Читать книгу Gallybird - Sheila Kaye-Smith - Страница 3

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§ 1

Old Gervase Alard was walking through Leasan. He did not strictly deserve to be called old, for he was no more than fifty-six; but lately old age seemed to have come down on him like a September frost, showing itself less in any whitening and withering than in a queer twisting, a subtle turning of his mind and body toward winter.

He walked with his cassock and gown bundled up round his haunches, so that his long legs could stride their way over the ruts. In his right hand he clutched a holly stick, which was less a help to his legs than an accent to his thoughts, for it was more often in the air than on the ground—waving and twirling and beating about, as his thoughts took him here and there and up and down, in and out of the little houses and far away across the water.

"Good evenun', Parson"—"Evenun', Parson."

Respectful forelocks were pulled and aprons bobbed, while less respectful voices followed him, as he strode on without noticing either the forelocks or the aprons.

"Up in the clouds as ever."

"Or over the sea."

"Maybe un's thinking how to bring the King back."

"Such an old wagpasty 'ud never do it."

The voices came after him down the April wind, blowing with the cry of lambs and the rumble of a cart behind him, and meaning as little to him as either.

He thought: I do well to go. All the best men are going—the Archbishop's going. Soon they'll find there won't be a manjack of them to take the oath. And if we all go out, we take the Church of England with us. Anyway, we're the Church, and what's left's the schism. I'm wise to go. And I'll be glad . . . twenty years in a parish is too long. I'd like a change before I'm older—and a Bishopric, maybe . . . why not? I've never had a chance, buried in this hole. I was a fool ever to come into it. But now I go out. . . . Besides, it's against my conscience to take the oath. I swore faith to King James, and I'll never have William of Orange save as Regent. . . . My girls 'ull cackle like a yard of hens, but they'll be well enough at my brother's—for my brother must take us. And he must take my books. I pray he have room for my books, for I won't go without 'em. I do well to go. Now at last I've a chance to study, to prove myself a learned man. I shall have hours and days to read in, with none to call for the Parson. . . . But since I'm still the Parson I must look where I'm walking, for it seems I've passed the road. . . . La! La! I'm through the horns and along to Colespore . . . . Eh well, it won't be more than a yard or two to turn back.

He swung round on the road, waving his stick and cracking his fingers. He had been so busily considering his state and the state of the realm that he had walked past the cross-ways without thinking. He must take the southward road from Superstition Corner—the road to Conster, though he would not go so far. He was on his way to Newhouse to visit the sick, a clerkly duty that he must perform, though the fellow was a sad, sour-faced, round-headed scrub who deserved nothing.

Newhouse stood about half a mile from Superstition Corner. Unlike the cross-ways, which was so called because it had once been the turning for a Mass-house, it had got its name in no especial manner, merely through having been a new house a hundred years ago. It was still called new, though it looked old, with its leaning, lime-washed walls, and its sprawl of weathered roof. It had been built for the present owner's grandfather, a Harman who had married a Douce when first they came over from France—before their name was Dows on the local tongue or they had built their hump-roofed house on Starvencrow hill. They had been bad friends to the Alards, the Harmans and Douces, for when King Charles's star went down they had held by the parliament, and the Protector had given them Conster Manor—Harman the house and farmlands, Douce the furnace. It had been hard work getting them out of it when the King came back; but they had gone at last, to save their skins and their own lawful properties at Newhouse and La Petite Douce—though it was certainly a piece of luck that Accepted Harman had died when he did, leaving no heir but his brother Exalted, who was a poor psalm-singing, low-spirited man, too gutless to cling even to an ill-gotten estate. . . .

"Good evening, Mrs. Harman—and how's your goodman to-day?"

"Reckon he's the same, Parson. His affliction never changes."

"Eh well, I'll step up and see him. Is he in his bedroom?"

"Aye—he's in his chair. I haven't had time yet to wash his wound and put him to bed. We're hard at the lambing now, and short-handed for shepherds."

"Short-handed with such a family as yours—five boys and girls, all bred to farming?"

"Maybe, Parson, but they're lumperdee louts for all that, and I've eight lambs in the kitchen crying for their dams' milk. If you'll pardon me I'll go to 'em now, for my pan's on the fire and only that fool Condemnation to watch it."

She whisked off, leaving him to find his own way upstairs. Gervase did not like her and grimaced at her ample backside. The next moment he heard her voice raised loud in anger.

"Aye, to it, scold!" he muttered, fumbling up the dark staircase. "Scold the poor little foundling, since you dare not scold the Parson. I'd give much to have the poor child out of her hand."

§ 2

He knocked at the door.

"Come in."

The room was dark, for the window was hung over with a cloth to keep out the sunset. Blocked against the smothered light was the figure of a man in a chair.

"Ah, so it's Parson. Welcome, and pray sit down, Sir."

Gervase groped for a stool.

"Pox on you, Harman, for your love of darkness. It ill becomes the regenerate son of light that you would be."

"My eyes are feeble, and run in the light. You must learn to pardon my infirmity."

He spoke in a trailing voice that made Gervase snort and blow his nose, as a Christian substitute for more violent expression. It always took him a few minutes to accustom himself to Exalted Harman, who was almost alone in the parish for his Roundhead manners. Everybody save he had long forgotten the Protector and the last revolution but one. No doubt it was his consciousness of wrong-doing, this lapse of his that was always under his nose, that made him prate like an Anabaptist rattler, for all that he was a sober member of a sober church. (Gervase prided himself that there was not a single conventicle in his parish.)

"Hum ha. And how fares your leg? Your good wife says there's no change."

Exalted was a little roused by this.

"Aye, but there's great change since you came last. I had an issue of putrid humours for an hour on Tuesday. Michal and Condemnation were for ever upon the stairs with clean linen, and now there's a darkness gathering round the sore which I take to be a gangrene."

He spoke cheerfully, even hopefully, and to Gervase's disgust, pulled down the linen bandage that wrapped his leg, showing him the wound and its sullen edges. It had been caused three months ago by his fall from a tree when he was cutting off a rotten branch, and it certainly looked worse to-day than it had looked at the start, but Gervase could not pity the man, because of his evident pleasure.

"See, there's broken bits of bone in it: My wife brought one out last week as big as a walnut."

"Cover it now," said Gervase shortly.

Plague on the fellow! he thought to himself. He loves sickness and sores both of body and of soul. He's as proud of his broken, rotting leg as I'll warrant he's proud of his bastard.

"Has the physician called of late?" he asked.

"He came a' Thursday as usual. He says there is näun he can do, save take the leg off."

"And you won't have him do that?"

"No, surely—not even if I was at the point of death. What should I do at the Resurrection of the just with only one leg?"

"As well as the man who plucks out his offending eye in obedience to the Gospels. You are too exact, my friend. There's a natural body and a spiritual body."

"The Scripture says—'It is better for thee to enter into life with one eye than having two eyes be cast into everlasting fire,' And since it's evident from Scripture that the man who has sacrificed his eye for spiritual reasons never has it again, but enters into life with one eye, how could I think to find my leg again when I had cast it from me for reasons of carnal health?"

"Nay, you err altogether. Our bodies shall rise again in their integrity, and the aged shall enjoy eternal youth."

"But the Scripture says——"

"Quote no more Scripture to me. Who, think you, knows more of Scripture—you or I?"

"I am never without the Word of God."

"And I read it daily in the Parish Church as by law commanded . . ."

He broke off suddenly, then said in a different voice:

"Let's not reason and wrangle, for I came here to tell some news that I hope will sadden you. I can't take the oath, so I'm leaving Leasan Parsonage."

"Leaving? . . . What oath?"

"The oath of allegiance—the same that I took to King Charles when first I was made Vicar of Leasan and that when he died I took to King James."

"What! You're never a Jacobite."

"Jacobite forsooth! I'm no Jacobite, as they say in their new impudent, fleering fashion. I'm no Jacobite and I welcome a Protestant hero to save the liberties of England. But I believe in the divine right of kings and the high doctrine of the Lord's anointed. I've sworn allegiance to King James and I can't swear to any other king."

"You would have had the King stay?"

"No—I was all for their sending for the Prince of Orange, but as Regent, not as King. I'm for the Protestant religion at any cost, but not for two kings."

"Nay, there's but one King William."

"You say well that there's only one king, but he's King James."

"And you tell me you're no Jacobite?"

"Aye, and I tell you again. I wouldn't have King James back in London for the whole world: but he's King for all that, made a King for ever when the holy oil touched his head and he became the Lord's Anointed."

"I understand not your High Church disputations."

"High Church hobbyhorse! 'Tis the plain word of God." Gervase sprang to his feet and began to stride the room. "What says the Scripture? That the young man David would not lift up his hand against King Saul, though the King was hot upon his life and he lived in danger of him every hour. And what said David to the Amalekite who had slain Saul? 'Wast thou not afraid to stretch forth thine hand against the Lord's anointed?' And he smote him that he died."

Carried away by the power of his own oratory he wedded action to word, and smote the head of a young woman who had just come into the room.

§ 3

There was a crash of falling crocks, and a platter rolled on the ground, as she stumbled to her knees. Gervase was horrified.

"What have I done? I've hurt thee, pigsnie. Why, I wouldn't have hurt thee for the world, child. I was but quoting Scripture and forgot myself."

He slipped his hands under her armpits and tried to raise her.

"Forgive me, bud. It was all a forgetting on my part. I knew not thou wast there behind me, creeping mouse . . ."

"Condemnation!"

A voice cried from below, and the girl started up at once. She was a small creature, less than five feet high, with a secret little face, which with its great black starting eyes gave her the look of some animal—no creeping mouse, but rather some coney or hare crouching before a spring for safety.

"Condemnation! What hast thou broken now?"

"She has broken naught. It's I who've broken your platter, smiting her as David smote the Amalekite who had slain the King. Had not this happened," he continued, turning to Exalted Harman, "I should have quoted further how David said unto him 'thy blood be upon thy head, for thy mouth hath testified against thee saying I have slain the Lord's anointed.' So if David could thus avenge Saul who had sought his blood for many years and whose place he himself was anointed to take, how much less dare I forswear myself against a King who has done me no harm but only a general injustice through being a Papist."

Exalted always felt enraged when the Parson quoted Scripture. He was the only man in the district who could beat him with a text, and somehow it seemed all wrong for a Royalist Alard, bred in France, to know more of Holy Writ than a godly Harman whose father and brother had both fought for the Parliament. He searched his mind to cap him now, but could find nothing at the moment. His hand reached out for the Bible that was always at his side, when suddenly Gervase recalled himself.

"Where's the poor little bud?"

"Run away, during your argument."

"But I would know if I've hurt the poor rogue."

"Nay, she an't hurt—only scared to have broken another platter. And she an't so little and young as you would make her. She was eighteen at Christmas."

"What, a woman already. I'd no idea of it."

"I thought as much by your address," said Exalted primly. "But she is a woman, and will most likely be married before her next birthday, to my ploughman, Lambert Relph."

"Why, it seems only a few years ago that I held her in my arms at the font and called her by the outlandish name you would give her, adding but the name Ruth for the dignity of the Church, and the integrity of the Sacrament."

"'For I remember my fault, and my sin is ever before me,'" murmured Exalted.

"And you would have called her Sin had I not restrained you."

"Would you have me forget the sin of which she is the fruit?"

"Nay, forget it not, but confess it and be forgiven, and there let it rest. Why visit it upon an innocent babe who had no part in your iniquity?"

"No part! But she is my iniquity. She is my everlasting condemnation."

"Nay, in your soul is your iniquity. What says the Book of Enoch? 'And say not to thyself: I have Adam to my transgression, for I say unto thee that each one of us hath been the Adam of his own soul.'"

For a moment Exalted looked angry and baffled. Then he realized that the Parson had not quoted from Holy Writ.

"What is this Book of Enoch that you speak of? It an't in Scripture, of that I'm certain sure."

Gervase seemed confused.

"So. I was forgetting. I quote from a book I studied when I was in France—a learned book of the Jews."

"Is it the same Enoch that is in Scripture, who was not found because God had translated him?"

"The same, but the book concerns rather the fallen angels . . ." he stopped and stammered a little: "I had forgotten such things."

"The Church of England is much to be blamed," said Harman, "in that she encourages reading outside the Word of God, such as the fabulous books of Wisdom and Sirach, which are only tales."

"Nay, rather they are for example of life and instruction of manners, as the Article says. But Enoch is not among those."

"A Papist book?"

"Nay—nay, I told you—a book of the Jews. But let's have no more of it. . . . And here comes my little bud again, or rather my young woman; for I hear thou art a woman grown now, Condemnation."

The girl did not speak. She came in with a fresh platter of soup for her father, carrying under her arm a besom and a mop, with which she swept up the broken pieces and mopped the spilled soup from the floor. All the while she did not speak, though Gervase joked and teased her on being grown so old. Her air was both frightened and sullen. She seemed afraid to speak: though her fear was not so much a fear of blows—since neither Gervase nor Exalted would have struck her—as a sort of general fear of mankind. She was afraid as a bird is afraid in a man's hand; stroke her or strike her, she would fly away if she could.

At last she had picked up her pieces, and turned to go.

"Nay, not so fast," said the Parson, "I see thee so seldom that when I see thee I must examine thee. Art so old that thou hast forgotten thy Catechism?"

She shook her head.

"Come then, let's hear some of it. What is thy duty towards thy neighbour?"

"My duty to'rds my neighbour is to love 'un as myself and do t'all men as I would they do me to love honest and sucker my father and mother honest and obey the King and all or-orthumbrity under 'un . . ."

"La! La! La!" cried Gervase—"that isn't the English tongue. Where hast thou lost the good English tongue and learned to speak like a hob?"

"She can speak well enough," said Exalted, "but now she's sullen."

"Nay, she isn't sullen. Begin again, child—'my duty towards my neighbour' . . ."

But she would say no more, and when he pressed her, she turned from him and ran out of the room.

"Already reprobate," said Exalted calmly.

"Say rather, timid. She's timid as a jenny-wren. I sometimes wonder, friend, if your good wife isn't over-shrewd with her."

"Maybe she is. But what would you have? She must hate the girl."

"Why should she hate her?"

"You know well, sir."

"I know naught that she should hate her for, though enough that she should have hated you for once had she been so minded. But all that's very long ago, and had she felt bound to hate a poor innocent child for being born to her husband out of wedlock she shouldn't have taken her into her house."

"I commanded her to take her in. She was forced to obey me."

The Parson struggled a smile into a grimace. "You shouldn't have commanded. The child would be happier on the Parish than in a home where she's tormented."

"She an't tormented. She has been brought up under a godly discipline, as beseems a child of rebuke——"

"Nay, have done with that. I'm weary of your rebukes and sins and condemnations. You do but glory in them."

"I will glory in my infirmities, as the Apostle saith."

Gervase sighed stormily.

"Aye, your running sores of body and soul—whereas both could most likely be cured at once with a good plaster."

"You injure me."

"No, I injure you not. But all these years I've been offering you a plaster for your soul, at least, and you'll have none of it."

"If you would again persuade to absolution, I must again remind you of the Apostle's word—'confess your sins one to another,' which means no sacerdotal monopoly but a brotherly exchange. You tell me your transgressions and I will tell you mine."

"You've told me yours till I'm sick of hearing 'em, and mine are for no man's ears. So there's an end on't. But, come now, we won't quarrel. I must be going. I came only to tell you my news, which I lay has made you more glad than sorry."

"No, indeed. I am truly sorry; though I shan't be long in the world to mourn your loss, and your reasons for going don't seem to me plain in Scripture."

Gervase opened his mouth to quote again from the Book of Samuel, but thought better of it.

"You will most likely live longer than any of us," he said, "and I trust my successor may persuade you where I've been unable. Now I must go, and I shall tell my man to make you the famous plaster he made for my horse and cured him of a running sore in thirty-six hours. Good day to 'ee."

And he marched out, priding himself that he had got the better of Harman both in theology and in medicine.

§ 4

A little farther on the road home, it struck him that this was not the right way for a Pastor to feel toward a sick member of his flock. But he could not help it. He could not like Exalted Harman, who, after all, was a Churchman in name only. He had for his own comfort urged his not too difficult conscience to conformity—hence, no doubt, his failure to understand his Vicar's renunciation—but his mind was still full of Anabaptist rubbish and his heart of a secret enmity toward the Church of Laud and Ken and Sancroft, restored and re-established.

The man was a humbug. Gervase had vastly preferred his elder brother Accepted, though he and his family had often cursed him for an arrant, rank, iron-sided Bible thumper, but for whose timely death they would have been kept still longer out of their estates. He had refused to budge from where Cromwell had placed him, and he had thought John Douce a poor washy scoundrel for so readily coming to an agreement and surrendering an ownership for a mere mastership. He would have held Conster against the Philistines another ten years had he lived. But he had died.

Marching home between the hawthorn towers of the hedgerow, Gervase's mind went back to an evening eighteen years ago, soon after the Alards' return to Conster. He had been Vicar of Leasan only a few months, and he saw himself standing in his new gown upon a sunlit lawn, smelling as he smelt now the scents of the warm reviving earth. His father had given a feast to celebrate the family's restoration, nine years after the King's, and a summer-tree had been set up, for all the villagers and country folk who had not seen one since the Rebellion.

They had waited a year after the death of Accepted Harman, so there was nothing unseemly in the festival or likely to upset those families who had always been friendly with the dispossessed Harmans and Douces. But Exalted, he remembered, had watched the proceedings with a sour face, and would not let his wife or children dance—not because he still mourned his brother or resented the loss of Conster to his family, but because he held dancing to be lascivious and a maypole but little less idolatrous than a cross. Gervase remembered how the poor little children had wanted to dance, and how when he had pleaded with their father they had had their first Scripture-quoting contest, bringing the daughter of Herodias and her impious prancing against the godly measure that King David trod before the Ark.

Exalted had beaten him then, he remembered darkly, for he had been ordained no more than a year, and as his pre-Restoration life in France had not been particularly godly, he was as yet untrained to withstand the onslaught of woes and prophets and daughters of Sion, all brought forward to prove how easily the feet can trip the soul. Since then his daily reading of the Book of Common Prayer had given him as extensive an armoury as his antagonist, but on that day he had been defeated and had retired in dudgeon: and then . . . old Gervase gave a sudden hop and skip to the astonishment of some children driving a cow along the road . . . and then the mountebank woman had come.

She had come in at the low gate, he remembered, carrying her bundle high against her shoulder. Her long shadow had run ahead of her over the grass, and her shape had been mere rags and darkness. He had felt surprised when she stopped and asked him for Exalted Harman; but he had pointed him out, and then felt curious enough to follow her. She had gone straight up to where Exalted stood with his wife and children, some twenty yards from the dancers, and had straightway thrust her bundle into his arms—"There, take your brat."

Gervase laughed out loud at his memories, and the passing cow swung her head at him. It had been a famous sight—that sour black stick of a man gaping there with the child in his arms, and the mountebank running away . . . she had got to the fence before anyone thought of stopping her. Of course at first they had all believed it a joke—that she had been paid by some wag to plant her brat on the Puritan. But it was the man himself who had stuck for the truth of her words. He would have it that this was his own child, his own sin, the Lord's rebuke for a wantonness, twelve months old. Nay, he would tell them all how he had met a tinker woman at a fair and been tempted to his undoing.

"For twelve months I've borne the secret smart of my sin. Now the Lord has discovered my shame and visited his condemnation upon me."

All the time his wife was railing at him; for she believed him. It appeared that his manners to her a year ago had agreed with such a story.

"I knew well you'd been up to some wickedness. You were hang-dog and shamefaced and scrambling for a week or more. Nay, filthy! I know thee now."

For a while it was all a hubbub—he proclaiming his fault and she rating him for it; till the Squire walked down from the terrace to see what had happened, and the dancers came crowding and questioning from the summer-tree. There had been a great gabble and rattle of tongues, in the midst of which the poor infant had lifted up her voice and cried lustily. The merrymakers laughed and hullooed and dug one another in the sides. They had drunk some good ale and their spirits were high, and it seemed to them the best thing in the world that Exalted Harman, who had condemned their sport, should stand before them confessing himself the father of a bastard.

In the end they had all joined hands and danced round him as if he were a maypole. Old Gervase laughed aloud and capered, as he remembered Exalted Harman, dressed in black, with a steeple-crowned hat on his head and a squalling brat in his arms, standing there with his eyes rolled up to heaven, while the boys and girls danced round him singing: "Pinch him, pinch him, black and blue . . ." He! He! He! It had been a famous sight, and he felt better for remembering it so well.

"Pinch him blue and pinch him black, Let him not lack Sharp nails to pinch him blue and red Till sleep has rocked his addle head."

Those nails had certainly done their work when he was home, to judge by his appearance during the next day or two. But for all that Mistress Harman had had to keep the child. She might pinch her husband, but she must obey him and breed up his bastard—if so be it really was his, since none could tell whose child the mountebank might have fathered on him. Possibly she didn't know herself whose it was, but her luck had sent her a mighty fine chance to get rid of it. Sir Charles Alard had had her searched for, but she had gone from the district.

Exalted Harman would never hear a word against the child being his. You might have thought he gloried in it, though for the matter of that Gervase guessed well enough that his faith in Providence was at stake with his paternity. The Lord would never have condemned him with another man's child, so the child must be his and he would bring her up in his family as a perpetual memorial of his sin, its punishment, and its forgiveness. He had drunk strong waters at a fair, and gone with a vagabond woman, and hidden his sin for a year. But there is nothing secret that shall not be revealed, and that which ye shall speak in your closets—or rather in the hollow by the hedge of Dodyland Shaw—shall be proclaimed on the housetops—or on the lawn of Conster Manor at a May-day feast. To that end he had had the poor wretch christened Condemnation, so that he might say when he saw her: my rebuke is ever before me. The old fool! Gervase switched off a head of fennel in the ditch.

They had better have sent her to the workhouse, for she had had a hard life under her father's roof. It was not to be expected that her stepmother should love her, and the young Harmans—solid, healthy, witless boys and girls—were so unlike her that it seemed natural she should be their butt and sport. He'd lay his life she was no Harman; she came of a darker, wilder breed, belike of those Egyptians that were coming into the country. . . . She'd be happier in the hedge than in the house. . . .

But she was growing up now and would soon be married. He did not like the thought of her marrying Lambert Relph, who was nothing but a labourer. Harman had no right to mate her so low—most likely it was all a part of his psalm-singing and sin-snivelling and general Roundheadedness. She ought to have a good husband, the poor little bud—not a yokel or a Puritan, but some tight merry lad. Perhaps he could find one for her—who would do for her, now? He went over a list of names. There was Nick Lord of Peryman's Garden, and young Ned Martin of Cobbeach who soon would be looking for a wife. Or what of William Douce, John Douce's son, when he came back from France? He was a roving lad and might suit a wild, brown girl like Condemnation, though it was more likely he aimed higher. That was the trouble with most of 'em. They wouldn't stoop to a wife born out of wedlock. He'd better mate her with one of the Tuktons of Colespore—being Papists, they couldn't look high, and they too were dark and wild. . . . Thus his thoughts rambled on while his stick smote the tall weeds in the hedgerow.

§ 5

When he came to Leasan the sun was already low, a reddish ball above the little houses and the darkness of Lordine Wood. The church steeple rose in a black tapering shaft against the glow, and from it came the plaint of its ancient bell. He must hurry, or there would not be light enough to read Evening Prayers.

He went in, and the sunset followed him, painting the whitewashed walls of the little bare place with fiery colours, and lighting up into another sun the great brass alms dish that stood upon the altar. He loved his church, with its dim smell of devotion, and suffered his first renunciatory pang when he thought that he must leave it, that perhaps it would be many weeks before a stranger should stand reading prayers to Tom Synden the clerk and old Goody Munskull. . . . No doubt there were many things more glorious than that, but he would miss the godly order of his days, and his honourable position as Parson of the parish, free to stand up in his pulpit and say what he liked, even to his brother the Squire. . . . King of his own little kingdom. His heart sank, heavy with the thought of his sacrifice for conscience's sake.

What should he do in his brother's house? He would feel no better than a layman. Study? What for? He would have no sermons to preach and collect into a goodly volume for issue with a Lewes bookseller, as he had done already and had meant to do again. . . . La! he had too much conscience. Why couldn't he be like his predecessor whose tomb lay under his feet as he reached for his surplice on its nail behind the pulpit? Nicholas Pecksall had been made Vicar of Leasan in 1556 under Queen Mary and had held his living till King Jamie came to the throne in 1603. Like most of the neighbouring clergy at that period he changed from Catholic to Protestant with, apparently, no more trouble than a man changes from his summer to his winter coat. Why couldn't Gervase Alard be like him? Because maybe he was a better man—a man of his oath, a man of his conscience, though with a sound, sensible, theological conscience, unlike some. . . .

"To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses though we have rebelled against him, neither have we obeyed the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in his laws which he set before us. Dearly beloved brethren . . ."

He had begun to read prayers, though the goody had not yet come. Perhaps her rheumatism was troubling her—he had seen rain in the sky, lying in tremulous pools and sheets of green and yellow beside the fine-weather flush. She must have her rheumatism again and would not come at all. There was no use waiting for anybody else. His girls would not come, the flighty wretches—no doubt they were sporting with some young fellow or other in the house; they never came to prayers except on Sundays. Their mother would have come: their mother had always done as she was bid. How was it that his commands had bred out of her obedience so many disobedient children?

But his church was full on Sundays, and next Sunday he would preach 'em a fine rating sermon about coming in the week. His successor must not find the place slack and neglected. He frowned at the cool empty shadows in the nave, and on the empty benches near the door. He was reading the Psalms now and his thoughts could no longer roam freely while his tongue moved between the fences of habit. His thoughts must follow his tongue in his godly duet with Tom Synden. Tom was as good a clerk as you'd find within fifty miles, and spoke the English language instead of some outlandish jargon of his own. Whosoever came to Leasan would marvel at it; but there was no marvel, since his Parish Priest himself had trained him, moulding his speech to gentleness. . . . La! Tom spake better than his own daughters.

Gervase: "Lord, I am not high minded: I have no proud looks."

Tom: "I do not exercise myself in great matters: which are too high for me."

Gervase: "But I refrain my soul and keep it low, like as a child that is weaned from his mother: yea, my soul is even as a weaned child."

Tom: "O Israel, trust in the Lord: from this time forth for ever more."

Gervase opened his Bible and turned over the pages for the Lesson. He generally kept a marker in the place, but it must have fallen out, for he could not find it. The stiff pages crackled as he swung them over. He loved turning the pages of his Bible, which was as fine a Bible as any in the kingdom—one of the first to be printed of King James's version. The Lesson was in the First Book of Samuel—a mighty fine book for those who would assert and prove the divine right of kings—but he was in no great hurry to find it; he enjoyed turning the pages, and there was no one to wait for him but Tom. . . . "And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness . . . Enoch also, the seventh from Adam prophesied . . ." Strange that he should light upon that passage after what he had said to Exalted Harman. . . . It was many years now since he had thought of the fallen angels and their powers among men. Once he had even known their names. Could he remember them now? . . . Ramuel, Taniel, Araziel. . . . Perhaps when he was at Conster he would be able to revive some of that lost knowledge. No, better not—it savoured of magic, touched the corners of it . . . a Parson should not meddle with such things, and he would still be a priest even when he left Leasan, and maybe some day the Archbishop would give him another benefice in the new free church which the dispossessed hierarchy would doubtless set up . . . he might rise high in that . . .

"The lesson's First Samuel fifteen, Sir," said Tom Synden, and craned his head over the reading-desk, where the Parson was muttering to himself as he turned the pages.

§ 6

Evening Prayers had been duly, if somewhat absently, read. The Parson and the Clerk exchanged good nights, and Gervase walked through the churchyard to Leasan Vicarage. His father had rebuilt the house for him soon after his appointment to the living, and it was now handsome and commodious, less like a Vicarage than the house of a small country gentleman. It used to be a little thatched place, snug enough, but too small for a man just married and meaning to breed a family.

Gervase, as Vicar of Leasan, was the first of a long line of Alard's younger sons. On their return with the King, the family had found in occupation an Anabaptist crony of Accepted Harman's. Unable to change his religion as easily as Nicholas Pecksall, he had gone out with the rest of Cromwell's men on Black Bartholomew's day, and soon afterwards Sir Stephen Alard (baroneted by King Charles on Newbury field) had conceived the notion of presenting the living to Gervase. His elder son's boy was alive then and naturally regarded as the heir: he was only doing the best he could for the dissatisfied and rather strange young man who had returned with them from France. Gervase was more than thirty years old, and up till then, like the rest of them, had lived chiefly by his wits, knowing dire poverty as well as dissipation. He had been bred up to nothing, but he had always been fond of books and liable to serious fits, and his father discredited the rumour which accused him of going with the necromancers and magicians of Tours. Gervase would settle down into a good sort of country parson, he had not a doubt, and such an establishment would encourage him to marry and become more like other people.

The young fellow himself did not hesitate long before accepting the offer. He was already tired of living in the country without occupation or interest or very much money, and he believed—erroneously—that the living of Leasan would lead to promotion in the Church of England. He was impressed by that Church itself, by its discreet and godly order, by the solemn cadences of its liturgy, to which he came almost as a stranger after twenty years' exile. At one time he had thought of joining the Romish Church, but had been dissuaded by his family and the sudden turn of affairs toward the King's restoration. Now he was glad that he had not done so; though for several years after their return the Alards had to bear the suspicion of Popery, Charles Alard having brought back with him a young French wife who never came to church, but, it was rumoured, received the ministrations of wandering Jesuits.

Gervase himself had married soon after his ordination—Mary Ann Pye, the daughter of a Kentish Squire who had returned to his estates at much the same time as the Alards. She had been a good wife to him in all save her failure to bear a son. This had not mattered at first, but when Charles's boy died soon after his father's succession to the title and estates, he had grown anxious about it. "Let it be a boy this time, child," he would say to his wife on intimate occasions, and she would answer solemnly, "I'll do my best, dear heart," and give him a girl as sure as clockwork.

Folk said she'd died of her disappointment after the fifth girl was born, though Gervase had never reproached her for what he must believe was the will of God and the course of Nature rather than her fault. He had, however, often been distressed, first by the thought of Louise cutting him out with another son, and then, when he saw this was not going to happen, by the thought of the family's extinction at his death. Once before the chain had been nearly broken, when an earlier Gervase, Peter Alard's son, had become a seminary priest; but the gap had been filled by Peter's brother Tom, Sir Stephen's grandfather. Now there was no brother to inherit: the property without the title would go to the Oxenbrigges of Iden, on the Kentish border, who were the family's next of kin. Gervase's death would mean the end of the house of Alard—that ancient, honourable house of Squires and Crusaders, which would then become mere dead history, as musty as de Icklesham and de Etchingham and other names on tombs.

For a while he played with the idea of marrying again, but nothing came of it and in time he gave up the notion. He had always been of solitary, eccentric habit, and his marriage to poor Mary Ann had alternately bored and exasperated him. He would sooner be free—and as for the inheritance; that must go to the Oxenbrigges. They were no doubt as good as Alard in the eyes of heaven and soon would be as good in the eyes of Leasan. And his daughter Bess was to marry one of them.

Was that Ned Oxenbrigge with them now in the garden? He could see the gaily coloured dresses standing out of the twilight among the tall bushes he had planted. Laughter came to him, and somehow both laughter and colour seemed strangely out of place in that encroaching dusk, which was swallowing up the garden, beginning with the groves and shrubberies and finishing with the grey lawns where the colours moved.

"Hey!" he called. "Hey! Wretches—come in: the dew's falling."

A titter of laughter answered him and one or two colours detached themselves and came floating toward him.

"It'll gather on your gowns and draggle 'em. That ought to move you if obedience won't. Eh, Bess—hast thy gallant here?"

"No, Father. Ned has ridden over to Ashford to see the fighting cocks. The gentlemen here are Monsieur de Champfort and Monsieur de Périgault."

"What, the old fellows?"

"No—Monsieur Eustache and Monsieur Gilles."

"And have they taught thee any French?"

"They've been teaching us all French. That's why we were laughing so."

"Aye, hussy—laugh at the language of thy father's exile; and learn it from thy gallants since thou wouldst never learn it from thine aunt."

"I'd have willingly learned it from my aunt if she hadn't mocked me."

"So it was she who laughed instead of thee and thou'dst sooner do the laughing thyself. Well, well. And here come the young fellows. Bon soir, messieurs."

"Bon soir, Monsieur le Pasteur . . . Bon soir."

The young French gentlemen bowed low and swept the ground with their plumed hats. They were very different from the common run of Huguenot immigrants, from the families, mostly of the trading class—cloth-workers, weavers and iron smelters—that had been dribbling into the country for the last hundred and fifty years. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had brought a new type of refugee—ancient families from the south and south-west of France, impoverished but noble, not bred to any trade save war. One or two of these had settled in the neighbourhood of Leasan, living frugally in small houses, but none the less maintaining a civilization that the English-born gentry had never known.

Gervase liked them for their elegance and their panache, and would have asked them in to supper, so that he might discourse with them all the evening in a language his daughters could not understand. But they made their excuses: they had already stayed too long and their families expected them home. Model young men indeed! Gervase pointed and stressed their excellence as he marched in front of his daughters into the house—a tall black prancing shepherd leading a flock of many-coloured sheep.

§ 7

His daughters were a pretty pack, for the Alards were a handsome family, and Mary Ann Pye's face, though luckily not all her fortune, was just as enviable a dowry. She had given her youngest girls, Bridget and Madge, her ruddy, chestnut hair, her skin of honey and roses; the rest were Alards, brown-haired, blue-eyed and white-skinned where they were not tanned. Bess, the eldest, took care of her complexion and kept it white with cucumber and milk and a strange mess of ashes and almond oil which she plastered on at night, to the derision of her sisters, who conjectured freely as to its effect on her bridegroom. After Bess came Ann, then Henrietta; Gervase was sometimes as much bored by them as he had been by their mother, though on the whole he enjoyed their chatter round his table, and always found pleasure in teasing them and in censuring their country manners.

"And how many times have these young sparks been here in your father's absence? Nay, Biddy child, keep thy fingers out of the dish and use thy fork."

"This is the first time they've come, but we met them both last week at my aunt's."

"I'll warrant she's glad to speak her own tongue again, though she must hate their reason for leaving France. Eh well, they're pretty fellows, and you can sort 'em out amongst ye, so long as Bess keeps to Oxenbrigge."

"They'll never marry one of us. Their fathers have lost everything, so they must marry women of fortune."

"And none of ye's penniless. I'll wager that neither the Sieur de Champfort nor the Sieur de Périgault will find four thousand pounds come amiss just now. And when I die there's the furnace, though you can't have the estate."

"Maybe the furnace won't be blowing then. John Douce says the timber will be all used up in another fifty years."

"Well, that's thy life as well as mine, child; and John Douce is an old croaker—maybe he'd sing another tune if the furnace was still his. Henny, hast forgotten what I read 'ee out of Lady Rich's book? 'Throwing your liquor as into a funnel is an action fitter for a juggler than a gentlewoman.'"

"Father, you're as teasing as my aunt."

"I've your good at heart in the same way, child. You've been brought up without a mother's care, and have some sad country manners in consequence. You must behave better at table if you want to marry a fine French gentleman."

"I'd sooner marry an Englishman," said Ann. "The French are for ever mocking and mincing."

"Nay, they're civilized. We're louts beside 'em. I trust your aunt to make some improvement in your manners when you live at Conster."

"Then is it settled that we're to live at Conster?"

"Aye, it's settled. Your uncle must take us since we've nowhere else to go, and there'll be plenty of room for us all."

The girls groaned and made faces.

"I don't like Conster," cried Ann, "it's a great gloomy place, all planted round with trees, and they say Galloping Kate's ghost rides down the hill at nights."

"For shame to believe such a tale! Conster Manor's a fine, cheerful house, with twice as many windows as this."

"If we live at Conster," said Bridget, "our aunt will be for ever scolding us."

"And laughing at us."

"And reading to us out of the 'Closet of Rarities.'"

"Nay, Bess, it an't for you to grumble—you'll soon be away from it all at Iden."

"When shall we go to Conster?" asked Bess.

"I don't know, child. But it must be before August."

"Father, why must we go? We're all happy here."

"We'll all be happy there."

"Shall we have our horses?"

"You shall indeed. I lose four hundred pounds a year, but it needn't trouble you. Your uncle will take your horses into his stable."

"I'd sooner stay here—away from my uncle and aunt. I can't see why we need go."

"Because, as I've told you a hundred times, you thoughtless rogue, I will not take the oath to the new King and they will not let me stay without it."

"I can't see why they won't let you stay nor why you can't take the oath."

Gervase rolled up the whites of his eyes.

"What a litter, what a brood, have I begotten! All ignorant hussies without grace or sense. As if it weren't bad enough my being without a son to inherit the estates, I must have daughters brained no better than conies."

He was half laughing as he spoke, but in his heart was an angry feeling of loneliness. He felt lonely in the midst of their chattering ignorance; their pretty, smiling faces were mere masks—there was no human brain behind them to understand him. He was alone among masks.

§ 8

The next day he went over to Conster as soon as he had read Morning Prayers. He went as usual on foot, for unless the way were very long he would always rather walk than ride, and Conster was barely two miles from Leasan. He walked at a great pace and his mind moved faster than his legs. Striding along with his holly stick in his hand and his cassock bunched round his middle, his thoughts were on horseback, galloping ahead of him; whereas when he rode a horse his thoughts crawled only at a foot pace.

To-day his thoughts were cavalry, charging the future. He saw the Church of England in disruption—what could they do when they found that only a fraction of the clergy would take the oath? They couldn't deprive them all. And no power on earth could deprive them of their orders; Bishops and Priests would remain Bishops and Priests, the ministry of the new church—the bones of the Phoenix. . . . Schism? Nay, the schism lay with those who intruded their swearing nominees into sees and cures already occupied by men too loyal and logical to swear . . . the men who followed Canterbury would be the ministers of the true Church of England, the others but usurpers and schismatics. . . . He was to be turned out of his living, but he would soon have something better—a bishopric maybe. He was a man of ripe age and experience—they would surely give him an important place in any new administration, all the more because he was not a Jacobite . . . he was all for William of Orange and against the Pope. . . . But he would not swear sacrilegious, unscriptural oaths . . . and he was weary of Leasan—his galloping thoughts swept down the fences that yesterday had been set about his mind—weary of a Parson's daily round, of reading prayers to old women and breathing the foul air of sickrooms. He was king of his castle—but it was only a toy castle, and his crown a paper crown. How ran the Psalm? "I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord" . . . or John Milton: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" . . . nay, that was not his meaning; but he was well rid of Leasan. He saw himself a Bishop of some newly created see, resigning at last for an honourable retirement to Conster Manor on his brother's death. . . .

"Good day, brother."

Charles's voice came coolly, unaware that he greeted a retired Bishop who had supplanted him.

Gervase pulled up, a little dazed by the spread of his thoughts and surprised to find that his legs, at an almost equal speed, had taken him all unwittingly over the footbridge that crossed the River Tillingham, and into the lower groves of Conster's garden.

"Good day, Charles. Good day, Master Douce."

Charles was standing on a green lawn-slope beside the river, in conference with his furnace master, John Douce, great-grandson of Robert Douce, the melancholy Frenchman who had come as a refugee from Beauface more than a hundred years ago. The Douces and the Harmans were connected, for a daughter of Robert Douce had married the young Harman of her day, and for a time, as no Alard could ever forget, the Conster estate had been parcelled out between them. But their power had ended with the Commonwealth and the Douces had returned to their former state more philosophically than the Harmans. Perhaps John Douce, as owner of Conster Furnace, had seen the shadow creeping down on it, and thought it as well to put himself in a less responsible position. The shadow came from the high hill behind Conster, where the forest of Mardersham met the forest of Wagenmary. The furnace had blown for a hundred years and already the trees were growing thin. New plantations had been made, but the young stock was not thriving—and anyway it is impossible to grow a tree in the time it takes to cut one down.

Charles had been discussing timber with John Douce when Gervase charged in on them.

"In ten years' time we'll be forced to buy our fuel, and that will sink our profits yet lower. The new plantation at Farthingland won't be up before the rest of the forest is down."

"How's that?" said Gervase. "Your trees look well enough?"

He gazed round him at the tall oaks standing about the lawn, and then up at the tree-covered slope of Wagenmary, where the young foliage of oak and ash and beech burned in a yellowish fire against the sky. All about Conster stood the trees, shutting it away from the countryside into the leafy prison of its wealth. The shadows lay dark against the sunlight in the clear heat of spring.

Gervase repeated: "Your trees look well enough."

"Hark!" said Charles.

Through the silence came the rocketing laugh of a woodpecker. Ha-ha-ha-hi!

"The place is infested with gallybirds," said Douce. "What harm can they do?"

"None to a sound tree; but a gallybird never goes to a sound tree. Our trees are rotting, so the gallybirds are in most of 'em."

"But your wood is wanted mainly for burning, so I can't see that a little unsoundness can affect you much." Charles laughed.

"A rotten tree burns twice—thrice—as fast as a sound one. That's why we shall have burned all our old trees before the new ones are up. I'll lay, brother, that when Conster's yours, the furnace will be blowing at a loss."

"Then it shall blow no more—I'll have no loss on it."

Gervase's inheritance was in the way of being a joke between them—a better joke for the elder than for the younger—because Charles was scarcely two years older than his brother. In point of fact he looked younger; his skin was almost unlined and his forehead was pale and smooth under the eaves of his monstrous periwig. Beside him Gervase looked gnarled, and there was grey in the hard, stubbly thatch of his hair. Only his smile was younger than his brother's, for he had a wide grin showing sound, white teeth, while Charles's teeth were minced together like a rabbit's and his smile was languid.

"And how fares your controversy at Leasan? I see by my 'Newsletter' that those who won't swear are to go."

"I shall go—and so will two-thirds of the clergy on the Establishment."

"Two-thirds?" Charles raised his eyebrows. "I shouldn't have thought two-tenths. But whether you go with the majority or the minority I'm glad that you go. You've been Parson of a parish long enough."

"Eh, how's that?" Gervase was surprised and a little annoyed to find his brother so accurately expressing his recent thoughts.

"You've been Vicar of Leasan more than twenty years. It was a bad scheme of my father's to put you in; but doubtless he thought it would lead to something better."

"And what better am I to have now?"

"You will be able to lead the life of a scholar and a gentleman. Both my wife and I will be glad for you to settle here—our family's too small for such a place."

Gervase was pleased to find his brother proposing what he himself had meant to ask at a more favourable opportunity.

"But, remember, I'm not alone. If your family's small, mine's large—too large, since there's no variety in it."

"No, but there's good room for your daughters, and we shall enjoy having so much young company. Come up to the house and let my wife tell you what we've been talking of."

They had already started to walk, Gervase's long legs setting a pace that gave his brother hard work to keep up with him and made John Douce fall behind.

"We shall all agree together well enough," continued Charles.

"And you will take my books?"

"I wouldn't take you without 'em, and you shall have the east room to study in—it's quiet and away from the rest. You'll be a happier man when you can sit among your books instead of having to go forth into stinking cottages to look at sores and boils or into a cold church to read prayers to witches."

"I read no prayers to witches."

"What! Has no one told you that Goody Munskull is a witch——"

"Nay, I'd never listen to such rank talk."

"But our neighbour Austen was telling me only last night at dinner that the goody's a witch and keeps a little cow no bigger than a cat."

"Foh! there speaks our learned magistrate, our English Squire, with a nose as good for a witch as for a fox."

"Aye indeed. But you mustn't be solemn over it. When you live at the Manor you will laugh at such things. Brother, you and I are still suffering from our seventeen years in France, where we learned to be civilized, and perversely to speak the English tongue. If we had never been away, we should be like any other Squire round here, with no thought save to guzzle ale and hunt the fox, and no speech save the 'uums' and 'aahs' of a yokel at a fair."

"You'll soon see plain that my girls have never been in France."

"Madame shall teach them how to behave à la française; though I'll lay you don't want 'em trained up as wives for the French exiles."

"I've no objection if she makes them polite enough. Two pretty, prancing young fellows were at my house last night and I told the girls they could do as they pleased with 'em so long as they remembered that Bess marries the heir. They'll have money of their own, so can afford to pay for blood."

"We've some fine ancient families exiled now among us, much as we once were exiled among them. Louise was mightily pleased with one or two that she saw, though she doesn't like their religion . . . there she is, on the terrace."

Gervase could see the vivid colours of his sister's gown and petticoat standing against the dim, rosy wall of the manor. The ground floor of Conster was built of old, mellow bricks, above which the upper story hung, three beamed and lime-washed gables.

"Who's that with her?" he asked.

"Mr. Parsons."

Gervase made a grimace.

§ 9

"Ah, Gerr-r-vase," said Louise Alard, coming forward.

She spoke English with charming fluency and some equally charming hesitations. She had been no more than sixteen when Charles Alard married her at the end of his exile, and now she looked far less than her thirty-eight years, for her shape was trim and delicate and her face was like a little pointed heart.

Gervase kissed her hand, which had a mysterious scent upon it, and turned from her to answer her companion's greeting. Mr. Parsons was about forty years old, dark, short, and dressed in a neat, old-fashioned style. Gervase had met him already once or twice, for he was a fairly frequent visitor at the Manor. Rumour held him to be a Jacobite spy, and though Gervase was convinced of his brother's political integrity he had a pretty strong suspicion that the stranger was a Romish priest. Louise, he knew, was periodically visited by such, who ministered to her and to the one or two Papist families that still survived in the neighbourhood. The tolerance of the times allowed it, and he personally was glad that his sister should still be pious in her adopted country and have opportunities to practise her religion. But he respected the silence that Charles always maintained on the subject, reading in it a desire not to embarrass him as Parson of the parish. . . . Apart from his pride in keeping out conventicles (and he was not sure if Mr. Parsons' visits constituted a conventicle) he had no strong feelings against the Romish Church; he had indeed at one time thought of joining it.

"My love, I've told my brother of his coming to us—" Charles's voice broke into his thoughts.

"And he's corning?"

"I trust that he is, with all our pretty nieces."

"We shall be a large family," said Louise, laughing. "But I am pleased. This house often seems lonely, as if more people should be in it."

"And I've promised Gervase that you shall train up his daughters to marry the very best of the French exiles—that they shall wear their caps and mantos and petticoats and trains in such a fashion that no man can resist 'em, and dress their heads in so artful a manner that each hair shall be a chain to lead a beau . . ."

"Nay, I am not a milliner or a hairdresser, and they are more like to take a Frenchman's heart with their pretty English barbarities than with graces learned from a Frenchwoman."

"I don't want my daughters turned into fine ladies," said Gervase, "all I ask you, sister, is to teach 'em gentle manners. They've lacked a mother's care too long."

"My friend," laughed Louise, "I can teach them nothing—they will not learn from me. But I shall be very pleased to have them in the house and listen to them laughing so loud—so loud . . . and I think that the young réfugiés will like it too."

"They are anxious to know if they may bring their horses. Brother, is there room in your stables for my daughters' horses?"

"Yes, we have room—let them bring what they like. And you shall bring your books . . . My joy, I've promised him the east room for his own that he may study there as he pleases."

"Mr. Alard is a great scholar," said Mr. Parsons with a little formal bow—"the clergy of England are known for their learning."

"Aye, stupor mundi is the saying, and I understand there's envy of our learned clerks in countries where the clergy are less learned"—his bright blue eyes, curiously innocent and child-like in a face so marked by experience, raked Parsons' countenance to see the effect of this random shot; but he only bowed again. "But I was never at an English University," continued Gervase—"I spent my youth in Paris, exiled for King Charles, and my studies were under French masters."

"You were perhaps a student of Paris University?"

"Aye, for a time—and in the country."

"The truth is," said Charles, "that in those days we were devilish short of money. My brother's studies were often interrupted. But he was always a great student—would go without his dinner for a book, and sooner spend an evening in reading than in dancing. That's why my father made him Vicar of Leasan—he thought it would give him still further opportunities; and now he's coming to us here it will be better still. I've told you, brother, that you'll be a happier man when you can sit among your books without interruption from your parishioners."

It seemed to Gervase that too rosy a view was being taken of his situation. In the eyes of his brother and sister he was no martyr to a sacred cause but a man who has chosen decidedly for the better.

"Nay, I was happy enough at Leasan. It's sad to leave it now when I should be reaping the fruit of twenty years' labour."

"Then why do you leave? Nay, never tell me it's because of the oath. I'd take that from some, but not from you. Your conscience was never tender."

Gervase resented such talk in front of Mr. Parsons. A dull flush mounted his cheeks and he cracked his finger joints in anger.

"Brother, if you talk more in this style I shall understand that you know nothing of religion or politics."

"You will then understand correctly, and I care even less than I know. But you must allow me to know my brother and feel surprised that he should divide his issues by a hair."

"You call the doctrine of the King's supremacy a hair. My conscience would be tough indeed could I swear allegiance in two places."

"Logic and reason support you as well as conscience," said Mr. Parsons—in his calm, precise voice. "If it's true that the King's supremacy is of divine appointment, then to put him aside and swear allegiance to another is to presume to dictate to Almighty God."

"True, Sir—quite true—you speak well," said Gervase—then was not quite sure if the other had spoken so well. There had been too great a stress upon the if; and why was everyone determined to get rid of his conscience?

§ 10

He sometimes wondered how and why it was that in certain happy moments his heart should fail him suddenly, sinking under some panic of loneliness, disappointment or even despair. Yesterday, among his chattering daughters, he had felt lonely—utterly lonely and forsaken; and to-day, talking to his kind brother and sister and their courteous friend, planning his future among them, he suddenly felt hopeless, frustrated, a man whose life is useless and undone. On the way home the feeling persisted. His thoughts no longer galloped ahead of him, and his bodily pace was slower too. He smote at the hedges with his stick, and scowled as he walked, staring at the dust on his shoes. It was well enough to plan for his life at Conster, but he could not see it now as a life worth living. He would not be independent. His father had left him a small personal fortune, but had always meant it to be supplemented by the tithes and revenues of the Vicarage of Leasan, amounting in all to some four hundred pounds a year—indeed, no doubt he had thought in time of a richer living than Leasan . . . he had not thought of Gervase being stuck there twenty years. At Conster he would feel the want of his fees—that is if he meant to live as an independent gentleman and not on his brother's hospitality. But he would have to accept Charles's hospitality in part . . . his brother would not hear of his paying rent for his rooms or for food that came off the estate—though doubtless Louise would soon find the difference that five healthy young women as hungry as carp would make to her housekeeping. Still, they would doubtless soon be all married and gone. Only he would be left—living on in his brother's house, useless and obscure—he who had once thought to make the world his ball.

As he walked up Starvencrow Hill from Conster, the slope was alight with golden broom and with the green and yellow tops of the young trees that John Douce had planted round his steading. They rose up the hill in a wall of broken fire, pale, gleaming coloured balls round the thatched hump of La Petite Douce standing among them. Over them the blue of the May-day sky ached cloudlessly. . . . Gervase's eyes stared past them to a darker landscape, and saw instead of their bright colours and soft shapes the dark outline of the Château le Thisay under the stars, with the shadow which was the Clos de l'Eternel—in the Pays du Néant. . . . Strange names, that had rung hollowly to him then—they were dead echoes now—the Field of Eternity, the Land of Nothingness. He saw himself slipping through the darkness from the farm, along the rutted track, past the tall ghosts of the agrimony, toward the light that hung in the castle tower.

That seemed another man from the disillusioned clerk now plodding his way home. What would have happened if the King had not enjoyed his own again? He had almost refused to return with his father to England, for he had felt himself on the verge of discovering some tremendous secret of power. But he had not been sure . . . he had hesitated . . . memories had called him—memories of green slopes and buttercups and sun-dappled brooks, queer intrusions into the darkness of his new quest. Besides, his father had been so sure that they would all make their fortunes out of Conster Furnace and the King's gratitude—enticing him back with the bait of riches and honour and then poking him into the Vicarage of Leasan. He should have gone back to France—he could have gone, but he had not. He had not felt quite sure . . . and there had been that night when the Abbé had warned him, and that dreadful experiment in the kitchen under the tower. . . .

He seldom looked back on those times, and yet he never looked back on them without seeing them as days of youth and hope as well as of darkness. There was a glamour about them: he saw them lit up like a city at night, and turned to them almost with longing from the milk-and-water landscape of his present existence—whether at the Parsonage or at the Manor mattered nothing. Even this new adventure of the oath was but a poor, dry, desiccated affair, a crusade of pedants, leading nowhere. . . . He would end his days as Charles's pensioner—he saw that now.

He wondered what had happened to those others who had been with him—le Thisay himself and de la Sourmaise, and the two brothers from Châtençeau. Were they all now as old and disappointed and obscure as he? He was never likely to know. These Frenchmen who were now pouring into the district would never have heard of them. They came from a different part of France—they would never have heard. . . . But surely so much learning and so much experiment could not have been without fruit. For all the years he had been with them he seemed to have been hanging on the verge of some tremendous discovery—powers hitherto unrealized. Yet, if such powers had been discovered, by this time the world must have known it . . . the Abbé had told him it was all useless and worse, all darkness, a mere blind alley of science. But then the Abbé had been prejudiced by his refusal to accept the Romish faith and by the suspicion that this science had dissuaded him . . . as doubtless it had at the moment, though he had better reasons now. He had had the choice between submission and power, and he had chosen power. Yet where was his power? That too was gone—he had let it slip from him while his hand grasped at riches—riches and honour, and he had lost those too . . .

. . . It was queer how he would sometimes come to himself out of a daze of thought, and find himself in some place without knowing how he had got there. Just as two hours ago he had found himself upon the lawn at Conster, now he found himself in his study at Leasan Parsonage. He could not tell how. He had come in through the house and garden. Yet here he was appropriately gazing at his books, his old companions, his only treasure, all that he had saved out of the withering of his years . . . the sun burned low upon them through the little leaded window, waking up their dim colours and filling the air with the warm, musty smell of their ancient leather bindings.

A queer smile twisted and lit up his face. He walked over to them and fingered the brownish rows. He remembered well how some of them had come to him. This copy of Bacon's "Novum Organum" had come from a little shop in the Rue du Bac and had cost him his dinner for a week. Charles was right when he said he would go without food to buy a book. And his hunger seemed delicious to him now. He had gone hungry too for "Several Treatises of Jacob Boehme" . . . how that book had intoxicated him!—it had sung in his head like summer and wine. He took it from the shelf, turning the musty pages. Would it sing to him now that his stomach was full, or was its music only for hungry boys? "So Mars clothes all his servants which love him and Saturn with his cloak, that they find only the copper of Venus, and not the gold which is in the copper; the spirit of the seeker enters into Sol, that is into pride, and supposes that he has Venus, when he has Saturn, which is covetousness. If he went forth in the dark water, that is in the resigned humility of Venus, the stone of the wise men would be revealed to him. . . ."

The voice came thinly like the pipe of a reed—he could barely remember how once he had shouted for alchemy . . . not the base alchemy of the chemists, but the spiritual alchemy of the Magi and Paracelsians . . . "Hunting the Green Lion" . . . "The Rosy Cross." . . . His studies had not all been dark. Jacob Boehme is an excellent Protestant philosopher, worthy reading for an English divine. He had once been full of zeal for Jacob Boehme and for Theophrastus Bombast his master, though he never read either of them now. Perhaps he might resume his study of their works—it might cure him of certain hankerings after a lore that had superseded theirs.

For he had dabbled in strange learnings, he had ridden off the straight path of his University course down dark alleyways, which had been like the ruelles of Paris—tall houses, full of secrets, nodding their dangerous heads over the tiny figure that creeps between the gutters. Now a light is seen behind a casement—a voice is heard—a door is half opened and shut again.

These books upon his shelves were not those that had taken him out of Paris—that he had taken out of Paris when he had gone into the country. He kept those hidden away in a cupboard. It was not fit that they should lie to hand and be read by his daughters, though that danger was not great since they were most of them written in French. Still, they were better hidden—perhaps better burned. A voice lifted itself out of his memories and he saw the Abbé's face, aglow with exhortation, while the candle-light shone upon the jewelled ring he wore—Gervase could remember now how he had turned and turned his hand, staring at it while he spoke . . . folk said it was a favour granted him by Madame le Thisay with other favours . . . but his voice had been the voice of the Church, rebuking, warning. . . .

Well, no good had come of taking his warning. Here he was, his life all behind him and nothing done—nothing but his books left . . . his books and his daughters. His daughters would marry and go from him, only his books would be there to remind him with dim colours and musty smells of ardours that were cold, and dreams that had fallen into dust.

"O God," he prayed—and he seldom prayed outside his public ministrations—"O God, surely it would be a little thing for thee to let me live again before I die."