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Brother Copas

by Arthur Quiller-Couch · English · Gutenberg #20979 · 384,268 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Brother Copas

Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch


        
Release date: April 3, 2007 [eBook #20979]
                Most recently updated: November 9, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20979

Credits: E-text prepared by Lionel Sear


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROTHER COPAS ***


E-text prepared by Lionel Sear



BROTHER COPAS

by

ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH.

1911







TO THE GENTLE READER.

In a former book of mine, _Sir John Constantine_, I expressed
(perhaps extravagantly) my faith in my fellows and in their capacity
to treat life as a noble sport.  In _Brother Copas_ I try to express
something of that corellative scorn which must come sooner or later
to every man who puts his faith into practice..  I have that faith
still; but that

    "He who would love his fellow men
     Must not expect too much of them"

is good counsel if bad rhyme.  I can only hope that both the faith
and the scorn are sound at the core.


For the rest, I wish to state that St. Hospital is a society which
never existed.  I have borrowed for it certain features from the
Hospital of St. Cross, near Winchester.  I have invented a few
external and all the internal ones.  My "College of Noble Poverty"
harbours abuses from which, I dare to say, that nobler institution is
entirely free.  St Hospital has no existence at all outside of my
imagining.

                              ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.

The Haven, Fowey.
   February 16th, 1911.




"And  a little Child shall lead them."--ISAIAH xi. 6.



CONTENTS.

Chapter

        I.          THE MASTER OF ST. HOSPITAL.

        II.         THE COLLEGE OF NOBLE POVERTY.

        III.        BROTHER COPAS HOOKS A FISH.

        IV.         CORONA COMES.

        V.          BROTHER COPAS ON RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES.

        VI.         GAUDY DAY.

        VII.        LOW AND HIGH TABLES.

        VIII.       A PEACE-OFFERING.

        IX.         BY MERE RIVER.

        X.          THE ANONYMOUS LETTER.

        XI.         BROTHER COPAS ON THE ANGLO-SAXON.

        XII.        MR. ISIDORE TAKES CHARGE.

        XIII.       GARDEN AND LAUNDRY.

        XIV.        BROTHER COPAS ON THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

        XV.         CANARIES AND GREATCOATS.

        XVI.        THE SECOND LETTER.

        XVII.       PUPPETS.

        XVIII.      THE PERVIGILIUM.

        XVIX.       MERCHESTER PREPARES.

        XX.         NAUGHTINESS, AND A SEQUEL.

        XXI.        RECONCILIATION.

        XXII.       MR. SIMEON MAKES A CLEAN BREAST.

        XXIII.      CORONA'S BIRTHDAY.

        XXIV.       FINIS CORONAT OPUS.

                    CONCLUSION.




BROTHER COPAS.



CHAPTER I.


THE MASTER OF ST. HOSPITAL.

    'As poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet
     possessing all things . . .'

The Honourable and Reverend Eustace John Wriothesley Blanchminster,
D.D., Master of St. Hospital-by-Merton, sat in the oriel of his
library revising his Trinity Gaudy Sermon.  He took pains with these
annual sermons, having a quick and fastidious sense of literary
style.  "It is," he would observe, "one of the few pleasurable
capacities spared by old age."  He had, moreover, a scholarly habit
of verifying his references and quotations; and if the original,
however familiar, happened to be in a dead or foreign language, would
have his secretary indite it in the margin.  His secretary, Mr.
Simeon, after taking the Sermon down from dictation, had made out a
fair copy, and stood now at a little distance from the corner of the
writing-table, in a deferential attitude.

The Master leaned forward over the manuscript; and a ray of afternoon
sunshine, stealing in between a mullion of the oriel and the edge of
a drawn blind, touched his bowed and silvery head as if with a
benediction.  He was in his seventy-third year; lineal and
sole-surviving descendant of that Alberic de Blanchminster (Albericus
de Albo Monasterio) who had founded this Hospital of Christ's Poor in
1137, and the dearest, most distinguished-looking old clergyman
imaginable.  An American lady had once summed him up as a Doctor of
Divinity in Dresden china; and there was much to be allowed to the
simile when you noted his hands, so shapely and fragile, or his
complexion, transparent as old ivory--and still more if you had
leisure to observe his saintliness, so delicately attuned to this
world.

"_As having nothing, and yet possessing all things_."--The Master
laid his forefinger upon the page and looked up reproachfully.
"os meden echontes--my good Simeon, is it possible?  A word so common
as os! and after all these years you make it perispomenon!"

Mr. Simeon stammered contrition.  In the matter of Greek accents he
knew himself to be untrustworthy beyond hope.  "I can't tell how it
is, sir, but that os always seems to me to want a circumflex, being
an adverb of sorts."  On top of this, and to make things worse, he
pleaded that he had left out the accent in os ptochoi, just above.

"H'm--as poor, and yet thankful for small mercies," commented the
Master with gentle sarcasm.  He had learnt in his long life to
economise anger.  But he frowned as he dipped a pen in the ink-pot
and made the correction; for he was dainty about his manuscripts as
about all the furniture of life, and a blot or an erasure annoyed
him.  "Brother Copas," he murmured, "never misplaces an accent."

Mr. Simeon heard, and started.  It was incredible that the Master,
who five-and-twenty years ago had rescued Mr. Simeon from a school
for poor choristers and had him specially educated for the sake of
his exquisite handwriting, could be threatening dismissal over a
circumflex.  Oh, there was no danger!  If long and (until the other
day) faithful service were not sufficient, at least there was
guarantee in the good patron's sense of benefits conferred.
Moreover, Brother Copas was not desirable as an amanuensis. . . .
None the less, poor men with long families will start at the shadow
of a fear; and Mr. Simeon started.

"Master," he said humbly, choosing the title by which his patron
liked to be addressed, "I think Greek accents must come by gift of
the Lord."

"Indeed?"

The Master glanced up.

"I mean, sir"--Mr. Simeon extended a trembling hand and rested his
fingers on the edge of the writing-table for support--"that one man
is born with a feeling for them, so to speak; while another, though
you may teach and teach him--"

"In other words," said the Master, "they come by breeding.  It is
very likely."

He resumed his reading:

     '--and yet possessing all things.  We may fancy St. Paul's
     actual words present in the mind of our Second Founder, the
     Cardinal Beauchamp, as their spirit assuredly moved him,
     when he named our beloved house the College of Noble Poverty.
     His predecessor, Alberic de Blanchminster, had called it after
     Christ's Poor; and the one title, to be sure, rests implicit in
     the other; for the condescension wherewith Christ made choice of
     His associates on earth has for ever dignified Poverty in the
     eyes of His true followers.'

"And you have spelt 'his' with a capital 'H'--when you know my
dislike of that practice!"

Poor Mr. Simeon was certainly not in luck to-day.  The truth is that,
frightened by the prospect of yet another addition to his family
(this would be his seventh child), he had hired out his needy pen to
one of the Canons Residentiary of Merchester, who insisted on using
capitals upon all parts of speech referring, however remotely, to
either of the Divine Persons.  The Master, who despised Canon Tarbolt
for a vulgar pulpiteer, and barely nodded to him in the street, was
not likely to get wind of this mercenage; but if ever he did, there
would be trouble.  As it was, the serving of two masters afflicted
Mr. Simeon's conscience while it distracted his pen.

"I will make another fair copy," he suggested.

"I fear you must.  Would you mind drawing back that curtain?
My eyes are troublesome this afternoon.  Thank you."--

     'Nevertheless it was well done of the great churchman to declare
     his belief that the poor, as poor, are not only blessed--as Our
     Lord expressly says--but noble, as Our Lord implicitly taught.
     Nay, the suggestion is not perhaps far-fetched that, as Cardinal
     Beauchamp had great possessions, he took this occasion to
     testify how in his heart he slighted them.  Or again--for
     history seems to prove that he was not an entirely scrupulous
     man, nor entirely untainted by self-seeking--that his tribute to
     Noble Poverty may have been the assertion, by a spirit netted
     among the briars of this world's policy, that at least it saw
     and suspired after the way to Heaven.  _Video meliora,
     proboque_--

       "O limed soul, that struggling to be free
        Art more engaged!"

     'But he is with God: and while we conjecture, God knows.

     'Lest, however, you should doubt that the finer spirits of this
     world have found Poverty not merely endurable but essentially
     noble, let me recall to you an anecdote of Saint Francis of
     Assisi.  It is related that, travelling towards France with a
     companion, Brother Masseo, he one day entered a town
     wherethrough they both begged their way, as their custom was,
     taking separate streets.  Meeting again on the other side of the
     town, they spread out their alms on a broad stone by the
     wayside, whereby a fair fountain ran; and Francis rejoiced that
     Brother Masseo's orts and scraps of bread were larger than his
     own, saying, "Brother Masseo, we are not worthy of such
     treasure."  "But how," asked Brother Masseo, "can one speak of
     treasure when there is such lack of all things needful?
     Here have we neither cloth, nor knife, nor plate, nor porringer,
     nor house, nor table, nor manservant, nor maidservant."
     Answered Francis, "This and none else it is that I account wide
     treasure; which containeth nothing prepared by human hands, but
     all we have is of God's own providence--as this bread we have
     begged, set out on a table of stone so fine, beside a fountain
     so clear.  Wherefore," said he, "let us kneel together and pray
     God to increase our love of this holy Poverty, which is so noble
     that thereunto God himself became a servitor."'

The declining sun, slanting in past the Banksia roses, touched
the edge of a giant amethyst which the Master wore, by inheritance
of office, on his forefinger; and, because his hand trembled a
little with age, the gem set the reflected ray dancing in a
small pool of light, oval-shaped and wine-coloured, on the white
margin of the sermon.  He stared at it for a moment, tracing it
mistakenly to a glass of Rhone wine--a _Chateau Neuf du Pape_ of a date
before the phylloxera--that stood neglected on the writing-table.
(By his doctor's orders he took a glass of old wine and a biscuit
every afternoon at this hour as a gentle digestive.)

Thus reminded, he reached out a hand and raised the wine to his lips,
nodding as he sipped.

"In Common Room, Simeon, we used to say that no man was really
educated who preferred Burgundy to claret, but that on the lower
Rhone all tastes met in one ecstasy. . . . I'd like to have your
opinion on this, now; that is, if you will find the decanter and a
glass in the cupboard yonder--and if you have no conscientious
objection."

Mr. Simeon murmured, amid his thanks, that he had no objection.

"I am glad to hear it. . . . Between ourselves, there is always
something lacking in an abstainer--as in a man who has never learnt
Greek.  It is difficult with both to say what the lack precisely is;
but with both it includes an absolute insensibility to the
shortcoming."

Mr. Simeon could not help wondering if this applied to poor men who
abstained of necessity.  He thought not; being, for his part,
conscious of a number of shortcomings.

"Spirits," went on the Master, wheeling half-about in his
revolving-chair and crossing one shapely gaitered leg over another,
"Spirits--and especially whisky--eat out the health of a man and
leave him a sodden pulp.  Beer is honest, but brutalising.
Wine--certainly any good wine that can trace its origin back beyond
the Reformation--is one with all good literature, and indeed with
civilisation.  _Antiquam exquirite matrem_: all three come from the
Mediterranean basin or from around it, and it is only the ill-born
who contemn descent."

"Brother Copas--" began Mr. Simeon, and came to a halt.

He lived sparely; he had fasted for many hours; and standing there he
could feel the generous liquor coursing through him--nay could almost
have reported its progress from ganglion to ganglion.  He blessed it,
and at the same moment breathed a prayer that it might not affect his
head.

"Brother Copas--?"

Mr. Simeon wished now that he had not begun his sentence.
The invigorating _Chateau Neuf du Pape_ seemed to overtake and chase
away all uncharitable thoughts.  But it was too late.

"Brother Copas--you were saying--?"

"I ought not to repeat it, sir.  But I heard Brother Copas say the
other day that the teetotallers were in a hopeless case; being mostly
religious men, and yet having to explain in the last instance why Our
Lord, in Cana of Galilee, did not turn the water into ginger-pop."

The Master frowned and stroked his gaiters.

"Brother Copas's tongue is too incisive.  Something must be forgiven
to one who, having started as a scholar and a gentleman, finds
himself toward the close of his days dependent on the bread of
charity."

It was benignly spoken; and to Mr. Simeon, who questioned nothing his
patron said or did, no shade of misgiving occurred that, taken down
in writing, it might annotate somewhat oddly the sermon on the table.
It was spoken with insight too, for had not his own poverty, or the
fear of it, sharpened Mr. Simeon's tongue just now and prompted him
to quote Brother Copas detrimentally?  The little man did not shape
this accusation clearly against himself, for he had a rambling head;
but he had also a sound heart, and it was uneasy.

"I ought not to have told it, sir. . . . I ask you to believe that I
have no ill-will against Brother Copas."

The Master had arisen, and stood gazing out of the window immersed in
his own thoughts.

"Eh?  I beg your pardon?" said he absently.

"I--I feared, sir, you might think I said it to his prejudice."

"Prejudice?" the Master repeated, still with his back turned, and
still scarcely seeming to hear.  "But why in the world? . . . Ah,
there he goes!--and Brother Bonaday with him.  They are off to the
river, for Brother Copas carries his rod.  What a strange fascination
has that dry-fly fishing!  And I can remember old anglers discussing
it as a craze, a lunacy."

He gazed out, still in a brown study.  The room was silent save for
the ticking of a Louis Seize clock on the chimney-piece; and Mr.
Simeon, standing attentive, let his eyes travel around upon the
glass-fronted bookcases, filled with sober riches in vellum and gilt
leather, on the rare prints in black frames, the statuette of _Diane
Chasseresse_, the bust of Antinous, the portfolios containing other
prints, the Persian carpets scattered about the dark bees'-waxed
floor, the Sheraton table with its bowl of odorous peonies.

"Eh?  I beg your pardon--" said the Master again after three minutes
or so, facing around with a smile of apology.  "My wits were
wool-gathering, over the sermon--that little peroration of mine does
not please me somehow. . . . I will take a stroll to the home-park
and back, and think it over. . . . Thank you, yes, you may gather up
the papers.  We will do no more work this afternoon."

"And I will write out another fair copy, sir."

"Yes, certainly; that is to say, of all but the last page.  We will
take the last page to-morrow."

For a moment, warmed by the wine and by the Master's cordiality of
manner, Mr. Simeon felt a wild impulse to make a clean breast,
confess his trafficking with Canon Tarbolt and beg to be forgiven.
But his courage failed him.  He gathered up his papers, bowed and
made his escape.



CHAPTER II.


THE COLLEGE OF NOBLE POVERTY.

If a foreigner would apprehend (he can never comprehend) this England
of ours, with her dear and ancient graces, and her foibles as ancient
and hardly less dear; her law-abidingness, her staid, God-fearing
citizenship; her parochialism whereby (to use a Greek idiom) she
perpetually escapes her own notice being empress of the world; her
inveterate snobbery, her incurable habit of mistaking symbols and
words for realities; above all, her spacious and beautiful sense of
time as builder, healer and only perfecter of worldly things; let him
go visit the Cathedral City, sometime the Royal City, of Merchester.
He will find it all there, enclosed and casketed--"a box where sweets
compacted lie."

Let him arrive on a Saturday night and awake next morning to the note
of the Cathedral bell, and hear the bugles answering from the
barracks up the hill beyond the mediaeval gateway.  As he sits down
to breakfast the bugles will start sounding nigher, with music absurd
and barbarous, but stirring, as the Riflemen come marching down the
High Street to Divine Service.  In the Minster to which they wend,
their disused regimental colours droop along the aisles; tattered, a
hundred years since, in Spanish battlefields, and by age worn almost
to gauze--"strainers," says Brother Copas, "that in their time have
clarified much turbid blood."  But these are guerdons of yesterday in
comparison with other relics the Minster guards.  There is royal dust
among them--Saxon and Dane and Norman--housed in painted chests above
the choir stalls.  "_Quare fremuerunt gentes?_" intone the
choristers' voices below, Mr. Simeon's weak but accurate tenor among
them.  "_The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel
together_ . . ."  The Riflemen march down to listen.  As they go by
ta-ra-ing, the douce citizens of Merchester and their wives and
daughters admire from the windows discreetly; but will attend _their_
Divine Service later.  This, again, is England.

Sundays and week-days at intervals the Cathedral organ throbs across
the Close, gently shaking the windows of the Deanery and the Canons'
houses, and interrupting the chatter of sparrows in their ivy.
Twice or thrice annually a less levitical noise invades, when our
State visits its Church; in other words, when with trumpeters and
javelin-men the High Sheriff escorts his Majesty's Judges to hear the
Assize Sermon.  On these occasions the head boy of the great School,
which lies a little to the south of the Cathedral, by custom presents
a paper to the learned judge, suing for a school holiday; and his
lordship, brushing up his Latinity, makes a point of acceding in the
best hexameters he can contrive.  At his time of life it comes easier
to try prisoners; and if he lie awake, he is haunted less by his day
in Court than by the fear of a false quantity.

The School--with its fourteenth-century quadrangles, fenced citywards
behind a blank brewhouse-wall (as though its Founder's first
precaution had been to protect learning from siege), and its
precincts opening rearwards upon green playing-fields and
river-meads--is like few schools in England, and none in any other
country; and is proud of its singularity.  It, too, has its stream of
life, and on the whole a very gracious one, with its young, careless
voices and high spirits.  It lies, as I say, south of the Close;
beyond the northward fringe of which you penetrate, under archway or
by narrow entry, to the High Street, where another and different tide
comes and goes, with mild hubbub of carts, carriages, motors--ladies
shopping, magistrates and county councillors bent on business of the
shire, farmers, traders, marketers. . . . This traffic, too, is all
very English and ruddy and orderly.

Through it all, picturesque and respected, pass and repass the
bedesmen of Saint Hospital: the Blanchminster Brethren in black gowns
with a silver cross worn at the breast, the Beauchamp Brethren in
gowns of claret colour with a silver rose.  The terms of the twin
bequests are not quite the same.  To be a Collegian of Christ's Poor
it is enough that you have attained the age of sixty-five, so reduced
in strength as to be incapable of work; whereas you can become a
Collegian of Noble Poverty at sixty, but with the proviso that
misfortune has reduced you from independence (that is to say, from a
moderate estate).  The Beauchamp Brethren, who are the fewer, incline
to give themselves airs over the Blanchminsters on the strength of
this distinction: like Dogberry, in their time they have "had
losses."  But Merchester takes, perhaps, an equal pride in the
pensioners of both orders.

Merchester takes an even fonder pride in St. Hospital itself--that
compact and exquisite group of buildings, for the most part Norman,
set in the water-meadows among the ambient streams of Mere.  It lies
a mile or so southward of the town, and some distance below the
School, where the valley widens between the chalk-hills and, inland
yet, you feel a premonition that the sea is not far away.
All visitors to Merchester are directed towards St. Hospital, and
they dote over it--the American visitors especially; because nowhere
in England can one find the Middle Ages more compendiously summarised
or more charmingly illustrated.  Almost it might be a toy model of
those times, with some of their quaintest customs kept going in
smooth working order.  But it is better.  It is the real thing,
genuinely surviving.  No visitor ever finds disappointment in a
pilgrimage to St. Hospital: the inmates take care of that.

The trustees, or governing body, are careful too.  A few years ago,
finding that his old lodgings in the quadrangle were too narrow for
the Master's comfort, they erected a fine new house for him, just
without the precincts.  But though separated from the Hospital by a
roadway, this new house comes into the picture from many points of
view, and therefore not only did the architect receive instructions
to harmonise it with the ancient buildings, but where he left off the
trustees succeeded, planting wistarias, tall roses and selected ivies
to run up the coigns and mullions.  Nay, it is told that to encourage
the growth of moss they washed over a portion of the walls (the
servants' quarters) with a weak solution of farmyard manure.
These conscientious pains have their reward, for to-day, at a little
distance, the Master's house appears no less ancient than the rest of
the mediaeval pile with which it composes so admirably.

With the Master himself we have made acquaintance.  In the words of
an American magazine, "the principal of this old-time foundation,
Master E. J. Wriothesley (pronounced 'Wrottesley') Blanchminster, may
be allowed to fill the bill.  He is founder's kin, and just sweet."

The Master stepped forth from his rose-garlanded porch, crossed the
road, and entered the modest archway which opens on the first, or
outer, court.  He walked habitually at a short trot, with his head
and shoulders thrust a little forward and his hands clasped behind
him.  He never used a walking-stick.

The outer court of St. Hospital is plain and unpretending, with a
brewhouse on one hand and on the other the large kitchen with its
offices.  Between these the good Master passed, and came to a second
and handsomer gate, with a tower above it, and three canopied niches
in the face of the tower, and in one of the niches--the others are
empty--a kneeling figure of the great cardinal himself.
The passageway through the tower is vaulted and richly groined, and
in a little chamber beside it dwells the porter, a part of whose duty
it is to distribute the Wayfarers' Dole--a horn of beer and a manchet
of bread--to all who choose to ask for it.  The Master halted a
moment to give the porter good evening.

"And how many to-day, Brother Manby?"

"Thirty-three, Master, including a party of twelve that came in
motor-cars.  I was jealous the cast wouldn't go round, for they all
insisted on having the dole, and a full slice, too--the gentlemen
declaring they were hungry after their drive.  But," added Brother
Manby, with a glance at a card affixed by the archway and announcing
that tickets to view the hospital could be procured at sixpence a
head, "they were most appreciative, I must say."

The Master smiled, nodded, and passed on.  He gathered that someone
had profited by something over and above the twelve sixpences.

But how gracious, how serenely beautiful, how eloquent of peace and
benediction, the scene that met him as he crossed the threshold of
the great quadrangle!  Some thousands of times his eyes had rested on
it, yet how could it ever stale?

"_In the evening there shall be light_."--The sun, declining in a
cloudless west behind the roof-ridge and tall chimneys of the
Brethren's houses, cast a shadow even to the sundial that stood for
centre of the wide grass-plot.  All else was softest gold--gold
veiling the sky itself in a powdery haze; gold spread full along the
front of the 'Nunnery,' or row of upper chambers on the eastern line
of the quadrangle, where the three nurses of St. Hospital have their
lodgings; shafts of gold penetrating the shaded ambulatory below;
gold edging the western coigns of the Norman chapel; gold rayed and
slanting between boughs in the park beyond the railings to the south.
Only the western side of the quadrangle lay in shadow, and in the
shadow, in twos and threes, beside their doors and tiny flower-plots
(their pride), sat the Brethren, with no anxieties, with no care but
to watch the closing tranquil hour: some with their aged wives
(for the Hospital, as the Church of England with her bishops, allows
a Brother to have one wife, but ignores her existence), some in
monastic groups, withdrawn from hearing of women's gossip.

The Master chose the path that, circumventing the grass-plot, led him
past these happy-looking groups and couples.  To be sure, it was not
his nearest way to the home-park, where he intended to think out his
peroration; but he had plenty of time, and moreover he delighted to
exchange courtesies with his charges.  For each he had a greeting--

--"Fine weather, fine weather, Brother Dasent!  Ah, this is the time
to get rid of the rheumatics!  Eh, Mrs. Dasent?  I haven't seen him
looking so hale for months past."

--"A beautiful evening, Brother Clerihew--yes, beautiful
indeed. . . . You notice how the swallows are flying, both high and
low, Brother Woolcombe? . . . Yes, I think we are in for a spell of
it."

--"Ah, good evening, Mrs. Royle!  What wonderful ten-week stocks!
I declare I cannot grow the like of them in my garden.  And what a
perfume!  But it warns me that the dew is beginning to fall, and
Brother Royle ought not to be sitting out late.  We must run no
risks, Nurse, after his illness?"

The Master appealed to a comfortable-looking woman who, at his
approach, had been engaged in earnest talk with Mrs. Royle--talk to
which old Brother Royle appeared to listen placidly, seated in his
chair.

--And so on.  He had a kindly word for all, and all answered his
salutations respectfully; the women bobbing curtseys, the old men
offering to rise from their chairs.  But this he would by no means
allow.  His presence seemed to carry with it a fragrance of his own,
as real as that of the mignonette and roses and sweet-Williams amid
which he left them embowered.


When he had passed out of earshot, Brother Clerihew turned to Brother
Woolcombe and said--

"The silly old '--' is beginning to show his age, seemin' to me."

"Oughtn't to," answered Brother Woolcombe.  "If ever a man had a soft
job, it's him."

"Well, I reckon we don't want to lose him yet, anyhow--'specially if
Colt is to step into his old shoes."

Brother Clerihew's reference was to the Reverend Rufus Colt, Chaplain
of St. Hospital.

"They never would!" opined Brother Woolcombe, meaning by "they" the
governing body of Trustees.

"Oh, you never know--with a man on the make, like Colt.  Push carries
everything in these times."

"Colt's a hustler," Brother Woolcombe conceded.  "But, damn it all,
they _might_ give us a gentleman!"

"There's not enough to go round, nowadays," grunted Brother Clerihew,
who had been a butler, and knew.  "Master Blanchminster's the real
thing, of course . . ."  He gazed after the retreating figure of the
Master.  "Seemed gay as a goldfinch, he did.  D'ye reckon Colt has
told him about Warboise?"

"I wonder.  Where is Warboise, by the way?"

"Down by the river, taking a walk to cool his head.  Ibbetson's wife
gave him a dressing-down at tea-time for dragging Ibbetson into the
row.  Threatened to have her nails in his beard--I heard her.
That woman's a terror. . . . All the same, one can't help
sympathising with her.  'You can stick to your stinking
Protestantism,' she told him, 'if it amuses you to fight the
Chaplain.  You're a widower, with nobody dependent.  But don't you
teach my husband to quarrel with his vittles.'"

"All the same, when a man has convictions--"

"Convictions are well enough when you can afford 'em," Brother
Clerihew grunted again.  "But up against Colt--what's the use?
And where's his backing?  Ibbetson, with a wife hanging on to his
coat-tails; and old Bonaday, that wouldn't hurt a fly; and Copas,
standing off and sneering."

"A man might have all the pains of Golgotha upon him before ever
_you_ turned a hair," grumbled Brother Dasent, a few yards away.

He writhed in his chair, for the rheumatism was really troublesome;
but he over-acted his suffering somewhat, having learnt in forty-five
years of married life that his spouse was not over-ready with
sympathy.

"T'cht!" answered she.  "I ought to know what they're like by this
time, and I wonder, for my part, you don't try to get accustomed to
'em.  Dying one can understand: but to be worrited with a man's
ailments, noon and night, it gets on the nerves. . . ."


"You're _sure_?" resumed Mrs. Royle eagerly, but sinking her voice--
for she could hardly wait until the Master had passed out of earshot.

"Did you ever know me spread tales?" asked the comfortable-looking
Nurse.  "Only, mind you, I mentioned it in the strictest secrecy.
This is such a scandalous hole, one can't be too careful. . . . But
down by the river they were, consorting and God knows what else."

"At his age, too!  Disgusting, I call it."

"Oh, _she's_ not particular! My comfort is I always suspected that
woman from the first moment I set eyes on her.  Instinct, I s'pose.
'Well, my lady,' says I, 'if you're any better than you should be,
then I've lived all these years for nothing.'"

"And him--that looked such a broken-down old innocent!"

"They get taken that way sometimes, late in life."

Nurse Turner sank her voice and said something salacious, which
caused Mrs. Royle to draw a long breath and exclaim that she could
never have credited such things--not in a Christian land.  Her old
husband, too, overheard it, and took snuff with a senile chuckle.

"Gad, that's spicy!" he crooned.


The Master, at the gateway leading to the home-park, turned for a
look back on the quadrangle and the seated figures.  Yes, they made
an exquisite picture.  Here--

    "Here where the world is quiet"--

Here, indeed, his ancestor had built a haven of rest.

    "From too much love of living,
        From hope and fear set free,
     We thank with brief thanksgiving
        Whatever gods may be
     That no life lives for ever;
     That dead men rise up never;
     That even the weariest river
        Winds somewhere safe to sea."

As the lines floated across his memory, the Master had a mind to
employ them in his peroration (giving them a Christian trend, of
course) in place of the sonnet he had meant to quote.  This would
involve reconstructing a longish paragraph; but they had touched his
mood, and he spent some time pacing to and fro under the trees before
his taste rejected them as facile and even cheap in comparison with
Wordsworth's--

    "Men unto whom sufficient for the day,
        And minds not stinted or untill'd are given,
        --Sound healthy children of the God of heaven--
     Are cheerful as the rising sun in May."

"Yes, yes," murmured the Master, "Wordsworth's is the better.
But what a gift, to be able to express a thought just _so_--with that
freshness, that noble simplicity!  And even with Wordsworth it was
fugitive, lost after four or five marvellous years.  No one not being
a Greek has ever possessed it in permanence. . . ."

Here he paused at the sound of a footfall on the turf close behind
him, and turned about with a slight frown; which readily yielded,
however, and became a smile of courtesy.

"Ah, my dear Colt! Good evening!"

"Good evening, Master."

Mr. Colt came up deferentially, yet firmly, much as a nurse in a good
family might collect a straying infant.  He was a tall, noticeably
well-grown man, a trifle above thirty, clean shaven, with a square
and obstinate chin.  He wore no hat, and his close black hair showed
a straight middle parting above his low and somewhat protuberant
forehead.  The parting widened at the occiput to a well-kept tonsure.
At the back the head wanted balance; and this lent a suggestion of
brutality--of "thrust"--to his abounding appearance of strength.
He walked in his priestly black with the gait and carriage proper to
a heavy dragoon.

"A fine evening, indeed.  Are you disengaged?"

"Certainly, certainly"--in comparison with Mr. Colt's grave voice the
Master's was almost a chirrup--"whether for business or for the
pleasure of a talk.  Nothing wrong, I hope?"

For a moment or two the Chaplain did not answer.  He seemed to be
weighing his words.  At length he said--

"I should have reported at once, but have been thinking it over.
At Early Celebration this morning Warboise insulted the wafer."

"Dear, dear, you don't say so!"

--"Took it from me, held it derisively between finger and thumb, and
muttered.  I could not catch all that he said, but I distinctly heard
the words 'biscuit' and 'Antichrist.'  Indeed, he confesses to having
used them.  His demeanour left no doubt that he was insolent of set
purpose. . . . I should add that Ibbetson, who was kneeling next to
him and must have overheard, walked back from the altar-rail straight
out of chapel; but his wife assures me that this was purely a
coincidence, and due to a sudden weakness of the stomach."

"You have spoken to Warboise?"

"Yes, and he is defiant.  Says that bread is bread, and--when I
pressed him for a definition--asked (insolently again) if the
Trustees had authorised our substituting biscuit for bread in the
Wayfarers' Dole.  Advised us to 'try it on' there, and look out for
letters in the  _Merchester Observer_.  He even threatened--if you'll
believe me--to write to the Press himself.  In short, he was beyond
all self-control."

"I was afraid," murmured the Master, flushing a little in his
distress, "you would not introduce this--er--primitive use--or, I
should say, restore it--without trouble.  Brother Warboise has strong
Protestant prejudices; passionate, even."

"And ignorant."

"Oh, of course, of course!  Still--"

"I suggest that, living as he does on the Church's benefaction,
eating the bread of her charity--"

The Chaplain paused, casting about for a third phrase to express
Brother Warboise's poor dependence.

The Master smiled whimsically.

"'The bread'--that's just it, he would tell you . . . And Alberic de
Blanchminster, moreover, was a layman, not even in any of the minor
orders; so that, strictly speaking--"

"But he left his wealth expressly to be administered by the Church.
 . . . Will you forgive me, Master, if I repeat very respectfully the
suggestion I made at the beginning?  If you could see your way to be
celebrant at the early office, your mere presence would silence these
mutineers.  The Brethren respect your authority without question,
and, the ice once broken, they would come to heel as one man."

The Master shook his head tremulously, in too much of a flurry even
to note the Chaplain's derangement of metaphors.

"You cannot guess how early rising upsets me.  Doctor Ainsley,
indeed, positively forbids it. . . . I can sympathise, you see, with
Ibbetson . . . and, for Brother Warboise, let us always remember that
St. Hospital was not made, and cannot be altered, in a day--even for
the better.  Like England, it has been built by accretions, by
traditions; yes, and by traditions that apparently conflict--by that
of Brother Ingman, among others. . . .

"We who love St. Hospital," continued the Master, still tremulously,
"have, I doubt not, each his different sense of the _genius loci_.
Warboise finds it, we'll say, in the person of Peter Ingman,
Protestant and martyr.  But I don't defend his behaviour.  I will
send for him to-morrow, and talk to him.  I will talk to him very
severely."



CHAPTER III.


BROTHER COPAS HOOKS A FISH.

"Well," said Brother Copas, "since the fish are not rising, let us
talk.  Or rather, you can tell me all about it while I practise
casting. . . . By what boat is she coming?"

"By the _Carnatic_, and due some time to-morrow.  I saw it in the
newspaper."

"Well?--" prompted Brother Copas, glancing back over his shoulder as
Brother Bonaday came to a halt.

The bent little man seemed to have lost the thread of his speech as
he stood letting his gentle, tired eyes follow the flight of the
swallows swooping and circling low along the river and over the
meadow-grasses.

"Well?--" prompted Brother Copas again.

"Nurse Branscome will go down to meet her."

"And then?--"

"I am hoping the Master will let her have my spare room," said
Brother Bonaday vaguely.

Here it should be explained that when the Trustees erected a new
house for the Master his old lodgings in the quadrangle had been
carved into sets of chambers for half a dozen additional Brethren,
and that one of these, differing only from the rest in that it
contained a small spare room, had chanced to be allotted to Brother
Bonaday.  He had not applied for it, and it had grieved him to find
his promotion resented by certain of the Brethren, who let slip few
occasions for envy.  For the spare room had been quite useless to him
until now.  Now he began to think it might be, after all, a special
gift of Providence.

"You have spoken to the Master?" asked Brother Copas.

"No: that is to say, not yet."

"What if he refuses?"

"It will be very awkward.  I shall hardly know what to do. . . . Find
her some lodging in the town, perhaps; there seems no other way."

"You should have applied to the Master at once."

Brother Bonaday considered this, while his eyes wandered.

"But why?" he asked.  "The boat had sailed before the letter reached
me.  She was already on her way.  Yes or no, it could make no
difference."

"It makes this difference: suppose that the Master refuses, you have
lost four days in which you might have found her a suitable lodging.
What's the child's name, by the by?

"Corona, it seems."

"Seems?"

"She was born just after her mother left me and went to America,
having a little money of her own saved out of our troubles." Again
Brother Copas, in the act of making a cast, glanced back over his
shoulder, but Brother Bonaday's eyes were on the swallows.
"In 1902 it was, the year of King Edward's coronation: yes, that will
be why my wife chose the name. . . . I suppose, as you say,"
Brother Bonaday went on after a pause, "I ought to have spoken to the
Master at once; but I put it off, the past being painful to me."

"Yet you told Nurse Branscome."

"Someone--some woman--had to be told.  The child must be met, you
see."

"H'm. . . . Well, I am glad, anyway, that you told me whilst there
was yet a chance of my being useful; being, as you may or may not
have observed, inclined to jealousy in matters of friendship."

This time Brother Copas kept his face averted, and made a fresh cast
across stream with more than ordinary care.  The fly dropped close
under the far bank, and by a bare six inches clear of a formidable
alder.  He jerked the rod backward, well pleased with his skill.

"That was a pretty good one, eh?"

But clever angling was thrown away upon Brother Bonaday, whom
preoccupation with trouble had long ago made unobservant.
Brother Copas reeled in a few feet of his line.

"You'll bear in mind that, if the Master should refuse and you're
short of money for a good lodging, I have a pound or two laid by.
We must do what we can for the child; coming, as she will, from the
other side of the world."

"That is kind of you, Copas," said Brother Bonaday slowly, his
eyes fixed now on the reel, the whirring click of which drew his
attention, so that he seemed to address his speech to it.
"It is very kind, and I thank you.  But I hope the Master will not
refuse: though, to tell you the truth, there is another small
difficulty which makes me shy of asking him a favour."

"Eh? What is it?"

Brother Bonaday twisted his thin fingers together.  "I--I had
promised, before I got this letter, to stand by Warboise.  I feel
rather strongly on these matters, you know--though, of course, not so
strongly as he does--and I promised to support him.  Which makes it
very awkward, you see, to go and ask a favour of the Master just when
you are (so to say) defying his authority. . . . While if I hide it
from him, and he grants the favour, and then next day or the day
after I declare for Warboise, it will look like treachery, eh?"

"Damn!" said Brother Copas, still winding in his line meditatively.
"There is no such casuist as poverty.  And only this morning I was
promising myself much disinterested sport in the quarrelling of you
Christian brethren. . . . But isn't that Warboise coming along the
path? . . . Yes, the very man!  Well, we must try what's to be done."

"But I have given him my word, remember."

Brother Copas, if he heard, gave no sign of hearing.  He had turned
to hail Brother Warboise, who came along the river path with eyes
fastened on the ground, and staff viciously prodding in time with his
steps.

"Hallo, Warboise!  Halt, and give the countersign!"

Brother Warboise halted, taken at unawares, and eyed the two
doubtfully from under his bushy grey eyebrows.  They were Beauchamp
both, he Blanchminster.  He wore the black cloak of Blanchminster,
with the silver cross _patte_ at the breast, and looked--so Copas
murmured to himself--"like Caiaphas in a Miracle Play."  His mouth
was square and firm, his grey beard straightly cut.  He had been a
stationer in a small way, and had come to grief by vending only those
newspapers of which he could approve the religious tendency.

"The countersign?" he echoed slowly and doubtfully.

He seldom understood Brother Copas, but by habit suspected him of
levity.

"To be sure, among three good Protestants!  '_Bloody end to the
Pope!_' is it not?"

"You are mocking me," snarled Brother Warboise, and with that struck
the point of his staff passionately upon the pathway.  "You are a
Gallio, and always will be: you care nothing for what is heaven and
earth to us others.  But you have no right to infect Bonaday, here,
with your poison.  He has promised me."  Brother Warboise faced upon
Brother Bonaday sternly, "You promised me, you know you did."

"To be sure he promised you," put in Brother Copas.  "He has just
been telling me."

"And I am going to hold him to it!  These are not times for
falterers, halters between two opinions.  If England is to be saved
from coming a second time under the yoke of Papacy, men will have to
come out in their true colours.  He that is not for us is against
us."

Brother Copas reeled in a fathom of line with a contemplative,
judicial air.

"Upon my word, Warboise, I'm inclined to agree with you. I
don't pretend to share your Protestant fervour: but hang it!
I'm an Englishman with a sense of history, and that is what no single
one among your present-day High Anglicans would appear to possess.
If a man wants to understand England he has to start with one or two
simple propositions, of which the first--or about the first--is that
England once had a reformation, and is not going to forget it.
But that is just what these fellows would make-believe to ignore.
A fool like Colt--for at bottom, between ourselves, Colt is a fool--
says 'Reformation?  There was no such thing: we don't acknowledge
it.'  As the American said of some divine who didn't believe in
eternal punishment, 'By gosh, he'd better not!'"

"But England _is_ forgetting it!" insisted Brother Warboise.
"Look at the streams of Papist monks she has allowed to pour in
ever since France took a strong line with her monastic orders.
Look at those fellows--College of St. John Lateran, as they call
themselves--who took lodgings only at the far end of this village.
In the inside of six months they had made friends with everybody."

"They employ local tradesmen, and are particular in paying their
debts, I'm told."

"Oh," said Brother Warboise, "They're cunning!"

Brother Copas gazed at him admiringly, and shot a glance at Brother
Bonaday.  But Brother Bonaday's eyes had wandered off again to the
skimming swallows.

"Confessed Romans and their ways," said Brother Warboise, "one is
prepared for, but not for these wolves in sheep's clothing.
Why, only last Sunday-week you must have heard Colt openly preaching
the confessional!"

"I slept," said Brother Copas.  "But I will take your word for it."

"He did, I assure you; and what's more--you may know it or not--Royle
and Biscoe confess to him regularly."

"They probably tell him nothing worse than their suspicions of you
and me.  Colt is a vain person walking in a vain show."

"You don't realise the hold they are getting.  Look at the money they
squeeze out of the public; the churches they restore, and the new
ones they build.  And among these younger Anglicans, I tell you, Colt
is a force."

"My good Warboise, you have described him exactly.  He is a force--
and nothing else.  He will bully and beat you down to get his way,
but in the end you can always have the consolation of presenting him
with the shadow, which he will unerringly mistake for the substance.
I grant you that to be bullied and beaten down is damnably unpleasant
discipline, even when set off against the pleasure of fooling such a
fellow as Colt.  But when a man has to desist from pursuit of
pleasure he develops a fine taste for consolations: and this is going
to be mine for turning Protestant and backing you in this business."

"_You?_"

"Your accent is so little flattering, Warboise, that I hardly dare to
add the condition.  Yet I will.  If I stand in with you in resisting
Colt, you must release Bonaday here.  Henceforth he's out of the
quarrel."

"But I do not understand." Brother Warboise regarded Brother Copas
from under his stiff grey eyebrows.  "Why should Bonaday back out?"

"That is his affair," answered Brother Copas smoothly, almost before
Brother Bonaday was aware of being appealed to.

"But--you don't mind my saying it--I've never considered you as a
Protestant, quite; not, at least, as an earnest one."

"That," said Brother Copas, "I may be glad to remember, later on.
But come; I offer you a bargain.  Strike off Bonaday and enlist me.
A volunteer is proverbially worth two pressed men; and as a
Protestant I promise you to shine.  If you must have my reason, or
reasons, say that I am playing for safety."

Here Brother Copas laid down his rod on the grassy bank and felt for
his snuff-box.  As he helped himself to a pinch he slyly regarded the
faces of his companions; and his own, contracting its muscles to take
the dose, seemed to twist itself in a sardonic smile.

"Unlike Colt," he explained, "I read history sometimes, and observe
its omens.  You say that our clergy are active just now in building
and restoring churches.  Has it occurred to you that they were never
so phenomenally active in building and rebuilding as on the very eve
of the Reformation crash?  Ask and inquire, my friend, what
proportion of our English churches are Perpendicular; get from any
handbook the date of that style of architecture; and apply the omen
if you will."

"That sounds reassuring," said Brother Warboise.  "And so you really
think we Protestants are going to win?"

"God forbid!  What I say is, that the High Anglicans will probably
lose."

"One never knows when you are joking or when serious."  Brother
Warboise, leaning on his staff, pondered Brother Copas's face.
It was a fine face; it even resembled the conventional portrait of
Dante, but--I am asking the reader to tax his imagination--with
humorous wrinkles set about the eyes, their high austerity clean
taken away and replaced by a look of very mundane shrewdness, and
lastly a grosser chin and mouth with a touch of the laughing faun in
their folds and corners.  "You are concealing your real reasons,"
said Brother Warboise.

"That," answered Brother Copas, "has been defined for the true
function of speech. . . . But I am quite serious this time, and I ask
you again to let Brother Bonaday off and take me on.  You will find
it worth while."

Brother Warboise could not see for the life of him why, at a time
when it behoved all defenders of the reformed religion to stand
shoulder to shoulder, Brother Bonaday should want to be let off.

"No?" said Brother Copas, picking up his rod again.  "Well, those are
my terms . . . and, excuse me, but was not that a fish over yonder?
They are beginning to rise. . . ."

Brother Warboise muttered that he would think it over, and resumed
his walk.


"He'll agree, safe enough.  And now, no more talking!"

But after a cast or two Brother Copas broke his own injunction.

"A Protestant! . . . I'm doing a lot for you, friend.  But you must
go to the Master this very evening.  No time to be lost, I tell you!
Why, if he consent, there are a score of small things to be bought to
make the place fit for a small child.  Get out pencil and paper and
make a list. . . .  Well, where do we begin?"

"I--I'm sure I don't know," confessed Brother Bonaday helplessly.
"I never, so to speak, had a child before, you see."

"Nor I . . . but damn it, man, let's do our best and take things in
order!  When she arrives--let me see--the first thing is, she'll be
hungry.  That necessitates a small knife and fork.  Knife, fork and
spoon; regular godfather's gift.  You must let me stand godfather and
supply 'em.  You don't happen to know if she's been christened, by
the way?"

"No--o.  I suppose they look after these things in America?"

"Probably--after a fashion," said Brother Copas with a fine smile.
"Heavens! if as a Protestant I am to fight the first round over
Infant Baptism--"

"There _is_ a font in the chapel."

"Yes.  I have often wondered why."

Brother Copas appeared to meditate this as he slowly drew back his
rod and made a fresh cast.  Again the fly dropped short of the alder
stump by a few inches, and fell delicately on the dark water below
it.  There was a splash--a soft gurgling sound dear to the angler's
heart.  Brother Copas's rod bent and relaxed to the brisk whirr of
its reel as a trout took fly and hook and sucked them under.

Then followed fifteen minutes of glorious life.  Even Brother
Bonaday's slow blood caught the pulse of it.  He watched, not daring
to utter a sound, his limbs twitching nervously.

But when the fish--in weight well over a pound--had been landed and
lay, twitching too, in the grasses by the Mere bank, Brother Copas,
after eyeing it a moment with legitimate pride, slowly wound up his
reel.

"And I am to be a Protestant! . . . Saint Peter--King Fisherman--
forgive me!"



CHAPTER IV.


CORONA COMES.

When Nurse Branscome reached the docks and inquired at what hour the
_Carnatic_ might be expected, the gatekeeper pointed across a maze of
dock-basins, wharves, tramway-lines, to a far quay where the great
steamship lay already berthed.

"She've broken her record by five hours and some minutes," he
explained.  "See that train just pulling out of the station?
That carries her mails."

Nurse Branscome--a practical little woman with shrewd grey eyes--
neither fussed over the news nor showed any sign of that haste which
is ill speed.  Scanning the distant vessel, she begged to be told the
shortest way alongside, and noted the gatekeeper's instructions very
deliberately, nodding her head.  They were intricate.  At the close
she thanked him and started, still without appearance of hurry, and
reached the _Carnatic_ without a mistake.  She arrived, too, a
picture of coolness, though the docks lay shadeless to the afternoon
sun, and the many tramway-lines radiated a heat almost insufferable.

The same quiet air of composure carried her unchallenged up a gangway
and into the great ship.  A gold-braided junior officer, on duty at
the gangway-head, asked politely if he could be of service to her.
She answered that she had come to seek a steerage passenger--a little
girl named Bonaday.

"Ach!" said a voice close at her elbow, "that will be our liddle
Korona!"

Nurse Branscome turned.  The voice belonged to a blond, middle-aged
German, whose gaze behind his immense spectacles was of the
friendliest.

"Yes--Corona: that is her name."

"So!" said the middle-aged German.  "She is with my wive at this
moment.  If I may ascort you? . . . We will not then drouble Mister
Smid' who is so busy."

He led the way forward.  Once he turned, and in the faint light
between-decks his spectacles shone palely, like twin moons.

"I am habby you are come," he said.  "My wive will be habby. . . .
I told her a dozzen times it will be ol' right--the ship has arrived
before she is agspected. . . . But our liddle Korona is so agscited,
so imbatient for her well-beloved England."

He pronounced "England" as we write it.

"So!" he proclaimed, halting before a door and throwing it open.

Within, on a cheap wooden travelling-trunk, sat a stout woman and a
child.  The child wore black weeds, and had--as Nurse Branscome noted
at first glance--remarkably beautiful eyes.  Her right hand lay
imprisoned between the two palms of the stout woman, who, looking up,
continued to pat the back of it softly.

"A friendt--for our Mees Korona!"

"Whad did I not tell you?" said the stout woman to the child, cooing
the words exultantly, as she arose to meet the visitor.

The two women looked in each other's eyes, and each divined that the
other was good.

"Good afternoon," said Nurse Branscome.  "I am sorry to be late."

"But it is we who are early. . . . We tell the liddle one she must
have bribed the cabdain, she was so craved to arr-rive!"

"Are you related to her?"

"Ach, no," chimed in husband and wife together as soon as they
understood.  "But friendts--friendts, Korona--_hein?_"

The husband explained that they had made the child's acquaintance on
the first day out from New York, and had taken to her at once, seeing
her so forlorn.  He was a baker by trade, and by name Muller; and he
and his wife, after doing pretty well in Philadelphia, were returning
home to Bremen, where his brother (also a baker) had opened a
prosperous business and offered him a partnership.

--"Which he can well afford," commented Frau Muller. "For my husband
is beyond combetition as a master-baker; and at the end all will go
to his brother's two sons. . . . We have not been gifen children of
our own."

"Yet home is home," added her husband, with an expansive smile,
"though it be not the Vaterland, Mees Korona--_hein?_"  He eyed the
child quizzically, and turned to Nurse Branscome.  "She is badriotic
so as you would nevar think--

    "'Brit-ons nevar, nevar, nev-ar-will be Slavs!'"

He intoned it ludicrously, casting out both hands and snapping his
fingers to the tune.

The child Corona looked past him with a gaze that put aside these
foolish antics, and fastened itself on Nurse Branscome.

"I think I shall like you," she said composedly and with the clearest
English accent.  "But I do not quite know who you are.  Are you
fetching me to Daddy?"

"Yes," said Nurse Branscome, and nodded.

She seldom or never wasted words.  Nods made up a good part of her
conversation always.

Corona stood up, by this action conveying to the grown-ups--for she,
too, economised speech--that she was ready to go, and at once.
Youth is selfish, even in the sweetest-born of natures.
Baker Muller and his good wife looked at her wistfully.  She had come
into their childless life, and had taken unconscious hold on it,
scarce six days ago--the inside of a week.  They looked at her
wistfully.  Her eyes were on Nurse Branscome, who stood for the
future.  Yet she remembered that they had been kind.  Herr Muller,
kind to the last, ran off and routed up a seaman to carry her box to
the gangway.  There, while bargaining with a porter, Nurse Branscome
had time to observe with what natural good manners the child suffered
herself to be folded in Frau Muller's ample embrace, and how prettily
she shook hands with the good baker.  She turned about, even once or
twice, to wave her farewells.

"But she is naturally reserved," Nurse Branscome decided.
"Well, she'll be none the worse for that."

She had hardly formed this judgment when Corona went a straight way
to upset it.  A tuft of groundsel had rooted itself close beside the
traction rails a few paces from the waterside.  With a little cry--
almost a sob--the child swooped upon the weed, and plucking it,
pressed it to her lips.

"I promised to kiss the first living thing I met in England," she
explained.

"Then you might have begun with me," said Nurse Branscome, laughing.

"Oh, that's good--I like you to laugh!  This is real England, merry
England, and I used to 'spect it was so good that folks went about
laughing all the time, just because they lived in it."

"Look here, my dear, you mustn't build your expectations too high.
If you do, we shall all disappoint you; which means that you will
suffer."

"But that was a long time ago.  I've grown since. . . . And I didn't
kiss you at first because it makes me feel uncomfortable kissing
folks out loud.  But I'll kiss you in the cars when we get to them."

But by and by, when they found themselves seated alone in a
third-class compartment, she forgot her promise, being lost in wonder
at this funny mode of travelling.  She examined the parcels' rack
overhead.

"'_For light articles only_,'" she read out.  "But-but how do we
manage when it's bedtime?"

"Bless the child, we don't sleep in the train!  Why, in little over
an hour we shall be at Merchester, and that's home."

"Home!" Corona caught at the word and repeated it with a shiver of
excitement.  "Home--in an hour?"

It was not that she distrusted; it was only that she could not focus
her mind down to so small a distance.

"And now," said Nurse Branscome cheerfully, as they settled
themselves down, "are you going to tell me about your passage, or am
I to tell you about your father and the sort of place St. Hospital
is?  Or would you," added this wise woman, "just like to sit still
and look out of window and take it all in for a while?"

"Thank you," answered Corona, "that's what I want, ezactly."

She nestled into her corner as the train drew forth beyond the
purlieus and dingy suburbs of the great seaport and out into the
country--our south country, all green and glorious with summer.
Can this world show the like of it, for comfort of eye and heart?

Her eyes drank, devoured it.--Cattle knee-deep in green pasture,
belly-deep in green water-flags by standing pools; cattle resting
their long flanks while they chewed the cud; cattle whisking their
tails amid the meadow-sweet, under hedges sprawled over with wild
rose and honeysuckle.--White flocks in the lengthening shade of elms;
wood and copse; silver river and canal glancing between alders,
hawthorns, pollard willows; lichened bridges of flint and brick;
ancient cottages, thatched or red-tiled, timber-fronted, bulging out
in friendliest fashion on the high road; the high road looping its
way from village to village, still between hedges.  Corona had never
before set eyes on a real hedge in the course of her young life; but
all this country--right away to the rounded chalk hills over which
the heat shimmered--was parcelled out by hedges--hedges by the
hundred--and such hedges!

"It's--it's like a garden," she stammered, turning around and meeting
a question in Nurse Branscome's eyes.  "It's all so lovely and tiny
and bandboxy.  However do they find the time for it?"

"Eh, it takes time," said Nurse Branscome, amused.  "You'll find
that's the main secret with us over here.  But--disappointed, are
you?"

"Oh, no--no--no!" the child assured her.  "It's ten times lovelier
than ever I 'spected--only," she added, cuddling down for another
long gaze, "it's different--different in size."

"England's a little place," said Nurse Branscome.  "In the colonies--
I won't say anything about the States, for I've never seen them; but
I've been to Australia in my time, and I expect with Canada it's much
the same or more so--in the colonies everything's spread out; but
home here, I heard Brother Copas say, if you want to feel how great
anything is, you have to take it deep-ways, layer below layer."

Corona knit her small brow.

"But Windsor Castle is a mighty big place?" she said hopefully.

"Oh, yes!"

"Well, I'm glad of that anyway."

"But why, dear?"

"Because," said Corona, "that is where the King lives.  I used to
call him _my_ King over on the Other Side, because my name is Corona,
and means I was born the year he was crowned.  They make out they
don't hold much stock in kings, back there; but that sort of talk
didn't take me in, because when you _have_ a King of your own you
know what it feels like.  And, anyway, they had to allow that King
Edward is a mighty big one, and that he is always making peace for
all the world. . . . So now you know why I'm glad about Windsor
Castle."

"I'm afraid it is not quite clear to me yet," said Nurse Branscome,
leading her on.

"I can't 'splain very well."--The child could never quite compass the
sound "ex" in words where a consonant followed.--"I'm no good at
'splaining.  But I guess if the job was up to you to make peace for
all-over-the-world, you'd want to sit in a big place, sort of empty
an' quiet, an' feel like God."  Corona gazed out of window again.
"You can tell he's been at it, too, hereabouts; but somehow I didn't
'spect it to be all lying about in little bits."

They alighted from the idling train at a small country station
embowered in roses, the next on this side of Merchester and but a
short three-quarters of a mile from St. Hospital, towards which they
set out on foot by a meadow-path and over sundry stiles, a porter
following (or rather making a _detour_ after them along the high
road) and wheeling Corona's effects on a barrow.  From the first
stile Nurse Branscome pointed out the grey Norman buildings, the
chapel tower, the clustering trees; and supported Corona with a hand
under her elbow as, perched on an upper bar with her knees against
the top rail, she drank in her first view of home.

Her first comment--it shaped itself into a question, or rather into
two questions--gave Nurse Branscome a shock: it was so infantile in
comparison with her talk in the train.

"Does daddy live there?  And is he so very old, then?"

Then Nurse Branscome bethought her that this mite had never yet seen
her father, and that he was not only an aged man but a broken-down
one, and in appearance (as they say) older than his years.
A great pity seized her for Corona, and in the rush of pity all her
oddities and grown-up tricks of speech (Americanisms apart) explained
themselves.  She was an old father's child.  Nurse Branscome was
midwife enough to know what freakishness and frailty belong to
children begotten by old age.  Yet Corona, albeit gaunt with growing,
was lithe and well-formed, and of a healthy complexion and a clear,
though it inclined to pallor.

"Your father is not a young man," she said gently.  "You must be
prepared for that, dear. . . . And of course his dress--the dress of
the Beauchamp Brethren--makes him look even older than he is."

"What is it?" asked Corona, turning about as well as she could on the
stile and putting the direct question with direct eyes.

"It's a long gown, a gown of reddish-purple, with a silver rose at
the breast."

"Save us!" exclaimed this unaccountable child.  "'Seems I'd better
start right in by asking what news of the Crusades."


In the spare room pertaining to Brother Bonaday he and Brother Copas
were (as the latter put it) making very bad weather with their
preparations.  They supposed themselves, however, to have plenty of
time, little guessing that the captain of the _Carnatic_ had been
breaking records.  In St. Hospital one soon learns to neglect
mankind's infatuation for mere speed; and yet, strange to say,
Brother Copas was discoursing on this very subject.

He had produced certain purchases from his wallet, and disposed them
on the chest of drawers which was to serve Corona for dressing-table.
They included a cheap mirror, and here he felt himself on safe
ground; but certain others--such as a gaudily-dressed doll, priced at
1s. 3d., a packet of hairpins, a book of coloured photographs,
entitled _Souvenir of Royal Merchester_--he eyed more dubiously.
He had found it hard to bear in mind the child's exact age.
"But she was born in Coronation Year.  I have told you that over and
over," Brother Bonaday would protest.  "My dear fellow, I know you
have; but the devil is, that means something different every time."

--"The purpose of all right motion," Brother Copas was saying, "is to
get back to the point from which you started.  Take the sun itself,
or any created mass; take the smallest molecule in that mass; take
the world whichever way you will--"

     'Behold the world, how it is whirled round!
      And, for it so is whirl'd, is named so.'

"(There's pretty etymology for you!)  All movement in a straight line
is eccentric, lawless, or would be were it possible, which I doubt.
Why this haste, then, in passing given points?  If man did it in a
noble pride, as a _tour de force_, to prove himself so much the
cleverer than the brute creation, I could understand it; but if
that's his game, a speck of radium beats him in a common canter.
I read in a scientific paper last week, in a signed article which
bore every impress of truth, that there's a high explosive that will
run a spark from here to Paris while you are pronouncing its name.
Yet extend that run, and run it far and fast as you will, it can only
come back to your hand. . . . Which," continued Brother Copas,
raising his voice, for Brother Bonaday had toddled into the
sitting-room to see if the kettle boiled, "reminds me of a story I
picked up in the Liberal Club the other day, the truth of it
guaranteed.  Ten or eleven years ago the Mayor of Merchester died on
the very eve of St. Giles's Fair.  The Town Council met, and some
were for stopping the shows and steam roundabouts as a mark of
respect, while others doubted that the masses (among whom the Mayor
had not been popular) would resent this curtailing of their fun.
In the end a compromise was reached.  The proprietor of the
roundabouts was sent for, and the show-ground granted to him, on
condition that he made his steam-organ play hymn tunes.  He accepted,
and that week the merrymakers revolved to the strains of 'Nearer, my
God, to Thee.'  It sounds absurd; but when you come to reflect--"

Brother Copas broke off, hearing a slight commotion in the next room.
Brother Bonaday, kneeling and puffing at the fire which refused to
boil the water, had been startled by voices in the entry.  Looking
up, flushed of face, he beheld a child on the threshold, with Nurse
Branscome standing behind her.

"Daddy!"

Brother Copas from one doorway, Nurse Branscome from the other, saw
Brother Bonaday's face twitch as with a pang of terror.  He arose
slowly from his knees, and very slowly--as if his will struggled
against some invisible, detaining force--held out both hands.
Corona ran to them; but, grasped by them, drew back for a moment,
scanning him before she suffered herself to be kissed.

"My, what a dear old dress! . . . Daddy, you _are_ a dude!"



CHAPTER V.


BROTHER COPAS ON RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE.

"Ah, good evening, Mr. Simeon!"

In the British Isles--search them all over--you will discover no more
agreeable institution of its kind than the Venables Free Library,
Merchester; which, by the way, you are on no account to confuse with
the Free Public Library attached to the Shire Hall.  In the latter
you may study the newspapers with all the latest financial, police
and betting news, or borrow all the newest novels--even this novel
which I am writing, should the Library Sub-Committee of the Town
Council (an austerely moral body) allow it to pass.  In the Venables
Library the books are mostly mellowed by age, even when naughtiest
(it contains a whole roomful of Restoration Plays, an unmatched
collection), and no newspapers are admitted, unless you count the
monthly and quarterly reviews, of which _The Hibbert Journal_ is the
newest-fangled.  By consequence the Venables Library, though open to
all men without payment, has few frequenters; "which," says Brother
Copas, "is just as it should be."

But not even public neglect will account for the peculiar charm of
the Venables Library.  That comes of the building it inhabits:
anciently a town house of the Marquesses of Merchester, abandoned
at the close of the great Civil War, and by them never again
inhabited, but maintained with all its old furniture, and from time
to time patched up against age and weather--happily not restored.
When, early in the last century, the seventh Marquess of Merchester
very handsomely made it over to a body of trustees, to house a
collection of books bequeathed to the public by old Dean Venables,
Merchester's most scholarly historian, it was with a stipulation that
the amenities of the house should be as little as possible disturbed.
The beds, to be sure, were removed from the upper rooms, and the old
carpets from the staircase; and the walls, upstairs and down, lined
with bookcases.  But a great deal of the old furniture remains; and,
wandering at will from one room to another, you look forth through
latticed panes upon a garth fenced off from the street with railings
of twisted iron-work and overspread by a gigantic mulberry-tree, the
boughs of which in summer, if you are wise enough to choose a
window-seat, will filter the sunlight upon your open book,

     Annihilating all that's made
     To a green thought in a green shade.

Lastly, in certain of the rooms smoking is permitted; some bygone
trustee--may earth lie lightly on him!--having discovered and taught
that of all things a book is about the most difficult to burn.
You may smoke in 'Paradise,' for instance.  By this name, for what
reason I cannot tell, is known the room containing the Greek and
Latin classics.

Brother Copas, entering Paradise with a volume under his arm, found
Mr. Simeon seated there alone with a manuscript and a Greek lexicon
before him, and gave him good evening.

"Good evening, Brother Copas! . . . You have been a stranger to us
for some weeks, unless I mistake?"

"You are right.  These have been stirring times in politics, and for
the last five or six weeks I have been helping to save my country, at
the Liberal Club."

Mr. Simeon--a devoted Conservative--came as near to frowning as his
gentle nature would permit.

"You disapprove, of course," continued Brother Copas easily.
"Well, so--in a sense--do I.  We beat you at the polls; not in
Merchester--we shall never carry Merchester--though even in
Merchester we put up fight enough to rattle you into a blue funk.
But God help the pair of us, Mr. Simeon, if our principles are to be
judged by the uses other men make of 'em!  I have had enough of my
fellow-Liberals to last me for some time. . . . Why are you studying
Liddell and Scott, by the way?"

"To tell the truth," Mr. Simeon confessed, "this is my fair copy of
the Master's Gaudy Sermon.  I am running it through and correcting
the Greek accents.  I am always shaky at accents."

"Why not let me help you?" Brother Copas suggested.  "Upon my word,
you may trust me.  I am, as nearly as possible, impeccable with Greek
accents, and may surely say so without vanity, since the gift is as
useless as any other of mine."

Mr. Simeon, as we know, was well aware of this.

"I should be most grateful," he confessed, in some compunction.
"But I am not sure that the Master--if you will excuse me--would care
to have his sermon overlooked.  Strictly speaking, indeed, I ought
not to have brought it from home: but with six children in a very
small house--and on a warm evening like this, you understand--"

"I once kept a private school," said Brother Copas.

"They are high-spirited children, I thank God." Mr. Simeon sighed.
"Moreover, as it happened, they wanted my Liddell and Scott to play
at forts with."

"Trust me, my dear sir.  I will confine myself to the Master's
marginalia without spying upon the text."

Brother Copas, as Mr. Simeon yielded to his gentle insistence, laid
his own book on the table, and seated himself before the manuscript,
which he ran through at great speed.

"H'm--h'm . . . psyche here is _oxyton_--here and always . . . and
anoetos proparoxyton: you have left it unaccented."

"I was waiting to look it up, having some idea that it held a
contraction."

Brother Copas dipped pen and inserted the accent without comment.

"I see nothing else amiss," he said, rising.

"It is exceedingly kind of you."

"Well, as a matter of fact it is; for I came here expressly to
cultivate a bad temper, and you have helped to confirm me in a good
one. . . . Oh, I know what you would say if your politeness allowed:
'Why, if bad temper's my object, did I leave the Liberal Club and
come here?'  Because, my dear sir, at the Club--though there's
plenty--it's of the wrong sort.  I wanted a _religiously_ bad temper,
and an intelligent one to boot."

"I don't see what religion and bad temper have to do with one
another," confessed Mr. Simeon.

"That is because you are a good man, and therefore your religion
doesn't matter to you."

"But really," Mr. Simeon protested, flushing; "though one doesn't
willingly talk of these inmost things, you must allow me to say that
my religion is everything to me."

"You say that, and believe it.  Religion, you believe, colours
all your life, suffuses it with goodness as with a radiance.
But actually, my friend, it is your own good heart that colours and
throws its radiance into your religion."

     'O lady, we receive but what we give,
      And in our life alone does Nature live'--

"--Or religion either. . . . Pardon me, but a thoroughly virtuous or a
thoroughly amiable man is not worth twopence as a touchstone for a
creed; he would convert even Mormonism to a thing of beauty. . . .
Whereas the real test of any religion is--as I saw it excellently
well put the other day--'not what form it takes in a virtuous mind,
but what effects it produces on those of another sort.'  Well, I have
been studying those effects pretty well all my life, and they may be
summed up, roughly but with fair accuracy, as Bad Temper."

"Good men or bad," persisted Mr. Simeon, "what _can_ the Christian
religion do but make them both better?"

"_Which_ Christian religion?  Catholic or Protestant?  Anglican or
Nonconformist? . . . I won't ask you to give away your own side.
So we'll take the Protestant Nonconformists.  There are a good many
down at the Club: you heard some of the things they said and printed
during the Election; and while your charity won't deny that they are
religious--some of 'em passionately religious--you will make haste to
concede that their religion and their bad temper were pretty well
inseparable.  They would say pretty much the same of you
Anglo-Catholics."

"You will not pretend that we show bad temper in anything like the
same degree."

"Why should you? . . . I don't know that, as a fact, there is much to
choose between you; but at any rate the worse temper belongs very
properly to the under dog.  Your Protestant is the under dog in
England to-day; socially, if not politically. . . . Yes, and
politically, too; for he may send what majority he will to the House
of Commons pledged to amend the Education Act of 1902: he does it in
vain.  The House of Lords--which is really not a political but a
social body, the citadel of a class--will confound his politics,
frustrate his knavish tricks.  Can you wonder that he loses his
temper, sometimes inelegantly?  And when the rich Nonconformist tires
of striving against all the odds--when he sets up his carriage and
his wife and daughters find that it won't carry them where they had
hoped--when he surrenders to their persuasions and goes over to the
enemy--why, then, can you wonder that his betrayed coreligionists
roar all like bears or foam like dogs and run about the city? . . .
I tell you, my dear Mr. Simeon, this England of ours stands in real
peril to-day of merging its class warfare in religious differences."

"You mean it, of course, the other way about--of merging our religion
in class warfare."

"I mean it as I said it.  Class warfare is among Englishmen a quite
normal, healthy function of the body politic: it keeps the blood
circulating.  It is when you start infecting it with religion the
trouble begins. . . . We are a sane people, however, on the whole;
and every sane person is better than his religion."

"How can you say such a thing?"

"How can you gainsay it--nay, or begin to doubt it--if only you will
be honest with yourself?  Consider how many abominable things
religion has taught, and man, by the natural goodness of his heart,
has outgrown.  Do you believe, for example, that an unchristened
infant goes wailing forth from the threshold of life into an eternity
of punishment?  Look me in the face, you father of six!  No, of
course you don't believe it.  Nobody does.  And the difference is not
that religion has ceased to teach it--for it hasn't--but that men
have grown decent and put it, with like doctrines, silently aside in
disgust.  So it has happened to Satan and his fork: they have become
'old hat.'  So it will happen to all the old machinery of hell: the
operating decency of human nature will grow ashamed of it--that is
all . . . Why, if you look into men's ordinary daily conduct--which
is the only true test--they _never_ believed in such things.  Do you
suppose that the most frantic Scotch Calvinist, when he was his douce
daily self and not temporarily intoxicated by his creed, ever treated
his neighbours in practice as men predestined to damnation?
Of course he didn't!"

"But religion," objected Mr. Simeon, "lifts a man out of himself--his
daily self, as you call it."

"It does that, by Jove!" Brother Copas felt for his snuff-box.
"Why, what else was I arguing?"

"And," pursued Mr. Simeon, his voice gaining assurance as it happened
on a form of words he had learnt from somebody else, "the efficacy of
religion is surely just here, that it lifts the individual man out of
his personality and wings him towards Abba, the all-fatherly--as I
heard it said the other day," he added lamely.

"Good Lord!"--Brother Copas eyed him over a pinch.  "You must
have been keeping pretty bad company, lately.  Who is it? . . .
That sounds a trifle too florid even for Colt--the sort of thing Colt
would achieve if he could . . . Upon my word, I believe you must have
been sitting under Tarbolt!"

Mr. Simeon blushed guiltily to the eyes.  But it was ever the
mischief with Brother Copas's worldly scent that he overran it on the
stronger scent of an argument.

"But it's precisely a working daily religion, a religion that
belongs to a man when he _is_ himself, that I'm after," he ran on.
"You fellows hold that a sound religious life will ensure you an
eternity of bliss at the end.  Very well.  You fellows know that the
years of a man's life are, roughly, threescore and ten.  (Actually it
works out far below that figure, but I make you a present of the
difference.)  Very well again.  I take any average Christian aged
forty-five, and what sort of premium do I observe him paying--I won't
say on a policy of Eternal Bliss--but on any policy a business-like
Insurance Company would grant for three hundred pounds?  There _is_
the difference too," added Brother Copas, "that _he_ gets the eternal
bliss, while the three hundred pounds goes to his widow."

Brother Copas took a second pinch, his eyes on Mr. Simeon's face.
He could not guess the secret of the pang that passed over it--that
in naming three hundred pounds he had happened on the precise sum in
which Mr. Simeon was insured, and that trouble enough the poor man
had to find the yearly premium, due now in a fortnight's time.
But he saw that somehow he had given pain, and dexterously slid off
the subject, yet without appearing to change it.

"For my part," he went on, "I know a method by which, if made
Archbishop of Canterbury and allowed a strong hand, I would undertake
to bring, within ten years, every Dissenter in England within the
Church's fold."

"What would you do?"

"I would lay, in one pastoral of a dozen sentences, the strictest
orders on my clergy to desist from all politics, all fighting; to
disdain any cry, any struggle; to accept from Dissent any rebuff,
persecution, spoliation--while steadily ignoring it.  In every parish
my Church's attitude should be this: 'You may deny me, hate me,
persecute me, strip me: but you are a Christian of this parish and
therefore my parishioner; and therefore I absolutely defy you to
escape my forgiveness or my love.  Though you flee to the uttermost
parts of the earth, you shall not escape these: by these, as surely
as I am the Church, you shall be mine in the end.' . . . And do you
think, Mr. Simeon, any man in England could for ever resist that
appeal?  A few of us agnostics, perhaps.  But we are human souls,
after all; and no one is an agnostic for the fun of it.  We should be
tempted--sorely tempted--I don't say rightly."

Mr. Simeon's eyes shone.  The picture touched him.

"But it would mean that the Church must compromise," he murmured.

"That is precisely what it would not mean.  It would mean that all
her adversaries must compromise; and with love there is only one
compromise, which is surrender. . . . But," continued Brother Copas,
resuming his lighter tone, "this presupposes not only a sensible
Archbishop but a Church not given up to anarchy as the Church of
England is.  Let us therefore leave speculating and follow our noses;
which with me, Mr. Simeon--and confound you for a pleasant
companion!--means an instant necessity to cultivate bad temper."

He picked up his volume from the table and walked off with it to the
window-seat.

"You are learning bad temper from a book?" asked Mr. Simeon, taking
off his spectacles and following Brother Copas with mild eyes of
wonder.

"Certainly. . . . If ever fortune, my good sir, should bring you
(which God forbid!) to end your days in our College of Noble Poverty,
you will understand the counsel given by the pilot to Pantagruel and
his fellow-voyagers--that considering the gentleness of the breeze
and the calm of the current, as also that they stood neither in hope
of much good nor in fear of much harm, he advised them to let the
ship drive, nor busy themselves with anything but making good cheer.
I have done with all worldly fear and ambition; and therefore in
working up a hearty Protestant rage (to which a hasty promise commits
me), I can only tackle my passion on the intellectual side.
Those fellows down at the Club are no help to me at all. . . . My
book?  It is the last volume of Mr. Froude's famous _History of
England_.  Here's a passage now--

    "'The method of Episcopal appointments, instituted by Henry VIII,
     as a temporary expedient, and abolished under Edward as an
     unreality, was re-established by Elizabeth, not certainly
     because she believed that the invocation of the Holy Ghost was
     required for the completeness of an election which her own
     choice had already determined, not because the bishops obtained
     any gifts or graces in their consecration which she herself
     respected, but because the shadowy form of an election, with a
     religious ceremony following it, gave them the semblance of
     spiritual independence, the semblance without the substance,
     which qualified them to be the instruments of the system which
     she desired to enforce.  They were tempted to presume on their
     phantom dignity, till a sword of a second Cromwell taught them
     the true value of their Apostolic descent. . . .

"That's pretty well calculated to annoy, eh?  Also, by the way, in
its careless rapture it twice misrelates the relative pronoun; and
Froude was a master of style.  Or what do you say to this?--

    "'But neither Elizabeth nor later politicians of Elizabeth's
     temperament desired the Church of England to become too genuine.
     It has been more convenient to leave an element of unsoundness
     at the heart of an institution which, if sincere, might be
     dangerously powerful.  The wisest and best of its bishops have
     found their influence impaired, their position made equivocal,
     by the element of unreality which adheres to them.  A feeling
     approaching to contempt has blended with the reverence attaching
     to their position, and has prevented them from carrying the
     weight in the councils of the nation which has been commanded by
     men of no greater intrinsic eminence in other professions.'

"Yet another faulty relative!

    "'Pretensions which many of them would have gladly abandoned have
     connected their office with a smile.  The nature of it has for
     the most part filled the Sees with men of second-rate abilities.
     The latest and most singular theory about them is that of the
     modern English Neo-Catholic, who disregards his bishop's advice,
     and despises his censures; but looks on him nevertheless as some
     high-bred, worn-out animal, useless in himself, but infinitely
     valuable for some mysterious purpose of spiritual propagation.'"

Brother Copas laid the open volume face-downward on his knee--a
trivial action in itself; but he had a conscience about books, and
would never have done this to a book he respected.

"Has it struck you, Mr. Simeon," he asked, "that Froude is so
diabolically effective just because in every fibre of him he is at
one with the thing he attacks?"

"He had been a convert of the Tractarians in his young days, I have
heard," said Mr. Simeon.

"Yes, it accounts for much in him.  Yet I was not thinking of that--
which was an experience only, though significant.  The man's whole
cast of mind is priestly despite himself.  He has all the
priesthood's alleged tricks: you can never be sure that he is not
faking evidence or garbling a quotation. . . . My dear Mr. Simeon,
truly it behoves us to love our enemies, since in this world they are
often the nearest we have to us."



CHAPTER VI.


GAUDY DAY.

In the sunshine, on a lower step of the stone stairway that leads up
and through the shadow of a vaulted porch to the Hundred Men's Hall,
or refectory, Brother Biscoe stood with a hand-bell and rang to
dinner.  Brother Biscoe was a charming old man to look upon; very
frail and venerable, with a somewhat weak face; and as senior
pensioner of the hospital he enjoyed the privilege of ringing to
dinner on Gaudy Days--twenty-seven strokes, distinct and separately
counted--one for each brother on the two foundations.

The Brethren, however, loitered in groups before their doorways,
along the west side of the quadrangle, awaiting a signal from the
porter's lodge.  Brother Manby, there, had promised to warn them as
soon as the Master emerged from his lodging with the other Trustees
and a few distinguished guests--including the Bishop of Merchester,
Visitor of St. Hospital--on their way to dine.  The procession would
take at least three minutes coming through the outer court--ample
time for the Brethren to scramble up the stairway, take their places,
and assume the right air of reverent expectancy.

As a rule--Brother Copas, standing on the gravel below Brother Biscoe
and counting the strokes for him, begged him to note it--they were
none so dilatory.  But gossip held them.  His shrewd glance travelled
from group to group, and between the strokes of the bell he counted
the women-folk.

"They are all at their doors,"  he murmured.  "For a look at the dear
Bishop, think you?"

"They are watching to see what Warboise will do," quavered Brother
Biscoe.  "Oh, I know!"

"The women don't seem to be taking much truck with Warboise or his
Petition.  See him over there, with Plant and Ibbetson only. . . .
And Ibbetson's only there because his wife has more appetising fish
to fry.  But she's keeping an eye on him--watch her!  Poor woman, for
once she's discovering Rumour to be almost too full of tongues."

"I wonder you're not over there too, lending Warboise support,"
suggested Brother Biscoe.  "Royle told me last night that you had
joined the Protestant swim."

"But I am here, you see," Brother Copas answered sweetly; "and just
for the pleasure of doing you a small service."

Even this did not disarm the old man, whose temper was malignant.

"Well, I wish you joy of your crew.  A secret drinker like Plant, for
instance!  And your friend Bonaday, in his second childhood--"

"Bonaday will have nothing to do with us."

"Ah?"  Brother Biscoe shot him a sidelong glance.  "He's more
pleasantly occupied, perhaps?--if it's true what they tell me."

"It never is," said Brother Copas imperturbably; "though I haven't a
notion to what you refer."

"But surely you've heard?"

"Nothing: and if it concerns Bonaday, you'd best hold your tongue
just now; for here he is."

Brother Bonaday in fact, with Nurse Branscome and Corona, at that
moment emerged from the doorway of his lodgings, not ten paces
distant from the steps of the Hundred Men's Hall.  The three paused,
just outside--the Nurse and Corona to await the procession of
Visitors, due now at any moment.  Brother Bonaday stood and blinked
in the strong sunlight: but the child, catching sight of Brother
Copas as he left Brother Biscoe and hurried towards her, ran to meet
him with a friendly nod.

"I've come out to watch the procession,"  she announced.  "That's all
we women are allowed; while you--Branny says there's to be ducks and
green peas! Did you know that?"

"Surely you must have observed my elation?"

Brother Copas stood and smiled at her, leaning on his staff.

"The Bishop wears gaiters they tell me; and the Master too.  I saw
them coming out of Chapel in their surplices, and the Chaplain with
the Bishop's staff: but Branny wouldn't let me go to the service.
She said I must be tired after my journey.  So I went to the lodge
instead and made friends with Brother Manby.  I didn't," said Corona
candidly, "make very good weather with Brother Manby, just at first.
He began by asking 'Well, and oo's child might _you_ be?'--and when
I told him, he said, 'Ow's anyone to know _that_?'  That amused me,
of course."

"Did it?" asked Brother Copas in slight astonishment.

"Because," the child explained, "I'd been told that English people
dropped their h's; but Brother Manby was the first I'd heard doing
it, and it seemed too good to be true.  _You_ don't drop your h's;
and nor does Daddy, nor Branny."

Brother Copas chuckled.

"Don't reproach us,"  he pleaded.  "You see, you've taken us at
unawares more or less.  But if it really please you--"

"You are very kind," Corona put in; "but I guess that sort of thing
must come naturally, to be any good.  You can't think how naturally
Brother Manby went on dropping them; till by and by he told me what a
mort of Americans came here to have a look around.  Then, of course,
I saw how he must strike them as the real thing."

Brother Copas under lowered eyebrows regarded the young face.  It was
innocent and entirely serious.

"So I said," she went on, "that I came from America too, and it was a
long way, and please would he hurry up with the bread and beer?
After that we made friends, and I had a good time."

"Are you telling me that you spent the forenoon drinking beer in the
porter's lodge?"

Corona's laugh was like the bubbling of water in a hidden well.

"It wasn't what you might call a cocktail," she confided.  "The
tiredest traveller wouldn't ask for crushed ice to it, not with a
solid William-the-Conqueror wall to lean against."

Brother Copas admitted that the tenuity of the Wayfarer's Ale had not
always escaped the Wayfarer's criticism.  He was about to explain
that, in a country of vested interests, publicans and teetotallers
agreed to require that beer supplied _gratis_ in the name of charity
must be innocuous and unenticing.  But at this moment Brother Manby
signalled from his lodge that the procession was approaching across
the outer court, and he hurried away to join the crowd of Brethren in
their scramble upstairs to the Hundred Men's Hall.

The procession hove in sight; in number about a dozen, walking
two-and-two, headed by Master Blanchminster and the Bishop.
Nurse Branscome stepped across to the child and stood by her,
whispering the names of the dignitaries as they drew near.
The dear little gaitered white-headed clergyman--the one in the
college cap--was the Master; the tall one, likewise in gaiters, the
Bishop.

"--and the gentleman behind him is Mr. Yeo, the Mayor of Merchester.
That's the meaning of his chain, you know."

"Why, is he dangerous?" asked Corona.

"His chain of office, dear.  It's the rule in England."

"You don't say! . . . Over in America we've never thought of that: we
let our grafters run loose.  But who's the tall one next to him?
My! but can't you see him, Branny, with his long legs crossed?"

Branny was puzzled.

"--on a tomb, in chain armour, with his hands _so_."  Corona put her
two palms together, as in the act of prayer.

"Oh, I see!  Well, as it happens, his house has a private chapel with
five or six of just those tombs--all of his ancestors.  He's Sir John
Shaftesbury, and he's pricked for High Sheriff next year.  One of the
oldest families in the county; in all England, indeed.  Everyone
loves and respects Sir John."

"Didn't I say so!"  The small palms were pressed together
ecstatically.  "And does he keep a dwarf, same as they used to?"

"Eh? . . . If you mean the little man beside him, with the
straw-coloured gloves, that's Mr. Bamberger; Mr. Julius Bamberger,
our Member of Parliament."

"Say that again, please."

The child looked up, wide-eyed.

"He's our Member of Parliament for Merchester; immensely rich, they
say."

"Well," decided Corona after a moment's thought, "I'm going to
pretend he isn't, anyway.  I'm going to pretend Sir John found him
and brought him home from Palestine."

Branny named, one by one, the rest of the Trustees, all persons of
importance.

Mr. Colt and the Bishop's chaplain brought up the rear.

The procession came to a halt.  Old Warboise had not followed in the
wake of the Brethren, but stood at the foot of the stairway, and
leaned there on his staff.  His face was pale, his jaw set square to
perform his duty.  His hand trembled, though, as he held out a paper,
accosting the Bishop.

"My lord," he said, "some of the Brethren desire you as Visitor to
read this Petition."

"Hey?" interrupted the Master, taken by surprise.  "Tut--tut--my good
Warboise, what's the meaning of this?"

"Very sorry, Master," Brother Warboise mumbled: "and meaning no
disrespect to you, that have always ruled St. Hospital like a
gentleman.  But a party must reckon with his conscience."

The Bishop eyed the document dubiously, holding it between finger and
thumb.

"Some affair of discipline?" he asked, turning to the Master.

"Romanisers, my lord--Romanisers: that's what's the matter!" answered
Brother Warboise, lifting his voice and rapping the point of his
staff on the gravel.

Good Master Blanchminster, shocked by this address, lifted his eyes
beyond Warboise and perceived the womenkind gathered around their
doorways, listening.  Nothing of the sort had happened in all his
long and beneficent rule.  He was scandalised.  He lost his temper.

"Brother Warboise," he said severely, "whatever your grievances--and
I will inquire into it later--you have chosen a highly indecorous
and, er, offensive way of obtruding it.  At this moment, sir, we are
going together to dine and to thank God for many mercies vouchsafed
to us.  If you have any sense of these you will stand aside now and
follow us when we have passed.  His lordship will read your petition
at a more convenient opportunity."

"Quite so, my good man."  The Bishop took his cue and pocketed the
paper, nodding shortly.  The procession moved forward and mounted the
staircase, Brother Warboise stumping after it at a little distance,
scowling as he climbed, scowling after the long back and wide
shoulders of Mr. Colt as they climbed directly ahead of him.

Around their tables in the Hundred Men's Hall the Brethren were
gathered expectant.

"Buzz for the Bishop--here he comes!" quoted Brother Copas, and stood
forth ready to deliver the Latin grace as the visitors found their
places at the high table.

St. Hospital used a long Latin grace on holy-days; "and," Brother
Copas had once observed, "the market-price of Latinity in England
will ensure that we always have at least one Brother capable of
repeating it."

" . . . _Gratias agimus pro Alberico de Albo Monasterio, in fide
defuncto_--"

Here Brother Copas paused, and the Brethren responded "_Amen!_"

"_Ac pro Henrico de Bello Campo, Cardinali_."

As the grace proceeded Brother Copas dwelt on the broad vowels with
gusto.

"..._Itaque precamur; Miserere nostri, te quaesumus Domine, tuisque
donis, quae de tua benignitate percepturi sumus, benedicito.
Per Jesum Christum, Dominum nostrum.  Amen_."

His eyes wandered down to the carving-table, where Brother Biscoe
stood ready, as his turn was, to direct and apportion the helpings.
He bowed to the dignitaries on the dais, and walked to his place at
the board next to Brother Warboise.

"Old Biscoe's carving," he announced as he took his seat.  "You and I
will have to take a slice of _odium theologicum_ together, for auld
lang syne."

Sure enough, when his helping of duck came to him, it was the back.
Brother Warboise received another back for his portion.

"Courage, Brother Ridley!" murmured Copas, "you and I this day have
raised a couple of backs that will not readily be put down."


Nurse Branscome had been surprised when Brother Warboise accosted the
Bishop.  She could not hear what he said, but guessed that something
unusual was happening.  A glance at the two or three groups of women
confirmed this, and when the procession moved on, she walked across
to the nearest, taking Corona by the hand.

The first she addressed happened to be Mrs. Royle.

"Whatever was Brother Warboise doing just now?" she asked.

Mrs. Royle hunched her shoulders, and turned to Mrs. Ibbetson.

"There's worse scandals in St. Hospital," said she with a sniff,
"than ever old Warboise has nosed.  Eh, ma'am?"

"One can well believe that, Mrs. Royle," agreed Mrs. Ibbetson, fixing
an eye of disapproval on the child.

"And I am quite sure of it," agreed Nurse Branscome candidly; "though
what you mean is a mystery to me."



CHAPTER VII.


LOW AND HIGH TABLES.

"This," said Brother Copas sweetly, turning over his portion of roast
duck and searching for some flesh on it, "is not a duck at all, but a
pelican, bird of wrath.  See, it has devoured its own breast."

Beside the dais, at the eastern end of the Hundred Men's Hall, an
ancient staircase leads to an upper chamber of which we shall
presently speak; and on the newel-post of this staircase stands one
of the curiosities of St. Hospital--a pelican carved in oak, vulning
its breast to feed its young.  Brother Copas, lifting a pensive eye
from his plate, rested it on this bird, as though comparing notes.

"The plague take your double meanings!" answered Brother Warboise
gruffly.  "Not that I understand 'em, or want to.  'Tis enough, I
suppose, that the Master preached about it this morning, and called
it the bird of love, to set you miscalling it."

"Not a bit," Brother Copas replied.  "As for the parable of the
Pelican, the Master has used it in half a dozen sermons; and you had
it by heart at least as long ago as the day before yesterday, when I
happened to overhear you pitching it to a convoy of visitors as you
showed them the staircase.  I hope they rewarded you for the
sentiment of it."

"Look here," fired up Brother Warboise, turning over _his_ portion of
duck, "if it's poor I am, it don't become you to mock me.  And if I
haven't your damned book-learning, nor half your damned cleverness,
maybe you've not turned either to such account in life as to make a
boast of it.  And if you left me just now to stand up alone to the
Master, it don't follow I take pleasure in your sneering at him."

"You are right, my dear fellow," said Brother Copas; "and also you
are proving in two or three different ways that I was right just now.
Bird of love--bird of wrath--they are both the same thing.  But, with
all submission, neither you nor the Master have the true parable,
which I found by chance the other day in an old book called the
_Ancren Riwle.  Ancren_, brother, means 'anchoresses,' recluses,
women separated, and living apart from the world pretty much as by
rights we men should be living in St. Hospital; and _riwle_ is
'rule,' or an instruction of daily conduct.  It is a sound old book,
written in the thirteenth century by a certain good Bishop Poore
(excellent name!) for a household of such good women at Tarrent, on
the River Stour; and it contains a peck of counsel which might be
preached not only upon the scandal-mongering women who are the curse
of this place--yes, and applied; for it recommends here and there, a
whipping as salutary--but even, _mutatis mutandis_, upon us
Brethren--"

"We've had one sermon, to-day," growled Brother Warboise.

"I am correcting it.  This book tells of the Pelican that she is a
peevish bird and so hasty of temper that, when her young ones molest
her, she kills them with her beak; and soon after, being sorry, she
moans, smites her own breast with the same murderous beak, and so
draws blood, with which (says the Bishop) 'she then quickeneth her
slain birds.'  But I, being no believer in miracles, think he is
right as to the repentance but errs about the bringing back to life.
In this world, Brother, that doesn't happen; and we poor angry devils
are left wishing that it could."

Brother Warboise, playing with knife and fork, looked up sharply from
under fierce eyebrows.

"The moral?" pursued Brother Copas.  "There are two at least: the
first, that here we are, two jolly Protestants, who might be as
comfortable as rats in a cheese--you conscious of a duty performed,
and I filled with admiration of your pluck--and lo! when old Biscoe
annoys us by an act of petty spite, we turn, not on him, but on one
another.  You, already more angry with yourself than with Biscoe,
suddenly take offence with me because I didn't join you in standing
between a good man and his dinner; while I, with a spoilt meal of my
own for a grievance, choose to feel an irrational concern for the
Master's, turn round on my comrade who has spoilt _that_, and ask,
What the devil is wrong with Protestantism, that it has never an
ounce of tact?  Or why, if it aims to be unworldly, must it always
overshoot its mark and be merely inhuman?"

Brother Warboise put nine-tenths of this discourse aside.

"You think it has spoilt the Master's dinner?" he asked anxiously,
with a glance towards the high table.

"Not a doubt of it," Brother Copas assured him.  "Look at the old
boy, how nervously he's playing with his bread."

"I never meant, you know--"

"No, of course you didn't; and there's my second moral of the
Pelican.  She digs a bill into her dearest, and then she's sorry.
At the best of her argument she's always owing her opponent
an apology for some offence against manners.  She has no
_savoir-faire_."  Here Brother Copas, relapsing, let the cloud of
speculation drift between him and Brother Warboise's remorse.
"_Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_--I reverence the pluck
of a man who can cut himself loose from all that; for the worst loss
he has to face (if he only knew it) is the inevitable loss of
breeding.  For the ordinary gentleman in this world there's either
Catholicism or sound Paganism; no third choice."


In truth Master Blanchminster's dinner was spoilt for him.
He sat distraught, fingering his bread between the courses which
he scarcely tasted, and giving answers at random, after pauses, to
the Bishop's small-talk.  He was wounded.  He had lived for years a
life as happy as any that can fall to the lot of an indolent,
unambitious man, who loves his fellows and takes a delight in their
gratitude.  St. Hospital exactly suited him.  He knew its history.
His affection, like an ivy, clung about its old walls and
incorporated itself in the very mortar that bound them.  He loved to
spy one of its Brethren approaching in the street; to anticipate and
acknowledge the deferential salute; to see himself as father of a
happy family, easily controlling it by good will, in the right of
good birth.

He had been a reformer, too.  The staircase beside the dais led to an
upper chamber whence, through a small window pierced in the wall,
former Masters had conceived it their duty to observe the behaviour
of the Brethren at meals.  In his sixth year of office Master
Blanchminster had sent for masons to block this window up.
The act of espial had always been hateful to him: he preferred to
trust his brethren, and it cost far less trouble.  For close upon
thirty years he had avoided their dinner-hour on all but Gaudy Days.

He had been warming a serpent, and it had bitten him.  The wound
stung, too.  Angry he was at Warboise's disloyalty; angrier at the
manner of it.  If these old men had a grievance, or believed they
had, at least they might have trusted him first with it.  Had he ever
been tyrannical, harsh, unsympathetic even, that instead of coming to
him as to their father and Master they should have put this public
affront on him and appealed straight away to the Bishop?  To be sure,
the Statutes provided that the Bishop of Merchester, as Visitor, had
power to inquire into the administration of St. Hospital and to
remedy abuses.  But everyone knew that within living memory, and for
a hundred years before, this power had never been invoked.  Doubtless
these malcontents, whoever they might be--and it disquieted Master
Blanchminster yet further that he could not guess as yet who they
were or how many--had kept to the letter of their rights.  But good
Heaven! had _he_ in all these years interpreted his rule by the
letter, and not rather and constantly by the spirit?

Brother Copas was right.  Warboise's action had been inopportune,
offensive, needlessly hurting a kindly heart.  But the Master, while
indignant with Warboise, could not help feeling just a reflex touch
of vexation with Mr. Colt.  The Chaplain no doubt was a stalwart
soldier, fighting the Church's battle; but her battle was not to be
won, her rolling tide of conquest not to be set going, in such a
backwater as St. Hospital.  Confound the fellow!  Why could not these
young men leave old men alone?


Thus it happened that the Master, immersed in painful thoughts,
missed the launching of the Great Idea, which was to trouble him and
indeed all Merchester until Merchester had done with it.

The idea was Mr. Bamberger's.

("Why, of course it was," said Brother Copas later; "ideas, good and
bad, are the mission of his race among the Gentiles.")

Mr. Bamberger, having taken his seat, tucked a corner of his
dinner-napkin between his collar and the front of his hairy throat.
Adaptable in most things, in feeding and in the conduct of a napkin
he could never subdue old habit to our English custom, and to-day,
moreover, he wore a large white waistcoat, which needed protection.
This seen to, he gazed around expansively.

"A picture, by George!"--Mr. Bamberger ever swore by our English
patron saint.  "Slap out of the Middle Ages, and priceless."

(He actually said "thlap" and "pritheless," but I resign at the
outset any attempt to spell as Mr. Bamberger pronounced.)

"--Authentic, too!  To think of this sort of thing taking place
to-day in Merchester, England's ancient capital.  Eh, Master?
Eh, Mr. Mayor?"

Master Blanchminster awoke so far out of his thoughts as to correct
the idiom.

"Undoubtedly Merchester was the capital of England before London
could claim that honour."

"Aye," agreed his Worship, "there's no end of antikities in
Merchester, for them as takes an interest in such.  Dead-and-alive
you may call us; but, as I've told the Council more than once,
they're links with the past in a manner of speaking."

"But these antiquities attract visitors, or ought to."

"They do: a goodish number, as I've told the Council more than once."

"Why shouldn't they attract more?"

"I suppose they would, if we had more of 'em," answered his Worship
thoughtfully.  "When I said just now that we had no end of
antikities, it was in a manner of speaking.  There's the Cathedral,
of course, and the old Palace--or what's left of it, and St. Hospital
here.  But there's a deal been swept away within my recollection.
We must move with the times."

At this point the inspiration came upon Mr. Bamberger.  He laid down
the spoon in his soup and hurriedly caught at the rim of his plate as
a vigilant waiter swept a hand to remove it.

"Hold hard, young man!" said Mr. Bamberger, snatching at his spoon
and again fixing his eye on the Mayor.  "You ought to have a Pageant,
Sir."

"A what?"

"A Pageant; that's what we want for Merchester--something to
advertise the dear old place and bring grist to our mills.
I've often wondered if we could not run something of the sort."

This was not a conscious falsehood, but just a word or two of
political patter, dropped automatically, absently.  In truth, Mr.
Bamberger, possessed by his inspiration, was wondering why the
deuce it had never occurred to him until this moment.  Still more
curious, too, that it had never occurred to his brother Isidore!
This Isidore, after starting as a _croupier_ at Ostend and pushing on
to the post of _Directeur des Fetes Periodiques_ to the municipality
of that watering-place, had made a sudden name for himself by
stage-managing a Hall of Odalisques at the last Paris Exposition,
and, crossing to London, had accumulated laurels by directing popular
entertainments at Olympia (Kensington) and Shepherd's Bush.
One great daily newspaper, under Hebrew control, habitually alluded
to him as the Prince of Pageantists.  Isidore saw things on a grand
scale, and was, moreover, an excellent brother.  Isidore (said Mr.
Julius Bamberger to himself) would find all the History of England in
Merchester and rattle it up to the truth of music.

Aloud he said--

"This very scene we're looking on, f'r instance!"

"There would be difficulties in the way of presenting it in the open
air," hazarded his Worship.

Mr. Bamberger, never impatient of stupidity, opined that this could
be got over easily.

"There's all the material made to our hand.  Eh, Master?--these old
pensioners of yours--in a procession?  The public is always
sentimental."

Master Blanchminster, rousing himself out of reverie, made guarded
answer that such an exhibition might be instructive, historically,
for schoolchildren.

"An institution like this, supported by endowments, don't need
advertising, of course--not for its own sake," said Mr. Bamberger.
"I was thinking of what might be done indirectly for Merchester.
But--you'll excuse me, I must ride a notion when I get astride of
one--St. Hospital would be no more than what we call an episode.
We'd start with Alfred the Great--maybe before him; work down to the
Cathedral and its consecration and Sir John, here--that is, of
course, his ancestor--swearing on the Cross to depart for Jerusalem."

Sir John--a Whig by five generations of descent--glanced at Mr.
Bamberger uneasily.  He had turned Unionist when Mr. Gladstone
embraced Home Rule; and now, rather by force of circumstance than by
choice, he found himself Chairman of the Unionist Committee for
Merchester; in fact he, more than any man, was responsible for Mr.
Bamberger's representing Merchester in Parliament, and sometimes
wondered how it had all come about.  He answered these rare
questionings by telling himself that Disraeli, whose portrait hung in
his library, had also been a Jew.  But he did not quite understand
it, or what there was in Mr. Bamberger that personally repelled him.

At any rate Sir John was a pure Whig and to your pure Whig personal
dignity is everything.

"So long," murmured he, "as you don't ask me to dress up and make
myself a figure of fun."

The Bishop had already put the suggestion, so far as it concerned
him, aside with a tolerant smile, which encouraged everything from
which he, _bien entendu_, was omitted.

Mr. Bamberger, scanning the line of faces with a Jew's patient
cunning, at length encountered the eye of Mr. Colt, who at the
farther end of the high table was leaning forward to listen.

"You're my man," thought Mr. Bamberger.  "Though I don't know your
name and maybe you're socially no great shakes; a chaplain by your
look, and High Church.  You're the useful one in this gang."

He lifted his voice.

"You won't misunderstand me, Master," he said.  "I named the
Cathedral and the Crusades because, in Merchester, history cannot get
away from the Church.  It's _her_ history that any pageant of
Merchester ought to illustrate primarily--must, indeed: _her_ past
glories, some day (please God) to be revived."

"And," said Mr. Bamberger some months later, in private converse with
his brother Isidore, "that did it, though I say it who shouldn't.
I froze on that Colt straight; and Colt, you'll allow, was trumps."

For the moment little more was said.  The company at the high table,
after grace--a shorter one this time, pronounced by the Chaplain--
bowed to the Brethren and followed the Master upstairs to the little
room which had once served for espial-chamber, but was now curtained
cosily and spread for dessert.

"By the way, Master," said the Bishop, suddenly remembering the
Petition in his pocket, and laughing amicably as he dropped a lump of
sugar into his coffee, "what games have you been playing in St.
Hospital, that they accuse you of Romanising?"

The Master's ivory face flushed at the question.

"That was old Warboise," he answered nervously.  "I must apologise
for the annoyance."

"Not at all--not at all! It amused me, rather, to be reminded that,
as Visitor, I am a person in St. Hospital, and still reckoned an
important one.  'Made me feel like an image in a niche subjected to a
sudden dusting.  Who is this--er, what-d'-ye-call-him?  Warboise?
An eccentric?"

"I will not say that.  Old and opinionated, rather; a militant
Protestant--"

"Ah, we know the sort.  Shall we glance over his screed?  You permit
me?"

"I was about to suggest your doing so.  To tell the truth, I am
curious to be acquainted with the charge against me."

The Bishop smiled, drew forth the paper from his pocket adjusted his
gold-rimmed eyeglasses and read--

    "To the Right Rev.  Father in God, Walter, Lord Bishop of
     Merchester.

    "My Lord,--We the undersigned, being Brethren on the
     Blanchminster and Beauchamp foundations of St. Hospital's
     College of Noble Poverty by Merton, respectfully desire your
     lordship's attention to certain abuses which of late have crept
     into this Society; and particularly in the observances of
     religion.

    "We contend (1) that, whereas our Reformed and Protestant Church,
     in Number XXII of her Articles of Religion declares the Romish
     doctrine of purgatory inter alia to be a fond thing vainly
     invented, etc., and repugnant to the Word of God, yet prayers
     for the dead have twice been publicly offered in our Chapel and
     the practice defended, nay recommended, from its pulpit.

    "(2) That, whereas in Number XXVIII of the same Articles the
     Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is defined in intention, and the
     definition expressly cleared to repudiate several practices not
     consonant with it, certain of these have been observed of late
     in our Chapel, to the scandal of the Church, and to the pain and
     uneasiness of souls that were used to draw pure refreshment from
     these Sacraments--"

The Bishop paused.

"I say, Master, this Brother Warboise of yours can write passable
English."

"Warboise?  Warboise never wrote that--never in his life."

Master Blanchminster passed a hand over his forehead.

"It's Copas's handwriting!" announced Mr. Colt, who had drawn close
and, unpermitted, was staring over the Bishop's shoulder at the
manuscript.

The Bishop turned half about in his chair, slightly affronted by this
offence against good manners; but Mr. Colt was too far excited to
guess the rebuke.

"Turn over the page, my lord."

As the Bishop turned it, on the impulse of surprise, Mr. Colt pointed
a forefinger.

"There it is--half-way down the signatures! 'J. Copas,' written in
the same hand!"



CHAPTER VIII.


A PEACE-OFFERING.

    "'Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
      Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week!'"

Quoted Brother Copas from one of his favourite poems.  This was in
the kitchen, three days later, and he made one of the crowd edging,
pushing, pressing, each with plate in hand, around the great table
where the joints stood ready to be carved and distributed.  For save
on Gaudy Days and great festivals of the Church, the Brethren dine in
their own chambers, not in Hall; and on three days of the week must
fend for themselves on food purchased out of their small allowances.
But on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays they fetch it from
the kitchen, taking their turns to choose the best cuts.  And this
was Thursday and, as it happened, Brother Copas stood first on the
rota.

The rota hung on the kitchen wall in a frame of oak canopied with
faded velvet--an ingenious and puzzling contrivance, somewhat like
the calendar prefixed to the Book of Common Prayer, with the names of
the Brethren inserted on movable cards worn greasy with handling.
In system nothing could be fairer; but in practice, human nature
being what it is, and the crowd without discipline, the press and
clamour about the table made choosing difficult for the weaker ones.

"Brother Copas to choose!  Brother Clerihew to divide!"

"Aye," sang out Brother Copas cheerfully, "and I'll take my time
about it.  Make room, Woolcombe, if you please, and take your elbow
out of my ribs--don't I know the old trick?  And stop pushing--you
behind there! . . . 'Rats in a hamper, swine in a sty, wasps in a
bottle.'--Mrs. Royle, ma'am, I am very sorry for your husband's
rheumatism, but it does not become a lady to show this indecent
haste."

"Indecent?" shrilled Mrs. Royle.  "Indecent, you call me?--you that
pretend to ha' been a gentleman!  I reckon, if indecency's the matter
in these times, I could talk to one or two of ye about it."

"Not a doubt of _that_, ma'am. . . . But really you ladies have no
right here: it's clean against the rules, and the hubbub you provoke
is a scandal."

"Do you mean to insinuate, sir--"

"With your leave, ma'am, I mean to insinuate myself between your
person and the table from which at this moment you debar me.
Ah!" exclaimed Brother Copas as the cook whipped off the first of the
great dish-covers, letting loose a cloud of savoury steam.
He sniffed at it.

"What's this? Boiled pork, and in June!  We'll have a look at the
others, please . . . Roast leg of mutton, boiled neck and scrag of
mutton--aha!  You shall give me a cut of the roast, please; and start
at the knuckle end.  Yes, Biscoe--_at the knuckle end_."

Hate distorted Brother Biscoe's patriarchal face.  He came second on
the rota, and roast knuckle of mutton was the tit-bit dearest of all
to his heart, as Brother Copas knew.  Brother Biscoe also had a
passion for the two first cutlets of a mutton-neck; but he thought
nothing of this in his rage.

"Please God it'll choke ye!" he snarled.

"Dear Brother," said Copas amiably, "on Monday last you helped me to
the back of a duck."

"Hurry up there!" shouted Brother Woolcombe, and swung round.
"Are we all to get cold dinner when these two old fools have done
wrangling?"

"Fool yourself, Woolcombe!"  Brother Biscoe likewise swung about.
"Here's Copas has brought two plates!  Isn't it time to speak up,
when a rogue's caught cheating?"

One or two cried out that he ought to lose his turn for it.

"My friends," said Brother Copas, not at all perturbed, "the second
plate is for Brother Bonaday's dinner, when his turn arrives.
He has a heart-attack to-day, and cannot come for himself."

"A _heart_-attack!" sniggered Mrs. Royle, her voice rising shrill
above the din.  "Oh, save us if we didn't all know _that_ news!"

Laughter crackled like musketry about Brother Copas's ears, laughter
to him quite meaningless.  It was plain that all shared some joke
against his friend Bonaday; but he had no clue.

"And," pursued Mrs. Royle, "here's his best friend tellin' us as 'tis
a scandal the way women push themselves into St. Hospital--'when
they're not wanted,' did I hear you say, sir?  Yes, 'a scandal' he
said, and 'indecent'; which I leave it to you is pretty strong
language as addressed to a woman what has her marriage lines I should
hope!"

Brother Copas, bewildered by this onslaught--or, as he put it later,
comparing the encounter with that between Socrates and Gorgias the
Sophist--drenched with that woman's slop-pail of words and blinded
for the moment, received his portion of mutton and drew aside,
vanquished amid peals of laughter, of which he guessed only from its
note that the allusion had been disgusting.  Indeed, the whole
atmosphere of the kitchen sickened him; even the portion of mutton
cooling on his plate raised his gorge in physical loathing.
But Brother Bonaday lay helpless in his chamber, without food.
Remembering this, Brother Copas stood his ground and waited, with the
spare plate ready for the invalid's portion.

The babel went on as one after another fought for the spoil.
They had forgotten him, and those at the back of the crowd had found
a new diversion in hustling old Biscoe as he struggled to get away
with his two cutlets of half-warm mutton.

Brother Copas held his gaze upon the joints.  His friend's turn came
all but last on the rota; and by perversity--but who could blame it,
in the month of June?--everyone eschewed the pork and bid emulously
for mutton, roast or boiled.  He knew that Brother Bonaday abhorred
pork, which, moreover, was indigestible, and by consequence bad for a
weak heart.  He stood and watched, gradually losing all hope except
to capture a portion of the mutton near the scrag-end.  As for the
leg, it had speedily been cleaned to the bone.

At the last moment a ray of hope shot up, as an expiring candle
flames in the socket.  Brother Inchbald--a notoriously stingy man--
whose turn came immediately before Brother Bonaday's, seemed to doubt
that enough of the scrag remained to eke out a full portion; and bent
towards the dish of pork, fingering his chin.  Copas seized the
moment to push his empty plate towards the mutton, stealthily, as one
forces a card.

As he did so, another roar of laughter--coarser than before--drew him
to glance over his shoulder.  The cause of it was Nurse Branscome,
entering by way of the refectory, with a hot plate held in a napkin
between her hands.

She paused on the threshold, as though the ribaldry took her in the
face like a blast of hot wind.

"Oh, I am late!" she cried.  "I came to fetch Brother Bonaday's
dinner.  Until five minutes ago no one told me--"

"It's all right," called back Brother Copas, still looking over his
shoulder while his right hand extended the plate.  "His turn is just
called, and I am getting it for him."

Strange to say, his voice reached the Nurse across an almost dead
silence; for the laughter had died down at sight of a child--Corona--
beside her in the doorway.

"But your plate will be cold.  Here, change it for mine!"

"Well thought upon!  Wait a second!"

But before Brother Copas could withdraw the plate a dollop of meat
had been dumped upon it.

"Eh? but wait--look here!--"

He turned about, stared at the plate, stared from the plate to the
dish of scrag.  The meat on the plate was pork, and the dish of scrag
was empty.  Brother Inchbald had changed his mind at the last moment
and chosen mutton.

The Brethren, led by Mrs. Royle, cackled again at sight of his
dismay.  One or two still hustled Brother Biscoe as he fought his way
to the foot of the refectory steps, at the head of which Nurse
Branscome barred the exit, with Corona holding fast by her hand and
wondering.

"But what is it all about?" asked the child.

"Hush!"  The Nurse squeezed her hand, meaning that she must have
courage.  "We have come too late, and the dinner is all shared up--or
all of it that would do your father good."

"But"--Corona dragged her small hand loose--"there is plenty left;
and when they know he is sick they will make it all right. . . .
If you please, sir," she spoke up, planting her small body in front
of Brother Biscoe as he would have pushed past with his plate, "my
father is sick, and Nurse says he must not eat the meat that's left
on the dish there.  Won't you give me that on your plate?"

She stretched out a hand for it, and Brother Biscoe, spent with
senile wrath at this last interruption of his escape, was snatching
back the food, ready to curse her, when Brother Copas came battling
through the press, holding both his plates high and hailing
cheerfully.

"I forgot," he panted, and held up the plate in his left hand.
"Bonaday can have the knuckle.  I had first choice to-day."

"He ought not to eat roasted meat," said Nurse Branscome slowly.
"I am sorry.  You are good and will be disappointed.  The smallest
bit of boiled, now--were it only the scrag--"

"Why," bustled Brother Copas, "Brother Biscoe has the very thing,
then--the two best cutlets at the bottom of the neck.  And, what's
more, he'll be only too glad to exchange 'em for the roast knuckle
here, as I happen to know."

He thrust the tit-bit upon Brother Biscoe, who hesitated a moment
between hate and greed, and snatched the cutlets from him before hate
could weigh down the balance.

Brother Biscoe, clutching the transferred plate, fled ungraciously,
without a word of thanks.  Nurse Branscome stayed but a moment to
thank Brother Copas for his cleverness, and hurried off with Corona
to hot-up the plate of mutton for the invalid.

They left Brother Copas eyeing his dismal pork.

"And in June, too!" he murmured.  "No: a man must protect himself.
I'll have to eke out to-day on biscuits."



CHAPTER IX.


BY MERE RIVER.

Brother Bonaday's heart-attacks, sharp while they lasted, were soon
over.  Towards evening he had so far recovered that the Nurse saw no
harm in his taking a short stroll, with Brother Copas for _socius_.

The two old men made their way down to the river as usual, and there
Brother Copas forced his friend to sit and rest on a bench beside the
clear-running water.

"We had better not talk," he suggested, "but just sit quiet and let
the fresh air do you good."

"But I wish to talk.  I am quite strong enough."

"Talk about what?"

"About the child. . . . We must be getting her educated, I suppose."

"Why?"

Brother Bonaday, seated with palms crossed over the head of his
staff, gazed in an absent-minded way at the water-weeds trailing in
the current.

"She's an odd child; curiously shrewd in some ways and curiously
innocent in others, and for ever asking questions.  She put me a
teaser yesterday.  She can read pretty well, and I set her to read a
chapter of the Bible.  By and by she looked up and wanted to know why
God lived apart from His wife!"

Brother Copas grunted his amusement.

"Did you tell her?"

"I invented some answer, of course.  I don't believe it satisfied
her--I am not good at explanation--but she took it quietly, as if she
put it aside to think over."

"The Athanasian Creed is not easily edited for children. . . . If she
can read, the likelihood is she can also write.  Does a girl need to
learn much beyond that?  No, I am not jesting.  It's a question upon
which I have never quite made up my mind."

"I had hoped to find you keener," said Brother Bonaday with a small
sigh.  "Now I see that you will probably laugh at what I am going to
confess. . . . Last night, as I sat a while before going to bed, I
found myself hearkening for the sound of her breathing in the next
room.  After a bit, when a minute or so went by and I could hear
nothing, a sort of panic took me that some harm had happened to her:
till I could stand it no longer, but picked up the lamp and crept in
for a book.  There she lay sleeping, healthy and sound, and prettier
than you'd ever think. . . . I crept back to my chair, and a foolish
sort of hope came over me that, with her health and wits, and being
brought up unlike other children, she might come one day to be a
little lady and the pride of the place, in a way of speaking--"

"A sort of Lady Jane Grey, in modest fashion--is that what you mean?"
suggested Brother Copas--

     'Like Her most gentle, most unfortunate,
      Crowned but to die--who in her chamber sate
      Musing with Plato, tho' the horn was blown,
      And every ear and every heart was won,
      And all in green array were chasing down the sun.'

--"Well, if she's willing, as unofficial godfather I might make a
start with the Latin declensions.  It would be an experiment: I've
never tried teaching a girl.  And I never had a child of my own,
Brother; but I can understand just what you dreamed, and the Lord
punish me if I feel like laughing."

He said it with an open glance at his friend.  But it found no
responsive one.  Brother Bonaday's brow had contracted, as with a
spasm of the old pain, and his eyes still scrutinised the trailing
weeds in Mere river.

"If ever a man had warning to be done with life," said Brother
Bonaday after a long pause, "I had it this forenoon.  But it's
wonderful what silly hopes a child will breed in a man."

Brother Copas nodded.

"Aye, we'll have a shot with her.  But--Oh, good Lord!  Here's the
Chaplain coming."


"Ah, Copas--so here you are!" sung out Mr. Colt as he approached with
his long stride up the tow-path.  "Nurse Branscome told me I should
find you here.  Good evening, Bonaday!"

He nodded.

Copas stood up and inclined his body stiffly.

"I hope, sir," was his rebuke, "I have not wholly forfeited the title
of Brother?"

The Chaplain flushed.

"I bring a message," he said.  "The Master wishes to see you, at
half-past six."

"That amounts to a command."

Brother Copas pulled out his watch.

"I may as well warn you," the Chaplain pursued.  "You will be
questioned on your share in that offensive Petition.  As it appears,
you were even responsible for composing it."

Brother Copas's eyebrows went up.

"Is it possible, sir, that you recognised the style? . . . Ah, no;
the handwriting must have been your index.  The Bishop showed it to
you, then?"

"I--er--have been permitted to glance it over."

"Over his shoulder, if I may make a guess," murmured Brother Copas,
putting his watch away and searching for his snuff-box.

"Anyway, you signed it: as Bon--as Brother Bonaday here was too
sensible to do: though," added Mr. Colt, "_his_ signature one could
at least have respected."

Brother Copas tapped his snuff-box, foreseeing comedy.

"And why not mine, sir?"

"Oh, come, come!" blurted the Chaplain.  "I take you to be a man of
some education."

"Is that indeed the reason?"

"A man of some education, I say."

"And I hear you, sir." Brother Copas bowed.  "'Praise from Sir
Richard Strahan is praise indeed'--though my poor friend here seems
to get the backhand of the compliment."

"And it is incredible you should go with the ignorant herd and
believe us Clergy of the Church of England to be heading for Rome, as
your Petition asserts."

Brother Copas slowly inhaled a pinch.

"In England, Mr. Chaplain, the ignorant herd has, by the admission of
other nations, a practical political sense, and a somewhat downright
way with it.  It sees you reverting to many doctrines and uses from
which the Reformation cut us free--or, if you prefer it, cut us
loose; doctrines and uses which the Church of Rome has taught and
practised without a break.  It says--this ignorant herd--'If these
fellows are not heading for Rome, then where the dickens _are_ they
heading?'  Forgive this blunt way of putting it, but the question is
not so blunt as it looks.  It is on the contrary extremely shrewd;
and until you High Anglicans answer it candidly, the ignorant herd
will suspect--and you know, sir, the lower classes are incurably
suspicious--either that yourselves do not know, or that you know and
won't tell."

"You say," answered Mr. Colt, "that we revert to many doctrines and
uses which, since the Romish clergy preach and practise them, are
ignorantly supposed to belong to Rome.  But 'many' is not 'all'; nor
does it include the most radical doctrine of all.  How can we intend
Romanising while we deny the supreme authority of the Pope?--or
Bishop of Rome, as I should prefer to call him."

"Fairly countered," replied Brother Copas, taking another pinch;
"though the ignorant herd would have liked better an answer to its
question.  You deny the supreme authority of the Pope?  Very well.
Whose, then, do you accept?"

"The authority of Christ, committed to His Church."

"Oh, la, la, la! . . . I should have said, Whose authoritative
interpretation of Christ's authority?"

"The Church's."

"Aye?  Through whose mouth?  We shall get at something definite in
time. . . . I'll put it more simply.  You, sir, are a plain priest in
holy orders, and it's conceivable that on some point of use or
doctrine you may be in error.  Just conceivable, hey?  At all events,
you may be accused of it.  To whom, then, do you appeal?  To the
King?--Parliament?--the Court of Arches, or any other Court?  Not a
bit of it.  Well, let's try again.  Is it to the Archbishop of
Canterbury?  Or to your own Diocesan?"

"I should appeal to the sanction of the Church Catholic as given in
her ancient Councils."

"And again--as nowadays interpreted by whom?  Let us pass a hundred
possible points on which no Council bothered its head, and on which
consequently it has left no decision.  Who's the man, anywhere, to
take you by the scruff of the neck and chastise you for an error?"

"Within the limits of conscience I should, of course, bow to my
Diocesan."

"Elastic limits, Mr. Colt! and, substituting Brother Warboise's
conscience for yours, precisely the limits within which Brother
Warboise bows to you!  Anarchy will obey anything 'within the limits
of conscience'--that's precisely what anarchy means; and even so and
to that extent will you obey Bishop or Archbishop.  In your heart you
deny their authority; in speech, in practice, you never lose an
occasion of flouting them and showing them up for fools.  Take this
Education Squabble for an example.  The successor to the Chair of
Augustine, good man--he's, after all, your Metropolitan--runs around
doing his best to discover a way out, to patch up a 'concordat,' as
they call it?  What's the effect, upon any Diocesan Conference?
Up springs subaltern after subaltern, fired with zeal to give his
commander away.  'Our beloved Archbishop, in his saintly
trustfulness, is bargaining away our rights as Churchmen'--all the
indiscipline of a middle-class private school (and I know what that
is, Mr. Colt, having kept one) translated into the sentimental
erotics of a young ladies' academy!"

Mr. Colt gasped.

"And so, believe me, sir,"  concluded Brother Copas, snapping down
the lid of his snuff-box, "this country of ours did not get rid of
the Pope in order to make room for a thousand and one Popelings, each
in his separate parish practising what seems right in his own eyes.
At any rate, let us say, remembering the parable of the room swept
and garnished, it intended no such result.  Let us agree, Mr.
Chaplain, to economise in Popes, and to condemn that business of
Avignon.  So the ignorant herd comes back on you with two questions,
which in effect are one: 'If not mere anarchists, what authority own
you?  And if not for Rome, for what in the world _are_ you heading?'
You ask Rome to recognise your Orders.--_Mais, soyez consequent,
monsieur_."

It was Mr. Colt's turn to pull out his watch.

"Permit me to remind you," he said, "that you, at any rate, have to
own an authority, and that the Master will be expecting you at
six-thirty sharp.  For the rest, sir, you cannot think that
thoughtful Churchmen have no answer to these questions, if put by
anyone with the right to put them.  But _you_--not even a
communicant!  Will you dare to use these arguments to the Master, for
instance?"


"He had the last word there," said Brother Copas, pocketing his
snuff-box and gazing after the Chaplain's athletic figure as it swung
away up the tow-path.  "He gave me no time to answer that one suits
an argument to the adversary.  The Master?  Could I present anything
so crude to one who, though lazy, is yet a scholar?--who has
certainly fought this thing through, after his lights, and would get
me entangled in the Councils of Carthage and Constance, St. Cyprian
and the rest? . . . Colt quotes the ignorant herd to me, and I put
him the ignorant herd's question--without getting a reply."

"You did not allow him much time for one," said Brother Bonaday
mildly.

Brother Copas stared at him, drew out his watch again, and chuckled.

"You're right.  I lose count of time, defending my friends; and this
is your battle I'm fighting, remember."

He offered his arm, and the two friends started to walk back towards
St. Hospital.  They had gone but a dozen yards when a childish voice
hailed them, and Corona came skipping along the bank.

"Daddy! you are to come home at once! It's past six o'clock, and
Branny says the river fog's bad for you."

"Home?" echoed Brother Bonaday inattentively.  The word had been
unfamiliar to him for some years, and his old brain did not grasp it
for a moment.  His eyes seemed to question the child as she stood
before him panting, her hair dishevelled.

"Aye, Brother," said Copas with a glance at him, "you'll have to get
used to it again, and good luck to you!  What says the pessimist,
that American fellow?--"

    'Nowhere to go but out,
     Nowhere to come but back '--

"Missy don't agree with her fellow-countryman, eh?"

His eye held a twinkle of mischief.

"He _isn't_ my fellow-countryman!" Corona protested vehemently.
"I'm English--amn't I, Daddy?"

"There, there--forgive me, little one! And you really don't want to
leave us, just yet?"

"Leave you?"  The child took Brother Bonaday's hand and hugged it
close.  "Uncle Copas, if you won't laugh I want to tell you
something--what they call confessing." She hesitated for a moment.
"Haven't you ever felt you've got something inside, and how awful
good it is to confess and get it off your chest?"

Brother Copas gave a start, and eyed his fellow-Protestant.

"Well?" he said after a pause.

"Well, it's this way," confessed Corona.  "I can't say my prayers yet
in this place--not to get any heft on them; and that makes me feel
bad, you know.  I start along with 'Our Father, which art in heaven,'
and it's like calling up a person on the 'phone when he's close at
your elbow all the time.  Then I say 'God bless St. Hospital,' and
there I'm stuck; it don't seem I want to worry God to oblige beyond
that.  So I fetch back and start telling how glad I am to be home--as
if God didn't know--and that bats me up to St. Hospital again.
I got stone-walled that way five times last night.  What's the sense
of asking to go to heaven when you don't particularly want to?"

"Child," Brother Copas answered, "keep as honest as that and peg
away.  You'll find your prayers straighten themselves out all right."

"Sure? . . . Well, that's a comfort: because, of course, I don't want
to go to hell either.  It would never do. . . . But why are you
puckering up your eyes so?"

"I was thinking," said Brother Copas, "that I might start teaching
you Latin.  Your father and I were discussing it just now."

"Would he like me to learn it?"

"It's the only way to find out all that St. Hospital means, including
all it has meant for hundreds of years. . . . Bless me, is that the
quarter chiming?  Take your father's hand and lead him home, child.
_Venit Hesperus, ite capellae_."

"What does that mean?"

"It's Latin," said Brother Copas.  "It's a--a kind of absolution."



CHAPTER X.


THE ANONYMOUS LETTER.

Although the month was June and the evening warm, Master
Blanchminster sat huddled in his armchair before a bright fire.
A table stood at his elbow, with some books upon it, his untasted
glass of wine, and half a dozen letters--his evening's post.
But the Master leaned forward, spreading his delicate fingers to the
warmth and, between them, gazing into the core of the blaze.

The butler ushered in Brother Copas and withdrew, after a glance at
the lights.  Two wax candles burned upon the writing-table in the
oriel, and on the side-table an electric lamp shaded with green silk
faintly silhouetted the Master's features.  Brother Copas, standing a
little within the doorway, remarked to himself that the old gentleman
had aged of late.

"Ah, Brother Copas?  Yes, I sent for you," said the Master, rousing
himself as if from a brown study.  "Be seated, please."

He pointed to a chair on the opposite side of the hearth; and Brother
Copas, seating himself with a bow, spread the worn skirt of his
Beauchamp robe, and arranged its folds over his knees.  The firelight
sparkled upon the Beauchamp rose on his breast, and seemed to hold
the Master's eye as he looked up after a pause.

"You guess, no doubt, why I sent for you?"

Brother Copas inclined his head.

"It concerns the Petition which Brother Warboise presented to the
Bishop last Monday.  I am not complaining just now of his fashion of
procedure, which I may hazard was not of your suggesting."

"It was not, Master.  I may say so much, having warned him that I
should say it if questioned."

"Yet you wrote out and signed the Petition, and, if I may hazard
again, composed it?"

"I did."

"I have," said Master Blanchminster, studying the back of his hands
as he held his palms to the fire, "no right to force any man's
conscience.  But it seemed to me, if I may say so, that while all
were forcibly put, certain of your arguments ignored--or, let me
rather say, passed over--points which must have occurred to a man of
your learning.  Am I mistaken?"

"You understand, Master," said Brother Copas, slightly embarrassed,
and slightly the more embarrassed because the Master, after asking
the question, seemed inclined to relapse into his own thoughts,
"the Petition was not mine only.  I had to compose it for all the
signatories; and that, in any public business, involves striking a
mean."

"I understand even more," said the Master, rousing himself, and
reaching for a copy of the Petition, which lay among his papers.
"I understand that I have no right to cross-question a man on his
share in a document which six or eight others have signed.
Shall it be further understood"--he looked up with a quick smile of
goodness, whereat Brother Copas felt ashamed--"that I sent for you as
a friend, and that you may speak frankly, if you will so honour me,
without fear of my remembering a word to your inconvenience?"

"And since you so honour me, Master," said Brother Copas, "I am ready
to answer all you ask."

"Well, then, I have read with particular interest, what you have to
say here about the practice of Confession.  (This, by the way, is a
typed copy, with which the Bishop has been kind enough to supply me.)
You have, I assume, no belief in it or in the efficacy of the
Absolution that follows it."

The Master, searching for a paragraph, did not perceive that Brother
Copas flushed slightly.

"And," he continued, as he found the passage and laid his finger on
it, "although you set out your arguments with point--with fairness,
too, let me add--I am perhaps not very far wrong in guessing that you
have for Confession an instinctive dislike which to your own mind
means more than any argument you use."

The Master looked up with a smile; but by this time Brother Copas's
flush had faded.

"You may say that, Master, of the whole document.  I am an old man--
far too old to have my beliefs and disbeliefs quickened by argument.
They have long since hardened into prejudices; and, speaking
generally, I have a prejudice against this setting of old men by the
ears with a lot of Neo-Catholic stuff which irritates half of us
while all are equally past being provoked to any vital good."

The Master sighed, for he understood.

"I, too, am old," he answered, "older even than you; and as death
draws nearer I incline with you, to believe that the fewer our words
on these questions that separate us the better.  (There's a fine
passage to that effect in one of Jowett's Introductions, you may
remember--the _Phaedo_, I think.) Least said is soonest mended, and
good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than
they know.  Since we are opening our minds a little beyond our wont,
let me tell you exactly what is my own prejudice, as you would call
it.  To me Confession has been a matter of happy experience--I am
speaking now of younger days, at Cuddesdon--"

"Ah!" breathed Copas.

"And the desire to offer to others what has been a great blessing to
myself, has at times been very strong.  But I recognised that the
general English mind--yes, I'll grant you, the general _healthy_
English mind--had its prejudice too; a prejudice so sturdy against
Confession, that it seemed to me I should alienate more souls than I
attracted and breed more ill-temper than charity to cover it.
So--weakly perhaps--I never spoke of it in sermons, and by
consequence no Brother of St. Hospital has ever sought from me that
comfort which my conscience all the while would have approved of
giving."

Brother Copas bowed his head for sign that he understood.

"But--excuse me, Master--you say that you found profit in Confession
at Cuddesdon; that is, when I dare say your manhood was young and in
ferment.  Be it granted that just at such a crisis, Confession may be
salutary.  Have you found it profitable in later life?"

"I cannot," the Master answered, "honestly say more than that no
doubt of it has ever occurred to me, and for the simple reason that I
have not tried.  But I see at what you are driving--that we of St.
Hospital are too old to taste its benefit? . . . Yet I should have
thought that even in age it might bring comfort to some; and, if so,
why should the others complain?"

"For the offence it carries as an infraction of the reformed doctrine
under which they supposed themselves to order their lives and
worship.  They contend, Master, that they are all members of one
Society; and if the doctrine of that Society be infringed to comfort
A or B, it is to that extent weakened injuriously for C and D, who
have been building their everlasting and only hope on it, and have
grown too old to change."

"But," answered Master Blanchminster, pinning his finger on the
paragraph, "you admit here that even the reformed Church, in the
Order for the Visitation of the Sick, enjoins Confession and
prescribes a form of Absolution.  Now if a man be not too old for it
when he is dying, _a fortiori_ he cannot be too old for it at any
previous time."

Brother Copas rubbed his hands together softly, gleefully.  He adored
dialectic.

"With your leave, Master," he replied, "dying is a mighty singular
business.  The difference between it and growing old cannot be
treated as a mere matter of degree.  Now one of the points I make is
that the Church, by expressly allowing Confession on this singular
occasion, while saying nothing about it on any other, thereby
inferentially excludes it on all others--or discountenances it, to
say the least."

"There I join issue with you, maintaining that all such occasions are
covered by the general authority bestowed at Ordination with the
laying-on of hands--'Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven,'
etc.  To construe an open exhortation in one of her offices as a
silent denunciation in all the rest seems to me--"

For the next few minutes the pair enjoyed themselves to the top of
their bent; until, as the Master pushed aside some papers on the
table to get at his Prayer Book--to prove that No. XXV of the
Articles of Religion did not by its wording disparage Absolution--his
eye fell on a letter which lay uppermost.  He paused midway in a
sentence, picked the thing up and held it for a moment disgustfully
between forefinger and thumb.

"Brother Copas," he said with a change of voice, "we lose ourselves
in logomachy, and I had rather hark back to a word you let drop a
while ago about the Brotherhood.  You spoke of 'setting old men by
the ears.'  Do you mean it seriously--that our Brethren, just now,
are not dwelling in concord?"

"God bless your innocent old heart!" murmured Brother Copas under his
breath.  Aloud he said, "Men of the Brethren's age, Master, are not
always amiable; and the tempers of their womenfolk are sometimes
unlovely.  We are, after all, failures in life, and to have lived
night and day beside any one of us can be no joke."

The Master, with his body half-turned towards the reading-lamp, still
held the letter and eyed it at arm's length.

"I observed," he said after a while, "that Brother Bonaday did not
sign your Petition.  Yet I had supposed him to be an Evangelical, and
everyone knows you two to be close friends."  The Master mused again.
"Pardon me, but he has some reason, of course?"

"He has."

--"Which you are not at liberty to tell me?"

"That is so."

"Ah, well," said the Master, turning and facing about on Brother
Copas with a sudden resolve.  "I wonder if--to leave this matter of
the Petition--you can tell me something else concerning your friend;
something which, if you can answer it so as to help him, will also
lift a sad weight off my mind.  If you cannot, I shall equally forget
that the question was ever put or the answer withheld. . . . To be
candid, when you were shown in I was sitting here in great distress
of mind."

"Surely not about Bonaday, Master?" said Brother Copas, wondering.

"About Bonaday, yes." The Master inclined his head.  "Poison--it has
been running through my thoughts all the while we have been talking.
I suppose I ought not to show you this; the fire is its only proper
receptacle--"

"Poison?" echoed Brother Copas.  "And about Bonaday? who, good soul,
never hurt a fly!"

"I rejoice to hear you say it," said the Master, plainly relieved,
and he appeared half-minded to withdraw and pocket the scrap of paper
for which Copas held out a hand.  "It is an anonymous letter, and--
er--evidently the product of a foul mind--"

Brother Copas took it and, fumbling for his glasses, gazed
around in search of the handiest light by which to read it.
Master Blanchminster hurried to catch up the electric lamp and set it
on the mantel-shelf above his shoulder.  Its coil of silk-braided
wire dragging across the papers on the table, one or two dropped on
the floor; and whilst the Master stooped to collect them Brother
Copas read the letter, first noting at a glance that the paper was
cheap and the handwriting, though fairly legible, at once uneducated
and painfully disguised.

It ran--

    "Master,--This is to warn you that you are too kind and anyone
     can take you in.  It wasn't enough Bonaday should get the best
     rooms in S. Hospital but now you give him leave for this child
     which every one in S. Hospital knows is a bastard.  If you want
     to find the mother, no need to go far.  Why is Nurse B--hanging
     about his rooms now.  Which they didn't carry it so far before,
     but they was acquainted years ago, as is common talk.
     God knows my reasons for writing this much are honest, but I
     hate to see your goodness put upon, and a scandal which the
     whole S. Hospital feels bitter about--such letchery and
     wickedness in our midst, and nobody knowing how to put a stop to
     it all.

                                      "Yours obdtly.,

                                      "A Well Wisher."

"The handwriting," said Brother Copas, "is a woman's, though
disguised."

The Master, erect again, having collected his papers, eyed Brother
Copas as if surprised by his calm tone.

"You make nothing of it, then?"

"P'st!"

"I--I was hoping so."  The Master's voice was tremulous, apologetic.
"It came by this evening's post, not half an hour ago. . . . I am not
used to receive such things: yet I know what ought to be done with
them--toss them into the fire at once and dismiss them from your
mind.  I make no doubt I should have burnt it within another ten
minutes: as for cleansing one's mind of it so quickly, that must be a
counsel of perfection.  But you were shown in, and I--I made certain
that you could contradict this disgraceful report and set my mind at
rest.  Forgive me."

"Ah, Master"--Brother Copas glanced up with a quick smile--
"it almost looks as if you were right after all, and one is never too
old to confess!"  He bent and held the edge of the paper close to the
blaze.  "May I burn it?"

"By all means."

"Nay, then, I won't.  But since you have freely parted with it, may I
keep it? . . . I have had some little experience with manuscripts,
and it is just possible I may trace this to the writer--who is
assuredly a woman," added Brother Copas, studying the letter again.
"You have my leave to do so."

"And you ask no further question?"

The Master hesitated.  At length he said firmly--

"None.  I have no right.  How can so foul a thing confer any right?"

Brother Copas was silent for a space.

"Nay, that is true, Master; it cannot. . . . Nevertheless, I will
answer what was in your mind to ask.  When I came into the room you
were pondering this letter.  The thought of it--pah!--mixed itself up
with a thought of the appointment you had set for me--with the
Petition; and the two harked back together upon a question you put to
me just now.  'Why was not Brother Bonaday among the signatories?'
Between them they turned that question into a suspicion.  Guilty men
are seldom bold: as the Scots say, 'Riven breeks sit still.' . . .
Was not this, or something like it, in your mind, sir?"

"I confess that it was."

"Why then, Master, I too will confess--I that came to you to denounce
the practice.  Of what this letter hints Bonaday is innocent as--as
you are.  He approved of the Petition and was on the point of signing
it; but he desired your good leave to make a home for his child.
Between parent and Protestant my friend was torn, and moreover
between conscience and loyalty.  He could not sue for this favour
from you, his soul weighted with an intention to go straightway and
do what must offend you."

Master Blanchminster faced Brother Copas squarely, standing of a
sudden erect.  It seemed to add inches to his stature.

"Had he so poor a trust in me, after these years?"

"No, Master." Brother Copas bent his head.  "That is where I come in.
All this is but preparatory. . . . I am a fraud--as little Protestant
as Catholic.  I found my friend in straits, and made a bargain with
those who were pressing him--"

"Do I understand, Brother Copas, that this Petition--of which all the
strength lies in its scholarship and wording--is yours, and that on
these terms only you have given me so much pain?"

"You may put it so, Master, and I can say no more than 'yes'--though
I might yet plead that something is wrong with St. Hospital, and--"

"Something is very wrong with St. Hospital," interrupted the Master
gravely.  "This letter--if it come from within our walls--But I after
all, as its Master, am ultimately to blame."  He paused for a moment
and looked up with a sudden winning smile.  "We have both confessed
some sins.  Shall we say a prayer together, Brother?"

The two old men knelt by the hearth there.  Together in silence they
bowed their heads.



CHAPTER XI.


BROTHER COPAS ON THE ANGLO-SAXON.

"You ought to write a play," said Mrs. Simeon.

Mr. Simeon looked up from his dinner and stared at his wife as though
she had suddenly taken leave of her senses.  She sat holding a fork
erect and close to her mouth, with a morsel of potato ready to be
popped in as soon as she should finish devouring a paragraph of
_The People_ newspaper, folded beside her plate.  In a general way
Mrs. Simeon was not a reader; but on Mondays (washing-days) she
regularly had the loan of a creased copy of _The People_ from a
neighbour who, having but a couple of children, could afford to buy
and peruse it on the day of issue.  There is much charity among the
working poor.

"I--I beg your pardon, my dear?" Mr. Simeon murmured, after gently
admonishing his second son (Eustace, aged 11, named after the Master)
for flipping bread pills across the table.  "I am afraid I did not
catch--"

"I see there's a man has made forty thousand pounds by writing one.
And he did it in three weeks, after beginning as a clerk in the
stationery. . . . Forty thousand pounds, only think!  That's what I
call turning cleverness to account."

"But, my love, I don't happen to be clever," protested Mr. Simeon.

His wife swallowed her morsel of potato.  She was a worn-looking
blonde, peevish, not without traces of good looks.  She wore the
sleeves of her bodice rolled up to the elbows, and her wrists and
forearms were bleached by her morning's work at the wash-tub.

"Then I'm sure I don't know what else you are!" said she, looking at
him straight.

Mr. Simeon sighed.  Ever on Mondays he returned at midday to a house
filled with steam and the dank odour of soap-suds, and to the worst
of the week's meagre meals.  A hundred times he had reproached
himself that he did ungratefully to let this affect him, for his wife
(poor soul) had been living in it all day, whereas his morning had
been spent amid books, rare prints, statuettes, soft carpets, all the
delicate luxuries of Master Blanchminster's library.  Yet he could
not help feeling the contrast; and the children were always at their
most fractious on Mondays, chafed by a morning in school after two
days of freedom.

"Where are you going this afternoon?" his wife asked.

"To blow the organ for Windeatt."

Dr. Windeatt (Mus. Doc. Oxon.) was the Cathedral organist.

"Has he offered to pay you?"

"Well--it isn't _pay_ exactly.  There was an understanding that if I
blew for him this afternoon--old Brewer being laid up with the
shingles--he would take me through that tenor part in the new
_Venite Exultemus_.  It's tricky, and yesterday morning I slurred it
horribly."

"Tc'ht!  A man of your education blowing an organ, and for nothing!
If there was any money in it one wouldn't mind so much. . . . But you
let yourself be put upon by anybody."

Mr. Simeon was silent.  He knew that to defend himself would be to
court a wrangle, reproaches, tears perhaps, all unseemly before the
children; and, moreover, what his wife said was more than half
deserved.

"Daddy, why _don't_ you write a play?" demanded the five-year-old
Agatha.  "And then mammy would have a carriage, and I'd go to a real
boarding-school with canaries in the window like they have at Miss
Dickinson's."


The meal over, Mr. Simeon stole away to the Cathedral.  He was
unhappy; and as he passed through Friars' Gateway into the Close, the
sight of the minster, majestical above its green garth, for once gave
no lift to his spirit.  The great central tower rose against a sky of
clearest blue, strong and foursquare as on the day when its Norman
builders took down their scaffolding.  White pigeons hovered or
perched on niche and corbel.  But fortitude and aspiration alike had
deserted Mr. Simeon for the while.  Life--hard life and poverty--had
subdued him to be one of the petty, nameless crowd this Cathedral had
seen creep to their end in its shadow. . . . "What should such
creatures as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?"  A thousand
thousand such as Mr. Simeon had listened or lifted their voice to its
anthems--had aspired for the wings of a dove, to fly away and be at
rest.  Where now were all their emotions?  He entered by a side-door
of the western porch.  The immense, solemn nave, if it did not catch
his thoughts aloft, at least hushed them in awe.  To Mr. Simeon
Merchester Cathedral was a passion, nearer, if not dearer, than wife
or children.

He had arrived ten minutes ahead of the appointed time.  As he walked
towards the great organ he heard a child's voice, high-pitched and
clear, talking behind the traceries of the choir screen.  He supposed
it the voice of some irreverent chorister, and stepping aside to
rebuke it, discovered Corona and Brother Copas together gazing up at
the coffins above the canopy.

"And is King Alfred really up there?--the one that burnt the cakes?--
and if so, which?" Corona was asking, too eager to think of grammar.

Brother Copas shrugged his shoulders.

"What's left of him is up there somewhere."

     'Here are sands, ignoble things
      Dropped from the ruined sides of kings.'

"--But the Parliament troopers broke open the coffins and mixed the
dust sadly.  The Latin says so.  '_In this and the neighbouring
chests_' (or caskets, as you say in America), '_confounded in a time
of Civil Fury, reposes what dust is left of_--'  Ah, good afternoon,
Mr. Simeon!  This young lady has laid forcible hands on me to give
her an object-lesson in English history.  Do you, who know ten times
more of the Cathedral than I, come to my aid."

"If you are looking for King Alfred," answered Mr. Simeon,
beaming on Corona through his glasses, "there's a tradition that his
dust lies in the second chest to the right . . . a tradition only.
No one really knows."

Corona shifted her position some six paces to the right, and tilted
her gaze up at the coffer as though she would crick her neck.

"Aye, missie"--Mr. Simeon still beamed--"they're up there, the royal
ones--Dane and Norman and Angevin; and not one to match the great
Anglo-Saxon that was father of us all."

Brother Copas grunted impatiently.

"My good Simeon, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!  God forbid
that one should decry such a man as Alfred was.  But the pedantry of
Freeman and his sect, who tried to make 'English' a conterminous name
and substitute for 'Anglo-Saxon,' was only by one degree less
offensive than the ignorance of your modern journalist who degrades
Englishmen by writing them down (or up, the poor fool imagines) as
Anglo-Saxons.  In truth, King Alfred was a noble fellow.  No one in
history has struggled more pluckily to rekindle fire in an effete
race or to put spirit into an effete literature by pretending that
both were of the prime."

"Come, come," murmured Mr. Simeon, smiling.  "I see you are off upon
one of your hobbies. . . . But you will not tell me that the fine
rugged epic of _Beowulf_, to which the historians trace back all that
is noblest in our poetry, had lost its generative impulse even so
early as Alfred's time.  That were too extravagant!"

"_Brekekekex, ten brink, ten brink!_" snapped Brother Copas.
"All the frogs in chorus around Charon's boat!  Fine rugged
fiddlestick--have you ever read _Beowulf_?"

"In translation only."

"You need not be ashamed of labour saved.  I once spent a month or
two in mastering Anglo-Saxon, having a suspicion of Germans when they
talk about English literature, and a deeper suspicion of English
critics who ape them.  Then I tackled _Beowulf_, and found it to be
what I guessed--no rugged national epic at all, but a blown-out bag
of bookishness.  Impulse?  Generative impulse?--the thing is wind, I
tell you, without sap or sinew, the production of some conscientious
Anglo-Saxon whose blue eyes, no doubt, watered with the effort of
inflating it.  I'll swear it never drew a human tear otherwise. . . .
That's what the whole Anglo-Saxon race had become when Alfred arose
to galvanise 'em for a while--a herd of tall, flabby, pale-eyed men,
who could neither fight, build, sing, nor enforce laws.  And so our
England--wise as Austria in mating--turned to other nuptials and
married William the Norman.  Behold then a new breed; the country
covered with sturdy, bullet-headed, energetic fellows, who are no
sooner born than they fly to work--hammers going, scaffolds climbing;
cities, cathedrals springing up by magic; and all to a new song that
came with some imported workmen from the Provence--"

     'Quan la douss' aura venta
        Deves vostre pays'--

"And so--pop!--down the wind goes your pricked bladder of a _Beowulf_:
down the wind that blows from the Mediterranean, whence the arts and
the best religions come."

Mr. Simeon rubbed the side of his jaw thoughtfully.

"Ah," said he, "I remember Master Blanchminster saying something of
the sort the other day.  He was talking of wine."

"Yes--the best religions and the best wine: they go together.
Could ever an Anglo-Saxon have built _that_, think you?" demanded
Brother Copas with a backward jerk of the head and glance up at the
vaulted roof.  "But to my moral.--All this talk of Anglo-Saxons,
Celts, and the rest is rubbish.  We are English by chemical action of
a score of interfused bloods.  That man is a fool who speaks as
though, at this point of time, they could be separated: had he the
power to put his nonsense into practice he would be a wicked fool.
And so I say, Mr. Simeon, that the Roundheads--no pure Anglo-Saxon,
by the way, ever had a round head--who mixed up the dead dust in the
caskets aloft there, were really leaving us a sound historical
lesson--"

But here Mr. Simeon turned at the sound of a brisk footstep.
Dr. Windeatt had just entered by the western door.

"You'll excuse me?  I promised the Doctor to blow the organ for him."

"Do people blow upon organs?" asked Corona, suddenly interested.
"I thought they played upon them the same as pianos, only with little
things that pulled out at the sides."

"Come and see," Mr. Simeon invited her, smiling.

The three went around to the back of the organ loft.  By and by when
Mr. Simeon began to pump, and after a minute, a quiet _adagio_,
rising upon a throb of air, stole along the aisles as though an angel
spoke in it, or the very spirit of the building, tears sprang into
the child's eyes and overflowed.  She supposed that Mr. Simeon alone
was working this miracle. . . . Blinking more tears away, she stared
at him, meeting his mild, half-quizzical gaze as he stooped and rose
and stooped again over the bellows.

Brother Copas, touching her elbow, signed to her to come away.
She obeyed, very reluctantly.  By a small doorway in the southern
aisle she followed him out into the sunshine of the Cathedral Close.

"But how does he do it?" she demanded.  "He doesn't look a bit as if
he could do anything like that--not in repose."

Brother Copas eyed her and took snuff.  "He and the like of him don't
touch the stops, my dear.  He and the like of him do better; they
supply the afflatus."

     O ye holy and humble Men of heart, bless ye the Lord: praise
     Him, and magnify Him for ever!

Mr. Simeon worked mechanically, heaving and pressing upon the bellows
of the great organ.  His mind ran upon Master Copas's disparagement
of _Beowulf_ and the Anglo-Saxons.  It was ever the trouble that he
remembered an answer for Brother Copas after Brother Copas had gone.
 . . . Why had he not bethought him to cite Caedmon, at any rate,
against that sweeping disparagement?  How went the story?--

     Caedmon was a lay brother, a tender of cattle at the Abbey of
     Whitby under the Abbess Hilda who founded it.  Until somewhat
     spent in years he had never learnt any poems.  Therefore at a
     feast, when all sang in turn, so soon as he saw the harp coming
     near him, he would rise and leave the table and go home.
     Once when he had gone thus from the feast to the stables, where
     he had night-charge of the beasts, as he yielded himself to
     sleep One stood over him and said, greeting him by name,
     "Caedmon, sing some song to me."  "I cannot sing," he said, "and
     for this cause left I the feast."  "But you shall sing to me,"
     said the Vision.  "Lord, what shall I sing?"  "Sing the
     Creation," said the Vision.  Caedmon sang, and in the morning
     remembered what he had sung . . .

"If this indeed happened to Caedmon, and late in life" (mused Mr.
Simeon, heaving on the bellows of the great organ), "might not even
some such miracle befall me?"

     Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thy house, and the place
     where Thine honour dwelleth.

"I might even write a play," thought Mr. Simeon.



CHAPTER XII.


MR. ISIDORE TAKES CHARGE.

"Uncle Copas," said Corona, as the two passed out through the small
doorway in the southern aisle and stood blinking in the sunshine,
"I want you next to show me what's left of the old Castle where the
kings lived: that is, if you're not tired."

"Tired, child?  'Tis our business--'tis the Brethren's business--
to act as guides around the relics of Merchester.  By fetching a very
small circuit we can take the Castle on our way, and afterwards walk
home along the water-meads, my favourite path."

Corona slipped her hand into his confidentially.  Together they left
the Close, and passing under the King's Gate, turned down College
Street, which led them by the brewhouse and outer porch of the great
School.  A little beyond it, where by a conduit one of the Mere's
hurrying tributaries gushed beneath the road, they came to a regiment
of noble elms guarding a gateway, into which Brother Copas turned
aside.  A second and quite unpretentious gateway admitted them to a
green meadow, in shape a rough semicircle, enclosed by ruinated
walls.

"You may come here most days of the month," said Brother Copas,
holding the gate wide, "and never meet a soul.  'Tis the
tranquillest, most forsaken spot in the city's ambit."

But here, as Corona caught her breath, he turned and stared.
The enclosure was occupied by a squad of soldiers at drill.

They wore uniforms of khaki, and, dressed up with their backs to the
gateway, were performing the simple movements of foot drill in face
of a choleric sergeant-major, who shouted the words of command, and
of a mounted officer who fronted the squad, silent, erect in saddle,
upon a strapping bay.  Some few paces behind this extremely military
pair stood a couple of civilian spectators side by side, in attire--
frock-coats, top-hats, white waistcoats--which at a little distance
gave them an absurd resemblance to a brace of penguins.

"Heavens!" murmured Brother Copas.  "Is it possible that Bamberger
has become twins?  One never knows of what these Jews are
capable. . . ."

His gaze travelled from the two penguins to the horseman in khaki.
He put up a shaking hand to shade it.

"Colt?  Colt in regimentals?  Oh, this must be vertigo!"


At a word from the sergeant-major the squad fell out and stood in
loose order, plainly awaiting instructions.  Mr. Colt--yes, indeed it
was the Chaplain--turned his charger's head half-about as the two
frock-coated civilians stepped forward.

"Now, Mr. Bamberger, my men are at your disposal."

"I t'ank you, Reverent Mr. Major--if zat is ze form to address you--"
began Mr. Bamberger's double.

"'Major,' _tout court_, if you please," Mr. Colt corrected him.
"One drops the 'reverend' while actually on military duty."

"So? Ach, pardon!--I should haf known. . . Now Ze first is, we get ze
angle of view, where to place our Grandt Standt so ze backgrount mek
ze most pleasing pigture.  At ze same time ze Standt must not
tresbass--must not imbinge, _hein_?--upon our stage, our
what-you-call-it area.  Two t'ousand berformers--we haf not too mooch
room.  I will ask you, Mr. Major, first of all to let your men--zey
haf tent-pegs, _hein_?--to let your men peg out ze area as I direct.
Afterwards, with your leaf, you shall place z'em here--z'ere--in
groups, zat I may see in some sort how ze groups combose, as we say.
Himmel! what a backgroundt!  Ze Cathedral, how it lifts over ze
trees--Bar-fect!  Now, if you will follow me a few paces to ze right,
here . . . Ach! see yonder, by ze gate!  Zat old man in ze red
purple _poncho_--haf ze berformers already begon to aszemble
zemselves? . . ."

Mr. Colt slewed his body about in the saddle.

"Eh? . . . Oh, that's Brother Copas, one of our Beauchamp Brethren.
Mediaeval he looks, doesn't he?  I assure you, sir, we keep the
genuine article in Merchester."

"You haf old men dressed like _zat_? . . . My dear Julius, I see zis
Bageant retty-made!"

"It was at St. Hospital--the almshouse for these old fellows--that
the notion first came into my head."

"Sblendid! . . . We will haf a Brocession of them; or, it may be, a
whole Ebisode. . . . Will you bid him come closer, Mr. Major, zat I
may study ze costume in its detail?"

"Certainly." Mr. Colt beckoned to Brother Copas, who came forward
still holding Corona by the hand.  "Brother Copas, Mr. Isidore
Bamberger here--brother of Our Member--desires to make your
acquaintance."

"I am honoured," said Brother Copas politely.

"Ach, so!" burst in Mr. Isidore.  "I was telling the major how moch I
admire zat old costume of yours."

"It is not for sale, however." Brother Copas faced the two Hebrews
with his ironical smile.  "I am sorry to disappoint you, sirs, but I
have no old clothes to dispose of, at present."

"No offence, no offence, I hope?" put in Mr. Julius.  "My brother,
sir, is an artist--"

"Be easy, sir: I am sure that he intended none.  For the rest,"
pursued Brother Copas with a glance at Mr. Colt and a twinkle,
"if we had time, all four of us here, to tell how by choice or
necessity we come to be dressed as we are, I dare say our stories
might prove amusing as the Calenders' in _The Arabian Nights_."

"You remind me," said Mr. Isidore, "zat I at any rate must not keep
zese good Territorials standing idle.  Another time--at your
service--"

He waved a hand and hurried off to give an instruction to the
sergeant-major.  His brother followed and overtook him.

"Damn it all, Isidore!  You might remember that Merchester is my
constituency, and my majority less than half a hundred."

"_Hein_?  For what else am I here but to helb you to increase it?"

"Then why the devil start by offending that old chap as you did?"

"Eh?  I offended him somehow.  Zat is certain: zough why on earth he
should object to having his dress admired--" Mr. Isidore checked his
speech upon a sudden surmise.  "My goot Julius, you are not telling
me he has a Vote!"

"You silly fool, of course he has!"

"Gott in himmel! I am sorry, Julius. . . . I--I sobbosed, in England,
that paupers--"

"State-paupers,"  corrected his brother.  "Private paupers, like the
Brethren of St. Hospital, rank as tenants of their living-rooms."

"I shall never gombrehend the institutions of zis country," groaned
Mr. Isidore.

"Never mind: make a Pageant of 'em," said his brother grimly.
"I'll forgive you this time, if you'll promise me to be more
careful."

"I'll do more, Julius.  I'll get aroundt ze old boy somehow: mek him
bivot-man in a brocession, or something of the sort.  I got any
amount of tagt, once I know where to use it."


"Smart man, Our Member!"  commented Mr. Colt, gazing after the pair.
"And Mr. Isidore doesn't let the grass grow under his feet, hey?"

"Has an eye for detail, too," answered Brother Copas, taking snuff.
"See him there, upbraiding his brother for want of tact towards a
free and independent elector. . . . But--excuse me--for what purpose
are these two parcelling out the Castle Meadow?"

"You've not heard?  There's a suggestion--and I may claim some share
in the credit of it, if credit there be--to hold a Pageant here next
summer, a Merchester Pageant.  Mr. Bamberger's full of it.
What's your idea?"

"A capital notion," said Brother Copas slowly.  "Since _jam pridem
Syrus in Tamesin defluxit Orontes_, I commend any attempt to educate
Mr. Bamberger and his tribe in the history of this England they
invade.  But, as you say, this proposed Pageant is news to me.
I never seem to hear any gossip.  It had not even reached me, Mr.
Chaplain, that you were deserting St. Hospital to embrace a military
career."

"Nor am I. . . . At Cambridge I ever was an ardent volunteer.
Here in Merchester (though this, too, may be news to you) I have for
years identified myself with all movements in support of national
defence.  The Church Lads' Brigade, I may say, owed its inception to
me; likewise the Young Communicants' Miniature Rifle Association; and
for three successive years our Merchester Boy Scouts have elected me
President and Scoutmaster.  It has been a dream of my life, Brother
Copas, to link up the youth of Britain in preparation to defend the
Motherland, pending that system of compulsory National Service which
(we all know) must eventually come.  And so when Sir John
Shaftesbury, as Chairman of our County Territorial Force Association,
spoke to the Lord-Lieutenant, who invited me to accept a majority in
the Mershire Light Infantry, Second Battalion, Territorial--"

"I can well understand, sir," said Brother Copas, as Mr. Colt drew
breath; "and I thank you for telling me so much.  No wonder Sir John
enlisted such energy as yours!  Yet--to be equally frank with you--I
am sorry."

"You disapprove of National Service?"

"I approve of it with all my heart.  Every young man should prepare
himself to fight, at call, for his country.  But the devotion should
be voluntary."

"Ah, but suppose our young men will not?  Suppose they prefer to
attend football matches--"

"That, sir--if I may respectfully suggest it--is your business to
prevent.  And I might go on to suggest that the clergy, by preaching
compulsory military service, lay themselves open, as avowed
supporters of 'law and order,' to a very natural suspicion.
We will suppose that you get your way, and every young Briton is
bound, on summons, to mobilise.  We will further suppose a
Conservative Government in power, and confronted with a devastating
strike--shall we say a railwaymen's strike?  What more easy than to
call out one-half of the strikers on service and oblige them, under
pain of treason, to coerce the other half?  Do you suppose that this
nation will ever forget Hounslow Heath?"

"Let us, then," said Mr. Colt, "leave arguing this question of
compulsory National Service until another occasion, when I shall hope
to convince you.  For the moment you'll allow it to be every man's
duty, as a citizen, to carry arms for his country?"

"Every man's, certainly--if by that you exclude priests."

"Why exclude priests?"

"Because a priest, playing at warfare, must needs be mixing up things
that differ.  As I see it, Mr. Colt, your Gospel forbids warfare; and
if you consent to follow an army, your business is to hold a cross
above human strife and point the eyes of the dying upward, to rest on
it, thus rebuking men's passions with a vision of life's ultimate
peace."

"Yet a Bishop of Beauvais (as I read) once thought it not unmeet to
charge with a mace at the head of a troop; and our own dear
Archbishop Maclagan of York, as everyone knows, was once lieutenant
in a cavalry regiment!"

"Oh, la, la!" chuckled Brother Copas.  "Be off, then, to your
Territorials, Mr. Chaplain!  I see Mr. Isidore, yonder, losing his
temper with the squad as only an artist can. . . . But--believe an
old man, dear sir--you on your horse are not only misreading the
Sermon but mistaking the Mount!"


Mr. Colt rode off to his squad, and none too soon; for the men,
startled by Mr. Isidore's sudden onslaught of authority and the
explosive language in which he ordered them hither and thither,
cursing one for his slowness with the measuring-tape, taking another
by the shoulders and pushing him into position, began to show signs
of mutiny.  Mr. Julius Bamberger mopped a perspiring brow as he ran
about vainly trying to interpose.

"Isidore, this is damned nonsense, I tell you!"

"You leave 'em to me," panted Mr. Isidore.  "Tell me I don't
understand managing a crowd like this!  It's part of ze _method_, my
goot Julius.  Put ze fear of ze Lord into 'em, to start wiz.
Zey gromble at first; Zen zey findt zey like it: in the endt zey lof
you.  _Hein_?  It is not for nozzing zey call me ze Bageant
King! . . ."


The old man and the child, left to themselves, watched these
operations for a while across the greensward, over which the elms now
began to lengthen their shadows.

"The Chaplain was right," said Brother Copas.  "Mr. Isidore certainly
does not let the grass grow under his feet."

"If I were the grass, I shouldn't want to," said Corona.



CHAPTER XIII.


GARDEN AND LAUNDRY.

"The nasty pigs!"

Nurse Branscome's face, usually composed and business-like
(as a nurse's should be), was aflush between honest shame and equally
honest scorn.

"To be sure," said Brother Copas soothingly.  He had met her by
chance in the ambulatory on her way from Brother Bonaday's rooms.
On a sudden resolve he had told her of the anonymous letter, not
showing it, but conveying (delicately as he might) its substance.
"To be sure," he repeated.  "But I am thinking--"

"As if I don't know your thoughts!" she interrupted vigorously.
"You are thinking that, to save scandal, I had better cease my
attendance on Brother Bonaday, and hand over the case to Nurse
Turner.  That I could do, of course; and if _he_ knows of it,
I certainly shall.  Have you told him?"

Brother Copas shook his head.

"No.  What is more, I have not the smallest intention of telling
him."

"Thank you. . . . Oh, but it is vile--vile!"

"So vile that, believe me, I had great difficulty in telling you."

"I am sure you had. . . . I can hand over the case to Nurse Turner,
of course; in fact, it came on her _rota_, but she asked me as a
favour to take it, having her hands full just then with Brother Royle
and Brother Dasent's rheumatics.  It will be hard, though, to give up
the child."  Nurse Branscome flushed again.  "Oh, yes--you are a
gentleman, Brother Copas, and will not misunderstand!  I have taken a
great liking for the child, and she will ask questions if I suddenly
desert her.  You see the fix? . . . Besides, Nurse Turner--I hope I
am not becoming like one of these people, but I must say it--Nurse
Turner has not a nice mind."

"There we get at it," said Brother Copas.  "As a fact, you were far
from reading my thoughts just now.  They did not (forgive me) concern
themselves with you or your wisest line of conduct.  You are a grown
woman, and know well enough that honesty will take care of its own in
the end.  I was thinking rather of Corona.  As you say, she has laid
some hold upon the pair of us.  She has a pathetic belief in all the
inmates of St. Hospital--and God pity us if our corruption infects
this child! . . . You take me?"

Nurse Branscome looked at him squarely.

"If I could save her from that!"

"You would risk appearances?"

"Gladly. . . . Will you show me the letter?"

Brother Copas shook his head.

"You must take it on faith from me for a while . . . at any rate
until I find out who in St. Hospital begins her 'w's' with a curl
like a ram's horn.  Did you leave the child with her father?"

"No; she had run out to the kitchen garden.  Since she has discovered
it she goes there regularly twice a day, morning and evening.
I can't think why, and she won't tell.  She is the queerest child."


The walled kitchen garden of St. Hospital lies to the south, between
the back of the "Nunnery" and the River Mere.  It can be reached from
the ambulatory by a dark, narrow tunnel under the nurses' lodgings.
The Brethren never went near it.  For years old Battershall, the
gardener, had dug there in solitude--day in, day out--and had grown
his vegetables, hedged in from all human intercourse, nor grumbling
at his lot.

Corona, exploring the precincts, had discovered this kitchen garden,
found it to her mind, and thereafter made free of it with the
cheerfullest _insouciance_.  The dark tunnel, to begin with, put her
in mind of some adventure in a fairy tale she could not recall; but
it opened of a sudden and enchantingly upon sunshine and beds of
onions, parsley, cabbages, with pale yellow butterflies hovering.
Old Battershall, too, though taciturn, was obviously not displeased
by her visits.  He saw that while prying here and there--especially
among the parsley beds, for what reason he could not guess--the child
stole no fruit, did no harm.  She trampled nothing.  She lifted no
leaf to harm it.  When she stopped to speak with him her talk was
"just nonsense, you know."  Unconsciously, by the end of the third
day he had looked up twice or thrice from his delving, asking himself
why she was late.

And what (do you suppose) did Corona seek in the kitchen garden?
She too, unknowing, was lonely.  Unknowing, this child felt a need
for children, companions.  Uncle Copas's doll--well meant and priced
at 1s. 3d.--had somehow missed to engage her affections.  She could
not tell him so, but she hated it.

Like every woman-child of her age she was curious about babies.
She had heard, over in America, that babies came either at early
morning or at shut of eve, and were to be found in parsley
beds.  Now old Mr. Battershall grew parsley to make you proud.
At the Merchester Rural Gardening Show he regularly took first prize;
his potting-shed, in the north-east angle of the wall, was papered
with winning tickets from bench to roof.  At first when he saw Corona
moving about the bed, lifting the parsley leaves, he had a mind to
chide her away; for, as he put it, "Children and chicken be always
a-pickin'--the mischief's in their natur'."  Finding, however, that
she did no damage, yet harked back to the parsley again and again, he
set her down for an unusually intelligent child, who somehow knew
good gardening when she saw it.

"Glad to see you admirin' it, missie," he said one morning, coming up
behind her unperceived.

Corona, in the act of upturning a leaf, started and drew back her
hand.  Babies--she could not tell why--made their appearance in this
world by stealth, and must be searched for furtively.

"A mort o' prizes I've took with that there parsley one time and
another," pursued Mr. Battershall, not perceiving the flush of guilt
on her face (for his eyesight was, in his own words, not so young as
it used to be).  "Goodbody's Curly Mammoth is the strain, and I don't
care who knows it, for the secret's not in the strain, but in the way
o' raisin' it.  I grows for a succession, too.  Summer or winter
these six-an'-twenty years St. Hospital's ne'er been without a fine
bed o' parsley, I thank the Lord!"

Six-and-twenty years. . . . It was comforting in a way to know that
parsley grew here all the seasons round.  But--six-and-twenty years,
and not one child in the place save herself, who had come over from
America!  Yet Mr. Battershall was right; it _seemed_ excellent
parsley.

"You don't find that anything comes and--and takes away--" she
hazarded, but came to a full stop.

"There's slugs," answered Mr. Battershall stolidly, "and there's
snails.  Terrible full o' snails the old wall was till I got the
Master to repoint it."

"Would snails--"

"Eh?" he asked as she hesitated.

"They might take away the--the flowers, for instance."

Old Battershall guffawed.

"You wasn' sarchin' for flowers, was you?  Dang me, but that's a good
'un! . . . I don't raise my own seed, missie, if that's your meanin';
an' that bein' so, he'd have to get up early as would find a flower
in my parsley."

Ah, this might explain it!  As she eyed him, her childish mind
searching the mystery, yet keeping its own secret, Corona resolved to
steal down to the garden one of these fine mornings very early
indeed.

"Now I'll tell you something about parsley," said Mr. Battershall;
"something very curious, and yet it must be true, for I heard the
Master tell it in one of his sermons.  The ancients, by which I mean
the Greeks, set amazin' store by the yerb.  There was a kind of
Athletic Sports--sort of Crystal Palace meetin'--_the_ great event,
as you might say, and attractin' to sportsmen all over Greece--"

"All over what?"

"Greece.  Which is a country, missy, or, at any rate, was so.
The meeting was held every four years; and what d'ye suppose was the
top prize, answerin', as you may say, to the Championship Cup?
Why, a wreath o' parsley!  'Garn!' says you.  And 'Parsley!' says
you.  Which a whole wreath of it might cost fivepence at the
outside. . . ."

Now Corona, whose mind was ever picking up and hoarding such trifles,
had heard Uncle Copas two days before drop a remark that the Greeks
knew everything worth knowing.  Plainly, then, the parsley held some
wonderful secret after all.  She must contrive to outwit old
Battershall, and get to the garden ahead of him, which would not be
easy, by the way.

To begin with, on these summer mornings old Battershall rose with the
lark, and boasted of it; and, furthermore, the door of her father's
bedroom stood open all night.  To steal abroad she must pass it, and
he was the lightest of sleepers.  She did not intend to be beaten,
though; and meanwhile she punctually visited the parsley morning and
evening.

Heaven knows how the day-dream came to take possession of her.
She was not consciously lonely.  She worshipped this marvellous new
home.  Sometimes in her rambles she had to pinch herself to make
sure this was all really happening.  But always in her rambles she
saw St. Hospital peopled with children--boys, girls, and little
toddlers--chasing one another across the lawns, laughing at
hide-and-seek in the archways, bruising no flower-bed, filling old
souls with glee.  They were her playmates, these innocents of her
fancy, the long day through.  At evening in her prayers she called
them home, and they came reluctant--

     No, no, let us play, for it is yet day
        And we cannot go to sleep;
     Besides, in the sky the little birds fly
        And the hills are all covered with sheep.

The tunnel was populous with them as she passed through it from the
garden to the ambulatory, and at the end of the tunnel she came plump
upon Branny and Uncle Copas in converse.  They started guiltily.


"I've been looking for you this half-hour," said Brother Copas,
recovering himself.  "Didn't a certain small missy make an
appointment with me to be shown the laundry and its wonders?
And isn't this Tuesday--ironing day?"

"You promised to show it to me _some time_," answered Corona, who was
punctilious in small matters; "but you never fixed any time in
p'tic'lar."

"Oh, then I must have made the appointment with myself!  Never mind;
come along now, if you can spare the time."

Nurse Branscome nodded and left them, turning in at the stairway
which led to her quarters in the Nunnery.  At the foot of it she
paused to call after them--

"Mind, Corona is not to be late for her tea!  I've invited myself
this evening, and there is to be a plum cake in honour of the
occasion."

Brother Copas and Corona passed down the ambulatory and by the
porter's lodge to the outer court.  Of a sudden, within a few paces
of the laundry, Brother Copas halted to listen.

"You had better stop here for a moment," he said, and walked forward
to the laundry door, the hasp of which he lifted after knocking
sharply with his staff.  He threw the door open and looked in,
surveying the scene with an angry disgust.

"Hallo!  More abominations?" exclaimed Brother Copas.


The quarrel had started in the forenoon over a dirty trick played by
Brother Clerihew, the ex-butler.  (Brother Clerihew had a name for
underhand practice; indeed, his inability to miss a chance of it had
cost him situation after situation, and finally landed him in St.
Hospital.)  This time he had played it upon poor old doddering
Brother Ibbetson.  Finding Ibbetson in the porter's gateway, with
charge of a lucrative-looking tourist and in search of the key of the
Relique Room, he noted that the key, usually handed out by Porter
Manby, hung on a hook just within the doorway; but old Ibbetson,
being purblind, could not see it, or at all events could not
recognise it, and Manby happened to be away at the brewhouse on some
errand connected with the Wayfarers' Dole.  Brother Clerihew, who had
left him there, sent Ibbetson off on a chase in the wrong direction,
loitered around for a couple of minutes chatting about the weather,
and then, with a remark that it was shameful to keep gentlefolks
waiting so, looked casually in at the doorway.

"Why the key is here all the time!" he exclaimed.  "If you are in any
hurry, sir, permit me to take brother Ibbetson's place, and show you
round.  Oh," he added falsely, seeing the visitor hesitate, "it won't
hurt _him_ at all!  I don't like to mention it, but any small
gratuities bestowed on the Brethren are carried to a common fund."

Ibbetson, harking back from a vain search to find his bird had flown,
encountered Porter Manby returning with Brother Warboise from the
brew-house, and tremulously opened up his distress.

"Eh?" snapped Warboise, after exchanging glances with the Porter.
"Clerihew said Manby was in the kitchen, did he?  But he'd left us at
the brewhouse not a minute before."

"And the key! gone from the hook!" chimed in Porter Manby, "where
I'll swear I left it.  This is one of Clerihew's monkeyings, you
bet."

"I'll monkey him," growled Brother Warboise.

The three kept sentry, knowing that Clerihew must sooner or later
return with his convoy, there being no other exit.  When at length he
hove in sight with his convoy his face wore an uneasy, impudent
smile.  He was the richer by half a crown.  They stood aside and let
him brazen it past them; but Manby and Ibbetson were still waiting
for him as he came back alone.  Ibbetson was content with a look of
reproach.  Manby told him fair and straight that he was a swindling
cur.  But meanwhile Warboise had stumped off and told Ibbetson's
wife.  This done, he hurried off, and catching Clerihew by the steps
of the Hundred Men's Hall, threatened the rogue with his staff.
Manby caught them in altercation, the one aiming impotent blows, the
other evading them still with his shameless grin, and separated them.
Brother Ibbetson looked on, feebly wringing his hands.

But Mrs. Ibbetson was worth three of her husband, and a notorious
scold.  In the laundry, later on, she announced within earshot of
Mrs. Clerihew that, as was well beknown, Clerihew had lost his last
three places for bottle-stealing; and Mrs. Royle, acknowledged virago
of St. Hospital, took up the accusation and blared it obscenely.
For a good five minutes the pair mauled Mrs. Clerihew, who, with an
air of high gentility, went on ironing shirts.  She had been a lady's
maid when Clerihew married her, and could command, as a rule,
a high-bred, withering sneer.  Unhappily, the united attack of Mrs.
Ibbetson and Mrs. Royle goaded her so far beyond the bounds of
breeding that of a sudden she upped and called the latter a bitch;
whereupon, feeling herself committed, this ordinarily demure woman
straightened her spine and followed up the word with a torrent of
filthy invective that took the whole laundry aback.

Her success was but momentary.  Mrs. Royle had a character to
maintain.  Fetching a gasp, she let fly the dirtiest word one woman
can launch at another, and on the instant made a grab at Mrs.
Clerihew's brow. . . . It was a matter of notoriety in St. Hospital
that Mrs. Clerihew wore a false "front."  The thing came away in Mrs.
Royle's clutch, and amid shrieks of laughter Mrs. Royle tossed it to
Mrs. Ibbetson, who promptly clapped down a hot flat-iron upon it.
The spectators rocked with helpless mirth as the poor woman strove to
cover her bald brows, while the thing hissed and shrivelled to
nothing, emitting an acrid odour beneath the relentless flat-iron.

"Ladies! ladies!" commanded Brother Copas.  "A visitor, if you
please!"

The word--as always in St. Hospital--instantly commanded a hush.
The women fled back to their tables, and started ironing, goffering,
crimping for dear life, with irons hot and cold.  Brother Copas, with
a chuckle, leant back and beckoned Corona in from the yard.

At sight of her on the threshold Mrs. Royle broke into a coarse
laugh.  It found no echo, and died away half-heartedly.  For one
thing, there might yet be a real visitor behind the child; for
another, these women stood in some little awe of Brother Copas, who
paid well for his laundry-work, never mixed himself up with gossip,
and moreover had a formidable trick of lifting his hat whenever he
passed one of these viragoes, and after a glance at her face, fixing
an amused stare at her feet.

"Pardon me, ladies," said he; "but my small laundry-work has hitherto
gone, as you know, to old Mrs. Vigurs in St. Faith's Road.  Last week
she sent me word that she could no longer undertake it, the fact
being that she has just earned her Old Age Pension and is retiring
upon it.  I come to ask if one of you will condescend to take her
place and oblige me."

He paused, tasting the fun of it.  As he well knew, they all feared
and hated him for his trick of irony; but at least half a dozen of
them desired his custom, for in St. Hospital (where nothing escaped
notice) Brother Copas's fastidious extravagance in body-linen and his
punctuality in discharging small debts were matters of common
knowledge.  Moreover, in their present mood each of these women saw a
chance of spiting another by depriving her of the job.

Brother Copas eyed them with an amiable smile.

"Come," he said, "don't all speak at once! . . . I'll not ask you to
bid for my little contract just now when I see you are all so busy.
But seriously, I invite tenders, and will ask any one of you who
cares for my custom to send me (say by to-morrow evening) a list of
her prices in a sealed envelope, each envelope to bear the words
'Washing List' in an upper corner, that I may put all the tenders
aside and open them together.  Eh? What do you say, ladies?"

"I shall be happy for one," said Mrs. Clerihew, laying stress on the
aspirate.  She was always careful of this, having lived with
gentlefolks.  She burned to know if Brother Copas had heard her call
Mrs. Royle a bitch.  Mrs. Royle (to do her justice) when enraged
recked neither what she said nor who overheard.  But 

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