Robert Kimberly Part 52

Kimberly made a deprecatory gesture. "My chief affair is to find men to do my work for me. Personally, I am fairly free."

"From all save responsibility, perhaps. I know how hard it is to delegate that. And you give all of your energy to business. You have no family?"

"No, and this brings me to the object of my visit." Kimberly paused a moment. "I shall soon enter into marriage."

"Ah, I see!"

"And the subject is a difficult one to lay before your grace."

The archbishop saw an indefinable embarra.s.sment in his visitor's manner and raised his thin hand. "Then it has every claim to sympathetic consideration. Forget for a moment that I am almost a stranger--I am certainly no stranger to difficulties. And do no longer address me formally. I said a moment ago that I was glad to meet you if only to thank you for your responses to our numerous needs. But there is another reason.

"When I was a young man, first ordained, my charge was the little village of Sunbury up in the lake country. You may imagine how familiar the Kimberly estates became to me in my daily rounds of exercise. I heard much of your people. Some of their households were of my congregation. Your mother I never met. I used to hear of her as exceedingly frail in health. Once, at least, I recall seeing her driving. But her servants at The Towers were always instructed not alone to offer me flowers for the altar but diligently to see that the altar was generously provided from her gardens and hot-houses.

"I once learned," the archbishop's head drooped slightly in the reminiscence and his eyes rested full upon his visitor, "that she was pa.s.sing through a dreaded ordeal, concerning which many feared for her.

It was on a Sunday before ma.s.s that the word came to me. And at the ma.s.s I told my little flock that the patroness to whom we owed our constant offering of altar flowers was pa.s.sing that morning through the valley of the shadow of death, and I asked them to pray for her with me.

You were born on a Sunday, Mr. Kimberly." Kimberly did not break the silence and the archbishop spoke on. "You see I am quite old enough myself to be your father. I remember reading an account of your baptism."

Kimberly looked keenly into the clear, gray eyes. Not a shade of thought in the mind of the man before him was lost upon his penetration.

"Any recollection of my mother," he said slowly, "touches me deeply. To think that you recall her so beautifully is very grateful to me--as you may well imagine. And that was my birthday! Then if my mother was, or I have ever been, able to help you I am sure we are repaid in being so remembered all these years. I lost my father and my mother many years ago----"

He paused. "It is very pleasant to be remembered," he repeated uncertainly, as if collecting himself. "I shall never forget what you have just told me. And I thank you now for the prayers you said for my mother when she brought me into the world. Your grace," he added abruptly, "I am greatly perplexed."

"Tell me frankly, how and why."

"I came here with some confidence of getting what I should ask for. I am naturally a confident man. Yet my a.s.surance deserts me. It seems, suddenly, that my mission here is vain, that my hopes have deluded me--I even ask myself why I have come. I could almost say I am sorry that I have come."

The archbishop lifted his hand to speak. "Believe me, it is not other than for good that you have come," he said.

Kimberly looked at him questioningly. "I cannot tell for what good,"

added the archbishop as if to say he could not answer the unspoken question. "But believe me, you have done right and not wrong in coming--of that I am sure. Tell me, first, what you came to tell me, what it is in your heart that has brought you here."

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

"I must tell you," began Kimberly, "that while seemingly in a wide authority in directing the business with which I am connected I am not always able to do just as I please. Either voluntarily or involuntarily, I yield at times to the views of those a.s.sociated with me. If my authority _is_ final, I prefer not to let the fact obtrude itself. Again, circ.u.mstances are at times too strong for any business man to set his mere personal views against. Yielding some years ago to the representations of my a.s.sociates I took into our companies a group of Western factories controlled by a man whom I distrusted.

"To protect our interests it was necessary to move, in the premises, in one of two ways. I favored the alternative or driving him out of the business then and there. There were difficulties in either direction.

If we ruined him we should be accused of 'trust methods,' of crus.h.i.+ng a compet.i.tor, and should thus incur added public enmity. On the other hand, I contended if the man were untrustworthy he would grow more dangerous with power. I need hardly explain to an intelligent man, regardless of his views on trusts, that any man of integrity, no matter how threatening or violent a compet.i.tor he may be in the beginning, is a man we welcome as an a.s.sociate into our business. We need him just as he needs us--but that is aside. We took the man in----"

"Against your judgment?"

"Against my judgment. I never met him until he came East. My estimates of him were made wholly on his record, and I knew what is known to but few--that he had ruined his own father-in-law, who died a bankrupt directly through this man's machinations, and without ever suspecting him. This seemed to me so unspeakable, so cannibalistic, that I never needed to know anything further of the man. Yet I took him in, determined only to add a new care in watching him and still to keep him in my power so that I could crush him if he ever played false.

"He came to us--and brought his wife. I knew the man thoroughly the instant I set eyes on him. His appearance confirmed my impression. But I met his wife, and found in her a woman to engage respect, homage, and devotion, one with a charm of manner and person to me unequalled; with a modesty coupled with spirit and humor that confounded my ideas of women--a woman, in a word, like my own mother. I am keeping nothing from you----"

"Your confidence is safely bestowed."

"I was moved the moment I saw her. But unhappy experiences had checked and changed me somewhat. I did not disclose my feelings though I already knew how she affected me. If I had misjudged her husband I would make amends--on her account. Then as I watched them the question came to me--how is he treating her? I will make, for her sake, a new judgment of him, I said. But I saw him as indifferent to her as if she did not exist. I saw him neglect her and go out of his way to humiliate her with attentions to women of our circle that were not fit to be her servants. I asked myself whether she could be happy--and I saw that as far as affection was concerned she sat at a hearthstone of ashes.

"Even her religion--she was a Catholic--with petty and contemptible persecutions he had robbed her of. She was wretched and I knew it before I let even her suspect my interest. After that I vacillated, not knowing what I should do. I advanced and retreated in a way I never did before. But one day--it was an accident--her ankle turned as she stepped out of her car and as she fell forward I caught her on my arm.

She repelled me in an instant. But from that moment I determined to win her for my wife."

The archbishop regarded him in silence.

"I am telling you the exact truth. It would profit me nothing to deceive you, nor have I ever deceived myself or her. She fought my persistence with all her strength. I tried to make her see that I was right and she was wrong, and my best aid came from her own husband. I knew it would be said I was to blame. But this man never had made a home in any sense for his wife. And if it could be urged that he ever did do so, it was he, long before I ever saw him, who wrecked it--not his wife--not I."

"You say she was a Catholic. Has this poor child lost her faith?"

Kimberly paused. "I do not know. I should say that whatever her faith was, he robbed her of it."

"Do not say exactly that. You have said we must not deceive ourselves and you are right--this is of first importance. And for this reason alone I say, no one can deprive me of my faith without my consent; if I part with it, I do so voluntarily."

"I understand, quite. Whatever I myself might profess, I feel I should have no difficulty in practising. But here is a delicate woman in the power of a brute. There is an element of coercion which should not be lost sight of and it might worry such a woman out of the possession of her principles. However, whatever the case may be, she does not go to church. She says she never can. But some keen unhappiness lies underneath the reason--if I could explain it I should not be here."

"Has she left her husband?"

"No. He, after one of his periodical fits of abuse, and I suspect violence, left her, and not until he knew he had lost her did he make any effort to claim her again. But he had imperilled her health--it is this that is my chief anxiety--wrecked her happiness, and made himself intolerable by his conduct. She divorced him and is free forever from his brutality.

"So I have come to you. I am to make her my wife--after I had thought never to make any woman my wife--and for me it is a very great happiness. It is a happiness to my brother and my sister. Through it, the home and the family which we believed was fated to die with this generation--my brother is, unhappily, childless--may yet live. Can you understand all this?"

"I understand all."

"Help me in some way to reconcile her religious difficulties, to remove if possible, this source of her unhappiness. Is it asking too much?"

The archbishop clasped his hands. His eyes fixed slowly upon Kimberly.

"You know, do you not, that the Catholic Church cannot countenance the remarriage of a wife while the husband lives."

"I know this. I have a profound respect for the principles that restrain the abuses of divorce. But I am a business man and I know that nothing is impossible of arrangement when it is right that it should be arranged. This, I cannot say too strongly, is the exceptional case and therefore I believe there is a way. If you were to come to me with a difficult problem within the province of my affairs as I come to you bringing one within yours, I should find a means to arrange it--if the case had merit."

"Unhappily, you bring before me a question in which neither the least nor the greatest of the church--neither bishop nor pope--has the slightest discretionary power. The indissolubility of marriage is not a matter of church discipline; it is a law of divine inst.i.tution.

Christ's own words bear no other meaning. 'What G.o.d hath joined together let not man put asunder.' He declared that in restoring the indissolubility of marriage he only reestablished what was from the beginning, though Moses because of Jewish hardness of heart had tolerated a temporary departure. No consent that I could give, Mr.

Kimberly, to a marriage such as you purpose, would in the least alter its status. I am helpless to relieve either of you in contracting it.

"It is true that the church in guarding sacredly the marriage bond is jealous that it shall be a marriage bond that she undertakes to guard.

If there should have been an impediment in this first marriage--but I hardly dare think of it, for the chances are very slender. A prohibited degree of kindred would nullify a marriage. There is nothing of this, I take it. If consent had clearly been lacking--we cannot hope for that.

If her husband never had been baptized----"

"What difference would that make?"

"A Christian could not contract marriage with a pagan--such a union would be null."

"Would a good Catholic enter into such a union?"

"No."

Kimberly shook his head. "Then she would not. If she had been a disgrace to her religion she might have done it. If she had been a woman of less character, less intelligence it might be. If she had been a worse Catholic," he concluded with a tinge of bitterness, "she might stand better now."