The Late Rector of Hipley
The dinner-table left a blurred impression on Bredon, for all his
habit of observing his fellow men and analysing his feelings about
them. The setting-out of the meal had faults that Angela would have
condemned, and would have put right in no time; you were conscious at
once that the household belonged to bachelors. Yet the meal itself and
the cooking of it were of excellent quality; and it was thrown at you
with a clamorous, insistent hospitality that made you feel like a
guest of honour. The room seemed to be full of priests—there were
five, perhaps, in reality, besides the Bishop—and every detail of
their behaviour proved that they were free from any sense of formality
or restraint; yet constant little attentions shewed the guest that he
was never forgotten. The topic of conversation which Bredon (who in
the mean time had informed the Bishop of the post-office mistake)
could recall most distinctly afterward was a learned and almost
technical discussion between the Bishop and the youngest priest
present on the prospects of the local soccer team for next year.
Nothing fitted in, somehow, with his scheme of probabilities; there
was a Father O’Shaughnessy, who had been born and bred in Pullford and
never seemed to have been outside it; there was a Father Edwards who
talked with a violent Irish brogue. A teetotaller opposite kept plying
him with Barsac.
It was perhaps a delicate attention that Bredon’s neighbour, on the
side away from the Bishop, was the only other layman present. He was
introduced as the Bishop’s secretary; and he was the only man in the
room who looked like a clergyman. He seemed some fifty years old; he
was silent by habit, and spoke with a dry humour that seemed to amuse
everybody except himself. Bredon could not help wondering how such a
man came to occupy such a position at his time of life, for his voice
betrayed university education and he was plainly competent, yet he
obviously thought of himself as a supernumerary in the household. The
riddle was solved when Bredon, in answer to some question about his
journey down to Chilthorpe, explained that he did not come from London
itself, but from a village in Surrey, a place called Burrington.
“What!” exclaimed Mr. Eames, the secretary, “not Burrington near
Hipley?” And, when Bredon asked if he knew Hipley, “Know it? I ought
to. I was rector there for ten years.”
The picture of the rectory at Hipley stood out before Bredon’s mind;
you see it from the main road. There is an old-fashioned tennis-lawn
in front of it; roses cluster round it endearingly; there is a cool
dignity about the Queen Anne house, the terraces of which are
spotlessly mowed. Yes, you could put this man in clerical clothes, and
he would fit beautifully into that spacious garden; you saw him, with
surplice fluttering in the breeze, going up the churchyard path to
ring the bell for evening service; that was his atmosphere. And here,
unfrocked by his own conscience, he was living as a hired servant,
almost a pensioner, in this gaunt house, these cheerless rooms. . . .
You wondered less at his silent habit, and his melancholy airs of
speech.
Nothing creates intimacy like a common background discovered among
strangers. They belonged, it seemed, to the same university, the same
college; their periods were widely different, but dons and scouts, the
mile-stones of short-lived undergraduate memory, were recalled, and
their mannerisms discussed; and when at the end of the meal the Bishop
rose, profuse in his apologies, to attend a meeting, Eames volunteered
to walk Bredon back to his hotel. “I thought there’d be no harm, My
Lord, if we just took a look in at poor Mottram’s house; I daresay it
would interest Mr. Bredon to see it. The housekeeper,” he explained to
Bredon, “is one of our people.”
The Bishop approved the suggestion; and with a chorus of farewells
they left the Cathedral house together. “Well,” said Bredon to his
companion, “you’ve got a wonderful Bishop here.”
“Yes,” said Eames, “the mind dwells with pleasure on the thought of
him. There are few of us for whom more can be said than that.”
“I can’t fit Mottram, from what I’ve heard of him, into that
household.”
“Because you’re not a provincial. Our common roots are in Oxford and
in London. But in a place like this people know one another because
they are neighbours.”
“Even the clergy?”
“The Catholic clergy, anyhow. You see, our priests don’t swap about
from one diocese to another; they are tied to the soil. Consequently
they are local men, most of them, and a local man feels at home with
them.”
“Still, for a man who had no religion particularly, isn’t it rather a
challenge to be up against your faith like that? I should have thought
a man was bound to react one way or the other.”
“Not necessarily. It’s astonishing what a lot of theoretical interest
a man can take in the faith and yet be miles away from it practically.
Why, Mottram himself, about three weeks ago, was pestering us all
about the old question of ‘the end justifying the means.’ Being a
Protestant, of course he meant by that doing evil in order that good
may come. He worried the life out of the Bishop, urging the most
plausible reasons for maintaining that it was perfectly right. He
simply couldn’t see why the Bishop insisted you weren’t ever allowed
to do what’s wrong, whatever comes of it. And the odd thing was, he
really seemed to think he was being more Catholic over it than we
were. However, all that bores you.”
“No, indeed. I want to know everything about Mottram; and it’s silly
to pretend that a man’s religion doesn’t matter. Was he thinking at
all, do you suppose, of becoming a Catholic?”
Eames shrugged his shoulders. “How can I tell? I don’t think he really
shewed any dispositions. But of course he was a religious man in a
way, he wasn’t one of your nogoddites, like Brinkman. You’ve met
Brinkman?”
“Yes, I’m staying in the same hotel, you see. And I confess I’m
interested in him too. What do you make of him? Who is he, or where
did Mottram pick him up?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like the little man. I don’t even know what his
nationality is; he’s spent a long time in Paris, and I’m pretty sure
he’s not British. And mind you, he hated us. I think he had
corresponded for some paper out in Paris; anyhow, he knew all the
seedy anti-clericals; and I rather think he was asked to leave.
Mottram seems to have taken him on on the recommendation of a friend;
he had some idea, I think, of doing a history of the town; and of
course Brinkman can write. But Brinkman very seldom came in here, and
when he did he was like a dog among snakes. I daresay he thought the
house was full of oubliettes. He’d got all that Continental
anti-clericalism, you see. Here’s the house.”
They turned up a short drive which led them through a heavily walled
park to the front door of a painfully mid-Victorian mansion. A mansion
it must be called; it did not look like a house. Strange reminiscences
of various styles, Gothic, Byzantine, Oriental, seemed to have been
laid on by some external process to a red-brick abomination of the
early seventies. Cream-coloured and slate-coloured tiles wove
irrelevant patterns across the bare spaces of wall, Conservatories
masked a good half of the lowest storey. It was exactly suited to be
what it afterward became, a kind of municipal museum, in which the
historic antiquities of Pullford, such as they were, could be visited
by the public on dreary Sunday afternoons.
“Now,” said Eames, “does that give you Mottram’s atmosphere?”
“God forbid!” replied Bredon.
“See then the penalty of too great riches. Only one man in a thousand
can express his personality in his surroundings if he has a million of
money to do it with. It wasn’t Mottram, of course, who did this; but
he would have built the same sort of horror if he hadn’t taken it over
from a predecessor like himself. And the rooms are as bad as the
house.”
Eames was fully justified in this last criticism. The house was full
of expensive bad taste; the crude work of local artists hung on the
walls; bulging goddesses supported unnecessary capitals; velvet and
tarnished gilding and multicoloured slabs of marble completed the
resemblance to a large station restaurant. Mottram had possessed no
private household gods, had preserved no cherished knickknacks. The
house was the fruit of his money, not of his personality. He had given
the architect a free hand, and in the midst of all that barbaric
splendour he had lived a homeless exile.
The housekeeper had little to add to what Bredon already knew. Her
master usually went away for a holiday about that time in the year,
and Mr. Brinkman always went with him. He had expected to be away for
a fortnight, or perhaps three weeks. He had not shewn, to the servants
at any rate, any signs of depression or anxiety; he had not left any
parting messages to suggest a long absence. His letters were to be
redirected, as usual, to the _Load of Mischief_. There had been none,
as a matter of fact, except a few bills and circulars. She didn’t
think that Mr. Mottram went to any of the Pullford doctors, regularly
at least; and she had had no knowledge of his seeing the specialist in
London. She did not remember Mr. Mottram being ill, except for an
occasional cold, though he did now and again take a sleeping draught.
“It’s quite true,” said Eames as they left the house, “that we never
noticed any signs of depression or anxiety in Mottram. But I do
remember, only a short time ago, his seeming rather excited one
evening when he was round with us. Or am I imagining it? Memory and
imagination are such close neighbours. But I do think that when he
asked the Bishop to go and stay down at Chilthorpe he seemed
unnaturally insistent about it. He was fond of the Bishop, of course,
but I shouldn’t have thought he was as fond of him as all that. To
hear him talk, you would think that it was going to make all the
difference to him whether the Bishop shared his holiday or not.”
“Yes, I wonder what that points to?”
“Anything or nothing. It’s possible, of course, that he was feeling
depressed, as he well might be; and thought that he wanted more than
Brinkman’s company to help him over a bad time. Or—I don’t know. He
was always secretive. He gave the Bishop a car, you know; and took
endless pains to find out beforehand what sort of car would be useful
to him, without ever giving away what he was doing till the last
moment. And the other evening—well, I feel now as if I’d felt then
that he had something up his sleeve. But did I really feel it then? I
don’t know.”
“On the whole, though, you incline to the suicide theory?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s possible, isn’t it, that a man who had some
premonition of a violent end might want company when he went to a
lonely place like Chilthorpe?”
“Had he any enemies, do you think, in Pullford?”
“Who hasn’t? But not that sort of enemies. He used, I fancy, to be
something of a martinet with his work-people, in the old manner. In
America, a disgruntled employee sometimes satisfies his vendetta with
a shotgun. But in England we have no murdering classes. Even the
burglars, I am told, make a principle of going unarmed, for fear they
might be tempted to shoot. You would probably find two or three
hundred men in Pullford who would grouse at Mottram’s success and call
him a bloodsucker, but not one who would up with a piece of lead
piping if he met him in a lonely lane.”
“I say, it’s been very kind of you looking after me like this. I wish,
if you’ve any time to spare in the next day or two, you would drop
down to Chilthorpe and help me to make the case out. Or is that asking
too much?”
“Not the least. The Bishop goes off to a confirmation to-morrow and I
shall probably have time on my hands. If you think I could be of any
use, I’ll certainly look in. I like Chilthorpe; every prospect pleases
and only the chops are vile. No, I won’t come in, thanks; I ought to
be getting back now.”
Angela was a little inclined to be satirical at her husband’s
prolonged absence; but she seemed to have killed the time with some
success. She had not even been reduced to going round the early Perp.
church. They made short work of the way back to Chilthorpe, and found
Leyland eagerly awaiting them at the door of the hotel.
“Well,” he asked, “have you found out anything about Mottram?”
“Not much, and that’s a fact. Except that a man who strikes me as a
competent observer thought he had noticed a certain amount of
excitement in Mottram’s manner last week, as if he had been more than
ordinarily anxious to get the Bishop to stay with him. That, and the
impression made on the same observer that he was keeping dark about
something—had something up his sleeve. I have seen the house; it is a
beastly place; and it has electric light laid on, of course. I have
seen the housekeeper, an entirely harmless woman, partly Irish by
extraction, who has nothing to add to what we know, and does not
believe that Mottram habitually employed any of the Pullford doctors.”
“Well, and what about the Bishop?”
“Exactly, what about him? I find his atmosphere very difficult to
convey. He was very nice to me and very hospitable; he has not the
overpowering manners of a great man, and yet his dignities seem to sit
on him quite easily. He is entirely natural, and I am prepared to go
bail for his being an honest man.”
“That,” said Leyland, “is just as well.”
“How do you mean? Have you had the answer to your telegram?”
“I have, and a very full answer it is. The solicitors gave all the
facts without a murmur. About fifteen years ago Mottram made a will
which was chiefly in favour of his nephew. A few years later he
cancelled that will absolutely and made another will in which he
devised his property to certain public purposes—stinkingly useless
ones, as is the way of these very rich men. I can’t remember it all;
but he wants his house to be turned into a silly sort of museum, and
he provides for the erection of a municipal art gallery—that sort of
thing. But this is the important point: His Euthanasia policy was not
mentioned at all in the later will. Three weeks ago he put in a
codicil directing how the money he expects from the Indescribable is
to be disposed of.”
“Namely how?”
“The entire half-million goes to the Bishop of Pullford to be
administered by him for the benefit of his diocese as he and his
successors shall think fit!”