CHAPTER XIII
After the dull day and the storm a bright sun broke through the clouds and slanted in long mellow rays across the wet country. Every flower and herb gave out scent, and there was a sense of indescribable sweet freshness in the air as Andy stood at the gate leading into the Stamfords’ garden, and looked at the village through a gap in the trees.
The little whitewashed houses and red-brick ones, grown lovely with time, clustered together round the grey church among the trees, in a bower of small flowery gardens and climbing roses and honeysuckle. Andy saw then, why some poet once upon a time had looked at it so, and called it Gaythorpe: though the present generation jeered at the name being given to a place that was over three miles from a station and had no modern improvements.
“Gay!” they would say. “Call this gay? Now, Blackpool’s gay, if you like.”
But Andy walked up to the Stamfords’ door with a very tender feeling in his heart for the little place that smiled in the sunshine after rain, with something of the exquisite pathetic radiance of a child laughing through tears.
From that moment he loved Gaythorpe – the place itself – apart from the people, or his work amongst them.
When he entered the drawing-room Mrs. Stamford was there alone, as she had been on the first occasion that he took a meal in the house, and her appearance in evening dress was just of the same startlingly unfinished kind as her day attire. By some accident somebody seemed to have thrown a necklace round her neck and it had remained – but it was quite impossible to feel that Mrs. Stamford had had anything to do with its getting there. And her hair was somehow a distinct protest against the low neck, though it would have been impossible to picture her at that hour of the day in anything but a low neck.
She glanced out of the window after greeting Andy, and remarked —
“This rain will do old Sam Petch’s garden good. He cried yesterday when my husband went to see him because his marigolds were dried up. I fear he is failing at last.”
Andy looked at her, and suddenly he saw too, how the Stamfords and Gaythorpe were one – welded together by generations of common interests. It was as natural for Mr. Stamford to drive down to see old Sam Petch as it was for him to sit in his own garden.
Andy recalled the “visiting of the poor,” which he had heard and seen, and knew that he was witnessing the last of a vanishing system which may or may not have been good but was quite certainly beautiful.
“Mr. Stamford takes a great interest in old Sam Petch,” was all Andy found to say out of these many thoughts.
“Interest!” said Mrs. Stamford. “Why, old Sam worked for my husband’s grandfather, and he used to make whistles out of cabbage-stalks for Dick when he was a boy.” She paused. “By the way, I’m so glad you and Dick are friends.” She paused again. “If there is anything at all you are wanting for the church or village – ”
Andy smiled at her in a way most women would have found pleasant.
“There’s nothing I want. And I’m only too delighted to come up for a game of billiards whenever your son asks me.”
Another of those unspoken conversations – full of difficult pride and mother-love on the one side, and touched recognition of it on the other – but perfectly clear to both.
A very rare colour crept up into Mrs. Stamford’s weather-beaten cheeks.
“He’s all we have,” she said.
“I know,” Andy answered.
Then the other two came in, and they all went through the atmosphere of reposeful centuries to dinner, when the conversation dragged sufficiently for Andy to search his mind for a fresh topic, and he introduced his aunt and cousins with a feeling that this was just what they would like. And he was quite sure Mrs. Stamford would like them, for they were social lights fitted to adorn any circle, and such very stylish dressers.
He did not say this in so many words, but his boyish gratitude to his aunt and admiration for the Webster girls shone sufficiently clearly through the remarks he did make to cause Mrs. Stamford’s cordial —
“I shall be delighted if you will bring your aunt and cousins to lunch with us.”
Andy little knew how seldom such an invitation was issued by his exclusive hostess, and he was conscious of promising equal enjoyment to both entertainer and entertained when he replied gratefully —
“Thank you very much. I am sure they would like to come.”
Soon afterwards the two young men adjourned to the billiard-room, while Mr. Stamford went to his sofa, exhausted by one of his painful and tedious days which became more frequent as time went on, and Mrs. Stamford played with determination certain hard pieces on the piano to distract the invalid, not because they gave her the slightest pleasure, but because it was the duty of a wife to play music to her sick husband if she knew how.
Through a series of open doors the sound of correct and metallic “runs” penetrated even to the billiard-room, and caused Dick Stamford to remark irreverently —
“There’s the mater giving the poor old dad piano exercise again. She does believe in keeping things going.”
He was walking to a little table containing whisky and soda and cigars as he said this, and he raised the whisky decanter, tilted it over the glass, then paused an irresolute second and put it down with the remark —
“She’s a good sort, is the mater, all the same.”
Andy turned away his head and answered casually —
“Anybody can tell that.”
But his whole being was filled with a sudden rush of pity and comprehension and an intense desire to help. He felt he could go on for ever walking interminable miles round that billiard-table if it could do any good. He wanted, almost more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, to do something which should strengthen this weak man for the fight against such a tremendous enemy. Every instinct of backing the weak against the strong which had grown with him from boyhood, became focused and alert. But he could only say, after all —
“I’m sorry I can’t play billiards to-night. I’ve hurt my arm.”
“What a bore! How?” said Dick Stamford.
“Oh, got it strained a bit,” said Andy. “Soon be all right.”
“Well, we’ll have a smoke instead,” said Stamford, drawing a chair to the empty fireplace and putting his feet on the fender-stool. He was not in the least drunk, but he had taken enough whisky during the day to make him confidential and talkative, and he gave Andy to understand that when he was with the regiment he had enjoyed a gay and lurid past.
“You’re not like some parsons,” he said. “A chap can make a friend of you. You know there are such things as chorus girls – eh? What?”
“The only ones I ever met were dull,” said Andy.
“Dull!” The bare originality of the suggestion struck Stamford dumb. How could a chorus girl be dull?
“Too jolly pleased with themselves to have any sort of humour,” maintained Andy.
“What’s a woman want with a sense of humour?” said Dick Stamford – and it must be owned that there he spoke for his sex.
“Well – the Atterton girls – they’ve got any amount,” suggested Andy.
Stamford leaned forward in his chair.
“Yes, and between you and me that’s the one thing I don’t like about ’em. Norah, now; you never quite know if she isn’t getting at you.”
“But you can’t say that of Miss Elizabeth,” said Andy.
“No. No, you can’t say that of Elizabeth.” He paused, and added very confidentially, “I shouldn’t be doing the good little boy as I have been doing the last eight months if you could say that of her.”
Andy stared at him but said nothing, because he could not – all sorts of unheeded incidents were crowding into his mind so quickly that he felt as if it would burst.
“Fact is – I’m on probation. If I behave, I may pay my addresses to Miss Elizabeth Atterton next October. Old Atterton doesn’t want it, but Mrs. does, because Elizabeth would live next door, so to speak, instead of perhaps going off to India or goodness knows where. And I believe the mater would go straight up to heaven in a sort of bust of thankfulness if it ever came off. But I’ve promised on my honour to say nothing to her until next October, so of course I can’t. Rum situation, isn’t it?” And he drew a long whiff of his cigar and leaned back with the consciousness of being interesting.
Andy stared at the stove and still said nothing.
“Queer, ain’t it?” said Stamford, a little surprised at this lack of sympathy.
Then Andy got up.
“Look here,” he said. “I’m in love with Miss Elizabeth Atterton. I want to marry her.”
Stamford gazed at him with unflattering astonishment.
“You!” he said. “My dear chap – they’d never look at you. Don’t you know they’re rolling in money and consider those girls Venuses? Why, they wouldn’t think me good enough, even if I were as steady as you are, if I didn’t own a place next door.”
“I know I’m a bad match. I know I’m not to ask her,” said Andy.
“Well,” said Stamford with slight alcoholic emotion, “we’ve been pals, you and I. I never thought you’d go and steal a march on me when my hands were tied and I couldn’t do anything.”
“I’ve – I’ve sort of half proposed,” said Andy, turning very red. “I must go on. She’ll think it so dishonourable if I don’t, whether she likes me or not.”
“Oh, very well,” said Stamford, rising and walking across the room to the whisky and soda. “You are perfectly within your right, of course.”
He jolted out a stiff glass and drank it off.
Andy’s thoughts ran round and round like a rat in a trap as he sat watching. Then something in the lad which underlay all his clerical affectations and easy immaturity rose up and made itself felt. It was that germ – that something – which has informed the saints of all creeds and all ages, and with which a very human, faulty man may be a saint, and without which no man can be.
“If you’ll – if you’ll keep clear of that – I’ll wait,” he said. “We’ll take an equal chance.”
“What business is it of yours whether I drink or not?” demanded Stamford violently – only he used other terms which it is unnecessary to repeat. “And you’d have no earthly chance with her, anyway.”
But certain unnoticed incidents were also crowding into his mind now, and he was sufficiently in love with Elizabeth to feel outraged at the thought of any other man proposing to her. He was more in love with her at that moment, as a matter of fact, than he ever had been before.
“Whether I have any chance or not, I mean to ask her,” said Andy steadily. “But I’ll play fair. I’ll wait until you are free!”
“I suppose you think you are mighty magnanimous,” replied Stamford unpleasantly. “Do you propose that we should walk up to the lady arm-in-arm, and say, ‘Which of us will you have?’ ”
That was a difficulty which certainly had not presented itself to Andy, but he grappled with it in a desperate —
“Let’s write then! So that she gets both letters by the same post.”
Stamford kicked the fender-stool in silence for a moment or two, then he said suddenly —
“You’re a good chap, Deane. My father knew what he was doing when he liked the look of you, and asked you to accept Gaythorpe.”
“It was odd I should happen to be preaching that morning,” said Andy dully.
“Preaching! Why, you don’t suppose your sermon had anything to do with it, do you? If it had, you and I would never have hit it off as we have done.”
“Why did he offer me the living, then?” said Andy.
“Oh, he saw you were a decent chap, and young and all that, of course.”
“So that was it, was it?” said Andy. “Well, I think I’ll be going. My arm bothers me a bit.”
“Queer thing. If it hadn’t been for your bad arm we should never have had this talk. We should have been playing billiards.”
Queer thing! It was indeed, thought poor Andy as he went home. First he owed his meeting with Elizabeth at Marshaven to his fight with the carpenter, and now this conversation. He realised more acutely than ever that there are in the world no private black eyes or damaged arms. They all concern the Universe.
CHAPTER XIV
Any one who has ever gone home after a great shock, hurrying along, and keeping the tearing thoughts of it at bay until a place is reached where they can be fought alone, will know how Andy felt as he went back to the Vicarage that evening. And those who have not felt it themselves could never understand how he struck the match left for him by Mrs. Jebb in the dark hall, and lighted the candle and stumbled up to bed, still fighting off the realisation of what had happened.
But when he was in his own bedroom, and had locked the door, he sat down on his bed and let it come. It had to come.
So all this time there had been some sort of understanding between Elizabeth and Dick Stamford – or, if not exactly that, some arrangement of which she must have been aware. Mrs. Atterton was not the woman to keep such a thing to herself, even if her husband thought it politic to do so.
He – Andy – was only another of the suitors, who doubtless crowded round that pleasant, affluent household with the two charming daughters. It was his own idiotic conceit which had made him hope.
Then he remembered the look he had seen on Elizabeth’s face by the flaring blue and yellow at Marshaven, and he wondered if she did care, after all.
But he recalled that visit when she had chatted in a distant window-seat with Stamford, not noticing him, while he took in to tea a garrulous Miss Banks, and the despair which is always waiting for the true lover because he thinks himself unworthy, gripped poor Andy’s vitals.
Of course she would never look at him.
Still – she had looked: she had done more, she had let him touch her arm as they stood close together, laughing, in Mrs. Petch’s kitchen.
He groaned – the contrast between that exquisite moment and this was too great to bear.
All the pleasant certainty which had undoubtedly lurked at the bottom of Andy’s mind, fostered by the opinion he had unconsciously gained during his London curacy that men were rather rare birds, and all women pleased to catch them, was swept away from him.
She wouldn’t have him. She would never have him. Elizabeth!
If he could only go and ask her, and so make sure —
But he couldn’t.
The gates of Andy’s soul clashed to on such a temptation with a vibration that roused him from his despair: but the sight of the spacious wall on which his shadow flickered brought back the memory of that other blow, which in the first agony of love’s suspense he had forgotten.
He owed all this, then, to the fact that Mr. Stamford needed a companion for his son – a young fellow who should not be too old or too clever to disdain such companionship.
Oh, Andy was no fool, once his eyes were opened, and he saw that plainly enough now. But it is a painful thing to be wounded in one’s vanity – more keenly smarting than to be wounded in one’s love, though without the dull ache that love’s hurts leave behind.
He went to the window and pulled up the blind. There was no moon, but it was a light night with stars, and he could see clearly the gravestones in the churchyard, and the dim whiteness of the lilies in the garden. He felt he could not stay within those four walls any longer.
The house was intensely quiet in the midst of the starlit silence, and he dreaded above all things to have Mrs. Jebb peering at him over the banisters in curling pins and dressing-gown as he went out of the door.
He looked down at the ivy beneath the window – the growth of fifty years – and crept down upon that green ladder provided by his predecessor into the free coolness of the summer night.
The wet grass soaked his thin boots as he crept cautiously across the lawn, and out by the churchyard path. Once out of sight of the house, he paused, and stood leaning against the gate with his hands in his pockets. The fact of doing something had diverted his thoughts for a while, and now a sort of dull depression settled down upon him – that horrible dull time after a storm of emotion, when nothing seems worth while.
But in that storm the mantle of the senior curate – good man that he was, with a real desire to serve his Master his own way – had been blown away from Andy’s shoulders for ever. It never fitted, or perhaps it would have clung more closely.
And it was just a lad doubtful of himself, and of everything else, who stumbled miserably down the churchyard path in the uncertain light. He had forgotten all about Brother Gulielmus, and only because he caught his foot on the edge of the path that curved outwards by the tombstone did he pause there for a moment.
But once stayed, he glanced from habit at the familiar resting-place of that Gulielmus who had once been plain Will Ford.
Over fifty years. And the Vicar before Andy had been fifty years as well.
That half-century stretched out, interminable, before the young man’s vision.
What was the good of a life like that? Why had he ever become a parson? It was no career for an active man in the flush of youth and energy.
But it was too late now to change.
He suddenly realised that his arm hurt intensely after his climb on the ivy, and that he was very tired, and he sat down on the edge of the tombstone.
It was the dark hour before dawn now, and the stars were setting. Andy and plain Will Ford – not Gulielmus – seemed to be very alone and very near together in the darkness.
It was as if the young had crept to the old, crying —
“Did you ever feel like this? How did you fight through it?”
Then the first cock crowed to herald in the morning, and it seemed almost like an echo of the sane and jolly laughter of Will Ford, now asleep. A dog barked somewhere – birds began to chirp – and – it is a strange thing, but true – Andy heard a voice say to him, so distinctly that it might have been Will Ford speaking: “Help the living – comfort the dying.”
Andy started – the words did so seem to come from nowhere – then he remembered that they came from somewhere very near indeed.
“His work was to help the living, to comfort the dying” – so ran, in Latin, the inscription on the tombstone, where Andy sat. And then he realised, of course, what most of us have done at one time or another, that an inward voice says things to us which seem to come from nowhere, and are arrestingly true, though they are but the echo of something we have heard before.
And by the way in which life turns sometimes on one of those echoes we get a glimpse – a vague glimpse, all shadowy – of how echoes from this existence may influence our souls in the next: we hold our breath in the face of what seems, then, to open out before us.
Andy did, anyway.
He looked down at the tomb of a man forgotten, whom nobody had thought about for a couple of hundred years, and he knew that not only are there no private black eyes in the immediate present, but that they influence eternity.
He felt very small, did Andy, as he trudged back to the house in the growing morning; but when the immense truths come quite near to us we all feel little.
Before he reached the door, an odour of burning reached him, floating at first almost impalpable in the sweet air, though definite enough when it had once been perceived.
He stood quite still for a second, then he began to run quickly towards the lane, and in the direction of Mrs. Simpson’s cottage.
He tore along, forgetful of his aching arm, and with a horrible picture of Sally and Jimmy being burned to death before his mind’s eye. As he ran, he planned rapidly what he should do in case the front door were locked and the sleeping Mrs. Simpson still unconscious of danger, and with his heart thumping against his side, he raced round the corner to see Mrs. Simpson seated calmly on a garden seat in a print dress and silk mantle, with the two children in woollen rugs and antimacassars beside her.
Andy was ill, so the run and the odd revulsion of feeling left him rather faint and breathless. He sat down on the end of the garden seat with the rest, unable to speak.
And, really, it was an odd sight if any one had been there to see. Andy in crushed and crumpled evening dress, with his hair in a curly bush on his forehead, staring wildly at Mrs. Simpson, while Sally’s anxious little face between them was turned first to one and then the other; while the boy tried to kick the leg of the seat with his bare feet and shouted —
“Give me my boots! I want my boots!”
“It’s out,” said Mrs. Simpson placidly, in response to Andy’s appearance, which seemed to demand something. “The partition between the two rooms caught fire from the back of the stove. They never ought to have put one in there. We might all have been burnt to death in our beds.”
Andy wiped his damp forehead.
“You are sure it is quite extinguished?”
“Oh yes. The clothes were in soak, so I had water all handy. It seems as if it was meant. They’ll have to either take the partition away or build it up, new. So I shall get it taken away. Then I can have my sideboard back.”
Andy stared in a muddled sort of way, first at Mrs. Simpson and then at the house.
“Yes,” he said. “Oh yes.”
Mrs. Simpson’s face quickened to anxiety at last.
“Of course – if you don’t feel you can part with it – ” she began.
“But of course I can. It’s yours,” said Andy eagerly. “I want you to have it.”
Mrs. Simpson heaved a sigh of relief.
“That’s all right,” she said. “Well, I think we may be going in now.” She glanced down at her toilet. “I just snatched up my widow’s mantle – I knew I should never get another.” Then something, strange in Andy’s attire did seem to strike her. “I expect you were on your way home from a party,” she said. She paused, considered the hour, and added: “A ball, I s’pose?”
“N – no,” said Andy. “Only a dinner party. But I took a walk in the churchyard afterwards.”
It sounded lame, and Andy was conscious, as the words died on his lips, that it had so sounded. “I’m a tremendous person for fresh air,” he added.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Simpson.
And that was all she did say – then.
“Well, I must be going,” said Andy, using the formula which no parson ever escapes.
Mrs. Simpson held out her hand, and glanced at her apparel.
“You’ll excuse me rising,” she said, “but I – er – can’t.”
“Of course,” said Andy hastily, seeking refuge behind a clerical distance of manner. “Good-day.”
But the dawn was rising so glorious over the odd little group that he was moved to add impulsively —
“I am thankful you’re all right, Mrs. Simpson.”
And something in the kind, boyish face under the upstanding mop of hair may have stirred Mrs. Simpson, for she said, in the queer tone she always used coming down the aisle in church —
“I prayed that some way might be found for me to have the sideboard. And now one’s been found. You never know how Providence is going to help you.”
Andy opened his mouth to explain that Providence does not set fire to some one else’s property to provide a tenant with space for a sideboard, when he saw Sally’s eager face looking up at him.
The senior curate would have been able to explain without hurting anything, no doubt, but Andy was afraid to try.
“You never do know,” was all he said.
Then he went home through the freshness of the early morning, and managed to open the door with his latch-key, unheard by Mrs. Jebb. It was a fortunate thing that he had forgotten to bolt it after him the night before, because his arm was now so painful that he would have found it impossible to climb up the ivy to his window.
He slept late, in spite of the pain, for he was worn out, and after a poor attempt at a midday meal he was sitting at tea in the dining-room when Sam Petch chanced to go past the window.
The no-butter rule still held good, but Andy was no anchorite, and generally mitigated the dryness of his bread with jam or marmalade. This evening, however, his stomach turned against plum jam, and he sat listlessly gnawing a piece of dry bread when Sam Petch glanced in at the window.
Sam stood quite still for a moment, then put down his spade and rake, and crept on the short grass to the side of the window, where, by craning his neck, he could see without being seen.
He stood there watching for a few minutes, then suddenly turned away, and began to run fast across the grass in the direction of his cottage.
Five minutes later, Andy was rising from the tea-table, when Sam Petch burst panting into the room with a plate of butter in his hand.
“Here,” he said; “take it. Butter your bread on both sides with it. And I’m durned if I touch another drop o’ beer until further notice.”
Andy looked at Sam, and he understood.
“Thank you, Sam,” he said. But a great deal more than that passed unspoken between them.
“Have a bit now,” said Sam, nervously anxious to avoid comment, though he usually welcomed it. “Here! Butter a bit and try!”
So Andy buttered and ate a piece of bread, while Sam stood over him, watching every mouthful.
“Delicious butter. Where do you get it?” said Andy.
“Mrs. Will Werrit’s. She’s a rare hand for butter-making,” answered Sam. “Well, I’ll get home to my tea. Good afternoon, sir.”
“Good afternoon, Sam,” said Andy.
But as the two men parted on those words their souls drew quite near and said: “We are brothers.”
Of course men’s lips are always saying that – but when two souls say it there is joy in heaven, because the day for which all creation strives is just so much the nearer.