1
You are surprised (said Saunders) at being asked to associate Miss Lettice with the idea of passion, requited or unrequited. And, if you recall her small plump figure, and the nun-like pallor of the face that peered placidly from under her black bonnet, you will readily believe that hers was no ordinary passion. But it was passion: let there be no mistake about that; I’m not going to fob off some remote mystical ecstasy upon you under that name. It’s hard enough to credit that the heart of that staid, quaint, curtseying old spinster was aflame with a hunger that ultimately destroyed her, but the evidence is overwhelming. It is twofold, that evidence: there is the evidence of her words and the evidence of my own eyes.
My interest in Miss Lettice was first roused by a disquieting rumour that reached me, by a devious route, from a neighbour’s wife who was employed by Miss Lettice to come in and do the rough housework for her. According to this rumour Miss Lettice was, for no stated reason, afraid of me. This puzzled me, as well it might, because at that time I didn’t even know who she was: if we had met in the street I could not have recognized her. But it was more than puzzling: it was distressing. I knew that if I were to be of any use to the parish at all, fear was the very last emotion I must inspire. I examined the few sermons I had preached, for there, I thought, since they were the only communications I had had with the lady, the solution of my problem must lie. I looked for unsound doctrine, or for traces of hell-fire, or for anything else that could have alarmed a timid soul; and I found nothing. You must remember that I was new to the job, and totally without experience, and altogether too disposed to take trifles seriously. To-day I should soon find a summary method of dealing with such a situation, but at that time it baffled me. I accepted it for a while as a permanent minor discomfort.
I had promised myself to make friends, if I could, with every member of my congregation, and with as many others as I could contrive to visit—no small undertaking in this wilderness of scattered dwellings. Miss Lettice had to wait her turn, of course, but it was a point of honour with me that she should not have to wait beyond it. Nervous, but also curious, I knocked at her front door.
She received me, rather sternly, I thought, but without discomposure. I was shewn into a tiny mottled room, which she called, I believe, the parlour. It was rather crowded by furniture, but the furniture itself was good and old and the mantelpiece was laden with less than the usual cottage assortment of bric-à-brac, though, of course, there was the inevitable lustreware glittering on each side of a marble clock, and, equally inevitable, a pair of china dogs. The pink beflowered walls were hung with very bad pictures, in the Marcus Stone tradition, most of them from Christmas annuals; but there was not a photograph to be seen anywhere. I remembered having heard Miss Lettice described as ‘a real lady in reduced circumstances,’ and I knew that she supplemented a tiny inherited income by giving music lessons.
For half an hour we talked of indifferent things, and I began to fear that I should never succeed in breaking through her armour of frigid politeness. But in those days I was an obstinate young mule and determined to get at the truth behind that rumour. At last she gave me my chance.
‘You have been in the parish three months, have you not, Mr. Saunders?’
I chose to regard the remark as a challenge. ‘Three very busy months,’ I answered, loading my words with all the weight they would carry.
‘Too busy, I’m sure, to visit middle-aged nobodies,’ she retorted. And then, taking sudden pity on my youthful confusion—I was nearly twenty years her junior—she smiled in a way that seemed to betoken forgiveness.
It was a smile almost maternal, and it emboldened me. ‘Miss Lettice,’ I said, smiling in return, ‘why do you dislike me?’ Placidly she shook her head. ‘Then why did you dislike me? Oh, never mind how I know. Things soon get about in a little community like ours.’
She seemed startled. ‘What do you know?’ Her eyes narrowed to gimlet points. The abrupt change in her manner disconcerted me. ‘What do you know?’ she repeated defiantly, and, finding me silent, she flung another question at me, this time a veritable challenge: ‘Do you know about my son?’
Her son! So that was the cause of all the misunderstanding. ‘Nothing at all,’ I assured her. ‘Upon my word this is the first I’ve heard of him. Did you think....’
‘Yes, I did. I thought you disapproved of me, as your predecessor did, or maybe his wife. I thought you were never going to call.’
‘But why,’ I protested, ‘why should I or anyone presume to disapprove of you?’ And I wondered what travesty of religion had been current in this parish before my coming.
She looked unaccountably severe. ‘I think you don’t understand.’
‘I think I do,’ said I, with cheerful arrogance.
‘Mr. Saunders, I am an unmarried woman, and I have a son.’
‘Yes?’ I said, simulating polite interest when in truth I was burning with curiosity. But if I hoped to win her sympathy by this unconventional attitude I was to be woefully disappointed. ‘You don’t seem to realize the gravity of what I tell you,’ Miss Lettice rebuked me. ‘It is mistaken kindness to treat a sin so lightly.’
‘I want to be a friend to the parish, not a judge.’ Priggish remarks rise readily to the lips of a young man such as I was then. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘if your son was a child of true love there was no worse a sin than indiscretion.’
But the confessed sinner would not hear of such wickedness. ‘You, the vicar, to say a thing like that! That’s not the kind of teaching we want in this parish. Why, I’ve done penance all my life for that indiscretion, as you dare to call it. I forfeited marriage and sent my lover away. Not even for the child’s sake would I condone our sin by marrying. And do you tell me that all my bitter repentance was unnecessary?’
What could I say? It would have been cruel to convince her that she had thrown away her happiness in sheer waste, sacrificed her life on the altar of a false god. I hadn’t the heart to attempt it, so I fell back, I’m afraid, on Scriptural quotations, and left it at that. The familiar words seemed to comfort her and to reinstate me in her eyes as a moralist. None the less she was sufficiently assured of my sympathy to speak of her love, and as she spoke I began to wonder whether after all my pity had not been misplaced. Sin or no sin, the memory of her golden youth was dear to her. She was repentant enough, no doubt, when she remembered to be; but she did not live by morality alone. The woman in her still exulted, the woman’s eyes still shone, in the knowledge that she had, however long ago, been found beautiful. ‘We were very young,’ she said, with disarming simplicity, ‘and we loved each other very much. He was all the world to me.’ Her cheeks flushed; her meagre bosom rose and fell tremulously—and in that moment I saw her as she had been, young, fresh, adorable, alight with limitless ecstasy, the incarnation of a man’s desire. The transfigurement endured only for a flash, and flickered away, leaving me desolated with the stabbing poignancy of life. From that to this, I thought, we must all pass. To hide my emotion I led the talk back to her son. ‘And where is he now?’ I asked. ‘Does he often come to see you?’
She smiled wanly. ‘He’s all I’ve got. You see there’s a place set for him. You’ll take a cup of tea with us?’
The lid of the kettle that stood on the fire was already palpitating. Miss Lettice made the tea and enclosed the pot in a knitted cosy of green wool. For the next few minutes we exchanged only tea-table talk. But afterwards, when I made gestures of going, she confronted me wistfully, her eyes lit up once again. But this was a new light, and one more consonant with her years.
‘Would you like to see his room?’ she said, almost in a whisper.
I expressed eagerness, and she led me to the threshold of a room so tiny that it made one think of a monastic cell. It was just large enough to contain a small single bed, ready for use, a wash-stand, and a miniature dressing-table. The furniture was all of childish dimensions. In the further corner, under the window, stood a cricket-bat. I glanced round with the vague smile of politeness. ‘So this is Bernard’s room. A snug little place. And I see it’s all ready for his return.’
After a silence Miss Lettice sighed. ‘He would have been eighteen this coming April,’ she murmured.
I stared at her a moment in stupid wonder. ‘He would have been ... do you mean...?’
‘He was stillborn,’ she confessed, and her glance dropped before my stare. ‘It was silly not to tell you at once. But Bernard’s all I’ve got. He’d be a fine big fellow by now.’
To avoid those glistening eyes I turned away, only to encounter a sight but one degree less pitiful: Bernard’s cricket-bat—symbol of lusty young manhood, white flannels, sunlit turf—which no cricketer’s hand had ever grasped. What could I say or do? I was angered as well as touched by the wanton sentimentality of that room, and having murmured words of conventional comfort I hurried back to the vicarage. Not until many hours had passed did I succeed in hustling away my mood of melancholy; and as I entered my own bachelor bedroom I shuddered to hear, in imagination, the Good-night uttered by that fond impossible woman to the ghost with whom she shared her home.