Chapter II (1)
A sort of holiday feeling not very difficult to account for enveloped Tristram Hungerford as he walked over the Downs this September afternoon with his face set towards Compton Regis. His short sojourn in London with relatives of his father’s had made him feel, as usual, the gulf between himself and these good and pious people, which had sprung into existence when he was sent to a public school, had widened when he went to Oxford, and was fairly yawning now that he had become a High Churchman. It was not unnatural that he should look forward to his stay, with Dormer, in a more congenial atmosphere, rather as a schoolboy looks forward to an exeat, and it chimed with his mood that he must leave the coach at Lambourn and walk to Compton over the Downs. It was good to have the short springy grass once more underfoot, to breathe again that light intoxicating air, to see the great rolling distances which had been his inheritance since boyhood. Oxford and work were good, but this was good too.
Tristram had been rather happy these last months, for Keble had told him that, contrary to what he himself felt, he had much to offer, and so at his ordination as deacon he at last took the step from which only an obstinate humility had been holding him back, and, in his own mind, dedicated himself to the single life.
He had also been very busy. St. Thomas’s, the most populous and the most degraded parish in Oxford, lay, a beggar full of sores, almost at the gates of Christ Church, in whose gift was the living. Its incumbent, who was also precentor of the Cathedral, did not reside in the parish; indeed it would have been hard to find, in that huddle of old houses, a suitable dwelling. Dirt, squalor, and vice reigned everywhere. The little twelfth century church, dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, was damp and in ill-repair, though it had recently been repewed; during the flood its aisle was often under water. It was opened only for service on Sundays. Tristram Hungerford resolved that there should be a parson in the parish, and, letting his house at Compton Parva, he took rooms in Hollybush Row, undismayed by the open ditch which ran along in front of his window. His coming was not looked upon with favour in a district given over to thieves and prostitutes. It was not without considerable personal risk that he visited the narrow winding passages between the dirty old seventeenth century houses; the men who lurked there regarded him as a spy, the women screamed abuse. He was more than once warned of plans to set on him some dark night. The warning had only the effect of making him more determined to remain where he was; he had no objection at all to the idea of a scuffle, and it may have been this evident readiness, joined to the appearance which he bore of being a man of his hands, which secured him against actual molestation.
He had also another ally, the cholera, which, starting in June with two fatal cases at the Castle gaol, in the parish of St. Thomas’s itself, swept the south-west quarter of Oxford before it migrated to the north-west, and the suburb of St. Clement’s. For the lost three months Tristram had been to the district doctor, nurse—and friend.
And was it, he sometimes wondered, because he moved daily in activity and peril, or was he so profoundly changed that the news of Armand’s death—amazing in its sudden tragedy—had so little effect upon him? He was indeed deeply grieved for Horatia. He thought of her as heart-broken. For after he had seen her in Paris he had come definitely to the conclusion, already dawning on him there, that the change in her was not due in any way to Armand, but to her new relatives. He still had an uneasiness for which he could not account, but Mr. Grenville having, by the exercise of great discretion and self-restraint, kept Horatia’s secret, there was nothing to make him suspect the real state of affairs. Hence when, only about a fortnight ago, the Rector had suddenly told him most of the truth about Armand he was divided between anger and pity, but the revelation did not seem to affect him personally. He was curiously absorbed in his work; since his services during the cholera he had been very differently received in the dens of St. Thomas’s, and had even had a transient success when, (encouraged by the fact that during the epidemic the Senior Proctor had provided daily Morning and Evening Prayer in the House of Observation in St. Aldate’s), he began to read it in the church, hoping that it might attract those who had escaped or recovered from the scourge. At first he had a sprinkling of people, then two or three, then he read the service in an echoing silence, but, having begun, he continued to read it.
He nourished indeed a hope that one day this little fast-closed church, named for an English saint and so typically English with its quiet graveyard and its ancient yew, might mean something to those who lived round it, that it might be a home to them, like the always-open churches he had seen in Italy. More, having now a practical experience of the bitter spiritual needs of the poor in a small neglected town parish, he indulged sometimes in what he felt to be an almost chimerical vision, of a church, spacious and beautiful as it might be, set in some great manufacturing town where life was thickly pent and had no hope or outlet—a church for the poor, served by the poor. When he was tired, which was not unseldom, he used to think of this dream structure of his, even picturing some of its architectural details. Of late he had admitted Dormer to the same occupation, and though to the latter the grimy surroundings of the imaginary fabric were clearly not an attraction, as they were to its original designer, the idea gained substance from his participation in it. Having ruled out galleries, family pews and the Royal arms, settled that the holy table should not only be fenced off from desecration, but that it should be restored to the position at present usurped by the pulpit, they—or rather Dormer—had even gone so far as to decide on the dedication. Hence at this very moment, while his eyes were fixed on a great white bastion of cloud rising exultant over the sky-line, Tristram was thinking that if his dining-room table at Compton, relic of the solid hospitality of Clapham days, was to be used in the refectory of the attached college of priests, the said college would have to be built on a more generous scale than Dormer seemed to think necessary; he should tell him so this evening. It would be a waste to sell that table.
He began to walk faster, exulting in the wind that resisted him, in the song of the larks above him, in the great cloud, in the wonderful feeling both of loneliness and of life at the highest pitch. Scraps of that incomparable Te Deum, the hundred and forty-eighth Psalm, came into his mind—“Praise the Lord upon earth, ye dragons and all deeps; fire and hail, snow and vapours; wind and storm, fulfilling his word; mountains and all hills, fruitful trees and all cedars...”
At this point he perceived, rather to his astonishment, that he was not alone upon the Downs. About a quarter of a mile off two people had emerged upon the smooth curve of the hill that rose before him, walking swiftly, a sheep-dog heralding their way. They must have come up by the old track in the hollow to have remained hidden until that moment, thought Tristram as he idly watched them. They were too far off for him to see anything distinctive; he could make no guess at their identity, only, by their movements, they were young, and they were man and woman. But as he looked a curious interest seized upon him. It seemed to him almost as if the pulsing life around had centred in these two figures, instinct with joy and youth.
They reached the summit of the hill. A lark rose in the sky, a tiny speck against the cloud; the wind fluttered the woman’s dress. Suddenly they stopped, turned, and kissed each other. There was no trace of courting or of timidity in the action; it was beautiful and fitting, as though the sun and wind had met together and praised God for the fulness of joy. The dog leapt round them barking. In another instant they were walking on as quickly as before, till they were swallowed up in a dip of the Downs.
Tristram had stopped too. In less time than it takes a pebble to fall from a cliff, the sun, the wind, the clouds, the very grass were clothed in a new significance. This, the close of the great Psalm, this was the highest thing that existence had to offer, and he was putting it by—he was putting by deliberately, with the hand of a madman, the draught which it was no longer sin to contemplate. Those two figures! He flung himself down on the ground, the lark’s song beating in his brain, and prayed passionately to know the same joy before life was done.
(2)
Two hours later, as he drew near Compton Rectory, he saw down the long road a horseman cantering towards him on the wayside grass. In all his life Tristram had known only two men who sat a horse with so supreme an ease; one was his friend, the other his rival. And at that moment he could have wished it were Armand risen, from his bloody grave.
Dormer came on; drew rein and bent down. “I thought it was you,” he said as they shook hands. “I guess that you left the coach at Lambourn and walked over the Downs.”
“I did,” answered Tristram.
“That must have been delightful,” remarked the other, and Tristram, without answering, opened the Rectory gate and watched him pass in.
There was no denying that the Rector had aged during the past year, but to-night he was quite rejuvenated.
“I am really not without hopes of having Horatia home for Christmas,” he announced, as they sat down to dinner. “Of course you know, Mr. Dormer, that I lost my son-in-law last June under very tragic circumstances. He took part in the rising organised by that misguided woman the Duchesse de Berry, and was shot, poor boy, by the soldiers of the Government. A dreadful business; he died in my daughter’s arms. The shock completely prostrated her, as you may imagine; she was ill for some time, then there were endless legal formalities, and it is only now that she talks of being able to come over and pay me a long visit at Christmas.”
“Does she not intend to make her home in England?” asked Dormer.
“She wishes to, naturally,” replied Mr. Grenville, “and by French law she can do as she likes, but whether poor Armand’s relatives will bring pressure to bear to keep her in France I don’t know. I try not to meet trouble half-way. At any rate she will be here for Christmas. There will be a child in the house again; Christmas seems to demand that. And to think that you have both seen my grandson since I have!”
Neither of the young men waxed communicative on the subject of the infant; Dormer, indeed, had suddenly become rather thoughtful.
“Tristram, you will have to come over here at Christmas-time,” went on the Rector. “We must hang up a stocking for Maurice. They don’t keep Christmas in France, I understand.”
Tristram murmured something about being busy at Christmas, and that he would be taking his priest’s orders just before that festival.
“Oh, I daresay you’ll be able to manage it,” said the Rector easily. “A few days in the country now and then would set you up, living as you do in that plague-spot. By the way, I hear you exposed yourself very unnecessarily in the cholera there—most laudable of course, but you young men are so rash. It’s just the same with this foolish and shocking idea of throwing over the supremacy of the State which you have got into your heads. Church and State, to any right-thinking mind, are as inseparable as body and soul, and it will be a black day for England if they are ever torn apart. How you, Mr. Dormer, with your ultra-Tory ancestry... but there, I suppose it is just because they were Non-jurors that the idea is not as repugnant to you as it ought to be.”
“Dormer’s not a Tory, Rector,” remarked Tristram. “He’s a Radical, like me, now.”
“Oh, indeed,” returned Mr. Grenville, not much perturbed. “Well, I won’t upset your convictions; but, Tories or Radicals, I don’t fancy you will welcome this new Parliament of ours when we get it.”
“Why not, Mr. Grenville?” asked Dormer.
“Because, if ever there was a middle-class measure, it is this Reform Act! You mark my words, it will be worse, not better, for the poor man now than under the old state of things.”
“I fully agree with you,” observed Dormer.
“It is quite pathetic,” pursued the Rector, “to see how every class thinks the Millennium is coming because of the extension of the franchise. Wages are going to rise, and the price of corn is going to fall.... No, what is really wanted is Poor Law reform. Am I not right, Tristram?”
Tristram wearily agreed. It seemed to him that the evening would never end. He only desired one thing, to be alone. In the study after dinner the Rector rallied him once or twice on his silence, and he was half afraid to meet Dormer’s eyes, which always saw so much. Yet when at last Mr. Grenville, taking up his own candlestick, had said paternally, “Now don’t you young men stay talking here till the small hours,” and himself departed to bed, Tristram sat down again by the fire, lest the abrupt exit which he longed to make should either wound his friend or give him cause for speculation. And he then embarked on such an unnecessarily detailed account of the pressing need of better drainage, not only in the parish of St. Thomas’s but also in St. Clement’s, in fact throughout the whole of Oxford, that his somewhat unresponsive listener came to the conclusion that he was thoroughly overdone oy the cholera, and suggested of his own accord that they should go to bed.