Fabiola : or, The church of the catacombs - Digital Repository Services

eottagp resiliences for giving a laboring man any corner to live
in which is not either a pigstye or a wash-house, he must per-
force take refuge in the public-house."
" You have got him on his specialty now," said Werner.
"What I propose to do by my lectures to my artists, he would
effect among his ploughmen by model cottages and model
wives."
" But how procure the latter commodity ?" I inquired with
no little curiosity.
"Peace, man," said Leven. "I do not admit all to my
secrets ; I have correspondents among half the Rev. Mothers
in England, and you have not yet seen the Glenleven schools.
How long it will last it is hard to say ; but as yet neither
School Board nor inspectors have shown their faces at Glen-
leven, and we train up our boys and girls to become very tolerable
Christians."
"Well," I said, "I really wonder at yon. After all your fine
talking about the supernatural, you profess to regenerate
society, or at any rate, the clodhopping portion of it, by no
higher machinery than well-ventilated cottages and smart
womankind. "
" I beg your pardon," he replied, " but for a lawyer you are
By this time we had left the workshops, and found our way
into the garden, where the abbot joined us. For the first time
I was able to take in a general view of the pile of monastic
buildings, as yet unfinished, but in course of completion, which
extended before me."
"Remember," said Leven, "that they had just raised in
the home they left a pile as extensive, and created a work even
more fruitful. "
"Yes," said the abbot, "such would seem to be the rule of
monastic life. What one age creates, another overthrows, and
so the seed is broadcast ; and we emerge from our ruins to
to the chant as I heard it yesterday."
" You must know," said Leven, " that you have made a convert
of Mr. Aubrey; he came, an unbeliever in plain chant, and
departs under tke spell.
The abbot
"
smiled. I believe it possible that we shall make
as many converts by singing as by preaching," he said. "Your
friend Mr. Knowles for one."
" What ? does he come here to gather ideas ?"
" I don't know about that," said Werner. " The first time
he came it was to disseminate some of his own. He was greatly
distressed at the warming apparatus in the choir, and complained
of our having no carvings of fox and geese under the Miserere
seats, as in old cathedrals. The abbot explained that the said
carvings were not always of the most edifying description, but
he said the mediaeval idea suffered by their omission."
We all laughed heartily.
"Poor Knowles!" said Leven "he must ;
suffer before he
can be real. At present he plays with the truth as children do
with pretty pebbles, which they like because they shine and
please the eye. The day will come when he will need a rock to
stand on."
"Yes," said the abbot, " he must suffer ; or," he added, in a
low tone, which struck to my heart, "some one else must suffer
for him ; it is the only way :" and his glance rested, as he
spoke, on Werner. My eye followed his, but the countenance
of the young monk evinced no particular response to his words:
whilst on Leven's cheek I detected a faint flush ;
lild it, I asked myself what it might indicate. By
THE AUSTRALIAN DUKE OR THE NEW UTOPIA.
and as I be-
one of those
interior instincts which go beyond the knowledge we acquire by
the senses, I seemed to understand that these three men knew
more of one another than appeared on the surface, and I wondered
that I had never wondered before, who Werner was, and
what had been the history of that strong tie which had linked
him with my friend, before he entered the cloister. I resolved to
and as Leven and I took leave of our
penetrate the mystery ;
hosts, and bent our steps homeward, my thoughts were bnny
how best to approach the subject. My readers will probably
ere this have discovered that I am a poor diplomatist. I have
acted on mathematical principle that the shortest line between
two given points is a right line nor has ; my ingenuity ever hit
on any method of attack superior to a straightforward question.
So, as we sat together in the summer twilight, the hour when
it becomes so easy to ask and answer questions from which we
would shrink under the sun of noon-day, I opened the trenches
with the sudden "
question : Who is Werner, Grant, and how
did you first know liirn ?"
Grant, for so I like to call him, appeared to brace himself to
sustain the cross-examination with severe indifference.
"Werner is a German; his mother is Baroness Werner, a
Bavarian I made his ; acquaintance when I went out there for
a month or two, the year after you left England. We got to be
Badly inaccurate in stating a case. Here are a set of men and
women who know their religion and their duties. I simply
(acting as what you once called '
the secular arm') come in to
supply humanizing, and cut off brutalizing, influences. Then
we expose them to the action of all that can be done in the way
of instruction, encouragement, personal kindness, and assistance
in time of difficulty, and leave it to the grace of God to do the
great
rest."
friends he is an excellent ;
fellow."
"I wonder what the abbot meant by what he said."
" About the plain chant, you mean ?"
"
No, I don't mean. I mean about Knowles and the suffering."
"
Well, I suppose a fellow must suffer before he takes to
things in earnest."
" Yes, but about others suffering for him. *
"Well?"
" Well, what did he mean?"
"How can I say? I suppose he considered Anglicanism a kind
of demon that could be cast out only by prayer and fasting. "
A pause.
" Has Werner ever had such a demon ?" I asked. It was a
bow drawn at a venture, but it hit the mark. It was impossible
for Grant to conceal the deep emotion which my words called
forth, and I felt there was nothing left for it but to apologize
for unintentionally touching on a tender chord, which I did
At last he said :
commence all over again. It is a perpetual exercise of the virtue
of Hope."
"Well," I said, "we owe something to Bismarck; but for
his Falck Laws we should never have listened on English soil
as awkwardly as possible.
" 1 know, Jack, you have often been puzzled at me, and perhaps,
in your heart have thought many thoughts."
" What thoughts ?"
"
Well, that I exaggerate, that I am taking a wrong bent
about it all, following a whimsical fancy ; and perhaps it has
come to you to conceive the possibility of there being
a something
to explain it all. Well, there is, or was in short, Werner's
history is a chapter in my own. "
" My dear Grant, I have no right to ask you, but can you
tell it me?"
He smiled ; and, after a minute or two, settling himself so
that as he spoke his eyes could rest on the hills and the even-
ing sky, and not on my countenance, he began.
CHAPTEB XTV.
WERNEB'S STOBY.
"I WENT abroad the year after you left England. You
know pretty well what I thought about things at that time. I
had thought a good deal about money and society, and one's
duty about such things, and how one could obey the Gospel,
but Jack, I had thought of these
obey it to the letter I mean ;
things as a poor man, and not as a rich man. When the wealth
came, it was enormous. I felt the weight and the responsibility,
and I tried to fix my principles, and be true to them and
;
the shape they took was something in this way : almsdeeds, en-
couragement of all undertakings to improve the laboring
classes, founding of religious works, creation of a great circlo
of usefulness and edification, and myself in the ccntr< nf it.
Pictures even ef that family life we once talked of, sometimes