NO sooner had Father Francis closed one door behind him than Hugh entered through another.
“I thought that old raven would never have done with his croaking, and be gone,” said the boy irreverently, and of course in English, as he balanced himself upon the arm of a (so-called) easy-chair, near his father's couch.
The sad face of the Lord of Savelburg brightened perceptibly, and he looked at his son with evident pride and pleasure, as he answered, in a tone of half-playful reproof, “You should not speak of him in that way. Towards you he is most favorably disposed. He even wishes to undertake your education.”
“Do not allow him, father. I could never learn anything from him. He deceived me. He is a liar.”
“Do not judge him too harshly. He committed the fraud, as he believed, for my good, and for yours.”
Hugh's feelings found vent in a long, low, and not untuneful whistle.
“What have you been doing?” his father asked him presently.
“Writing to Jeanie. Father―dear father―you will let me send her a letter soon, will you not? She must be so unhappy. Uncle Charlie will have sent her word that I never came to him.”
“Rest assured, dear boy, that I will communicate with her as soon as I can. I am as anxious to do so as you can possibly be. But there are difficulties in the way, greater than you can understand. She is in Nuremberg, which is garrisoned by the Swedes; I am an officer in the Imperial service.”
“Oh, father, how I wish you could see her! She is so beautiful and so good.”
“Describe her to me.”
“That I couldna. She has bonny dark eyes, and great waves of golden hair, and such a face! I can tell you, father, the folk in Nuremberg love the ground she walks on, and think me the luckiest lad alive to have her for a sister. I'm no' that sure, however,” added the boy archly, “that Junker August von Lübeling would like to change with me. But, father, there is something that troubles me very much.”
“About your sister?”
“Well, partly about her, on account of the great love there is between her and the Lady of Savelburg. But more about you. It is dreadful to think that you have got Franlein Gertrud's land, and everything she ought to have. It puzzles me. I want her to get it, and you to keep it, and how baith can be together, I'm sure I canna think! Unless,” he added gravely, and with the air of one to whose mind a valuable suggestion had just occurred― “Unless you were to marry her. That would make all right.”
“Now you are talking nonsense. Instead of troubling your head with things you cannot understand, suppose you repeat for me some of the good words you have learned. I like to hear them in the English tongue.”
This Hugh was often asked to do; and it was well that his instructors had early stored his memory with passages of Scripture. Upon the present occasion, however, he meditated a more ambitious flight. “Father,” he said, “if I could remember the questions, or if you could put me in a little bit here and there, I think I could say over the whole ‘Carritch’ for you.”
But the generous offer was declined “with thanks.” “When I was your age, my boy, I had rather too much of the Carritch, so I have not cared for any more of it since.”
“That is what Uncle Charlie says. But he likes these things better now, since coming to the camp. Well then, father, what shall I say for you?”
“That chapter about the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
Hugh gravely and reverently repeated those parting words of our Lord, upon which so many sorrowing hearts have stayed themselves, all along the ages, from the time they were spoken until now. When he had finished, his father asked him suddenly, “Do you understand all that?”
Hugh answered, as most boys of his age would do, “I dinna ken.”
“What does our Lord mean by calling Himself ‘the Way, the Truth, and the Life’?”
When his father asked him questions, as he often did, Hugh always thought he meant to test his knowledge, not in any way to increase his own. He never dreamed of instructing his elders, who, being his elders, must of necessity know more than he did; although, to be sure, his father's Romanism was a mystery, for which he could not and did not try to account. He looked upon it rather as a kind of disease, a deplorable fact, but one which could not be helped, and for which the sufferer was not personally responsible. He answered simply, as he would have done to Jeanie, or to his schoolmaster in the camp, “He is the way, because we can come to God only by Him.”
“How, then, is He the truth, and the life?”
“He is the truth, because He is true Himself, and therefore all He tells us must be true also. He would never make up lying stories to deceive, as Father Francis deceived me. He is the life―oh, the life,” he hesitated a moment,― “because He has life in Himself, and He gives it to us.”
“Good. We can only come to God by Him. But how, then, are we to come to Him?”
“Oh, that's easy. There's no mistaking that. The way we come to anyone. The way I come to you to ask for anything I want.”
“Not so easy as you think, my boy. It is not like coming to me. Tell me, if you had wanted anything when you were with the Swedish army, would you have walked in boldly to the royal tent and asked the king for it? You know you would not even have dreamed of such a thing. You would have sent your request through the proper channel—schoolmaster, colonel, quarter-master, as the case might be. Thus it is, Hugh, that I have been wont to offer mine to God,―that I ask the blessed Virgin and the saints to intercede for me, as you might ask your schoolmaster to speak for you to the colonel, and he in his turn might speak to the general of brigade, and so upwards, by proper gradations, to the king himself. That is the way the Church appoints.”
“Ay,” said Hugh, considering. “Ay, father. But if the king were here in the room with me, I warrant me it's to his ainself I'd go, and none other. What for no'? He's better and kinder than all the rest put together. Everybody would like to go straight to him, if they only could. But they couldna; for how could he be in a thousand places, and listen to a thousand people, all at once? He would want for that a thousand eyes and ears; but since he has them not, his servants have to be eyes and ears to him as well as they can. But Christ is everywhere, because He is God.”
“Do you think He is here in the room with us, as you said of the king?” asked his father, interested.
“I'm right sure He is,” Hugh answered confidently.
“Then I suppose you―you yourself—think you can come to Him?”
“Yes.”
“For what do you ask Him?”
“Oh, I think, for everything,” Hugh answered, with some hesitation and reluctance. “One just comes. One comes first to be forgiven, and taken care of, and made all right― ‘saved,’ as the Bible says. After that there are heaps of things to be asked for. Such as that Jeanie and I may be together again,―that I may be wiser another time than to keep secrets from everybody, and believe the stories of a sneaking Jesuit like Father Francis, ―that the king may get a splendid victory over Wallenstein.”
“Take care, Hughie. Wallenstein is my general, and I honor him as you do your king. What if you and I should ask God for contrary things?”
“Oh, then, He would do like the king in such a case―the right thing, and that in the end would be best for both. At least I suppose so.”
“It may be. Now it is time for you to go out, and the day is fine. Ask Franz to saddle your pony, and to go with you.”
“Yes, father,” said Hugh, not ill pleased, though he lingered at the door and looked affectionately at his father. “You are better today, are you not?” he asked. “Will you not soon be able to come out with me?”
“I am much better, my boy. Indeed, I believe I could ride a little now, if I tried. But―you are so sharp and sensible, Hugh, that I think I may peak to you as if you were a man. You will keep what I say to yourself?”
“Certainly, father,” said Hugh, delighted at this confidence. “I will not breathe a word to anyone. There is no one here save yourself to whom I might to tell things,” he added, with a penitent recollection of the want of openness with his sister, which was now causing so much trouble to them both.
“I intend some day soon to steal a march upon Father Francis, and ride off suddenly to the camp of Wallenstein. I shall take you with me, of course, and the troopers. But not Father Francis. He will not be pleased, because he wishes me to remain here longer under his care; and because he thinks I shall tell Wallenstein some things he does not want him to know.”
“Father Francis does not love Wallenstein. He says he neither fears God nor regards man.”
Hugh Graham's brow darkened. “Ah, those Jesuits!” he murmured. “Not the first great man, nor the last, they will have ruined amongst them.― My boy, there is one thing you must remember if you come with me to the army. Such a word as you have quoted now, or any word at all against the Duke of Friedland, would be enough to make the place too hot to hold you, and perhaps me too. Now go for your ride and enjoy it.”
Left alone a second time, Hugh Graham set himself deliberately to ponder his present position, He did not intend to begin with a review of his past life, he rather wished to put it from him, but it rose unbidden before him, and claimed and chained his attention. Why, he asked himself, had he abandoned his early faith? Because it had never quite satisfied either his intellect or his heart. But was that its fault, or the fault of his instructors, or of himself? Looking back dispassionately upon his early life, he thought Master John Aird had not dealt wisely with him. He had tried to silence his doubts and questionings instead of answering them. He had virtually forbidden him to think for himself by branding all independent thought as either foolish or sinful. But then, after all, did not Father Francis do much the same?
Moreover, the minister was cold and austere, both in his manner and his rule, which the Jesuit assuredly was not. The one prescribed amusement and indulgence, where the other would have used the rod. This might be, however, a mere difference of temperament. On the other hand, Master John Aird never deceived anyone in his life, and would certainly have gone to the scaffold before, for any conceivable end, he would have set his hand to a forgery. This, he suspected, was a difference not so much of temperament as of principle.
Perhaps, after all, Master John may have been right in asserting that until a man was converted he could not understand the things of God, they must be foolishness to him. This way of presenting truth, which had then exercised a chilling and repressing influence upon him, now came back upon his mind in a light that was rather helpful. Perhaps there was something in his early creed which, for want of the right faculty of perception, he had really failed to comprehend. He remembered standing outside the cathedral of Prague, and looking up at the colored windows—mere blots, opaque patches of dull matter, broken into segments without order or beauty. But presently he went in, and lo! the soft light came to him through the rich medium of a thousand jewels―sapphire, amethyst, topaz, emerald, each a separate glory, yet all combining in the pictured and beautiful forms of saint and prophet and apostle. So to those outside the Faith there might be chaos and darkness, where to those within there was beauty, order, and light.
But here his thoughts missed their logical sequence, as thoughts so often do; and the sensible image which they had called to their aid as a servant became their master. He lost himself in a dream of grand old cathedrals, their jewels of pictured glass, their sculptured monuments, their long, dim, pillared aisles, their chanted masses, with the pealing of solemn organs and the sweet treble of childish voices―all the spells which art and music and romance had woven around his heart. Was it these things after all that had made him a Catholic? Gifted with a rich imagination, an exquisite taste, and an intense love of the beautiful, he had failed to find satisfaction for those parts of his being in his early home or in the Church of his fathers. He was rather taught to think that they were vain, sinful propensities, which ought to be crushed and repressed. This was the fault, not of his creed, but of its interpreters. There may be more thrilling music in the Huguenot's psalm than in the chanted mass, and more to touch the imagination in
“the belfry by the gray kirk,
In whose shadow sleeps our dead,”
than in the grandest of cathedrals. There is certainly more poetry in the faith of John Knox than in that of the Council of Trent: for the one gives the people a free Bible, that living fountain of inspiration, in the lower as well as in the higher sense of the word; the other feeds them on the dry husks of a dead theology.
But Hugh Graham knew not this, and could not know it. It seemed to him as though he had lived all his early days in a close, dark dungeon, and the Catholic Church had set him free, and opened for him the gates of an enchanted garden of beauty, music, and art. That within him which was―if not his deepest, truest self―at least very close to it, found at length the rest of full satisfaction. So he thought, and the thought was only natural, “I have found rest for my soul.”
When he had reached this stage his instructors who had also been his generous helpers in poverty and his patient nurses in sickness and pain―spoke for him to the Duke of Friedland. Wallenstein cared no whit whether he was a Lutheran or a Catholic; but he took a fancy to him, and when Wallenstein took a fancy to a man that man's fortune was made. The taste of temporal prosperity was new to the penniless laird of Denniscraig, and it cannot be denied that he liked it. He unconsciously set down the enjoyments it afforded him, and the general pleasantness of his new surroundings, to the credit of his new Faith. For the first time in his life―save perhaps those bright brief days of his early marriage―he was very happy; and he thought that it was his religion which made him so. If he could but have had his children, over whom his loving heart yearned so fondly, all would have been well with him. But he knew their friends would never consent to entrust them to his care. His instructors told him that he had made a mistake in avowing his change of creed until he had induced them to join him; and it was by their advice that he had ceased for years to communicate with them, or with any of his relatives in Scotland. The design of the Jesuits was to wean him from them altogether; his was to wait until his children should be grown up and independent, when he might write to them freely, and perhaps even tempt them to come to him.
Whilst following the standard of Wallenstein he was content; for he was a gallant soldier, he loved his general, and heartily espoused the cause of his new Church. But when Wallenstein, at the time of his temporary retirement, gave him Savelburg, and sent him to set it in order, he began to find that life had still cares and perplexities, even for a prosperous man. The Jesuits had a “mission” in the hamlet that nestled beneath the castle wall; and they were harassing the unfortunate peasants in every conceivable way to force them to attend mass and confession, and to give up the sacred books which they kept concealed in their houses. The new lord's kindness of heart and love of fair play revolted against these things. More than once he interfered on behalf of his oppressed and tortured tenants, and high words passed between him and the Jesuit missionaries. Then first he began to suspect that the beautiful and graceful panther of the desert had claws which were sharp and strong and a heart that was hard and pitiless. He began to perceive, underneath all the artistic attractiveness and the sentimental illusions of his new creed, the existence of ruthless cruelty and of unscrupulous falsehood.
Thus a shadow had crept over his dream, even before Wallenstein was recalled from his seclusion to oppose the victorious King of Sweden. He was glad to rejoin his old leader, hoping, as so many have hoped before and since, “to resolve doubt in action.” But doubt is perverse, and often refuses to be so resolved. During those tedious weeks before Nuremberg, Hugh Graham's perplexities “did not pass, but grew.” The intrigues of the Jesuits against Wallenstein further contributed to separate him from them. He looked upon the followers of Loyola as something more than the advanced guard of Rome; he regarded them rather as the development and incarnation of her true spirit. So his quarrel with them really meant for him a quarrel with Rome. And it was perhaps unfortunate that they, on their part, would not let him alone. Having been his first friends, and, as they called themselves, “the humble instruments of his conversion,” they regarded him as their peculiar care, and fastened themselves upon him with a zeal and pertinacity which nothing could discourage. His choice seemed to lie between giving himself up to them utterly, or coming to a total and final breach with them; and each day saw him farther from the former and nearer to the latter alternative.
But how bitter the suspicion that the only part of his career which had been in any sense effective had been founded on a mistake! That throughout the busiest and happiest years of his life he had been building on the sand―nay, that the very foundations of his being were shifting and delusive! Which was worse—to awake from his delusions now—or hereafter, when the storm should break or sweep the whole fabric away into nothingness? It was while thus staggering and ready to faint beneath the burden of his perplexities, that he received from his brother's hand the wound which rendered him unable to accompany Wallenstein on his march. He had no suspicion of the hand that struck the blow, never having chanced to look his antagonist fully in the face. The wound was painful, if not dangerous; and though the enforced leisure that followed was brightened by the unexpected, and to him most delightful, companionship of his son, it was not the less—indeed, it was the more―a time of many thoughts and of much searching of heart.