A Bachelor's Comedy

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.

CHAPTER XV

Andy was young and strong, so a good night’s rest and a little attention from the Millsby doctor soon put his arm sufficiently right to permit of his going about as usual. A few days later, therefore, he was quite able to escort his aunt and cousins to luncheon at the Stamfords’, whence they were to motor over to a garden-party at the Attertons’ in the afternoon.

But no one can be hurt in their vanity by a wound from which it will never recover sufficiently to grow strong again, without showing some signs of stress. And when to this is added a never-ceasing ache of suspense about the attitude of the Beloved, there is no doubt that the first chubby, careless look of youth is bound to vanish. The aunt and cousins found to their surprise that Andy was, after all, really grown up.

But enough boyishness remained to make him feel highly delighted, in spite of everything, at the prospect of showing the girls to his new friends, and his new friends to them. He was unfeignedly proud, too, of Mrs. Dixon and her smart appearance; even, vaguely, of the blue powder, which had seemed to him from earliest youth a sort of symbol of discreet dashingness.

“My aunt and cousins – Mrs. Stamford,” he said, with such a pleasant triumph in presenting people sure to accord to each other, that only a heart of stone could have failed to respond.

Mrs. Stamford, however, possessed that heart, socially; but she was so anxious to be agreeable to Andy’s relatives that she said with cordiality —

“I am so glad you were able to come.”

All the same, the stockings of the young ladies had a horrible fascination for her: she had never before realised that stockings could, as it were, so fill the horizon.

But to Dick Stamford, who entered as luncheon was announced, they were a delightful and yet familiar surprise. He had known stockings to fill the horizon before, and the general impression which the Webster girls gave, and Phyllis in particular, of having more eyes and hair and neck than other people, created an atmosphere in which he was absolutely at home.

And Mrs. Stamford was so pleased to see Dick roused from the rather sullen lethargy which was becoming habitual with him, that she began to see the Webster girls in a pleasant light too, in spite of the fact that they outraged all her inherent prejudices every minute. And yet she was a woman of strong character. But it is upon the strongest that mother-love works such ironic miracles.

“Really,” said Mrs. Dixon, seating herself at table in the beautiful old dining-room, with a feeling that here – in places like this – was where she and the girls belonged, “really, I must describe the tapestry in your hall to Lady Jones. Lady Jones is a friend of mine whose husband has just bought an estate – almost fabulously wealthy, or seems so to a poor woman who can only just afford to live.” And she gave her bangles and her expensive gown a sort of quivering movement to indicate, with subtlety, that the circles were indeed wealthy where she could be considered poor.

“The tapestry? Oh, my husband could tell you all about that, but, unfortunately, he is not well to-day, and obliged to remain in his room.”

“I said to Lady Jones when she consulted me about her house, ‘Old masters in the hall, of course. But I see now I made a mistake. I shall now advise tapestry exactly like yours.’ ”

“I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Stamford with a suspicion of dryness, “that Lady Jones will have rather a job to find it.”

Mrs. Dixon glanced at Mrs. Stamford’s coat and skirt, which bore obvious signs of wear, and at the exquisitely fine linen tablecloth, which was darned in three places.

“Look here,” she said. “You don’t seem to care very much for the tapestry, and I know if I just advise Lady Jones, she will be ready to give anything —anything. Now – can I? I should be so pleased. I know what agricultural depression is.”

She leaned back, feeling nothing could ever be more delicately done, but Mrs. Stamford paused, fork in mid-air, and stared at her guest with an expression that roused her son’s sense of the ridiculous.

“Ha-ha!” he laughed. “That’s good! Ask the mater to sell her nose while you are doing, Mrs. Dixon.”

“Oh, it was only a suggestion,” said Mrs. Dixon, sailing over the difficulty, and thinking it highly probable that Mrs. Stamford would come to her afterwards about the offer, in order to ask her to use her influence with Lady Jones. The power of the local millionaire does naturally appear illimitable in these days of the higher thought, when everybody is growing able to understand it. It seems odd to think that only a hundred years or so ago people believed there were things more valuable than money.

Andy was engrossed in youthful reminiscences with Irene, so he did not hear the whole conversation between his aunt and his hostess, and now broke in with a genial —

“Very jolly part where my aunt lives. Always something going on!”

“Some people say we give ourselves airs at Barkham – but we don’t, really. Only it’s impossible to know everybody who wants to know you, isn’t it?” said Irene.

“Yes,” continued Phyllis, who was rather excited at the way in which she was getting on with a smart man about town such as Dick appeared to be. “I’ve heard it said I was ‘sidey.’ Now you could hardly believe that, could you, Mr. Stamford?”

Mr. Stamford bent towards her, and, under cover of some general conversation about the garden-party to which they were all going, he murmured in her ear —

“Couldn’t believe anything about you that wasn’t most awfully nice, you know.”

The last young lady to whom Dick said that, had replied loudly with a push, “Get along with you!” Phyllis translated this into a whispered “Oh! I’ve heard that old tale before!” which did just as well, and held that same pleasant, beckoning intention which Dick called vaguely, in his own mind, “Having no nonsense about her.”

Then the fruit furnished a topic to Mrs. Dixon, who described the strawberries she had eaten in February at the table of Sir Henry and Lady Jones, and Andy said he hated fruit out of season, which his aunt thought stupid when it was so fashionable – she resolved to speak to him about it afterwards; and finally the whole party went out into the gardens to await the arrival of the motor which was to take them to the Attertons’ garden-party.

Speculation was rife in Mrs. Dixon’s mind during that interval. She began to feel, somehow, that Mrs. Stamford could have a silk-lined dress trimmed with lace, too, if she wanted it – and yet she wore that blouse! Could it be considered more aristocratic in county society to go to a party in loose rags than in a tight and expensive toilet? If so, she and the girls would get rags. They had climbed into the Jones’ set from an obscure company of poorish merchants and professional people by showing themselves equal to any society, and they would continue to follow out the same successful principles without regard to personal feeling.

But as Mrs. Dixon glanced at her hostess, and pictured her own carefully repressed figure in that coat and skirt, she did feel that what you have to throw away in climbing is almost as painful as what you have to take on.

The relief therefore was rather great when Mrs. Stamford remarked casually —

“I am not going to the Attertons’ this afternoon; my husband is so seedy I do not care to leave him.”

As the big motor ran silently up the drive of Millsby Hall the four young people inside caught sight of light dresses and gay flowery hats against the green lawns and the clear blue of the summer sky. Life seemed to them all – even to Dick, fighting the hidden enemy – even to Andy, hasting to a Tantalus feast – to be a sunny, flowery time of youth and pleasure. Then a gust of wind brought the sound of a band in the distance playing an inspiriting march.

“Go on – you’re sure to win – Life was made for such as you!”

That was what the sunshine and the music and the swift, exhilarating movement of the car cried out to Andy, almost in words. And he looked so noticeably young and full of eager hope in spite of, or perhaps because of, the signs of strain round his mouth and eyes, that Mrs. Atterton was moved to remark —

“It is a glorious day, isn’t it?”

She did not mean only that, of course; what her mind said to Andy’s was, “I see you are finding life glorious. How very nice!” But no pleasant, normal person spoils such things by putting them into words. And Andy understood, though he did not know he did, any more than she knew that her mind had spoken to his mind through the gay bustle and the sunshine of that greeting. He would learn to see later, would Andy, the fun and beauty to be found in unspoken conversations – so far he only felt it.

“I am obliged to receive my guests seated,” apologised Mrs. Atterton, shaking hands with Mrs. Dixon and the girls. “My back – ” she smiled the smile she always wore when referring to that part of her person, cheerful and yet obviously brave.

“How sad! I know a lady who never put her foot to the ground for three years from the same cause,” said Mrs. Dixon.

“Ah, I have my family to think of,” sighed Mrs. Atterton, whose back was not to be outdone by any stranger’s. “No one knows the effort – ”

“How splendid of you,” said Phyllis. “I do admire pluck.”

“To give a large party in your state of health – awfully unselfish,” murmured Irene.

Then they all passed on, and Mrs. Atterton remarked to her daughter Norah that Mr. Deane’s relations seemed very good-hearted, kind people. She was glad, because she liked Mr. Deane.

“You wouldn’t like those eyes and those stockings in the family though, would you?” said Norah, looking after the young ladies.

“In our family?” said Mrs. Atterton. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I suppose if Elizabeth were to marry Mr. Deane they would be in our family, in a way, wouldn’t they?”

“Elizabeth – Mr. Deane – how ridic – ” began Mrs. Atterton, when a new batch of visitors came up. But when they also had gone on into the gardens she said uneasily —

“Norah, where is Elizabeth?”

Norah laughed.

“Oh, she’s all right just now – she is over there shepherding the two old Miss Birketts – and they are such clingers that she won’t get away from them for some time. You can always tell a clinger at a party – they’re so afraid of losing you for fear they don’t get any one else.”

Mrs. Atterton’s jolly face grew even pleasanter than usual, and she looked extraordinarily like her daughter Elizabeth, in spite of her huge bulk, as she replied —

“How awful not to be sure you are wanted!”

Norah glanced in the direction of her sister, who sat between two elderly ladies on a long seat.

“It’s awful to care about being wanted as much as Elizabeth does.” She paused, her keen, lovely little face and slim, erect figure outlined clearly against the green lawn. “It’s dangerous,” she added. “She’d far rather be with a dull person who wanted her badly than the most brilliant one who was indifferent. It’s a fault in her character. I’ve always felt it, even when we were at school.”