The Black Robe Part 28

Father Benwell--"all things to all men"--cheerfully accepted a cigar from the box on the table.

"Father Benwell possesses all the social virtues," Mr. Winterfield ran on. "He shall have his coffee, and the largest sugar-basin that the hotel can produce. I can quite understand that your literary labors have tried your nerves," he said to Romayne, when he had ordered the coffee.

"The mere t.i.tle of your work overwhelms an idle man like me. 'The Origin of Religions'--what an immense subject! How far must we look back to find out the first wors.h.i.+pers of the human family?--Where are the hieroglyphics, Mr. Romayne, that will give you the earliest information?

In the unknown center of Africa, or among the ruined cities of Yucatan?

My own idea, as an ignorant man, is that the first of all forms of wors.h.i.+p must have been the wors.h.i.+p of the sun. Don't be shocked, Father Benwell--I confess I have a certain sympathy with sun-wors.h.i.+p. In the East especially, the rising of the sun is surely the grandest of all objects--the visible symbol of a beneficent Deity, who gives life, warmth and light to the world of his creation."

"Very grand, no doubt," remarked Father Benwell, sweetening his coffee.

"But not to be compared with the n.o.ble sight at Rome, when the Pope blesses the Christian world from the balcony of St. Peter's."

"So much for professional feeling!" said Mr. Winterfield. "But, surely, something depends on what sort of man the Pope is. If we had lived in the time of Alexander the Sixth, would you have called _him_ a part of that n.o.ble sight?"

"Certainly--at a proper distance," Father Benwell briskly replied. "Ah, you heretics only know the worst side of that most unhappy pontiff! Mr.

Winterfield, we have every reason to believe that he felt (privately) the truest remorse."

"I should require very good evidence to persuade me of it."

This touched Romayne on a sad side of his own personal experience.

"Perhaps," he said, "you don't believe in remorse?"

"Pardon me," Mr. Winterfield rejoined, "I only distinguish between false remorse and true remorse. We will say no more of Alexander the Sixth, Father Benwell. If we want an ill.u.s.tration, I will supply it, and give no offense. True remorse depends, to my mind, on a man's accurate knowledge of his own motives--far from a common knowledge, in my experience. Say, for instance, that I have committed some serious offense--"

Romayne could not resist interrupting him. "Say you have killed one of your fellow-creatures," he suggested.

"Very well. If I know that I really meant to kill him, for some vile purpose of my own; and if (which by no means always follows) I am really capable of feeling the enormity of my own crime--that is, as I think, true remorse. Murderer as I am, I have, in that case, some moral worth still left in me. But if I did _not_ mean to kill the man--if his death was my misfortune as well as his--and if (as frequently happens) I am nevertheless troubled by remorse, the true cause lies in my own inability fairly to realize my own motives--before I look to results. I am the ignorant victim of false remorse; and if I will only ask myself boldly what has blinded me to the true state of the case, I shall find the mischief due to that misdirected appreciation of my own importance which is nothing but egotism in disguise."

"I entirely agree with you," said Father Benwell; "I have had occasion to say the same thing in the confessional."

Mr. Winterfield looked at his dog, and changed the subject. "Do you like dogs, Mr. Romayne?" he asked. "I see my spaniel's eyes saying that he likes you, and his tail begging you to take some notice of him."

Romayne caressed the dog rather absently.

His new friend had unconsciously presented to him a new view of the darker aspect of his own life. Winterfield's refined, pleasant manners, his generous readiness in placing the treasures of his library at a stranger's disposal, had already appealed irresistibly to Romayne's sensitive nature. The favorable impression was now greatly strengthened by the briefly bold treatment which he had just heard of a subject in which he was seriously interested. "I must see more of this man," was his thought, as he patted the companionable spaniel.

Father Benwell's trained observation followed the vivid changes of expression on Romayne's face, and marked the eager look in his eyes as he lifted his head from the dog to the dog's master. The priest saw his opportunity and took it.

"Do you remain long at Ten Acres Lodge?" he said to Romayne.

"I hardly know as yet. We have no other plans at present."

"You inherit the place, I think, from your late aunt, Lady Berrick?"

"Yes."

The tone of the reply was not encouraging; Romayne felt no interest in talking of Ten Acres Lodge. Father Benwell persisted.

"I was told by Mrs. Eyrecourt," he went on "that Lady Berrick had some fine pictures. Are they still at the Lodge?"

"Certainly. I couldn't live in a house without pictures."

Father Benwell looked at Winterfield. "Another taste in common between you and Mr. Romayne," he said, "besides your liking for dogs."

This at once produced the desired result. Romayne eagerly invited Winterfield to see his pictures. "There are not many of them," he said.

"But they are really worth looking at. When will you come?"

"The sooner the better," Winterfield answered, cordially. "Will to-morrow do--by the noonday light?"

"Whenever you please. Your time is mine."

Among his other accomplishments, Father Benwell was a chess-player. If his thoughts at that moment had been expressed in language, they would have said, "Check to the queen."

CHAPTER IV.

THE END OF THE HONEYMOON.

ON the next morning, Winterfield arrived alone at Romayne's house.

Having been included, as a matter of course, in the invitation to see the pictures, Father Benwell had made an excuse, and had asked leave to defer the proposed visit. From his point of view, he had nothing further to gain by being present at a second meeting between the two men--in the absence of Stella. He had it on Romayne's own authority that she was in constant attendance on her mother, and that her husband was alone.

"Either Mrs. Eyrecourt will get better, or she will die," Father Benwell reasoned. "I shall make constant inquiries after her health, and, in either case, I shall know when Mrs. Romayne returns to Ten Acres Lodge.

After that domestic event, the next time Mr. Winterfield visits Mr.

Romayne, I shall go and see the pictures."

It is one of the defects of a super-subtle intellect to trust too implicitly to calculation, and to leave nothing to chance. Once or twice already Father Benwell had been (in the popular phrase) a little too clever--and chance had thrown him out. As events happened, chance was destined to throw him out once more.

Of the most modest pretensions, in regard to numbers and size, the pictures collected by the late Lady Berrick were masterly works of modern art. With few exceptions, they had been produced by the matchless English landscape painters of half a century since. There was no formal gallery here. The pictures were so few that they could be hung in excellent lights in the different living-rooms of the villa. Turner, Constable, Collins, Danby, Callcott, Linnell--the master of Beaupark House pa.s.sed from one to the other with the enjoyment of a man who thoroughly appreciated the truest and finest landscape art that the world has yet seen.

"You had better not have asked me here," he said to Romayne, in his quaintly good-humored way. "I can't part with those pictures when I say good-by to-day. You will find me calling here again and again, till you are perfectly sick of me. Look at this sea piece. Who thinks of the brushes and palette of _that_ painter? There, truth to Nature and poetical feeling go hand in hand together. It is absolutely lovely--I could kiss that picture."

They were in Romayne's study when this odd outburst of enthusiasm escaped Winterfield. He happened to look toward the writing-table next.

Some pages of ma.n.u.script, blotted and interlined with corrections, at once attracted his attention.

"Is that the forthcoming history?" he asked. "You are not one of the authors who perform the process of correction mentally--you revise and improve with the pen in your hand."

Romayne looked at him in surprise. "I suspect, Mr. Winterfield, you have used your pen for other purposes than writing letters."

"No, indeed; you pay me an undeserved compliment. When you come to see me in Devons.h.i.+re, I can show you some ma.n.u.scripts, and corrected proofs, left by our great writers, collected by my father. My knowledge of the secrets of the craft has been gained by examining those literary treasures. If the public only knew that every writer worthy of the name is the severest critic of his own book before it ever gets into the hands of the reviewers, how surprised they would be! The man who has worked in the full fervor of composition yesterday is the same man who sits in severe and merciless judgment to-day on what he has himself produced. What a fascination there must be in the Art which exacts and receives such double labor as this?"

Romayne thought--not unkindly--of his wife. Stella had once asked him how long a time he was usually occupied in writing one page. The reply had filled her with pity and wonder. "Why do you take all that trouble?"

she had gently remonstrated. "It would be just the same to the people, darling, if you did it in half the time."

By way of changing the topic, Romayne led his visitor into another room.

"I have a picture here," he said, "which belongs to a newer school of painting. You have been talking of hard work in one Art; there it is in another."

"Yes," said Winterfield, "there it is--the misdirected hard work, which has been guided by no critical faculty, and which doesn't know where to stop. I try to admire it; and I end in pitying the poor artist. Look at that leafless felled tree in the middle distance. Every little twig, on the smallest branch, is conscientiously painted--and the result is like a colored photograph. You don't look at a landscape as a series of separate parts; you don't discover every twig on a tree; you see the whole in Nature, and you want to see the whole in a picture. That canvas presents a triumph of patience and pains, produced exactly as a piece of embroidery is produced, all in little separate bits, worked with the same mechanically complete care. I turn away from it to your shrubbery there, with an ungrateful sense of relief."

He walked to the window as he spoke. It looked out on the grounds in front of the house. At the same moment the noise of rolling wheels became audible on the drive. An open carriage appeared at the turn in the road. Winterfield called Romayne to the window. "A visitor," he began--and suddenly drew back, without saying a word more.

Romayne looked out, and recognized his wife.