CHAPTER XXX

That was what he was longing for—for the claimant to come in person and lay a hand upon her. He felt that he would have given half his estate for the chance of answering the fellow as he should be answered—not by any reference to the opinions of those half-pagan patriarchs known as The Fathers; not by any reference to the views promulgated in the Middle Ages by that succession of thieving voluptuaries, murderers and excommunicators, the heads of the Church of Rome; or by modern sentimentalists struggling to reach the focus of the public eye—no, but by the aid of a dog-whip.

That was what he was longing for in these days—the chance to use his dog-whip upon the body of Marcus Blaydon. But Marcus Blaydon did not seem particularly anxious to give him the chance, and this fact caused his indignation against the man to increase. He felt as indignant as the henwife when her favourite chicken had shown some reluctance to come out of its coop to be killed.

It was the Reverend Osney Possnett, the vicar of Athalsdean, who paid a visit to the Manor House. Mr. Possnett had not been able to officiate at the marriage ceremony between Priscilla and Marcus Blaydon; he had been in Italy at the time; it was his curate for the time being, the Reverend Sylvanus Purview, who had married them. Doubtless if Mr. Purview had remained in the parish he would have paid Priscilla a visit when still under her father’s roof, to offer her official consolation upon the untoward incident which, happening at the church porch immediately after the ceremony, had deprived her (as it turned out) of the society of her husband; but the Reverend Sylvanus Purview had found that the air of the Downs was too bracing for him, and he had quitted the parish a few days after the vicar’s return, leaving the vicar to pay for his month’s board and lodging, which he himself had, by some inadvertence that was never fully explained, omitted doing, although it was afterwards discovered that he had borrowed from Churchwarden Wadhurst the money necessary for this purpose.

Mr. Possnett had, however, made up for his curate’s official deficiencies, as well as his monetary, and had spoken very seriously to Priscilla, on his return from Siena, on the subject of what he termed her trial—though it was really to Marcus Blaydon’s trial he was alluding.

Priscilla had listened.

And now the Reverend Osney Possnett would not accept the formal statement of the footman, that Mr. and Mrs. Wingfield were not at home, but had written a few lines on the back of his card, begging Priscilla to allow him to speak a few words to her.

“I wouldn’t bother with him, if I were you,” said Jack when she showed him the card. “We have no use for your Reverend Osney Possnett. But please yourself.”

“I don’t want to be rude,” said Priscilla.

“No, but he does,” said Jack.

“I don’t mind his rudeness,” she cried. “Perhaps—who can tell?—he may have something important to communicate to me—something material——”

“They scorn anything bordering on the material,” remarked Jack, “except when they get hold of a fraudulent prospectus with a promise of eighty per cent, dividends. But see him if you have any feeling in the matter.”

“I think I should see him, Jack.”

“Then see him. I’m sure he won’t mind if I clear off.”

So Jack went out of the room by the one door and the Reverend Osney Possnett was admitted by the other. The room was the large drawing-room with the cabinets of Wedgwood; and the sofa on which Priscilla sat was of the design of that in which Madame de Pompadour was painted by Boucher. It is, however, scarcely conceivable that the Reverend Osney Possnett became aware of any sinister suggestiveness in this coincidence.

He shook hands with her, not warmly, not even socially, but strictly officially.

“Priscilla,” he said—he had known her from her childhood—“Priscilla, I have seen your father. He has told me all. I felt it to be my duty to come to you—to take you away from here.”

She looked up and laughed—just in the way that Mrs. Patrick Campbell laughs in “Magda” when the man makes the suggestion about the child. Priscilla’s rendering of that laugh made her visitor feel angry. He was not accustomed to be laughed at—certainly not to his face. He took a step toward her in a way that suggested scarcely curbed indignation.

“Priscilla,” he cried, “have you realized what you are doing? Have you realized what you are—what you must be called so long as you remain in this house?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I am Mr. Wingfield’s wife, and I am called Mrs. Wingfield by all in this house, and I must be called so by everyone who visits at this house!”

“You are not his wife—you know that you are not his wife,” said Mr. Possnett, vehemently.

“I know that I am his wife, Mr. Possnett,” she replied with irritating gentleness. “I married him in accordance with the law of the land.”

“But you were already married—that you have found out; so your marriage was no marriage.”

“I agree with you—my marriage with Marcus Blaydon was no marriage.”

“It was a marriage, celebrated in the house of God, by a priest of God, that made it a marriage—sacred; and yet you——”

“Sacred? Sacred? Mr. Possnett, do not be so foolish, I beg of you. Don’t be so—so profane. Surely the sacredness of marriage does not begin and end with the form of words spoken in the church. Surely it is on account of its spiritual impulses that a marriage, the foundation of which is love, is sacred. A marriage is made sacred by the existence of a mutual love, and by that only. Is not that the truth?”

“I have not come here to-day to discuss with you any quibble, Priscilla. You know that you can legally have but one husband and——”

“Ah! I had no idea that you would make such a sudden drop from the question of the sacredness of marriage to the question of mere legality. I understood that the Church’s first and only line of defence was the spirituality of marriage—the sacred symbolism—the mystery. Now you drop at once to the mundane level of the law—you talk of the legal marriage. I thank God, Mr. Possnett, that I adopt a higher tone. I elect to stand on a loftier level than yours. I do not talk of legality, but of spirituality.”

“You cannot evade your responsibility by harping on words or phrases, Priscilla. In any question of marriage one cannot express too rigid an adherence to what is legal and what is illegal.”

“In that case, then, surely we shall be able to obtain a divorce in a court of law——”

“There is no such thing as divorce.”

Mr. Possnett had unwittingly walked into the trap laid for his feet by a young woman who had for years been acquainted with his individual views respecting the dissolution by a court of law of a marriage celebrated in a church of God.

“There is no such thing as divorce,” he said. “I refuse to recognize the validity of a so-called decree of divorce. I would think it my duty to refuse to perform the service of marriage between two persons either of whom had been divorced. Having once said the words, ‘Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder!’”

“But surely divorce is perfectly legal, Mr. Possnett?” said Priscilla.

“I care nothing for that.”

“But you said just now that in all questions of marriage one must be bound down by what is legal and what is illegal; and now you tell me that you refuse to be bound down to a legal decree of divorce. Oh, Mr. Possnett, you cannot blow both hot and cold in the same breath.”

“In all matters but this—but our Church permits a priest to hold his own opinion, if it be formed on conscientious grounds. It is not like the Church of Rome; it recognizes the imperative nature of the call of religious scruples on the part of an individual priest.”

“And the Church does well. Let the priest follow the example of his Church, and recognize the spiritual exigencies of a poor woman who loved a man and married him in all honesty of purpose and in all good faith.”

“Talk not to me of such things; the fact remains—the terrible truth—that man is not your husband. Priscilla, this is, I know, a great trial; but you know whence it comes. I have taught you ill all these years if you fail to acknowledge the Hand—the Hand—you know that it comes from God.”

“That is the reflection which prevents me from being overwhelmed, Mr. Possnett. I try to feel that it all comes from God—that it is meant to try our faith, and I cannot doubt that its effect will be to draw us closer together, my dear husband and myself—nay, I have felt that it has done so already. Our faith in each other has been strengthened—it has indeed.”

“That is not the object of the trial. Trial is sent to purify the soul, as gold is tried by fire; the furnace of affliction is meant to cleanse, not to strengthen one’s persistence in a course of sin.”

“I have never doubted it, Mr. Possnett, nor can I doubt that this burden, though it is hard to bear, will but strengthen our characters—strengthen all those qualities which go to build up into one life the life of a man and a woman who love each other, and whose faith in each other has been proved under the stress of adversity.”

The Reverend Osney Possnett felt that he was now being subjected to a greater trial of patience than he could bear. Here was this young woman, the daughter of his own churchwarden, facing him and turning and twisting his words to suit her own pernicious views! He could almost fancy that she was mocking him. He could scarcely believe that such a trial should be included among those of celestial origin.

“Priscilla, I, your priest, tell you that you are living in sin with this man who is not your husband, and I command you to forsake this life and to forsake that man who, I doubt not, has tempted you by the allurements of a higher position in life than that for which you were intended by God, to be false to your Church, false to the teaching of its priest, false to your own better nature. Leave him, Priscilla; leave him before it is too late!”

Again she laughed; but this time it was with a different expression.

“I cannot say ‘Retro me? because I am not resisting any temptation,” she said. “You have shown that you do not understand in the least how I feel in regard to my position—you could not possibly understand me if I were to refer to the church in which you preach as a house of sin.”

“Priscilla, for God’s sake, pause—pause——”

“I have not called it a house of sin; God forbid that I should be so foolish! but it was made the means of my committing the greatest sin of my life—the abandonment of myself—myself—at the bidding of my parents. All that has happened since, you have assured me as a delegate, is to be part of a great trial sent for the purification of my heart, my soul, whatever you please. Well, I told you that I accepted that view and that I hoped I should come away from it purified and strengthened. But I cannot get away altogether from the thought that perhaps it may be a judgment on myself for being untrue to myself when I entered your church at the bidding of my father and my mother to say words that I knew to be false—that they knew to be false—to make promises that I knew it would be a crime to keep.”

“I care nothing about that, Priscilla. All that concerns me is that you were joined to a man according to the rites of the Holy Church, and that, he being still alive you are now wife to him and to no other.”

“And you would have me now go to him and live with him as his wife according to God’s holy ordinance, and to keep those promises which I made in your church?”

“I solemnly affirm that such is your duty.”

“You say that, knowing the man, and knowing that he is a criminal—that he married me to save himself from the consequences of his crime—you can tell me that I should worship him with my body, that I should love, honour, and obey him till death us do part? Knowing that I have never had any love for him, you tell me that my place is by his side?”

“Your place is by his side. The words of the Prayer-book are there; no Christian priest has any option in the matter. The mystic words have been said. ‘The twain shall be one flesh.’”

“Ah, there is the difference between us—the flesh. You will insist on looking at the fleshly side of marriage, whereas I look on the spiritual. Don’t you think that there may be something to be said in favour of the spiritual aspect of marriage—the marriage voice which says, not, ‘The twain shall be one flesh,’ but ‘The twain shall be one spirit’? What, Mr. Possnett, will you say that marriage is solely a condition of the flesh?”

“I refuse to answer any question put to me in this spirit by a woman who is living in sin with a man who is not her husband.”

“You will admit that the trial to which I have been subjected has influenced me for good—making me patient and forbearing in the face of a repeated insult such as I would not have tolerated from any human being a week ago. I have listened to you, and I have even brought myself to pay you the compliment of discussing with you a matter which concerns only my husband and myself, but you have not even thought it worth your while to be polite to me—to treat me as an erring sister. You come with open insults—with an assumption of authority—to pronounce one thing sin and another thing duty. But your authority is a mockery—as great a mockery as the enquiry in the marriage service, ‘Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?’ when you know that the pew-cleaner will be accepted by the priest as the one who possesses that authority. Your authority is a mockery, and your counsel is worth no more than that of any other man of some education, of abilities which have the lowest market value of those required for any profession, and experiences of the most limited character.”

“Woman—Priscilla, you forget yourself!”

The Reverend Osney Possnett, who had never had a chance in his life of reaching a point of declamation beyond what was necessary for the adequate reproof of a ploughman for neglecting to attend Divine service, and who had never been addressed except with respect bordering upon awe since the days of his curacy, found himself in a mental condition for which the word flabbergasted was invented by a philologist in the lumber trade. When he had told Priscilla that she was forgetting herself he forgot himself. He forgot his part. He had come to the Manor House, on the invitation of his churchwarden, Farmer Wadhurst, to administer a severe rebuke to Farmer Wadhurst’s self-willed daughter, whose early religious instruction he had superintended, and who, he saw no reason to doubt, would be at once amenable to his ministration; but he found himself forced not only to enter into something of an argument with her—a course of action which was very distasteful to him—but also to be reproved by her for a sensualist, looking at the fleshly side of marriage instead of the spiritual—to be told by her that his opinion was of no greater value than that of an ordinary man who had never been granted the distinction of holy orders, which the whole world recognizes as a proof of the possession of the highest culture, pagan as well as Christian, the most virile human intellect, and an intuitive knowledge of mankind, such as ordinary people can only gain by experience!

He had come to be letter-perfect in the part which he had meant to play in her presence, and with a good working knowledge of the “business” of the part; but she had failed to act up to him. She had disregarded the cues which he waited for from her, and the result was naturally the confusion that now confronted him—that now overwhelmed him. He had in his mind actually, if unconsciously, the feeling that it was her failure in regard to her cues which had put him out, when he cried:

“Priscilla, you forget yourself.”

“No, you do not quite mean that,” she said, with a disconcerting readiness; “you do not quite mean that; you mean that I forget that for years I sat Sunday after Sunday under your pulpit listening to your preaching—that for years and years you gave your opinion, which was followed without question, to my father and mother on the subject of my bringing up; that until now I was submissive to you, with all the members of the household. That is what you had on your mind just now, and I do not wonder at it. I have amazed you. I don’t doubt it; I have amazed myself. The troubles which I have had during the past eighteen months—you call them trials, and that is the right word—have been the means of showing me myself—showing me what I am as an individual: that I am not merely as a single grain of sand running down with a million other grains in the hour-glass only to mark time till the whole are swallowed up. I thank God for those trials which have made me what I am to-day. I can even thank God for the present trial, terrible though it seems, because I have faith in God’s way of working to bring out all that is best in man and woman; and I know that we shall come out of it with our love for each other strengthened and our belief in God strengthened. That is what you forgot when you came here to-day, Mr. Possnett; you forgot the power that there is in suffering to develop the character, the nature, the individuality, the human feeling and the Divine love of every one who experiences it. That was your mistake: you did not make allowance for God’s purpose in suffering. You thought that I should be the same to-day that I was eighteen months ago. You have much to learn, both of God and man, Mr. Possnett. So have I. I am learning daily.”

The Reverend Osney Possnett lifted up his hands—the attitude was that of Moses blessing the congregation; but by a sudden increase of emphasis and a tightening of the hands into fists it became the attitude of Balak the son of Zippor reproving Balaam the Prophet for having betrayed the confidence reposed in him as an agent of commination. He was not a man of any intelligence worth speaking of, and with so limited an experience of the world that the least departure from the usual found him without resources for meeting it. Such men are unwise if they make the attempt to play the usual against the unusual. They are wisest in avoiding it.

The Reverend Osney Possnett showed that he was not without wisdom by his retreat. Sorrow and not indignation was the lubricant of his farewell. His prayer was that she might be brought to see in what direction the truth lay before it should be too late.

And that was just the prayer to which Priscilla could say “Amen!” with all her heart.