Card-playing and novel-reading were not the only cases in which Mr.
Hazard took a liberal view of his functions. His theology belonged to
the high-church school, and in the pulpit he made no compromise with the
spirit of concession, but in all ordinary matters of indifference or of
innocent pleasure he gave the rein to his instincts, and in regard to
art he was so full of its relations with religion that he would admit of
no divergence between the two. Art and religion might take great
liberties with each other, and both be the better for it, as he thought.
His thirteenth-century ideas led him into a curious experiment which was
quite in the thirteenth-century spirit. Catherine's insatiable spirit of
coquetry was to blame, although it was not with him that she coquetted.
Ready enough to try her youthful powers on most men, she had seemed to
recognize by instinct that Mr. Hazard did not belong to her. Yet she
could not rest satisfied without putting even him to some useful purpose
of her own.
During Hazard's visits to the scaffold, he sometimes took up a pencil
and drew. Once he drew a sketch of Wharton in the character of a monk
with his brush and pallet in his hands. Catherine asked what connection
there was between Mr. Wharton and a monastery.
"None!" replied Mr. Hazard; "but I like to think of church work as done
by churchmen. In the old days he would have been a monk and would have
painted himself among these figures on the walls.
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