AN ABSENT VICAR
“Exactly,” said the Reverend Septimus Prior; “the exchange was the most fortuitous, not to say the most fortunate” (he gave a little giggle and bow) “possible. Your uncle saw my advertisement, answered it, and for a brief period he goes to my cure, and I come to his.”
“Well, if you feel certain,” said Miss Robin, regretfully resting in her lap the novel she was reading.
Mr. Prior sipped his tea and nibbled his rusk. In the intervals between, he would occasionally glance at the portrait of a scholarly cleric, with a thin grim mouth and glassy eyes, which bantered him from the wall opposite.
“Your uncle—Mr. Fearful?” he had once ventured to ask; and the niece had answered, “Yes. It is very like him.”
Now he paused, with his cup half-way to his mouth.
“I beg your pardon?” he exclaimed.
Miss Robin put her book to her lips, and looking over it—really rather charmingly,—yawned behind the cover. She was surprisingly dégagée for a country vicar’s niece—self-collected, and admirably pretty; though her openwork stockings, which she did not hesitate to cross her legs to display, filled him with a weak sense of entanglement in some unrighteous mystery.
“You said?” he invited her.
“I said, If you feel certain,” she repeated calmly.
“Ah!” he said. “Yes. You mean?”
“I mean,” she said, without a ruffle, “that Uncle Philip may have settled to swap livings with you pro tem., and may have started off to take yours, and may have got there—if you feel certain that he has.”
“To be sure,” he answered. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Had he arrived—when you started—for here?”
“No. Certainly he hadn’t arrived. My train was due. I had to leave a message; but——”
She stopped him by dropping her book into her lap; and, clasping one knee in her hands, conned him amiably.
“Did he lead you to expect a niece among the charges he was committing to your care—or cure?” she asked.
“Well, I must confess,” said the young man, blushing, “he—ah! mentioned a housekeeper—Mrs. Gaunt, I think—but——”
“No, of course not,” she interrupted him. “He had forgotten all about me.”
Mr. Prior gasped, and looked down. This was his first holiday exchange of livings—an unsophisticated venture, which he was already half repenting. A suburban cure; a desire for fresh pastures; a daring resolution; an advertisement in the “Church Times”; a prompt answer; as prompt an acceptance (after due reference to the Clergy List); a long railway journey; a tramp, relatively as long, to a remote parsonage on the road to a seaport; an arrival in the dark; an innocence of all expectation of, or preparation for him; an explanation; production of his written voucher, and—here he was, accepted, he could not but think, on sufferance. But there he thought wrong. Miss Robin was not near so upset by his appearance as he was.
“He comes and goes” (she said of Uncle Philip) “without reference to anybody or anything. We never know what he’ll do next, or who’ll introduce himself into the house as his friend. It may be a burglar or a pirate for all we know. All sorts of strange people come up from the port, and are shown into my uncle’s room, and out again by himself at the side door. At least, I suppose so. We never know what becomes of them, or what’s going on, any more than I doubt he does himself. I dare say they fleece him nicely; and—you may laugh—but when he’s in his absent moods, you might undress him without his knowing. Only he’d probably strike you to the ground when he found out—he’s such an awful temper.”
“Dear me!” murmured the young man; “how very curious. One hears of such cases.”
“Does one?” said Miss Robin. “I’d rather hear of, than live with them, anyhow; and in a desert, too. It wouldn’t so much matter if he didn’t always hold others to blame for his mistakes and mislayings. He kept me in bed a week once, because he’d read right through a treatise on explosives in the pulpit, before he discovered that it wasn’t his peace-thanksgiving sermon.”
“Astonishing!” said Mr. Prior; then added, with a faint smile, “Well, I can promise you, at least, that I’m not a pirate.”
“No,” she said, “I can see you’re not. Won’t you have some more tea?”
He was shown to his bedroom by Mrs. Gaunt, who was a stony, silent woman, bleak with mystery. All night the wind howled round the lonely building; and the unhappy man, who, in a phase of worldly revolt, egged on by a dare-devil parishioner, had once read “The House on the Marsh”, thought of Sarah and Mr. Rayner, and of a silent weaving of strings across the stairway in the dark to catch him tripping should he venture upon escape.
He arose, feverish, to a sense of hooting draughts in a grey house, and went to matins in the gaunt dull church, which stood as lonely as a shepherd’s hut on a slope hard by. There was nothing in sight but wind-torn pastures, and, all around, little graves, which seemed trying vainly to tuck themselves and their shivering epitaphs under the grass. There appeared nothing in the world to attract a congregation; but, as a matter of fact, there were a few old frosted spinsters present, of that amphibious order, a sort of landcrabs, which forgathers on the neutral wastes between sea and country.
Mr. Prior went back to his dreary breakfast at the Vicarage. His lady hostess, it appeared, was wont to lie late abed, and did not think it worth her while to alter her habits for him. The meal, however, had been served and left to petrify, pending his return from matins. It was with a consciousness of congealed bacon-fat, insufficiently dissolved by lukewarm tea, sticking to the roof of his mouth, that he rose from it, and pondered his next movement. No one came near him. He looked dismally out on a weedy drive. He rather wished Miss Robin would condescend to his company. He was no pirate, certainly; but he believed he would brave, had braved already, much for his cloth. She had beautiful eyes—clear windows, he was sure, to a virginal soul. But then, the other end! the white feet peeping through that devil’s lattice! He tried to recall any authority in Holy Writ for openwork stockings. Certainly pilgrims went barefoot, and half a loaf was better than no bread.
“This will not do, Septimus,” he said, weakly striking his breast. “I will go and compose my sermon.”
He stepped into the hall. It was papered in cold blue and white marble, with a mahogany umbrella stand, and nothing else, to temper its tomb-like austerity. At the further end was a baize door of a faded strawberry colour.
He was entitled to the run of the house, he concluded. There had been no mention of any Bluebeard chamber. But, then, to be sure, there had been no mention of a niece. The association of ideas tingled him. What if he should turn the handle and alight on Miss Robin?
He flipped his breast again, frowning, and strode to the baize door. Beside it, he now observed, a passage went off to the kitchens. Desperately he pulled the door, found a second, of wood, beyond it, opened that also, and found himself in what was obviously the Vicar’s study.
Obviously, that is to say, to his later conceptions of his correspondent. Otherwise he might have taken it for the laboratory of a scientist. It was lined with bookcases, sparsely volumed; but five out of every six shelves were thronged with jars, instruments, and engines of a terrifying nature. In one place was a curtained recess potential with unholiness. Prints of discomposing organs hung on the walls. Immemorial dust blurred everything. There was a pedestalled desk in the middle, and opposite it, hung with a short curtain, a half-glazed door which the intruder, tiptoeing thither and peeping, with his heart at the gallop, found to lead into a dismal narrow lane which communicated with the road. He returned to the desk, which, frankly open, seemed to invite him to its use, and was pondering the moral practicability of composition in the midst of such surroundings, when a voice at his ear almost made him jump out of his skin.
“Pardon me, sir; but have you the master’s permission to use this room?”
Mrs. Gaunt had come upon him without a sound.
“Dear me, madam!” he said, wiping his forehead. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, sir,” she said, in her stony, colourless way, “that this room is interdict to both great and little, now and always, unless he makes an exception in your favour.”
“There was no specific mention of it, certainly,” said Mr. Prior, “neither for nor against. I concluded that the use of a study was not debarred me.”
“Pardon me,” she repeated monotonously. “I believe you concluded wrong, sir.”
“The door was not locked.”
“There are some prohibitions,” she said, “that need no locks.”
The inference was fearful.
“Miss June” (ecstatic name!) “and I,” she said, “have never dared so much as to put our noses inside, and not a word spoken to forbid it.”
Mr. Prior, to his own astonishment, revolted. Smarting, perhaps, under the memory of some suspected covert innuendo in a certain silvery acquiescence in a statement of his made last night, he revolted. He would prove that he could be a pirate if he chose.
“I shall stop here,” he said, trembling all over. “There was no embargo laid, and I must have somewhere to write my sermon.”
“Of course,” said a voice; and Miss Robin stood in the doorway—the most enchanting morning vision, her eyes bright with curiosity.
“I am delighted you support me,” he said, kindling and advancing.
She still looked beside and around him.
“Do you know,” she said, “it is perfectly true. I have not once dared to venture in here before, though never actually told not to. But that is all one, I think. What an extraordinary litter!”
She had not ventured! and with the inducement of her petrifying surroundings! She was uninquisitive, then—“an excellent thing in woman.”
“Since there is no veto,” he said, incomparably audacious, “supposing we explore together?”
She looked at him admiringly.
“I should like to.” She hesitated.
“June!” cried Mrs. Gaunt.
“And I will,” said the girl.
But the housekeeper, content, it appeared, with her protest, stood, not uninterested in the subsequent investigation.
“Do you not find all this a little remote, a little lifeless sometimes, Miss Robin?” said the clergyman, greatly daring.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Eels get used to skinning. It’s not life, of course. But I have to make the best of it, and there’s no help.”
“Ah, yes, there is!” said her companion, intending to imply the spiritual, but half hoping she would construe it into the material consolation.
“What do you mean?” she asked simply.
“Why,” he said, stammering and blushing furiously, and giving away his case at once, “with your youth, and—and beauty—O, forgive me! I am a little confused.”
“Where do you live?” she said, fixing him with her large eyes.
“At Clapton,” he murmured.
“It sounds most joyous,” she said, clasping her hands.
Hardly knowing what he did, he pulled the curtain away from the recess by which they stood, and instantly staggered back. The housekeeper, who, foreseeing his act, had crept up inquisitively behind, gave a mortal gasp, and Miss Robin a faint shriek—for, stretched lifeless and livid on a couch within, lay the stark body of a man.
For a minute they all stood staring, frozen with horror; then Mrs. Gaunt began to wring her hands.
“It is the same,” she cried, in awful tones. “I remember him—the dark foreigner. He wandered up here from the port a week ago; and I took him in to the master, and he never came out again. I thought he had let him go by the door there into the lane. O, woe on this fearful house! Long have I suspected and long dreaded. The sounds, and the awful, awful smells!”
“Perhaps,” whispered the girl, gulping, and clutching at her breast, “he died unexpectedly, and uncle put him away here, and forgot all about him.”
Mrs. Gaunt shrieked, and seizing the clergyman’s arm, pointed—
“Look! Pickled babies—one, two, three! And bones! And a fish-kettle! It is all plain. He kills them, and boils them down for his experiments, and by an accident he forgot to empty his larder—his larder! hoo-hoo!—before he went!”
She broke into hysteric laughter and gaspings. Miss Robin, whinnying, tottered quite close up to the young man, who stood shivering and speechless.
“What can we do to save him?” she whimpered. “Mr. Prior, say something!”
Thus urged, the unhappy young man strove to press his brain into a focus with his hand, and to rally himself to what, he felt, was the supreme occasion of his life. The appealing eyes and parted lips so close to his would have intoxicated a saint, much more a pirate.
“We must warn him—agony column—from returning,” he ejaculated, reeling. “Cryptic address—has he any distinguishing mark?”
“Yes,” she said, with frantic eagerness; “he has a large mole at the root of his nose.”
“Very well,” he said—“something of this sort: ‘Nose, with large mole at root of. All discovered. Don’t return!’ ”
“But what is the use of an advertisement? O, Mr. Prior! what is the use of an advertisement when we know where he is, or ought to be, and can go——?”
“Do you really think he will be there? It was a blind. O, Miss Robin, it is evident now it was a blind to cover his tracks!”
“But why should he have designed to escape at all, leaving this—O, Mr. Prior!—leaving this horror behind him?”
“We can only conjecture—O, Miss Robin, we can only conjecture! Perhaps because of his conscience overtaking him; perhaps because, killing in haste, he discovered at leisure that it would not go into the kettle; perhaps in a phase of that deadly absence of mind, which, he will have realized by now, the Lord has converted to his confusion.”
“Well, if you are right. And in the meantime we must get rid of this—somehow. O, pray think of a means! Do! Do!”
Mrs. Gaunt steadied her storming breast as she leaned for support, with hanging head, against the door.
“There’s the old well—off the lane,” she panted, without looking up. “He there might have fallen in—as he went out—and none have guessed it to this day.”
It was a fearful inspiration. Mr. Prior, in that moment of supreme sentient exaltation, abandoned himself to the awful rapture of things.
“June!” he whispered, putting shaking hands on the girl’s shoulders; “if I do this thing for your sake, will you—will you—I have a mother—this is no longer a place for you—come to Clapton?”
“Yes,” she answered, offering to nestle to him. “I had supposed that was understood.”
He was a little taken aback.
“We must move this first,” he said, wringing his damp forehead. “Who—who will help me?”
It was really heroic of him. In a shuddering group, they approached together the terrible thing—hesitated—plunged, and dragged it out with a sickening flop on the floor.
A greasy turban, which it wore, rolled away, disclosing a near bald head. Its eyes were closed; its teeth grinned through a fluff of dark hair; a lank frock-coat embraced its body, linen puttees its shanks, and at the end were stiff bare feet.
“Look, and see if the coast is clear,” gasped the clergyman.
Miss Robin turned to obey, and uttered a startled shriek.
“What are you doing with my Senassee?” cried a terrible voice at the door.
Mr. Prior whipped round, echoing his beloved’s squawk. A fierce old man, leaning on a stick, stood glaring in the opening.
“Uncle!” cried the girl.
He advanced, sneering and caustic, pushed them all rudely aside, dropped on his knees beside the corpse, and, thrusting his finger forcibly into its mouth, appeared to hook and roll its tongue forward. Instantly an amazing transformation occurred. A convulsion shook the body; life flowed into its drab cheeks; its eyes opened and rolled; inarticulate sounds came from its jaws.
“Ha!” cried the old man; “I have foreclosed on these busybodies.”
Then he rose to his feet, leaving the patient yawning and stretching on the floor.
“Fearful!” gasped the clergyman.
“Do you address me, sir?” asked the old man, scowling.
“Conjurer!” whispered Mr. Prior.
“If you like,” snarled the other. “It is a common enough trick with these Yogis, but one I had never seen until he came my way and offered to show it me for a consideration. I had forgot he was still lying there when I agreed to exchange livings with you. (You are Mr. Prior, I presume?) It was the merest oversight, which I remembered on my way, and came back by an early train to rectify—none too soon, it seems, for the staying of meddlesome fingers.”
“Forgot he was there!” cried Mr. Prior.
“And what if I did, sir?” snapped the other. “It was a full week he had lain tranced; and let me tell you, sir, I have more things to think of in a week than your mind could accommodate in a century. Why,” he cried, in sudden enlightenment, “I do believe the fools imagined I had murdered the man.”
“Look at the babies in the bottles!” cried Mrs. Gaunt hysterically.
“As to you, you old ass,” shouted the Vicar, flouncing round, “if you can’t distinguish embryo simiadæ from babies, you’d better call yourself Miss, as I believe you are!”
“I give notice on the spot!” cried Mrs. Gaunt.
Miss Robin stepped up bravely to the young clergyman, and linked her arm in his.
“And I,” she said. “I think you have behaved very cruelly to me, to us all, Uncle, and—and Mr. Prior has a mother.”
“I dare say; he seems fool enough for anything,” roared the old gentleman. “Go back to her, sir! Go to——”
June shrieked.
“Clapton!” he shouted, “and take this baggage with you!”