Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/53

Rh Mr. Sutcliffe was at this time about thirty, and as I had told Mary three years before, he could not be said to be handsome. His figure was tall, broad and muscular, the arms a little too long and the head decidedly too large to be in proportion. His features were squarely cut and rather heavy, and the eyes were small, but the glance was full of life and he had a sweet smile. We used to tease him, when I knew him better, about a certain unconscious ferocity of expression he sometimes fell into. We declared that he was the image of a most ferocious and prominent figure in an old picture hanging in a passage at Peak Hall, representing a press-gang going about to devour the harmless countrymen during the Napoleonic wars. Marcelle once said that when he came into the room giving a big laugh at some joke of his own, he made her think of a group of Englishmen in Shakespeare's historical plays. "Enter the Earls of Suffolk, Gloucester and Hereford." That Mr. Sutcliffe had been in the Navy was proved by his walk, but he had not the preciseness and neatness of a sailor, and he was curiously indifferent to big or small possessions; he had not even a favourite pocket-knife or an old watch. Yet there was much about him of the schoolboy, and at times it seemed impossible to make him serious. He would have jested on the scaffold, like Sir Thomas More, and have gone there quite as readily. As a Catholic he was indeed in the true English style. For if he would have died with More for the Papal prerogatives, he would have died as willingly in the defence of his country against the Spanish Armada. Very humble and very independent, he owed both characteristics to the absolute clearness of his faith.

Mr. 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