“Exactly,” said the Reverend Septimus Prior; “the exchange was the
most fortuitous, not to say the most fortunate” (he gave a little
giggle and bow) “possible. Your uncle saw my advertisement, answered
it, and for a brief period he goes to my cure, and I come to his.”
“Well, if you feel certain,” said Miss Robin, regretfully resting in
her lap the novel she was reading.
Mr. Prior sipped his tea and nibbled his rusk. In the intervals
between, he would occasionally glance at the portrait of a scholarly
cleric, with a thin grim mouth and glassy eyes, which bantered him
from the wall opposite.
“Your uncle—Mr. Fearful?” he had once ventured to ask; and the niece
had answered, “Yes. It is very like him.”
Now he paused, with his cup half-way to his mouth.
“I beg your pardon?” he exclaimed.
Miss Robin put her book to her lips, and looking over it—really
rather charmingly,—yawned behind the cover. She was surprisingly
dégagée for a country vicar’s niece—self-collected, and admirably
pretty; though her openwork stockings, which she did not hesitate to
cross her legs to display, filled him with a weak sense of
entanglement in some unrighteous mystery.
“You said?” he invited her.
“I said, If you feel certain,” she repeated calmly.
“Ah!” he said. “Yes. You mean?”
“I mean,” she said, without a ruffle, “that Uncle Philip _may_ have
settled to swap livings with you _pro tem._, and _may_ have started
off to take yours, and _may_ have got there—_if_ you feel certain
that he has.”
“To be sure,” he answered. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Had he arrived—when you started—for here?”
“No. Certainly he hadn’t arrived. My train was due. I had to leave a
message; but——”
She stopped him by dropping her book into her lap; and, clasping one
knee in her hands, conned him amiably.
“Did he lead you to expect a niece among the charges he was committing
to your care—or cure?” she asked.
“Well, I must confess,” said the young man, blushing, “he—ah!
mentioned a housekeeper—Mrs. Gaunt, I think—but——”
“No, of course not,” she interrupted him. “He had forgotten all about
me.”
Mr. Prior gasped, and looked down. This was his first holiday exchange
of livings—an unsophisticated venture, which he was already half
repenting. A suburban cure; a desire for fresh pastures; a daring
resolution; an advertisement in the “Church Times”; a prompt answer;
as prompt an acceptance (after due reference to the Clergy List); a
long railway journey; a tramp, relatively as long, to a remote
parsonage on the road to a seaport; an arrival in the dark; an
innocence of all expectation of, or preparation for him; an
explanation; production of his written voucher, and—here he was,
accepted, he could not but think, on sufferance. But there he thought
wrong. Miss Robin was not near so upset by his appearance as he was.
“He comes and goes” (she said of Uncle Philip) “without reference to
anybody or anything. We never know what he’ll do next, or who’ll
introduce himself into the house as his friend. It may be a burglar or
a pirate for all we know. All sorts of strange people come up from the
port, and are shown into my uncle’s room, and out again by himself at
the side door. At least, I suppose so. We never know what becomes of
them, or what’s going on, any more than I doubt he does himself. I
dare say they fleece him nicely; and—you may laugh—but when he’s in
his absent moods, you might undress him without his knowing. Only he’d
probably strike you to the ground when he found out—he’s such an
awful temper.”
“Dear me!” murmured the young man; “how very curious. One hears of
such cases.”
“Does one?” said Miss Robin. “I’d rather hear of, than live with them,
anyhow; and in a desert, too. It wouldn’t so much matter if he didn’t
always hold others to blame for his mistakes and mislayings. He kept
me in bed a week once, because he’d read right through a treatise on
explosives in the pulpit, before he discovered that it wasn’t his
peace-thanksgiving sermon.”
“Astonishing!” said Mr. Prior; then added, with a faint smile, “Well,
I can promise you, at least, that _I’m_ not a pirate.”
“No,” she said, “I can see you’re not. Won’t you have some more tea?”
He was shown to his bedroom by Mrs. Gaunt, who was a stony, silent
woman, bleak with mystery. All night the wind howled round the lonely
building; and the unhappy man, who, in a phase of worldly revolt,
egged on by a dare-devil parishioner, had once read “The House on the
Marsh”, thought of Sarah and Mr. Rayner, and of a silent weaving of
strings across the stairway in the dark to catch him tripping should
he venture upon escape.
He arose, feverish, to a sense of hooting draughts in a grey house,
and went to matins in the gaunt dull church, which stood as lonely as
a shepherd’s hut on a slope hard by. There was nothing in sight but
wind-torn pastures, and, all around, little graves, which seemed
trying vainly to tuck themselves and their shivering epitaphs under
the grass. There appeared nothing in the world to attract a
congregation; but, as a matter of fact, there were a few old frosted
spinsters present, of that amphibious order, a sort of landcrabs,
which forgathers on the neutral wastes between sea and country.
Mr. Prior went back to his dreary breakfast at the Vicarage. His lady
hostess, it appeared, was wont to lie late abed, and did not think it
worth her while to alter her habits for him. The meal, however, had
been served and left to petrify, pending his return from matins. It
was with a consciousness of congealed bacon-fat, insufficiently
dissolved by lukewarm tea, sticking to the roof of his mouth, that he
rose from it, and pondered his next movement. No one came near him. He
looked dismally out on a weedy drive. He rather wished Miss Robin
would condescend to his company. He was no pirate, certainly; but he
believed he would brave, had braved already, much for his cloth. She
had beautiful eyes—clear windows, he was sure, to a virginal soul.
But then, the other end! the white feet peeping through that devil’s
lattice! He tried to recall any authority in Holy Writ for openwork
stockings. Certainly pilgrims went barefoot, and half a loaf was
better than no bread.
“This will not do, Septimus,” he said, weakly striking his breast. “I
will go and compose my sermon.”
He stepped into the hall. It was papered in cold blue and white
marble, with a mahogany umbrella stand, and nothing else, to temper
its tomb-like austerity. At the further end was a baize door of a
faded strawberry colour.
He was entitled to the run of the house, he concluded. There had been
no mention of any Bluebeard chamber. But, then, to be sure, there had
been no mention of a niece. The association of ideas tingled him. What
if he should turn the handle and alight on Miss Robin?
He flipped his breast again, frowning, and strode to the baize door.
Beside it, he now observed, a passage went off to the kitchens.
Desperately he pulled the door, found a second, of wood, beyond it,
opened that also, and found himself in what was obviously the Vicar’s
study.
Obviously, that is to say, to his later conceptions of his
correspondent. Otherwise he might have taken it for the laboratory of
a scientist. It was lined with bookcases, sparsely volumed; but five
out of every six shelves were thronged with jars, instruments, and
engines of a terrifying nature. In one place was a curtained recess
potential with unholiness. Prints of discomposing organs hung on the
walls. Immemorial dust blurred everything. There was a pedestalled
desk in the middle, and opposite it, hung with a short curtain, a
half-glazed door which the intruder, tiptoeing thither and peeping,
with his heart at the gallop, found to lead into a dismal narrow lane
which communicated with the road. He returned to the desk, which,
frankly open, seemed to invite him to its use, and was pondering the
moral practicability of composition in the midst of such surroundings,
when a voice at his ear almost made him jump out of his skin.
“Pardon me, sir; but have you the master’s permission to use this
room?”
Mrs. Gaunt had come upon him without a sound.
“Dear me, madam!” he said, wiping his forehead. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, sir,” she said, in her stony, colourless way, “that this room
is interdict to both great and little, now and always, unless he makes
an exception in your favour.”
“There was no specific mention of it, certainly,” said Mr. Prior,
“neither for nor against. I concluded that the use of a study was not
debarred me.”
“Pardon me,” she repeated monotonously. “I believe you concluded
wrong, sir.”
“The door was not locked.”
“There are some prohibitions,” she said, “that need no locks.”
The inference was fearful.
“Miss June” (ecstatic name!) “and I,” she said, “have never dared so
much as to put our noses inside, and not a word spoken to forbid it.”
Mr. Prior, to his own astonishment, revolted. Smarting, perhaps, under
the memory of some suspected covert innuendo in a certain silvery
acquiescence in a statement of his made last night, he revolted. He
would prove that he could be a pirate if he chose.
“I shall stop here,” he said, trembling all over. “There was no
embargo laid, and I must have somewhere to write my sermon.”
“Of course,” said a voice; and Miss Robin stood in the doorway—the
most enchanting morning vision, her eyes bright with curiosity.
“I am delighted you support me,” he said, kindling and advancing.
She still looked beside and around him.
“Do you know,” she said, “it is perfectly true. I have not once dared
to venture in here before, though never actually told not to. But that
is all one, I think. What an extraordinary litter!”
She had not ventured! and with the inducement of her petrifying
surroundings! She was uninquisitive, then—“an excellent thing in
woman.”
“Since there is no veto,” he said, incomparably audacious, “supposing
we explore together?”
She looked at him admiringly.
“I should like to.” She hesitated.
“June!” cried Mrs. Gaunt.
“And I will,” said the girl.
But the housekeeper, content, it appeared, with her protest, stood,
not uninterested in the subsequent investigation.
“Do you not find all this a little remote, a little lifeless
sometimes, Miss Robin?” said the clergyman, greatly daring.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Eels get used to skinning. It’s not life, of course. But I have to
make the best of it, and there’s no help.”
“Ah, yes, there is!” said her companion, intending to imply the
spiritual, but half hoping she would construe it into the material
consolation.
“What do you mean?” she asked simply.
“Why,” he said, stammering and blushing furiously, and giving away his
case at once, “with your youth, and—and beauty—O, forgive me! I am a
little confused.”
“Where do you live?” she said, fixing him with her large eyes.
“At Clapton,” he murmured.
“It sounds most joyous,” she said, clasping her hands.
Hardly knowing what he did, he pulled the curtain away from the recess
by which they stood, and instantly staggered back. The housekeeper,
who, foreseeing his act, had crept up inquisitively behind, gave a
mortal gasp, and Miss Robin a faint shriek—for, stretched lifeless
and livid on a couch within, lay the stark body of a man.
For a minute they all stood staring, frozen with horror; then Mrs.
Gaunt began to wring her hands.
“It is the same,” she cried, in awful tones. “I remember him—the dark
foreigner. He wandered up here from the port a week ago; and I took
him in to the master, and he _never came out again_. I thought he had
let him go by the door there into the lane. O, woe on this fearful
house! Long have I suspected and long dreaded. The sounds, and the
awful, awful smells!”
“Perhaps,” whispered the girl, gulping, and clutching at her breast,
“he died unexpectedly, and uncle put him away here, and forgot all
about him.”