CHAPTER XLIX.
Reconciliation.
‘Yes. That is all which the spiritual interests of mankind require at the hands of the Roman Church,’ said Lesbia gravely, as she laid a printed copy of the papal document upon the breakfast-table at Dulham vicarage. ‘I only hope that Madame Pisa-Vitri will see it in the same light. We must get an introduction to her, Uncle Spines—she is still in Paris—and talk the matter over, and persuade her to receive Cardinal Power. He would like nothing better, I know, than to figure again conspicuously as the leading man.’
‘Well, if I don’t go myself, I will send you Lesbie,’ replied her uncle. ‘Perhaps your friend Lady Friga would accompany you, and be of more service in some ways than I could. But what’s that other letter there, which you have not yet opened?’
‘From Cardinal Power, I declare—just as we were talking about him!’
‘Well, what does he say?’ asked Mr Bristley, as soon as his niece had had time to read the letter.
‘All’s well; there is no need for any of us to go to Paris. Madame Pisa-Vitri herself has written to him, saying that she considers the Council of London and its result as a full and sufficient atonement for all the past errors of the Church; that she assumes all differences between herself and the papacy to be at an end; and that in that case she will use her influence with the Italian Government to allow the Pope to return to Rome, on well-defined conditions. I suspect, Uncle Spines, that the conditions will include her own ordination as a priestess, or appointment to some post of still greater responsibility and power; be that as it may, Cardinal Power is willing, and the rest will be obliged, to eat whatever shew-bread it may please Madame Pisa-Vitri to bake for their consumption.’
‘Does the cardinal mention anything about the ordaining of priestesses?’ asked the vicar.
‘Yes, they have already chosen the first English one, the Lady Superior of Hildenboro.[1] She will have completed her probation by the beginning of winter, and as soon as she is ordained, I must go to her and be baptised into the Church. I cannot consistently refuse, nor can you, uncle.’
‘I have no wish to refuse,’ he replied. ‘I was always ready to meet Rome half way. It will entail upon me the necessity of converting this neighbourhood, but I do not apprehend much difficulty in that now. Does the cardinal say anything else?’
‘Yes, he congratulates me upon being one of the few who had lived to witness the realisation of their progressive ideas. But I shall tell him in reply, that in the first place an individual can only be the mouthpiece of the age; secondly, that the idea owes at least as much to you as to me, if indeed either of us were the real chief actor.’
‘You say well there, Lesbie; the real chief actors are not denizens of this world, although probably they may have been so.’
‘The last piece of intelligence in the cardinal’s letter, said Lesbia, ‘is that they are to get back Westminster Abbey. They have been hankering after it ever since the days of Cardinal Wiseman, and now at last they have done something to deserve the reward.’
‘I suppose,’ said Mr Bristley, ‘it will be a race between non-established Rome and dis-established Anglicanism, as they call it, for all the fine cathedrals of the kingdom. It would be a sin to let them go to ruin; somebody must have them. Madonna and Mylitta—which of the two forms of woman-worship will get the best of it in this country?’
‘If one may forecast the future,’ replied his niece, ‘I should say that Mylittism will be very soon merged in Catholicism as a special congregation. Depend upon it, Rome will not have rivals, if by latitudinarianism she can avoid it.’
‘Latitudinarianism is a fine word, and may be made to mean a good deal,’ said Mr Bristley, laughing.
‘Let it mean all it can,’ said Lesbia; ‘the leap has been taken. Moreover, are we not told that no man having put his hand to the plough and looking back—’
‘Is fit for the kingdom of Mylitta,’ put in the vicar. ‘But seriously, Lesbie, it does seem at last as if the horizon were clearing all round. The great convulsion has not wrought the misery we all feared it would. Enormous changes have come about, but the classes concerned are adapting themselves to the new conditions, and are not harassed by those who agitated for those conditions. An element of what might almost be called conservatism is tempering the zeal of revolutionaries; we may soon look to see all the wounds which are still open bound up, all the sores healed. The great battle upon which it all hinged is already ancient history, it has left no international rancour; the constitutional landmarks which had been overthrown are being silently replaced by new ones not wholly unlike them, only better. Much that excited mere blind animosity now receives fair consideration; the clash of interests is less loud; jarring and discord of all sorts go more against the grain. Yes, the horizon is decidedly clearing; it was high time it should. We may fairly hope that the world has passed the dark hour which precedes the dawn, and that those lines of Swinburne are in course of being realised:—
I see not the red rains fall,
Hear not the tempest at all,
Nor thunder in heaven any more:
All the distance is white
With the soundless feet of the sun
Night, with the woes that it wore,
Night is over and done.’
- ↑ A village on the South-Eastern Railway, which might possess a convent.