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.