in need just now. For it must be

admitted that a change had come over the spirit of Julius March's great

ecclesiastical dream. Absence from Oxford and foreign travel had tended

at once to widen and modify his thought. He had seen the Tractarian

Movement from a distance, in due perspective. He had also seen

Catholicism at close quarters. He had realised that the logical

consequence of the teaching of the former could be nothing less than

unqualified submission to the latter. On his return to England he

learned that more than one of his Oxford friends was arriving,

reluctantly, at the same conclusion. Then there arose within him the

fiercest struggle his gentle nature had ever yet known. He was torn by

the desire to go forward, risking all, with those whom he reverenced;

yet was restrained by a sense of honour. For there was in Julius a

strain of obstinate, almost fanatic, loyalty. To the Anglican Church he

had pledged himself. Through her ministry he had received illumination.

To the work of her awakening he had given all his young enthusiasm. How

then could he desert her? Her rites might be maimed. The scandal of

schism might tarnish her fair fame. Accusations of sloth and

lukewarmness might not unjustly be preferred against her. All this he

admitted; and it was very characteristic of the man that, just because

he did admit it, he remained within her fold.

Yet the decision was dislocating to all his thought, even as the

struggle had been. It left him bruised. It cruelly shook his

self-confidence. For he was not one of those persons upon whom the

shipwreck of long-cherished hopes and purposes have a stimulating

effect, filling them merely with a buoyant satisfaction at the

opportunity afforded them of beginning all over again! Julius was

oppressed by the sense of a great failure. The diaries of this period

are but sorrowful reading. He believed he should go softly all his

days; and, from a certain point of view, in this he was right.

And it was here that Sir Richard Calmady intervened. He had watched his

cousin's struggle, had accepted its reality, sympathising, through

friendship rather than through moral or intellectual agreement. For he

was one of those fortunate mortals who, while possessing a strong sense

of God, have but small necessity to define Him. Many of Julius's

keenest agonies appeared to him subjective, a matter of words and

phrases. Yet he respected them, out of the sincere regard he bore the

man who suffered them. He did more. He tried a practical remedy.

Modestly, as one asking rather than conferring a favour, he invited

Julius to remain at Brockhurst, on a fair stipend, as domestic chaplain

and librarian.

"In the fulness of your generosity towards me you are creating a costly

sinecure," Julius had remonstrated.

"Not in the least. I am selfishly trying to secure myself a most

welcome companion, by asking you to undertake a very modest cure of

souls and to catalogue my books, when you might be filling some

important post and qualifying for a bishopric."

Julius had shaken his head sadly enough. "The high places of the Church

are not for me," he said. "Neither are her great adventures."

Thus did Julius March, somewhat broken both in health and spirit,

become a carpet-priest. The trumpet blasts of controversy reached him

as echoes merely, while his days passed in peaceful, if pensive

monotony. He read prayers morning and evening to the assembled

household in the chapel; reduced the confusion of the library shelves,

doing a fair amount of study, both secular and theological, during the

process; rode with his cousin on fine afternoons to distant farms, by

high-banked lanes in the lowland, or across the open moors; visited the

lodges, or the keepers' and gardeners' cottages within the limits of

the park, on foot. Now and again he took a service, or preached a

sermon, for good Mr. Caryll of Sandyfield, in whose amiable mind

instinctive admiration of those, even distantly, related to persons of

wealth and position jostled an equally instinctive terror of Mr.

March's "well-known Romanising tendencies." And in that there was,

surely, a touch of the irony of fate! Lastly, Julius did his utmost to

exercise an influence for good over the twenty and odd boys at the

racing stables--an unpromising generation at best, the majority of

whom, he feared, accepted his efforts for their moral and spiritual

welfare with the same somewhat brutish philosophy with which they

accepted Tom Chifney, the trainer's, rough-and-ready system of

discipline, and the thousand and one vagaries of the fine-limbed,

queer-tempered horses which were at once the glory and torment of their

young lives.

Things had gone on thus for rather more than a year, when Richard

Calmady married. Julius was perhaps inclined, beforehand, to underrate

the importance of that event. He was singularly innocent, so far, of

the whole question of woman. He had no sisters. At Oxford he had lived

exclusively among men, while the Tractarian Movement had offered a

sufficient outlet to all his emotion. The severe and exquisite verses

of the "Lyra Apostolica" fitly expressed the passions of his heart. To

the Church, at once his mother and his mistress, he had wholly given

his first love. He had gone so far, indeed, in a rapture of devotion

one Easter day, during the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, as to

impose upon himself a vow of livelong chastity. This he did--let it be

added--without either the sanction or knowledge of his spiritual

advisers. The vow, therefore, remained unwitnessed and unratified, but

he held it inviolable nevertheless. And it lay but lightly upon him,

joyfully almost--rather as a ridding of himself of possible

perturbations and obsessions, than as an act of most austere

self-renunciation. In his ignorance he merely went forward with an

increased freedom of spirit. All of which is set down, not without

underlying pathos, in the diary of that date.

And that freedom of spirit remained by him, notwithstanding his altered

circumstances. It even served--indirectly, since none knew the fact of

his self-dedication save himself--as a basis of pleasant intercourse

with the women of his own social standing whom he now met. It served

him thus in respect of Lady Calmady, who accepted him as a member of

her new household with charming kindliness, treating him with a gentle

solicitude born of pity for his far from robust health and for the

mental struggles which she understood him to have passed through.

Many persons, it must be owned, described Julius as remarkably ugly.

But he did not strike Katherine thus. His heavy black hair, beardless

face and sallow skin--rendered dull and colourless, his features

thickened, though not actually scarred, by smallpox, which he had had

as a child,--his sensitive mouth, and the questioning expression of his

short-sighted brown eyes, reminded her of a fifteenth-century

Florentine portrait that had always challenged her attention when she

passed it in the vestibule of a certain obscure, yet aristocratic,

Parisian hotel, on the left bank--well understood--of the Seine.

The man of the portrait was narrow-chested, clothed in black. So was

Julius March. He had long-fingered, finely shaped hands. So had Julius.

He gave her the impression of a person endowed with a capacity of

prolonged and silent self-sacrifice. So did Julius. She wondered about

his story. For Julius, at least--little as she or he then suspected

it--the deepest places of the story still lay ahead.