Gentian Hill

  And so to her husband’s delight she accepted the pretty clothes that their friends gave her, and wore them with an air. She went to the opera and the plays with Charles, took care of her beauty, and relearned the forgotten art of brilliant conversation. She had been a fine musician and an exquisite needlewoman, and she polished up these accomplishments and taught music and embroidery. Charles, a line linguist, taught languages. They managed to make a living, and had a small home--two rooms in Orchard Street. A child was born to them there.

  She came prematurely and nearly cost her mother her life, but when once the fear and pain were past she made her parents’ happiness a thing as nearly perfect as happiness can be in this world. She was a lovely little thing, but almost from the beginning strangely mature. She seldom cried, never grabbed or screamed if defrauded of what she wanted, and though she was always happy, it was quiet and attentive happiness with the small things near at hand. Her mother, gazing into the deep eyes of her small daughter, could understand the unchildish wisdom. She was the child of grief as well as love; they could not expect her to be quite as other children. Her father boasted that he saw in her signs of remarkable intelligence, as well as remarkable beauty. That was to be expected, he thought, for upon either side she had a fine inheritance. They called her Marie Thérese.

  They could not afford a nurse for their baby and so, in those days, they went out very little, spending their evenings reading together. To please his wife, Charles had become a practicing Catholic, though not a very devout one, and he read the Christian apologists. To please him she studied Greek and let him put her through a course of his beloved classics. Each was strangely captured by the books beloved of the other. St. Augustine’s glowing love of God, the startling beauty of the sentences in which he daringly confessed it, helped Charles to understand Thérese’s certainty. Therese, making acquaintance with the wisdom of the Greeks, could almost understand how to Charles this had seemed enough, and how he had halted here.

  One night, arguing over Christian and pagan conceptions of love, each had written down sentences that they liked on scraps of paper and passed them across to each other. Charles had written, "Love is the divinity who creates peace among men and calm upon the sea, the windless silence of storms, repose ·and sleep in sadness. Love sings to all things which live and are, soothing the troubled minds of gods and men." Therese smiled as he handed it to her, thinking how well the words fitted the turmoil of much of their life together, and she folded the bit of paper and slipped it inside the locket that he had given her on their wedding day. She had written, “Blessed is the man who loves Thee, O God, and his friend in Thee and his enemy for Thee. For he alone loses no one who is dear to him, for all are dear in God, who is never lost." Charles, remembering how nearly she had died when the child was born, did not smile, but he, too, folded the paper and put it away in his pocket book.

  2

  Therese was never well after the birth of the child, the two little rooms in Orchard Street were noisy and airless, and she got less well as time went on. Charles, through the same good friend who had brought them to England on his ship, was offered a post as secretary and tutor in a country house in Ireland. He accepted the offer gladly, for he thought Therese would improve there. But when the time came to leave, both Therese and little Marie were ill of some fever and could not travel. They decided that he must go without them, for he had been told that he must take up his work upon a certain date, and he must not fail his patron. The wife of their friend would look after Therese and the child meanwhile, and as soon as they were well again, and he had found lodgings for them in Ireland, he would come back and fetch them.

  Charles found his work to his liking and his employers kind. They let him have a small cottage on the estate and he joyfully made it ready for Therese and Marie. He had just got leave to go back to England and fetch them when a letter arrived from Therese. She and Marie had quite recovered, and there was no need for him to come and fetch them. The frigate Amphion, commanded by their friend’s nephew, was sailing from Plymouth to Ireland with troops on board, and several oflfcers’ wives were sailing too. She and Marie had permission to go with them and were leaving for Plymouth immediately. There was to be a farewell party on board and he had re-trimmed the green gown that he liked so much. By the time he got this letter, she and Marie would be on the sea. It was lovely September weather. They would have a good voyage, she was sure. There would be "calm upon the sea and the windless silence of storms," and soon they would be together again.

  But Charles, when he got this letter, felt no elation, only a most unreasonable fear that shadowed the days and nights until the day when there could be no more shadows because the darkness was complete.

  Years later, the Abbé could not remember very much about the man who had gone back to Plymouth and tramped the streets day after day, asking crazy questions of every man he met who had had anything at all to do with the tragedy of the Amp/zion. There had been friends with him, he believed, trying to help him, but he had not taken much notice of them until one of them found a man who described a dark haired woman in a green gown whom he had helped to lift drowned from the water, with her dead child clasped in her arms. This evidence, combined with the fact that if Therese and Marie were not among the few who had been saved, then they must be numbered among the three hundred dead, convinced him at last. They took him to see the long lines of the graves, but they could not tell him which held the bodies of his wife and child. The explosion had caused such fear and distress in the town, they told him, that there had been much confusion. So it was only for this that he had saved Thérese to die among scenes as terrible as any at Toulon or Leghorn, and to lie in a nameless grave. This was the end of their great and happy love. There was a war on, he remembered, and in a world at war, love was likely to be short-lived. He was merely one of many.

  3

  He went back to Ireland, and he imagined that he was doing his work quite well until his patron told him that it was not so, and advised a change and rest. Not far away there was a monastery beside a mere, and he went there. The monks nursed him through the physical and mental collapse that descended upon him, once the compulsion of work was removed. Tough as he was, he regained physical strength very soon, but mental and nervous health were not so easily recovered. The monks let him alone. He read for hours in the library, worked hard and furiously in the garden, tramped for miles about the quiet countryside, and he thought that he got no better. Yet, unknown to himself, the wisdom of the books he read, his contact in the garden with earth and sun and wind, the quiet mere where among the rustling reeds the birds found sanctuary, were all good medicine. He was only dimly aware of the stillness and peace, yet he drank of them.

  He still could not think of Therese and the child without coming near to madness, but more and more often he thought of the Curé and remembered that look on his face of a boy in love. The memory of that look became one with the pleasure that he was just beginning to take once more in scholarship, one with the warmth of the sun and the reflection of the birds’ wings in the mere. That was natural, he supposed, for they were a part of love. To love is wisdom, warmth, and light. In that look he had felt once that there was hope, both for himself and for the world. However dark the age, there were always men who loved enough to give their lives for others. Wisdom never quite died upon the earth. There had never yet been a day without, somewhere, birds’ wings flashing in the sun and water lapping on a quiet shore. Eternity was a fact. Intellectually he had always known it, coldly and without conviction, but now the dry bones of fact seemed slowly to clothe themselves with flesh.

  Love was not just an emotion to be experienced or an abstraction to be argued about, but the actual stuff of eternal life, and the Curé had known it, as in love with God and man he went to the physical death that was without power to extinguish it in him. And Charles found one day that he knew it too, not as a man awake at midnight knows that the sun exists, but as the same man knows it when
the sun has risen and he is steeped in its warmth and light.

  A little later he found that he could think of Therese and the child! One night he lay sleepless, thinking of them, with aching longing but no longer with madness. With the first light he got up and went down to the mere. It lay gray and still beneath the sky, the wind rustling in the reeds. The sky brightened, and the ripples at his feet gleamed with silver. The strange eerie cries of the marsh birds, waking in the reeds, came to him very faintly. A moor-hen darted out from her lair, patterning the water in her wake with arrows of quicksilver, and a string of wild duck went beating up into the sky, their green necks iridescent in the growing light.

  The sun rose and the light was so dazzling that Charles shut his eyes, that were weak and aching from sleeplessness. But he felt the warmth on his face, and heard through the rustling of the reeds the beating of great wings. It was the swans, who often at this hour flew from this mere to a more distant one that was their daytime feeding ground. He opened his eyes again and saw them sweeping up into the sky. They passed, many together, in arrow formation that echoed the arrows of quicksilver with which the moor-hen had patterned the water. Then one passed quite alone, flying low over the mere. The sun caught her pure and lovely plumage, edging it with gold, and her reflection in the water seemed to linger even after she had passed upon her way, seeming to fly straight into the heart of the sun. Charles did not know why the passing of the swan touched him so deeply. It seemed to work some sort of liberation in him. He thought of Therese again, and this time the thought of her, and the thought of God, "eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God," were inseparable in his mind. He bowed his head in his hands, and for the first and last time in his adult life, he wept.

  4

  When he came to himself again, it was to see old Father Joseph crawling along toward him beside the mere with his strange, sideways, crablike crawl. Father Joseph was eighty-six years old and never spoke unless he had to. He was exceedingly infirm, and was always much engrossed in getting his body to the appointed places at the appointed times, and in trying not to be a nuisance to his brethren when he got there. He had the cell next to the one which had been given to Charles, and though they had little intercourse with each other, Charles had been from the beginning very much aware of Father Joseph. The old man’s great domed forehead and deep eyes spoke of the fine intellect that was still his, and the marks of his holiness were stamped upon his face as a king’s seal is stamped upon wax. Sometimes during a bad night he would suddenly think of that holy old face, remember that Father Joseph was in the cell next to him, and be calmed.

  And in chapel the next morning most probably the old man would come and kneel next to him, lowering himself to his knees with extreme caution and loudly cracking joints, and not disdaining the younger man’s help when it was necessary to get up again. Sometimes he and Charles were together in the library and then he would smile at him, and sometimes even croak out a word or two, but only about the weather, so that Charles had come to feel quite safe with him, knowing that the old man would make no attempt to violate his secret anguish or to offer him the advice which was the last thing he wanted.

  He was astonished now to see Father Joseph beside the mere. Though it was close to the monastery, he had not known the aged Father had the strength to get even so short a distance. He went to meet him and found him, as he expected, short of breath. They sat down together on a boulder beside the water, the waves lapping at their feet, the peace enfolding them, and said nothing at all while Father Joseph got the better of his breathlessness. When he had succeeded, he straightened his sagging shoulders, placed his hands one over each knee, and cleared his throat. This meant that he felt he had to say something and had collected his strength to that end. Charles turned courteously, expecting the usual croaked comment upon the beauty of the day. Instead the old man said quietly, without looking at him, "You have wept, my son."

  That was all. Charles could do what he liked now, confide in him or not just as he pleased. He had loved the younger man on sight, as a father his son, and for months he had been upholding him with his prayers. Now the time had come to let him know it. Upon waking this morning and looking from the window of his cell, he had seen Charles going down to the mere, and had known that the time had come. He had performed the slow, difficult task of dressing himself with humility and patience, and tackled the path with courage and determination, and here he was. Charles could use him or not-just as he pleased. But he hoped that he might be of use, and Charles knew that. It was not possible to disappoint so old and holy a man; even such a man might the Curé have been, had he lived. There was not much that he managed to say that first morning, before they had to go back to the monastery, but the next day and the next, when they sat together in the library, or on a bench in the sun in the garden, he said more, until at last Father Joseph knew it all.

  Charles began the story with that day in his boyhood when the Curé had lighted the candle for him; and he ended it with the white swan flying over the mere, her feathers edged with flaming gold, her reflection seeming to linger on the water after she had flown away into the sun. Father Joseph saw the connection. "The flame of the love of God is lit again in your heart, my son," he said. "You doubtless know St. Augustine as well as I do. ‘Blessed is the man who loves Thee, O God, and his friend in Thee and his enemy for Thee. For he alone loses no one who is dear to him, for all are dear in God, Who is never lost.’ "

  Charles caught his breath. Those were the words that Therese had written on the scrap of paper that was even now in his pocket book, which through all these months he had not been able to bring himself to look at. Now that he had heard them uttered by another, he thought that he would be able.

  The next day, as they sat in the garden, Father Joseph asked him what he meant to do with himself, now that he was nearly recovered and must leave the monastery. He received in reply that poignant gesture of the hands with which a Frenchman can express his hopelessness with no word spoken.

  "Your wife turned from the religious life for your sake," said Father Joseph slowly. "Has it not occurred to you that you might take upon yourself the vows she did not make? Give yourself to God in her place?"

  Charles was speechless, the expression upon his face one of almost comic astonishment and dismay. How could he-the man of the world, a man who had been so great a sinner, who had won so hardly to his faith, and held it now so precariously -become a monk?

  "I have no vocation for the cloister, Father," he said at last.

  "No, I do not think that you have," said the old man. "But I think it possible that God might have a use for you as priest and scholar. You have no plans for yourself. Well, that is of no consequence, as God most certainly has. You have merely to wait and pray until they are revealed to you. There is the bell. We must go in."

  And in the end, it seemed to Charles the only thing to do.

  It seemed to him a terrible thing, almost an insult to God, that he should take this step merely because it seemed the only thing to do; but old Father Joseph seemed quite satisfied, his argument being that if there seemed nothing else to do, then this was the thing to do. The lack of ardor and devotion in himself that so distressed Charles didn’t distress Father Joseph. The fact of Charles’s distress told him that they would come into being one day, when this man was less exhausted and frozen by adversity and grief. Not long after Charles’ ordination as priest, the old man died, and it was Charles who gave him his viaticurn upon a morning of early spring, warm and fragrant, pulsing with newborn life and the ecstatic clamor of the birds.

  5

  But for the man who was now the Abbé de Colbert, there was no warmth, no melting of his ice-bound winter. He went back to London and worked there as a priest, but he who had once been so accomplished a courtier found it hard now to make contact with other human beings. These English men and women in this comfortable England had known no Terror. Those of his compatriots who had known it had not known bereavement
quite like his. His experience and his suffering seemed to have put him at a vast distance from them all, and his tortured nerves so shrank from further pain that he was afraid to try and bridge the gap. I-le shrank more and more in upon himself, and at the last, it was chiefly as scholar and writer that he earned his bread and served his Church and God.

  At times he was almost happy, feeling that his life of stern self-discipline brought him very near to Therese and the life of discipline she would have lived at Carmel, aware when he administered the sacraments that, as priest, the Curé lived again in him. And he had his faith, real and living now at last, since the passing of the white swan. But at other times he was near to despair. "Blessed is the man who loves Thee, O God." But dared he say that he loved God, when he could make so little contact with his fellow men? He loved no one at all upon this earth. At times it seemed to him that the candle the Curé had lit for him in his boyhood was out again and would never be relit, and he would echo the words of Job, "Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me; when His candle shined upon my head, and when by His light I walked through darkness."

  While he was in one of these moods of despair, he was asked if he would go to Torquay and take care of the small community of Catholics who worshipped at Torre Abbey; there were only a few of them and he would have ample time for scholarship, and in a mood of despair he went. He was doing no good in London. In the country he might do better, he thought. It might be that the peace and beauty of it would ease away the iron that was clasped about his heart.