IV The Father Rector’s Tale

The Father-Rector of San Filippo was an old man, a Canadian by birth, who had been educated in England, but he had worked in many parts of the world since receiving the priesthood nearly fifty years ago, and for my part I certainly expected that he would have many experiences to relate.

At first, however, he entirely refused to tell a story. He said he had had an uneventful life, that he could not compete with the tales he had heard. But persuasion proved too strong, and on going in to see him on another matter one morning I found him at his tin despatch-box with a diary in his hand.

“I have found something that I think may do,” he said, “if no one else has promised for this evening. It is really the only thing approaching the preternatural I have ever experienced.”

I congratulated him and ourselves; and the same evening after supper he told his story, with the diary beside him, to which he referred now and then. (I shall omit his irrelevancies, of which there were a good many.)

“This happened to me,” he said, “nearly thirty years ago. I had been twenty years a priest, and was working in a town mission in the south of England. I made the acquaintance of a Catholic family who had a large country house about ten miles away. They were not very fervent people, but they had a chapel in the house, where I would say mass sometimes on Sundays, when I could get away from my own church on Saturday night.

“On one of these occasions I met for the first time an artist, whose name you would all know if I mentioned it, but it will be convenient to call him Mr. Farquharson. He made an extremely unpleasant impression on me, and yet there was no reason for it that I could see. He was a big man, palish, with curling brown hair. He was always very well dressed, with a suspicion of scent about him; he talked extremely wittily and would say the most surprising things that were at once brilliant and dangerous; and yet in his talk he never transgressed good manners. In fact, he was very cordial always to me; he seemed to go out of his way to be courteous and friendly, and yet I could not bear the fellow. However, I tried to conceal that, and with some success, as you will see.

“I was astonished that he asked me no questions about our beliefs or practices. Such people generally do, you know; and they profess to admire our worship and its dignity. In the evening he played and sang magnificently—very touching and pathetic songs, as a rule.

“On the following morning he attended mass, but I did not think much of that. Guests generally do, I have found, in Catholic houses. Then I went off in the afternoon back to my mission.

“I suppose it was six weeks before I met him again, and then it was at the same place. My hostess gave me tea alone, for I arrived late, and as we sat in the hall, told me that Mr. Farquharson was there again. Then she added, to my surprise, that he had expressed a great liking for me, and had come down from town partly with the hope of meeting me. She went on talking about him for a while; told me that three of his pictures had been taken again by the French Salon, and at last told me that he had been baptized and educated as a Catholic, but had for many years ceased to practise his religion. She had only learned this recently.

“Well, that explained a good deal; and I was a good deal taken aback. I did not quite know how to act. But she talked on about him a little, and I became sorry for the man and determined that I would make no difference in my behavior toward him. From what she said, I gathered that it might be in my power to win him back. He had everything against him, she told me.

“Now, let me tell you a word about his pictures. I had seen them here and there, as well as reproductions of them, as all the world had at that time, and they were very remarkable. They were on extraordinarily simple and innocent subjects, and often religious—a child going to first Communion; a knight riding on a lonely road; a boy warming his hands at the fire; a woman praying. There was not a line or a color in them that any one could dislike, and yet—yet they were corrupt. I know nothing about art; but it needed no art to see that these were corrupt. I did not understand it then, and I do not now; but—well, there it is. I cannot describe their effect on me; but I know that many others felt the same, and I believe that kind of painting is not uncommon in the French school.”

The priest paused a moment.

“As I went down the long passage to the smoking-room I declare that I was not thinking of this side of the man. I was only wondering whether I could do anything, but the moment I came in and found him standing alone on the hearth-rug all this leaped back into my mind.

“His personality was exactly like his own pictures. There was nothing that one could point to in his face and say that it revealed his character. It did not. It was a clean-shaven, clever face, strong and artistic; his hand as he took mine was firm and slender and strong, too. And yet—yet my flesh crept at him. It seemed to me he was a kind of devil.

“Again I did my utmost to hide all this as we sat and talked that evening till the dressing gong rang; and again I succeeded, but it was a sore effort. Once when he put his hand on my arm I nearly jerked it off, so great was the horror it gave me.

“I did not sit near him at dinner; there were several people dining there that night, but our host was unwell and went to bed early, and this man and myself, after he had played and sung an hour or so in the drawing-room, talked till late in the smoking-room, and all the while the horror grew; I have never felt anything like it. I am generally fairly placid; but it was all I could do to keep quiet. I even wondered once or twice whether it was not my duty to tell him plainly what I felt, to—to—well, really, this sounds absurd—but to curse him as an unclean and corrupt creature who had lost faith and grace and everything, and was on the very brink of eternal fire.”

The old man’s voice rang with emotion. I had never seen him so much moved, and was astonished at his vehemence.

“Well, thank God, I did not!

“At last it came out that I knew about his having been a Catholic. I did not tell him where I had learned it, but perhaps he suspected. Of course, though, I might have learned it in a hundred ways.

“He seemed very much surprised—not at my knowing, but at my treating him as I had. It seemed that he had met with unpleasantness more than once at the hands of priests who knew.

“Well, to cut it short, before I went away next day he asked me to call upon him some time at his house in London, and he asked me in such a way that I knew he meant it.”

The priest stopped and referred to his diary. Then he went on.

“It was in the following May, six months later, that I fulfilled my promise.

“It may have been association, and what I suspected of the man, but the house almost terrified me by its beauty and its simplicity and its air of corruption. And yet there was nothing to account for it. There was not a picture in it, as far as I could see, that had anything in it to which even a priest could object. There was a long gallery leading from the front door, floored, ceiled, and walled with oak in little panels, with pictures in each along the two sides, chiefly, I should suppose now, of that same French school of which I have spoken. There was an exquisite crucifix at the end, and yet, in some strange way, even that seemed to be tainted. I felt, I suppose, in the manner that Father Stein described to us when he mentioned Benares; and yet there, I have heard, the pictures and carving correspond with the sensation, and here they did not.

“He received me in his studio at the end of the passage. There was a great painting on an easel, on which he was working, a painting of Our Lady going to the well at Nazareth—most exquisite and yet terrible. I could hardly keep my eyes off it. It was nearly finished, he told me. And there was his grand piano against the wall.

“Well, we sat and talked; and before I left that evening I knew everything. He did not tell me in confession, and the story became notorious after his death five years later; but yet I can tell you no more now than that all I had felt about him was justified by what I heard. Part of what the world did not hear would not have seemed important to any but a priest; it was just the history of his own soul, apart from his deeds, the history of his wanton contempt of light and warnings. And I heard more besides, too, that I cannot bear to think of even now.”

The priest stopped again; and I could see his lips were trembling with emotion. We were all very quiet ourselves; the effect on my mind, at least, was extraordinary. Presently he went on:

“Before I left I persuaded him to go to confession. The man had not really lost faith for a moment, so far as I could gather. I learned from details that I cannot even hint at that he had known it all to be true, pitilessly clear in his worst moments. Grace had been prevailing especially of late, and he was sick of his life. Of course, he had tried to stifle conscience, but by the mercy of God he had failed. I cannot imagine why, except that there is no end to the loving kindness of God; but I have known many souls, not half so evil as his, lose their faith and their whole spiritual sense beyond all human hope of recovery.”

The priest stopped again, turned over several pages of his diary, and as he did so I saw him stop once or twice and read silently to himself, his lips moving.

“I must miss out a great deal here. He did not come to confession to me, but to a Carthusian, after a retreat. I need not go into all the details of that, so far as I knew them, and I will skip another six months.

“During that time I wrote to him more than once, and just got a line or two back. Then I was ordered abroad, and when we touched at Brindisi I received a letter from him.”

The priest lifted his diary again near his eyes.

“Here is one sentence,” he said; “listen.

“‘I know I am forgiven; but the punishment is driving me mad. What would you say if you knew all! I cannot write it. I wonder if we shall meet again. I wonder what you would say.’

“There was more that I cannot read; but it offers no explanation of this sentence. I wrote, of course, at once, and said I would be home in four months, and asked for an explanation. I did not hear again, though I wrote three or four times; and after three or four months in Malta I went back to England.

“My first visit was to Mr. Farquharson, when I had written to prepare him for my coming.”

The old man stopped again, and I could see he was finding it more and more difficult to speak. He looked at the diary again once or twice, but I could see that it was only to give himself time to recover. Then he lowered it once more, leaned his elbow on the chair arm and his head on his hand, and went on in a slow voice full of effort.

“The first change was in the gallery; its pictures were all gone, and in their place hung others—engravings and portraits of no interest or beauty that I could see. The crucifix was gone, and in its place stood another very simple and common—a plaster figure on a black cross. It was all very commonplace—such a room as you might see in any house. The man took me through as before, but instead of opening the studio door as I expected, turned up the stairs on the right, and I followed. He stopped at a little door at the end of a short passage, tapped, and threw it open. He announced my name and I went in.”

He paused once more.

“There was a Japanese screen in front of me, and I went round it, wondering what I should find. I caught a sight of a simple, commonplace room with a window looking out on my left, and then I saw an old man sitting in a high chair over the fire, on which boiled a saucepan, warming his hands, with a rug over his knees. His face was turned to me, but it was that of a stranger.

“There was a table between us, and I stood hesitating, on the point of apologizing, and the old man looked at me, smiling.

“‘You do not know me,’ he said.

“Then I saw he bore an odd sort of resemblance to Mr. Farquharson; and I supposed it was his father. That would account for the mistake, too, I thought in a moment. My letter must have been delivered to him instead.

“‘I came to see Mr. Farquharson,’ I said. ‘I beg your pardon if—’ Then he interrupted me. Well, you will guess—this was the man I had come to see.

“It took a minute or two before I could realize it. I swear to you that the man looked not ten, nor twenty, nor thirty, but fifty years older.

“I went and took his hand and sat down, but I could not say a word. Then he told me his story; and as he told it I watched him. I looked at his face; it had been full and generous in its lines, now the skin was drawn tightly over his cheeks and great square jaw. His hair, so much of it as escaped under his stuff cap, was snow white and like silk. His hands, stretched over the fire, were gnarled and veined and tremulous. And all this had come to him in less than one year.

“Well, this was his story: His health had failed abruptly within a month of my last sight of him. He had noticed weakness coming on soon after his reconciliation, and the failure of his powers had increased like lightning.

“I will tell you what first flashed into my mind—that it was merely a sudden, unprecedented breakdown that had first given room for grace to reassert itself, and had then normally gone forward. The life he had led—well, you understand.

“Then he told me a few more facts that soon put that thought out of my head. All his artistic powers had gone, too. He gave me an example.

“‘Look round this room,’ he said in his old man’s voice, ‘and tell me frankly what you think of it—the pictures, the furniture.’

“I did so, and was astonished at their ugliness. There were a couple of hideous oleographs on the wall opposite the window; perhaps you know them—of the tombs of our Lord and His Blessed Mother, with yellow candlesticks standing upon them. There were green baize curtains by the windows; an Axminster carpet of vivid colors on the floor; a mahogany table in the centre with a breviary upon it and a portfolio open. It was the kind of a room that you might find in twenty houses in a row on the outskirts of a colliery town.

“I supposed, of course, that he had furnished his room like this out of a morbid kind of mortification, and I hinted this to him.

“He smiled again, but he looked puzzled.

“‘No,’ he said; ‘indeed not. Then you do think them ugly, too? Well, well; it is that I do not care. Will you believe me when I tell you that? There is no asceticism in the matter. Those pictures seem to me as good as any others. I have sold the others.’

“‘But you know they are not good,’ I said.

“‘My friends tell me so, and I remember I used to think so once, too. But that has all gone. Besides, I like them.’

“He turned in his chair and opened the portfolio that lay by him.

“‘Look,’ he said, and pushed it over to me, watching my face as I took it.

“It was full of sheets of paper scrawled with such pictures as a stupid child might draw. There was not the faintest trace of any power in them. Here is one of them that he gave me.” (He drew out a paper from his diary and held it up.) “I will show it you presently.

“As I looked at them it suddenly struck me that all this was an elaborate pose. I suppose I showed the thought in the way I glanced up at him. At any rate, he knew it. He smiled again pitifully.

“‘No,’ he said; ‘it is not a pose. I have posed for forty years, but I have forgotten how to do it now. It does not seem to me worth while, either.’

“‘Are you happy?’ I asked.

“‘Oh, I suppose so,’ he said.

“I sat there bewildered.

“‘And music?’ I said.

“He made a little gesture with his old hands.

“‘Tell Jackson to let you see the piano in the studio,’ he said, ‘as you go downstairs. And you might look at the picture of Our Lady at Nazareth at the same time. You will see how I tried to go on with it. My friends tell me it is all wrong, and asked me to stop. I supposed they knew, so I have stopped.’

“Well, we talked a while, and I learned how all was with him. He believed with his whole being, and that was all. He received the sacraments once a week, and he was happy in a subdued kind of way. There was no ecstasy of happiness; there was no torment from the imagination, such as is usual in these cases of conversion. He had suffered agonies at first from the loss of his powers, as he realized that his natural perceptions were gone, and it was then that he had written to me.”

The Rector stopped again a moment, fingering the paper.

“I saw his doctor, of course, and——”

Monsignor broke in. I noticed that he had been listening intently.

“The piano and the picture,” he said.

“Ah, yes. Well, the piano was just a box of strings; many of the notes were broken, and the other wires were hopelessly out of tune. They were broken, the man told me, within a week or two of his master’s change of life. He spoke quite frankly to me. Mr. Farquharson had tried to play, it seemed, and could scarcely play a right note, and in a passion of anger it was supposed he had smashed the notes with his fists. And the picture—well, it was a miserable sight. There was a tawdry sort of crown, ill drawn and ill colored, on her head, and a terrible sort of cherub was painted all across the sky. Some one else, it seemed, had tried to paint these out, which increased the confusion.

“The doctor told me it was softening of the brain. I asked him honestly to tell me whether he had ever come across such a case before, and he confessed he had not.

“It took me a week or two, and another conversation with Mr. Farquharson, before I understood what it all meant. It was not natural, the doctor assured me, and it could scarcely be that Almighty God had arbitrarily inflicted such a punishment. And then I thought I understood, as no doubt you have all done before this.”

The old priest’s voice had an air of finality in his last sentence, and he handed the scrap of paper to Father Bianchi, who sat beside him.

“One moment, Father,” I said; “I do not understand at all.”

The priest turned to me, and his eyes were full of tears.

“Why, this is my reading of it,” he said; “the man had been one mass of corruption, body, mind, and soul. Every power of his had been nurtured on evil for thirty years. Then he made his effort and the evil was withdrawn, and—and—well, he fell to pieces. The only thing that was alive in him was the life of grace. There was nothing else to live. He died, too, three months later, tolerably happy, I think.”

As I pondered this the paper was handed to me, and I looked at it in bewildered silence. It was a head grotesque in its feebleness and lack of art. There was a crown of thorns about it, and an inscription in a child’s handwriting below:

Then my own eyes were full of tears, too.