CHAPTER XLIII

ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF PENANCE

His customary wrestle with the night drove Lord Fleetwood in the stillness of the hour after matins from his hated empty Esslemont up again to the village of the long-lived people, enjoying the moist earthiness of the air off the ironstone.  He rode fasting, a good preparatory state for the simple pleasures, which are virtually the Great Nourisher’s teats to her young.  The earl was relieved of his dejection by a sudden filling of his nostrils.  Fat Esslemont underneath had no such air.  Except on the mornings of his walk over the Salzkammergut and Black Forest regions, he had never consciously drawn that deep breath of the satisfied rapture, charging the whole breast with thankfulness.  Huntsmen would know it, if the chase were not urgent to pull them at the tail of the running beast.  Once or twice on board his yacht he might have known something like it, but the salt sea-breeze could not be disconnected from his companion Lord Feltre, and a thought of Feltre swung vapour of incense all about him.  Breathing this air of the young sun’s kiss of earth, his invigoration repelled the seductions of the burnt Oriental gums.

Besides, as he had told his friend, it was the sincerity of the Catholic religion, not the seductiveness, that won him to a form of homage—­the bend of the head of a foreign observer at a midnight mass.  Asceticism, though it may not justify error, is a truth in itself, it is the essence extracted of the scourge, flesh vanquished; and it stands apart from controversy.  Those monks of the forested mountain heights, rambling for their herbs, know the blessedness to be found in mere breathing:  a neighbour readiness to yield the breath inspires it the more.  For when we do not dread our end, the sense of a free existence comes back to us:  we have the prized gift to infancy under the piloting of manhood.  But before we taste that happiness we must perform our penance; ’No living happiness can be for the unclean,’ as the holy father preached to his flock of the monastery dispersing at matins.

Ay, but penance? penance?  Is there not such a thing as the doing of penance out of the Church, in the manly fashion?  So to regain the right to be numbered among the captains of the world’s fighting men, incontestably the best of comrades, whether or no they led away on a cataract leap at the gates of life.  Boldly to say we did a wrong will clear our sky for a few shattering peals.

The penitential act means, youth put behind us, and a steady course ahead.  But, for the keeping of a steady course, men made of blood in the walks of the world must be steadied.  Say it plainly-mated.  There is the humiliating point of our human condition.  We must have beside us and close beside us the woman we have learned to respect; supposing ourselves lucky enough to have found her; ’that required other