of her discovery of this came early, and it is only
she, perhaps, who could tell how the strange bond
wove itself that drew her being—the Magdalene’s—to
the priest who sat behind a lady in swansdown and
chiffon in the upper box nearest to the stage on the
right. The beginnings of such things are untraceable,
but the fact may be considered in connection with
this one that Hamilton Bradley, who represented, as
we have been told he would, the Chief Character, did
it upon lines very recognisably those of the illustrations
of sacred books, very correct as to the hair and beard
and pictured garment of the Galilean; with every accent
of hollow-eyed pallor and inscrutable remoteness,
with all the thin vagueness, too, of a popular engraving,
the limitations and the depression. Under it
one saw the painful inconsistency of the familiar
Hamilton Bradley of other presentations, and realised
with irritation, which must have been tenfold in Hilda,
how he rebelled against the part. Perhaps this
was enough in itself to send her dramatic impulse to
another focus, and the strangeness of the adventure
was a very thing she would delight in. Whatever
may be said about it, while yet the shock of the woman’s
earthly passion with its divine object was receding
from Arnold’s mind before the exquisite charm
and faithfulness of the worshipping Magdalene, he
became aware that in some special way he sat judging
and pitying her. She had hardly lifted her eyes
to him twice, yet it was he, intimately he, who responded
as if from afar off, to the touch of her infinite
solicitude and abasement, the joy and the shame of
her love. As he watched and knew, his lips tightened
and his face paled with the throb of his own renunciation,
he folded his celibate arms in the habit of his brotherhood,
and was caught up into a knowledge and an imitation
of how the spotless Original would have looked upon
a woman suffering and transported thus. The
poverty of the play faded out; he became almost unaware
of the pinchbeck and the fustian of Patullo’s
invention, and its insufferable mixture with the fabric
of which every thread was precious beyond imagination.
He looked down with tender patience and compassion
upon the development of the woman’s intrigue
in the palace, through the very flower of her crafts
and guiles, to save Him who had transfigured her from
the hands of the rabble and the high priests; he did
not even shrink from the inexpressibly grating note
of the purified Magdalene’s final passionate
tendering of her personal sacrifice to the enamoured
Pilate as the price of His freedom, and when at the
last she wept at His feet where He lay bound and delivered,
and wrapped them, in the agony of her abandonment,
in the hair of her head, the priest’s lips almost
moved in words other than those of the playwright—
words that told her he knew the height and the depth
of her sacrifice and forgave it, “Neither do
I condemn thee . . .” In his exultation
he saw what it was to perform miracles, to remit sins.