Josephine Mary Hope-Scott Ward

“ I tripped up the little well-worn shallow steps, clothed in moss and tiny wild strawberry plants which had pushed their way between the chinks. As I stood facing the front door I had the garden on my right, and could see over the low wall that divided it from the terrace on which I stood, a bright vision of flowers, then the elm trees, the church tower, and, rising high above all, the purple moors crowned by the sunset. ”

“ Take it in his own favourite way, and call it the largest, the deepest, the widest expression of the religion of the human race. And to him, all he wants done is so perfectly simple. He knows so little of human nature; he has no philosophy of action, he leaves everything to ideas. Teach the young priests philosophy up to date, shake the Vatican like a bottle of medicine till you get the right things at the top, and you will have a Catholic Church made in Germany, and fit, according to him, to guide and to embody the thought of the human race. ”

“ So, in the sunshine, at the age of sixteen, I wrestled with the temptation to revolt against the long quiet years that I saw before me.
I think I did conquer. I prayed to my dear father, who would have understood me so well, I thought, who would surely have taken me away from Crowfield sometimes, who had liked my mother to have pretty frocks—whereas mine were hideous—and who would surely have wished me to see some people of my own age. And there is the pathos of it! My mother never told us of her difficulties simply because they were my father's fault. ”

“ I have had a river for a friend which spoke to me when men were dumb, which dried tears on the eyes that looked into it, which did not reason with an unsatisfied heart, and made no reproach to want of courage. Its voice has been to me the handmaiden of religion, soothing what was strained in nature, and the gentle companion of sorrow, when the human voice would have been intolerable. ”

“ To George Sutcliffe he talked of Church history, and to me the vividness of his word-pictures was astonishing. I remember wondering if it were with intention that he so often alluded to the use which great rulers and leaders made of the baser kind of humanity.
"You are such an Idealist," he said to George, "you should realise that in all ages there has been some one equivalent to the modern journalist. At one time he was a letter writer, at another a playwright, often a poet. At all times there needs must be interpreters between the thinker and the crowd." ”

“ My first introduction to this river was simply exhilarating: life flowed out of it, and its waters bubbled with delicious nonsense, as if it were chaffing, in schoolboy fashion, the old grey silence of the hilltops who loved its impertinence. It did not talk to me that evening, but I seemed to be drinking it in. Meanwhile the sky was flushing a deep rose, and the grass fields on either side were bright green, and the heather—the hills above on both sides were clad in heather now—glowed with its own wealth of colour that grew shadowy under the great stony masses higher up the ridges. ”

“ I cried, "and come out into the garden; you're quite cracked to-day."
But Mary had to read with Miss Mills, not having finished that process of not being educated, which was considered to be complete in my own case.
I went into the garden with Pascal's Pensées determined to rise to a higher level, but I couldn't. I was really not well; the air of the place was soft, and we were buried in fine conifers, great brutes of evergreens that are bad for body and soul. I could not understand a word of Pascal, and I was annoyed with myself for minding so very much about the frocks. ”

“ We both, and the donkey, paused and looked behind to see if Marcelle were coming.
"It is, as far as I can make out, the reform of the intellectual condition of the Church Catholic and Universal. I smell something of Christian Socialism in the business, which is not much in my line, but it is what attracts his sister. He regards Catholicism as the one hope for religion and order in the future—as the one effective defence against infidelity and anarchism. But the Church cannot triumph unless it assimilates modern science, and keeps its hold on the people. It must be scientific and democratic. ”

“ I remember at this time moments on the old bench in the wood, wild walks on the common, and slow pacing of the garden plot in front of the house, dull with mental pain. A mist had come over my prayers; I lay awake at night, and could not eat, which was for me the most surprising symptom of all. It was soon after Father Thompson came back, and perhaps at his suggestion, that my mother and old Miss Mills, the governess, first spoke of tonics and then of a change. I felt entirely indifferent as long as I was not again to be sent to anything like the party at Thornly. ”

“ Too much happiness is like too much sweet cake, I feel as if I wanted to swim in a rough sea or climb some rocks. What a comfort that Paul has such a friend ! I used to fear his being dropped into something — the sea, or a river, or a boiler, but le cher George wouldn't allow it Ah, Lisa, it is sweet to think of us all four together! I love to see Paul looking at you. ”

“ I have sat listening to him and watching the singular gleam when he seems to have an eye within an eye which sees a vision not granted to others—the vision of a Church, glorious and conquering, the expression and the crown of a complete world of knowledge, where the human and the Divine clash no more even seemingly. ”

“ Marcelle and I felt when they had gone, that the weather and the circumstances justified dawdling under the elms at the bottom of the garden.
"There is a sense of freedom in having parted with them," she said, while a tear still lingered on her eyelashes." ”

“ In a solitary life anybody may make an impression, almost anybody becomes important, and young people especially are too much at the mercy of books. The monotony of our days went on, almost unbroken, for nearly three years. It was tacitly assumed that I had come out, and that my one party had been a foretaste of gaieties to follow in some vague future. The schoolroom had become more and more of a fiction even for Mary, who was almost eighteen. My mother and my governess let me go my own way in my studies, and I spent whole days in reading. ”

“ Poor father, he died leaving a beautiful will, and a handsome jointure for my mother, but for my half-brother there was a fine old property gone to rack and ruin, and the sound investments, independent of land, that had been the mainstay of the family since the days of the East India Company, had simply ceased to exist. My half-brother John was not exactly a chivalrous character, and he certainly had his trials. There must have been much that was painful, but nothing coarse or angry could be associated with the broken-hearted widow. ”

“ Sutcliffe was by nature a man of action. But circumstances had made him realise that the field for action in the present day for all who are interested in religion is an intellectual one. If he had lived only among his own kinsfolk, or if he had continued in the Navy, he would never in all probability have become interested in the subjects that drew him into friendship with the Comte d'Etranges. ”

“ Marcelle turned round delighted. "Tiens, comme c'est Anglais, you are the most material people; fancy Paul remembering £40,—ah, mais c'est trop fort, another £40 to you is to mean another day's starvation to the witch."
"I wish you could just send her something, and let me do my work," said Mr. Sutcliffe weakly.
"Send!" she cried, "why it is twelve miles off at the least; besides, it is so beautiful, I have wanted for so long to see that valley."
"And Miss Fairfax is to walk twelve miles?" he said. ”

“ Sutcliffe. He and I, and the donkey, were waiting in a steep street of a nominal village of scattered grey stone cottages and innumerable low walls of reddish brown stones without mortar. A little crowd of children gathered about us as Marcelle dashed in and out of cottages trying to make a few dull old people she could find direct us to the witch's cottage. Happily we knew also that the witch bore the very ordinary name of Mrs. Brown.
"It is part of a plot," she exclaimed to us in French as she came out of the last cottage; "they will not let us find her and help her." ”

“ Madame d'Etranges after she became Madame de Pourcelles parted very unwillingly with her daughter, and did all she could to take care of her from a distance. Marcelle d'Etranges, after a couple of years spent in Germany with her brother, came to England, which was Paul's maternal country, with him. Madame de Pourcelles had in vain tried to make some social relations for her daughter in Germany. She and Paul were determined to be independent, and to mix with a world quite unknown to her mother—a world of savants, of thinkers, and of students. ”

“ I leant back, very still, in a luxury of enjoyment that was not without the young element of surprise. "After all," the music seemed to say, "this world is not always dull, work-a-day, matter of fact, and the men and women in it are in reality beautiful. This great earth can be very still, and music is the soul of it." At last the sleepy head of Jacques put itself in at the drawing-room door.
"Night prayers," said the Count rising.
"Oh, dear!" said Marcelle, "must there always be prayers?"
George Sutcliffe came out on the terrace. "Don't let her go to prayers," he said, looking at me. ”

“ The long, northern summer twilight had faded at last, and there was darkness clinging about the old walls. Deep shadows without edges lay about us, and clear skies that lit us dimly without rays of light drew our eyes to the skyline of the moors high above us on either side of the valley. ”

“ His life is almost alarmingly complete; he sleeps, and eats, and walks, simply to keep the machine in better order to subserve his mission. And yet"—and Mr. Sutcliffe sighed and looked half-humorously perplexed—"sometimes I think his ideas are all sheer moonshine, and a form of madness that may spoil one's own small bit of work for the Church in helping to reconcile the new learning of these days with the eternal truths she has to guard. At other times I feel as if he were the God-sent thinker to do that very work. ”

“ Now they think it a duty not to retire. Then such unfortunate little extras as Mary and myself were still looked on, chiefly, as being likely to prove a comfort to the mother in her retirement. Now everything would be arranged with a view to their opening lives. Oh, but as the years went on at Crowfield life was dull, dull, dull! The governess, dear little Miss Mills, was dull, the lessons were dull, the meals were deadly dull. And the life had no outlet! It was the want of hope that made even my limbs ache that spring morning on the mossy bench. ”

“ Sutcliffe as I got to know him afterwards. Perhaps it is easier to be unreserved with an almost total stranger, than it is later on when further intimacy has revealed to us the complications that divide all minds, unless there is a special union of the heart. We were silent, and I felt a friendly glow towards the man at my side as we went slowly forwards until Marcelle overtook us. ”

“ As some men who have been thrown across physical horrors give up their whole lives to the struggle to diminish, however little, the misery they have seen, George Sutcliffe, after his friendship with Mrs. Telles, threw himself heart and soul into the controversies between the Christian ethics and the pagan. ”

“ He wanted them to understand how the usual text-books used by Catholics in this country, were not only inadequate to express the great truths of religion, but were almost unintelligible to those who had been educated in the language of a new civilisation. That that civilisation might be decadent and morbid was not the point, the point being that it was in possession of the minds of men. Greek may be a finer language than English, but it is not usually of so much use in dealing with the inhabitants of the British Isles. ”

“ Do trees growing beside other rivers bend quite so low, and so persistently keep their branches in the water, like children leaning over a boat's side for the pleasure of the trickle through their fingers? ”

“ Sutcliffe severely; "but why, since this new fancy, do you go barefoot out-of-doors and wear shoes indoors?"
"Why, because of needles,—cows don't drop needles," retorted Mademoiselle d'Etranges as she left the room. Mr. George Sutcliffe looked at her retreating back with the sun-bonnet hanging over her shoulder and then at me, and smiled and almost winked. "But you are too tired to enjoy any of it yet," he said. "By this time she has probably forgotten all about us, and the main fact is that you must have some tea. Tea is by no means easy to get here. ”