Dominic Iglesias

“ Iglesias answered quietly.
"We can't talk here, though," Smyth said. "That blundering ass of a waiter will be coming in directly; and whatever he overhears is sure to go the round of the house. All servants are spies."
"We can go up to my sitting-room and talk there," Iglesias replied.
Yet he was conscious of making the proposal with reluctance, pity struggling against repulsion. For not only was the man's appearance very unkempt, but his manner and bearing were eloquent of a certain desperation. Of anything approaching physical fear Dominic Iglesias was happily incapable. ”

“ Later, journeying westward upon the 'bustop, Dominic Iglesias meditated in a spirit of humorous pity upon the above conversation. He was very glad he had not lost his temper. Eyes blinded by self-worship, an inpenetrable hide, these things, too, have their uses in time—very practical uses, which it would be silly to ignore. Why, then, be angry? ”

“ The Latin, unlike the Anglo-Saxon, does not consider it necessary as soon as adolescence is past to extirpate his heart; or, failing successful performance of that heroic operation, strictly to limit the activities of it to his amours, legitimate or otherwise. Hence Dominic Iglesias felt no shame that the sight of his old plaything, or of his old school-fellow—now unhappily estranged from and suspicious of him—should provoke in him a great tenderness. ”

“ The neighbours on both sides are away for the holidays, thank the powers! and their houses stand empty. While the voices and footsteps down in the road only make us more happily alone. So tell me things, Dominic. I am a trifle stirred up with all this affair of the theatre, and you always quiet me. I'm really a very good child. I deserve a treat. And there are things I dreadfully want to know."
"Alas! there is so absurdly little to tell," Iglesias answered, "that, here and now, in face of my existing sense of life and of vision, I am humbled by my own ignorance and poverty of achievement. ”

“ For in the last nine months Dominic Iglesias' habits and outlook had changed notably. The values were altered. It would be far harder to return to the monotonous routine of business life now—even though a fine revenge, a delicate heaping of coals of fire, accompanied that return—than it had been to part company with it last year. Loneliness, the emptiness induced by absence of definite employment, no longer oppressed him. ”

“ Modern Protestantism might eventuate in Rationalism, in a limiting of human endeavour exclusively to the end of material well-being. But this worship of the pseudo-sciences, this tinkering at the accepted foundations and accepted decencies of the social order, this cultivation of intellectual and moral chaos, could, for the vast majority of its professors at all events, eventuate only in the mad-house. And to the mad-house, whether by twentieth-century esoteric airship or occult subway, Dominic Iglesias had not the very smallest desire to go. ”

“ The air, as Iglesias met it—he occupying the seat on the right immediately behind that of the driver—was soft, yet with a perceptible freshness of moisture in it; a cool, wistful wind seeming to hail from very far, the wings of it laden less with hopeful promise than with rare unspoken farewells, gentle yet penetrating regrets; so that Dominic, even while welcoming the refreshment of it, was moved in spirit with impressions of impending finality as though it spoke to him of things finished, laid aside, not wholly without sorrow relinquished and—so far as outward seeming went—forgot. ”

“ Reginald, in virtue of his youth, his energy, and relentless concentration of purpose, had rapidly become the ruling spirit of the house of Barking Brothers & Barking. Iglesias had no cause to love him, since to him he owed his dismissal. But that fact failed to colour his present meditations. Under the influence of his cherished and new-found charity, Dominic had little time or inclination for personal resentment. Too, the habits of the best part of a lifetime cannot be thrown aside in a day. ”

“ The claims of the body become dominant; and the exalted moment is too often paid for sorrowfully enough in sluggish brain and irritated nerves. Dominic, however, had not reached that stage of the tragi-comedy of the marriage of flesh and spirit. He was happy, with the white unearthly happiness of those who have been admitted to the Sacred Mysteries. And it was not without a sense of shock, as of rough descent to common things, of pity and of regret, that he recognised good George Lovegrove cruising thus, elephantine, among the roystering babes. Then Iglesias checked himself sternly. ”

“ Females are very sensitive, and it would have hurt her to know all I felt. If the Almighty is good enough to give a man a faithful woman to look after him, he can't be too scrupulous in sparing her pain—at least, so I think." Suddenly his tone changed. "But you are not going to leave us, Dominic?—you are not going to move, I do hope?"
He was mindful of his promise to Eliza Hart, but he was also mindful of himself. It had occurred to him for how very much in the interest and pleasure of his life Dominic Iglesias really stood.
"Why, should you regret my going? Should you miss me?" ”

“ And so it came about that Dominic Iglesias followed Poppy St. John upstairs—she moving rapidly, in a way defiantly—followed her into a bedchamber, where a subtle sweetness of orris-root met him; and a fantastic brightness of gaslight and moonlight, coming in through open windows, chequered the handsome dark-polished brass-inlaid furniture, the green silk coverlet and hangings, the dimly patterned ceiling and walls. Without hesitation or apology, Poppy walked straight through this apartment, and passed out on to the white-planked and white-railed balcony. ”

“ Iglesias inquired. "Are you beginning to quarrel a little with your blessings?"
George Lovegrove became very serious.
"Yes," he said, "I am afraid you are right. As usual you have laid your finger on the spot. I do reproach myself for unthankfulness often. I know I have a good home, and everything decent and respectable about me; more so, indeed, than a man in my position has any right to expect. And yet I regret the old days in the city, Dominic, that I do. ”

“ Dominic Iglesias had listened to this astonishing tirade in silence. The man was evidently suffering from feelings of bitter injury, also he was his—Iglesias'—guest. Both pity and hospitality engaged him to endurance. But there are limits. And at this point professional dignity and a lingering loyalty towards the house of Barking Brothers & Barking enjoined protest.
"No doubt we live in times of commerce, rather than in those of chivalry," he remarked. "Still, I venture to think your condemnation is too sweeping. One should discriminate surely between trade and finance." ”

“ She looked meaningly at Dominic Iglesias as she spoke. And he looked back at her gravely and kindly, though with a slightly amused smile. His thoughts had travelled away—they had done so pretty frequently during the last twenty-four hours—to the smirking self-conscious little house on the verge of Barnes Common. Unpromising though it had appeared outwardly, yet within it he believed he had found a friend—a friend who was also an enigma. Perhaps, as he now reflected, all women are enigmas. Certainly they are amazingly different. He thought of Poppy. He looked at Serena. ”

“ While, as arrayed in a crisp black muslin gown—the frills and panels of it painted with shaded crimson roses and bronze-green leaves—Poppy St. John ministered to her guest, chattered to, and rallied him, her eyes were extraordinarily dark and luminous, and her voice rich in soft caressing tones. Never had she appeared more engaging, more natural and human, never stronger yet more tenderly gay. Dominic Iglesias yielded himself up gladly, gratefully, to the charm of the woman and to the comfort of his surroundings. Temperate in all things, he was temperate in enjoyment. ”

“ This verdict of a fair-minded and highly competent Protestant church historian on the most controverted point of Dominic’s career is of great value. His method was to travel over the country on foot and barefooted, in extreme poverty, simplicity and austerity, preaching and instructing in highways and villages and towns, and in the castles of the nobility, controverting and discussing with the heretics. He used often to organize formal disputations with Albigensian leaders, lasting a number of days. Many times plots were laid against his life. ”

“ Here the first convent of Dominican friars was established, and the spot is historic ground in the annals of the order of Preachers. In the turbulent thirteenth century, when papal, feudal and democratic parties opposed each other in Rome, and the vigorous sap of half-tamed barbarian life still coursed through the pulses of Italy, Saint Dominic rose like a reformer, a lawgiver and a peace-maker. ”

“ Before his time, every bishop was a sort of Inquisitor in his own diocese; but Dominic contrived to incorporate a body of men, independent of every human being, except the Pope, for the express purpose of ensnaring and destroying Christians. He was well aware, that however loudly the priests declaimed against heresy, the lords of the soil would not suffer them to butcher their tenants under any such vain pretences. ”

“ To humble themselves, remembering their own great unworthiness, to come down from the Mount of Transfiguration to the dwellers in the plain, and be gentle and human towards them—this surely is the primary duty of those who have assisted at the Divine Sacrament? And so Iglesias went forward and hailed his old school-fellow in all tenderness and friendship, causing the latter to raise his eyes from pathetic contemplation of those charming but wholly self-absorbed small human animals, and look up. ”

“ Both saints, as they are impiously called, were commanded by the Pope, "to excite the Catholic princes and people to extirpate heretics; in all places to inquire into their number and quality; and to transmit a faithful account to Rome." Hence they were called Inquisitors.
The erection of that extraordinary court, "the Inquisition," is, indeed, uniformly ascribed to Dominic, a man of the most blood-thirsty disposition, and whose deeds of cruelty may not unjustly be compared with those of the infamous Nero. Dominic was born at the village of Cabaroga, in Spain, in the [Pg 16] year 1170. ”

“ The Waldenses and Albigenses had been used to reproach the clergy of the Church for their habits of pomp and luxury; and Dominic had done what he could to meet these charges by the plainness and hardness of the life which he and his companions led while labouring in the south of France. And when he resolved to found a new order of monks, he carried the notion of poverty to an extreme. His followers were to be not only poor, but beggars. They were to live on alms, and from day to day, refusing any gifts of money so large as to give the notion of a settled provision for their needs. ”

“ Dominic was an organizer and statesman. There was a strain of ecclesiastical anarchism in the early Franciscan Order; certain “spiritual” Franciscans of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century rebelled against religious authority as no Dominicans have ever done. Where the Italian saint puts an example ahead of precept, the Spaniard put precept ahead of example. To him the weakness of the Church was that not enough of her clergy [Pg 195] knew thoroughly her doctrine and were able to teach it. For him, as for the prophet Hosea, the “... people were destroyed for lack of knowledge.” ”

“ Towards the end of the war Dominic established a brotherhood which should devote itself to preaching with a view to refuting heretics. In 1215 he appeared at the Lateran Council, in order to obtain the papal approbation of this new Order. Innocent III, while taking under his protection the monastery of Prouille, desired Dominic to choose an already existing rule for his new community. The Dominican legend depicts Innocent as converted to the recognition of the Order by a dream, in which he saw the Lateran Church tottering and upheld by the support of the Spanish saint. ”

“ Dominic, they ravaged the provinces of Languedoc, Narbonne, and Dauphiny, to exterminate the heretics, as they called those true Christians who would not subject themselves to the dominion of the pope.
The Order of the Dominicans can boast of many men of great talent; yet they allowed themselves to be seduced from the primitive mode of worship, and to become in their turn seducers, to perpetuate this absurd system. It is from them125 that every thing most foolish and malignant in the barbarous ages, both in Spain and Italy, has been continued down to our own times. ”

“ But—but—there's one thing I should like to know—when I told you my name just now—Poppy St. John, Mrs. St. John—you remember?"
"I remember," he said.
"Well, didn't it convey—didn't it mean anything special to you?"
"I am afraid not," Iglesias answered. "You must pardon my ignorance, since I have lived very much out of the world. I know nothing of society."
"So much the better. The world is a vastly overrated place, and society is about the biggest fraud going." ”

“ Augustine, because he had deprived them of some Sangley shops in Tondo—and for other private feelings of resentment. They carried the torch into that meeting, making the encounter between the governor and the archbishop a political matter; consequently, they expressed the opinion that the censures should not be raised under any circumstances. A religious of St. Dominic said that they ought to last for five hundred years, while another added “even to the end of the world.” ”