Unknown (104 page)

“Why don't you keep a cat?” burst out John irrelevantly, turning to the lady at his side.

But it was from her husband that the answer came.

“All flesh is a conductor of force, didn't 'ee know that, lad? And when thoughts are being born they must be fed. He here,” —and the extraordinary man actually made a jerk with his great thumb towards the space in the centre of this snug, cushiony, be-tasseled, be-rugged, be-fringed, be-carpeted interior—“#s here wants all the force there is about, if I'm to keep Him close!”

John bit his underlip and looked down at those mouse-grey hairless islands in the black bear rug. He thought to himself: “Damn the fellow! He's nothing but a gross, overfed Cagliostro! What the devil am I doing in this muggy hole, selling my soul and swallowing all this tosh?”

“So our Mayoress isn't allowed to keep even a cat?” he brought out in a tone that did not conceal his feelings.

There was rather an uncomfortable silence for a while after that, broken only by the queer plop . . . plop . . . plop which the curtains made, as they bulged out and then went limp again, answering the gusts. But John thought of his nights with Mary in their Northload room. “It's worth it!” he said to himself. “I never knew a girl coul$ be so sweet.”

“You'll be more indulgent, laddie* when you've seen a little more of me,” said Mr. Geard suddenly, sinking back in his armchair and clasping his plump fingers together over his heavy gold watch-chain. “If you'd been a young Arab in the tent of Mahomet you'd have heard the Prophet break wind once and again!”

“John!” cried Megan Geard, letting her knitting sink upon her lap.

“It's all right, apple of me eye! The old man were only talking.” And he cast upon her a glance of such radiant affection, the heavy films vanishing from his black eyes, that John's emotions were once more swung in the opposite direction.

“I believe you've got in your head, Sir,” he couldn't help blurting out, “a whole new religion—but what I can't see is, how you're going to graft it upon the old one. These curst Anglicans are bound to give your Miracle their own twist. They'll say it's a proof that Rome hasn't a monopoly, and so on. They'll say it's the Grail of Arthur come back. They'll say------”

“Let 'em,” cried Bloody Johnny, in a hoarse, thick voice. “Let 'em say all they like and the Papists too. I've got a little something in store for 'em, lad—a little surprise—that even you, sly as you be, you rogue, haven't guessed yet!”

The ball of grey wool now rolled off Mrs. Geard's lap and John Crow got up to fetch it for her. He was still standing up holding the ball in his hands and trying to wind the loose thread when above the noise of wind and rain came the sound of the front door opening, and the excited voices of the girls come back. Both their parents rose to their feet and John, handing the woollen ball to Mrs. Geard, hurried out to help them take off their cloaks. He caught sight of Cordelia's rain-drenched profile as she struggled to shut the front door against the storm.

“She isn't a bad-looking girl after all,” he thought. “It must be the party!”

Crummie meanwhile had taken a seat on the only hall-chair, a miserably battered upright wicker chair, bought at a sale by her mother before she was born. John bent upon one knee to help her get off her galoshes. Aye! how the rain ran down in little pools from her drenched clothes. k Both the parents had appeared now and her father was tugging awkwardly at Crum-mie's mackintosh, while Mrs. Geard helped Cordelia to push the bolts to of the closed door. Then she also turned to Crummie. “How nice you do look, child, if I say it myself.”

“She always was the prettiest little wench in town, wasn't she, my chuck?” and Mr. Geard kissed the girl's wet cheeks.

John hurried to Cordelia and held her dripping cloak while she slipped out of it. “You come out, like a Naked Nannie from its calyx!” he whispered. And then, as he held the drenched cloak in his hands, not knowing where to put it, “What's that you were saying to Cordy, Mr. Crow?” threw in her mother.

“Only telling her how well her evening dress suits her, Missus! And so it does; don't you think so, Sir?” and he hung the cloak up on the only peg that was not overcrowded.

“No! Not there!” cried Cordelia sharply. “You're putting it over Mother's.”

It was the first remark either of the girls had yet made, but it let loose a flood of chatter from Crummie as they all went into the parlour. "Angela looked sweet, Dad. You'd have loved her. She had on that white dress I told you about. Mr. Wollop himself ordered it from London. She had one, little, single moss-rose pinned on the front. She looked bewitching, and she was more animated too than I've ever seen her. Oh, and you should have seen Mrs. Spear! She had an old-gold dress on. How she's been keeping it I don't know, in that awful room she?s got at Cantle's. It looks out on the yard! She took me up once, when

we met down there. It's the worst place for a girl like------" She

caught her breath, remembering John's relationship to this present cynosure of delicate scandal. Mrs. Geard broke in at this point as they all stood round the fire; Crummie with her frock folded up above her petticoat crouching on the bear-rug, with her white arms spread out to the blaze.

“May I tell Mr. Crow—for he's such a friend of the family now, and knows us all so well—what you told me when you started out tonight, Cordy dear?”

Cordelia's whole body stiffened. Her dislike of John had by no means modified with closer knowledge. The more she knew% the more she disliked! She turned towards him now a pair of the coldest, haughtiest eyes that had ever challenged him.

“It's nothing. Mother makes much too much of it. Besides, you probably know it already, being such a friend of Owen's. It's only that our banns are to be given out next Sunday.”

John made a funny little bow. “I'm sure,” he said, “I congratulate you—I mean I'm sure I congratulate Mr. Evans.”

“You ought to give my daughter a kiss, lad,” chuckled Mr. Geard, and he drew Cordy's proud head down wdth both his hands and kissed her himself on the forehead.

“He'd better kiss Crummie,'9 the tall girl murmured spitefully. ”Perhaps it'll bring her the same good luck—if it is good luck."

Her voice had died away to so faint a tone as she breathed these last words that only her father caught them.

“Hush, child!” he whispered, patting her bare shoulders with his plump hand. “You'll feel quite differently bye and bye.”

Mrs. Geard, with a delicacy worthy of the House of Rhys, avoided her daughter's eye as her husband spoke, while Crum-mie, with the laudable desire of drawing the general attention away from her angry, confused sister, glanced roguishly at John.

“Aren't I going to have that kiss?” she laughed.

John had expected this, and he had made up his mind exactly what he would do. He sprung forward, caught Crummie's fair head in both his bony hands exactly as her father had held Cordy's and gave it a gentle shaking, ending up with the lightest possible brushing of his lips amid her wavy hair.

“You tease! You tease! You tease!” he cried, as he shook her.

Between Crummie and John quite a piquant understanding had arisen. The pretty girl, in her silent, tantalised passion for Sam Dekker, had dropped all association with her other men friends. Red she never spoke to now, and in avoiding Red—for they worked in the same place—she found it easy to avoid Barter. To John, in a sense, she found herself positively clinging, and as Mary seemed, just at present, far too happy to be jealous, and as it was a situation that lent itself perfectly to John's artful nature, Crummie's spirits had revived a little during the last month or two; a little, not very much. Not very much! How often to her hot, tear-soaked pillow had the wretched girl moaned out the madness of her relentless love! What was the use of having a father who could exorcise devils, who could give sleep to the tormented, if he could not heal his own child's wounded heart?

At the very moment when John was tickling his lips with Crummie's shining tresses, the queer object of the girl's unfortunate craving was having a prolonged and distressing argument with his father on the subject of Nell.

“I tell you it only torments the woman the way you treat her! Better never see her at all than sneak off over there every day he's away!” The museum actually echoed to the indignant tone of the Vicar, and the lid of his tobacco-jar that stood adjacent to the aquarium tinkled ominously against the glass.

"But she's gone seven months with our child, Father. And since the end of August he's been at Wookey nearly all the time/

“But Mrs. Pippard's with her, boy! You found Mrs. Pippard for her yourself. She's fond of her, isn't she?”5

"But, Father, when a woman's going to have a child she's nervous and sensitive anyway, and when it's your own child

she's going to have------"

The Vicar's rugged face had become very red and his formidable little eyes—like Sam's, only much greyer—had ceased to be grey and had become a curious blue colour under his bushy eyebrows.

He rose from his chair and stood with his broad shoulders to the mantelpiece, angrily jerking up the tails of his long black coat and holding his hands beneath them while he warmed his back at the fire.

“It's all wrong,” he shouted. “The whole thing's outrageous! If you'd had the spunk of half a man in you you'd have made him divorce her; you'd have------”

He suddenly remembered that divorce was one of the things against which the party in the Church to which he belonged was especially opposed.

“Well, anyway,” he added. “You'd have done one thing or the other; not gone about dickering and havering and dodging in the way you have.”

Sam was silent for a second or two. His face did not show the faintest trace of any resentment against his father. Then he suddenly said, “Would you like her to leave Zoyland, Father? Would you like her to come and live wTith us here?”

His father's mouth opened with astonishment and he stared blankly.

“And be divorced, you mean? And you marry her, you mean?”

“No, no! Just live here with us. I'm not going to marry her nor any other woman—just live with us here, I mean.”

“As your mistress, after the child is born?”

“Father!”

“Well, isn't that what you mean? But perhaps you don't want to wait till the child is born. Perhaps you'd like to sleep with her, as she is, under my roof!”

If Sam had been endowed with a little more penetration he would have understood better what ° surge of suppressed feeling underlay his father's outburst.

As it was he could only sigh helplessly and cast his eyes upon the aquarium. Often and often had the sight of those fish, disturbed by the lamplight and behaving in a manner contrary to their ordinary routine, distracted his mind from weightier troubles. He got up now and placed over them the kitchen dishcloth, which, in the agitation of that night, both he and his father had forgotten.

“I suppose she'll be going into the hospital,” he said, as he sat down again, “in another month.”

His father let his coat-tails drop and began striding up and down the room. “I can't understand that fellow Zoyland,” he flung out, "any better than I can understand you. That sweet little woman between you two rogues! Yes! That's the word for it,— between you two roguesV

He glared at Sam out of eye-sockets that seemed like two deep, livid-blue holes in a rock of red clay.

Sam surveyed him helplessly, not shrinking from his gaze, but looking at him as he would have looked at Wirral Hill if it had suddenly become a volcano. His father's wrath was beginning to affect him like a wild dream out of which he felt he ought to be able to force himself to awake.

“What would you wish me to do, Father; if I did exactly what would please you?”

“Please me, does he say?” roared the exasperated man. “I tell you I hate the whole affair; and I've a mind to—a mind to— wash my hands of it!” It was on his tongue to say—“my hands of you!” but he corrected himself in time.

“But what would you tell me to do, Father, if I did exactly what you told me?”

This point-blank question did quiet the angry man a little. He put his hands into his trouser-pockets, and walked with a somewhat less assured stride. Sam had nonplussed him a bit by this question. It was much easier to storm and rage at his son than to give him intelligent advice. But he satisfied both his anger and his conscience when he finally came out with his reply.

“I think, if you haven't the guts to act like a man in the matter, you ought to leave this girl alone.” This was probablv the wickedest thing Mat Dekker had ever done in his life—the utterance of this opinion.

Sam's strange fixed idea of sharing in Christ's sacrifice might quite conceivably have put it into his head that it was his duty to do exactly as his father bade him, in which case Xell would have had the experience of losing her headstrong lover at the precise moment w7hen the sort of companionship he felt allowed to give her was exactly the comfort which she craved most to receive, which was indeed all she could receive. But Sam was not yet a complete maniac; nor had his father's constant harping upon this string of “being a man” and “having guts.” failed altogether to arouse a natural reaction. He rose firmly to his feet. “Well, Father,” he said, “if that's all the help you can give me, I think we'd better bring the conversation to a close.” He paused for a moment, and then, ashamed of the abruptness of his tone, he added more gently, “You've always been good to me, Father. This is the first time in my life that Fve—troubled you like this. I daresay we'll both of us see things more . . . calmly . . . more . . . more quietly . . . later . . . on.” He took a few steps towards the door and then stopped and turned. It had always been their custom, a custom rather unusual among sons and fathers in Glastonbury, and perhaps one that wTas an emotional legacy left to the atmosphere of that house by Sam's Swdss mother, to kiss each other good-night. On this occasion it needed one of the greatest spiritual efforts he had ever undertaken when Sam forced himself to go up to his father and make the motion of offering to kiss him.

A red-faced, righteously indignant, dignified and outraged man is not an easy objective for such an advance as Sam now made. But the power of habit is great, and Mat Dekker, after all, loved ncbody in the world—certainly not this girl whose troubling beauty had so upset him—as much as he loved his son. So now, though in deep and gloomy gravity, he did bend his head and allow his rough, bristly cheek—for he was a man who needed shaving twice a day—to touch, for the tenth part of a second, Sam's up-raised and twitching chin.