Part 73 (1/2)

Father Joseph Edward was a hidden force in the Church or England. He was a peer's son who had flashed out at Oxford, fifteen years before, as one of the cleverest, wildest, most brilliant and devil-may-care undergraduates who had ever been at ”The House.” Both by reason of wealth and position, but also by considered action, he had escaped authoritative condemnation and had been allowed to take his first in Lit. Hum.

But, as every one knew at his time Adrian Rathlone had been one of the wildest, wealthiest and wickedest young men of his generation.

And then, as all the world heard, Adrian Rathlone had taken Holy Orders. He had worked in the East End of London for a time, and had then founded his Cornish Monastery by permission of the Chapter and Bishop of Truro.

From the far west of England, where She stretches out her granite foot to spurn the onslaught of the Atlantic, it had become known that broken and contrite hearts might leave London and life, to seek, and find Peace upon the purple moors of the West.

”But now, John,” the Bishop said to Morton Sims, ”I want to tell you something. I want to explain a very important alteration in the agenda.

There was no doubt about it whatever, the Bishop's usually calm and suave voice was definitely disturbed.

He and Morton Sims bent over the table together looking at the printed paper.

The Bishop had a fat gold pencil case in his hand and was pointing to names upon the programme.

Mrs. Daly, from her seat by the fire, watched her friend, Morton Sims, with _his_ friend, William Denisthorpe Moultrie, Father in G.o.d, with immense interest. She was interested extremely in the Bishop's obvious perturbation, but even more so to see these two celebrated men standing together and calling each other by their Christian names like boys. She knew that they had been at Harrow and Oxford together, she knew that despite their disagreements upon many points they had always been fast friends.

”What boys nice men are after all,” she thought with a slight sympathetic contraction of her throat. ”'William'! 'John'!--Our men in America are not very often like that--but what, what is the Bishop saying?”

Her face became almost rigid with attention as she caught a certain name. Even as she did so the Bishop spoke in an undertone to Morton Sims, and then glanced slightly in her direction with a hint of a question in his eyes.

”Mrs. Daly, William,” Morton Sims said, ”is on the Committee. She is one of my greatest friends and, perhaps, the greatest friend Edith has in the world. She was also a great friend of Mrs. Lothian and knew her well. You need not have the slightest hesitation in saying anything you wish before her.”

Julia Daly rose from her seat, her heart was beating strangely.

”What is this?” she said in her gentle, but almost regal way. ”Why, my lord, the doctor and I were only talking of Gilbert Lothian and his saintly wife a moment or two ago. Have you news of the poet?”

The Bishop, still with his troubled, anxious face, turned to her with a faint smile. ”I did not know, Mrs. Daly,” he said, ”that you took any interest in Lothian, but yes, I have news.”

”Then you can solve the mystery?” Julia Daly said.

The Bishop sighed. ”If you mean,” he said, ”why Mr. Lothian has disappeared from the world for a year, I can at least tell you what he has been doing. John here tells me that you have known all about him, so that I am violating no confidences. After his wife's death, poor Lothian became very seriously ill in consequence of his excesses. He was cured eventually, but one night--it was late at night in Norfolk--some one, quite unlike the Gilbert Lothian I had known, came to my house. It was like a ghost coming. He told me many strange and terrible things, and hinted that he could have told me more, though I forbade him. With every appearance of contrition, with his face streaming with tears--ah, if ever during my career as a Priest I have seen a broken and a contrite heart I saw it then--he wished, he told me, to work out his soul's release, to go away from the world utterly and to fight the Fiend Alcohol. He would go into no home, would submit to no legal restraint. He wished to fight the devil that possessed him with no other aids than spiritual ones. I sent him to Father Joseph Edward.”

”And he has cured himself?” the American lady said in a tone which so rang and vibrated through the Committee room, with eyes in which such gladness was dawning, that the three men there looked at her as if they had seen a vision.

The monkish-looking clergyman replied.

”Quite cured,” he said gravely. ”He is saved in body and saved in soul.

You say his wife, Madam, was a Saint: I think, Madam, that our friend is not very far from it now.”

He stopped suddenly, almost jerkily, and his dark, somewhat saturnine face became watchful and with a certain fear in it.

What all this might mean John Morton Sims was at a loss to understand.

That it meant something, something very out of the ordinary, he was very well aware. William Moultrie was not himself--that was very evident.

And he had brought this odd, mediaeval parson with him for some special reason. Morton Sims was not very sympathetic toward the Middle Age.

Spoken to-day the word ”Abbot” or ”Father”--used ecclesiastically--always affected him with slight disgust.

Nevertheless, he nodded to the Bishop and turned to Mrs. Daly.