Hadrian the Seventh

“I never have accepted it. I never have acquiesced in it. I never will accept it. I never will acquiesce in it.”

“Would you mind telling me your reasons?”

“I should have to say very disagreeable things, Eminency.”

“Never mind. Tell me all the truth. Try to feel that you are confiding in your spiritual father, whose only desire is to do justice—I may even say to do justice at the eleventh hour.”

“I am inclined indeed to believe that, because you yourself have condescended to come to me. I wish, in fact, to believe that. But—is it advisable to rake up old grievances? Is it desirable to scarify half-healed wounds? And, how did Your Eminency find me after all these years?” The feline temper of him produced dalliance.

“It certainly was a difficult matter at first. You had completely disappeared—”

“I object to that,” George interrupted. He suddenly saw that this was the one chance of his life of saying the right thing to the right person; and he determined to fight every step of the way with this cardinal before death claimed him. “I object to that,” he repeated. “I neither disappeared nor hid myself in any way. There was no question of concealment whatever. I found myself most perfidiously deserted; and I went on my way alone, neither altering my habits, nor changing my appearance—”

“There was no implication of that kind, Mr. Rose.”

“I am very glad to hear Your Eminency say so. But such things are said. They are the formulae which spite or indolence or foolishness uses of a man whom it has not seen for a month. Sometimes they are detrimental. To me they are offensive; and I am not in a mood to tolerate them.”

The cardinal swallowed the cachet; and proceeded, “I first wrote to you at your publishers; and my letters were returned unopened, and marked ‘Refused.’ ”

“That was in accordance with my own explicit directions. A few years ago, the opportunity was given me of drawing a sharp line across my life—”

“You mean—”

“I allude to a series of libels which were directed against me in the newspapers, especially in Catholic newspapers—dirty Celtic wood-pulp—”

“Precisely. But why was that an occasion for drawing what you call a sharp line across your life?”

“Eminency,” said George, calming down and setting out to be concise and categorical, “scores of people who had known me all my life must have seen that those attacks were libellous, and false. You yourself must have seen that.” He stretched out a hand and opened and shut it, as though claws protruded from velvet and retired. “Yet only a single one out of all those scores came forward to assure me of friendship in that dreadful moment. All the rest spewed their bile or licked their lips in unctuous silence. I was left to bear the brunt alone, except for that one; and he was not a Catholic. Except from him, I had no sympathy and no comfort whatever. I don’t know any case in all my reading, to say nothing of my experience, where a man had a better or a clearer or a more convincing test of the trueness and the falseness of his friends. Not to do any man an injustice, and that no one might call me rash or precipitate in my decision, I waited two years—two whole years. The Bishop of Caerleon came to me in this period of isolation; and one other Catholic, a man of my own trade. Later, that one betrayed me again, so I will say no more of him. Women, of course, I neglect. And the rest unanimously held aloof. Then I published a book; and I told my publishers to refuse all letters which might be addressed to them for me. The sharp line was drawn. I wanted no more fair-weather friends, afraid to stand by me in storms. If, after those two awful years, I had received overtures from my former acquaintances, I really think I should have fulminated at them St. Matthew 25:41–43—”

“What is that?”

“ ‘I was an hungred and ye gave me no meat’ down to ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into aeonial fire.’ Yes, the sharp line was drawn across my life. I had one true friend, a protestant. As for the Faith, I found it comfortable. As for the Faithful, I found them intolerable. The Bishop of Caerleon at present is the exception which proves the rule, because he came to me in the teeth of calumny.”

“You are hard, Mr. Rose, very hard.”

“I am what you and your Catholics have made me.”

“Poor child—poor child,” the cardinal adjected.

“I request that Your Eminency will not speak to me in that tone. I disdain your pity at this date. The catastrophe is complete. I nourish no grudge, and seek no revenge, no, nor even justice. I am content to live my own life, avoiding all my brother-Catholics, or treating them with severe forbearance when circumstances throw them in my path. I don’t squash cockroaches.”

“The effect on your own soul?”

“The effect on my own soul is perfectly ghastly. I positively loathe and distrust all Catholics, known and unknown, with one exception. I have become a rudderless derelict. I have lost all faith in man, and I have lost the power of loving.”

“How terrible!” the cardinal sighed. “And are there none of us for whom you have a kindly feeling? At times, I mean? You cannot always be in a state of white-hot rage, you know. There must be intervals when the tension of your anger is relaxed, perhaps from sheer fatigue: for anger is deliberate, the effect of exertion. And, in those intervals, have you never caught yourself thinking kindly of any of your former friends?”

“Yes, Eminency, there are very many, clerks and laics both, with whom, strange to say, when my anger is not dynamic, I sometimes wish to be reconciled. However, I myself never will approach them; and they afford me no opportunity. They do not come to me, as you have come.” His voice softened a little; and his smile was an alluring illumination.

“But you would meet them with vituperation; and naturally they don’t want to expose themselves to affronts?”

“Oh, of course if their sense of duty (to say nothing of decency) does not teach them to risk affronts—But I will not say before hand how I should meet them beyond this: it would depend on their demeanour to me. I should do as I am done by. For example,” he turned to the ruddy bishop, “did I heave chairs or chinaware at Your Lordship?”

“Indeed you did not, although I thoroughly deserved both. Yrmnts,”2 the young prelate continued, “I believe I understand Mr. Rose’s frame of mind. He has been hit very hard; and he’s badly bruised. He is a burnt child; and he dreads the fire. It’s only natural. I’m firmly convinced that he has been more sinned against than sinning; and, though I’m sorry to see him practically keeping us at arms’ length, I really don’t know what else we can expect until we treat him as we ourselves would like to be treated.”

“True, true,” the cardinal conceded.

“But it’s a pity all the same,” the bishop concluded.

The cardinal audibly thought, “You have perhaps not many very kindly feelings towards me personally, Mr. Rose.”

“I have no kindly feelings at all toward Your Eminency; and I believe you to be aware of my reasons. I trust that I never should be found wanting in reverence to your Sacred Purple: but apart from that—” indignant recollection stiffened and inflamed the speaker—“indeed I only am speaking civilly to you now because you are the successor of Augustine and Theodore and Dunstan and Anselm and Chichele and Chichester, and because my friend the Bishop of Caerleon has made you my guest for the nonce. My Lord Cardinal, I do not know what you want of me, nor why you have come to me: but let me tell you that you shall not entangle me again in my talk. You are going the Catholic way to work with me; and that is the wrong way. Frankness and open honesty is the only way to win me—if you want me.”

“Well, well! You were going to give me your own view of your Vocation.”

“Your Eminency first was about to tell me how you found me after your letters to my publishers had been returned.”

“I applied to several Catholics who, formerly, had been your friends; and, when they could tell me nothing, I had a letter sent to all the bishops of my province directing inquisition to be made among the clergy. Your personality, if not your name, was certain to be known to at least one of these if you still remained Catholic, you know.”

“If I still remained Catholic!” George growled with contemptuous ire.

“People in your position, Mr. Rose, have been known to commit apostasy.”

“And it is precisely because people in my position habitually commit apostasy that I decline to do what is expected of me. No. I’ll follow my cat’s example of exclusive singularity. It would be too obliging and too silly to give you Catholics that weapon to use against me. No, no, Eminency, rest assured that I rather will be a nuisance and poor, as I am, than an apostate and rich, as I might be.”

The cardinal raised his eyebrows. “I trust you have a worthier motive than that!”

“I mentioned that I was not in revolt against the Faith, but against the Faithful.”

“And the Grace of God?”

“Oh, of course the Grace of God,” George hastened in common courtesy conventionally to adjoin.

The fine dark brows came down again, and the cardinal continued, “As soon as I had issued the mandate to my suffragans, Dr. Talacryn at once furnished the desired information.”

“I see,” said George. Then, “Where would Your Eminency like me to begin?”

“Tell me your own tale in your own way, dear child.” George softly and swiftly stroked his little cat. He compelled himself to think intensely, to marshal salient facts on which he had brooded day and night unceasingly for years, and to try to eliminate traces of the acerbity, of the devouring fury, with which they still inspired him.

“Perhaps I’d better tell Mr. Rose, Yrmnts, that we’ve already gone very deeply into his case,” the bishop said. “It will make it easier for him to speak when he knows that it is not information we’re seeking, but his personal point of view.”

“Indeed it will,” said George; “and I sincerely thank Your Lordship. If you already know the facts, you will be able to check my narrative; and all I have to do is to state the said facts to the best of my knowledge and belief. I will begin with my career at Maryvale, where I was during a scholastic year of eight months as an ecclesiastical subject of the Bishop of Claughton, and where I received the Tonsure. At the end of those eight months, my diocesan wrote that he was unable to make any further plans for me, because there was not (I quote his words) an unanimous verdict of the superiors in favour of my Vocation. This was like a bolt from the blue: for the four superiors verbally had testified the exact contrary to me. Instantly I wrote, inviting them to explain the discrepancy. It was the Long Vacation. In reply, the President averred inability to understand my diocesan’s statement: advised me to change my diocese; and volunteered an introduction to the Bishop of Lambeth, in which he declared that my talents and energy (I am quoting again) would make me a very valuable priest. The Vice-president declined to add anything to what he already had told me. A dark man, he was, who hid inability under a guise of austerity. The Professor of Dogmatic Theology said that he never had been asked for, and never had volunteered, an opinion. The Professor of Moral Theology, who was my confessor, said the same; and, further, he superintended my subsequent correspondence with my bishop. You will mark the intentions of that act of his. However, all came to nothing. The Bishop of Claughton refused to explain, to recede, to afford me satisfaction. The Bishop of Lambeth refused to look at me, because the Bishop of Claughton had rejected me. It was my first introduction to the inexorability of the Roman Machine, inexorable in iniquity as in righteousness.”

“Did you form any opinion at this juncture?” the cardinal inquired, waving a white hand.

“I formed the opinion that someone carelessly had lied: that someone clumsily had blundered; and that all concerned were determined not to own themselves, or anyone else but me, to be in the wrong. A mistake had been made; and, by quibbles, by evasions, by threats, by every hole-and-corner means conceivable, the mistake was going to be perpetuated. Had the case been one of the ordinary type of ecclesiastical student, (the hebete and half-licked Celtic class I mean,) either I furiously should have apostatized, or I mildly should have acquiesced, and should have started-in as a pork-butcher or a cheesemonger. But those intellectually myopic authorities were unable to discriminate; and they quite gaily wrecked a life. Oh yes: I formed an opinion; and I very freely stated it.”

“I mean did you form any opinion of your own concerning your Vocation?”

“No. My opinion concerning my Vocation, such as it was and is, had been formed when I was a boy of fifteen. I was very fervent about that time. I frankly admit that I played the fool from seventeen to twenty, sowed my wild oats if you like. But I never relinquished my Divine Gift. I just neglected it, and said ‘Domani’ like any Roman. And at twenty-four I became extremely earnest about it. Yes, my opinion was as now, unchanged, unchangeable.”

“Continue,” the cardinal said.

“A year after I left Maryvale, the Archbishop of Agneda was instigated by one of his priests, a Varsity man who knew me well, to invite me to volunteer for his archdiocese. I was only too glad. His Grace sent me to St. Andrew’s College in Rome. The priest who recommended me, and Canon Dugdale, assured me that, in return for my services, my expenses would be borne by the archbishop. They never were. I was more than one hundred and twenty pounds out of pocket. After four months in College I was expelled suddenly and brutally. No reason ever has been given to me; and I never have been aware of a reason which could justify so atrocious an outrage. My archbishop maintained absolute silence. I did hear it said that I had no Vocation. That was the gossip of my fellow-students, immature cubs mostly, hybrid larrikins given to false quantities and nasal cacophonies. I took, and take, no account of such gossip. If my legitimate superiors had had grounds for their action, grounds which they durst expose to daylight; and, if they frankly had stated the same to me, I believe I should have given very little trouble. As it is, I am of course a thorn, or a pest, or a firebrand, or a rodent and purulent ulcer—vous en faites votre choix. The case is a mystery to me, inexplicable, except by an hypothesis connected with the character of the rector of St. Andrew’s College. I remember the Marquess of Mountstuart reading a leading article about him out of The Scotsman to me in 1886, and remarking that he was ‘an awful little liar.’ But perhaps the right reverend gentleman is known to Your Eminency?”

“Well known, Mr. Rose, well known. And now tell me of your subsequent proceedings.”

“I made haste to offer my services to other bishops. When I found every door shut against me, I firmly deliberated never to recede from my grade of tonsured clerk under any circumstances whatever; and I determined to occupy my energies with some pursuit for which my nature fitted me, until the Divine Giver of my Vocation should deign to manifest it to others as well as to myself. I chose the trade of a painter. I was just beginning to make headway when the defalcations of a Catholic ruined me. All that I ever possessed was swallowed up. Even my tools of trade illegally were seized. I began life again with no more than the clothes on my back, a Book of Hours, and eight shillings in my pocket. I obtained, from a certain prelate, whose name I need not mention, a commission for a series of pictures to illustrate a scheme which he had conceived for the confounding of Anglicans. He saw specimens of my handicraft, was satisfied with my ability, provided me with materials for a beginning and a disused skittle-alley for a studio; and, a few weeks later, (I quote his secretary) he altered his mind and determined to put his money in the building of a cathedral. I think that I need not trouble Your Eminency with further details.”

“Quite unnecessary,” Mr. Rose.

“I don’t know how I kept alive until I got my next commission. I only remember that I endured that frightful winter of 1894–5 in light summer clothes unchanged. But I did not die; and, by odds and ends of work, I managed to recover a great deal of my lost ground. Then a harebrained and degenerate priest asked me to undertake another series of pictures. I worked two years for him: and he valued my productions at fifteen hundred pounds: in fact he sold them at that rate. Well, he never paid me. Again I lost all my apparatus, all my work; and was reduced to the last extreme of penury. Then I began to write, simply because of the imperious necessity of expressing myself. And I had much to say. Note please that I asked nothing better than to be a humble chantry-priest, saying Mass for the dead. It was denied me. I turned to express beautiful and holy ideals on canvas. Again I was prevented. I must and will have scope, an outlet for what the President of Maryvale called my ‘talent and energy.’ Literature is the only outlet which you Catholics have left me. Blame yourselves: not me. Oh yes, I have very much to say.”

He paused. The cardinal evaded his glance; and intently gazed at the underside of well-manicured pink-onyx fingernails.

“And about your Vocation, Mr. Rose. What is your present opinion?”

George wrenched himself from retrospection. “My opinion, Eminency, as I already have had the honour of telling you, is the same as it always has been.”

“That is to say?”

“That I have a Divine Vocation to the Priesthood.”

“You persist?”

“Eminency, I am not one of your low Erse or pseudo Gaels, flippertigibbets of frothy flighty fervour, whom you can blow hither and thither with a sixpence for a fan. Thank The Lord I’m English, born under Cancer, tenacious, slow and sure. Naturally I persist.”

Cardinalitial eyebrows re-ascended. “The man, to whom Divine Providence vouchsafes a Vocation, is bound to prosecute it.”

“I am prosecuting it. I never for one moment have ceased from prosecuting it.”

“But now you have attained a position as an author.”

“Yes; in the teeth of you all; and no thanks to anyone but myself. However that is only the means to an end.”

“In what way?”

“In this way. When I shall have earned enough to pay certain debts, which I incurred on the strength of my faith in the honour of a parcel of archiepiscopal and episcopal and clerical sharpers, and also a sum sufficient to produce a small and certain annuity, then I shall go straight to Rome and square the rector of St. Andrew’s College.”

“Sh‑h!” the bishop sibilated. The cardinal threw up delicate hands.

“Yrmnts mustn’t be offended by Mr. Rose’s satirical way of putting it,” the bishop hastily put in. “He’s a regular phrase-maker. It’s his trade, you know. But at the bottom of his good heart I’m sure he means nothing but what is right and proper. And, George, you’re not the man to smite the fallen. Monsignor Cateran was deposed seven years ago and more.”

“I beg Your Eminency’s pardon if I have spoken inurbanely; and I thank Your Lordship for interpreting me so generously. I didn’t know that Cateran had come to his Cannae. Really I’m sorry: but, I’ve been stabbed and stung so many years that, now I am able to retaliate, I am as touchy as a hornet with a brand-new sting. I can’t help it. I seem to take an impish delight in making my brother-Catholics, especially clerks, smart and wince and squirm as I myself have squirmed and winced and smarted. I’m sorry. I simply meant to say that, when I have made myself free and independent, then I will try again to give you evidence of my Vocation.”

“Have you approached your diocesan recently?” the cardinal inquired.

“His Grace died soon after my expulsion from St. Andrew’s College. I approached his successor, who refused to hear me; and is dead. I never have approached the present archbishop, beyond giving him notice of my existence and persistence; for I certainly will not come before him with chains on my hands.”

“Chains?”

“Debts.”

“Have you any special reason for belonging to the archdiocese of Agneda?”

“There is a certain fascination in the idea of administering to a horde of unspeakable barbarians, ‘the horrible and ultimate Britons, ferocious to strangers.’ Otherwise I have no special reason. I had no choice. I happen to have been made an ecclesiastical subject of Agneda at the instance of Mr. George Semphill and at the invitation of the late Archbishop Smithson. That is all.”

“Would you be inclined to offer your services to another bishop now?”

“Eminency, ‘it is not I who have lost the Athenians: it is the Athenians who have lost me.’ I would say that in Greek if I thought you would understand me. When the Athenians want me, they will not have much difficulty in finding me. But to tell you the truth, I find these bishop-johnnies excessively tiresome. As I said just now, when Agneda silently relieved himself of his obligations to me, I offered my services to half-a-dozen of them, more or less, plainly telling them my history and my circumstances. What a fool they must have thought me—or what a brazen and dangerous scoundrel! Yes, I do believe they thought me that. I was astonishingly unsophisticate then. I didn’t know a tithe of what I know now; and I solemnly assever that I believe those owl-like hierarchs to have been completely flabbergasted because I neither whimpered penitence, nor whined for mercy, but actually had the effrontery to tell them the blind and naked truth about myself. Truth nude and unadorned, is such a rare commodity among Catholics, as you know, and especially among the clergy; and I suppose, as long as we continue to draw the majority of our spiritual pastors from the hooligan class, from the scum of the gutter, that the man who tells the truth in his own despite always emphatically will be condemned as mad, or bad, or both.”

“Really, Mr. Rose!” the cardinal interjected.

“Yes, Eminency: we teach little children that there are three kinds of lies; and that the Officiose Lie, which is told to excuse oneself or another—the meanest lie of the lot, I say—is only a Venial Sin. It’s in the catechism. Well, naturally enough the miserable little wretches, who can’t possibly grasp the subtlety of a distinguo, put undue importance on that abominable world ‘only’; and they grow up as the most despicable of all liars. Ouf! I learned all this from a thin thing named Danielson, just after my return to the faith of my forefathers. He lied to me. In my innocence I took his word. Then I found him out; and preached on the enormity of his crime. ‘Well, sir,’ says he as bold as brass, ‘it’s only a Venial Sin!’ ”

“George, you’re beside the point,” the bishop said.

“His Eminency will indulge me. What was I saying? Oh—that I had had enough of being rebuffed by bishops. I came to that conclusion when His Lordship of Chadsee blandly told me that I never would get a bishop to accept my services as long as I continued to tell the truth about my experiences. I stopped competing for rebuffs then. I do not propose to begin again until I am the possessor of a chequebook.”

The cardinal was gazing through the leaves of an india-rubber plant out of the window; his magnificent eyes were drained of all expression. When the nervose deliberately-hardened and pathetic voice of the speaker ceased, he brought the argument to a focus with these words, “George Arthur Rose, I summon you to offer yourself to me.”

“I am not ready to offer myself to Your Eminency.”

“Not ready?”

“I hoped that I had made it clear to you that, in regard to my Vocation, I am ‘marking time,’ until I shall have earned enough to pay my debts incurred on the strength of my faith in the honour of a parcel of archiepiscopal and episcopal and clerical sharpers, and also a sum sufficient to produce me a small and certain annuity—”

“You keep harping upon that string,” the cardinal complained.

“It is the only string which you have left unbroken on my lute.”

“I see you are a very sensitive subject, Mr. Rose. I think that long brooding over your wrongs has fixed in you some such pagan and erroneous idea as that which Juvenal expresses in the verse where he says that poverty makes a man ridiculous.”

“Nothing of the kind,” George retorted with all his claws out. “On the contrary, it is I—the creature of you, my Lord Cardinal, and your Catholics—who make Holy Poverty look ridiculous!”

“A clever paradox!” The cardinal let a tinge of his normal sneer affect his voice.

“Not even a paradox. A poor thing: but mine own,” George flung in, glaring through his great-great-grandfather’s silver spectacles which he used indoors.

“Well, well: the money-question need not trouble you,” said the cardinal, turning again to the window. Indifference was his pose.

“But it does trouble me. It vitally troubles me. And your amazing summons troubles me as well—now. Why do you come to me after all these years?”

“Precisely, Mr. Rose, after all these years, as you say. It has been suggested to me, and I am bound to say that I agree with the suggestion, that we ought to take your singular persistency during all these years—how many years?”

“Say twenty.”

“That we must take your singular persistency during twenty years as a proof of the genuineness of your Vocation.”

George turned his face to the little yellow cat, who had climbed to and was nestling on his shoulder.

“And therefore,” the cardinal continued, “I am here today to summon you to accept Holy Order with no delay beyond the canonical intervals.”

“I will respond to that summons within two years.”

“Within two years? Life is uncertain, Mr. Rose. We who are here today may be in our graves by then. I myself am an old man.”

“I know. Your Eminency is an old man. I, by the grace of God, the virtue of my ancestors, and my own attention to my physique, am still a young man; and younger by far than my years. I have not been preserved in the vigour and freshness of youth by miracle after miracle during twenty years for nothing. And, when I shall have published three more books, I will respond to your summons. Not till then.”

“I told you that the money-question need not hinder you.”

“Yes, Eminency; and my late diocesan said the same thing several years ago.”

“You are suspicious, Mr. Rose.”

“I have reason to be suspicacious, Eminency.”

The cardinal threw up his hands. The gesture wedded irritation to despair. “You doubt me?” he all but gasped.

“I trusted Your Eminency in 1894; and—”

The bishop intervened: for cardinalitial human nature burst out in vermilion flames.

“George,” he said, “I am witness of Zmnts’s words.”

“What’s the good of that? Suppose that I take His Eminency’s word! Suppose that in a couple of months he alters his mind, determines to mistake the large for the great and to perpetrate another pea-soup-and-streaky-bacon-coloured caricature of an electric-light-station! What then would be my remedy? Where would be my contract again? And could I hale a prince of the church before a secular tribunal? Would I? Could I subpoena Your Lordship to testify against your Metropolitan and Provincial? Would I? Would you? My Lord Cardinal, I must speak, and you must hear me, as man to man. You are offering me Holy Orders on good grounds, on right and legitimate grounds, on grounds which I knew would be conceded sooner or later. I thank God for conceding them now. … You also are offering something in the shape of money.” In his agitation, he suddenly rose, to Flavio’s supreme discomfiture; and began to roll a cigarette from dottels in a tray on the mantelpiece.

“If I correctly interpret you, you are offering to me, who will be no man’s pensioner, who will accept no man’s gifts, a gift, a pension—”

“No,” the cardinal very mildly interjected: “but restitution.”

“Oh!” George ejaculated, suddenly sitting down, and staring like the martyr who, while yet the pagan pincers were at work upon his tenderest internals, beheld the angel-bearers of his amaranthine coronal.

“Amends and restitution,” the cardinal repeated.

“What am I to say?” George addressed his cat and the bishop.

“You are simply to say in what form you will accept this act of justice from us,” the cardinal responded, taking the question to himself.

“Oh, I must have time to think. You must afford me time to think.”

“No, George,” said the bishop: “take no time at all. Speak your mind now. Do make an effort to believe that we are sincerely in earnest; and that in this matter we are in your hands. I may say that, Yrmnts?” he inquired.

“Certainly: we place ourselves in Mr. Rose’s hands—unreservedly—ha!” the cardinal affirmed, and gasped with the exertion.

George concentrated his faculties; and recited, rather than spoke, demurely and deliberately and dynamically. “I must have a written expression of regret for the wrongs which have been done to me both by Your Eminency and by others who have followed your advice, command, or example.”

“It is here,” the cardinal said, taking a folded paper from the fascicule of his breviary. “We knew that you would want that. I may point out that I have written in my own name, and also as the mouthpiece of the Catholic body.”

George took the paper and carefully read it two or three times, with some flickering of his thin fastidious lips. It certainly was very handsome. Then he said, “I thank Your Eminency and my brother-Catholics,” and put the document in the fire, where in a moment it was burned to ash.

“Man alive!” cried the bishop.

“I do not care to preserve a record of my superiors’ humiliation,” said George, again in his didactic recitative.

“I see that Mr. Rose knows how to behave nobly, as you said, Frank,” the cardinal commented.

“Only now and then, Eminency. One cannot be always posing. But I long ago had arranged to do that, if you ever should give me the opportunity. And now,” he paused—and continued, “you concede my facts?”

“We may not deny them, Mr. Rose.”

“Then, now that I in my turn have placed myself in your hands” (again he was reciting), “I must have a sum of money”—(that paradoxical “must” was quite in his best manner)—“I must have a sum of money equal to the value of all the work which I have done since 1892, and of which I have been—for which I have not been paid. I must have five thousand pounds.”

“And the amount of your debts, and a solatium for the sufferings—”

“You no more can solace me for my sufferings than you can revest me with ability to love my neighbour. The paltry amount of my debts concerns me and my creditors, and no one else. If I had been paid for my work I should have had no debts. When I am paid, I shall pay.”

“The five thousand pounds are yours, Mr. Rose.”

“But who is being robbed—”

“My dear child!” from the cardinal; and “George!” from the bishop.

“Robbed, Eminency. Don’t we all know the Catholic manner of robbing Peter to pay Paul? I repeat, who is being robbed that I may be paid? For I refuse to touch a farthing diverted from religious funds, or extracted from the innocuous devout.”

“You need not be alarmed on that score. Your history is well-known to many of us, as you know: latterly it has deeply concerned some of us, as perhaps you do not know. And one who used to call himself your friend, who—ha—promised never to let you sink—and let you sink—one who acquiesced when others wronged you, has now been moved to place ten thousand pounds at my disposal, in retribution, as a sort of sin-offering. I intend to use it for your rehabilitation, Mr. Rose—well then for your enfranchisement. Now that we understand each other, I shall open an account—have you a banking account though?—very good: I will open an account in your name at Coutts’s on my way back to Pimlico.”

“I must know the name of that penitent sinner: for quite a score have said as much as Your Eminency has quoted.”

“Edward Lancaster.”

“I might have guessed it. Well, he never will miss it—it’s just a drop of his ocean—I think I can do as much with it as he can.—Eminency, give him my love and say that I will take five thousand pounds: not more. The rest—oh, I know: I hand it to Your Eminency to give to converted clergymen who are harassed with wives, or to a sensible secular home for working boys, or to the Bishop of Caerleon for his dreadful diocese. Yes, divide it between them.”

The prelates stood up to go. George kneeled; and received benedictions.

“We shall see you at Archbishop’s House, Mr. Rose,” said the cardinal on the doorstep.

“If Your Eminency will telegraph to Agneda at once, you will be able to get my dimissorials to your archdiocese by tomorrow morning’s post. I will be at Archbishop’s House at half-past seven to confess to the Bishop of Caerleon. Your Eminency says Mass at eight, and will admit me to Holy Communion. At half-past eight the post will be in; and you will give me the four minor orders. Then—well, then, Eminency” (with a dear smile.) “You see I am not anxious for delay now. And, meanwhile, I will go and have a Turkish Bath, and buy a Roman collar, and think myself back into my new—no—my old life.”

“What does Yrmnts make of him?” the bishop inquired as the shabby brougham moved away.

“God knows! God only knows!” the cardinal responded. “I hope—Well we’ve done what we set out to do: haven’t we? What a most extraordinary, what a most incomprehensible creature to be sure! I don’t of course like his paganism, nor his flippancy, nor his slang, nor his readiness to dictate; and he is certainly sadly lacking in humility. He treated both of us with scant respect, you must admit, Frank. What was it he called us—ha—‘bishop-johnnies’—now you can’t defend that. And ‘owl-like hierarchs’ too!”

“Indeed no. I believe he hasn’t a scrap of reverence for any of us. After all I don’t exactly see that we can expect it. But it may come in time.”

“Do you really think so?” said the cardinal; and the four eyes in the carriage turned together, met, and struck the spark of a recondite and mutual smile.

“For my part,” the younger prelate continued, “I’m going to try to make amends for the immense wrong I did him by neglecting him. I can’t get over the feeling of distrust I have of him yet. But I confess I’m strangely drawn to him. It is such a treat to come across a man who’s not above treating a bishop as his equal.”

“Did it strike you that he was acting a part?”

“Indeed yes: I think he was acting a part nearly all the time. But I’m sure he wasn’t conscious of it. He’s as transparent and guileless as a child, whatever.”

“It seemed to me that he had all these pungent little speeches cut and dried. He said them like a lesson.”

“Well, poor fellow, he’s thought of nothing else for years; and I find, Yrmnts, that mental concentration, carried to anything like that extreme, gives a sort of power of prevision. I really believe that he had foreseen something, and was quite prepared for us.”

“Strange,” said the cardinal, whose supercilious oblique regard indicated dearth of interest in ideas that were out of his depth.

“He behaved very well about the money though?”

“Very well indeed. But, what a fool! Well, Frank, we can only pray that he may turn out well. I think he will. I really think he will. I hope and trust that we shall find the material of sanctity there. An unpleasant kind of sanctity perhaps. He will be difficult. That singular character, and the force which all those self-concentrated years have given him:—oh, he’ll never submit to management, depend upon it. Frank, I’ve seen just that type of face among academic anarchists. It will be our business to watch him, for he will go his own way; and his way will have to be our way. It won’t be the wrong way: but—oh yes, he will be very difficult. Well:—God only knows! Will you be on the lookout for a telegraph office, Frank, while I get through my Little Hours? Perhaps we had better—”