Brother Copas Part 4

"Hallo, Warboise! Halt, and give the countersign!"

Brother Warboise halted, taken at unawares, and eyed the two doubtfully from under his bushy grey eyebrows. They were Beauchamp both, he Blanchminster. He wore the black cloak of Blanchminster, with the silver cross _patte_ at the breast, and looked--so Copas murmured to himself--"like Caiaphas in a Miracle Play." His mouth was square and firm, his grey beard straightly cut. He had been a stationer in a small way, and had come to grief by vending only those newspapers of which he could approve the religious tendency.

"The countersign?" he echoed slowly and doubtfully.

He seldom understood Brother Copas, but by habit suspected him of levity.

"To be sure, among three good Protestants! '_b.l.o.o.d.y end to the Pope!_' is it not?"

"You are mocking me," snarled Brother Warboise, and with that struck the point of his staff pa.s.sionately upon the pathway. "You are a Gallio, and always will be: you care nothing for what is heaven and earth to us others. But you have no right to infect Bonaday, here, with your poison. He has promised me." Brother Warboise faced upon Brother Bonaday sternly, "You promised me, you know you did."

"To be sure he promised you," put in Brother Copas. "He has just been telling me."

"And I am going to hold him to it! These are not times for falterers, halters between two opinions. If England is to be saved from coming a second time under the yoke of Papacy, men will have to come out in their true colours. He that is not for us is against us."

Brother Copas reeled in a fathom of line with a contemplative, judicial air.

"Upon my word, Warboise, I'm inclined to agree with you. I don't pretend to share your Protestant fervour: but hang it!

I'm an Englishman with a sense of history, and that is what no single one among your present-day High Anglicans would appear to possess.

If a man wants to understand England he has to start with one or two simple propositions, of which the first--or about the first--is that England once had a reformation, and is not going to forget it.

But that is just what these fellows would make-believe to ignore.

A fool like Colt--for at bottom, between ourselves, Colt is a fool-- says 'Reformation? There was no such thing: we don't acknowledge it.' As the American said of some divine who didn't believe in eternal punishment, 'By gosh, he'd better not!'"

"But England _is_ forgetting it!" insisted Brother Warboise.

"Look at the streams of Papist monks she has allowed to pour in ever since France took a strong line with her monastic orders.

Look at those fellows--College of St. John Lateran, as they call themselves--who took lodgings only at the far end of this village.

In the inside of six months they had made friends with everybody."

"They employ local tradesmen, and are particular in paying their debts, I'm told."

"Oh," said Brother Warboise, "They're cunning!"

Brother Copas gazed at him admiringly, and shot a glance at Brother Bonaday. But Brother Bonaday's eyes had wandered off again to the skimming swallows.

"Confessed Romans and their ways," said Brother Warboise, "one is prepared for, but not for these wolves in sheep's clothing.

Why, only last Sunday-week you must have heard Colt openly preaching the confessional!"

"I slept," said Brother Copas. "But I will take your word for it."

"He did, I a.s.sure you; and what's more--you may know it or not--Royle and Biscoe confess to him regularly."

"They probably tell him nothing worse than their suspicions of you and me. Colt is a vain person walking in a vain show."

"You don't realise the hold they are getting. Look at the money they squeeze out of the public; the churches they restore, and the new ones they build. And among these younger Anglicans, I tell you, Colt is a force."

"My good Warboise, you have described him exactly. He is a force-- and nothing else. He will bully and beat you down to get his way, but in the end you can always have the consolation of presenting him with the shadow, which he will unerringly mistake for the substance.

I grant you that to be bullied and beaten down is d.a.m.nably unpleasant discipline, even when set off against the pleasure of fooling such a fellow as Colt. But when a man has to desist from pursuit of pleasure he develops a fine taste for consolations: and this is going to be mine for turning Protestant and backing you in this business."

"_You?_"

"Your accent is so little flattering, Warboise, that I hardly dare to add the condition. Yet I will. If I stand in with you in resisting Colt, you must release Bonaday here. Henceforth he's out of the quarrel."

"But I do not understand." Brother Warboise regarded Brother Copas from under his stiff grey eyebrows. "Why should Bonaday back out?"

"That is his affair," answered Brother Copas smoothly, almost before Brother Bonaday was aware of being appealed to.

"But--you don't mind my saying it--I've never considered you as a Protestant, quite; not, at least, as an earnest one."

"That," said Brother Copas, "I may be glad to remember, later on.

But come; I offer you a bargain. Strike off Bonaday and enlist me.

A volunteer is proverbially worth two pressed men; and as a Protestant I promise you to s.h.i.+ne. If you must have my reason, or reasons, say that I am playing for safety."

Here Brother Copas laid down his rod on the gra.s.sy bank and felt for his snuff-box. As he helped himself to a pinch he slyly regarded the faces of his companions; and his own, contracting its muscles to take the dose, seemed to twist itself in a sardonic smile.

"Unlike Colt," he explained, "I read history sometimes, and observe its omens. You say that our clergy are active just now in building and restoring churches. Has it occurred to you that they were never so phenomenally active in building and rebuilding as on the very eve of the Reformation crash? Ask and inquire, my friend, what proportion of our English churches are Perpendicular; get from any handbook the date of that style of architecture; and apply the omen if you will."

"That sounds rea.s.suring," said Brother Warboise. "And so you really think we Protestants are going to win?"

"G.o.d forbid! What I say is, that the High Anglicans will probably lose."

"One never knows when you are joking or when serious." Brother Warboise, leaning on his staff, pondered Brother Copas's face.

It was a fine face; it even resembled the conventional portrait of Dante, but--I am asking the reader to tax his imagination--with humorous wrinkles set about the eyes, their high austerity clean taken away and replaced by a look of very mundane shrewdness, and lastly a grosser chin and mouth with a touch of the laughing faun in their folds and corners. "You are concealing your real reasons,"

said Brother Warboise.

"That," answered Brother Copas, "has been defined for the true function of speech. . . . But I am quite serious this time, and I ask you again to let Brother Bonaday off and take me on. You will find it worth while."

Brother Warboise could not see for the life of him why, at a time when it behoved all defenders of the reformed religion to stand shoulder to shoulder, Brother Bonaday should want to be let off.

"No?" said Brother Copas, picking up his rod again. "Well, those are my terms . . . and, excuse me, but was not that a fish over yonder?

They are beginning to rise. . . ."

Brother Warboise muttered that he would think it over, and resumed his walk.

"He'll agree, safe enough. And now, no more talking!"

But after a cast or two Brother Copas broke his own injunction.

"A Protestant! . . . I'm doing a lot for you, friend. But you must go to the Master this very evening. No time to be lost, I tell you!

Why, if he consent, there are a score of small things to be bought to make the place fit for a small child. Get out pencil and paper and make a list. . . . Well, where do we begin?"

"I--I'm sure I don't know," confessed Brother Bonaday helplessly.

"I never, so to speak, had a child before, you see."

"Nor I . . . but d.a.m.n it, man, let's do our best and take things in order! When she arrives--let me see--the first thing is, she'll be hungry. That necessitates a small knife and fork. Knife, fork and spoon; regular G.o.dfather's gift. You must let me stand G.o.dfather and supply 'em. You don't happen to know if she's been christened, by the way?"

"No--o. I suppose they look after these things in America?"

"Probably--after a fas.h.i.+on," said Brother Copas with a fine smile.