The Avesham family manner of attending Cathedral was characteristic. Miss Fortescue was always the first to start, and she reached her seat in the choir five minutes before service began. She took with her a Bible, a prayer-book, and a large tune hymn-book, and frowned abstractedly at them all. Jeannie started about seven minutes after her, and was almost invariably just late, so that she had to sit in the nave close to the choir. Arthur considered it sufficient to arrive during the first lesson, and he sat at the far end of the nave, where he could hear nothing but the singing. It followed, therefore, as a corollary that he left before the sermon. Jack on this particular morning proposed to stay at home and go to the afternoon service. Thus, when Arthur came through the garden on his way to the first lesson, he found him[177] in a large chair underneath the mulberry-tree. He paused a moment.
“Would it seem more hospitable if I didn’t go to Cathedral?” he asked. “Remember, I rank hospitality very high among the cardinal virtues.”
“Be honest,” said Jack.
“Then perhaps I had better go to Cathedral,” he said. “But you might have made it easier for me to stop. Well, good-bye; I shall come out before the sermon.”
“I shall devote the time to silent meditation,” said Jack. “Where shall I find cigarettes? I’ve run out.”
“In the smoking-room. But it’s distinctly bad manners to talk about cigarettes to a fellow on his way to church. Have a novel and an iced drink, too, won’t you? Don’t mind me.”
Arthur made his reluctant way across the lawn and disappeared. If Jack had been obliged to be perfectly honest too he would have had to confess that he bore the prospect of a solitary hour with perfect equanimity. He had several things to think about, and he could do it best alone. In the first place, he[178] had received that morning a note from his mother asking him to tear up the letter she had written him, when he received it, unread. Also she would like to see him again before he left Wroxton. This note occupied Jack’s thoughts not a little. When Jeannie had broken in upon his meditations on the bridge the evening before he was doing his best not to draw conclusions, not to formulate in his own mind what his relations with his mother were. He had not known how their talk had moved her, and it was only natural that he should not. For Mrs. Collingwood’s deepest emotions were founded on the cardinal virtues, and the more she was moved the more passionately she felt and expressed horror of what was wrong, and to Jack, with his antipodal nature, this had appeared like hardness. He had wronged her, but his mistake was excusable. For with him, the more his emotions were touched the more human and indulgent he became—a dangerous development, no doubt, but, luckily for the kindliness of the world, a common one, and certainly one that is lovable if we are not too censoriously moral. That Frank should so have[179] failed to act up to the proper reasonable code made him feel the more tenderly toward him, though he regretted it. It was otherwise with his mother. A lapse of this kind blotted tenderness from her mind; had it happened to one she loved, the more complete would have been her horror. The attitude of neither mother nor son is ideal, but the resultant leaves nothing wanting.
This request, then, to tear up the letter unread seemed to him of good omen. His mother, he knew, had felt strongly about this picture of Jeannie, and her letter would not have been pleasant reading. But he did her the justice not even to question whether it had not been written with the most utter obedience to her notion of duty. She was never unkind from carelessness or anger; or, rather, if she was unkind from anger, the anger was never of a brutish or selfish sort. Thus he hoped that their interview would develop her idea that the letter should be unread.
But this was not the sum of the task of meditation. More intricate even and more absorbing was the remainder. He assured[180] himself, and believed his own assurance, that he was not falling in love; but when a man has to tell himself that it is doubtful whether he is any longer a fit person to decide. That radiant presence he had first met on the plank bridge was no longer a subject for sketches. She had stepped down (or up) from the platform of “subjects,” and had taken him by the hand. She had become, in fact, that ever agitating thing, a woman. Jack had been often agitated before, and took it as a doubtful boon. He had never indulged in those maudlin sentiments which place our human emotions on a pedestal, as it were, in an otherwise empty room. To be married ideally did not, according to him, mean an ideal life, if all else was to be sacrificed for that; and the man who gave up the whole world for a woman he loved was as incomplete as a man who gave up the woman he loved for the whole world. Still less was love a plaything to him. If it was not all-absorbing, it was not therefore nothing more than a pleasant amusement. More hopeless still was the common case of men who seem to regard it as a mere amusement, and yet devote their whole[181] life to it. Never did extremes meet more deplorably.
The truth lay beyond and between all these things. Every man had his work to do in the world; Jack at any rate made no question about that. To certain men and women came a great gift, a gift no less than the completion of their nature by fusion with another. It did not come to all, and whether it came or not there remained the stubborn fact that one had still one’s work to do. It was no use saying that love is the greatest thing in the world, or that it is stronger than death. For so, if we look at it aright, is the steam-engine. It must not be supposed that these chill reflections were rehearsed in Jack’s mind as he sat under the mulberry-tree that morning. They are given here merely to show the outcome of his previous thoughts on the subject, that the reader may be enabled to realize the starting-point from which his meditations began racing, the ground-colour of the piece on which perhaps the gold thread would be traced, the nature of the soil from which the mysterious seed would draw its nourishment. In intellectual and artistic matters he was[182] vivid, quick, fastidious, but sympathetic and, above all, almost incapable of accepting a thing as proved unless he had practical experience of it. And just as he would have denied with his utmost cheerfulness the claim of Raphael to be a great painter, unless he so considered him after looking at his pictures, so he would take no ideal of love as his own because it had been the ideal of great and good men.
He got up from his chair and looked out over the shining garden. The quiet peacefulness of a Sunday morning was in the air; hardly a breath of wind swayed the tall single dahlias, and the heavy heads of the sunflowers drooped. The great, quiet trees of the close, old but unaged, seemed a guarantee for the safety of the world, and the gray Cathedral numbered centuries to their decades. Yet, in spite of the suggestion of secure tranquility which the whole view offered, Jack felt excited and almost frightened.
“Who knows, who knows?” he said, half aloud. He paused a moment, and then walked forward, half laughing at himself.
“Falling in love is a common enough ex[183]perience,” he thought, “and it is not to be treated as a tragedy. But I cannot think of it as a comedy.”
Miss Fortescue, it appeared at lunch, had thought deeply on questions of ritual, or if she had not previously thought deeply, it apparently did not stand in the way of her speaking strongly. A reredos, it seemed, was a synonym for idolatry, and the absence of an extra candle on the altar was the only plank, so to speak, which saved the English Church from being immerged in the bottomless sea of Romanism. She proposed, as an experiment, to make an offer to the chapter that she would present to the Cathedral a small chapel in honour of St. Joseph, to be erected at her expense, if they would build a corresponding one to the Virgin, and felt no doubt that the thanks and acquiescence of the Cathedral body would be accorded to her and her proposal. The ingenuity with which she twisted the arguments of the other side to tell in her favour was truly remarkable, and when, at the end of a hot half-hour, she raised her eyes to the ceiling, she was not the only person present who was grateful for a[184] respite. She had already reduced Jack to such confusion............