Volume Ii Part 26 (2/2)
For a few minutes. Then this exquisite and magical effect broke up. The lighting spread through the church, became commonplace, showed the pompous lines of capital and cornice, the bad sculpture in the niches. A procession entered, and the service began.
Laura dropped on her knees. But she was no longer in London, in the Oratory church. She was far away, in the chapel of an old northern house, where the walls glowed with strange figures, and a dark crucifix hovered austerely above the altar. She saw the small scattered congregation; Father Bowles's grey head and blanched, weak face; Augustina in her long widow's veil; the Squire in his corner. The same words were being said there now, at this same hour. She looked at her watch, then hid her eyes again, tortured with a sick yearning.
But when she came out, twenty minutes later, her step was more alert. For a little while, she had been almost happy.
That night, after the returned travellers had finished their supper, the doctor was in a talking mood. He had an old friend with him a thinker and historian like himself. Both of them had lately come across ”Leadham of Trinity”--the convert and Jesuit, who was now engaged upon an important Catholic memoir, and was settled for a time, within reach of Cambridge libraries.
”You knew Father Leadham in the north, Miss Laura?” asked the doctor, as the girls came into the drawing-room.
Laura started.
”I saw him two or three times,” she said, as she made her way to the warm but dark corner near the fire. ”Is he in Cambridge?”
The doctor nodded.
”Come to embrace us all--breathing benediction on learning and on science! There has been a Catholic Congress somewhere.”--He looked at his friend. ”That will show us the way!”
The friend--a small, lively-eyed, black-bearded man, just returned from some theological work in a German university--threw back his head and laughed good-humouredly.
The talk turned on Catholic learning old and new; on the a.s.sumptions and limitations of it; on the forms taken by the most recent Catholic Apologetic; and so, like a vessel descending a great river, pa.s.sed out at last, steered by Friedland, among the breakers of first principles.
As a rule the doctor talked in paradox and ellipse. He threw his sentences into air, and let them find their feet as they could.
But to-day, unconsciously, his talk took a tone that was rare with him--became prophetical, pontifical--a.s.sumed a note of unction. And often, as Molly noticed, with a slight instinctive gesture--a fatherly turning towards that golden spot made by Laura's hair among the shadows.
His friend fell silent after a while--watching Friedland with small sharp eyes. He had come there to discuss a new edition of Sidonius Apollinaris,--was himself one of the driest and acutest of investigators.
All this talk for babes seemed to him the merest waste of time.
Friedland, however, with a curious feeling, let himself be carried away by it.
A little Catholic manual of Church history had fallen into his hands that morning. His fingers played with it as it lay on the table, and with the pages of a magazine beside it that contained an article by Father Leadham.
No doubt some common element in the two had roused him.----
”The Catholic war with history,” he said, ”is perennial! History, in fact, is the great rationalist; and the Catholic conscience is scandalised by her. And so we have these pitiful little books--” he laid his hand on the volume beside him--”which simply expunge history, or make it afresh. And we have a piece of Jesuit _apologia_, like this paper of Leadham's--so charming, in a sense, so scholarly! And yet one feels through it a cry of the soul--the Catholic arraignment of history, that she is what she is!”
”You'll find it in Newman--often,” said the black-bearded man suddenly--and he ran through a list of pa.s.sages, rapidly, in the student's way.
”Ah! Newman!” said Friedland with vivacity. ”This morning I read over that sermon of his he delivered to the Oscott Synod, after the re-establishment of the Hierarchy--you remember it, Dalton?--What a flow and thunder in the sentences!--what an elevation in the thought! Who would not rather lament with Newman, than exult with Froude?--But here again, it is history that is the rationalist--not we poor historians!
”... Why was England lost to the Church? Because Henry was a villain?--because the Tudor bishops were slaves and poltroons? Does Leadham, or any other rational man really think so?”
The little black man nodded. He did not think it worth while to speak.
But Friedland went on enlarging, with his hand on his Molly's head--looking into her quiet eyes.
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