"But you won't be gone before I get back?" John asked.
Laurence and Edith exchanged glances fraught with the unuttered solemnities of conjugal comprehension.
"Well, Ihadwanted to have a talk over things with you after lunch," Laurence explained. "In fact, I have a good deal to talk over. I should suggest driving you in to Galton, but I find it impossible to talk freely while driving. Even our poor old pony has been known to shy. Yes, indeed, poor old Primrose often shies."
John mentally blessed the aged animal's youthful heart, and said, to cover his relief, that old maids were often more skittish than young ones.
"Why?" asked Harold.
Everybody felt that Harold's question was one that should not be answered.
"You wouldn't understand, darling," said his mother; and the dining-room became tense with mystery.
"Of course, if we could have dinner put forward half an hour," said Laurence, dragging the conversation out of the slough of sex, "we could avail ourselves of the moon."
"Yes, you see," Edith put in eagerly, "it wouldn't be so dark with the moon."
Laurence knitted his brow at this and his wife hastened to add that an earlier dinner would bring Frida's bed-time much nearer to its normal hour.
"The point is that I have a great deal to talk over with John," Laurence irritably explained, "and that," he looked as if he would have liked to add "Frida's bed-time can go to the devil," but he swallowed the impious dedication and crumbled his bread.
Finally, notwithstanding that everybody felt very full of roast beef and scarlet-runners, it was decided to dine at half-past six instead of half-past seven.
"Poor Papa, I remember," said old Mrs. Touchwood, "always liked to dine at half-past three. That gave him a nice long morning for his patients and time to smoke his cigar after dinner before he opened the dispensary in the evening. Supper was generally cold unless he anticipated a night call, in which case we had soup."
All were glad that the twentieth century had arrived, and they smiled sympathetically at the old lady, who, feeling that her anecdote had scored a hit, embarked upon another about being taken to the Great Exhibition when she was eleven years old, which lasted right through the pudding, perhaps because it was trifle, and Harold did not feel inclined to lose a mouthful by rash interruptions.
After lunch John was taken all over the house and all round the garden and congratulated time after time upon the wisdom he had shown in buying Ambles: he was made to feel that property set him apart from other men even more definitely than dramatic success.
"Of course, Daniel was famous in his way," Hilda said. "But what did he leave me?"
John, remembering the £120 a year in the bank and the collection of stuffed humming birds at the pantechnicon, the importation of which to Ambles he was always dreading, felt that Hilda was not being ungratefully rhetorical.
"And of course," Laurence contributed, "a vicar feels that his glebe—the value of which by the way has just gone down another £2 an acre—is not his own."
"Yes, you see," Edith put in, "if anything horrid happened to Laurence it would belong to the next vicar."
Again the glances of husband and wife played together in mid-air like butterflies.
"And so," Laurence went on, "when you tell us that you hope to buy this twenty-acre field we all realize that in doingso you would most emphatically be consolidating your property."
"Oh, I'm sure you're wise to buy," said Hilda, weightily.
"It would make Ambles so much larger, wouldn't it?" suggested Edith. "Twenty acres, you see ... well, really, I suppose twenty acres would be as big as from...."
"Come, Edith," said her husband. "Don't worry poor John with comparative acres—we are all looking at the twenty-acre field now."
The fierce little Kerry cows eyed the prospective owner peacefully, until Harold hit one of them with a slug from his air-gun, when they all began to career about the field, kicking up their heels and waving their tails.
"Don't do that, my boy," John said, crossly—for him very crossly.
A short cut to Galton lay across this field, which John, though even when they were quiet he never felt on really intimate terms with cows, had just decided to follow.
"Darling, that's such a cruel thing to do," Hilda expostulated. "The poor cow wasn't hurting you."
"It was looking at me," Harold protested.
"There is a legend about Francis of Assisi, Harold," his Uncle Laurence began, "which will interest you and at the same time...."
"Sorry to interrupt," John broke in, "but I must be getting along. This telegram.... I'll be back for tea."
He hurried off and when everybody called out to remind him of the short cut across the twenty-acre field he waved back cheerfully, as if he thought he was being wished a jolly walk; but he took the long way round.
It was a good five miles to Galton in the opposite direction from the road by which he had driven up that morning; but on this fine autumn afternoon, going down hill nearly all the way through a foreground of golden woods with prospects of blue distances beyond, John enjoyed thewalk, and not less because even at the beginning of it he stopped once or twice to think how jolly it would be to see Miss Hamilton and Miss Merritt coming round the next bend in the road. Later on, he did not bother to include Miss Merritt, and finally he discovered his fancy so steadily fixed upon Miss Hamilton that he was forced to remind himself that Miss Hamilton in such a setting would demand a much higher standard of criticism than Miss Hamilton on the promenade deck of theMurmania. Nevertheless, John continued to think of her; and so pleasantly did her semblance walk beside him and so exceptionally mild was the afternoon for the season of the year that he must have strolled along the greater part of the way. At any rate, when he saw the tower of Galton church he was shocked to find that it was already four o'clock.
THEselection of presents for children is never easy, because in order to extract real pleasure from the purchase it is necessary to find something that excites the donor as much as it is likely to excite the recipient. In John's case this difficulty was quadrupled by having to find toys with an American air about them, and on top of that by the narrowly restricted choice in the Galton shops. He felt that it would be ridiculous, even insulting, to produce for Frida as typical of New York's luxurious catering for the young that doll, the roses of whose cheeks had withered in the sunlight of five Hampshire summers, and whose smile had failed to allure as little girls those who were now marriageable young women. Nor did he think that Harold would accept as worthy of American enterprise those more conspicuous portions of a diminutive Uhlan's uniform fastened to a dog's-eared sheet of cardboard, the sword belonging to which was rusting in the scabbard and the gilt lancehead of which no longer gave the least illusion of being metal. Finally, however, just as the clock was striking five he unearthed from a remote corner of the large ironmonger's shop, to which he had turned in despair from the toys offered him by the two stationers, a toboggan, and not merely a toboggan but a Canadian toboggan stamped with the image of a Red Indian.
"It was ordered for a customer in 1895," the ironmonger explained. "There was heavy snow that year, you may remember."
If it had been ordered by Methuselah when he was still in his 'teens John would not have hesitated.
"Well, would you—er—wrap it up," he said, putting down the money.
"Hadn't the carrier better bring it, sir?" suggested theironmonger. "He'll be going Wrottesford way to-morrow morning."
Obviously John could not carry the toboggan five miles, but just as obviously he must get the toboggan back to Ambles that night: so he declined the carrier, and asked the ironmonger to order him a fly while he made a last desperate search for Frida's present. In the end, with twilight falling fast, he bought for his niece twenty-nine small china animals, which the stationer assured him would enchant any child between nine and eleven, though perhaps less likely to appeal to ages outside that period. A younger child, for instance, might be tempted to put them in its mouth, even to swallow them if not carefully watched, while an older child might tread on them. Another advantage was that when the young lady for whom they were intended grew out of them, they could be put away and revived to adorn her mantelpiece when she had reached an age to appreciate the possibilities of a mantelpiece. John did not feel as happy about these animals as he did about the toboggan: there was not a single buffalo among them, and not one looked in the least distinctively American, but the stationer was so reassuring and time was going by so rapidly that he decided to risk the purchase. And really when they were deposited in a cardboard box among cotton-wool they did not look so dull, and perhaps Frida would enjoy guessing how many there were before she unpacked them.
"Better than a Noah's Ark," said John, hopefully.
"Oh yes, much better, sir. A much more suitable present for a young lady. In fact Noah's Arks are considered all right for village treats, but they're in very little demand among the gentry nowadays."
When John was within a quarter of a mile from Ambles he told the driver of the fly to stop. Somehow he must creep into the house and up to his room with the toboggan and the china animals; it was after six, and the children would have been looking out for his return since five. Perhaps the cows would have gone home by now and he should not excitetheir nocturnal apprehensions by dragging the toboggan across the twenty-acre field. Meanwhile, he should tell the fly to wait five minutes before driving slowly up to the house, which would draw the scent and enable him with Emily's help to reach his room unperceived by the backstairs. A heavy mist hung upon the meadow, and the paper wrapped round the toboggan, which was just too wide to be carried under his arm like a portfolio, began to peel off in the dew with a swishing sound that would inevitably attract the curiosity of the cows were they still at large; moreover, several of the china animals were now chinking together and, John could not help feeling with some anxiety, probably chipping off their noses.
"I must look like a broken-down Santa Claus with this vehicle," he said to himself. "Where's the path got to now? I wonder why people wiggle so when they make a path? Hullo! What's that?"
The munching of cattle was audible close at hand, a munching that was sometimes interrupted by awful snorts.
"Perhaps it's only the mist that makes them do that," John tried to assure himself. "It seems very imprudent to leave valuable cows out of doors on a damp night like this."
There was a sound of heavy bodies moving suddenly in unison.
"They've heard me," thought John, hopelessly. "I wish to goodness I knew something about cows. I really must get the subject up. Of course, theymaybe frightened ofme. Good heavens, they're all snorting now. Probably the best thing to do is to keep on calmly walking; most animals are susceptible to human indifference. What a little fool that nephew of mine was to shoot at them this afternoon. I'm hanged if he deserves his toboggan."
The lights of Ambles stained the mist in front; John ran the last fifty yards, threw himself over the iron railings, and stood panting upon his own lawn. In the distance could be heard the confused thudding of hoofs dying away toward the far end of the twenty-acre meadow.
"I evidently frightened them," John thought.
A few minutes later he was calling down from the landing outside his bedroom that it was time for presents. In the first brief moment of intoxication that had succeeded his defeat of the cattle John had seriously contemplated tobogganing downstairs himself in order to "surprise the kids" as he put it. But from his landing the staircase looked all wrong for such an experiment and he walked the toboggan down, which lamplight appeared to him a typical product of the bear-haunted mountains of Canada.
Everybody was waiting for him in the drawing-room; everybody was flatteringly enthusiastic about the toboggan and seemed anxious to make it at home in such strange surroundings; nobody failed to point out to the lucky boy the extreme kindness of his uncle in bringing back such a wonderful present all the way from America—indeed one almost had the impression that John must often have had to wake up and feed it in the night.
"The trouble you must have taken," Hilda exclaimed.
"Yes, I did take a good deal of trouble," John admitted. After all, so he had—a damned sight more trouble than any one there suspected.
"When will it snow?" Harold asked. "To-morrow?"
"I hope not—I mean, it might," said John. He must keep up Harold's spirits, if only to balance Frida's depression, about whose present he was beginning to feel very doubtful when he saw her eyes glittering with feverish anticipation while he was undoing the string. He hoped she would not faint or scream with disappointment when it was opened, and he took off the lid of the box with the kind of flourish to which waiters often treat dish-covers when they wish to promote an appetite among the guests.
"How sweet," Edith murmured.
John looked gratefully at his sister; if he had made his will that night she would have inherited Ambles.
"Ah, a collection of small china animals," said Laurence, choosing a cat to set delicately upon the table for generaladmiration. John wished he had not chosen the cat that seemed to suffer with a tumor in the region of the tail and disinclined in consequence to sit still.
"Yes, I was anxious to get her a Noah's Ark," John volunteered, seeming to suggest by his tone how appropriate such a gift would have been to the atmosphere of a vicarage. "But they've practically given up making Noah's Arks in America, and you see, these china animals will serve as toys now, and later on, when Frida is grown-up, they'll look jolly on the mantelpiece. Those that are not broken, of course."
The animals had all been taken out of their box by now, but a few paws and ears were still adhering to the cotton-wool.
"Frida is always very light on her toys," said Edith, proudly.
"Not likely to put them in her mouth," said John, heartily. "That was the only thing that made me hesitate when I first saw them in Fifth Avenue. But they don't look quite so edible here."
"Frida never puts anything in her mouth," Edith generalized, primly. "And she's given up biting her nails since Uncle John came home, haven't you, dear?"
"That's a good girl," John applauded; he did not believe in Frida's sudden conquest of autophagy, but he was anxious to encourage her in every way at the moment.
Yes, the gift-horses had shown off their paces better than he had expected, he decided. To be sure, Frida did not appear beside herself with joy, but at any rate she had not burst into tears—she had not thrust the present from her sight with loathing and begged to be taken home. And then Harold, who had been staring at the animals through his glasses, like the horrid little naturalist that he was, said:
"I've seen some animals like them in Mr. Goodman's shop."
John hoped a blizzard would blow to-morrow, that Harold would toboggan recklessly down the steepest slopeof the downs behind Ambles, and that he would hit an oak tree at the bottom and break his glasses. However, none of these dark thoughts obscured the remote brightness with which he answered:
"Really, Harold. Very likely. There is a considerable exportation of china animals from America nowadays. In fact I was very lucky to find any left in America."
"Let's go into Gallon to-morrow and look at Mr. Goodman's animals," Harold suggested.
John had never suspected that one day he should feel grateful to his brother-in-law; but when the dinner-bell went at half-past six instead of half-past seven solely on his account, John felt inclined to shake him by the hand. Nor would he have ever supposed that he should one day welcome the prospect of one of Laurence's long confidential talks. Yet when the ladies departed after dessert and Laurence took the chair next to himself as solemnly as if it were a fald-stool, he encouraged him with a smile.
"We might have our little talk now," and when Laurence cleared his throat John felt that the conversation had been opened as successfully as a local bazaar. Not merely did John smile encouragingly, but he actually went so far as to invite him to go ahead.
Laurence sighed, and poured himself out a second glass of port.
"I find myself in a position of considerable difficulty," he announced, "and should like your advice."
John's mind went rapidly to the balance in his passbook instead of to the treasure of worldly experience from which he might have drawn.
"Perhaps before we begin our little talk," said Laurence, "it would be as well if I were to remind you of some of the outstanding events and influences in my life. You will then be in a better position to give me the advice and help—ah—the moral help, of which I stand in need—ah—in sore need."
"He keeps calling it a little talk," John thought, "but byJove, it's lucky we did have dinner early. At this rate he won't get back to his vicarage before cock-crow."
John was not deceived by his brother-in-law's minification of their talk, and he exchanged the trim Henry Clay he had already clipped for a very large Upman that would smoke for a good hour.
"Won't you light up before you begin?" he asked, pushing a box of commonplace Murillos toward his brother-in-law, whose habit of biting off the end of a cigar, of letting it go out, of continually knocking off the ash, of forgetting to remove the band till it was smoldering, and of playing miserable little tunes with it on the rim of a coffee-cup, in fact of doing everything with it except smoke it appreciatively, made it impossible for John, so far as Laurence was concerned, to be generous with his cigars.
"I think you'll find these not bad."
This was true; the Murillos were not actually bad.
"Thanks, I will avail myself of your offer. But to come back to what I was saying," Laurence went on, lighting his cigar with as little expression of anticipated pleasure as might be discovered in the countenance of a lodging-house servant lighting a fire. "I do not propose to occupy your time by an account of my spiritual struggles at the University."
"You ought to write a novel," said John, cheerfully.
Laurence looked puzzled.
"I am now occupied with the writing of a play, but I shall come to that presently. Novels, however...."
"I was only joking," said John. "It would take too long to explain the joke. Sorry I interrupted you. Cigar gone out? Don't take another. It doesn't really matter how often those Murillos go out."
"Where am I?" Laurence asked in a bewildered voice.
"You'd just left Oxford," John answered, quickly.
"Ah, yes, I was at Oxford. Well, as I was saying, I shall not detain you with an account of my spiritual strugglesthere.... I think I may almost without presumption refer to them as my spiritual progress ... let it suffice that I found myself on the vigil of my ordination after a year at Cuddesdon Theological College a convinced High Churchman. This must not be taken to mean that I belonged to the more advanced or what I should prefer to call the Italian party in the Church of England. I did not."
Laurence here paused and looked at John earnestly; since John had not the remotest idea what the Italian party meant and was anxious to avoid being told, he said in accents that sought to convey relief at hearing his brother-in-law's personal contradiction of a charge that had for long been whispered against him:
"Oh, you didn't?"
"No, I did not. I was not prepared to go one jot or one tittle beyond the Five Points."
"Of the compass, you mean," said John, wisely. "Quite so."
Then seeing that Laurence seemed rather indignant, he added quickly, "Did I say the compass? How idiotic! Of course, I meant the law."
"The Five Points are the Eastward Position...."
"It was the compass after all," John thought. "What a fool I was to hedge."
"The Mixed Chalice, Lights, Wafer Bread, and Vestments, butnotthe ceremonial use of Incense."
"And those are the Five Points?"
Laurence inclined his head.
"Which you were not prepared to go beyond, I think you said?" John gravely continued, flattering himself that he was re-established as an intelligent listener.
"In adhering to these Five Points," Laurence proceeded, "I found that I was able to claim the support of a number of authoritative English divines. I need only mention Bishop Ken and Bishop Andrews for you to appreciate my position."
"Eastward, I think you said," John put in; for his brother-in-law had paused again, and he was evidently intended to say something.
"I perceive that you are not acquainted with the divergences of opinion that unhappily exist in our national Church."
"Well, to tell you the truth—and I know you'll excuse my frankness—I haven't been to church since I was a boy," John admitted. "But I know I used to dislike the litany very much, and of course I had my favorite hymns—we most of us have—and really I think that's as far as I got. However, I have to get up the subject of religion very shortly. My next play will deal with Joan of Arc, and, as you may imagine, religion plays an important part in such a theme—a very important part. In addition to the vision that Joan will have of St. Michael in the first act, one of my chief unsympathetic characters is a bishop. I hope I'm not hurting your feelings in telling you this, my dear fellow. Have another cigar, won't you? I think you've dipped the end of that one in the coffee-lees."
Laurence assured John bitterly that he had no reason to be particularly fond of bishops. "In fact," he went on, "I'm having a very painful discussion with the Bishop of Silchester at this moment, but I shall come to that presently. What I am anxious, however, to impress upon you at this stage in our little talk is the fact that on the vigil of my ordination I had arrived at a definite theory of what I could and could not accept. Well, I was ordained deacon by the Bishop of St. Albans and licensed to a curacy in Plaistow—one of the poorest districts in the East End of London. Here I worked for three years, and it was here that fourteen years ago I first met Edith."
"Yes, I seem to remember. Wasn't she working at a girls' club or something? I know I always thought that there must be a secondary attraction."
"At that time my financial position was not such as to warrant my embarking upon matrimony. Moreover, I had in a moment of what I should now call boyish exaltation registered a vow of perpetual celibacy. Edith, however, with that devotion which neither then nor at any crisis since hasfailed me expressed her willingness to consent to an indefinite engagement, and I remember with gratitude that it was just this consent of hers which was the means of widening the narrow—ah—the all too narrow path which at that time I was treading in religion. My vicar and I had a painful dispute upon some insignificant doctrinal point; I felt bound to resign my curacy, and take another under a man who could appreciate and allow for my speculative temperament. I became curate to St. Thomas's, Kensington, and had hopes of ultimately being preferred to a living. I realized in fact that the East End was a cul-de-sac for a young and—if I may so describe myself without being misunderstood—ambitious curate. For three years I remained at St. Thomas's and obtained a considerable reputation as a preacher. You may or may not remember that some Advent Addresses of mine were reprinted in one of the more tolerant religious weeklies and obtained what I do not hesitate to call the honor of being singled out for malicious abuse by theChurch Times. Eleven years ago my dear father died and by leaving me an independence of £417 a year enabled me not merely to marry Edith, but very soon afterwards to accept the living of Newton Candover. I will not detain you with the history of my financial losses, which I hope I have always welcomed in the true spirit of resignation. Let it suffice that within a few years owing to my own misplaced charity and some bad advice from a relative of mine on the Stock Exchange my private income dwindled to £152, while at the same time the gross income of Newton Candover from £298 sank to the abominably low nett income of £102—a serious reflection, I think you will agree, upon the shocking financial system of our national Church. It may surprise you, my dear John, to learn that such blows from fate not only did not cast me down into a state of spiritual despair and intellectual atrophy, but that they actually had the effect of inciting me to still greater efforts."
John had been fumbling with his check book when Laurence began to talk about his income; but the unexpectedturn of the narrative quietened him, and the Upman was going well.
"You may or may not come across a little series of devotional meditations for the Man in the Street entitled Lamp-posts. They have a certain vogue, and I may tell you in confidence that under the pseudonym of The Lamplighter I wrote them. The actual financial return they brought me was slight. Barabbas, you know, was a publisher. Ha-ha! No, although I made nothing, or rather practically nothing out of them for my own purse, by leading me to browse among many modern works of theology and philosophy I began to realize that there was a great deal of reason for modern indifference and skepticism. In other words, I discovered that, in order to keep the man in the street a Christian, Christianity must adapt itself to his needs. Filled with a reverent enthusiasm and perhaps half-consciously led along such a path by your conspicuous example of success, I have sought to embody my theories in a play, the protagonist of which is the apostle Thomas, whom when you read the play you will easily recognize as the prototype of the man in the street. And this brings me to the reason for which I have asked you for this little talk. The fact of the matter is that in pursuing my studies of the apostle Thomas I have actually gone beyond his simple rugged agnosticism, and I now at forty-two years of age after eighteen years as a minister of religion find myself unable longer to accept in any literal sense of the term whatever the Virgin Birth."
Laurence poured himself out a third glass of port and waited for John to recover from his stupefaction.
"But I don't think I'm a very good person to talk to about these abstruse divine obstetrics," John protested. "I really haven't considered the question. I know of course to what you refer, but I think this is essentially an occasion for professional advice."
"I do not ask for advice upon my beliefs," Laurence explained. "I recognize that nobody is able to do anythingfor them except myself. What I want you to do is to let Edith, myself, and little Frida stay with you at Ambles—of course we should be paying guests and you could use our pony and trap and any of the vicarage furniture that you thought suitable—until it has been decided whether I am likely or not to have any success as a dramatist. I do not ask you to undertake the Quixotic task of trying to obtain a public representation of my play about the apostle Thomas. I know that Biblical subjects are forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain, surely a monstrous piece of flunkeyism. But I have many other ideas for plays, and I'm convinced that you will sympathize with my anxiety to be able to work undisturbed and, if I may say so, in close propinquity to another playwright who is already famous."
"But why do you want to leave your own vicarage?" John gasped.
"My dear fellow, owing to what I can only call the poisonous behavior of Mrs. Paxton, my patron, to whom while still a curate at St. Thomas's, Kensington, I gave an abundance of spiritual consolation when she suffered the loss of her husband, owing as I say to her poisonous behavior following upon a trifling quarrel about some alterations I made in the fabric ofmychurch without consulting her, I have been subject to ceaseless inquisition and persecution. There has been an outcry in the more bigoted religious press about my doctrine, and in short I have thought it best and most dignified to resign my living. I am therefore, to use a colloquialism,—ah—at a loose end."
"And Edith?" John asked.
"My poor wife still clings with feminine loyalty to those accretions to faith from which I have cut myself free. In most things she is at one with me, but I have steadily resisted the temptation to intrude upon the sanctity of her intimate beliefs. She sees my point of view. Of her sympathy I can only speak with gratitude. But she is still an old-fashioned believer. And indeed I am glad, for I should not like to think of her tossed upon the stormy seas of doubtand exposed to the—ah—hurricanes of speculation that surge through my own brains."
"And when do you want to move in to Ambles?"
"Well, if it would be convenient, we should like to begin gradually to-morrow. I have informed the Bishop that I will—ah—be out in a fortnight."
"But what about Hilda?" John asked, doubtfully. "She is really looking after Ambles for me, you know."
"While we have been having our little talk in the dining-room Edith has been having her little talk with Hilda in the drawing-room, and I think I hear them coming now."
John looked up quickly to see the effect of that other little talk, and determined to avoid for that night at least anything in the nature of little talks with anybody.
"Laurence dear," said Edith mildly, "isn't it time we were going?"
John knew that not Hilda herself could have phrased more aptly what she was feeling; he was sure that in her opinion it was indeed high time that Edith and Laurence were going.
Laurence went over to the window and pulled aside the curtains to examine the moon.
"Yes, my dear, I think we might have Primrose harnessed. Where is Frida?"
"She is watching Harold arrange the animals that John gave her. They are playing at visiting the Natural History Museum."
John was aware that he had not yet expressed his own willingness for the Armitage family to move into Ambles; he was equally aware that Hilda was trying to catch his eye with a questioning and indignant glance and that he had already referred the decision to her. At the same time he could not bring himself to exalt Hilda above Edith who was the younger and he was bound to admit the favorite of his two sisters; moreover, Hilda was the mother of Harold, and if Harold was to be considered tolerable in the same house as himself, he could not deny as much of his forbearance to Laurence.
"Well, I suppose you two girls have settled it between you?" he said.
Hilda, who did not seem either surprised or elated at being called a girl, observed coldly that naturally it was for John to decide, but that if the vicarage family was going to occupy Ambles extra furniture would be required immediately.
"My dear," said Laurence. "Didn't you make it clear to Hilda that as much of the vicarage furniture as is required can be sent here immediately? John and I had supposed that you were settling all these little domestic details during your little talk together."
"No, dear," Edith said, "we settled nothing. Hilda felt, and of course I can't help agreeing with her, that it is really asking too much of John. She reminded me that he has come down here to work."
The last icicle of opposition melted from John's heart; he could not bear to think of Edith's being lectured all the way home by her husband under the light of a setting moon. "I dare say we can manage," he said, "and really, you know Hilda, it will do the rooms good to be lived in. I noticed this afternoon a slight smell of damp coming from the unfurnished part of the house."
"Apples, not damp," Hilda snapped. "I had the apples stored in one of the disused rooms."
"All these problems will solve themselves," said Laurence, grandly. "And I'm sure that John cannot wish to attempt them to-night. Let us all remember that he may be tired. Come along, Edith. We have a long day before us to-morrow. Let us say good-night to Mama."
Edith started: it was the first time in eleven years of married life that her husband had adopted the Touchwood style of addressing or referring to their mother, and it seemed to set a seal upon his more intimate association with her family in the future. If any doubts still lingered about the forthcoming immigration of the vicarage party to Ambles they were presently disposed of once and for all by Laurence.
"What are you carrying?" he asked Frida, when they were gathered in the hall before starting.
"Uncle John's present," she replied.
"Do not bother. Uncle John has invited us to stay here, and you do not want to expose your little animals to the risk of being chipped. No doubt Harold will look after them for you in the interim—the short interim. Come, Edith, the moon is not going to wait for us, you know. I have the reins. Gee-up, Primrose!"
"Fond as I am of Edith," Hilda said, when the vicarage family was out of hearing. "Fond as I am of Edith," she repeated without any trace of affection in accent or expression, "I do think this invasion is an imposition upon your kindness. But clergymen are all alike; they all become dictatorial and obtuse; they're too fond of the sound of their own voices."
"Laurence is perhaps a little heavy," John agreed, "a little suave and heavy like a cornflour shape, but we ought to do what we can for Edith."
He tactfully offered Hilda a share in his own benevolence, in which she ensconced herself without hesitation.
"Well, I suppose we shall have to make the best of it. Indeed the only thing thatreallyworries me is what we are to do with the apples."
"Oh, Harold will soon eat them up," said John; though he had not the slightest intention of being sarcastic, Hilda was so much annoyed by this that she abandoned all discussion of the vicarage and talked so long about Harold's inside and with such a passionate insistence upon what he required of sweet and sour to prevent him from dropping before her very eyes, that John was able fairly soon to plead that the hour was late and that he must go to bed.
In his bedroom, which was sharp-scented with autumnal airs and made him disinclined for sleep, John became sentimental over Edith and began to weave out of her troubles a fine robe for his own good-nature in which his sentimentality was able to show itself off. He assured himself of Edith'sluck in having Ambles as a refuge in the difficult time through which she was passing and began to visualize her past life as nothing but a stormy prelude to a more tranquil present in which he should be her pilot. That Laurence would be included in his beneficence was certainly a flaw in the emerald of his bounty, a fly in the amber of his self-satisfaction; but, after all, so long as Edith was secure and happy such blemishes were hardly perceptible. He ought to think himself lucky that he was in a position to help his relations; the power of doing kind actions was surely the greatest privilege accorded to the successful man. And what right had Hilda to object? Good gracious, as if she herself were not dependent enough upon him! But there had always been visible in Hilda this wretched spirit of competition. It had been in just the same spirit that she had married Daniel Curtis; she had not been able to endure her younger sister's engagement to the tall handsome curate and had snatched at the middle-aged explorer in order to be married simultaneously and secure the best wedding presents for herself. But what had Daniel Curtis seen in Hilda? What had that myopic and taciturn man found in Hilda to gladden a short visit to England between his life on the Orinoco and his intended life at the back of the uncharted Amazons? And had his short experience of her made him so reckless that nothing but his spectacles were found by the rescuers? What mad impulse to perpetuate his name beyond the numerous beetles, flowers, monkeys, and butterflies to which it was already attached by many learned societies had led him to bequeath Harold to humanity? Was not his collection of humming birds enough?
"I'm really very glad that Edith is coming to Ambles," John murmured. "Very glad indeed. It will serve Hilda right." He began to wonder if he actually disliked Hilda and to realize that he had never really forgiven her for refusing to be interested in his first published story. How well he remembered that occasion—twenty years ago almost to a day. It had been a dreary November in the time whenLondon really did have fogs, and when the sense of his father's approaching death had added to the general gloom. James had been acting as his father's partner for more than a year and had already nearly ruined the practice by his inexperience and want of affability. George and himself were both in the city offices—George in wool, himself in dog-biscuits. George did not seem to mind the soul-destroying existence and was full of financial ambition; but himself had loathed it and cared for nothing but literature. How he had pleaded with that dry old father, whose cynical tormented face on its pillow smeared with cigar ash even now vividly haunted his memory; but the fierce old man had refused him the least temporary help and had actually chuckled with delight amidst all his pain at the thought of how his family would have to work for a living when he should mercifully be dead. Was it surprising, when that morning he had found at the office a communication from a syndicate of provincial papers to inform him of his story's being accepted, that he should have arrived home in the fog, full of hope and enthusiasm? And then he had been met with whispering voices and the news of his father's death. Of course he had been shocked and grieved, even disappointed that it was too late to announce his success to the old man; but he had not been able to resist telling Hilda, a gawky, pale-faced girl of eighteen, that his story had been taken. He could recall her expression in that befogged gaslight even now, her expression of utter lack of interest, faintly colored with surprise at his own bad taste. Then he had gone upstairs to see his mother, who was bathed in tears, though she had been warned at least six months ago that her husband might die at any moment. He had ventured after a few formal words of sympathy to lighten the burden of her grief by taking the auspicious communication from his pocket, where it had been cracking nervously between his fingers, and reading it to her. He had been sure that she would be interested because she was a great reader of stories and must surely derive a grateful wonder from the contemplation of her own son as an author.But she was evidently too much overcome by the insistency of grief and by the prospect of monetary difficulties in the near future to grasp what he was telling her; it had struck him that she had actually never realized that the stories she enjoyed were written by men and women any more than it might have struck another person that advertisements were all written by human beings with their own histories of love and hate.
"You mustn't neglect your office work, Johnnie," was what she had said. "We shall want every halfpenny now that Papa is gone. James does his best, but the patients were more used to Papa."
After these two rebuffs John had not felt inclined to break his good news to James, who would be sure to sneer, or to George, who would only laugh; so he had wandered upstairs to the old schoolroom, where he had found Edith sitting by a dull fire and dissuading little Hugh from throwing coals at the cat. As soon as he had told Edith what had happened she had made a hero of him, and ever afterwards treated him with admiration as well as affection. Had she not prophesied even that he would be another Dickens? That was something like sisterly love, and he had volunteered to read her the original rough copy, which, notwithstanding Hugh's whining interruptions, she had enjoyed as much as he had enjoyed it himself. Certainly Edith must come to Ambles; twenty years were not enough to obliterate the memory of that warm-hearted girl of fifteen and of her welcome praise.
But Hugh? What malign spirit had brought Hugh to his mind at a moment when he was already just faintly disturbed by the prospect of his relations' increasing demands upon his attention? Hugh was only twenty-seven now and much too conspicuously for his own good the youngest of the family; like all children that arrive unexpectedly after a long interval, he had seemed the pledge of his parents' renewed youth on the very threshold of old age, and had been spoiled, even by his cross-grained old father, in consequence:as for his mother, though it was out of her power to spoil him extravagantly with money, she gave him all that she did not spend on caps for herself. John determined to make inquiries about Hugh to-morrow. Not another penny should he have from him, not another farthing. If he could not live on what he earned in the office of Stephen Crutchley, who had accepted the young spendthrift out of regard for their lifelong friendship, if he could not become a decent, well-behaved architect, why, he could starve. Not another penny ... and the rest of his relations agreed with John on this point, for if to him Hugh was a skeleton in the family cupboard, to them he was a skeleton at the family feast.
John expelled from his mind all misgivings about Hugh, hoped it would be a fine day to-morrow so that he could really look round the garden and see what plants wanted ordering, tried to remember the name of an ornamental shrub recommended by Miss Hamilton, turned over on his side, and went to sleep.
EARLYnext morning John dreamed that he was buying calico in an immense shop and that in a dreamlike inconsequence the people there, customers and shopmen alike, were abruptly seized with a frenzy of destruction so violent that they began to tear up all the material upon which they could lay their hands; indeed, so loud was the noise of rent cloth that John woke up with the sound of it still in his ears. Gradually it was borne in upon a brain wrestling with actuality that the noise might have emanated from the direction of a small casement in his bedroom looking eastward into the garden across a steep penthouse which ran down to within two feet of the ground. Although the noise had stopped some time before John had precisely located its whereabouts and really before he was perfectly convinced that he was awake, he jumped out of bed and hurried across the chilly boards to ascertain if after all it had only been a relic of his dream. No active cause was visible; but the moss, the stonecrop and the tiles upon the penthouse had been clawed from top to bottom as if by some mighty tropical cat, and John for a brief instant savored that elated perplexity which generally occurs to heroes in the opening paragraphs of a sensational novel.
"It's a very old house," he thought, hopefully, and began to grade his reason to a condition of sycophantic credulity. "And, of course, anything like a ghost at seven o'clock in the morning is rare—very rare. The evidence would be unassailable...."
After toadying to the marvelous for a while, he sought a natural explanation of the phenomenon and honestly tried not to want it to prove inexplicable. The noise began again overhead; a fleeting object darkened the casement like theswift passage of a bird and struck the penthouse below; there was a slow grinding shriek, a clatter of broken tiles and leaden piping; a small figure stuck all over with feathers emerged from the herbaceous border and smiled up at him.
"Good heavens, my boy, what in creation are you trying to do?" John shouted, sternly.
"I'm learning to toboggan, Uncle John."
"But didn't I explain to you that tobogganing can only be carried out after a heavy snowfall?"
"Well, it hasn't snowed yet," Harold pointed out in an offended voice.
"Listen to me. If it snows for a month without stopping, you're never to toboggan down a roof. What's the good of having all those jolly hills at the back of the house if you don't use them?"
John spoke as if he had brought back the hills from America at the same time as he was supposed to have brought back the toboggan.
"There's a river, too," Harold observed.
"You can't toboggan down a river—unless, of course, it gets frozen over."
"I don't want to toboggan down the river, but if I had a Canadian canoe for the river I could wait for the snow quite easily."
John, after a brief vision of a canoe being towed across the Atlantic by theMurmania, felt that he was being subjected to the lawless exactions of a brigand, but could think of nothing more novel in the way of defiance than:
"Go away now and be a good boy."
"Can't I ..." Harold began.
"No, you can't. If those chickens' feathers...."
"They're pigeons' feathers," his nephew corrected him.
"If those feathers stuck in your hair are intended to convey an impression that you're a Red Indian chief, go and sit in your wigwam till breakfast and smoke the pipe of peace."
"Mother said I wasn't to smoke till I was twenty-one."
"Not literally, you young ass. Why, good heavens, in myyoung days such an allusion to Mayne Reid would have been eagerly taken up by any boy."
Something was going wrong with this conversation, John felt, and he added, lamely:
"Anyway, go away now."
"But, Uncle John, I...."
"Don't Uncle John me. I don't feel like an uncle this morning. Suppose I'd been shaving when you started that fool's game. I might have cut my head off."
"But, Uncle John, I've left my spectacles on one of the chimneys. Mother said that whenever I was playing a rough game I was to take off my spectacles first."
"You'll have to do without your spectacles, that's all. The gardener will get them for you after breakfast. Anyway, a Red Indian chief in spectacles is unnatural."
"Well, I'm not a Red Indian any longer."
"You can't chop and change like that. You'll have to be a Red Indian now till after breakfast. Don't argue any more, because I'm standing here in bare feet. Go and do some weeding in the garden. You've pulled up all the plants on the roof."
"I can't read without my spectacles."
"Weed, not read!"
"Well, I can't weed, either. I can't do anything without my spectacles."
"Then go away and do nothing."
Harold shuffled off disconsolately, and John rang for his shaving water.
At breakfast Hilda asked anxiously after her son's whereabouts; and John, the last vestige of whose irritation had vanished in the smell of fried bacon and eggs, related the story of the morning's escapade as a good joke.
"But he can't see anything without his spectacles," Hilda exclaimed.
"Oh, he'll find his way to the breakfast table all right," John prophesied.
"These bachelors," murmured Hilda, turning to hermother with a wry little laugh. "Hark! isn't that Harold calling?"
"No, no, no, it's the pigeons," John laughed. "They're probably fretting for their feathers."
"It's to be hoped," said old Mrs. Touchwood, "that he's not fallen into the well by leaving off his spectacles like this. I never could abide wells. And I hate to think of people leaving things off suddenly. It's always a mistake. I remember little Hughie once left off his woollen vests in May and caught a most terrible cold that wouldn't go away—it simply wouldn't go."
"How is Hugh, by the way?" John asked.
"The same as ever," Hilda put in with cold disapproval. She was able to forget Harold's myopic wanderings in the pleasure of crabbing her youngest brother.
"Ah, you're all very hard on poor Hughie," sighed the old lady. "But he's always been very fond of his poor mother."
"He's very fond of what he can get out of you," Hilda sneered.
"And it's little enough he can, poor boy. Goodness knows I've little enough to spare for him. I wish you could have seen your way to do something for Hughie, Johnnie," the old lady went on.
"John has done quite enough for him," Hilda snapped, which was perfectly true.
"He's had to leave his rooms in Earl's Court," Mrs. Touchwood lamented.
"What for? Getting drunk, I suppose?" John inquired, sternly.
"No, it was the drains. He's staying with his friend, Aubrey Fenton, whom I cannot pretend to like. He seems to me a sad scapegrace. Poor little Hughie. I wish everything wasn't against him. It's to be hoped he won't go and get married, poor boy, for I'm sure his wife wouldn't understand him."
"Surely he's not thinking of getting married," exclaimed John in dismay.
"Why no, of course not," said the old lady. "How you do take anybody up, Johnnie. I said it's to be hoped he won't get married."
At this moment Emily came in to announce that Master Harold was up on the roof shouting for dear life. "Such a turn as it give Cook and I, mum," she said, "to hear that garshly voice coming down the chimney. Cook was nearly took with the convolsions, and if it had of been after dark, mum, she says she's shaw she doesn't know what she wouldn't of done, she wouldn't, she's that frightened of howls. That's the one thing she can't ever be really comfortable for in the country, she says, the howls and the hearwigs."
"I'm under the impression," John declared, solemnly, "that I forbade Harold to go near the roof. If he has disobeyed my express commands he must suffer for it by the loss of his breakfast. He has chosen to go back on the roof: on the roof he shall stay."
"But his breakfast?" Hilda almost whispered. She was so much awed by her brother's unusually pompous phraseology that he began to be impressed by it himself and to feel the first faint intimations of the pleasures of tyranny: he began to visualize himself as the unbending ruler of all his relations.
"His breakfast can be sent up to him, and I hope it will attract every wasp in the neighborhood."
This to John seemed the most savage aspiration he could have uttered: autumnal wasps disturbed him as much as dragons used to disturb princesses.
"Harold likes wasps," said Hilda. "He observes their habits."
This revelation of his nephew's tastes took away John's last belief in his humanity, and the only retort he could think of was a suggestion that he should go at once to a boarding-school.
"Likes wasps?" he repeated. "The child must be mad. You'll tell me next that he likes black beetles."
"He trained a black beetle once to eat something. I forget what it was now. But the poor boy was so happy about his little triumph. You ought to remember, John, that he takes after his father."
John made up his mind at this moment that Daniel Curtis must have married Hilda in a spirit of the purest empirical science.
"Well, he's not to go training insects in my house," John said, firmly. "And if I see any insects anywhere about Ambles that show the slightest sign of having been encouraged to suppose themselves on an equal with mankind I shall tread on them."
"I'm afraid the crossing must have upset you, Johnnie," said old Mrs. Touchwood, sympathetically. "You seem quite out of sorts this morning. And I don't like the idea of poor little Harold's balancing himself all alone on a chimney. It was never any pleasure to me to watch tight-rope dancers or acrobats. Indeed, except for the clowns, I never could abide circuses."
Hilda quickly took up the appeal and begged John to let the gardener rescue her son.
"Oh, very well," he assented. "But, once for all, it must be clearly understood that I've come down to Ambles to write a new play and that some arrangement must be concluded by which I have my mornings completely undisturbed."
"Of course," said Hilda, brightening at the prospect of Harold's release.
"Of course," John echoed, sardonically, within himself. He did not feel that the sight of Harold's ravening after his breakfast would induce in him the right mood for Joan of Arc. So he left the breakfast table and went upstairs to his library. Here he found that some "illiterate oaf," as he characterized the person responsible, had put in upside down upon the shelves the standard works he had hastily amassed. Instead of setting his ideas in order, he had to set his books in order: and after a hot and dusty morning with the rows of unreadable classics he came downstairs to find that thevicarage party had arrived just in time for lunch, bringing with them as the advance guard of their occupation a large clothes basket filled with what Laurence described as "necessary odds and ends that might be overlooked later."
"It's my theory of moving," he added. "The small things first."
He enunciated this theory so reverently that his action acquired from his tone a momentous gravity like the captain of a ship's when he orders the women and children into the boats first.
The moving of the vicarage party lasted over a fortnight, during which John found it impossible to settle down to Joan of Arc. No sooner would he have worked himself up to a suitable frame of mind in which he might express dramatically and poetically the maid's reception of her heavenly visitants than a very hot man wearing a green baize apron would appear in the doorway of the library and announce that a chest of drawers had hopelessly involved some vital knot in the domestic communications. It was no good for John to ask Hilda to do anything: his sister had taken up the attitude that it was all John's fault, that she had done her best to preserve his peace, that her advice had been ignored, and that for the rest of her life she intended to efface herself.
"I'm a mere cipher," she kept repeating.
On one occasion when a bureau of sham ebony that looked like a blind man's dream of Cologne Cathedral had managed to wedge all its pinnacles into the lintel of the front door, John observed to Laurence he had understood that only such furniture from the vicarage as was required to supplement the Ambles furniture would be brought there.
"I thought this bureau would appeal to you," Laurence replied. "It seemed to me in keeping with much of your work."
John looked up sharply to see if he was being chaffed; but his brother-in-law's expression was earnest, and the intendedcompliment struck more hardly at John's self-confidence than the most malicious review.
"Does my work really seem like gimcrack gothic?" he asked himself.
In a fit of exasperation he threw himself so vigorously into the business of forcing the bureau into the house that when it was inside it looked like a ruined abbey on the afternoon of a Bank Holiday.
"It had better be taken up into the garrets for the present," he said, grimly. "It can be mended later on."
The comparison of his work to that bureau haunted John at his own writing-table for the rest of the morning; thinking of the Bishop of Silchester's objection to Laurence, he found it hard to make the various bishops in his play as unsympathetic as they ought to be for dramatic contrast; then he remembered that after all it had been due to the Bishop of Silchester's strong action that Laurence had come to Ambles: the stream of insulting epithets for bishops flowed as strongly as ever, and he worked in a justifiable pun upon the name of Pierre Cauchon, his chief episcopal villain.
"I wonder, if I were allowed to, whether I would condemn Laurence to be burnt alive. Wasn't there a Saint Laurence who was grilled? I really believe I would almost grill him, I really do. There's something exceptionally irritating to me about that man's whole personality. And I'm not at all sure I approve of a clergyman's giving up his beliefs. One might get a line out of that, by the way—something about a weathercock and a church steeple. I don't think a clergyman ought to surrender so easily. It's his business not to be influenced by modern thought. This passion for realism is everywhere.... Thank goodness, I've been through it and got over it and put it behind me forever. It's a most unprofitable creed. What was my circulation as a realist? I once reached four thousand. What's four thousand? Why, it isn't half the population of Galton. And now Laurence Armitage takes up with it after being avicar for ten years. Idiot! Religion isn't realistic: it never was realistic. Religion is the entertainment of man's spirituality just as the romantic drama is the entertainment of his mentality. I don't read Anatole France for my representation of Joan of Arc. What business has Laurence to muddle his head with—what's his name—Colonel Ingoldsby—Ingersoll—when he ought to be thinking about his Harvest Festival? And then he has the effrontery to compare my work with that bureau! If that's all his religion meant to him—that ridiculous piece of gimcrack gothic, no wonder it wouldn't hold together. Why, the green fumed oak of a sentimental rationalism would be better than that. Confound Laurence! I knew this would happen when he came. He's taken my mind completely off my own work. I can't write a word this morning."
John rushed away from his manuscript and weeded furiously down a secluded border until the gardener told him he had weeded away the autumn-sown sweet-peas that were coming along nicely and standing the early frosts a treat.
"I'm not even allowed to weed my own garden now," John thought, burking the point at issue; and his disillusionment became so profound that he actually invited Harold to go for a walk with him.
"Can I bring my blow-pipe?" asked the young naturalist, gleefully.
"You don't want to load yourself up with soap and water," said John. "Keep that till you come in."
"My South American blow-pipe, Uncle John. It's a real one which father sent home. It belonged to a little Indian boy, but the darts aren't poisoned, father told mother."
"Don't you be too sure," John advised him. "Explorers will say anything."
"Well, can I bring it?"
"No, we'll take a non-murderous walk for a change. I'm tired of being shunned by the common objects of the countryside."
"Well, shall I bringAnts,Bees, andWasps?"
"Certainly not. We don't want to go trailing about Hampshire like two jam sandwiches."
"I mean the book."
"No, if you want to carry something, you can carry my cleek and six golf balls."
"Oh, yes, and then I'll practice bringing eggs down in my mouth from very high trees."
John liked this form of exercise, because at the trifling cost of making one ball intolerably sticky it kept Harold from asking questions; for about two hundred yards he enjoyed this walk more than any he had ever taken with his nephew.
"But birds' nesting time won't come till the spring," Harold sighed.
"No," said John, regretfully: there were many lofty trees round Ambles, and with his mouth full of eggs anything might happen to Harold.
The transference of the vicarage family was at last complete, and John was penitently astonished to find that Laurence really did intend to pay for their board; in fact, the ex-vicar presented him with a check for two months on account calculated at a guinea a week each. John was so much moved by this event—the manner in which Laurence offered the check gave it the character of a testimonial and thereby added to John's sense of obligation—that he was even embarrassed by the notion of accepting it. At the same time a faint echo of his own realistic beginnings tinkled in his ear a warning not to refuse it, both for his own sake and for the sake of his brother-in-law. He therefore escaped from the imputation of avarice by suggesting that the check should be handed to Hilda, who, as housekeeper, would know how to employ it best. John secretly hoped that Hilda, through being able to extract what he thought of as "a little pin money for herself" out of it, might discard the martyr's halo that was at present pinching her brains tightly enough, if one might judge by her constricted expression.
"There will undoubtedly be a small profit," he told himself,"for if Laurence has a rather monkish appetite, Edith and Frida eat very little."
Perhaps Hilda did manage to make a small profit; at any rate, she seemed reconciled to the presence of the Armitages and gave up declaring that she was a cipher. The fatigue of moving in had made Laurence's company, while he was suffering from the reaction, almost bearable. Frida, apart from a habit she had of whispering at great length in her mother's ear, was a nice uninquisitive child, and Edith, when she was not whispering back to Frida or echoing Laurence, was still able to rouse in her brother's heart feelings of warm affection. Old Mrs. Touchwood had acquired from some caller a new game of Patience, which kept her gently simmering in the lamplight every evening; Harold had discovered among the odds and ends of salvage from the move a sixpenny encyclopedia that, though it made him unpleasantly informative, at any rate kept him from being interrogative, which John found, on the whole, a slight advantage. Janet Bond had written again most seriously about Joan of Arc, and the film company had given excellent terms forThe Fall of Babylon. Really, except for two huffy letters from his sisters-in-law in London, John was able to contemplate with much less misgivings a prospect of spending all the winter at Ambles. Beside, he had secured his dog-cart with a dashing chestnut mare, and was negotiating for the twenty-acre field.
Yes, everything was very jolly, and he might even aim at finishing the first draft of the second act before Christmas. It would be jolly to do that and jolly to invite James and Beatrice and George and Eleanor, but not Hugh—no, in no circumstances should Hugh be included in the yuletide armistice—down to Ambles for an uproarious jolly week. Then January should be devoted to the first draft of the third act—really it should be possible to write to Janet Bond presently and assure her of a production next autumn. John was feeling particularly optimistic. For three days in succession the feet of the first act had been moving as rhythmically and regularly toward the curtain as the feet of guardsmenmove along the Buckingham Palace Road. It was a fine frosty morning, and even so early in the day John was tapping his second egg to the metrical apostrophes of Uncle Laxart's speech offering to take his niece, Joan, to interview Robert de Baudricourt. Suddenly he noticed that Laurence had not yet put in his appearance. This was strange behavior for one who still preserved from the habit of many early services an excited punctuality for his breakfast, and lightly he asked Edith what had become of her husband.
"He hopes to begin working again at his play this morning. Seeing you working so hard makes him feel lazy." Edith laughed faintly and fearfully, as if she would deprecate her own profanity in referring to so gross a quality as laziness in connection with Laurence, and perhaps for the first time in her life she proclaimed that her opinion was only an echo of Laurence's own by adding, "hesays that it makes him feel lazy. So he's going to begin at once."
John, whose mind kept reverting iambically and trochaically to the curtain of his first act, merely replied, without any trace of awe, that he was glad Laurence felt in the vein.
"But he hasn't decided yet," Edith continued, "which room he's going to work in."
For the first time a puff of apprehension twitched the little straw that might be going to break the camel's back.
"I'm afraid I can't offer him the library," John said quickly. "And you shall see the King of France to-day," he went on composing in his head. "No—And you shall see King Charles—no—and you shall see the King of France at once—no—and you shall see the King of France forthwith. Sensation among the villagers standing round. Forthwith is weak at the end of a line. I swear that you shall see the King of France. Sensation.Yes, that's it."
The top of John's egg was by this time so completely cracked by his metronomic spoon that a good deal of the shell was driven down into the egg: it did not matter, however, because appetite and inspiration were both disposed of by the arrival of Laurence.
"I wish you could have managed to help me with some of these things," he was muttering reproachfully to his wife.
The things consisted of six or seven books, a quantity of foolscap, an inkpot dangerously brimming, a paper-knife made of olive wood from Gethsemane, several pens and pencils, and a roll of blotting paper as white as the snow upon the summit of Mont Blanc, and so fat that John thought at first it was a tablecloth and wondered what his brother-in-law meant to do with it. He was even chilled by a brief and horrible suspicion that he was going to hold a communion service. Edith rose hastily from the table to help her husband unload himself.
"I'm so sorry, dear, why didn't you ring?"
"My dear, how could I ring without letting my materials drop?" Laurence asked, patiently.
"Or call?"
"My chin was too much occupied for calling. But it doesn't matter, Edith. As you see, I've managed to bring everything down quite safely."
"I'm so sorry," Edith went on. "I'd no idea...."
"I told you that I was going to begin work this morning."
"Yes, how stupid of me ... I'm so sorry...."
"Going to work, are you?" interrupted John, who was anxious to stop Edith's conjugal amenity. "That's capital."
"Yes, I'm really only waiting now to choose my room."
"I'm sorry I can't offer you mine ... but I must be alone. I find...."
"Of course," Laurence agreed with a nod of sympathetic knowingness. "Of course, my dear fellow, I shouldn't dream of trespassing. I, though indeed I've no right to compare myself with you, also like to work alone. In fact I consider that a secure solitude provides the ideal setting for dramatic composition. I have a habit—perhaps it comes from preparing my sermons with my eye always upon the spoken rather than upon the written word—I have a habit of declaiming many of my pages aloud to myself. That necessitates my being alone—absolutely alone."
"Yes, you see," Edith said, "if you're alone you're not disturbed."
John who was still sensitive to Edith's truisms tried to cover her last by incorporating Hilda in the conversation with a "What room do you advise?"
"Why not the dining-room? I'll tell Emily to clear away the breakfast things at once."
"Clear away?" Laurence repeated.
"And they won't be laying for lunch till a quarter-to-one."
"Laying for lunch?" Laurence gasped. "My dear Hilda! I don't wish to attribute to my—ah—work an importance which perhaps as a hitherto unacted playwright I have no right to attribute, but I think John at any rate will appreciate my objection to working with—ah—the bread-knife suspended over my head like the proverbial sword of Damocles. No, I'm afraid I must rule out the dining-room as a practicable environment."
"And Mama likes to sit in the drawing-room," said Hilda.
"In any case," Laurence said, indulgently, "I shouldn't feel at ease in the drawing-room. So I shall not disturb Mama. I had thought of suggesting that the children should be given another room in which to play, but to tell the truth I'm tired of moving furniture about. The fact is I miss my vicarage study: it was my own."
"Yes, nobody at the vicarage ever thought of interrupting him, you see," Edith explained.
"Well," said John, roused by the necessity of getting Joan started upon her journey to interview Robert de Baudricourt, "there are several empty bedrooms upstairs. One of them could be transformed into a study for Laurence."
"That means more arranging of furniture," Laurence objected.
"Then there's the garret," said John. "You'd find your bureau up there."
Laurence smiled in order to show how well he understood that the suggestion was only playfulness on John's side and how little he minded the good-natured joke.
"There is one room which might be made—ah—conducive to good work, though at present it is occupied by a quantity of apples; they, however, could easily be moved."
"But I moved them in there from what is now your room," Hilda protested.
"It is good for apples to be frequently moved," said Laurence, kindly. "In fact, the oftener they are moved, the better. And this holds good equally for pippins, codlins, and russets. On the other hand it means I shall lose half a day's work, because even if Icouldmake a temporary beginning anywhere else, I should have to superintend the arrangement of the furniture."