Читать книгу Cressage - A. C. Benson - Страница 7

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On the first Sunday Walter was very visibly relieved when he found that Norton was quite willing to go to church. "One should bow the head at all altars," Norton had said, quoting Flaubert; and Norton himself was delighted to find that the Manor party occupied a strange painted and canopied Jacobean pew, looking down on the church, which stood in a sort of choir transept, and behind which was the vestry. The sharp colours of the pompous pew had mellowed agreeably with time, and Norton was still more pleased to find, when he took up the old red leather prayer-book in his place, with CRESSAGE GARNET MANOR in gold letters on the side, that on the praying-desk, facing each worshipper, was depicted an enormous open eye, with the motto Tu Dne vides me. He was struck during the service with the whimsical thought how exactly the pew represented the Squire's mind, in its garishness and pomposity, and in all the elaborate devices to secure privacy and seclusion, when neither was needed.

The congregation that clattered in was very small. The Vicar was a middle-aged man, self-possessed and a little stern of aspect, who read the lessons as if they had a meaning, and whose sermon contained two or three passages of pleasing acidity.

In the little chapel beside the altar were several effigies, an armoured knight on a tomb, drowsy courtier-like figures on ledges, with heads propped on delicate hands. A great Jacobean tomb rich in gilded emblems. A Chantry bas-relief, with a slender and beautiful girlish figure, a marble tablet or two. Walter led him to a rude brass of a knight on the wall, and pointed to the epitaph. Norton read:

Jesus Christ, most of might,

Have a mercy of John le Garnet, knight,

And of his wyffe Elizabeth,

Wch out of this world is past by death,

Wch founded this chapel here.

Helpe them with yr harty praer;

That they may come to that place

Where ever is joy and solace.¹

¹ In a chapel at Luton, founded by John le Wenlocke.

"That is in 1470," said Walter, "--it goes straight to the point, at all events. Why should one be proud of descent from these very ordinary people? None of them ever did anything of importance; and yet it doesn't feel like an unwholesome pride!"

"It is certainly a rich and romantic background," said Norton, smiling.

He was still more pleased when he found Mr. Goring at lunch, together with his wife, who appeared to be a voluble and good-natured woman. At luncheon Mr. Goring behaved, Norton thought, with just the right shade of deference to the Squire and Mrs. Garnet, but he was careful to include both Walter and Norton himself in the talk, and spoke his mind very plainly and freely when a parish matter was discussed.

After luncheon, Mr. Goring asked Norton if they might have a little chat about Oxford, and going out into the garden, they sat down in a little recess in one of the curtain-walls, on an old oak settee. After a few words about Oxford, Mr. Goring said, "You are Walter's tutor, I believe, Mr. Norton; he seems to have done well? I have known Walter all his life and take a very great interest in him. What do you think of him?"

"It's rather hard to say; he is in a transitional state."

"What do you mean exactly?"

"Well, he has a great deal of ability. He has got a First, without so far as I can see taking the smallest interest in his subjects. He is very fastidious, and though he is a popular man, he has really no intimate friends. Yet he seems to me to know his own mind, and, under an appearance of indifference, to be going his own way much more than most men. He is rather a mystery to me,--and yet he is more confidential than most young men. I feel that he doesn't tell me all that is in his mind, but only a small and suitable selection."

"Yes," said the Vicar, musing, "that is so--he is a reserved youth, but I suspect him of caring very much for certain things, or at all events being prepared to care very much. His bringing up has of course been against him."

"Surely not!" said Norton; "his relations with his father and mother seem to me to be very fine."

"Up to a certain point, yes," said the Vicar. "But that kind of affection is a cramping thing. His parents--it is no good beating about the bush, if we are to talk seriously--are not wise people. They are entirely ignorant of the world and very uncultivated, and they have an immense idea of their consequence. They have brought him up like a plant in a greenhouse, to a great extent for their own amusement. They have no idea what is going on in his mind, and if he told them they would not understand it. The marvel is that things have turned out so well. To speak plainly, the atmosphere of this house stifles me; it is unreal from top to bottom. The Squire, to be candid, regards every living soul he meets as a mirror to regard his own perfections in. He is a miserly landlord, and I can't get him to help in anything in the parish. Yet the people revere him, and think no end of him. Mrs. Garnet is full of kindness, but her one idea is to keep the Squire 'in all his ways,' like the angels in the Psalm. I have a notion that Walter is not in the least taken in by all this, but he is too loyal to give a hint of it. The question is, what is to be done? I want to get Walter out of it at any cost."

"I don't think it has done him much harm," said Norton. "And knowing what I know of young men's homes, I can't say that I think it nothing to have developed and kept alive this extraordinary family affection. It seems to me a very rare thing and a very beautiful thing."

"Yes, I don't want to decry it," said Mr. Goring, "but to acquiesce is only accepting a situation and making the best of it. It doesn't make things any better. The household is a little close corporation, a mutual benefit society. You know the proverb, 'to love is easy--what is difficult is to respect'? I admit that it is in a way a happy home, but so is many a stagnant pool."

"I don't suppose it is necessary for Walter to have a profession, so far as money goes?" said Norton.

"There again I don't know. The Squire is an extravagant man; he has spent thousands on the house."

"I had thought of advising them to send Walter abroad."

"That would be excellent; but will they let him go?"

"I'll have a try anyhow," said Norton.

"Yes, do," said the Vicar, adding, "I hope you will forgive me for intervening thus. But we have no children of our own, and Walter is very dear to me. Perhaps I am a little jealous of the beautiful united circle?"

This conversation greatly quickened Norton's interest in Walter. He felt himself to blame for his inertia. He had been idly amusing himself by watching the situation, when he ought to have been finding more out about Walter, and trying to clear away obstacles from his path. But though he had a great sense of duty to the intellects of his pupils, he shrank from interfering with their minds and hearts; it seemed to him to be Jesuitical and secret, and to partake of the nature of sin. He was quite ready to advise, but he had no desire to influence.

But he was diplomatic enough in his approaches. He told Walter that the Squire had been consulting him about the future, and that before answering, he wanted to know what Walter's own wishes and aims were.

He was astonished to find how definite Walter's views were all the time. Walter said, in a very deprecating way, and with an evident desire not to lapse into any priggishness, that he was on the whole not interested in moral problems nor in the intellectual life--philosophy, metaphysics, political and social problems had no attraction for him; and what he was really allured by was the element of beauty in life. He went on to say with much diffidence that when people talked about religion and duty in the formal sense, and the intellectual evolution of the world, the whole thing seemed to him unutterably arid--but that beauty seemed to him to be the one divine thing beckoning to men and inviting them with an irresistible surprise and charm to a pure and free region where gross, sensual and material things counted for nothing: that life couldn't be a matter of rules and precepts, of prudence and security, but of impulses in an ascending scale; and that he had in himself a creative sense, calling him to make something beautiful--whether for his own satisfaction, or for the pleasure of others, he did not know--and that he must do this through writing in some form; he had no technical comprehension of art and music, but a great feeling for the value of words.

All this Norton elicited, shamefacedly and spasmodically, by seemingly ingenuous questions, and liberal sympathy. He saw to his amazement and self-condemnation that behind the neat and conventional indifference, there was something burning and glowing in the back of Walter's mind--a sacred fire. But then Walter's mood suddenly ebbed and

"like a fountain's sickening pulse, retired."

He said he was afraid he had been talking great rot. "My dear Walter," said Norton, "you must take a leaf out of Mr. George Moore's book, and learn to be ashamed of nothing except of being ashamed. You mustn't be always on the defensive."

The talk ended clumsily and confusedly. But from that moment, Norton was aware that he was in a new relation to Walter. A wall had been broken down between their spirits, and the passionate self-abandonment that he had witnessed was to him one of the surprising experiences of his life, a splendid secret not to be shared with anyone, and of which he must not even ever remind Walter himself.

They had been walking together that day out upon the uplands to the North, over a long stretch of wild forest-land, the remnant of some old chase, with heather-tufts and thorn-thickets, and here and there a gnarled and ancient tree. Far down below, the huge plain glimmered and shone, and great rays had now and then streamed down from the sun, hidden behind gold-rimmed clouds. It was a beautiful thing to regain the shelter of the wood, to pace along the green rides, with the sharp wholesome breath of the woodland wafted by them; to come suddenly upon the dusky chapel, among its huddled graves, with the tall gables of the manor looking tranquilly over, and to see the little gate-house, which seemed to peer anxiously down the sweet-scented avenue of limes, as if to mark any that went out, or returned, or entered in.

But to come from all this to the clatter of the teacups, to listen to the Squire proclaiming his own generosity and prescience, with Mrs. Garnet's obsequious applause and vapid interventions, and to see Walter moving about smiling, with anxious care for their most trivial needs, was almost more than Norton could bear. It seemed to him like some harem with a noble captive slave attending on the whim of a tyrant, fuming among his concubines, and roused in his mind a sharp disgust at the solemn inanity that seemed to have so cruel and relentless a power over life.