"The plague take your double meanings!" answered Brother Warboise gruffly. "Not that I understand 'em, or want to. 'Tis enough, I suppose, that the Master preached about it this morning, and called it the bird of love, to set you miscalling it."

"Not a bit," Brother Copas replied. "As for the parable of the Pelican, the Master has used it in half a dozen sermons; and you had it by heart at least as long ago as the day before yesterday, when I happened to overhear you pitching it to a convoy of visitors as you showed them the staircase. I hope they rewarded you for the sentiment of it."

"Look here," fired up Brother Warboise, turning over his portion of duck, "if it's poor I am, it don't become you to mock me. And if I haven't your damned book-learning, nor half your damned cleverness, maybe you've not turned either to such account in life as to make a boast of it. And if you left me just now to stand up alone to the Master, it don't follow I take pleasure in your sneering at him."

"You are right, my dear fellow," said Brother Copas; "and also you are proving in two or three different ways that I was right just now. Bird of love—bird of wrath—they are both the same thing. But, with all submission, neither you nor the Master have the true parable, which I found by chance the other day in an old book called the Ancren Riwle. Ancren, brother, means 'anchoresses,' recluses, women separated, and living apart from the world pretty much as by rights we men should be living in St. Hospital; and riwle is 'rule,' or an instruction of daily conduct. It is a sound old book, written in the thirteenth century by a certain good Bishop Poore (excellent name!) for a household of such good women at Tarrent, on the River Stour; and it contains a peck of counsel which might be preached not only upon the scandal-mongering women who are the curse of this place—yes, and applied; for it recommends here and there, a whipping as salutary—but even, mutatis mutandis, upon us Brethren—"

"We've had one sermon, to-day," growled Brother Warboise.

"I am correcting it. This book tells of the Pelican that she is a peevish bird and so hasty of temper that, when her young ones molest her, she kills them with her beak; and soon after, being sorry, she moans, smites her own breast with the same murderous beak, and so draws blood, with which (says the Bishop) 'she then quickeneth her slain birds.' But I, being no believer in miracles, think he is right as to the repentance but errs about the bringing back to life. In this world, Brother, that doesn't happen; and we poor angry devils are left wishing that it could."

Brother Warboise, playing with knife and fork, looked up sharply from under fierce eyebrows.

"The moral?" pursued Brother Copas. "There are two at least: the first, that here we are, two jolly Protestants, who might be as comfortable as rats in a cheese—you conscious of a duty performed, and I filled with admiration of your pluck—and lo! when old Biscoe annoys us by an act of petty spite, we turn, not on him, but on one another. You, already more angry with yourself than with Biscoe, suddenly take offence with me because I didn't join you in standing between a good man and his dinner; while I, with a spoilt meal of my own for a grievance, choose to feel an irrational concern for the Master's, turn round on my comrade who has spoilt that, and ask, What the devil is wrong with Protestantism, that it has never an ounce of tact? Or why, if it aims to be unworldly, must it always overshoot its mark and be merely inhuman?"

Brother Warboise put nine-tenths of this discourse aside.

"You think it has spoilt the Master's dinner?" he asked anxiously, with a glance towards the high table.

"Not a doubt of it," Brother Copas assured him. "Look at the old boy, how nervously he's playing with his bread."

"I never meant, you know—"

"No, of course you didn't; and there's my second moral of the Pelican. She digs a bill into her dearest, and then she's sorry. At the best of her argument she's always owing her opponent an apology for some offence against manners. She has no savoir-faire." Here Brother Copas, relapsing, let the cloud of speculation drift between him and Brother Warboise's remorse. "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus—I reverence the pluck of a man who can cut himself loose from all that; for the worst loss he has to face (if he only knew it) is the inevitable loss of breeding. For the ordinary gentleman in this world there's either Catholicism or sound Paganism; no third choice."

In truth Master Blanchminster's dinner was spoilt for him. He sat distraught, fingering his bread between the courses which he scarcely tasted, and giving answers at random, after pauses, to the Bishop's small-talk. He was wounded. He had lived for years a life as happy as any that can fall to the lot of an indolent, unambitious man, who loves his fellows and takes a delight in their gratitude. St. Hospital exactly suited him. He knew its history. His affection, like an ivy, clung about its old walls and incorporated itself in the very mortar that bound them. He loved to spy one of its Brethren approaching in the street; to anticipate and acknowledge the deferential salute; to see himself as father of a happy family, easily controlling it by good will, in the right of good birth.

He had been a reformer, too. The staircase beside the dais led to an upper chamber whence, through a small window pierced in the wall, former Masters had conceived it their duty to observe the behaviour of the Brethren at meals. In his sixth year of office Master Blanchminster had sent for masons to block this window up. The act of espial had always been hateful to him: he preferred to trust his brethren, and it cost far less trouble. For close upon thirty years he had avoided their dinner-hour on all but Gaudy Days.

He had been warming a serpent, and it had bitten him. The wound stung, too. Angry he was at Warboise's disloyalty; angrier at the manner of it. If these old men had a grievance, or believed they had, at least they might have trusted him first with it. Had he ever been tyrannical, harsh, unsympathetic even, that instead of coming to him as to their father and Master they should have put this public affront on him and appealed straight away to the Bishop? To be sure, the Statutes provided that the Bishop of Merchester, as Visitor, had power to inquire into the administration of St. Hospital and to remedy abuses. But everyone knew that within living memory, and for a hundred years before, this power had never been invoked. Doubtless these malcontents, whoever they might be—and it disquieted Master Blanchminster yet further that he could not guess as yet who they were or how many—had kept to the letter of their rights. But good Heaven! had he in all these years interpreted his rule by the letter, and not rather and constantly by the spirit?

Brother Copas was right. Warboise's action had been inopportune, offensive, needlessly hurting a kindly heart. But the Master, while indignant with Warboise, could not help feeling just a reflex touch of vexation with Mr. Colt. The Chaplain no doubt was a stalwart soldier, fighting the Church's battle; but her battle was not to be won, her rolling tide of conquest not to be set going, in such a backwater as St. Hospital. Confound the fellow! Why could not these young men leave old men alone?

Thus it happened that the Master, immersed in painful thoughts, missed the launching of the Great Idea, which was to trouble him and indeed all Merchester until Merchester had done with it.

The idea was Mr. Bamberger's.

("Why, of course it was," said Brother Copas later; "ideas, good and bad, are the mission of his race among the Gentiles.")

Mr. Bamberger, having taken his seat, tucked a corner of his dinner-napkin between his collar and the front of his hairy throat. Adaptable in most things, in feeding and in the conduct of a napkin he could never subdue old habit to our English custom, and to-day, moreover, he wore a large white waistcoat, which needed protection. This seen to, he gazed around expansively.

"A picture, by George!"—Mr. Bamberger ever swore by our English patron saint. "Slap out of the Middle Ages, and priceless."

(He actually said "thlap" and "pritheless," but I resign at the outset any attempt to spell as Mr. Bamberger pronounced.)

"—Authentic, too! To think of this sort of thing taking place to-day in Merchester, England's ancient capital. Eh, Master? Eh, Mr. Mayor?"

Master Blanchminster awoke so far out of his thoughts as to correct the idiom.

"Undoubtedly Merchester was the capital of England before London could claim that honour."

"Aye," agreed his Worship, "there's no end of antikities in Merchester, for them as takes an interest in such. Dead-and-alive you may call us; but, as I've told the Council more than once, they're links with the past in a manner of speaking."

"But these antiquities attract visitors, or ought to."

"They do: a goodish number, as I've told the Council more than once."

"Why shouldn't they attract more?"

"I suppose they would, if we had more of 'em," answered his Worship thoughtfully. "When I said just now that we had no end of antikities, it was in a manner of speaking. There's the Cathedral, of course, and the old Palace—or what's left of it, and St. Hospital here. But there's a deal been swept away within my recollection. We must move with the times."

At this point the inspiration came upon Mr. Bamberger. He laid down the spoon in his soup and hurriedly caught at the rim of his plate as a vigilant waiter swept a hand to remove it.

"Hold hard, young man!" said Mr. Bamberger, snatching at his spoon and again fixing his eye on the Mayor. "You ought to have a Pageant, Sir."

"A what?"

"A Pageant; that's what we want for Merchester—something to advertise the dear old place and bring grist to our mills. I've often wondered if we could not run something of the sort."

This was not a conscious falsehood, but just a word or two of political patter, dropped automatically, absently. In truth, Mr. Bamberger, possessed by his inspiration, was wondering why the deuce it had never occurred to him until this moment. Still more curious, too, that it had never occurred to his brother Isidore! This Isidore, after starting as a croupier at Ostend and pushing on to the post of Directeur des Fetes Periodiques to the municipality of that watering-place, had made a sudden name for himself by stage-managing a Hall of Odalisques at the last Paris Exposition, and, crossing to London, had accumulated laurels by directing popular entertainments at Olympia (Kensington) and Shepherd's Bush. One great daily newspaper, under Hebrew control, habitually alluded to him as the Prince of Pageantists. Isidore saw things on a grand scale, and was, moreover, an excellent brother. Isidore (said Mr. Julius Bamberger to himself) would find all the History of England in Merchester and rattle it up to the truth of music.

Aloud he said—

"This very scene we're looking on, f'r instance!"

"There would be difficulties in the way of presenting it in the open air," hazarded his Worship.

Mr. Bamberger, never impatient of stupidity, opined that this could be got over easily.

"There's all the material made to our hand. Eh, Master?—these old pensioners of yours—in a procession? The public is always sentimental."

Master Blanchminster, rousing himself out of reverie, made guarded answer that such an exhibition might be instructive, historically, for schoolchildren.

"An institution like this, supported by endowments, don't need advertising, of course—not for its own sake," said Mr. Bamberger. "I was thinking of what might be done indirectly for Merchester. But—you'll excuse me, I must ride a notion when I get astride of one—St. Hospital would be no more than what we call an episode. We'd start with Alfred the Great—maybe before him; work down to the Cathedral and its consecration and Sir John, here—that is, of course, his ancestor—swearing on the Cross to depart for Jerusalem."

Sir John—a Whig by five generations of descent—glanced at Mr. Bamberger uneasily. He had turned Unionist when Mr. Gladstone embraced Home Rule; and now, rather by force of circumstance than by choice, he found himself Chairman of the Unionist Committee for Merchester; in fact he, more than any man, was responsible for Mr. Bamberger's representing Merchester in Parliament, and sometimes wondered how it had all come about. He answered these rare questionings by telling himself that Disraeli, whose portrait hung in his library, had also been a Jew. But he did not quite understand it, or what there was in Mr. Bamberger that personally repelled him.

At any rate Sir John was a pure Whig and to your pure Whig personal dignity is everything.

"So long," murmured he, "as you don't ask me to dress up and make myself a figure of fun."

The Bishop had already put the suggestion, so far as it concerned him, aside with a tolerant smile, which encouraged everything from which he, bien entendu, was omitted.

Mr. Bamberger, scanning the line of faces with a Jew's patient cunning, at length encountered the eye of Mr. Colt, who at the farther end of the high table was leaning forward to listen.

"You're my man," thought Mr. Bamberger. "Though I don't know your name and maybe you're socially no great shakes; a chaplain by your look, and High Church. You're the useful one in this gang."

He lifted his voice.

"You won't misunderstand me, Master," he said. "I named the Cathedral and the Crusades because, in Merchester, history cannot get away from the Church. It's her history that any pageant of Merchester ought to illustrate primarily—must, indeed: her past glories, some day (please God) to be revived."

"And," said Mr. Bamberger some months later, in private converse with his brother Isidore, "that did it, though I say it who shouldn't. I froze on that Colt straight; and Colt, you'll allow, was trumps."

For the moment little more was said. The company at the high table, after grace—a shorter one this time, pronounced by the Chaplain— bowed to the Brethren and followed the Master upstairs to the little room which had once served for espial-chamber, but was now curtained cosily and spread for dessert.

"By the way, Master," said the Bishop, suddenly remembering the Petition in his pocket, and laughing amicably as he dropped a lump of sugar into his coffee, "what games have you been playing in St. Hospital, that they accuse you of Romanising?"

The Master's ivory face flushed at the question.

"That was old Warboise," he answered nervously. "I must apologise for the annoyance."

"Not at all—not at all! It amused me, rather, to be reminded that, as Visitor, I am a person in St. Hospital, and still reckoned an important one. 'Made me feel like an image in a niche subjected to a sudden dusting. Who is this—er, what-d'-ye-call-him? Warboise? An eccentric?"

"I will not say that. Old and opinionated, rather; a militant Protestant—"

"Ah, we know the sort. Shall we glance over his screed? You permit me?"

"I was about to suggest your doing so. To tell the truth, I am curious to be acquainted with the charge against me."

The Bishop smiled, drew forth the paper from his pocket adjusted his gold-rimmed eyeglasses and read—

"To the Right Rev. Father in God, Walter, Lord Bishop of Merchester.

"My Lord,—We the undersigned, being Brethren on the Blanchminster and Beauchamp foundations of St. Hospital's College of Noble Poverty by Merton, respectfully desire your lordship's attention to certain abuses which of late have crept into this Society; and particularly in the observances of religion.

"We contend (1) that, whereas our Reformed and Protestant Church, in Number XXII of her Articles of Religion declares the Romish doctrine of purgatory inter alia to be a fond thing vainly invented, etc., and repugnant to the Word of God, yet prayers for the dead have twice been publicly offered in our Chapel and the practice defended, nay recommended, from its pulpit.

"(2) That, whereas in Number XXVIII of the same Articles the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is defined in intention, and the definition expressly cleared to repudiate several practices not consonant with it, certain of these have been observed of late in our Chapel, to the scandal of the Church, and to the pain and uneasiness of souls that were used to draw pure refreshment from these Sacraments—"

The Bishop paused.

"I say, Master, this Brother Warboise of yours can write passable English."

"Warboise? Warboise never wrote that—never in his life."

Master Blanchminster passed a hand over his forehead.

"It's Copas's handwriting!" announced Mr. Colt, who had drawn close and, unpermitted, was staring over the Bishop's shoulder at the manuscript.

The Bishop turned half about in his chair, slightly affronted by this offence against good manners; but Mr. Colt was too far excited to guess the rebuke.

"Turn over the page, my lord."

As the Bishop turned it, on the impulse of surprise, Mr. Colt pointed a forefinger.

"There it is—half-way down the signatures! 'J. Copas,' written in the same hand!"



CHAPTER VIII.

A PEACE-OFFERING.

"'Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak! Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week!'"

Quoted Brother Copas from one of his favourite poems. This was in the kitchen, three days later, and he made one of the crowd edging, pushing, pressing, each with plate in hand, around the great table where the joints stood ready to be carved and distributed. For save on Gaudy Days and great festivals of the Church, the Brethren dine in their own chambers, not in Hall; and on three days of the week must fend for themselves on food purchased out of their small allowances. But on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays they fetch it from the kitchen, taking their turns to choose the best cuts. And this was Thursday and, as it happened, Brother Copas stood first on the rota.

The rota hung on the kitchen wall in a frame of oak canopied with faded velvet—an ingenious and puzzling contrivance, somewhat like the calendar prefixed to the Book of Common Prayer, with the names of the Brethren inserted on movable cards worn greasy with handling. In system nothing could be fairer; but in practice, human nature being what it is, and the crowd without discipline, the press and clamour about the table made choosing difficult for the weaker ones.

"Brother Copas to choose! Brother Clerihew to divide!"

"Aye," sang out Brother Copas cheerfully, "and I'll take my time about it. Make room, Woolcombe, if you please, and take your elbow out of my ribs—don't I know the old trick? And stop pushing—you behind there! . . . 'Rats in a hamper, swine in a sty, wasps in a bottle.'—Mrs. Royle, ma'am, I am very sorry for your husband's rheumatism, but it does not become a lady to show this indecent haste."

"Indecent?" shrilled Mrs. Royle. "Indecent, you call me?—you that pretend to ha' been a gentleman! I reckon, if indecency's the matter in these times, I could talk to one or two of ye about it."

"Not a doubt of that, ma'am. . . . But really you ladies have no right here: it's clean against the rules, and the hubbub you provoke is a scandal."

"Do you mean to insinuate, sir—"

"With your leave, ma'am, I mean to insinuate myself between your person and the table from which at this moment you debar me. Ah!" exclaimed Brother Copas as the cook whipped off the first of the great dish-covers, letting loose a cloud of savoury steam. He sniffed at it.

"What's this? Boiled pork, and in June! We'll have a look at the others, please . . . Roast leg of mutton, boiled neck and scrag of mutton—aha! You shall give me a cut of the roast, please; and start at the knuckle end. Yes, Biscoe—at the knuckle end."

Hate distorted Brother Biscoe's patriarchal face. He came second on the rota, and roast knuckle of mutton was the tit-bit dearest of all to his heart, as Brother Copas knew. Brother Biscoe also had a passion for the two first cutlets of a mutton-neck; but he thought nothing of this in his rage.

"Please God it'll choke ye!" he snarled.

"Dear Brother," said Copas amiably, "on Monday last you helped me to the back of a duck."

"Hurry up there!" shouted Brother Woolcombe, and swung round. "Are we all to get cold dinner when these two old fools have done wrangling?"

"Fool yourself, Woolcombe!" Brother Biscoe likewise swung about. "Here's Copas has brought two plates! Isn't it time to speak up, when a rogue's caught cheating?"

One or two cried out that he ought to lose his turn for it.

"My friends," said Brother Copas, not at all perturbed, "the second plate is for Brother Bonaday's dinner, when his turn arrives. He has a heart-attack to-day, and cannot come for himself."

"A heart-attack!" sniggered Mrs. Royle, her voice rising shrill above the din. "Oh, save us if we didn't all know that news!"

Laughter crackled like musketry about Brother Copas's ears, laughter to him quite meaningless. It was plain that all shared some joke against his friend Bonaday; but he had no clue.

"And," pursued Mrs. Royle, "here's his best friend tellin' us as 'tis a scandal the way women push themselves into St. Hospital—'when they're not wanted,' did I hear you say, sir? Yes, 'a scandal' he said, and 'indecent'; which I leave it to you is pretty strong language as addressed to a woman what has her marriage lines I should hope!"

Brother Copas, bewildered by this onslaught—or, as he put it later, comparing the encounter with that between Socrates and Gorgias the Sophist—drenched with that woman's slop-pail of words and blinded for the moment, received his portion of mutton and drew aside, vanquished amid peals of laughter, of which he guessed only from its note that the allusion had been disgusting. Indeed, the whole atmosphere of the kitchen sickened him; even the portion of mutton cooling on his plate raised his gorge in physical loathing. But Brother Bonaday lay helpless in his chamber, without food. Remembering this, Brother Copas stood his ground and waited, with the spare plate ready for the invalid's portion.

The babel went on as one after another fought for the spoil. They had forgotten him, and those at the back of the crowd had found a new diversion in hustling old Biscoe as he struggled to get away with his two cutlets of half-warm mutton.

Brother Copas held his gaze upon the joints. His friend's turn came all but last on the rota; and by perversity—but who could blame it, in the month of June?—everyone eschewed the pork and bid emulously for mutton, roast or boiled. He knew that Brother Bonaday abhorred pork, which, moreover, was indigestible, and by consequence bad for a weak heart. He stood and watched, gradually losing all hope except to capture a portion of the mutton near the scrag-end. As for the leg, it had speedily been cleaned to the bone.

At the last moment a ray of hope shot up, as an expiring candle flames in the socket. Brother Inchbald—a notoriously stingy man— whose turn came immediately before Brother Bonaday's, seemed to doubt that enough of the scrag remained to eke out a full portion; and bent towards the dish of pork, fingering his chin. Copas seized the moment to push his empty plate towards the mutton, stealthily, as one forces a card.

As he did so, another roar of laughter—coarser than before—drew him to glance over his shoulder. The cause of it was Nurse Branscome, entering by way of the refectory, with a hot plate held in a napkin between her hands.

She paused on the threshold, as though the ribaldry took her in the face like a blast of hot wind.

"Oh, I am late!" she cried. "I came to fetch Brother Bonaday's dinner. Until five minutes ago no one told me—"

"It's all right," called back Brother Copas, still looking over his shoulder while his right hand extended the plate. "His turn is just called, and I am getting it for him."

Strange to say, his voice reached the Nurse across an almost dead silence; for the laughter had died down at sight of a child—Corona— beside her in the doorway.

"But your plate will be cold. Here, change it for mine!"

"Well thought upon! Wait a second!"

But before Brother Copas could withdraw the plate a dollop of meat had been dumped upon it.

"Eh? but wait—look here!—"

He turned about, stared at the plate, stared from the plate to the dish of scrag. The meat on the plate was pork, and the dish of scrag was empty. Brother Inchbald had changed his mind at the last moment and chosen mutton.

The Brethren, led by Mrs. Royle, cackled again at sight of his dismay. One or two still hustled Brother Biscoe as he fought his way to the foot of the refectory steps, at the head of which Nurse Branscome barred the exit, with Corona holding fast by her hand and wondering.

"But what is it all about?" asked the child.

"Hush!" The Nurse squeezed her hand, meaning that she must have courage. "We have come too late, and the dinner is all shared up—or all of it that would do your father good."

"But"—Corona dragged her small hand loose—"there is plenty left; and when they know he is sick they will make it all right. . . . If you please, sir," she spoke up, planting her small body in front of Brother Biscoe as he would have pushed past with his plate, "my father is sick, and Nurse says he must not eat the meat that's left on the dish there. Won't you give me that on your plate?"

She stretched out a hand for it, and Brother Biscoe, spent with senile wrath at this last interruption of his escape, was snatching back the food, ready to curse her, when Brother Copas came battling through the press, holding both his plates high and hailing cheerfully.

"I forgot," he panted, and held up the plate in his left hand. "Bonaday can have the knuckle. I had first choice to-day."

"He ought not to eat roasted meat," said Nurse Branscome slowly. "I am sorry. You are good and will be disappointed. The smallest bit of boiled, now—were it only the scrag—"

"Why," bustled Brother Copas, "Brother Biscoe has the very thing, then—the two best cutlets at the bottom of the neck. And, what's more, he'll be only too glad to exchange 'em for the roast knuckle here, as I happen to know."

He thrust the tit-bit upon Brother Biscoe, who hesitated a moment between hate and greed, and snatched the cutlets from him before hate could weigh down the balance.

Brother Biscoe, clutching the transferred plate, fled ungraciously, without a word of thanks. Nurse Branscome stayed but a moment to thank Brother Copas for his cleverness, and hurried off with Corona to hot-up the plate of mutton for the invalid.

They left Brother Copas eyeing his dismal pork.

"And in June, too!" he murmured. "No: a man must protect himself. I'll have to eke out to-day on biscuits."



CHAPTER IX.

BY MERE RIVER.

Brother Bonaday's heart-attacks, sharp while they lasted, were soon over. Towards evening he had so far recovered that the Nurse saw no harm in his taking a short stroll, with Brother Copas for socius.

The two old men made their way down to the river as usual, and there Brother Copas forced his friend to sit and rest on a bench beside the clear-running water.

"We had better not talk," he suggested, "but just sit quiet and let the fresh air do you good."

"But I wish to talk. I am quite strong enough."

"Talk about what?"

"About the child. . . . We must be getting her educated, I suppose."

"Why?"

Brother Bonaday, seated with palms crossed over the head of his staff, gazed in an absent-minded way at the water-weeds trailing in the current.

"She's an odd child; curiously shrewd in some ways and curiously innocent in others, and for ever asking questions. She put me a teaser yesterday. She can read pretty well, and I set her to read a chapter of the Bible. By and by she looked up and wanted to know why God lived apart from His wife!"

Brother Copas grunted his amusement.

"Did you tell her?"

"I invented some answer, of course. I don't believe it satisfied her—I am not good at explanation—but she took it quietly, as if she put it aside to think over."

"The Athanasian Creed is not easily edited for children. . . . If she can read, the likelihood is she can also write. Does a girl need to learn much beyond that? No, I am not jesting. It's a question upon which I have never quite made up my mind."

"I had hoped to find you keener," said Brother Bonaday with a small sigh. "Now I see that you will probably laugh at what I am going to confess. . . . Last night, as I sat a while before going to bed, I found myself hearkening for the sound of her breathing in the next room. After a bit, when a minute or so went by and I could hear nothing, a sort of panic took me that some harm had happened to her: till I could stand it no longer, but picked up the lamp and crept in for a book. There she lay sleeping, healthy and sound, and prettier than you'd ever think. . . . I crept back to my chair, and a foolish sort of hope came over me that, with her health and wits, and being brought up unlike other children, she might come one day to be a little lady and the pride of the place, in a way of speaking—"

"A sort of Lady Jane Grey, in modest fashion—is that what you mean?" suggested Brother Copas—

'Like Her most gentle, most unfortunate, Crowned but to die—who in her chamber sate Musing with Plato, tho' the horn was blown, And every ear and every heart was won, And all in green array were chasing down the sun.'

—"Well, if she's willing, as unofficial godfather I might make a start with the Latin declensions. It would be an experiment: I've never tried teaching a girl. And I never had a child of my own, Brother; but I can understand just what you dreamed, and the Lord punish me if I feel like laughing."

He said it with an open glance at his friend. But it found no responsive one. Brother Bonaday's brow had contracted, as with a spasm of the old pain, and his eyes still scrutinised the trailing weeds in Mere river.

"If ever a man had warning to be done with life," said Brother Bonaday after a long pause, "I had it this forenoon. But it's wonderful what silly hopes a child will breed in a man."

Brother Copas nodded.

"Aye, we'll have a shot with her. But—Oh, good Lord! Here's the Chaplain coming."

"Ah, Copas—so here you are!" sung out Mr. Colt as he approached with his long stride up the tow-path. "Nurse Branscome told me I should find you here. Good evening, Bonaday!"

He nodded.

Copas stood up and inclined his body stiffly.

"I hope, sir," was his rebuke, "I have not wholly forfeited the title of Brother?"

The Chaplain flushed.

"I bring a message," he said. "The Master wishes to see you, at half-past six."

"That amounts to a command."

Brother Copas pulled out his watch.

"I may as well warn you," the Chaplain pursued. "You will be questioned on your share in that offensive Petition. As it appears, you were even responsible for composing it."

Brother Copas's eyebrows went up.

"Is it possible, sir, that you recognised the style? . . . Ah, no; the handwriting must have been your index. The Bishop showed it to you, then?"

"I—er—have been permitted to glance it over."

"Over his shoulder, if I may make a guess," murmured Brother Copas, putting his watch away and searching for his snuff-box.

"Anyway, you signed it: as Bon—as Brother Bonaday here was too sensible to do: though," added Mr. Colt, "his signature one could at least have respected."

Brother Copas tapped his snuff-box, foreseeing comedy.

"And why not mine, sir?"

"Oh, come, come!" blurted the Chaplain. "I take you to be a man of some education."

"Is that indeed the reason?"

"A man of some education, I say."

"And I hear you, sir." Brother Copas bowed. "'Praise from Sir Richard Strahan is praise indeed'—though my poor friend here seems to get the backhand of the compliment."

"And it is incredible you should go with the ignorant herd and believe us Clergy of the Church of England to be heading for Rome, as your Petition asserts."

Brother Copas slowly inhaled a pinch.

"In England, Mr. Chaplain, the ignorant herd has, by the admission of other nations, a practical political sense, and a somewhat downright way with it. It sees you reverting to many doctrines and uses from which the Reformation cut us free—or, if you prefer it, cut us loose; doctrines and uses which the Church of Rome has taught and practised without a break. It says—this ignorant herd—'If these fellows are not heading for Rome, then where the dickens are they heading?' Forgive this blunt way of putting it, but the question is not so blunt as it looks. It is on the contrary extremely shrewd; and until you High Anglicans answer it candidly, the ignorant herd will suspect—and you know, sir, the lower classes are incurably suspicious—either that yourselves do not know, or that you know and won't tell."

"You say," answered Mr. Colt, "that we revert to many doctrines and uses which, since the Romish clergy preach and practise them, are ignorantly supposed to belong to Rome. But 'many' is not 'all'; nor does it include the most radical doctrine of all. How can we intend Romanising while we deny the supreme authority of the Pope?—or Bishop of Rome, as I should prefer to call him."

"Fairly countered," replied Brother Copas, taking another pinch; "though the ignorant herd would have liked better an answer to its question. You deny the supreme authority of the Pope? Very well. Whose, then, do you accept?"

"The authority of Christ, committed to His Church."

"Oh, la, la, la! . . . I should have said, Whose authoritative interpretation of Christ's authority?"

"The Church's."

"Aye? Through whose mouth? We shall get at something definite in time. . . . I'll put it more simply. You, sir, are a plain priest in holy orders, and it's conceivable that on some point of use or doctrine you may be in error. Just conceivable, hey? At all events, you may be accused of it. To whom, then, do you appeal? To the King?—Parliament?—the Court of Arches, or any other Court? Not a bit of it. Well, let's try again. Is it to the Archbishop of Canterbury? Or to your own Diocesan?"

"I should appeal to the sanction of the Church Catholic as given in her ancient Councils."

"And again—as nowadays interpreted by whom? Let us pass a hundred possible points on which no Council bothered its head, and on which consequently it has left no decision. Who's the man, anywhere, to take you by the scruff of the neck and chastise you for an error?"

"Within the limits of conscience I should, of course, bow to my Diocesan."

"Elastic limits, Mr. Colt! and, substituting Brother Warboise's conscience for yours, precisely the limits within which Brother Warboise bows to you! Anarchy will obey anything 'within the limits of conscience'—that's precisely what anarchy means; and even so and to that extent will you obey Bishop or Archbishop. In your heart you deny their authority; in speech, in practice, you never lose an occasion of flouting them and showing them up for fools. Take this Education Squabble for an example. The successor to the Chair of Augustine, good man—he's, after all, your Metropolitan—runs around doing his best to discover a way out, to patch up a 'concordat,' as they call it? What's the effect, upon any Diocesan Conference? Up springs subaltern after subaltern, fired with zeal to give his commander away. 'Our beloved Archbishop, in his saintly trustfulness, is bargaining away our rights as Churchmen'—all the indiscipline of a middle-class private school (and I know what that is, Mr. Colt, having kept one) translated into the sentimental erotics of a young ladies' academy!"

Mr. Colt gasped.

"And so, believe me, sir," concluded Brother Copas, snapping down the lid of his snuff-box, "this country of ours did not get rid of the Pope in order to make room for a thousand and one Popelings, each in his separate parish practising what seems right in his own eyes. At any rate, let us say, remembering the parable of the room swept and garnished, it intended no such result. Let us agree, Mr. Chaplain, to economise in Popes, and to condemn that business of Avignon. So the ignorant herd comes back on you with two questions, which in effect are one: 'If not mere anarchists, what authority own you? And if not for Rome, for what in the world are you heading?' You ask Rome to recognise your Orders.—Mais, soyez consequent, monsieur."

It was Mr. Colt's turn to pull out his watch.

"Permit me to remind you," he said, "that you, at any rate, have to own an authority, and that the Master will be expecting you at six-thirty sharp. For the rest, sir, you cannot think that thoughtful Churchmen have no answer to these questions, if put by anyone with the right to put them. But you—not even a communicant! Will you dare to use these arguments to the Master, for instance?"

"He had the last word there," said Brother Copas, pocketing his snuff-box and gazing after the Chaplain's athletic figure as it swung away up the tow-path. "He gave me no time to answer that one suits an argument to the adversary. The Master? Could I present anything so crude to one who, though lazy, is yet a scholar?—who has certainly fought this thing through, after his lights, and would get me entangled in the Councils of Carthage and Constance, St. Cyprian and the rest? . . . Colt quotes the ignorant herd to me, and I put him the ignorant herd's question—without getting a reply."

"You did not allow him much time for one," said Brother Bonaday mildly.

Brother Copas stared at him, drew out his watch again, and chuckled.

"You're right. I lose count of time, defending my friends; and this is your battle I'm fighting, remember."

He offered his arm, and the two friends started to walk back towards St. Hospital. They had gone but a dozen yards when a childish voice hailed them, and Corona came skipping along the bank.

"Daddy! you are to come home at once! It's past six o'clock, and Branny says the river fog's bad for you."

"Home?" echoed Brother Bonaday inattentively. The word had been unfamiliar to him for some years, and his old brain did not grasp it for a moment. His eyes seemed to question the child as she stood before him panting, her hair dishevelled.

"Aye, Brother," said Copas with a glance at him, "you'll have to get used to it again, and good luck to you! What says the pessimist, that American fellow?—"

'Nowhere to go but out, Nowhere to come but back '—

"Missy don't agree with her fellow-countryman, eh?"

His eye held a twinkle of mischief.

"He isn't my fellow-countryman!" Corona protested vehemently. "I'm English—amn't I, Daddy?"

"There, there—forgive me, little one! And you really don't want to leave us, just yet?"

"Leave you?" The child took Brother Bonaday's hand and hugged it close. "Uncle Copas, if you won't laugh I want to tell you something—what they call confessing." She hesitated for a moment. "Haven't you ever felt you've got something inside, and how awful good it is to confess and get it off your chest?"

Brother Copas gave a start, and eyed his fellow-Protestant.

"Well?" he said after a pause.

"Well, it's this way," confessed Corona. "I can't say my prayers yet in this place—not to get any heft on them; and that makes me feel bad, you know. I start along with 'Our Father, which art in heaven,' and it's like calling up a person on the 'phone when he's close at your elbow all the time. Then I say 'God bless St. Hospital,' and there I'm stuck; it don't seem I want to worry God to oblige beyond that. So I fetch back and start telling how glad I am to be home—as if God didn't know—and that bats me up to St. Hospital again. I got stone-walled that way five times last night. What's the sense of asking to go to heaven when you don't particularly want to?"

"Child," Brother Copas answered, "keep as honest as that and peg away. You'll find your prayers straighten themselves out all right."

"Sure? . . . Well, that's a comfort: because, of course, I don't want to go to hell either. It would never do. . . . But why are you puckering up your eyes so?"

"I was thinking," said Brother Copas, "that I might start teaching you Latin. Your father and I were discussing it just now."

"Would he like me to learn it?"

"It's the only way to find out all that St. Hospital means, including all it has meant for hundreds of years. . . . Bless me, is that the quarter chiming? Take your father's hand and lead him home, child. Venit Hesperus, ite capellae."

"What does that mean?"

"It's Latin," said Brother Copas. "It's a—a kind of absolution."



CHAPTER X.

THE ANONYMOUS LETTER.

Although the month was June and the evening warm, Master Blanchminster sat huddled in his armchair before a bright fire. A table stood at his elbow, with some books upon it, his untasted glass of wine, and half a dozen letters—his evening's post. But the Master leaned forward, spreading his delicate fingers to the warmth and, between them, gazing into the core of the blaze.

The butler ushered in Brother Copas and withdrew, after a glance at the lights. Two wax candles burned upon the writing-table in the oriel, and on the side-table an electric lamp shaded with green silk faintly silhouetted the Master's features. Brother Copas, standing a little within the doorway, remarked to himself that the old gentleman had aged of late.

"Ah, Brother Copas? Yes, I sent for you," said the Master, rousing himself as if from a brown study. "Be seated, please."

He pointed to a chair on the opposite side of the hearth; and Brother Copas, seating himself with a bow, spread the worn skirt of his Beauchamp robe, and arranged its folds over his knees. The firelight sparkled upon the Beauchamp rose on his breast, and seemed to hold the Master's eye as he looked up after a pause.

"You guess, no doubt, why I sent for you?"

Brother Copas inclined his head.

"It concerns the Petition which Brother Warboise presented to the Bishop last Monday. I am not complaining just now of his fashion of procedure, which I may hazard was not of your suggesting."

"It was not, Master. I may say so much, having warned him that I should say it if questioned."

"Yet you wrote out and signed the Petition, and, if I may hazard again, composed it?"

"I did."

"I have," said Master Blanchminster, studying the back of his hands as he held his palms to the fire, "no right to force any man's conscience. But it seemed to me, if I may say so, that while all were forcibly put, certain of your arguments ignored—or, let me rather say, passed over—points which must have occurred to a man of your learning. Am I mistaken?"

"You understand, Master," said Brother Copas, slightly embarrassed, and slightly the more embarrassed because the Master, after asking the question, seemed inclined to relapse into his own thoughts, "the Petition was not mine only. I had to compose it for all the signatories; and that, in any public business, involves striking a mean."

"I understand even more," said the Master, rousing himself, and reaching for a copy of the Petition, which lay among his papers. "I understand that I have no right to cross-question a man on his share in a document which six or eight others have signed. Shall it be further understood"—he looked up with a quick smile of goodness, whereat Brother Copas felt ashamed—"that I sent for you as a friend, and that you may speak frankly, if you will so honour me, without fear of my remembering a word to your inconvenience?"

"And since you so honour me, Master," said Brother Copas, "I am ready to answer all you ask."

"Well, then, I have read with particular interest, what you have to say here about the practice of Confession. (This, by the way, is a typed copy, with which the Bishop has been kind enough to supply me.) You have, I assume, no belief in it or in the efficacy of the Absolution that follows it."

The Master, searching for a paragraph, did not perceive that Brother Copas flushed slightly.

"And," he continued, as he found the passage and laid his finger on it, "although you set out your arguments with point—with fairness, too, let me add—I am perhaps not very far wrong in guessing that you have for Confession an instinctive dislike which to your own mind means more than any argument you use."

The Master looked up with a smile; but by this time Brother Copas's flush had faded.

"You may say that, Master, of the whole document. I am an old man— far too old to have my beliefs and disbeliefs quickened by argument. They have long since hardened into prejudices; and, speaking generally, I have a prejudice against this setting of old men by the ears with a lot of Neo-Catholic stuff which irritates half of us while all are equally past being provoked to any vital good."

The Master sighed, for he understood.

"I, too, am old," he answered, "older even than you; and as death draws nearer I incline with you, to believe that the fewer our words on these questions that separate us the better. (There's a fine passage to that effect in one of Jowett's Introductions, you may remember—the Phaedo, I think.) Least said is soonest mended, and good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than they know. Since we are opening our minds a little beyond our wont, let me tell you exactly what is my own prejudice, as you would call it. To me Confession has been a matter of happy experience—I am speaking now of younger days, at Cuddesdon—"

"Ah!" breathed Copas.

"And the desire to offer to others what has been a great blessing to myself, has at times been very strong. But I recognised that the general English mind—yes, I'll grant you, the general healthy English mind—had its prejudice too; a prejudice so sturdy against Confession, that it seemed to me I should alienate more souls than I attracted and breed more ill-temper than charity to cover it. So—weakly perhaps—I never spoke of it in sermons, and by consequence no Brother of St. Hospital has ever sought from me that comfort which my conscience all the while would have approved of giving."

Brother Copas bowed his head for sign that he understood.

"But—excuse me, Master—you say that you found profit in Confession at Cuddesdon; that is, when I dare say your manhood was young and in ferment. Be it granted that just at such a crisis, Confession may be salutary. Have you found it profitable in later life?"

"I cannot," the Master answered, "honestly say more than that no doubt of it has ever occurred to me, and for the simple reason that I have not tried. But I see at what you are driving—that we of St. Hospital are too old to taste its benefit? . . . Yet I should have thought that even in age it might bring comfort to some; and, if so, why should the others complain?"

"For the offence it carries as an infraction of the reformed doctrine under which they supposed themselves to order their lives and worship. They contend, Master, that they are all members of one Society; and if the doctrine of that Society be infringed to comfort A or B, it is to that extent weakened injuriously for C and D, who have been building their everlasting and only hope on it, and have grown too old to change."

"But," answered Master Blanchminster, pinning his finger on the paragraph, "you admit here that even the reformed Church, in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, enjoins Confession and prescribes a form of Absolution. Now if a man be not too old for it when he is dying, a fortiori he cannot be too old for it at any previous time."

Brother Copas rubbed his hands together softly, gleefully. He adored dialectic.

"With your leave, Master," he replied, "dying is a mighty singular business. The difference between it and growing old cannot be treated as a mere matter of degree. Now one of the points I make is that the Church, by expressly allowing Confession on this singular occasion, while saying nothing about it on any other, thereby inferentially excludes it on all others—or discountenances it, to say the least."

"There I join issue with you, maintaining that all such occasions are covered by the general authority bestowed at Ordination with the laying-on of hands—'Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven,' etc. To construe an open exhortation in one of her offices as a silent denunciation in all the rest seems to me—"

For the next few minutes the pair enjoyed themselves to the top of their bent; until, as the Master pushed aside some papers on the table to get at his Prayer Book—to prove that No. XXV of the Articles of Religion did not by its wording disparage Absolution—his eye fell on a letter which lay uppermost. He paused midway in a sentence, picked the thing up and held it for a moment disgustfully between forefinger and thumb.

"Brother Copas," he said with a change of voice, "we lose ourselves in logomachy, and I had rather hark back to a word you let drop a while ago about the Brotherhood. You spoke of 'setting old men by the ears.' Do you mean it seriously—that our Brethren, just now, are not dwelling in concord?"

"God bless your innocent old heart!" murmured Brother Copas under his breath. Aloud he said, "Men of the Brethren's age, Master, are not always amiable; and the tempers of their womenfolk are sometimes unlovely. We are, after all, failures in life, and to have lived night and day beside any one of us can be no joke."

The Master, with his body half-turned towards the reading-lamp, still held the letter and eyed it at arm's length.

"I observed," he said after a while, "that Brother Bonaday did not sign your Petition. Yet I had supposed him to be an Evangelical, and everyone knows you two to be close friends." The Master mused again. "Pardon me, but he has some reason, of course?"

"He has."

—"Which you are not at liberty to tell me?"

"That is so."

"Ah, well," said the Master, turning and facing about on Brother Copas with a sudden resolve. "I wonder if—to leave this matter of the Petition—you can tell me something else concerning your friend; something which, if you can answer it so as to help him, will also lift a sad weight off my mind. If you cannot, I shall equally forget that the question was ever put or the answer withheld. . . . To be candid, when you were shown in I was sitting here in great distress of mind."

"Surely not about Bonaday, Master?" said Brother Copas, wondering.

"About Bonaday, yes." The Master inclined his head. "Poison—it has been running through my thoughts all the while we have been talking. I suppose I ought not to show you this; the fire is its only proper receptacle—"

"Poison?" echoed Brother Copas. "And about Bonaday? who, good soul, never hurt a fly!"

"I rejoice to hear you say it," said the Master, plainly relieved, and he appeared half-minded to withdraw and pocket the scrap of paper for which Copas held out a hand. "It is an anonymous letter, and— er—evidently the product of a foul mind—"

Brother Copas took it and, fumbling for his glasses, gazed around in search of the handiest light by which to read it. Master Blanchminster hurried to catch up the electric lamp and set it on the mantel-shelf above his shoulder. Its coil of silk-braided wire dragging across the papers on the table, one or two dropped on the floor; and whilst the Master stooped to collect them Brother Copas read the letter, first noting at a glance that the paper was cheap and the handwriting, though fairly legible, at once uneducated and painfully disguised.

It ran—

"Master,—This is to warn you that you are too kind and anyone can take you in. It wasn't enough Bonaday should get the best rooms in S. Hospital but now you give him leave for this child which every one in S. Hospital knows is a bastard. If you want to find the mother, no need to go far. Why is Nurse B—hanging about his rooms now. Which they didn't carry it so far before, but they was acquainted years ago, as is common talk. God knows my reasons for writing this much are honest, but I hate to see your goodness put upon, and a scandal which the whole S. Hospital feels bitter about—such letchery and wickedness in our midst, and nobody knowing how to put a stop to it all.

"Yours obdtly.,

"A Well Wisher."

"The handwriting," said Brother Copas, "is a woman's, though disguised."

The Master, erect again, having collected his papers, eyed Brother Copas as if surprised by his calm tone.

"You make nothing of it, then?"

"P'st!"

"I—I was hoping so." The Master's voice was tremulous, apologetic. "It came by this evening's post, not half an hour ago. . . . I am not used to receive such things: yet I know what ought to be done with them—toss them into the fire at once and dismiss them from your mind. I make no doubt I should have burnt it within another ten minutes: as for cleansing one's mind of it so quickly, that must be a counsel of perfection. But you were shown in, and I—I made certain that you could contradict this disgraceful report and set my mind at rest. Forgive me."

"Ah, Master"—Brother Copas glanced up with a quick smile— "it almost looks as if you were right after all, and one is never too old to confess!" He bent and held the edge of the paper close to the blaze. "May I burn it?"

"By all means."

"Nay, then, I won't. But since you have freely parted with it, may I keep it? . . . I have had some little experience with manuscripts, and it is just possible I may trace this to the writer—who is assuredly a woman," added Brother Copas, studying the letter again. "You have my leave to do so."

"And you ask no further question?"

The Master hesitated. At length he said firmly—

"None. I have no right. How can so foul a thing confer any right?"

Brother Copas was silent for a space.

"Nay, that is true, Master; it cannot. . . . Nevertheless, I will answer what was in your mind to ask. When I came into the room you were pondering this letter. The thought of it—pah!—mixed itself up with a thought of the appointment you had set for me—with the Petition; and the two harked back together upon a question you put to me just now. 'Why was not Brother Bonaday among the signatories?' Between them they turned that question into a suspicion. Guilty men are seldom bold: as the Scots say, 'Riven breeks sit still.' . . . Was not this, or something like it, in your mind, sir?"

"I confess that it was."

"Why then, Master, I too will confess—I that came to you to denounce the practice. Of what this letter hints Bonaday is innocent as—as you are. He approved of the Petition and was on the point of signing it; but he desired your good leave to make a home for his child. Between parent and Protestant my friend was torn, and moreover between conscience and loyalty. He could not sue for this favour from you, his soul weighted with an intention to go straightway and do what must offend you."

Master Blanchminster faced Brother Copas squarely, standing of a sudden erect. It seemed to add inches to his stature.

"Had he so poor a trust in me, after these years?"

"No, Master." Brother Copas bent his head. "That is where I come in. All this is but preparatory. . . . I am a fraud—as little Protestant as Catholic. I found my friend in straits, and made a bargain with those who were pressing him—"

"Do I understand, Brother Copas, that this Petition—of which all the strength lies in its scholarship and wording—is yours, and that on these terms only you have given me so much pain?"

"You may put it so, Master, and I can say no more than 'yes'—though I might yet plead that something is wrong with St. Hospital, and—"

"Something is very wrong with St. Hospital," interrupted the Master gravely. "This letter—if it come from within our walls—But I after all, as its Master, am ultimately to blame." He paused for a moment and looked up with a sudden winning smile. "We have both confessed some sins. Shall we say a prayer together, Brother?"

The two old men knelt by the hearth there. Together in silence they bowed their heads.



CHAPTER XI.

BROTHER COPAS ON THE ANGLO-SAXON.

"You ought to write a play," said Mrs. Simeon.

Mr. Simeon looked up from his dinner and stared at his wife as though she had suddenly taken leave of her senses. She sat holding a fork erect and close to her mouth, with a morsel of potato ready to be popped in as soon as she should finish devouring a paragraph of The People newspaper, folded beside her plate. In a general way Mrs. Simeon was not a reader; but on Mondays (washing-days) she regularly had the loan of a creased copy of The People from a neighbour who, having but a couple of children, could afford to buy and peruse it on the day of issue. There is much charity among the working poor.

"I—I beg your pardon, my dear?" Mr. Simeon murmured, after gently admonishing his second son (Eustace, aged 11, named after the Master) for flipping bread pills across the table. "I am afraid I did not catch—"

"I see there's a man has made forty thousand pounds by writing one. And he did it in three weeks, after beginning as a clerk in the stationery. . . . Forty thousand pounds, only think! That's what I call turning cleverness to account."

"But, my love, I don't happen to be clever," protested Mr. Simeon.

His wife swallowed her morsel of potato. She was a worn-looking blonde, peevish, not without traces of good looks. She wore the sleeves of her bodice rolled up to the elbows, and her wrists and forearms were bleached by her morning's work at the wash-tub.

"Then I'm sure I don't know what else you are!" said she, looking at him straight.

Mr. Simeon sighed. Ever on Mondays he returned at midday to a house filled with steam and the dank odour of soap-suds, and to the worst of the week's meagre meals. A hundred times he had reproached himself that he did ungratefully to let this affect him, for his wife (poor soul) had been living in it all day, whereas his morning had been spent amid books, rare prints, statuettes, soft carpets, all the delicate luxuries of Master Blanchminster's library. Yet he could not help feeling the contrast; and the children were always at their most fractious on Mondays, chafed by a morning in school after two days of freedom.

"Where are you going this afternoon?" his wife asked.

"To blow the organ for Windeatt."

Dr. Windeatt (Mus. Doc. Oxon.) was the Cathedral organist.

"Has he offered to pay you?"

"Well—it isn't pay exactly. There was an understanding that if I blew for him this afternoon—old Brewer being laid up with the shingles—he would take me through that tenor part in the new Venite Exultemus. It's tricky, and yesterday morning I slurred it horribly."

"Tc'ht! A man of your education blowing an organ, and for nothing! If there was any money in it one wouldn't mind so much. . . . But you let yourself be put upon by anybody."

Mr. Simeon was silent. He knew that to defend himself would be to court a wrangle, reproaches, tears perhaps, all unseemly before the children; and, moreover, what his wife said was more than half deserved.

"Daddy, why don't you write a play?" demanded the five-year-old Agatha. "And then mammy would have a carriage, and I'd go to a real boarding-school with canaries in the window like they have at Miss Dickinson's."

The meal over, Mr. Simeon stole away to the Cathedral. He was unhappy; and as he passed through Friars' Gateway into the Close, the sight of the minster, majestical above its green garth, for once gave no lift to his spirit. The great central tower rose against a sky of clearest blue, strong and foursquare as on the day when its Norman builders took down their scaffolding. White pigeons hovered or perched on niche and corbel. But fortitude and aspiration alike had deserted Mr. Simeon for the while. Life—hard life and poverty—had subdued him to be one of the petty, nameless crowd this Cathedral had seen creep to their end in its shadow. . . . "What should such creatures as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?" A thousand thousand such as Mr. Simeon had listened or lifted their voice to its anthems—had aspired for the wings of a dove, to fly away and be at rest. Where now were all their emotions? He entered by a side-door of the western porch. The immense, solemn nave, if it did not catch his thoughts aloft, at least hushed them in awe. To Mr. Simeon Merchester Cathedral was a passion, nearer, if not dearer, than wife or children.

He had arrived ten minutes ahead of the appointed time. As he walked towards the great organ he heard a child's voice, high-pitched and clear, talking behind the traceries of the choir screen. He supposed it the voice of some irreverent chorister, and stepping aside to rebuke it, discovered Corona and Brother Copas together gazing up at the coffins above the canopy.

"And is King Alfred really up there?—the one that burnt the cakes?— and if so, which?" Corona was asking, too eager to think of grammar.

Brother Copas shrugged his shoulders.

"What's left of him is up there somewhere."

'Here are sands, ignoble things Dropped from the ruined sides of kings.'

"—But the Parliament troopers broke open the coffins and mixed the dust sadly. The Latin says so. 'In this and the neighbouring chests' (or caskets, as you say in America), 'confounded in a time of Civil Fury, reposes what dust is left of—' Ah, good afternoon, Mr. Simeon! This young lady has laid forcible hands on me to give her an object-lesson in English history. Do you, who know ten times more of the Cathedral than I, come to my aid."

"If you are looking for King Alfred," answered Mr. Simeon, beaming on Corona through his glasses, "there's a tradition that his dust lies in the second chest to the right . . . a tradition only. No one really knows."

Corona shifted her position some six paces to the right, and tilted her gaze up at the coffer as though she would crick her neck.

"Aye, missie"—Mr. Simeon still beamed—"they're up there, the royal ones—Dane and Norman and Angevin; and not one to match the great Anglo-Saxon that was father of us all."

Brother Copas grunted impatiently.

"My good Simeon, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! God forbid that one should decry such a man as Alfred was. But the pedantry of Freeman and his sect, who tried to make 'English' a conterminous name and substitute for 'Anglo-Saxon,' was only by one degree less offensive than the ignorance of your modern journalist who degrades Englishmen by writing them down (or up, the poor fool imagines) as Anglo-Saxons. In truth, King Alfred was a noble fellow. No one in history has struggled more pluckily to rekindle fire in an effete race or to put spirit into an effete literature by pretending that both were of the prime."

"Come, come," murmured Mr. Simeon, smiling. "I see you are off upon one of your hobbies. . . . But you will not tell me that the fine rugged epic of Beowulf, to which the historians trace back all that is noblest in our poetry, had lost its generative impulse even so early as Alfred's time. That were too extravagant!"

"Brekekekex, ten brink, ten brink!" snapped Brother Copas. "All the frogs in chorus around Charon's boat! Fine rugged fiddlestick—have you ever read Beowulf?"

"In translation only."

"You need not be ashamed of labour saved. I once spent a month or two in mastering Anglo-Saxon, having a suspicion of Germans when they talk about English literature, and a deeper suspicion of English critics who ape them. Then I tackled Beowulf, and found it to be what I guessed—no rugged national epic at all, but a blown-out bag of bookishness. Impulse? Generative impulse?—the thing is wind, I tell you, without sap or sinew, the production of some conscientious Anglo-Saxon whose blue eyes, no doubt, watered with the effort of inflating it. I'll swear it never drew a human tear otherwise. . . . That's what the whole Anglo-Saxon race had become when Alfred arose to galvanise 'em for a while—a herd of tall, flabby, pale-eyed men, who could neither fight, build, sing, nor enforce laws. And so our England—wise as Austria in mating—turned to other nuptials and married William the Norman. Behold then a new breed; the country covered with sturdy, bullet-headed, energetic fellows, who are no sooner born than they fly to work—hammers going, scaffolds climbing; cities, cathedrals springing up by magic; and all to a new song that came with some imported workmen from the Provence—"

'Quan la douss' aura venta Deves vostre pays'—

"And so—pop!—down the wind goes your pricked bladder of a Beowulf: down the wind that blows from the Mediterranean, whence the arts and the best religions come."

Mr. Simeon rubbed the side of his jaw thoughtfully.

"Ah," said he, "I remember Master Blanchminster saying something of the sort the other day. He was talking of wine."

"Yes—the best religions and the best wine: they go together. Could ever an Anglo-Saxon have built that, think you?" demanded Brother Copas with a backward jerk of the head and glance up at the vaulted roof. "But to my moral.—All this talk of Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and the rest is rubbish. We are English by chemical action of a score of interfused bloods. That man is a fool who speaks as though, at this point of time, they could be separated: had he the power to put his nonsense into practice he would be a wicked fool. And so I say, Mr. Simeon, that the Roundheads—no pure Anglo-Saxon, by the way, ever had a round head—who mixed up the dead dust in the caskets aloft there, were really leaving us a sound historical lesson—"

But here Mr. Simeon turned at the sound of a brisk footstep. Dr. Windeatt had just entered by the western door.

"You'll excuse me? I promised the Doctor to blow the organ for him."

"Do people blow upon organs?" asked Corona, suddenly interested. "I thought they played upon them the same as pianos, only with little things that pulled out at the sides."

"Come and see," Mr. Simeon invited her, smiling.

The three went around to the back of the organ loft. By and by when Mr. Simeon began to pump, and after a minute, a quiet adagio, rising upon a throb of air, stole along the aisles as though an angel spoke in it, or the very spirit of the building, tears sprang into the child's eyes and overflowed. She supposed that Mr. Simeon alone was working this miracle. . . . Blinking more tears away, she stared at him, meeting his mild, half-quizzical gaze as he stooped and rose and stooped again over the bellows.

Brother Copas, touching her elbow, signed to her to come away. She obeyed, very reluctantly. By a small doorway in the southern aisle she followed him out into the sunshine of the Cathedral Close.

"But how does he do it?" she demanded. "He doesn't look a bit as if he could do anything like that—not in repose."

Brother Copas eyed her and took snuff. "He and the like of him don't touch the stops, my dear. He and the like of him do better; they supply the afflatus."

O ye holy and humble Men of heart, bless ye the Lord: praise Him, and magnify Him for ever!

Mr. Simeon worked mechanically, heaving and pressing upon the bellows of the great organ. His mind ran upon Master Copas's disparagement of Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxons. It was ever the trouble that he remembered an answer for Brother Copas after Brother Copas had gone. . . . Why had he not bethought him to cite Caedmon, at any rate, against that sweeping disparagement? How went the story?—

Caedmon was a lay brother, a tender of cattle at the Abbey of Whitby under the Abbess Hilda who founded it. Until somewhat spent in years he had never learnt any poems. Therefore at a feast, when all sang in turn, so soon as he saw the harp coming near him, he would rise and leave the table and go home. Once when he had gone thus from the feast to the stables, where he had night-charge of the beasts, as he yielded himself to sleep One stood over him and said, greeting him by name, "Caedmon, sing some song to me." "I cannot sing," he said, "and for this cause left I the feast." "But you shall sing to me," said the Vision. "Lord, what shall I sing?" "Sing the Creation," said the Vision. Caedmon sang, and in the morning remembered what he had sung . . .

"If this indeed happened to Caedmon, and late in life" (mused Mr. Simeon, heaving on the bellows of the great organ), "might not even some such miracle befall me?"

Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thy house, and the place where Thine honour dwelleth.

"I might even write a play," thought Mr. Simeon.



CHAPTER XII.

MR. ISIDORE TAKES CHARGE.

"Uncle Copas," said Corona, as the two passed out through the small doorway in the southern aisle and stood blinking in the sunshine, "I want you next to show me what's left of the old Castle where the kings lived: that is, if you're not tired."

"Tired, child? 'Tis our business—'tis the Brethren's business— to act as guides around the relics of Merchester. By fetching a very small circuit we can take the Castle on our way, and afterwards walk home along the water-meads, my favourite path."

Corona slipped her hand into his confidentially. Together they left the Close, and passing under the King's Gate, turned down College Street, which led them by the brewhouse and outer porch of the great School. A little beyond it, where by a conduit one of the Mere's hurrying tributaries gushed beneath the road, they came to a regiment of noble elms guarding a gateway, into which Brother Copas turned aside. A second and quite unpretentious gateway admitted them to a green meadow, in shape a rough semicircle, enclosed by ruinated walls.

"You may come here most days of the month," said Brother Copas, holding the gate wide, "and never meet a soul. 'Tis the tranquillest, most forsaken spot in the city's ambit."

But here, as Corona caught her breath, he turned and stared. The enclosure was occupied by a squad of soldiers at drill.

They wore uniforms of khaki, and, dressed up with their backs to the gateway, were performing the simple movements of foot drill in face of a choleric sergeant-major, who shouted the words of command, and of a mounted officer who fronted the squad, silent, erect in saddle, upon a strapping bay. Some few paces behind this extremely military pair stood a couple of civilian spectators side by side, in attire— frock-coats, top-hats, white waistcoats—which at a little distance gave them an absurd resemblance to a brace of penguins.

"Heavens!" murmured Brother Copas. "Is it possible that Bamberger has become twins? One never knows of what these Jews are capable. . . ."

His gaze travelled from the two penguins to the horseman in khaki. He put up a shaking hand to shade it.

"Colt? Colt in regimentals? Oh, this must be vertigo!"

At a word from the sergeant-major the squad fell out and stood in loose order, plainly awaiting instructions. Mr. Colt—yes, indeed it was the Chaplain—turned his charger's head half-about as the two frock-coated civilians stepped forward.

"Now, Mr. Bamberger, my men are at your disposal."

"I t'ank you, Reverent Mr. Major—if zat is ze form to address you—" began Mr. Bamberger's double.

"'Major,' tout court, if you please," Mr. Colt corrected him. "One drops the 'reverend' while actually on military duty."

"So? Ach, pardon!—I should haf known. . . Now Ze first is, we get ze angle of view, where to place our Grandt Standt so ze backgrount mek ze most pleasing pigture. At ze same time ze Standt must not tresbass—must not imbinge, hein?—upon our stage, our what-you-call-it area. Two t'ousand berformers—we haf not too mooch room. I will ask you, Mr. Major, first of all to let your men—zey haf tent-pegs, hein?—to let your men peg out ze area as I direct. Afterwards, with your leaf, you shall place z'em here—z'ere—in groups, zat I may see in some sort how ze groups combose, as we say. Himmel! what a backgroundt! Ze Cathedral, how it lifts over ze trees—Bar-fect! Now, if you will follow me a few paces to ze right, here . . . Ach! see yonder, by ze gate! Zat old man in ze red purple poncho—haf ze berformers already begon to aszemble zemselves? . . ."

Mr. Colt slewed his body about in the saddle.

"Eh? . . . Oh, that's Brother Copas, one of our Beauchamp Brethren. Mediaeval he looks, doesn't he? I assure you, sir, we keep the genuine article in Merchester."

"You haf old men dressed like zat? . . . My dear Julius, I see zis Bageant retty-made!"

"It was at St. Hospital—the almshouse for these old fellows—that the notion first came into my head."

"Sblendid! . . . We will haf a Brocession of them; or, it may be, a whole Ebisode. . . . Will you bid him come closer, Mr. Major, zat I may study ze costume in its detail?"

"Certainly." Mr. Colt beckoned to Brother Copas, who came forward still holding Corona by the hand. "Brother Copas, Mr. Isidore Bamberger here—brother of Our Member—desires to make your acquaintance."

"I am honoured," said Brother Copas politely.

"Ach, so!" burst in Mr. Isidore. "I was telling the major how moch I admire zat old costume of yours."

"It is not for sale, however." Brother Copas faced the two Hebrews with his ironical smile. "I am sorry to disappoint you, sirs, but I have no old clothes to dispose of, at present."

"No offence, no offence, I hope?" put in Mr. Julius. "My brother, sir, is an artist—"

"Be easy, sir: I am sure that he intended none. For the rest," pursued Brother Copas with a glance at Mr. Colt and a twinkle, "if we had time, all four of us here, to tell how by choice or necessity we come to be dressed as we are, I dare say our stories might prove amusing as the Calenders' in The Arabian Nights."

"You remind me," said Mr. Isidore, "zat I at any rate must not keep zese good Territorials standing idle. Another time—at your service—"

He waved a hand and hurried off to give an instruction to the sergeant-major. His brother followed and overtook him.

"Damn it all, Isidore! You might remember that Merchester is my constituency, and my majority less than half a hundred."

"Hein? For what else am I here but to helb you to increase it?"

"Then why the devil start by offending that old chap as you did?"

"Eh? I offended him somehow. Zat is certain: zough why on earth he should object to having his dress admired—" Mr. Isidore checked his speech upon a sudden surmise. "My goot Julius, you are not telling me he has a Vote!"

"You silly fool, of course he has!"

"Gott in himmel! I am sorry, Julius. . . . I—I sobbosed, in England, that paupers—"

"State-paupers," corrected his brother. "Private paupers, like the Brethren of St. Hospital, rank as tenants of their living-rooms."

"I shall never gombrehend the institutions of zis country," groaned Mr. Isidore.

"Never mind: make a Pageant of 'em," said his brother grimly. "I'll forgive you this time, if you'll promise me to be more careful."

"I'll do more, Julius. I'll get aroundt ze old boy somehow: mek him bivot-man in a brocession, or something of the sort. I got any amount of tagt, once I know where to use it."

"Smart man, Our Member!" commented Mr. Colt, gazing after the pair. "And Mr. Isidore doesn't let the grass grow under his feet, hey?"

"Has an eye for detail, too," answered Brother Copas, taking snuff. "See him there, upbraiding his brother for want of tact towards a free and independent elector. . . . But—excuse me—for what purpose are these two parcelling out the Castle Meadow?"

"You've not heard? There's a suggestion—and I may claim some share in the credit of it, if credit there be—to hold a Pageant here next summer, a Merchester Pageant. Mr. Bamberger's full of it. What's your idea?"

"A capital notion," said Brother Copas slowly. "Since jam pridem Syrus in Tamesin defluxit Orontes, I commend any attempt to educate Mr. Bamberger and his tribe in the history of this England they invade. But, as you say, this proposed Pageant is news to me. I never seem to hear any gossip. It had not even reached me, Mr. Chaplain, that you were deserting St. Hospital to embrace a military career."

"Nor am I. . . . At Cambridge I ever was an ardent volunteer. Here in Merchester (though this, too, may be news to you) I have for years identified myself with all movements in support of national defence. The Church Lads' Brigade, I may say, owed its inception to me; likewise the Young Communicants' Miniature Rifle Association; and for three successive years our Merchester Boy Scouts have elected me President and Scoutmaster. It has been a dream of my life, Brother Copas, to link up the youth of Britain in preparation to defend the Motherland, pending that system of compulsory National Service which (we all know) must eventually come. And so when Sir John Shaftesbury, as Chairman of our County Territorial Force Association, spoke to the Lord-Lieutenant, who invited me to accept a majority in the Mershire Light Infantry, Second Battalion, Territorial—"

"I can well understand, sir," said Brother Copas, as Mr. Colt drew breath; "and I thank you for telling me so much. No wonder Sir John enlisted such energy as yours! Yet—to be equally frank with you—I am sorry."

"You disapprove of National Service?"

"I approve of it with all my heart. Every young man should prepare himself to fight, at call, for his country. But the devotion should be voluntary."

"Ah, but suppose our young men will not? Suppose they prefer to attend football matches—"

"That, sir—if I may respectfully suggest it—is your business to prevent. And I might go on to suggest that the clergy, by preaching compulsory military service, lay themselves open, as avowed supporters of 'law and order,' to a very natural suspicion. We will suppose that you get your way, and every young Briton is bound, on summons, to mobilise. We will further suppose a Conservative Government in power, and confronted with a devastating strike—shall we say a railwaymen's strike? What more easy than to call out one-half of the strikers on service and oblige them, under pain of treason, to coerce the other half? Do you suppose that this nation will ever forget Hounslow Heath?"

"Let us, then," said Mr. Colt, "leave arguing this question of compulsory National Service until another occasion, when I shall hope to convince you. For the moment you'll allow it to be every man's duty, as a citizen, to carry arms for his country?"

"Every man's, certainly—if by that you exclude priests."

"Why exclude priests?"

"Because a priest, playing at warfare, must needs be mixing up things that differ. As I see it, Mr. Colt, your Gospel forbids warfare; and if you consent to follow an army, your business is to hold a cross above human strife and point the eyes of the dying upward, to rest on it, thus rebuking men's passions with a vision of life's ultimate peace."

"Yet a Bishop of Beauvais (as I read) once thought it not unmeet to charge with a mace at the head of a troop; and our own dear Archbishop Maclagan of York, as everyone knows, was once lieutenant in a cavalry regiment!"

"Oh, la, la!" chuckled Brother Copas. "Be off, then, to your Territorials, Mr. Chaplain! I see Mr. Isidore, yonder, losing his temper with the squad as only an artist can. . . . But—believe an old man, dear sir—you on your horse are not only misreading the Sermon but mistaking the Mount!"

Mr. Colt rode off to his squad, and none too soon; for the men, startled by Mr. Isidore's sudden onslaught of authority and the explosive language in which he ordered them hither and thither, cursing one for his slowness with the measuring-tape, taking another by the shoulders and pushing him into position, began to show signs of mutiny. Mr. Julius Bamberger mopped a perspiring brow as he ran about vainly trying to interpose.

"Isidore, this is damned nonsense, I tell you!"

"You leave 'em to me," panted Mr. Isidore. "Tell me I don't understand managing a crowd like this! It's part of ze method, my goot Julius. Put ze fear of ze Lord into 'em, to start wiz. Zey gromble at first; Zen zey findt zey like it: in the endt zey lof you. Hein? It is not for nozzing zey call me ze Bageant King! . . ."

The old man and the child, left to themselves, watched these operations for a while across the greensward, over which the elms now began to lengthen their shadows.

"The Chaplain was right," said Brother Copas. "Mr. Isidore certainly does not let the grass grow under his feet."

"If I were the grass, I shouldn't want to," said Corona.



CHAPTER XIII.

GARDEN AND LAUNDRY.

"The nasty pigs!"

Nurse Branscome's face, usually composed and business-like (as a nurse's should be), was aflush between honest shame and equally honest scorn.

"To be sure," said Brother Copas soothingly. He had met her by chance in the ambulatory on her way from Brother Bonaday's rooms. On a sudden resolve he had told her of the anonymous letter, not showing it, but conveying (delicately as he might) its substance. "To be sure," he repeated. "But I am thinking—"

"As if I don't know your thoughts!" she interrupted vigorously. "You are thinking that, to save scandal, I had better cease my attendance on Brother Bonaday, and hand over the case to Nurse Turner. That I could do, of course; and if he knows of it, I certainly shall. Have you told him?"

Brother Copas shook his head.

"No. What is more, I have not the smallest intention of telling him."

"Thank you. . . . Oh, but it is vile—vile!"

"So vile that, believe me, I had great difficulty in telling you."

"I am sure you had. . . . I can hand over the case to Nurse Turner, of course; in fact, it came on her rota, but she asked me as a favour to take it, having her hands full just then with Brother Royle and Brother Dasent's rheumatics. It will be hard, though, to give up the child." Nurse Branscome flushed again. "Oh, yes—you are a gentleman, Brother Copas, and will not misunderstand! I have taken a great liking for the child, and she will ask questions if I suddenly desert her. You see the fix? . . . Besides, Nurse Turner—I hope I am not becoming like one of these people, but I must say it—Nurse Turner has not a nice mind."

"There we get at it," said Brother Copas. "As a fact, you were far from reading my thoughts just now. They did not (forgive me) concern themselves with you or your wisest line of conduct. You are a grown woman, and know well enough that honesty will take care of its own in the end. I was thinking rather of Corona. As you say, she has laid some hold upon the pair of us. She has a pathetic belief in all the inmates of St. Hospital—and God pity us if our corruption infects this child! . . . You take me?"