IIADRIAN
“Youknow, I can’t help thinking you’ve been all wrong about this business of Val’s,” Adrian said reproachfully to his remaining sisters.
Lucilla seemed singularly undisturbed by the distressing pronouncement, but Flora said anxiously:
“Why, Adrian?”
“Well, look how frightfully hard it is on the rest of us. You know what Father is—he’ll be days and days, if not months and months, getting over this, and it’ll put him dead against anything of that sort for life.”
“These things don’t happen twice in one family, I hope,” said Lucilla. “Neither Flora nor I are particularly likely to break off one engagement and enter into another and get married and go off to Canada, all inside a week.”
“You girls never think of anybody but yourselves.”
“Are you thinking of doing anything like that, then, Adrian?”
Lucilla appeared mildly to be amused, and not at all impressed by the probability of her own suggestion.
“How can I think of doing anything at all when I can’t get a decent job and only have a nominal allowance? I know Father can’t afford more, and we’re all in the same box—and then Val goes and marries a chap like Cuscaden, who hasn’t a penny, when she could have had a fellow with a decent little property and some money of his own, besides what I suppose he makes by writing. Why, just think what she could have done for all of us!”
Lucilla laughed outright.
“It wouldn’t have made millionaires of us, if she had married Owen.”
“Well, I can’t say I blame her, from one point of view,” Adrian conceded. “A more absolute prig than Owen has turned into, I never wish to meet. You know he won’t promise me the living at Stear?”
“The living at Stear?”
Flora looked at her brother in all but speechless astonishment, and Lucilla observed that a living was usually offered to a clergyman.
“And is there any reason why I shouldn’t go into the Church?” Adrian enquired, in counter-irony. “Goodness knows there was enough talk about it before the war, and it would please the governor frightfully. In fact, really, I’m thinking of him as much as anything. He was disappointed about old David going into the army, and he’s frightfully cut up about Val, and he may as well get a little comfort out of one of us. And I really don’t dislike the idea much, especially if it means a settled income in a year or two’s time.”
Lucilla got up.
“Talk to Mr. Clover, before you say anything to Father,” she advised. “Flossie, I’m going to see about Val’s class.”
Flora looked at Adrian with grave, unhumourous eyes.
“You don’t realize what Father would feel about your speaking of going into the priesthood in that sort of way, Adrian. You have no faintest vocation to the life of a clergyman.”
“What do you know about it? I’m the only person who can judge of that.”
“It lies between you and your conscience, certainly. But if you suppose that Father, with all his experience, would be satisfied with any but the highest motives——”
She stopped expressively.
“There may be different opinions as to what the highest motivesare,” said Adrian. “I wish this business of Val’s hadn’t put it out of the question to ask Owen anything.”
“Owen is coming to Stear in another month. I am quite certain that he doesn’t mean to let this make any difference, and you can ask him anything you want to. But really and truly, Adrian, if this suggestion wasn’t so absolutely wild, I should call it most irreverent.”
It was evident that Flora had uttered the most profound condemnation of which she was capable.
That night she enquired of Lucilla whether it was Adrian’s infatuation for Miss Duffle that brought to birth his strangely sudden desire for clerical life.
“I suppose so.”
“But apart from everything else, he’s much too young to marry. And I don’t suppose she’d look at him.”
“Neither do I. So we needn’t worry about it.”
“I feel as if Adrian was somebody quite new, whom I’d never known before.”
“He’s only growing up.”
“Does Father really know Adrian?”
Lucilla shook her head.
Both missed Valeria, and the mournful haste with which she had been equipped for her wedding and immediate departure for Canada had left them with a curious sense of having come through a great catastrophe.
The Canon was more profoundly depressed than they had ever seen him, and rarely spoke. The reduced number of people present at every meal rendered more significant the abysmal silences of each gathering.
Owen Quentillian, who had shown no marked disposition to take an immediate departure from St. Gwenllian, had been constrained to do so by the Canon’s grieved air of perceiving for him no other alternative.
The house bore a stricken aspect.
Only Adrian retained a sort of uneasy jauntiness, that petered away into silence in the presence of his father.
Canon Morchard’s presence, however, was far more withdrawn than usual from his family circle. Always energetic, he seemed able to find innumerable claims upon his time, and after the daily adjustment of these, the study door was apt to shut upon him decisively.
At dinner-time only were they certain of seeing him, and the resultant gloom was of a nature that induced Adrian, far more affected by it than either of his sisters appeared to be, to invite the innocuous Mr. Clover to dinner very soon after Valeria’s departure.
The curate was always ready to promote conversation, and sincerely supposed that his efforts must be consolatory to his hosts. His attempts took the form habitual to him of slightly self-evident remarks upon whatever caught his eye in his surroundings.
“Ha! Clover, dear man!” The Canon’s voice was sepulchral, rather than cordial. “Sit ye down—sit ye down.”
Mr. Clover made a few timid remarks to his neighbour, Flora, and wished that it had been Lucilla. He was always rather frightened of the silent Flora, and showed his alarmed consciousness of her musical talent by inquiring:
“And how is the piano?”
“What have we here, Lucilla?” said the Canon gravely, although the dish of cutlets was of an unmistakable nature.
He often made use of the phrase, and on this occasion it bore an inflexion of disapproval that was evidently not inspired by the cutlets themselves, but by some inner, more profound discontent.
“Cutlets in a silver dish,” said Mr. Clover.
“Do you know that the Admastons are getting up a theatrical show?” Adrian inquired. “Good idea, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t know any of them could act,” said Flora.
“Oh, they’ve got friends and people. I tell you who’sawfully good—Olga Duffle. She’s going to stay on for the performance. As a matter of fact, they’ve asked me to help get the thing up.”
Adrian’s elaborately casual tone did not prevent anyone except Lucilla from glancing surreptitiously at the Canon, to see how the announcement was received.
The Canon was frowning heavily.
“No one has more sympathy than myself with any diversions for young people, but the modern craze for amusement is carried too far. What is it that your friends are proposing to do, Adrian?”
“Just get up a musical show—a sort of Pierrot entertainment. It’ll be mostly singing and dancing, I expect.”
“I presume they have a charitable object in view.”
“I suppose so,” returned Adrian, in a tone that conveyed with sufficient accuracy to the majority of his hearers that he had no reason for supposing anything of the sort.
“The youth of today is an amazement to me,” said the Canon impressively. “After coming through Armageddon, the young men and young women of the present generation seem given over to a spirit of triviality—I can call it nothing else—that amazes me. There is no humour, today, there is ‘ragging’ or ‘rotting.’ There is no dancing—there is ‘fox-trotting,’ and ‘jazzing.’ There is no dressing, with beauty and dignity, for young womanhood—there is blatant indecency and an aping of a class that I cannot even name in this room. There is no art, no drama, no literature—there arerevues, and a new class of novel of which I cannot even trust myself to speak.”
The Canon drew a long breath and Adrian murmured sub-audibly:
“And fifthly, and lastly——”
Mr. Clover gazed at the bowl in the middle of the table and said:
“Very—very—nice maidenhair,” in a rapid undertone, and Canon Morchard resumed:
“I yield to no one, as you young folk here should readily admit, in my appreciation of the lighter side of life. I believe, indeed, that I have poked some shrewd enough fun in my day, at those who would have us believe that this world is a gloomy place. Rather would I say, in the old words we all know: ‘A merry heart goes all the way, but a sad one tires in a mile’—ah! You children can very well vouch for the amount of innocent amusement and recreation that has gone on amongst us. Our Sunday walks, our collecting crazes, our family quips in which young and old have taken full share—with deference due, be it understood, with deference due—our evening readings-aloud—I think all these, if they have been an entertainment, have also provided a certain instruction. And that is as it should be, let me tell you, young people—as it should be.”
“My father read aloud the whole of the Waverly novels to us, when we were children,” Lucilla explained to the curate.
“Nowadays, I am given to understand that children read an illustrated supplement entitledComic Cuts,” said the Canon bitterly.
“Pretty Wedgwood plate,” came in an aside from Mr. Clover.
“There is a reaction even against Tennyson, that king of song,” thundered the Canon.
“Most of all against Tennyson, according to Owen Quentillian,” said Adrian rather maliciously.
“Owen is tainted by the folly of the day, undoubtedly—but I cannot but believe that a young man of intellectual calibre such as his will learn to distinguish the true from the false in time. Owen is ‘the child of many prayers,’” said the Canon with a sudden softening of his voice.
A moment later he sighed heavily.
The direction of his thoughts was only too evidently concerned with the recent disastrous turn taken by Quentillian’saffaire de cœur.
“What is the programme of your friends’ entertainment?” the curate timorously inquired of Adrian.
“Well, they’ve not really worked out the details yet, but I’ve been asked to go over there this afternoon and help them settle. Of course, Miss Duffle will sing, and she’s promised to do a step-dance, and she and I thought of getting up a play of some kind.”
“You are not in a position to bind yourself to anything of that sort, Adrian,” said the Canon hastily. “I would have you realize that this supineness cannot go on. You appear to forget that you have to find some work for yourself.”
It was so seldom that Canon Morchard vented his feelings upon his younger son that an appalled silence followed his words, rendering them the more noticeable.
Then Mr. Clover said:
“Half-past eight,” in time to the chiming of the clock on the mantelpiece, and there was another silence.
Adrian looked sulky, and Flora nervous. The curate gazed across the table at Lucilla and inquired:
“What news from India?”
It was the head of the house who replied.
“David is strangely lax as a correspondent, Clover, strangely lax. Flora there is favoured with a letter more often than most of us—or should I rather say, less seldom? And yet it costs so little to send a few lines regularly to the loving ones at home! You young folk little think what you are laying up for yourselves in the years to come by neglecting tokens that may appear trivial at the time. The unspoken kind word, the unwritten affectionate letter—how they come back to haunt us later on!”
It almost appeared that these non-existent symbols were haunting St. Gwenllian at once, so heavily did the shadow of David’s remissness hang over the dinner table.
The Canon alternated between fits of profound and cataclysmic silence, during which he ate nothing and his eyes became grave and fixed in their unhappiness, and outbursts of vehement discoursiveness, that not infrequently took the form of rhetorical remonstrances addressed to an audience only too willing to agree with him.
The consciousness of his grief pervaded the atmosphere. No one could be unaware of it. His children, indeed, knew of old the successive stages of anger, morose irritability, and heart-broken remorse, to which mental suffering reduced their father.
Mr. Clover’s ineptitudes fell upon tense pauses, and remained unanswered.
Gradually the little man’s kind, anxious face showed a faint reflection of the misery that was so plainly to be read upon the Canon’s.
Flora’s face looked set in its gravity, Adrian was frankly sulky and resentful, and Lucilla’s impassivity was tinged with regretfulness.
Outside sounds struck almost with violence upon the silence within, and Mr. Clover murmured distressfully:
“A motor going along the road, towards the town.”
“The craze for rapid transport is ruining our English countryside,” said the Canon. “Frankly, I cannot away with it. What profit or pleasure can there be in whirling past unseen scenery, leaving clouds of dust and an evil odour behind?”
No one attempted to defend the satisfaction to be derived from the pastime so epitomized, and the Canon after a moment pushed back his chair.
“Don’t move—do not move on any account. Clover, you will pardon me, I know. I have a great deal of writing to get through. I shall require no coffee, Lucilla.”
He went out of the room, unsmiling, and with a slow, dejected step, his grey head a little bowed forward.
“How long is this going to last?” inquired Adrian, after a moment.
No one attempted to misunderstand his meaning.
“The worst of it is that he’ll be still more unhappy a little later on, when he realizes that his depression has reacted on all of us,” said Flora.
“In the meantime, Adrian, I strongly advise you to find a job and begin to work at it,” Lucilla added.
“Your father is very, very much depressed,” said Mr. Clover.
Adrian appeared to ponder these encouraging statements, and then he observed:
“Well, I don’t seem to be doing any good by staying here, so I think the best thing I can do is to accept the Admastons’ invitation and go over there and stay until after this show. It’ll be much handier for rehearsals, after all.”
It may be supposed that this reason, however adequate in fact, was not put forward, unsupported, by Lucilla, upon whom Adrian as a matter of course devolved the task of announcing his immediate intentions to the Canon.
“Let it be understood that he makes no further engagement of the kind,” said the Canon curtly. “I cannot interfere with his promise to these people, but this state of affairs must end. I will speak to him before he goes. Adrian is only a boy still, for all his war experience.”
There was the indulgent note in his voice that always crept there sooner or later when speaking of his youngest son.
Adrian went to the Admastons, and St. Gwenllian became used to the silence. Gradually the Canon resumed his habits of reading aloud after dinner, and of exchanging small items of general and parish news with his family during meals.
He seldom mentioned Valeria, but they knew that he had written to her.
He spoke of her again when an invitation came from the Admastons to witness their entertainment—an invitation which Adrian, it was evident to his sisters, cheerfully took it for granted that his father would refuse.
“It is very soon—very soon, indeed—to meet our neighbours after this unhappy affair of Valeria’s, that I fear has been only too much talked about. But it may be right to accept—it may be right. I cannot wish to disappoint the dear Adrian, either, though I am out of tune with gaieties at present. I will think over it, Lucilla, my dear, and let you know what answer to return.”
Lucilla, according to her wont, uttered no opinion, until Flora said to her:
“Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t go to these theatricals? Won’t Father dislike them very much?”
“Very much indeed, I should imagine.”
“And do you suppose Adrianwantsus to be there?”
“Probably not.”
They looked at one another, Lucilla with a certain rueful humourousness, Flora with none at all.
“But, Lucilla, can’t you stop him?”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
Miss Morchard was always philosophical, rather than enterprising.
The Canon’s decision was communicated to his daughters a few days later.
“I have pondered this matter, my daughters, trivial though it be in itself. And it seems to me that we should do well to accept Mrs. Admaston’s invitation. Lucilla, you are my secretary.... And one thing more, my daughters.”
The Canon’s glance rested upon Flora, upon whose face a shade of dismay had fallen.
“One thing more. ‘God loveth a cheerful giver.’ Even though it costs us something, let us go with a good grace. We owe it to Valeria, to our dear erring one, to show that she is whole-heartedly forgiven. Yes, I can say it now, children. I have written my full and free forgiveness to your sister. The cloud has lifted.”
If so, it appeared to have done so only with a view to descending upon other members of the Morchardménage.
Neither Lucilla nor Flora prepared for the Admastons’ party with any feelings save those of profound apprehension, and Adrian, meeting them in the hall, drew Lucilla aside in order to ask indignantly:
“Couldn’t you have stopped Father from coming tonight? I don’t want to be a beast, but really, it’s quite out of his line, and he won’t enjoy himself. In fact, he’ll probably be sick.”
The aspirant to the ministry was garbed as a Pierrot, with a curiously-shaped black patch upon his cheek, revealed as a miniature couple of dancers intertwined.
“Olga made it—isn’t it ripping?” said Adrian of this masterpiece. “I can’t wait—I ought to be behind the scenes at this minute. I came to look for some salts or something—Olga’s most awfully nervous. She’s simply shaking. What’s the proper thing to do for her, Lucilla? She’s really most awfully upset.”
“What about?”
“Stage fright, I tell you. Really good actors and actresses always get it. I wish I could get hold of some champagne for her.”
“Try standing over her with the water-jug,” Lucilla suggested crisply, and thereby deprived herself of her brother’s presence.
The Canon was always apt, at any gathering, to require a daughter upon either side, although he knew almost everyone in the county, and met old friends with a great and urbane pleasure. On this occasion, his eye roved in vain for Flora.
She had murmured to Lucilla: “I don’t think I can bear it. Even Maud Admaston says they’re all going to be verysilly, and I know Father will loathe it. I’ll change places later if you want me to.”
She had then disappeared to the very back of the large billiard-room at one end of which a stage and curtains had been erected.
Their hostess, with what Lucilla inwardly qualified as misguided kindness, conducted the Canon to a seat near the top of the room.
Lucilla resignedly took her place beside him.
“Capital, capital!” said the Canon genially. “But where is my little Flora?”
“I think she found someone who wanted to talk to her.”
“Flora is still timid—very timid. I fear that Flora has let slip her chance of joining our little family group. I should have enjoyed having a daughter on either side of me, to exchange impressions.”
The first item on the heterogeneous programme, however, was provocative of no very eloquent exchange of impressions between Canon Morchard and anyone else.
He listened with a faint air of surprise to an opening chorus from a row of Pierrots and Pierrettes, interspersed with various noises from a whistle, a comb, a pair of castanets, and a small and solid poker banged loudly and intermittently against a tin tray.
At the close of it he only said:
“I hardly recognized our dear lad, at first. That was he, was it not, at the end of the row, next to the little lady with black hair?”
“Yes. The girl was Olga Duffle. I believe she sings a great deal.”
The literal truth of her own description was borne in upon Lucilla as the evening went on. Miss Duffle did sing a great deal.
She sang a solo about the Moon, and another one about a Coal-black Baby Rose, and a third one, very short and modern and rather indeterminate, asking where was now the Flow’r, that had died within an Hour, and ending on the still more poignant enquiry, addressed tole Bon DieuAbove, Where was one who said “I love”?
The Canon, to this item, only asked in a puzzled way if the end was not rather abrupt?
“What in my day, we should have termed an unresolved discord,” he observed with some slight severity.
The sudden introduction of a quantity of toy balloons amongst the audience did not amuse him in the least, although he smiled, coldly and politely, as the guests, with little screams, buffeted them lightly from one to another.
Only the people on the stage, all very young, seemed thoroughly to realize the function of the toy balloons.
They banged them hither and thither, shrieking with laughter when the inevitable destruction ensued, and making each miniature explosion an excuse for calling out the catchword of the evening—imported from arevuecomedian whose methods, more or less successfully imitated by most of the young men on the stage, appeared to consist in the making of grotesque facial contortions:—“May—I—ask—you—politely—to—absquatulate?”
At each repetition of the phrase, the actors and actresses were overcome with mirth.
The members of the audience were more divided in their opinions. Their laughter was not immoderate, and that of Canon Morchard was non-existent.
Lucilla, gazing anxiously at his severe profile, was yet able to feel it some slight relief that at least Owen Quentillian was not present. One such expression of melancholy beside her was more than enough.
“I hope I am not what is vulgarly called ‘superior’,” said the Canon, “but I confess that all this noise appears to me to be little short of senseless. Surely our faculties were given us for some better purpose than pointless, discordant merriment? No one is more ready than myself to concede——”
The upheaval of an enormous drum on to the stage debarred Lucilla from hearing what it was that no one was more ready than her father to concede, and she was left, amidst ever-increasing din, to judge from his exceedingly uncompromising expression, how much more of the performance would elapse without causing him to become what was vulgarly called superior.
LucillaMorchard was not naturally of a sanguine disposition, and it must have been an optimist indeed who would have ventured to augur that the effect of the evening’s entertainment might be of benefit to the Canon’s spirits.
From placidity he passed to tolerance, and from tolerance to endurance. In the course of the short play that concluded the performance, Lucilla perceived with resigned dismay that endurance was turning rapidly to serious vexation.
“Extravagant, vulgar, decadent nonsense,” was the Canon’s verdict, and Lucilla’s critical faculty endorsed the trenchant adjectives that he had selected, although she was devoid of her parent’s apparently acute sense of disgust.
“Olga Duffle is a good actress,” she said.
“One dislikes thelevityof it all so profoundly,” said the Canon. “I believe I am the last man in the world to hold back from any cheerful, innocent amusement at fit and proper times and seasons, but I cannot but regret that Adrian, naturally gifted as he is, should turn his talents to no better account than mere buffoonery.”
The part relegated to Adrian in the little play was indeed of no exalted order, and the most subtle display of humour conceded to him was concerned with the sudden removal of a chair behind him and his consequent fall on to the floor.
The audience laughed, with mild amusement.
Lucilla dared not look at her father.
A spirited speech from Olga Duffle, who had shown no signs whatever of the stage fright that had caused her fellow-actor so much solicitude, brought down the curtain. Lucilla’s applause was rendered vigorous by an impulse of extreme thankfulness.
She was also grateful to the Canon for the measured clapping of the palm of one hand against the back of the other, with which he rewarded a performance that he had certainly found to be neither instructive nor amusing.
Adrian sought no parental congratulations, when the performers, still in theatrical costume, came down amongst the audience, but Olga Duffle made her way towards the Canon.
She looked, as usual, more attractive than any of the prettier girls present, and spoke with her habitual childlike, almost imperceptible, suggestion of lisping.
“Didn’t you think us all very silly? I’m afraid we were, but so few people care for anything else, nowadays.”
Her glance and gesture eloquently numbered the Canon in the few, though she did not extend the implication quite so far as to include Lucilla.
“You are a good actress, Miss Duffle. Have you had training?”
“Oh, no, nothing to speak of,” said Olga modestly. “They did offer to give me a year at the big Dramatic Training place, free, after I’d acted in a charity matinée a few years ago in London. They said I could easily play juvenile lead in any theatre in London at the end of a year, but of course that was all nonsense. Anyway my people naturally wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Indeed. Certainly it is a very moot point how far the possession of a definite talent justifies embracing a life such as that of a professional actress must needs be.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” said Olga.
Her big dark eyes were fixed on the Canon’s face, her lips parted with the expression of absorbed interest that lent her charm as a listener.
Lucilla was not surprised to see that the Canon’s face relaxed as he looked down at the small up-gazing figure.
She left them, in response to an imperious glance directed upon her from the other end of the room.
“I particularly want the old man to get to know Olga,” said Adrian with agitation. “It’d do him all the good in the world to have some of his ideas about the modern girl put straight, and if anyone can do it, she can. Wasn’t it priceless of her to make straight for him like that?”
“Perhaps she likes to talk to a distinguished man.”
“My dear old thing, don’t be absurd. Why, Olga has half London at her feet.”
Lucilla felt unable to make any display of enthusiasm at the announcement, although she saw no reason to doubt that a substratum of fact underlay Adrian’s hyperbole.
“I suppose Father thought the whole show utter tripe?”
“He didn’t say so,” Lucilla observed drily.
“Well, for goodness sake get him away as soon as Olga’s had her talk with him. The Admastons are determined to turn the whole thing into a glorious rag,and it’ll go on till all hours. Father would be wretched, and besides I should have him on my mind the whole time. I daresay I shan’t have many more opportunities of enjoying myself, so I may as well make the most of this,” said Adrian in a voice charged with meaning, that Lucilla understood to be an allusion to his recent ecclesiastical ambitions.
When she found herself beside her father again, he was in conversation with a short, fat, dark man whom he made known to his daughter with a somewhat abstracted air.
“Mr. Duffle, Lucilla.”
She was rather amused at the ease with which Olga’s parentage could be traced, although in her, aretroussénose replaced the wide and upturned pug of her father, and her dark, intelligent gaze was an unmistakably improved edition of his shrewd black eyes. From both faces shone the same ardent, restless, and essentially animal, vitality.
Mr. Duffle, however, had none of Olga’s claims to social charms and talents. Lucilla knew him to be a successful building contractor, who had amassed a fortune during the war, and decided that he looked the part.
“I’ll come along one morning then, Canon, and have a little chat with you,” Mr. Duffle was declaring with a breezy assurance that could hardly have been derived from the Canon’s expression.
“You’re kept pretty hard at it, I daresay?”
“The man who wants me is the man I want,” quoted the Canon, with his grave smile.
“Capital. I’ll blow along then, and give you a call.My big car is in London, but we’ve got a little Daimler down here that does very well for country lanes. My daughter, of course, runs her own little two-seater. These young people, nowadays, there’s no end to what they expect. Not that I grudge Olga anything in reason, you understand. She’s our only one, and naturally her mother and I think the world of her.”
A very simple pride beamed in his face as he spoke of Olga, and Lucilla congratulated him upon her acting.
“She’s pretty good, isn’t she? I believe she could take her place amongst professionals any day, so she tells me. But of course we shouldn’t hear of anything like that for her. In fact, her mother and I look very high for our little girl, very high indeed, I may say, after all that Nature’s done for her, and the advantages we’ve given her as well.”
He laughed heartily, and then leaning confidentially towards Lucilla he said in a semi-whisper:
“Whoever gets our little Olga, young lady, will be a very lucky fellow. There’ll be a little bit of—” he tapped his forehead knowingly “and a little bit of—” the tap was repeated, against his coat pocket this time. Lucilla required no very acute powers of intuition to refer these demonstrations to her brother’s intention.
She wondered whether the Canon had made a similar deduction.
He was silent during their long drive home, but it was the silence of thoughtfulness rather than that of depression. The Canon’s intimates could generally interpret without difficulty the nature of his silences.
On the morning following he called Lucilla into the study.
“I had no word with Adrian last night,” he said wistfully. “I saw you talking to him, my dear. Did he tell you what day he is coming home again?”
“No, Father.”
“I confess that I am perturbed. Are these new friends of his gentlefolk, are they church people, are they even Christians?” said the Canon, walking up and down. “If only the boy would be more unreserved with me! One is so terribly anxious.”
“I don’t think he wants to be reserved. He really has no serious suggestion to offer, as to the future.”
“My poor lad! He is not sufficiently in earnest. I have blinded myself to it long enough. His early piety and simplicity were so beautiful that perhaps I dwelt upon them as tokens of future growth more than I should have done. But there was a levity of tone about these intimates of his that displeased me greatly. It must cease, Lucilla—this intercourse must cease.”
Lucilla dreaded few things more than such resolutions, from which she knew that her father, at whatever cost to himself or to anybody else, never swerved.
“The Admastons are neighbours,” she pointed out.
“All the more reason for Adrian to be content to meet them in the ordinary course of events, without treating their house as an hotel. But there is a further attraction, Lucilla, I am convinced of it.”
The Canon dropped his voice to impart his piece of penetration.
“That little Miss Duffle is undoubtedly attractive,but can the boy have the incredible folly to be paying his addresses to her?”
It did not seem to Lucilla that any such formal term could possibly be applied to Adrian’s highly modern methods of displaying his admiration for Olga, and she informed her father so with decision.
“He must at all events be aware that he is in no position to render any young lady conspicuous by his attentions,” said the Canon. “I am displeased with Adrian, Lucilla.”
Canon Morchard was not alone in his displeasure. Two days after the theatricals, Olga Duffle’s father appeared at St. Gwenllian, and was shown into the study.
The Canon greeted him, his habitual rather stately courtesy in strong contrast to his visitor’s bluff curtness of manner.
“Sit you down, my dear sir.”
The Canon took his own place on the revolving chair before the writing-table, and the tips of his fingers were lightly joined together as he bent his gaze, benignant, and yet serious, upon the little building contractor.
“You’ve got a nice little old place here. Needs a lot of seeing to, though, I daresay. I see you haven’t the electric light.”
The Canon glanced round him as though he had hardly noticed, as indeed he had not, the absence of this modern advantage.
“It wouldn’t cost you more than a couple of hundred to put it in,” said Mr. Duffle negligently.
The Canon was not in the least interested in the problematical expense to be thus incurred, but he repliedgently that perhaps one of these days his successor might wish to improve St. Gwenllian, and be in a position to do so.
“Ah,” said Mr. Duffle. “That brings me to my point, in a roundabout sort of way. Your young man, Canon, has no particular inheritance to look forward to, if I understand rightly?”
“My young man?”
“Your boy Adrian. Not even your eldest son, is he?”
“Adrian is the youngest of my five children,” said the Canon with peculiar distinctness. “I have two sons and three daughters. May I enquire the reason of this interest in my family?”
“No offense, I hope, Canon. I thought you’d have guessed the reason fast enough—my girl Olga. Now mind you, I know very well that boys will be boys, and girls girls, for the matter of that. I’m not even saying that the little monkey hasn’t led him on a bit—she leads ’em all on, come to that! But Master Adrian has been talking of an engagement, it seems, and that won’t do at all, you know. So I thought you and me, Canon——”
“Stop!” The Canon’s face was rigid. “Am I to understand that your daughter has reason to complain that my son presses undesired attentions upon her, or causes their names to be coupled together in a manner displeasing to her?”
The builder’s stare was one of honest bewilderment.
“Coupled together!” he repeated derisively. “Why, the lad follows her about like a little dog. I should think old Matthew Admaston is as easy going as theymake ’em, but even he thought it a bit thick to have your young moon-calf, if you’ll excuse the expression, on his doorstep morning, noon and night, while my girl was in the house, till they had to ask him to stay, to save the front-door bell coming off in his hand.”
Mr. Duffle’s humourous extravagance of imagery awoke no response in Canon Morchard.
“My son’s impertinent folly shall be put a stop to immediately,” he said, through closely compressed lips.
“Bless me! there’s nothing that needs a rumpus made about it, you understand. Only when it comes to prating about being engaged, and promising to marry him in goodness knows how many years, and goodness knows what on—why, then it’s time us older folk stepped in, I think, and I’m sure you’ll agree with me.”
“Do I understand that my son—without reference to me, I may add—has asked Miss Duffle to do him the honour of becoming his wife?”
Mr. Duffle stared at the Canon blankly.
“Ill though he seems to have behaved, you will hardly expect me to accept, on his behalf, an entire rejection of his suit, without reference to the young lady herself.”
A resounding blow from Mr. Duffle’s open palm onto his knee startled the Canon and made him jump in his chair.
“Good God!” roared the builder, causing Canon Morchard to wince a second time, “is this talk out of a novel? How in the name of all that’s reasonable can the boy marry without a profession or an income? I’ll do him the justice to say that I’ve never thoughthim a fortune hunter. (He’s not got the guts for that, if you’ll excuse me being so plain-spoken.) He’s besotted about the girl, and not the first one either, though I do say it myself. But my Olga is our only child, and will get every penny I have to leave, and the fact of the matter is that she’ll be a rich woman one of these days, in a manner of speaking. Therefore, Canon, you’ll understand me when I say that Olga can look high—very high, she can look.”
The Canon’s countenance did, indeed, show the most complete comprehension of the case so stated. His face, in its stern pallor, became more cameo-like than ever.
“Sir, do you accuse my son of trifling, of the unutterable meanness of endeavouring to engage a young lady’s affections without any reasonable prospect of asking her in marriage like an honourable man?”
“Bless me, Canon, I don’t accuse the young fellow of anything, except of being a bit of an ass,” said the builder. “I daresay it’s been six of one and half a dozen of the other. He’s a nice-looking boy, and all this play-acting has thrown them together, like; but that’s over now, and Olga comes back to London with us next week. But I thought I’d throw you a hint,” said Mr. Duffle delicately, “so that there’s no nonsense about following us to town, or anything of that sort. Her mother’s going to speak to Olga about it, too. Bless me, it’s not the first time we’ve had to nip a little affair of this sort in the bud. The fellows are round our little girl like flies round a honey-pot. We give her a loose rein, too, in a manner of speaking, but as the wife pointed out to me last night, it only keepsoff better chances if a girl is always seen about with lads who don’t mean business.”
The Canon groaned deeply, and Mr. Duffle, fearing himself misunderstood, hastily interposed:
“Don’t run away with the idea that I’ve anything against the boy, now, Canon. I’m sure if he was only a year or two older, in a good job, and with a little something to look to later on, I’d be only too glad of the connection. But as things are, I’m sure as a family man yourself you see my point.”
He looked almost pleadingly at the Canon as he spoke.
“You did perfectly right to come to me, Mr. Duffle; you did perfectly right. Unspeakably painful though this conversation has been to me, I fully recognize the necessity for it.”
If Mr. Duffle still looked perplexed, he also looked relieved.
“That’s right, Canon. I felt you and me would understand one another. After all, we’ve been young ourselves, haven’t we, and I daresay we’ve chased a pretty pair of ankles or said more than we meant on a moonlight night, both of us, once upon a time.”
So far did Canon Morchard appear to be from endorsing this view of a joint past that his visitor added an extenuation.
“Of course, before you turned parson, naturally, I mean. I know you take your job seriously, if you’ll excuse me passing a personal remark, and that’s not more than’s needed nowadays. There’s no idea of young Adrian going in for the clerical line, I suppose?”
“What I have heard today would be enough to convinceme that it is out of the question,” said the Canon bitterly. “But my son has evinced no such desire.”
“H’m. There was some nonsense talked amongst the young people about a fat living at Stear being ready for him if he chose to step into it. I daresay there was nothing in it but a leg-pull, as they say. In any case, my girl wouldn’t look at a country parson. No offence to you, Canon, but it’s best to have these things out in plain English.”
“Enough,” said the Canon with decision. “You may rest assured that my son will cease this insensate persecution of——”
“Excuse me interrupting, but why make a mountain out of a molehill? There’s been no persecution or any of that talk out of books, in the case. Why, my Olga can’t help making eyes at a good-looking lad, and letting him squeeze her hand every now and then.”
The Canon gave utterance, irrepressibly, to yet another groan.
Mr. Duffle looked at him with compassion.
“Why make a mountain out of a molehill, as I said before?” he repeated. “There’s been no harm done, except maybe a little gossiping among the Admaston lot, and if you tip the wink to your lad, and mother and I trot Olga back to London again, we needn’t hear any more of it. We’re old-fashioned people, and brought up the child old-fashioned, and she’s not one of these modern young women who can’t live at home. I give her the best of everything, and a pretty long rope, but she knows that as long as she’s living under my roof and spending my money she’s got to obey me and her mother when wedogive an order.”
The builder’s face, momentarily dogged, relaxed again and he laughed jovially.
“Though I’m not saying the little puss can’t get most things out of us by coaxing! But we’re set on a good marriage for her, that I tell you straight.”
“There is only one foundation for the sacrament of marriage,” said the Canon sombrely, “and that is mutual love, trust and esteem.”
“Quite, quite; the wife always takes that line herself. ‘When the heart is given, let the hand follow,’ she always says, and Olga knows well enough that she’ll have a free choice, within reason. But love in a cottage isn’t her style, and things being as they are, there’s no reason, as I said before, why she shouldn’t look high. She’s a sensible girl, too, and if there is a bit of the flirt about her, she doesn’t lose her head. I will say that for her.”
“I wish that I could say the same of my son,” bitterly rejoined the Canon.
“Well, well, don’t be too hard on the lad. Human nature is human nature all the world over, is what I always say. All the parsons in Christendom can’t alter that, if you’ll excuse the saying. It’s natural enough your son should lose his head over a pretty girl like my Olga,” said Miss Duffle’s parent indulgently. “All I mean is, that it must stop there, and no nonsense about being engaged, or anything of that kind.”
“Do these unhappy young people consider themselves bound to one another, as far as you know?”
“Bless me, Canon, they’re not unhappy. At least, my Olga certainly isn’t, and if your lad throws off a few heroics, he’ll soon get over it. Why, I rememberthreatening to blow out my brains—as I chose to call them—when I was no older than he is, and all for the sake of a lady ten years older than myself, and married and the mother of three, into the bargain!”
Mr. Duffle was moved to hearty laughter at this reminiscence, although it failed signally to produce the same exhilarating effect upon Canon Morchard.
Perhaps in consequence of this, his mirth died away spasmodically, with a rather apologetic effect.
“Well, well, Canon, take a tip from me, if I may suggest such a thing, and don’t take this business too seriously. He’ll be head over ears in love with somebody else before you can look round, and it’ll all be to do over again.”
Before this luminous vista of future amatory escapades, the builder appeared to feel that the interview had better be brought to its conclusion, and he rose.
An evident desire to console and reassure his host possessed him.
“Get the young fellow a job of work, if I may advise. It’s wonderful how it steadies them down. He’ll have no time to run after the petticoats when he’s tied by the leg to an office, or roughing it in one of the Colonies.”
“The choice of a career lies in my son’s own hands,” said the Canon stiffly. “But you may rest assured, Mr. Duffle, that he will be allowed no further occasion for misusing his time and abusing other people’s hospitality as he appears to have been doing. I am obliged to you, painful though this conversation has been to us both, for treating me with so much frankness in the matter.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Mr. Duffle.
The Canon bowed slightly and escorted his visitor to the door.
The Daimler car was in waiting, but the builder paused with one foot on the step.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Canon,” he remarked confidentially.
The Canon, with extreme reluctance in his demeanour, signified attention.
“If youshouldthink of having that little improvement made to the place that I suggested—you know, the electric light put in—I can tell you the very people to go to—Blapton & Co. They’ve done a lot of work for our firm, and they’ll do it as reasonable as you can hope for. Don’t hesitate to mention my name.”
He nodded, and got into the car.
The Canon stood upon the front doorstep, his face pale and furrowed, his lips compressed.
“Stop!” shouted Mr. Duffle, suddenly thrusting his head from the window of the slowly moving car.
The Daimler stopped.
Mr. Duffle descended from it nimbly and once more approached the Canon.
He looked, for the first time, heated and confused.
“It slipped my memory that I wanted to give you this trifle. Perhaps you’ll see to some of those poor fellows who are out of work through no fault of their own, having the handling of it for the wives and kiddies. I’ve been lucky myself, and I never like to leave a place without what I may call some sort of thanksgiving. Not a word, please. Ta-ta.”
The Daimler made anothersortie, and the Canon was left, still standing motionless on the doorstep, with the builder’s cheque for twenty-five pounds in his hand.