I have thought fit in this story to alter all the names involved and
disguise the actual scene of it: and have done this so carefully that,
although the story has a key, the reader who should search for it would
not only waste his time but miss even the poor satisfaction of having
guessed an idle riddle. He whom I call Parson West is now dead. He was
an entirely conscientious man; which means that he would rather do wrong
himself than persuade or advise another man--above all, a young man--to
do it. I am sure therefore that in burying the body of John Emmet as he
did, and enlisting my help, he did what he thought right, though the
action was undoubtedly an illegal one. Still, the question is one for
casuists; and remembering how modest a value my old friend set on his
own wisdom, I dare say that by keeping his real name out of the
narrative I am obeying what would have been his wish. His small breach
of the law he was (I know) prepared to answer for cheerfully, should the
facts come to light. He has now gone where their discovery affects him
not at all.
Parson West, then, when I made his acquaintance in 188-, had for thirty
years been vicar of the coast-parish of Lansulyan. He had come to it
almost fresh from Oxford, a young scholar with a head full of Greek,
having accepted the living from his old college as a step towards
preferment. He was never to be offered another. Lansulyan parish is a
wide one in acreage, and the stipend exiguous even for a bachelor. From
the first the Parson eked out his income by preparing small annotated
editions of the Classics for the use of Schools and by taking occasional
pupils, of whom in 188- I was the latest. He could not teach me
scholarship, which is a habit of mind; but he could, and in the end did,
teach me how to win a scholarship, which is a sum of money paid
annually. I have therefore a practical reason for thinking of him with
gratitude: and I believe he liked me, while despising my Latinity and
discommending my precociousness with tobacco.
His pupils could never complain of distraction. The church-town--a
single street of cottages winding round a knoll of elms which hide the
Vicarage and all but the spire of St. Julian's Church--stands high and a
mile back from the coast, and looks straight upon the Menawhidden reef,
a fringe of toothed rocks lying parallel with the shore and half a mile
distant from it. This reef forms a breakwater for a small inlet where
the coombe which runs below Lansulyan meets the sea. Follow the road
downhill from the church-town and along the coombe, and you come to a
white-washed fishing haven, with a life-boat house and short sea-wall.
The Porth is its only name. On the whole, if one has to live in
Lansulyan parish the Porth is gayer than the church-town, where from the
Vicarage windows you look through the trees southward upon ships moving
up or down Channel in the blue distance and the white water girdling
Menawhidden; northward upon downs where herds of ponies wander at will
between the treeless farms, and a dun-coloured British earthwork tops
the high sky-line. Dwellers among these uplands, wringing their
livelihood from the obstinate soil by labour which never slackens, year
in and year out, from Monday morning to Saturday night, are properly
despised by the inhabitants of the Porth, who sit half their time
mending nets, cultivating the social graces, and waiting for the harvest
which they have not sown to come floating past their doors.
By consequence, if a farmer wishes to learn the spiciest gossip about
his nearest neighbour, he must travel down to the Porth for it.
And this makes it the more marvellous that what I am about to tell,
happening as it did at the very gates of the Porth, should have escaped
the sharpest eyes in the place.
The Vicar's custom was to read with me for a couple of hours in the
morning and again for an hour and a half before dinner. We had followed
this routine rigidly and punctually for three months or so when, one
evening in June, he returned from the Porth a good ten minutes late,
very hot and dusty, and even so took a turn or two up and down the room
with his hands clasped behind his coat-tails before settling down to
correct my iambics.
"John Emmet is dead," he announced, pausing before the window with his
back towards me and gazing out upon the ill-kept lawn.
"Wasn't he the coxswain of the life-boat?" I asked.
"Ah, to be sure, you never saw him, did you? He took to his bed before
you came . . . a long illness. Well, well, it's all over!" Parson West
sighed. "He saved, or helped to save, a hundred and fifteen lives,
first and last. A hundred and fifteen lives!"
"I've heard something of the sort down at the Porth. A hundred and
fifty, I think they said. They seemed very proud of him down there."
"Why?" The Vicar faced round on me, and added after a moment abruptly--
"He didn't belong to them: he was not even born in this parish."
"Where then?"
He disregarded the question. "Besides, the number was a hundred and
fifteen: that's just the pity."
I did not understand: but he had seated himself at table and was running
through my iambics. In the third verse he underlined a false quantity
with blue pencil and looked up for an explanation. While I confessed
the fault, his gaze wandered away from me and fell upon his fingers
drumming upon the table's edge. A slant of red sunshine touched the
signet-ring on his little finger, which he moved up and down watching
the play of light on the rim of the collet. He was not listening.
By-and-by he glanced up, "I beg your pardon--" stammered he, and leaving
the rest of my verses uncorrected, pointed with his pencil to the
concluding one. "That's not Greek," he said.
"It's in Sophocles," I contended: and turning up the word in "Liddell
and Scott," I pushed the big lexicon under his nose.
For a moment he paid no heed to the action; did not seem to grasp the
meaning of it. Then for the first and last time in my acquaintance with
him he broke into a passion of temper.
"What do you mean, Sir? It's offensive, I tell you: a downright
offensive, ungentlemanly thing to do! Yes, Sir, ungentlemanly!"
He crumpled up my verses and tossed them into the waste-paper basket.
"We had better get on with our Tacitus." And "Offensive!" I heard him
muttering once more, as he picked up the book and found his place.
I began to construe. His outburst had disconcerted me, and no doubt I
performed discreditably: but glancing up in some apprehension after a
piece of guess-work which even to me carried no conviction, I saw that
again he was not attending. After this, by boldly skipping each
difficulty as it arose I managed to cover a good deal of ground with
admirable fluency.
We dined together in silence that evening, and after dinner strolled out
to the big filbert-tree under which, for a few weeks in the year, Parson
West had his dessert laid and sipped his thin port--an old common-room
fashion to which he clung. To the end of his days he had the white
cloth removed before dessert, and the fruits and the one decanter set
out upon polished mahogany.
I glanced at him while helping myself to strawberries and cream. He sat
nervously folding and refolding the napkin on his knee. By-and-by he
spoke, but without looking at me.
"I lost my temper this afternoon, and I beg your pardon, my boy."
I began to stammer my contrition for having offended him: but he cut me
short with a wave of the hand. "The fact is," he explained, "I was
worried by something quite different."
"By John Emmet's death," I suggested. He nodded, and looked at me
queerly while he poured out a glass of Tarragona.
"He was my gardener years ago, before he set up market-gardening on his
own account."
"That's queer too," said I.
"What's queer?" He asked it sharply.
"Why, to find a gardener cox'n of a life-boat."
"He followed the sea in early life. But I'll tell you what _is_ queer,
and that's his last wish. His particular desire was that I, and I
alone, should screw down the coffin. He had Trudgeon the carpenter up
to measure him, and begged this of me in Trudgeon's presence and the
doctor's. What's more, I consented."
"That's jolly unpleasant," was my comment, for lack of a better.
The Vicar sat silent for a while, staring across the lawn, while I
watched a spider which had let itself down from a branch overhead and
was casting anchor on the decanter's rim. With his next question he
seemed to have changed the subject.
"Where do you keep your boat now?"
"Renatus Warne has been putting in a new strake and painting her.
I shall have her down on the beach to-morrow."
"Ah, so that's it? I cast my eye over the beach this afternoon and
couldn't see her. You haven't been trying for the conger lately."
"We'll have a try to-morrow evening if you'll come, Sir. I wish you
would."
The Vicar, though he seldom found time for the sport, was a famous
fisherman. He shook his head; and then, leaning an arm on the table,
gazed at me with sudden seriousness.
"Look here: could you make it convenient to go fishing for conger this
next night or two--_and to go alone?_"