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CHAPTER XXXVI - THE APPLE OF DISCORD
Besides Fifine Beck's mother, another power had a word to say to M.
Paul and me, before that covenant of friendship could be ratified. We
were under the surveillance of a sleepless eye: Rome watched jealously
her son through that mystic lattice at which I had knelt once, and to
which M. Emanuel drew nigh month by month--the sliding panel of the
confessional.
"Why were you so glad to be friends with M. Paul?" asks the reader.
"Had he not long been a friend to you? Had he not given proof on proof
of a certain partiality in his feelings?"
Yes, he had; but still I liked to hear him say so earnestly--that he
was my close, true friend; I liked his modest doubts, his tender
deference--that trust which longed to rest, and was grateful when
taught how. He had called me "sister." It was well. Yes; he might call
me what he pleased, so long as he confided in me. I was willing to be
his sister, on condition that he did not invite me to fill that
relation to some future wife of his; and tacitly vowed as he was to
celibacy, of this dilemma there seemed little danger.
Through most of the succeeding night I pondered that evening's
interview. I wanted much the morning to break, and then listened for
the bell to ring; and, after rising and dressing, I deemed prayers and
breakfast slow, and all the hours lingering, till that arrived at last
which brought me the lesson of literature. My wish was to get a more
thorough comprehension of this fraternal alliance: to note with how
much of the brother he would demean himself when we met again; to
prove how much of the sister was in my own feelings; to discover
whether I could summon a sister's courage, and he a brother's
frankness.
He came. Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will
not, match the expectation. That whole day he never accosted me. His
lesson was given rather more quietly than usual, more mildly, and also
more gravely. He was fatherly to his pupils, but he was not brotherly
to me. Ere he left the classe, I expected a smile, if not a word; I
got neither: to my portion fell one nod--hurried, shy.
This distance, I argued, is accidental--it is involuntary; patience,
and it will vanish. It vanished not; it continued for days; it
increased. I suppressed my surprise, and swallowed whatever other
feelings began to surge.
Well might I ask when he offered fraternity--"Dare I rely on you?"
Well might he, doubtless knowing himself, withhold all pledge. True,
he had bid me make my own experiments--tease and try him. Vain
injunction! Privilege nominal and unavailable! Some women might use
it! Nothing in my powers or instinct placed me amongst this brave
band. Left alone, I was passive; repulsed, I withdrew; forgotten--my
lips would not utter, nor my eyes dart a reminder. It seemed there had
been an error somewhere in my calculations, and I wanted for time to
disclose it.
But the day came when, as usual, he was to give me a lesson. One
evening in seven he had long generously bestowed on me, devoting it to
the examination of what had been done in various studies during the
past week, and to the preparation of work for the week in prospect. On
these occasions my schoolroom was anywhere, wherever the pupils and
the other teachers happened to be, or in their close vicinage, very
often in the large second division, where it was easy to choose a
quiet nook when the crowding day pupils were absent, and the few
boarders gathered in a knot about the surveillante's estrade.
On the customary evening, hearing the customary hour strike, I
collected my books and papers, my pen and ink, and sought the large
division.
In classe there was no one, and it lay all in cool deep shadow; but
through the open double doors was seen the carre, filled with pupils
and with light; over hall and figures blushed the westering sun. It
blushed so ruddily and vividly, that the hues of the walls and the
variegated tints of the dresses seemed all fused in one warm glow.
The, girls were seated, working or studying; in the midst of their
circle stood M. Emanuel, speaking good-humouredly to a teacher. His
dark paletot, his jetty hair, were tinged with many a reflex of
crimson; his Spanish face, when he turned it momentarily, answered the
sun's animated kiss with an animated smile. I took my place at a desk.
The orange-trees, and several plants, full and bright with bloom,
basked also in the sun's laughing bounty; they had partaken it the
whole day, and now asked water. M. Emanuel had a taste for gardening;
he liked to tend and foster plants. I used to think that working
amongst shrubs with a spade or a watering-pot soothed his nerves; it
was a recreation to which he often had recourse; and now be looked to
the orange-trees, the geraniums, the gorgeous cactuses, and revived
them all with the refreshment their drought needed. His lips meantime
sustained his precious cigar, that (for him) first necessary and prime
luxury of life; its blue wreaths curled prettily enough amongst the
flowers, and in the evening light. He spoke no more to the pupils, nor
to the mistresses, but gave many an endearing word to a small
spanieless (if one may coin a word), that nominally belonged to the
house, but virtually owned him as master, being fonder of him than any
inmate. A delicate, silky, loving, and lovable little doggie she was,
trotting at his side, looking with expressive, attached eyes into his
face; and whenever he dropped his bonnet-grec or his handkerchief,
which he occasionally did in play, crouching beside it with the air of
a miniature lion guarding a kingdom's flag.
There were many plants, and as the amateur gardener fetched all the
water from the well in the court, with his own active hands, his work
spun on to some length. The great school-clock ticked on. Another hour
struck. The carre and the youthful group lost the illusion of sunset.
Day was drooping. My lesson, I perceived, must to-night be very short;
but the orange-trees, the cacti, the camelias were all served now. Was
it my turn?
Alas! in the garden were more plants to be looked after,--favourite
rose-bushes, certain choice flowers; little Sylvie's glad bark and
whine followed the receding paletot down the alleys. I put up some of
my books; I should not want them all; I sat and thought; and waited,
involuntarily deprecating the creeping invasion of twilight.
Sylvie, gaily frisking, emerged into view once more, heralding the
returning paletot; the watering-pot was deposited beside the well; it
had fulfilled its office; how glad I was! Monsieur washed his hands in
a little stone bowl. There was no longer time for a lesson now; ere
long the prayer-bell must ring; but still we should meet; he would
speak; a chance would be offered of reading in his eyes the riddle of
his shyness. His ablutions over, he stood, slowly re-arranging his
cuffs, looking at the horn of a young moon, set pale in the opal sky,
and glimmering faint on the oriel of Jean Baptiste. Sylvie watched the
mood contemplative; its stillness irked her; she whined and jumped to
break it. He looked down.
"Petite exigeante," said he; "you must not be forgotten one moment, it
seems."
He stopped, lifted her in his arms, sauntered across the court, within
a yard of the line of windows near one of which I sat: he sauntered
lingeringly, fondling the spaniel in his bosom, calling her tender
names in a tender voice. On the front-door steps he turned; once again
he looked at the moon, at the grey cathedral, over the remoter spires
and house-roofs fading into a blue sea of night-mist; he tasted the
sweet breath of dusk, and noted the folded bloom of the garden; he
suddenly looked round; a keen beam out of his eye rased the white
facade of the classes, swept the long line of croisees. I think he
bowed; if he did, I had no time to return the courtesy. In a moment he
was gone; the moonlit threshold lay pale and shadowless before the
closed front door.
Gathering in my arms all that was spread on the desk before me, I
carried back the unused heap to its place in the third classe. The
prayer-bell rang; I obeyed its summons.
The morrow would not restore him to the Rue Fossette, that day being
devoted entirely to his college. I got through my teaching; I got over
the intermediate hours; I saw evening approaching, and armed myself
for its heavy ennuis. Whether it was worse to stay with my co-inmates,
or to sit alone, I had not considered; I naturally took up the latter
alternative; if there was a hope of comfort for any moment, the heart
or head of no human being in this house could yield it; only under the
lid of my desk could it harbour, nestling between the leaves of some
book, gilding a pencil-point, the nib of a pen, or tinging the black
fluid in that ink-glass. With a heavy heart I opened my desk-lid; with
a weary hand I turned up its contents.
One by one, well-accustomed books, volumes sewn in familiar covers,
were taken out and put back hopeless: they had no charm; they could
not comfort. Is this something new, this pamphlet in lilac? I had not
seen it before, and I re-arranged my desk this very day--this very
afternoon; the tract must have been introduced within the last hour,
while we were at dinner.
I opened it. What was it? What would it say to me?
It was neither tale nor poem, neither essay nor history; it neither
sung, nor related, not discussed. It was a theological work; it
preached and it persuaded.
I lent to it my ear very willingly, for, small as it was, it possessed
its own spell, and bound my attention at once. It preached Romanism;
it persuaded to conversion. The voice of that sly little book was a
honeyed voice; its accents were all unction and balm. Here roared no
utterance of Rome's thunders, no blasting of the breath of her
displeasure. The Protestant was to turn Papist, not so much in fear of
the heretic's hell, as on account of the comfort, the indulgence, the
tenderness Holy Church offered: far be it from her to threaten or to
coerce; her wish was to guide and win. _She_ persecute? Oh dear
no! not on any account!
This meek volume was not addressed to the hardened and worldly; it was
not even strong meat for the strong: it was milk for babes: the mild
effluence of a mother's love towards her tenderest and her youngest;
intended wholly and solely for those whose head is to be reached
through the heart. Its appeal was not to intellect; it sought to win
the affectionate through their affections, the sympathizing through
their sympathies: St. Vincent de Paul, gathering his orphans about
him, never spoke more sweetly.
I remember one capital inducement to apostacy was held out in the fact
that the Catholic who had lost dear friends by death could enjoy the
unspeakable solace of praying them out of purgatory. The writer did
not touch on the firmer peace of those whose belief dispenses with
purgatory altogether: but I thought of this; and, on the whole,
preferred the latter doctrine as the most consolatory. The little book
amused, and did not painfully displease me. It was a canting,
sentimental, shallow little book, yet something about it cheered my
gloom and made me smile; I was amused with the gambols of this
unlicked wolf-cub muffled in the fleece, and mimicking the bleat of a
guileless lamb. Portions of it reminded me of certain Wesleyan
Methodist tracts I had once read when a child; they were flavoured
with about the same seasoning of excitation to fanaticism. He that had
written it was no bad man, and while perpetually betraying the trained
cunning--the cloven hoof of his system--I should pause before accusing
himself of insincerity. His judgment, however, wanted surgical props;
it was rickety.
I smiled then over this dose of maternal tenderness, coming from the
ruddy old lady of the Seven Hills; smiled, too, at my own
disinclination, not to say disability, to meet these melting favours.
Glancing at the title-page, I found the name of "Pere Silas." A fly-
leaf bore in small, but clear and well-known pencil characters: "From
P. C. D. E. to L--y." And when I saw this I laughed: but not in my
former spirit. I was revived.
A mortal bewilderment cleared suddenly from my head and vision; the
solution of the Sphinx-riddle was won; the conjunction of those two
names, Pere Silas and Paul Emanuel, gave the key to all. The penitent
had been with his director; permitted to withhold nothing; suffered to
keep no corner of his heart sacred to God and to himself; the whole
narrative of our late interview had been drawn from him; he had avowed
the covenant of fraternity, and spoken of his adopted sister. How
could such a covenant, such adoption, be sanctioned by the Church?
Fraternal communion with a heretic! I seemed to hear Pere Silas
annulling the unholy pact; warning his penitent of its perils;
entreating, enjoining reserve, nay, by the authority of his office,
and in the name, and by the memory of all M. Emanuel held most dear
and sacred, commanding the enforcement of that new system whose frost
had pierced to the marrow of my bones.
These may not seem pleasant hypotheses; yet, by comparison, they were
welcome. The vision of a ghostly troubler hovering in the background,
was as nothing, matched with the fear of spontaneous change arising in
M. Paul himself.
At this distance of time, I cannot be sure how far the above
conjectures were self-suggested: or in what measure they owed their
origin and confirmation to another quarter. Help was not wanting.
This evening there was no bright sunset: west and east were one cloud;
no summer night-mist, blue, yet rose-tinged, softened the distance; a
clammy fog from the marshes crept grey round Villette. To-night the
watering-pot might rest in its niche by the well: a small rain had
been drizzling all the afternoon, and still it fell fast and quietly.
This was no weather for rambling in the wet alleys, under the dripping
trees; and I started to hear Sylvie's sudden bark in the garden--her
bark of welcome. Surely she was not accompanied and yet this glad,
quick bark was never uttered, save in homage to one presence.
Through the glass door and the arching berceau, I commanded the deep
vista of the allee defendue: thither rushed Sylvie, glistening through
its gloom like a white guelder-rose. She ran to and fro, whining,
springing, harassing little birds amongst the bushes. I watched five
minutes; no fulfilment followed the omen. I returned to my books;
Sylvie's sharp bark suddenly ceased. Again I looked up. She was
standing not many yards distant, wagging her white feathery tail as
fast as the muscle would work, and intently watching the operations of
a spade, plied fast by an indefatigable hand. There was M. Emanuel,
bent over the soil, digging in the wet mould amongst the rain-laden
and streaming shrubs, working as hard as if his day's pittance were
yet to earn by the literal sweat of his brow.
In this sign I read a ruffled mood. He would dig thus in frozen snow
on the coldest winter day, when urged inwardly by painful emotion,
whether of nervous excitation, or, sad thoughts of self-reproach. He
would dig by the hour, with knit brow and set teeth, nor once lift his
head, or open his lips.
Sylvie watched till she was tired. Again scampering devious, bounding
here, rushing there, snuffing and sniffing everywhere; she at last
discovered me in classe. Instantly she flew barking at the panes, as
if to urge me forth to share her pleasure or her master's toil; she
had seen me occasionally walking in that alley with M. Paul; and I
doubt not, considered it my duty to join him now, wet as it was.
She made such a bustle that M. Paul at last looked up, and of course
perceived why, and at whom she barked. He whistled to call her off;
she only barked the louder. She seemed quite bent upon having the
glass door opened. Tired, I suppose, with her importunity, he threw
down his spade, approached, and pushed the door ajar. Sylvie burst in
all impetuous, sprang to my lap, and with her paws at my neck, and her
little nose and tongue somewhat overpoweringly busy about my face,
mouth, and eyes, flourished her bushy tail over the desk, and
scattered books and papers far and wide.
M. Emanuel advanced to still the clamour and repair the
disarrangement. Having gathered up the books, he captured Sylvie, and
stowed her away under his paletot, where she nestled as quiet as a
mouse, her head just peeping forth. She was very tiny, and had the
prettiest little innocent face, the silkiest long ears, the finest
dark eyes in the world. I never saw her, but I thought of Paulina de
Bassompierre: forgive the association, reader, it _would_ occur.
M. Paul petted and patted her; the endearments she received were not
to be wondered at; she invited affection by her beauty and her
vivacious life.
While caressing the spaniel, his eye roved over the papers and books
just replaced; it settled on the religious tract. His lips moved; he
half checked the impulse to speak. What! had he promised never to
address me more? If so, his better nature pronounced the vow "more
honoured in the breach than in the observance," for with a second
effort, he spoke.--"You have not yet read the brochure, I presume? It
is not sufficiently inviting?"
I replied that I had read it.
He waited, as if wishing me to give an opinion upon it unasked.
Unasked, however, I was in no mood to do or say anything. If any
concessions were to be made--if any advances were demanded--that was
the affair of the very docile pupil of Pere Silas, not mine. His eye
settled upon me gently: there was mildness at the moment in its blue
ray--there was solicitude--a shade of pathos; there were meanings
composite and contrasted--reproach melting into remorse. At the moment
probably, he would have been glad to see something emotional in me. I
could not show it. In another minute, however, I should have betrayed
confusion, had I not bethought myself to take some quill-pens from my
desk, and begin soberly to mend them.
I knew that action would give a turn to his mood. He never liked to
see me mend pens; my knife was always dull-edged--my hand, too, was
unskilful; I hacked and chipped. On this occasion I cut my own finger
--half on purpose. I wanted to restore him to his natural state, to set
him at his ease, to get him to chide.
"Maladroit!" he cried at last, "she will make mincemeat of her hands."
He put Sylvie down, making her lie quiet beside his bonnet-grec, and,
depriving me of the pens and penknife, proceeded to slice, nib, and
point with the accuracy and celerity of a machine.
"Did I like the little book?" he now inquired.
Suppressing a yawn, I said I hardly knew.
"Had it moved me?"
"I thought it had made me a little sleepy."
(After a pause:) "Allons donc! It was of no use taking that tone with
him. Bad as I was--and he should be sorry to have to name all my
faults at a breath--God and nature had given me 'trop de sensibilite
et de sympathie' not to be profoundly affected by an appeal so
touching."
"Indeed!" I responded, rousing myself quickly, "I was not affected at
all--not a whit."
And in proof, I drew from my pocket a perfectly dry handkerchief,
still clean and in its folds.
Hereupon I was made the object of a string of strictures rather
piquant than polite. I listened with zest. After those two days of
unnatural silence, it was better than music to hear M. Paul haranguing
again just in his old fashion. I listened, and meantime solaced myself
and Sylvie with the contents of a bonbonniere, which M. Emanuel's
gifts kept well supplied with chocolate comfits: It pleased him to see
even a small matter from his hand duly appreciated. He looked at me
and the spaniel while we shared the spoil; he put up his penknife.
Touching my hand with the bundle of new-cut quills, he said:--"Dites
donc, petite soeur--speak frankly--what have you thought of me during
the last two days?"
But of this question I would take no manner of notice; its purport
made my eyes fill. I caressed Sylvie assiduously. M. Paul, leaning--
over the desk, bent towards me:--"I called myself your brother," he
said: "I hardly know what I am--brother--friend--I cannot tell. I know
I think of you--I feel I wish, you well--but I must check myself; you
are to be feared. My best friends point out danger, and whisper
caution."
"You do right to listen to your friends. By all means be cautious."
"It is your religion--your strange, self-reliant, invulnerable creed,
whose influence seems to clothe you in, I know not what, unblessed
panoply. You are good--Pere Silas calls you good, and loves you--but
your terrible, proud, earnest Protestantism, there is the danger. It
expresses itself by your eye at times; and again, it gives you certain
tones and certain gestures that make my flesh creep. You are not
demonstrative, and yet, just now--when you handled that tract--my God!
I thought Lucifer smiled."
"Certainly I don't respect that tract--what then?"
"Not respect that tract? But it is the pure essence of faith, love,
charity! I thought it would touch you: in its gentleness, I trusted
that it could not fail. I laid it in your desk with a prayer: I must
indeed be a sinner: Heaven will not hear the petitions that come
warmest from my heart. You scorn my little offering. Oh, cela me fait
mal!"
"Monsieur, I don't scorn it--at least, not as your gift. Monsieur, sit
down; listen to me. I am not a heathen, I am not hard-hearted, I am
not unchristian, I am not dangerous, as they tell you; I would not
trouble your faith; you believe in God and Christ and the Bible, and
so do I."
"But _do_ you believe in the Bible? Do you receive Revelation?
What limits are there to the wild, careless daring of your country and
sect. Pere Silas dropped dark hints."
By dint of persuasion, I made him half-define these hints; they
amounted to crafty Jesuit-slanders. That night M. Paul and I talked
seriously and closely. He pleaded, he argued. _I_ could not
argue--a fortunate incapacity; it needed but triumphant, logical
opposition to effect all the director wished to be effected; but I
could talk in my own way--the way M. Paul was used to--and of which he
could follow the meanderings and fill the hiatus, and pardon the
strange stammerings, strange to him no longer. At ease with him, I
could defend my creed and faith in my own fashion; in some degree I
could lull his prejudices. He was not satisfied when he went away,
hardly was he appeased; but he was made thoroughly to feel that
Protestants were not necessarily the irreverent Pagans his director
had insinuated; he was made to comprehend something of their mode of
honouring the Light, the Life, the Word; he was enabled partly to
perceive that, while their veneration for things venerable was not
quite like that cultivated in his Church, it had its own, perhaps,
deeper power--its own more solemn awe.
I found that Pere Silas (himself, I must repeat, not a bad man, though
the advocate of a bad cause) had darkly stigmatized Protestants in
general, and myself by inference, with strange names, had ascribed to
us strange "isms;" Monsieur Emanuel revealed all this in his frank
fashion, which knew not secretiveness, looking at me as he spoke with
a kind, earnest fear, almost trembling lest there should be truth in
the charges. Pere Silas, it seems, had closely watched me, had
ascertained that I went by turns, and indiscriminately, to the three
Protestant Chapels of Villette--the French, German, and English--_id
est_, the Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian. Such liberality
argued in the father's eyes profound indifference--who tolerates all,
he reasoned, can be attached to none. Now, it happened that I had
often secretly wondered at the minute and unimportant character of the
differences between these three sects--at the unity and identity of
their vital doctrines: I saw nothing to hinder them from being one day
fused into one grand Holy Alliance, and I respected them all, though I
thought that in each there were faults of form, incumbrances, and
trivialities. Just what I thought, that did I tell M. Emanuel, and
explained to him that my own last appeal, the guide to which I looked,
and the teacher which I owned, must always be the Bible itself, rather
than any sect, of whatever name or nation.
He left me soothed, yet full of solicitude, breathing a wish, as
strong as a prayer, that if I were wrong, Heaven would lead me right.
I heard, poured forth on the threshold, some fervid murmurings to
"Marie, Reine du Ciel," some deep aspiration that _his_ hope
might yet be _mine_.
Strange! I had no such feverish wish to turn him from the faith of his
fathers. I thought Romanism wrong, a great mixed image of gold and
clay; but it seemed to me that _this_ Romanist held the purer
elements of his creed with an innocency of heart which God must love.
The preceding conversation passed between eight and nine o'clock of
the evening, in a schoolroom of the quiet Rue Fossette, opening on a
sequestered garden. Probably about the same, or a somewhat later hour
of the succeeding evening, its echoes, collected by holy obedience,
were breathed verbatim in an attent ear, at the panel of a
confessional, in the hoary church of the Magi. It ensued that Pere
Silas paid a visit to Madame Beck, and stirred by I know not what
mixture of motives, persuaded her to let him undertake for a time the
Englishwoman's spiritual direction.
Hereupon I was put through a course of reading--that is, I just
glanced at the books lent me; they were too little in my way to be
thoroughly read, marked, learned, or inwardly digested. And besides, I
had a book up-stairs, under my pillow, whereof certain chapters
satisfied my needs in the article of spiritual lore, furnishing such
precept and example as, to my heart's core, I was convinced could not
be improved on.
Then Pere Silas showed me the fair side of Rome, her good works; and
bade me judge the tree by its fruits.
In answer, I felt and I avowed that these works were _not_ the
fruits of Rome; they were but her abundant blossoming, but the fair
promise she showed the world, That bloom, when set, savoured not of
charity; the apple full formed was ignorance, abasement, and bigotry.
Out of men's afflictions and affections were forged the rivets of
their servitude. Poverty was fed and clothed, and sheltered, to bind
it by obligation to "the Church;" orphanage was reared and educated
that it might grow up in the fold of "the Church;" sickness was tended
that it might die after the formula and in the ordinance of "the
Church;" and men were overwrought, and women most murderously
sacrificed, and all laid down a world God made pleasant for his
creatures' good, and took up a cross, monstrous in its galling weight,
that they might serve Rome, prove her sanctity, confirm her power, and
spread the reign of her tyrant "Church."
For man's good was little done; for God's glory, less. A thousand ways
were opened with pain, with blood-sweats, with lavishing of life;
mountains were cloven through their breasts, and rocks were split to
their base; and all for what? That a Priesthood might march straight
on and straight upward to an all-dominating eminence, whence they
might at last stretch the sceptre of their Moloch "Church."
It will not be. God is not with Rome, and, were human sorrows still
for the Son of God, would he not mourn over her cruelties and
ambitions, as once he mourned over the crimes and woes of doomed
Jerusalem!
Oh, lovers of power! Oh, mitred aspirants for this world's kingdoms!
an hour will come, even to you, when it will be well for your hearts--
pausing faint at each broken beat--that there is a Mercy beyond human
compassions, a Love, stronger than this strong death which even you
must face, and before it, fall; a Charity more potent than any sin,
even yours; a Pity which redeems worlds--nay, absolves Priests.
* * * * *
My third temptation was held out in the pomp of Rome--the glory of her
kingdom. I was taken to the churches on solemn occasions--days of fete
and state; I was shown the Papal ritual and ceremonial. I looked at
it.
Many people--men and women--no doubt far my superiors in a thousand
ways, have felt this display impressive, have declared that though
their Reason protested, their Imagination was subjugated. I cannot say
the same. Neither full procession, nor high mass, nor swarming tapers,
nor swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial
jewellery, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me as
tawdry, not grand; as grossly material, not poetically spiritual.
This I did not tell Pere Silas; he was old, he looked venerable:
through every abortive experiment, under every repeated
disappointment, he remained personally kind to me, and I felt tender
of hurting his feelings. But on the evening of a certain day when,
from the balcony of a great house, I had been made to witness a huge
mingled procession of the church and the army--priests with relics,
and soldiers with weapons, an obese and aged archbishop, habited in
cambric and lace, looking strangely like a grey daw in bird-of-
paradise plumage, and a band of young girls fantastically robed and
garlanded--_then_ I spoke my mind to M. Paul.
"I did not like it," I told him; "I did not respect such ceremonies; I
wished to see no more."
And having relieved my conscience by this declaration, I was able to
go on, and, speaking more currently and clearly than my wont, to show
him that I had a mind to keep to my reformed creed; the more I saw of
Popery the closer I clung to Protestantism; doubtless there were
errors in every church, but I now perceived by contrast how severely
pure was my own, compared with her whose painted and meretricious face
had been unveiled for my admiration. I told him how we kept fewer
forms between us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps,
the nature of mankind in the mass rendered necessary for due
observance. I told him I could not look on flowers and tinsel, on wax-
lights and embroidery, at such times and under such circumstances as
should be devoted to lifting the secret vision to Him whose home is
Infinity, and His being--Eternity. That when I thought of sin and
sorrow, of earthly corruption, mortal depravity, weighty temporal woe
--I could not care for chanting priests or mumming officials; that when
the pains of existence and the terrors of dissolution pressed before
me--when the mighty hope and measureless doubt of the future arose in
view--_then_, even the scientific strain, or the prayer in a
language learned and dead, harassed: with hindrance a heart which only
longed to cry--"God be merciful to me, a sinner!"
When I had so spoken, so declared my faith, and so widely severed
myself, from him I addressed--then, at last, came a tone accordant, an
echo responsive, one sweet chord of harmony in two conflicting
spirits.
"Whatever say priests or controversialists," murmured M. Emanuel, "God
is good, and loves all the sincere. Believe, then, what you can;
believe it as you can; one prayer, at least, we have in common; I also
cry--'O Dieu, sois appaise envers moi qui suis pecheur!'"
He leaned on the back of my chair. After some thought he again spoke:
"How seem in the eyes of that God who made all firmaments, from whose
nostrils issued whatever of life is here, or in the stars shining
yonder--how seem the differences of man? But as Time is not for God,
nor Space, so neither is Measure, nor Comparison. We abase ourselves
in our littleness, and we do right; yet it may be that the constancy
of one heart, the truth and faith of one mind according to the light
He has appointed, import as much to Him as the just motion of
satellites about their planets, of planets about their suns, of suns
around that mighty unseen centre incomprehensible, irrealizable, with
strange mental effort only divined.
"God guide us all! God bless you, Lucy!"
Content of CHAPTER XXXVI - THE APPLE OF DISCORD [Charlotte Bronte's novel: Villette]
_
Read next: CHAPTER XXXVII - SUNSHINE
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