Lord Alistair's Rebellion

The carriage which brought the Duchess of Trent and Miss Vanbrugh to the Legitimist bazaar set them down at the door of a mean-looking, brick-built schoolroom, over the door of which was a niche containing the statue of a woman holding a babe in her arms.

This woman was intended for a Jewish peasant, wife of the carpenter Joseph of Nazareth. This babe was her Divine Son, the second person of the Christian Triad.

The woman wore an emblem of glory in the form of a crown on her head. The babe’s head was undecorated. The group was copied without alteration from the ancient pagan idols of the Great Mother and her Child, worshipped for countless ages in the Mediterranean zone.

Beneath the niche four letters were cut. They were the four initials, A.M.D.G., of the Latin words, Ad majorem Dei gloriam—“To the greater glory of God.”

It was the motto of the famous Society of Jesus, set up over a building in which the children of Protestant Churchmen were being educated. Only the Jesuit motto was not set out in full; it was merely hinted at by those cryptic letters. This was a touch that Ignatius Loyola would have admired.

Neither of the two ladies observed the unobtrusive initials, nor, if they had done so, would they have understood their significance. But they could scarcely avoid seeing the idol in its niche; and just as they were stepping out of the carriage a bright little lad, attractively robed in a white gown with a red vest above, evidently a singing-boy from the church hard by, passed through the doorway, bowing reverently to the sacred image as he went up the steps.

The Duchess of Trent was amazed. Her works of charity had never brought her into this part of the parish, and she had always kept herself from contact with the religious activities of St. Jermyn’s.

“If that is not Popery, I should like to know what is?” she exclaimed bluntly to her young friend. “Did you see that boy bowing to the Virgin Mary? I have no doubt they are taught to pray to her as well.”

This surmise was perfectly just. Such slight control as the episcopate, or at least the lay judges of the Privy Council, exercised over the services in St. Jermyn’s Church, appeared to cease altogether on the threshold of the school. Within that building Dr. Coles was supreme, and taught what religion he pleased. If it had suited him to set up an image of Siva for the adoration of his scholars, or to inculcate the most degrading beliefs of primitive savagery, no one would have interfered with his discretion. Thus, while the Vicar maintained some of the forms of Anglican worship in the parish church, in the schoolroom he had long laid them aside. The catechism taught to the boys was one prepared by a clerical secret society, and was carefully contrived to fill the learner’s mind with hatred for the Protestant heresy, and to turn it in the direction of Catholic Unity.

A special liturgy, compiled by the same hands, was also provided for the use of the scholars. In it the Mother of God figured as the principal, though not the sole, object of worship, the Apostle Peter taking the second place. Among the prayers, precedence was given to one for the Patriarch of the West—“Thy servant Leo, that he may be inspired rightly to define and zealously to defend the faith once delivered to Thy saints.” After this came petitions on behalf of a personage discreetly referred to as “the lawful Sovereign of these realms,” the souls of the dead “now awaiting Thy judgment,” and the reunion, “under one visible Head on earth,” of all branches of the Holy Catholic Church. Dr. Coles himself was responsible for a supplementary prayer in which “our blessed patron, Saint Jermyn,” was complimented on his influence with the Mother of God, due to the continence of his life on earth, and implored to use that influence on behalf of the area for which he was, as it were, the spiritual County Councillor.

It was a document breathing the spirit of the Dark Ages, when God figured in men’s minds as a sort of Byzantine Emperor, surrounded by a court of heavenly chamberlains and eunuchs, each dispensing favours to his own train of followers, and none incapable of being bribed.

Miss Vanbrugh, regarding the symbolical sculpture with the indifference born of ignorance, smiled at her friend’s indignation.

“Let us go in,” she said; “I don’t think it’s so bad inside.”

The whitewashed walls of the room in which they found themselves offered a curious medley of science and religion, evidencing a painful struggle in the mind of Dr. Coles between proselytizing zeal and a desire to earn the grants of an heretical Government. A large crucifix over the teacher’s desk was flanked by a geological map of Great Britain, and a glass case containing silk in various stages from the cocoon to the finished skein. The Ten Commandments on one wall were faced by the two hemispheres on the other; and an illuminated calendar of Holy Days was half concealed by a chart depicting screws, wedges, levers, and other mechanical appliances. The cloven, or at least the clerical, hoof peeped out in a series of cartoons illustrative of English history, the scenes chosen being all in one category—the landing of Augustine, the martyrdom of Edmund, Thomas à Becket defying Henry II., and Langton, with a formidable crozier, extorting Magna Charta from King John apparently by the threat of physical violence, while the barons respectfully looked on.

On this particular occasion the eye was quickly distracted from these mural decorations by the exhibition beneath. The room, which was large enough to contain one or two hundred people, was lined round three sides by stalls loaded with that extraordinary description of articles which are manufactured specially for sale at bazaars, and in which the greatest possible uselessness is combined with the greatest possible fragility. Children’s frocks, which no child could wear for an hour without damaging them, embroidered tobacco-pouches sufficient to dismay the most stout-hearted smoker, weird contrivances of paper and cheap ribbon described as toilet-tidies, ridiculous pin-cushions, and impossible patchwork quilts formed the staple of the display. In one corner a lottery was being conducted by the Rev. Aloysius Grimes, happy in that immunity from the law which newspaper editors cannot obtain; and pretty little choristers, in their sacred vestments, were passing to and fro among the ladies doing a roaring trade in the sale of tickets. But the great attraction of the afternoon was the theatre, which had been organized in an adjoining classroom, and in which it was announced that a Miracle Play would be produced at four o’clock, under the direction of Egerton Vane, Esq.

As soon as Mr. Grimes caught sight of the Duchess of Trent and her companion, he handed over the care of the lottery to a young lady assistant, and hastened forward to greet them. He was just shaking hands, when a stir in the doorway announced the arrival of Dr. Coles.

In appearance the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s contrasted very favourably with his curate. It was easy to see that he was a man of education and refinement, and his white hairs gave him a certain dignity. His face was that of a sensualist, but the benevolent smile, which had become almost stereotyped on his lips, produced an impression of cordiality and goodness of heart. The Doctor’s career had not been quite untroubled by the voice of scandal. But any bygone slips on the part of a saintly man had been forgotten or forgiven. The reverent murmur which welcomed his appearance among his flock was a striking testimony to the influence he had secured over those among whom he worked.

The Rev. Aloysius, breaking away from the two ladies in the middle of a sentence, without apology, was the first to cast himself on both knees before his employer, and respectfully kiss a large ring on the Vicar’s extended forefinger.

“What in the name of goodness does that mean?” the astonished Duchess asked of Hero.

She spoke loudly enough to be heard by several persons in the throng, who turned and cast rebuking glances at her. Directly afterwards she saw a number of well-dressed women advance one after the other and salute the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s with the same ceremonial as that observed by Mr. Grimes.

“Are they all mad, or what is it?” the Duchess whispered. “I have never seen such a thing before in my life, except when I was abroad, in Roman Catholic society. But even they don’t kneel to their priests, only to a Bishop.”

Hero blushed guiltily. She was better informed than the Duchess, but she was not sure that her knowledge might not damage her in her friend’s eyes.

“Perhaps these people regard Dr. Coles as a Bishop,” she suggested timidly. “Have you never heard it whispered that he had been secretly consecrated by—an Armenian Bishop, I think?”

The Duchess stared at her in honest bewilderment.

“How could that be? I don’t understand. Why should an English clergyman go to Armenia to be consecrated?”

Hero saw that she must make her revelation complete.

“I understand the object was to renew the Apostolical Succession in the Church of England.”

“It has never been broken,” said the Duchess, with decision. She had been told so as a girl, and had never given the subject a second thought. To her devout mind, too candid to be taken in logical snares, the presence or absence of one or two or three Bishops at the consecration of another could not seem a matter of real concern. To attribute to such details the awful consequences they possess for Catholic minds would have seemed to her to attribute the technical instincts of a small attorney to the Maker of the sun and stars.

“The Pope of Rome refuses to recognize Anglican Orders, you know,” Hero explained gently. “The application was made to him the other day by Lord Bargreave on behalf of a third of the clergy, and he told them that the English Church had no Bishops, no priests, and no Sacraments.”

The Duchess flushed to the roots of her hair.

“When I was a girl,” she said sternly, “the Church of England would have refused to recognize the Pope of Rome. I was brought up to believe that the Roman communion was a half-pagan, half-political body, which had corrupted the Gospel with idolatry and superstition, and forfeited its right to be called a Christian Church.”

It was Hero’s turn to be astonished as she listened to the language of an extinct generation. Brought up in the age which had witnessed the triumph of the Ritualist propaganda, it was news to her that the national Church had ever occupied any attitude but one of envious imitation or suppliant apology towards that of Rome. And yet Hero Vanbrugh was a girl who had read a good deal, travelled much, and used her own powers of observation and reasoning. She had seen the ignorant priesthoods of Spain and Italy, and their brutish flocks, the most degraded element in the European population. The sight of the Rev. Aloysius Grimes cringing to Mike Finigan had roused her indignation. And yet the spectacle of a great society of Grimeses cringing to Mike Finigan’s master, in the name of Elizabeth’s and Cromwell’s countrymen, had scarcely moved her to a passing sigh.

“Times have changed,” she murmured to the Duchess.

And times had. Even the Duchess realized dimly that it had become unsafe to utter aloud her sentiments of loyalty to the English Church or to the English Throne in a Church of England schoolroom, while it had ceased to be unsafe for Dr. Coles to parade openly his treason to both. His episcopal character was no secret in the theological colleges from which a steady stream of young men like the Rev. Aloysius turned their steps to the obscure Lambeth Vicarage in search of those supernatural powers which they deemed the neighbouring Archbishop had no power to bestow. In this way the whole Church was being gradually leavened, so that the time was at hand when some portion of the mysterious virtue brought from Armenia would have found its way into all the channels of ordination, and obstinate Evangelicals would be receiving Armenian Orders unknown to themselves, and would be working the great Transubstantiation miracle in which they personally did not believe.

For the sake of achieving this object Dr. Coles had put on one side the prospect of promotion in the English Church. With abilities sufficient to have raised him perhaps to the House of Lords, he had deliberately accepted the part of priest of an obscure parish, content if his underground revolution was allowed to proceed without interference. His motives were mixed, perhaps, but great revolutions are the result of mixed motives, and never of wholly small and base ones. The Vicar of St. Jermyn’s was blinded to the degrading character of his methods by the loftiness of his aims. He took the guilt of fraud and perjury on his conscience, and he did so contentedly, looking forward to the time when the Church he served would re-enter the Catholic unity, and the Body of Christ be made whole.

As soon as he had finished receiving the homage of his peculiar adherents, the old priest went up to the Duchess of Trent, for whom he had a warm regard. In spite of the theological gulf that sundered them, she commanded his sympathy far more than the vain and hysterical women who grovelled in his confessional, and her simple and unselfish piety displayed in those good works which all religions enjoin had won his gratitude and respect. Had he been able to make a convert of the Duchess he would have felt it as great a triumph as when the State-appointed Bishop of Linchester, laying aside his jewelled crozier and mitre, came and knelt in the humble study of St. Jermyn’s Vicarage to receive them again at the hands of the “Bishop of Lambeth.”

On her side the Duchess was not blind to the merits of Dr. Coles, his indefatigable zeal, unworldliness, and kindly temper. They met as friends meet, seated in different trains, and going in opposite directions, who exchange a brief word of greeting before they pass out of each other’s sight.

The Duchess had never referred to the religious aberrations of the Doctor, but she thought she might safely challenge him on the subject of loyalty to the Throne.

“I had no idea that you sympathized with the Legitimists,” she observed.

The Vicar smiled indulgently.

“This bazaar, I suppose you mean? It is more Father Grimes’s doing than mine. I hold entirely aloof from politics.”

“But you have lent your schoolroom.”

Dr. Coles frowned.

“My schoolroom, as you call it, is a public building,” he said, with a touch of anger. “I find I am expected to lend it for the purposes of political meetings, even to the party which almost openly aims at Disestablishment. I sometimes wonder I don’t receive an application to lend it for an infidel lecture.”

The Duchess was impressed. Dr. Coles had struck the one note which brought them into perfect accord, in his reference to infidelity.

In the view of the Duchess this was the one thing worse than Popery. Her religious scale was made up of five degrees. At the very bottom came Infidelity, in which term she was disposed to include the Unitarian denomination and those divines of her own Church whose Hebrew studies had led them to take different views as to the authorship of the Old Testament books from those at one time prevalent. The second head, Popery, covered practically the whole Christian Church during the ages between the death of Paul and the conversion of Martin Luther, and two-thirds of existing Christendom. The third division, under the word Idolatry, embraced the religions of the rest of mankind, including the stern monotheists of Islam. The Jews formed a class apart; the Duchess was too good a Conservative to blame that ancient race severely for their stubbornness in resisting even a Divine reform; she regarded them as a species of embryo Christians, whose development had been arrested in the caterpillar stage. Her fifth division, Protestantism, applied to the sects dating from the Lutheran revolt, and to stray heretics of the past, such as the Socialist Lollards and the freethinking Albigeois, who possessed the merit of having been persecuted by Rome. Among these, of course, she distinguished between the converted Christian and the much larger class of sinners for whom she wished to take for granted a death-bed repentance.

It was not an unimportant matter that the Duchess of Trent should have held these views. Money is always important, and the Duchess was one of a very large moneyed class who were always ready to open their purses on behalf of their favourite propaganda. The infidel and the sinner were supposed to be reached by the ordinary machinery of the Church, and the Papist and the Jew had been wellnigh abandoned as hopeless, though a few Englishmen of the lower class still prowled through countries like Spain and Portugal, distributing Protestant tracts and increasing the dislike felt for their nation. But the great field for missionary effort, of course, was that section of mankind labelled idolaters or heathen. In the spirit of the hymn which singles out the inoffensive Buddhists of Ceylon to brand them with the epithet vile, the good Duchess firmly believed that to thrust, not merely the theology, but the morals, social customs, marriage institutions, language, manners, and even clothing of her own age and country upon all the peoples of the earth was a Divine injunction to be neglected at her peril.

This generous zeal had long been encouraged by the statesmen of the Raj, who saw its possessions widened without the expense of arms. The British Empire resembles no other that has ever existed in having come into existence unconsciously. England has sent forth her outlaws on the shores of distant continents, and they have come back soldiers for her. Her merchants have gone forth seeking merchandise, and realms Alexander sighed for have fallen like ripe fruit into their hands. Her missionaries have Anglicized where they should have Christianized; the bigoted worshippers of Allah and Vishnu imitate the language of Macaulay, and every new church in Africa gives a new cotton-mill to Lancashire.

Dr. Coles had a more personal argument in store for the Duchess of Trent.

“Surely you cannot be very bigoted against the Legitimists,” he urged. “I thought that all the old Scotch families were Jacobites at heart. And Lord Alistair Stuart is a member of the Guild.”

“I have heard my mistress, the Queen, say: ‘I am the greatest Jacobite of them all,’” the Duchess responded. “But I don’t think she ever expected to hear of real Jacobites in the twentieth century. I don’t take your friends very seriously, Dr. Coles, and I dare say my son doesn’t either.”

Before the discussion could be carried further Alistair himself came into view. His mother watched him anxiously, half afraid of seeing him accord the same homage to Dr. Coles as the others. But whether because he was wanting in reverence for Armenia, or because he was ashamed to show greater respect to a man than to his own mother, Stuart contented himself with shaking hands with the priest, after he had previously greeted his parent.

He was surprised at first to see her at such a function. But the diplomacy of the Duchess was very transparent. She at once turned to Hero, and pronounced the formula which entitles two people in English society to know of each other’s existence.

It was the first time Alistair had seen Miss Vanbrugh, but not the first time he had heard her name. The eyes of society are very keen where a man like the Duke of Trent and Colonsay is concerned, and its whispering-gallery is very wide. Although the Duke himself had never given any significance to his intercourse with Hero, the correct significance had already been given to it by others, and the rumour had reached Lord Alistair. For him the girl who stood before him was the girl who was on the point of becoming his brother’s betrothed.

He raised his eyes to her face, and when he saw that picture of calm, sweet maidenhood, with all the bloom of youth and purity upon it, and those eyes radiant with high and happy thoughts, and when he recalled that other face he had just quitted, with the paint peeling off under the haggard eyes, and the cracked lips set in a querulous scowl because he had not dared to bring her into the company of reputable women, and when he compared his own lot, cast with that unhappy creature, with the life that lay before his brother, blest in so dear a wife, then his heart failed him, and he had to turn away his eyes to hide the unexpected smart.

On her part Hero was not much less moved. She saw standing before her the figure around which her imagination had already woven its romance, and he was handsomer than the hero of her romance. The gracefully-knit form, with its statuesque neck and curling dark hair, breathed the very spirit of the lays of Oisin. The swish of the heather was still in his elastic tread, the sunlight of the rain-washed Hebrides was in his glance. She seemed to see him in his kilt and plaid, the eagle’s feather nodding in his bonnet, and the claymore by his side, a young chieftain of the glens, starting at daybreak from his bed among the fern, and setting forth perhaps to woo a maiden like herself with the immemorial charms of song and dance. In the strait garb of the decorous capital he seemed to her like a shorn Samson, and she thought of violets fading in a city garret, and skylarks caged in a dark cellar beating their wings in want of light and air.

She, also, drew her comparison, and the cold and perfect courtier of Colonsay House suffered by it. For the first time she felt in its full strength that instinct of self-sacrifice which lies at the core of every noble nature. The task which Stuart’s mother had offered to her, and in which she had only taken a sentimental interest, now became a fascination. The longing to save this glorious soul, fallen among weeds and briars, to lift it up and wipe away its stains, and set it on its true path again, overcame her like the touch of love; the touch of love overcame her like the longing to save, and her hand trembled in Alistair Stuart’s.

The two Vanes sidled up, anxious to be recognized by their chief.

“So glad you have turned up, Stuart,” bleated the elder. “It’s quite a demonstration, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Wickham echoed, “it is a blow. I think we are striking a blow.”

He meant at the hated middle classes. It was the only kind of a blow he was ever likely to strike against that or any other enemy.

Stuart heard them with impatience. Somehow the presence of Hero made the two brothers look tawdry and ridiculous with their decadent cant, their untidy hair, and their silly, outlandish neckties. He answered with irony:

“No doubt the middle classes will be frightened when they hear of this bazaar. But you must see that it gets into the papers, otherwise the effect will be lost. Are there any reporters here?”

The brothers looked around a little nervously.

“I hope so,” said Egerton, whose vanity was slightly greater than his cowardice.

“It might vulgarize the thing,” suggested Wickham whose cowardice was slightly greater than his vanity.

Stuart understood their fears, and played on them by way of distraction from his secret emotion.

“I expect the place is crammed with detectives,” he observed. “I fancied I saw one or two suspicious-looking fellows with notebooks as I came in.”

Hero grasped the situation, and smiled.

“No; do you think so?” exclaimed the elder Vane in a tone of exultation, tempered by alarm. “But surely there is nothing they can take hold of—nothing illegal, I mean—in a bazaar?”

“They may shadow us after this, though,” muttered the junior, in whom alarm had got the better of exultation.

“They may treat the bazaar as evidence of a conspiracy,” Stuart suggested cheerfully. “But here comes St. Maur; you had better ask him.”

He turned, and led Hero away through the crowd, to escape from the person he had indicated, leaving the brothers in a state of cruel apprehension.

But Mr. St. Maur was not to be shaken off so easily. This gentleman, who had spelt his name “Maher” in his native city of “Dahblin” (as he was accustomed to pronounce it), was the son of a decent butter-merchant, who had put him to the Bar. Coming over to the Temple, in accordance with old custom to keep his terms, the ambitious youth was surprised and charmed to find that his membership of the Roman Church, which had stood somewhat in his light in the society of the Irish capital, was here a fashionable distinction. To drink the Roman Pontiff’s health before that of the British Sovereign appeared to be in some mysterious way a passport to Court favour, and a Roman missionary had just been given precedence over the heads of the English Church. The policy of the Primrose League had been adapted to the purposes of proselytism, and a club had been founded in the West End in which the middle-class aspirant could enjoy the privilege of lunching in the same room as a Roman Cabinet Minister and receiving the Times fresh from the hands of a Roman Duke. Unfortunately the Duke and the Cabinet Minister failed to play their parts with sufficient zeal, or else there were not enough of them to go around, and St. Bridget’s Club gradually sunk from depth to depth till not merely Protestants, but Jews, profaned its portals, and it became a refuge for all the suspicious characters whom other clubs refused.

Young Maher was not long in deciding to forsake the Irish Bar for the English, and a slight alteration in the spelling of his name enabled him to pose as an offshoot of one of the greatest families in Britain. The difficulty of an accent which clove obstinately to his tongue was met by a well-constructed legend of an Irish branch of the family in question, supposed to have settled in the Emerald Isle about the time of Strongbow. On the strength of this genealogy, which would have done credit to the Heralds’ College in its best remunerated moments, Mr. St. Maur was in the habit of referring to a nobleman of lofty rank as “the head of our house,” thereby causing intolerable anguish to his friends, the Vanes, who were only nephews of a baronet. Unfortunately they were prevented from questioning the genuineness of St. Maur’s pedigree, inasmuch as they had laid every stress upon it in introducing him to their acquaintance. But they had an uneasy sense that the Irishman was an impostor who had beaten them by mere bluff.

On his part the barrister having, as he conceived, surpassed the Vanes, was seeking for loftier heights to scale. As soon as he met Lord Alistair Stuart in the brothers’ flat he promptly marked him out for attack. Undaunted by Stuart’s evident dislike for him, the Irishman persistently forced himself on his notice. With this object he had thrown himself heart and soul into the Legitimist cause, as he would have thrown himself into the Independent Labour Party the day after if the leaders of that movement had been members of the peerage.

Having come to the bazaar chiefly in order to push his acquaintance with Lord Alistair, Mr. St. Maur was not the man to be balked of his prey.

“Grand success, this, isn’t it, Stuart?” he bawled out from afar, as he hustled his way through the throng.

Much as Stuart disliked his follower, he failed to give him credit for the naked singleness of his aims. Had he fully understood the Irishman’s character, he would have got rid of him before this by the easy expedient of introducing him to his brother. Once anchored to the coat-tails of a Duke, St. Maur would have left a mere younger brother severely alone. As it was, Lord Alistair saw no way of repelling the intruder except by a harshness which was not in his nature.

Mr. St. Maur shook hands effusively, and then, finding he was not going to be introduced to Lord Alistair’s companion, began enlarging on the prospects of the movement.

“I consider this affair will launch us as a serious party,” he declared. “The public will begin to reckon with us. It will soon be time to think of a Parliamentary candidature. What do you say, Stuart?”

Alistair shrugged his shoulders.

“I should think you would get about ten votes in any constituency in England.”

“Ah, but what about Scotland? There is a feeling up there that might be appealed to. If a man like yourself, now, a member of an old Highland family, were to stand in your own part of the country, don’t you think the clansmen would rally round you?”

“You forget that I should have my brother’s influence dead against me. He is a member of the Government.”

“He would have to disavow you officially, of course. But privately, you know? Don’t you think the Duke might be brought to show some sympathy for the movement?”

“He would simply laugh at it, I expect,” said Stuart.

“The Duke of Gloucester does not laugh at it,” returned the other.

Alistair’s face darkened at the name, and he cast down his eyes.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

St. Maur swelled with importance.

“I happen to have private information that he watches the proceedings of the Guild with the closest attention. He has everything that appears in the press about us sent him by a press-cutting agency.”

“I wish I had known that before,” said Alistair. And, turning to Hero, he explained: “I have let them have an autograph letter of the Prince’s to sell at one of the stalls.”

The absurdity of this did not strike Hero so much as its ingratitude.

“A letter from the Prince to you, do you mean?” she asked, with an accent of reproach.

“Yes; I used to know him very well when we were boys. I came across it the other day among some old papers. But I shouldn’t like him to hear that I had let it be sold.”

A purpose had swiftly formed in Hero’s mind.

“Whereabouts is the stall?” she inquired.

“Over here.”

Turning his back on Mr. St. Maur with unwonted rudeness, he conducted Hero to a stall presided over by a pretty, overdressed little woman, who had been persuaded by Mr. Grimes in the confessional that she would thus atone for certain errors to which pretty, overdressed little women are prone. Prince Herbert’s autograph had been entrusted to her for sale, and by good luck it had not been disposed of when the two came up.

“What is the price of this letter?” Miss Vanbrugh asked quickly.

“One guinea,” the stallkeeper simpered. “It is from His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester to Lord Alistair Stuart,” she added in ignorance of who stood before her.

“Let me buy it, and give it to you!” cried Alistair, guessing Hero’s design.

She took up the letter. It was a short schoolboy’s note, and contained a misspelt word.

Hero handed the letter to her companion.

“I would rather you let me buy it, and give it back to you,” she said.

She handed the money to the lady of the stall, who was looking considerably astonished.

Alistair understood the delicate rebuke. His glance took in the contents of the friendly, boyish note afresh, and he felt ashamed that he had parted with it.

“I am very grateful to you, Miss Vanbrugh, believe me,” he said earnestly, as he slipped the letter into his pocket. “I ought not to have let it go into strange hands. But I hope I needn’t count you as a stranger. You are often at Colonsay House, aren’t you?”

“I have never met you there,” said Hero pointedly.

And Alistair was silent.

The Miracle Play was a great success, though not, perhaps, in the way anticipated by Dr. Coles.

The Vicar had understood that the text of the Ober-Ammergau performance was to furnish the basis of a version only slightly modified by Mr. Egerton Vane. But Mr. Vane, being deeply imbued with the spirit of Maeterlinck, had allowed his adaptation to become tinctured to an unforeseen extent by the vein of symbolism peculiar to the work of the Belgian master. The orthodox Christian interpretation being repugnant to his feelings as a Pagan, he had, moreover, boldly replaced it by something more congenial to his own sympathies.

The result was somewhat as though a conscientious Buddhist should rewrite “Paradise Lost,” endeavouring to make it illustrate the doctrine of metempsychosis.

In the opening scene Mary was introduced as the Spirit of Form, receiving the Annunciation from the Angel Gabriel as the representative of Creative Genius. The dialogue, which was fortunately unintelligible to nine-tenths of the audience, turned on the sterility of the Jewish nation in the department of the plastic arts. Mary was informed that her Son would remove the prohibition contained in the Second Commandment, thereby opening the way for the Christian school of statuary and painting.

The whole of the sacred narrative was dealt with from the same standpoint. The Wise Men were presented as the exponents of the three arts of Poetry, Music, and Painting, whose respective merits were discussed at some length. The dispute of the child Christ in the Temple was made to turn on Keats’s famous identification of Truth with Beauty. Satan, in the scene of the Temptation, appeared as the genius of Utilitarianism and the middle classes, urging the Christ to abandon the principle of Art for Art’s sake. Towards the end of the drama Byron’s jest about Barabbas was almost literally incorporated, Barabbas being designed as a type of commercial success in literature—a Jewish Tennyson or Ruskin.

Every allusion to the Jews as a people was barbed with the bitterest malignity. The Semitic spirit was branded, with some historical confusion, as that of Philistinism par excellence; and Isaiah and other prophets were ingeniously represented as having fallen martyrs to their literary excellence rather than to their reforming energy.

The allegory was so vague and the dialogue so obscure that most of those present entirely failed to grasp the enormity of the author’s transgression. But it was otherwise with Dr. Coles. The Armenian proselyte was a learned and thorough-going medievalist, and he had taken it for granted that medieval traditions would be strictly adhered to. He had left the work of superintending the rehearsals to his curate, never deeming that Mr. Grimes was capable of betraying the trust. Nor was he, had he been sufficiently intelligent to perceive that he was being made a cat’s-paw by his pagan librettist. The actors in the piece, being the choir-boys, were even less capable of judging of the drift of the performance.

The deeply mortified Vicar restrained his wrath till the moment when the High-Priest Caiaphas came upon the scene in the thinly-disguised character of the proprietor of a morning paper with an enormous circulation, when it became impossible to mistake the dramatist’s intentions. Rising from his seat in the front row of the audience, Dr. Coles gave a peremptory order for the curtain to be let down, and the thoroughly mystified spectators seized the opportunity to escape.