Read Ebook: The New Abelard: A Romance Volume 3 (of 3) by Buchanan Robert Williams

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Ebook has 770 lines and 31881 words, and 16 pages

Never had she felt so utterly solitary. The beautiful world, the empty sky, swam before her in all the loveliness of desolation, and turning her face towards Aletsch, she wept bitterly.

As she stood thus, she was suddenly conscious of another figure standing near to her, as if in rapt contemplation of the solemn scene. It was that of a middle-aged man, rather above the middle stature, who carried a small knapsack on his shoulders and leant upon an Alpine staff. She saw only his side face, and his eyes were turned away; yet, curiously enough, his form had an air of listening watchfulness, and the moment she was conscious of his presence he turned and smiled, and raised his hat. She noticed then that his sunburnt face was clean shaven, like that of a priest, and that his eyes were black and piercing, though remarkably good-humoured.

'Pardon, Madame,' he said in French, 'but I think we have met before.'

She had turned away her head to hide her tears from the stranger's gaze. Without waiting for her answer, he proceeded.

'In the hotel at Brieg. I was staying there when Madame arrived, and I left at daybreak this morning to cross the Pass on foot.'

What mark is it that Rome puts upon her servants, that we seem to know them under almost any habit or disguise? One glance convinced Alma that the stranger either belonged to some of the holy orders, or was a lay priest of the Romish Church.

'I do not remember to have seen you before, Monsieur,' she replied, also in French, with a certain hauteur.

The stranger smiled again, and bowed apologetically.

'Perhaps I was wrong to address Madame without a more formal introduction. I know that in England it is not the custom. But here on the mountain, far away from the conventions of the world, it would be strange, would it not, to meet in silence? We are like two souls that encounter on pilgrimage, both looking wearily towards the Celestial Gate.'

'Are you a priest, Monsieur?' asked Alma abruptly.

The stranger bowed again.

'A poor member of the Church, the Abb? Brest. I am journeying on foot through the Simplon to the Lago Maggiore, and thence, with God's blessing, to Milan. But I shall rest yonder, at the New Hospice, to-night.'

And he pointed across the mountain towards the refuge of the monks of St. Bernard, close to the region of perpetual snow. The tall figure of an Augustine monk, shading his eyes and looking up the road was visible; and from the refectory within came the faint tolling of a bell mingled from time to time with the deep barking of a dog.

'The monks receive travellers still?' asked Alma. 'I suppose the Hospice is rapidly becoming, like its compeers, nothing more or less than a big hotel?'

'Please do not call me Madame. I am unmarried.'

She spoke almost without reflection, and it was not until she had uttered the words that their significance dawned upon her. Her face became crimson with sudden shame.

It was characteristic of the stranger that he noticed the change in a moment, but that, immediately on doing so, he turned away his eyes and seemed deeply interested in the distant prospect, while he replied:--

'I have again to ask your pardon for my stupidity. Mademoiselle, of course, is English?'

'Yes.'

'And is therefore, perhaps, a little prejudiced against those who, like the good monks of the Hospice, shut themselves from all human companionship, save that of the wayfarers whom they live to save and shelter? Yet, believe me, it is a life of sacred service! Even here, among the lonely snows, reaches the arm of the Holy Mother, to plant this cross by the wayside, as a symbol of her heavenly inspiration, and to build that holy resting-place as a haven for those who are weary and would rest.'

He spoke with the same soft insinuating smile as before, but his eye kindled, and his pale face flushed with enthusiasm. Alma, who had turned towards the carriage which stood awaiting her, looked at him with new interest. Something in his words chimed in with a secret longing of her heart.

'I have been taught to believe, Monsieur, that your faith is practically dead. Everywhere we see, instead of its living temples, only the ruins of its old power. If its spirit exists still, it is only in places such as this, in company with loneliness and death.'

'Ah, but Mademoiselle is mistaken!' returned the other, following by her side as she walked slowly towards the carriage. 'Had you seen what I have seen, if you knew what I know, of the great Catholic reaction, you would think differently. Other creeds, gloomier and more ambitious, have displaced ours for a time in your England; but let me ask you--you, Mademoiselle, who have a truly religious spirit--you who have yourself suffered--what have those other creeds done for humanity? Believe me, little or nothing. In times of despair and doubt, the world will again turn to its first Comforter, the ever-patient and ever-loving Church of Christ.'

They had by this time reached the carriage door. The stranger bowed again and assisted Alma to her seat. Then he raised his hat with profound respect in sign of farewell. The coachman was about to drive on when Alma signed for him to delay.

'I am on my way to Domo d'Ossola,' she said. 'A seat in my carriage is at your service if you would prefer going on to remaining at the Hospice for the night.'

'Mademoiselle, it is too much! I could not think of obtruding myself upon you! I, a stranger!'

Yet he seemed to look longingly at the comfortable seat in the vehicle, and to require little more pressing to accept the offer.

'Pray do not hesitate,' said Alma, smiling, 'unless you prefer the company of the monks of the mountain.'

'After that, I can hesitate no longer,' returned the Abb?, looking radiant with delight; and he forthwith entered the vehicle and placed himself by Alma's side.

Thus it came to pass that my heroine descended the Pass of the Simplon in company with her new acquaintance, an avowed member of a Church for which she had felt very little sympathy until that hour. To do him justice, I must record the fact that she found him a most interesting companion. His knowledge of the world was extensive, his learning little short of profound, his manners were charming. He knew every inch of the way, and pointed out the objects of interest, digressing lightly into the topics they awakened. At every turn the prospect brightened. Leaving the wild and barren slopes behind them, the travellers passed through emerald pasturages, and through reaches of foliage broken by sounding torrents, and at last emerging from the great valley, and crossing the bridge of Crevola, they found themselves surrounded on every side by vineyards, orchards, and green meadows. When the carriage drew up before the door of the hotel at Domo d'Ossola, Alma felt that the time had passed as if under enchantment. Although she had spoken very little, she had quite unconsciously informed her new friend of three facts--that she was a wealthy young Englishwoman travelling through Europe at her own free will; that she had undergone an unhappy experience, involving, doubtless, some person of the opposite sex; and that, in despair of comfort from creeds colder and less forgiving, she was just in a fit state of mind to seek refuge in the bosom of the Church of Rome.

The acquaintance, begun so curiously in the Simplon Pass, was destined to continue. At Domo d'Ossola, Alma parted from the Abb? Brest, whose destination was some obscure village on the banks of Lago Maggiore; but a few weeks later, when staying at Milan, she encountered him again. She had ascended the tower of the Duomo, and was gazing down on the streets and marts of the beautiful city, when she heard a voice behind her murmuring her name, and turning somewhat nervously, she encountered the bright black eyes of the wandering Abb?.

There was something so unexpected, so mysterious in the man's reappearance, that Alma was startled in spite of herself, but she greeted him courteously, and they descended the tower steps together. The Abb? kept a solemn silence as they walked through the sacred building, with its mighty walls of white marble, its gorgeous decorations, its antique tombs, its works in bronze and in mosaic; but when they passed from the porch into the open sunlight, he became as garrulous as ever.

They walked along together in the direction of the Grand Hotel, where Alma was staying.

'Have you driven out to the cathedral at Monza?' inquired the Abb? in the course of their conversation.

'No; is it worth seeing?'

'Certainly. Besides, it contains the sacred crown of Lombardy, the iron band of which is made out of nails from the true cross.'

'Indeed!' exclaimed Alma with a smile that was incredulous, even contemptuous. She glanced at her companion, and saw that he was smiling too.

It was not until she had been some weeks away from England that Alma Craik quite realised her position in the world. In the first wild excitement of her flight her only feeling was one of bewildered agitation, mingled with a mad impulse to return upon her own footsteps, and, reckless of the world's opinion, take her place by Bradley's side. A word of encouragement from him at that period would have decided her fate. But after the first pang of grief was over, after she was capable of regretful retrospection, her spirit became numbed with utter despair. She found herself solitary, friendless, hopeless, afflicted with an incurable moral disease to which she was unable to give a name, but which made her long, like the old anchorites and penitents, to seek some desert place and yield her life to God.

In this mood of mind she turned for solace to religion, and found how useless for all practical purposes was her creed of beautiful ideas.

Her faith in Christian facts had been shaken if not destroyed; the Christian myth had the vagueness and strangeness of a dream; yet, true to her old instincts, she haunted the temples of the Church, and felt like one wandering through a great graveyard of the dead.

Travelling quite alone, for her maid was in no sense of the words a confidante or a companion, she could not fail to awaken curious interest in many with whom she was thrown into passing contact. Her extraordinary personal beauty was heightened rather than obscured by her singularity of dress; for though she wore no wedding-ring, she dressed in black like a widow, and had the manners as well as the attire of a person profoundly mourning. At the hotels she invariably engaged private apartments, seldom or never descending to the public rooms, or joining in the tables-d'hote. The general impression concerning her was that she was an eccentric young Englishwoman of great wealth, recently bereaved of some person very near and dear to her, possibly her husband.

Thus she lived in seclusion, resisting all friendly advances, whether on the part of foreigners or of her own countrymen; and her acquaintance with the Abb? Brest would never have passed beyond a few casual courtesies had it not begun under circumstances so peculiar and in a place so solitary, or had the man himself been anything but a member of the mysterious Mother Church. But the woman's spirit was pining for some kind of guidance, and the magnetic name of Rome had already awakened in it a melancholy fascination. The strange priest attracted her, firstly, by his eloquent personality, secondly, by the authority he seemed to derive from a power still pretending to achieve miracles: and though in her heart she despised the pretensions and loathed the dogmas of his Church, she felt in his presence the sympathy of a prescient mind. For the rest, any companionship, if intellectual, was better than utter social isolation.

So the meeting on the tower of the Duomo led to other meetings. The Abb? became her constant companion, and her guide through all the many temples of the queenly city.

The earth has hubbies as the water hath,

While the woman he had so cruelly deceived and wronged was wandering from city to city, and trying in vain to find rest and consolation, Ambrose Bradley remained at the post where she had left him, the most melancholy soul beneath the sun. All his happiness in his work being gone, his ministration lost the fervour and originality that had at first been its dominant attraction.

Sir George had not exaggerated when he said that the clergyman's flock was rapidly falling away from him. New lights were arising; new religious whims and oddities were attracting the restless spirits of the metropolis. A thought-reading charlatan from the New World, a learned physiologist proving the oneness of the sympathetic system with polarised light, a maniacal non-jurist asserting the prerogative of affirmation at the bar of the House of Commons, became each a nine-days' wonder. The utterances of the new gospel were forgotten, or disregarded as flatulent and unprofitable; and Ambrose Bradley found his occupation gone.

For all this he cared little or nothing. He was too lost in contemplation of his own moral misery. All his thought and prayer being to escape from this, he tried various distractions--the theatre, for example, with its provincial theory of edification grafted on the dry stem of what had once been a tree of literature. He was utterly objectless and miserable, when, one morning, he received the following letter:--

'Monmouth Crescent, Bayswater.

--With kind regards, in which my sister joins, I am, most faithfully yours,

'Salem Mapleleafe,

'Solar Biologist'.'

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