Chapter XIV A Moral Exigency
Archibald met his brother at Westchester Station, and drove him towards Birr Wood as the shadows lay long and cool upon the white road. A sweet stillness hung over the ancient capital—the stillness which in springtime is eloquent of strife. Everywhere the sap was forcing its way upward; buds were swelling, leaves were bursting from their bonds. And an ethereal mildness permeated the atmosphere, suffusing in golden haze the setting sun.
“Pull up,” said Mark.
“Eh?”
“I should like to read you my sermon here and now, within sight of the cathedral. We can walk across the downs afterwards, and arrive in plenty of time to dress for dinner.”
“All right,” Archie replied, “I’m keen enough to hear it. Was it hot in town? You look rather done.”
A groom took the reins and drove off. Mark stared at the cathedral.
“It lies in a golden chalice,” he said, indicating the haze which obscured the insignificant buildings of the town while lightening and revealing the splendid mass of stone, too heavy, too colourless when seen beneath grey skies.
“Good point that,” said Archie, nodding his handsome head.
The brothers walked across a strip of down, and found themselves near a clump of trees. Mark pulled from his pocket a sheaf of manuscript, and read aloud.
Archie lay flat on his back. Presently he sat up, staring at the cathedral. Then he fixed his eyes on Mark’s face, where they remained, fascinated, till the last word was said.
“Now,” Mark commanded, “I want you to declaim a bit of it—standing. You can give it all I cannot. Do you mind?”
Archibald took the manuscript, sensible of emotions and thrills never experienced before. Dominating these was the wish to do as he was asked—to declaim a part of the sermon. He felt a desire to possess himself of it, to incorporate with it his own physical attributes.
“Let yourself go,” said Mark. He watched his brother’s face intently, thinking that he would exchange the brains which had composed the sermon for the body now bending over it in envy and admiration. Archie had a gift for committing verse to memory. At Harrow he often boasted that he could read through a long ode of Horace and repeat it without making a blunder.
Presently Archie stood up, his massive proportions outlined against the amber-coloured sky. Although barely thirty, he had acquired a certain dignity of deportment, an air of maturity, in curious contrast to blooming cheeks and shining eyes. This aspect is not uncommon in young clergymen who take themselves seriously. Looking at Archibald Samphire, one might predict that in a few years he would assume the solidity of a pillar of the Church. Already, in the eyes of the spinsters in and around Westchester Close, he was regarded as a staff upon which the weak might safely and gratefully lean; already, when he gave an opinion, soft eyes gazed upward suffused with moisture.
He began to declaim Mark’s peroration in a slow, impressive voice, the kind of voice which seems to fill the corners of the soul with echoes at once strange and familiar. The late Mr. Gladstone possessed such a voice. Mark stared at his brother, absorbing every note and gesture. What aptitudes were his for such a part. Listening to him, the younger brother forgot that he had written the phrases which fell with sonorous significance upon the silence of the fields. He was able to judge of what he had done, as if he were hearing the sermon for the first time. Playwrights experience this bitter-sweet pleasure. Lines laboured at for many an hour, become in the mouth of a great actor or actress so changed, so sublimated by the touch of genius, as to prove unrecognisable, even as a child of peasants adopted by persons of rank may so dazzle the eyes of its mother that it appears for the moment as a stranger. And who shall interpret that same mother’s feelings when she sees lavished upon her darling gifts beyond her power to bestow—gifts which serve as symbols of her loss and another’s gain?
Mark Samphire listened to his brother with ears lacerated by envy; and because devils tore him he was the more determined to exorcise them, in the hope that what he did and said might hide what he felt. When Archie finished, the younger brother sprang up and seized his hand.
“From the bottom of my soul,” he exclaimed, “I believe that this voice of yours will be heard not only in Westchester, but in every cathedral in England.”
Archie answered, dully, “If you had my voice, Mark——”
“Ah!” gasped Mark, “if—if——” He paused, and ended quietly, “We need not speak of that.”
“You could read this sermon.”
“Even that is denied me. I can read the lessons or anything else save what I write myself. Oh, I have tried and tried. Always the lump comes in my throat—and I hear the laugh of that girl. You remember?”
Archie nodded, betraying his sympathy with a shudder. “It was awful,” he said, “awful.”
He handed the sheets of manuscript to Mark, adding, “It has helped me enormously. I will avail myself of some of your ideas.”
“You will redrape my ideas with your words.”
“I couldn’t use yours, you know.”
Mark gazed abstractedly at the cathedral; then he turned to his brother.
“Look here—I give it to you. Do what you like with it. I can’t preach it myself. It’s not b-b-bad.”
He paused as the stammer seized him. “Not bad?” echoed Archibald. “Why it’s splendid—splendid!”
“And why shouldn’t I help you—my brother?” His voice softened, as he stretched out his thin hand and touched Archibald’s mighty arm. “Take it!”
Archie hesitated, staring inquiringly at Mark. Mark had always been such a stickler for plain-dealing. Then he remembered what Billy had said: “Take what he gives, generously, and so you will best help him to play his part in life.”
Mark, meantime, was reflecting that he should like to read in Betty’s face the recognition of talents which he was not allowed to proclaim to the world.
“Take it,” he repeated. “And, look here, I shall sit beside Betty Kirtling, and afterwards I shall tell her that I wrote it and persuaded you to preach it. No one else shall know.”
Archie, unable to determine the ethics of the matter, sensible in a dull, inarticulate way that he ought to say NO, said—YES. His own sermon was inadequate; there was not time to prepare another; and he lacked the power of interpreting the message of those grey stones yonder. This and more flitted through a mind large enough but somewhat conventionally furnished.
“But what has Betty Kirtling to do with it?” he concluded heavily. “Why tell her? If this is to be between you and me, Mark—why tell her?”
Mark put up his hand to hide a smile.
“It may not be necessary to tell her,” he said quietly. “She might guess.” Then seeing consternation on Archie’s fine brows he added: “No one else will guess, but she—well, she has intuitions.”
“Is she going to marry Kirtling?”
Again Mark smiled at his brother’s lack of perception. He fenced with the question: “You ought to know; you’ve seen more of her than I have.”
“She’s a bit of a flirt.”
“No.”
“I say—yes. She has flirted with Kirtling, with me, with Pynsent, with Jim Corrance, and with you. I sometimes think that she likes you best, Mark. She might take you, because——”
“Go on!”
“Because,” Archie explained, “there are two Bettys: the Betty of Mayfair and the Betty of King’s Charteris. I heard Mrs. Corrance say that, and it struck me as worth remembering. Most women would only see the Betty of Mayfair, but the other Betty, who takes some finding, has an extravagant admiration of good and a morbid horror of evil. A girl running from evil is likely to rush into the arms of good. I saw my chance there,” he added thoughtfully, and again Mark smiled. “I said to myself that the time to catch the witch was just after the London season. I don’t mind telling you that I asked her to marry me the day she came back from Goodwood last year. And I was careful about choosing the right place. Depend upon it that tells in these affairs. I chose the Dean’s garden: there isn’t a sweeter, more peaceful spot under Heaven. But I wasted my time. Hullo! what’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re white as a sheet. You ought to take more care of yourself, my dear fellow. I do Sandow’s exercises every morning and evening. And I take a grain of calomel once a week. You look liverish. I find that my mind does not work properly unless my body is in tiptop condition. What were we talking of? Oh, yes—Betty Kirtling. Do you know that Harry Kirtling has proposed about five times—generally out hunting? But she laughs at him. She cried in the Dean’s garden.”
“Ah?” said Mark softly.
“She won’t laugh or cry when the right man speaks, and if you are he the sooner you speak the better. She’s an enchantress,” Archie concluded, “and her money would come in very handy—wouldn’t it?”
“Confound her money!” said Mark violently.