Part 21

He spent his time in many ways,--partly in acts of religion, partly in studies, frequenting several lectures, both in letters and in science, such as Mons. Febus's course of chemistry. He also frequented the tennis court in the Rue Verdelet, where the King of England, and the princes and nobles, both of that country and of France, amused themselves. He had been at this latter place one morning, and something having happened to prevent the gentleman who had arranged to play the match from appearing, Inglesant, who was a good tennis player, had been requested to take his place against Mons. Saumeurs, the great French player. There was a large and brilliant attendance to watch the play, and Inglesant exerted himself to the utmost, so much so, that he earned the applause and thanks of the company for the brilliant match played before them. Having at last been beaten, which occurred probably when the great player considered he had afforded sufficient amusement to the spectators, Inglesant turned to leave the court, having resumed his dress and sword, when he was accosted by an English nobleman whom he very slightly knew; who, no doubt, influenced by the applause and attention which Inglesant had excited, asked him to dine with him at a neighbouring place of entertainment. After dinner the gentleman told Inglesant that he was in the habit, together with many other English who wished to perfect their knowledge of French, of resorting to one or other of the convents of Paris, to talk with the ancient sisters, whose business it was to receive strangers, and had several such acquaintances with whom he might "chat at the grates, for the nuns speak a quaint dialect, and have besides most commonly all the news that passes, which they are ready to discourse upon as long as you choose to listen, whereby you gain a greater knowledge of the most correct and refined manner of speaking of all manner of common and trifling events than you could otherwise gain." He said that he had received a parcel of English gloves and knives from England the day before, some of which he intended that afternoon taking to one of his "Devota" (as they call a friend in a convent, he said, in Spain), and would take Inglesant with him if the latter wished to come. Inglesant willingly consented, and they went to a convent of the ---- in the Rue des Terres Fortes. They found the ancient nun--a little courtly old lady--as amusing and pleasant as they expected; and she was on her part apparently equally pleased with Lord Cheney's presents, and with Inglesant's courteous discourse and good French. She invited Inglesant to visit her again, but the next day he received a message which was brought by a servant of the convent, who had found his lodgings with some difficulty through Lord Cheney, requesting him to come to the convent at once. It lay in a retired and rather remote part of the city, and but for his friend's introduction he would never have visited it. Thinking the message somewhat strange, he complied with the request, and in the afternoon found himself again in the convent parlour. The nun came immediately to the grate.

"Ah, monsieur," she said, "I am glad that you are come. You think it strange, doubtless, that I should send for you so soon; but I spoke of you last night to an inmate of this house, who is a compatriot of yours, and who, I am sorry to say, is very ill,--nay, I fear at the point of death,--and she told me she had known you very well--ah, very well indeed--in times past; and she entreated me to send to you if I could find out your residence. I only knew of you through Milord Chene, but I sent to him."

"What is this lady's name, madame?" said Inglesant, who, even then, did not guess who it was.

"Ah, her name," said the nun; "her name is Collette--Mademoiselle Marie Collette."

She had the door in the grate opened for Inglesant, and took him through the house, and past a court planted with trees, to a small and quiet room overlooking the distant woodlands. There, upon a little bed--her face white, her hands and form wasted to a shadow, only her wonderful eyes the same as ever--lay Mary Collet, her face lighting up and her weak hands trembling as he came in. On his knees by the bedside, his face buried in his hands, her white fingers playing over his hair, Inglesant could not speak, dare not even look up. The old nun looked on kindly for some few minutes, and then left them.

Mary was the first to speak, and as she spoke, Inglesant raised his head and fixed his eyes on hers, keeping down the torrent of grief that all but mastered him as he might.

She spoke to him of her joy at seeing him--she so lonely and lost in a foreign land, separated from all her friends and family,--not knowing indeed where they were; of the suffering and hardships she had passed through since they had left Gidding--hardships which had caused the fever of which she lay dying as she spoke. She had come to Paris after parting from her uncle in Brittany, where they had suffered much deprivation with the Lady Blount, and had been received into this convent, where she had meant to take the veil; but the fever grew upon her, and the physicians at last gave her no hope of recovery. There she had lain day after day, tended by the kind nuns with every care, yet growing weaker and more weary--longing for some voice or face of her own country or of former days. While she had been well enough to listen, the nuns had told her all the little scraps of news relating to her own countrymen and to the Queen which had reached them; but Inglesant's arrival was not likely to be among these, and Mary had heard nothing of his being in Paris till the night before, when the kindly old nun, finding her a little better than usual, had thought to amuse her by speaking of the pleasant young Englishman who spoke French so well, and whose half foreign name she could easily remember, and who, Lord Cheney had told her, had been one of the most faithful servants of the poor murdered King.

The start of the dying girl before her, her flushed face as she raised herself in bed and threw herself into her friend's arms, entreating her that this old friend, the dearest friend she had ever known--ah! dearer now than ever--might be sent for at once while she had life and strength to speak to him, showed the nun that this was yet again a reacting of that old story that never tires a woman's heart. The nuns were not strict--far from it--and, even had Mary already taken the veil, the sisters would have thought little blame of her even for remembering that once she dreamt of another bridegroom than the heavenly Spouse. The nun had promised to send early in the morning to Lord Cheney, who, no doubt, knew the abode of his friend; and Mary, as she finished telling all this in her low and weak speech, lay still and quiet, looking upon her friend almost with as calm and peaceful a glance of her absorbing eyes as when she had looked at him in the garden parlour at Gidding years ago. He himself said little; it was not his words she wanted, could he have spoken them. That he was there by her, looking up in her face, holding her hand, was quite enough. At last she said,--

"And that mission to the Papist murderers, Johnny, you did not wish to bring them into England of your own accord or only as a plot of the Jesuits? Surely you were but the servant of one whom you could not discover."

"I had the King's own commission for all I did, for every word I said," said Inglesant eagerly--"a commission written by himself, and signed in my presence, which he gave me himself. That was the paper the Lord Biron would not burn."

"I knew it must be so, Johnny; my uncle told me it must be so. It seems to me you have served a hard master, though you do not complain. We heard about the scaffold at Charing Cross. Will you serve your heavenly Master as well as you have served your King?"

"I desire to serve Him, am seeking to serve Him even now, but I do not find the way. Tell me how I can serve Him, Mary, and I swear to you I will do whatever you shall say."

"He must teach you, Johnny, not I. I doubt not that you follow Him now, will serve Him hereafter much better than I could ever show you--could ever do myself. Whatever men may think of the path you have already chosen, no one can say you have not walked in it steadily to the end. Only walk in this way as steadily, Johnny,--only follow your heart as unflinchingly, when it points you to Him. I will do nothing night and day while I live, Johnny, but pray to Jesus that He may lead you to Himself."

The old familiar glamour that shed such a holy radiance on the woods and fields of Gidding, now, to Inglesant's senses, filled the little convent room. The light of heaven that entered the open window with the perfume of the hawthorn, was lost in the diviner radiance that shone from this girl's face into the depths of his being, and bathed the place where she was in light. His heart ceased to beat, and he lay, as in a trance, to behold the glory of God.

*CHAPTER XIX.*

Inglesant was present at the funeral in the cemetery of the convent, and caused a white marble cross to be set over the grave. He remained in his lodgings several days, melancholy and alone. His whole nature was shaken to the foundation, and life was made more holy and solemn to him than ever before. The burden of worldly matters became intolerable, and the coil that had been about his life so long grew more oppressive till it seemed to stifle his soul. He desired to listen to the Divine Voice, but the voice seemed silent, or to speak only the language of worldly plans and schemes. He desired to live a life of holiness, but the only life that seemed possible to him was one of business and intrigue. What was this life of holiness that men ought to lead? Could it be followed in the world? Or must he retire to some monastic solitude to cultivate it; and was it certain that it would flourish even there? It seemed more and more impossible for him to find it; he was repulsed and turned back upon his worldly life at every attempt he made. He almost resolved to give up the Jesuit, and to seek some more spiritual guide. He remembered Cressy, who had become a Romanist, and a Benedictine monk of the Monastery at Douay, and was at that moment in Paris.

When Inglesant had been last in Oxford, the secession of Hugh Paulin Cressy, as he had been named at the font in Wakefield Church,--Serenus de Cressy, as he called himself in religion,--had created a painful and disturbed impression. A Fellow of Merton, the chaplain and friend of Lord Strafford, and afterwards of Lord Falkland, a quick and accurate disputant, a fine and persuasive preacher, a man of sweet and attractive nature, and of natural and acquired refinement,--he was one of the leaders of the highest thought and culture of the University. When it was known, therefore, that this man, so admired and beloved, had seceded to Popery, the interest and excitement were very great, and one of Archbishop Usher's friends writes to him in pathetic words of the loss of this bright ornament of the Church, and of the danger to others which his example might cause.

He was at present in Paris, where the conjuncture of religious affairs was very exciting. There was much in the discussions which were going on, singularly fitted to Inglesant's state of mind, and in some degree conducive to it. The Jesuits, both in Rome and Paris, were occupied, as they had been for several years, in that great controversy with the followers of Jansenius, which, a few years afterwards, culminated in those discussions and that condemnation in the Sorbonne so graphically described by Pascal. We have only to do with it as it affected Inglesant, and it is therefore not necessary to inquire what were the real reasons which caused the Jesuits to oppose the Jansenists. The point at which the controversy had arrived, when Inglesant was in Paris, was one which touched closely upon the topics most interesting to his heart. This was the doctrine of sufficient grace. The Jesuits, on this as in all other matters, had taken that side which is undoubtedly most pleasing to the frailty of the human heart,--an invariable policy, to which they owed their supremacy over the popular mind.

When the faithful came to the theologians to inquire what was the true state of human nature since its corruption, they received St. Augustine's answer, confirmed by St. Bernard and St. Thomas Aquinas, and finally adopted by the Jansenists,--"That human nature has no more sufficient grace than God is pleased to bestow upon it, and that fresh efficacious grace must constantly be given by God, which grace God does not give to all, and without which no man can be saved." In opposition to this, the Jesuits, about the time of the Reformation, came forward with what was called a new doctrine,--that sufficient grace is given to all men, as men, but so far compliant with free-will that this latter makes the former efficacious or inefficacious at its choice, without any new supply from God. The Jansenists retorted that this doctrine rendered unnecessary the efficacious grace of Jesus Christ; but that this does not follow is plain, for this efficacious grace of God that is given to all men once for all, may be owing to the sacrifice of Christ. To many natures this universal gracious beneficent doctrine of all-pervading grace, which includes all mankind, was much more pleasing than the doctrine of the necessity of special grace, involving spiritual assumption in those who possess it or say they do, and bitter uncertainty and depression in humble, self-doubting, and thoughtful minds. It resembled also the doctrines of the Laudian School, in which Inglesant had been brought up. So attractive indeed was it, that the Benedictines were compelled to profess it, and to pretend to side with the Jesuits, while in reality hating their doctrine.

When Inglesant remembered Cressy, and remembered also that he belonged to the Benedictines, the polished and learned cultivators of the useful arts, and was told that Cressy had chosen this order that he might have leisure and books to prosecute his studies and his writings, he conceived great hope that from him he should learn the happy mean he was in search of, between the worldliness of the Jesuits on the one hand, and the narrow repulsiveness of the Mendicant orders and the Calvinists on the other. In this frame of mind he sought an interview with Cressy. The directions of the Jesuits and of the Laudian School seemed to Inglesant to have failed; to have associated himself with the Jansenists or Calvinists would have been distasteful to him, and almost impossible. He sought in the Benedictine monk that compromise which the heart of man is perpetually seeking between the things of this world and the things of God. But though for the time the influence of the training of his life was somewhat shaken, it was far from removed, and an event occurred which, even before he saw Cressy, reforged the chains upon him to some extent. One Sunday evening, the day before he was to meet Cressy, walking along the Rue St Martin from the Boulevard where he had lodgings, he turned into the Jesuits' Church just as the sermon had begun. The dim light found its way into the vast Church from the stained windows; a lamp burning before some shrine shone partially on the preacher, as he stood in the stone pulpit by a great pillar, in his white surplice and rich embroidered stole. He was a young man, thin and sad-looking, and spoke slowly, and with long pauses and intervals, but with an intense eagerness and pathos that went to every heart. The first words that Inglesant heard, as he reached the nearest unoccupied place, were these:--

"Ah! if you adored a God crowned with roses and with pearls, it were a matter nothing strange; but to prostrate yourselves daily before a crucifix, charged with nails and thorns,--you living in such excess and superfluity in the flesh, dissolved in softness,--how can that be but cruel? Ah, think of that crucifix as you lie warm in silken curtains, perfumed with eau de naffe, as you sit at dainty feasts, as you ride forth in the sunshine in gallantry. He is cold and naked; He is alone; behind Him the sky is dreary and streaked with darkening clouds, for the night cometh--the night of God. His locks are wet with the driving rain; His hair is frozen with the sleet; His beauty is departed from Him; all men have left him--all men, and God also, and the holy angels hide their faces. He is crowned with thorns, but you with garlands; He wears nothing in His hands but piercing nails; you have rubies and diamonds on yours. Ah! will you tell me you can still be faithful though in brave array? I give that answer which Tertullian gave,--'I fear this neck snared with wreaths and ropes of pearls and emeralds. I fear the sword of persecution can find no entrance there.' No! hear you not the voice of the crucifix? Follow me. We are engaged to suffer by His sufferings as we look on Him. Suffering is our vow and profession. Love which cannot suffer is unworthy of the name of love."

* * * * *

The next day, at the appointed hour, he went to the Benedictine Monastery, in the Rue de Varrennes, and sent in his name to Father de Cressy. He was shown, not into the visitors' room, but into a private parlour, where Cressy came to him immediately. Dressed in the habit of his order, with a lofty and refined expression, he was a striking and attractive man; differing from the Jesuit in that, though both were equally persuasive, the latter united more power of controlling others than the appearance of Cressy implied. He had known Inglesant slightly at Oxford, and greeted him with great cordiality.

"I am not surprised that you are come to me, Mr. Inglesant," he said, with a most winning gesture and smile; "De Guevera, who was himself both a courtier and a recluse, says that the penance of religious men was sweeter than the pleasures of courtiers. Has your experience brought you to the same conclusion?"

Inglesant thanked him for granting him an interview; and sitting down, he told him shortly the story of his life, and his early partiality for the mystical theology; of his wishes and attempts; of his desire to follow the Divine Master; and of his failures and discouragements, his studies, his Pagan sympathies; and how life and reality of every kind, and inquiry, and the truth of history, and philosophy, even while it sided with or supported religion, still seemed to hinder and oppose the heavenly walk.

"I do not know, Mr. Inglesant," said De Cressy, "whether your case is easier or more difficult than that of those who usually come to me; I have many come to me; and they usually, one and all, come with the exact words of the blessed gospel on their lips, 'Sir, we would see Jesus.' And I look them in the face often, and wonder, and often find no words to speak. See Jesus, I often think, I do not doubt it! who would not wish to see Him who is the fulness of all perfection that the heart and intellect ever conceived, in whom all creation has its centre, all the troubles and sorrows of life have their cure, all the longings of carnal men their fruition? But why come to me? Is He not walking to and fro on the earth continually, in every act of charity and self-sacrifice that is done among men? Is He not offered daily on every altar, preached continually from every pulpit? Why come to me? Old men of sixty and seventy come to me with these very words, 'Sir, we would see Jesus.' If the course of sixty years, if the troubles and confusions of a long life, if He Himself has not revealed this Beatific Vision to them,--how can I? But with you it is very different. By your own story I know that you have seen Jesus; that you know Him as you know your dearest friend. This makes our discourse at first much the easier, for I need waste no words upon a matter to enlarge upon which to you would be an insult to your heart. But it makes it more difficult afterwards, when we come to ask how it is that, with this transcendental knowledge, you are still dissatisfied, and find life so difficult a path to tread. I make no apology for speaking plainly; such would be as much an insult to you as the other. You remind me of the rich oratories I have seen of some of our Court ladies, where everything is beautiful and costly, but where a classic statue of Apollo stands by the side of a crucifix, a Venus with Our Lady, a Cupid near St. Michael, and a pair of beads on Mercury's Caduceus.

"You are like the young man who came to Jesus, and whom Jesus loved, for you have great possessions. You have been taught all that men desire to know, and are accomplished in all that makes life delightful. You have the knowledge of the past, and know the reality of men's power, and wisdom, and beauty, which they possess of themselves, and did possess in the old classic times. You have culled of the tree of knowledge, and know good and evil; yea, the good that belongs to this world, and is part of it, and the strength and wisdom and beauty of the children of this world; yea, and the evil and ignorance and folly of the children of light. Let us grant--I am willing to grant--that Plato has a purer spiritual instinct than St. Paul. I will grant that Lucretius has the wisdom of this world with him; ay, and its alluring tongue. Paul did not desire spiritual insight; he wanted Jesus. You stand as a god free to choose. On the one hand, you have the delights of reason and of intellect, the beauty of that wonderful creation which God made, yet did not keep; the charms of Divine philosophy, and the enticements of the poet's art: on the other side, Jesus. You know Him, and have seen Him. I need say no more of His perfections.