By What Authority? by Robert Hugh Benson (large ebook reader txt) 📖

had attacked him. All day long he was sinking. About eleven o'clock that night he fell asleep, apparently, and Lady Maxwell, who had watched incessantly, was persuaded to lie down; but at three o'clock in the morning, on the first of December, Mistress Margaret awakened her, and together they knelt by the bedside of the old man. The priest, who had anointed him on the previous evening, knelt behind, repeating the prayers for the dying.

Sir Nicholas lay on his back, supported by pillows, under the gloom of the black old four-posted bed. A wood-fire glowed on the hearth, and the air was fragrant with the scent of the burning cedar-logs. A crucifix was in the old man's hands; but his eyes were bright with fever, and his fingers every now and then relaxed, and then tightened their hold again on the cool silver of the figure of the crucified Saviour. His lips were moving tremulously, and his ruddy old face was pale now.

The priest's voice went on steadily; the struggle was beginning.

"Proficiscere, anima christiana, de hoc mundo.--Go forth, Christian soul, from this world in the name of God the Father Almighty, who created thee; in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Who suffered for thee; in the name of the Holy Ghost, who was shed forth upon thee; In the name of Angels and Archangels; in the name of Thrones and Dominions; in the name of Principalities and Powers----"

Suddenly the old man, whose head had been slowly turning from side to side, ceased his movement, and his open mouth closed; he was looking steadily at his wife, and a look of recognition came back to his eyes.

"Sweetheart," he said; and smiled, and died.

* * * *


Isabel did not see much of Mistress Margaret for the next few days; she was constantly with her sister, and when she came to the Dower House now and then, said little to the girl. There were curious rumours in the village; strangers came and went continually, and there was a vast congregation at the funeral, when the body of the old knight was laid to rest in the Maxwell chapel. The following day the air of mystery deepened; and young Mrs. Melton whispered to Isabel, with many glances and becks, that she and her man had seen lights through the chapel windows at three o'clock that morning. Isabel went into the chapel presently to visit the grave, and there was a new smear of black on the east wall as if a taper had been set too near.

The courier who had been despatched to announce to Hubert that his father had died and left him master of the Hall and estate, with certain conditions, returned at the end of the month with the news that the fleet had sailed again on the thirteenth, and that Hubert was gone with it; so Lady Maxwell, now more silent and retired than ever, for the present retained her old position and Mr. Piers took charge of the estate.

Although Isabel outwardly was very little changed in the last six years, great movements had been taking place in her soul, and if Hubert had only known the state of the case, possibly he would not have gone so hastily with Mr. Drake.

The close companionship of such an one as Mistress Margaret was doing its almost inevitable work; and the girl had been learning that behind the brilliant and even crude surface of the Catholic practice, there lay still and beautiful depths of devotion which she had scarcely dreamed of. The old nun's life was a revelation to Isabel; she heard from her bed in the black winter mornings her footsteps in the next room, and soon learnt that Mistress Margaret spent at least two hours in prayer before she appeared at all. Two or three times in the day she knew that she retired again for the same purpose, and again an hour after she was in bed, there were the same gentle movements next door. She began to discover, too, that for the Catholic, as well as for the Puritan, the Person of the Saviour was the very heart of religion; that her own devotion to Christ was a very languid flame by the side of the ardent inarticulate passion of this soul who believed herself His wedded spouse; and that the worship of the saints and the Blessed Mother instead of distracting the love of the Christian soul rather seemed to augment it. The King of Love stood, as she fancied sometimes, to Catholic eyes, in a glow of ineffable splendour; and the faces of His adoring Court reflected the ruddy glory on all sides; thus refracting the light of their central Sun, instead of, as she had thought, obscuring it.

Other difficulties, too, began to seem oddly unreal and intangible, when she had looked at them in the light of Mistress Margaret's clear old eyes and candid face. It was a real event in her inner life when she first began to understand what the rosary meant to Catholics. Mistress Corbet had told her what was the actual use of the beads; and how the mysteries of Christ's life and death were to be pondered over as the various prayers were said; but it had hitherto seemed to Isabel as if this method were an elaborate and superstitious substitute for reading the inspired record of the New Testament.

She had been sitting out in the little walled garden in front of the Dower House one morning on an early summer day after her father's death, and Mistress Margaret had come out in her black dress and stood for a moment looking at her irresolutely, framed in the dark doorway. Then she had come slowly across the grass, and Isabel had seen for the first time in her fingers a string of ivory beads. Mistress Margaret sat down on a garden chair a little way from her, and let her hands sink into her lap, still holding the beads. Isabel said nothing, but went on reading. Presently she looked up again, and the old lady's eyes were half-closed, and her lips just moving; and the beads passing slowly through her fingers. She looked almost like a child dreaming, in spite of her wrinkles and her snowy hair; the pale light of a serene soul lay on her face. This did not look like the mechanical performance that Isabel had always associated with the idea of beads. So the minutes passed away; every time that Isabel looked up there was the little white face with the long lashes lying on the cheek, and the crown of snowy hair and lace, and the luminous look of a soul in conscious communion with the unseen.

When the old lady had finished, she twisted the beads about her fingers and opened her eyes. Isabel had an impulse to speak.

"Mistress Margaret," she said, "may I ask you something?"

"Of course, my darling," the old lady said.

"I have never seen you use those before--I cannot understand them."

"What is it," asked the old lady, "that you don't understand?"

"How can prayers said over and over again like that be any good?"

Mistress Margaret was silent for a moment.

"I saw young Mrs. Martin last week," she said, "with her little girl in her lap. Amy had her arms round her mother's neck, and was being rocked to and fro; and every time she rocked she said 'Oh, mother.'"

"But then," said Isabel, after a moment's silence, "she was only a child."

"'Except ye become like little children--'" quoted Mistress Margaret softly--"you see, my Isabel, we are nothing more than children with God and His Blessed Mother. To say 'Hail Mary, Hail Mary,' is the best way of telling her how much we love her. And then this string of beads is like Our Lady's girdle, and her children love to finger it, and whisper to her. And then we say our paternosters, too; and all the while we are talking she is shewing us pictures of her dear Child, and we look at all the great things He did for us, one by one; and then we turn the page and begin again."

"I see," said Isabel; and after a moment or two's silence Mistress Margaret got up and went into the house.

The girl sat still with her hands clasped round her knee. How strange and different this religion was to the fiery gospel she had heard last year at Northampton from the harsh stern preacher, at whose voice a veil seemed to rend and show a red-hot heaven behind! How tender and simple this was--like a blue summer's sky with drifting clouds! If only it was true! If only there were a great Mother whose girdle was of beads strung together, which dangled into every Christian's hands; whose face bent down over every Christian's bed; and whose mighty and tender arms that had held her Son and God were still stretched out beneath her other children. And Isabel, whose soul yearned for a mother, sighed as she reminded herself that there was but "one Mediator between God and man--the man, Christ Jesus."

And so the time went by, like an outgoing tide, silent and steady. The old nun did not talk much to the girl about dogmatic religion, for she was in a difficult position. She was timid certainly of betraying her faith by silence, but she was also timid of betraying her trust by speech. Sometimes she felt she had gone too far, sometimes not far enough; but on the whole her practice was never to suggest questions, but only to answer them when Isabel asked; and to occupy herself with affirmative rather than with destructive criticism. More than this she hesitated to do out of honour for the dead; less than this she dared not do out of love for God and Isabel. But there were three or four conversations that she felt were worth waiting for; and the look on Isabel's face afterwards, and the sudden questions she would ask sometimes after a fit of silence, made her friend's heart quicken towards her, and her prayers more fervent.

The two were sitting together one December day in Isabel's upstairs room and the girl, who had just come in from a solitary walk, was half kneeling on the window-seat and drumming her fingers softly on the panes as she looked out at the red western sky.

"I used to think," she said, "that Catholics had no spiritual life; but now it seems to me that in comparison we Puritans have none. You know so much about the soul, as to what is from God and what from the Evil One; and we have to grope for ourselves. And yet our Saviour said that His sheep should know His voice. I do not understand it." And she turned towards Mistress Margaret who had laid down her work and was listening.

"Dear child," she said, "if you mean our priests and spiritual writers, it is because they study it. We believe in the science of the soul; and we consult our spiritual guides for our soul's health, as the leech for our body's health."

"But why must you ask the priest, if the Lord speaks to all alike?"

"He speaks through the priest, my dear, as He does through the physician."

"But why should the priest know