2
David Munroe arrived two days later. The Doña welcomed him very warmly, and then, having got him some illustrated papers, left him alone in the drawing-room, and hurried back to the sewing-room, where she was busy with Parker over the trousseau.
Teresa, coming in to look for a book about a quarter of an hour later, was surprised to find him already arrived, as she had not heard the car. In a flash she took in the badly cut semi-clerical black suit hanging on his strong well-knit body, and noticed how hollow-eyed and pale he had become.
She greeted him kindly, coolly; slightly embarrassed by the intentness of his gaze.
“We are so glad you were able to come. It’s so horrible to be ill in an institution. But you ought to get well soon now, the weather’s so heavenly, and you’ll soon be able to lie out in the garden,” she said, and began to look for her book.
He watched her in silence for a few seconds, and then said, “Miss Lane, when I was here last, I gave you to understand that I was the heir to Munroe of Auchenballoch.... I’ll admit it was said as a sort of a joke when I was angry, but it was a lie for all that. I come of quite plain people.”
Clearly, he was “making his soul” against ordination. She tried to feel irritated, and say in a cold and slightly surprised voice, “Really? I’m afraid I don’t remember ... er ...” but what she actually said was: “It doesn’t matter a bit; it was obviously, as you say, just a joke ... at least ... er ... well, at any rate, I haven’t the slightest idea what our great-grandfather was—quite likely a fishmonger; at any rate, I’m sure he was far from aristocratic.”
David gave a sort of grunt and began restlessly to pace up and down; this fidgeted Teresa: “Do sit down, Mr. Munroe,” she said, “you must be so tired. I can’t think where my sister is—she’ll come down soon, I expect,” and added to herself, “I really don’t see why I should have to entertain Concha’s discarded suitors.”
He sank slowly into an arm-chair. “Miss Lane,” he said, “is it true that your sister is leaving the Catholic fold?”
“I believe so,” she answered; and there was a note of dryness in her voice.
There was a pause; David leaning forward and staring at the Persian rug at his feet with knitted brows, as if it were a document in a strange and difficult script.
Suddenly he looked up and said; “Why is she doing that?”
“That you must ask her,” she answered coldly.
“I heard ... that ... that it was because Captain Dundas’s uncle wouldn’t leave him Drumsheugh, if he married a Catholic, but ... that wouldn’t be true, would it?”
“What? That Colonel Dundas has a prejudice against Catholics?”
“No, that that’s the reason she’s leaving the Church?”
She gave a little shrug: “Well, I suppose Paris makes up for a mass.”
For a few seconds he looked puzzled, and then said, “Oh yes, that was Henry IV. of France—only the other way round.... That was a curious case of Grace working through queer channels—a man finding the Church and salvation through worldliness and treachery to his friends. But I shouldn’t wonder if what I was saying wasn’t heresy—I’m not very learned in the Fathers yet.”
He paused; and then, fixing her with his eyes, said—“Did it shock you very much—her being perverted for such a reason?”
“Really, Mr. Munroe,” she said coldly, “my feelings about the matter are nobody’s concern, I....”
“I beg your pardon,” he said gruffly, and blushed to the roots of his hair.
“Oh these touchy Scots!” she thought impatiently.
There was an awkward silence for some seconds, and she decided the only way to “save his face” was to ask him a personal question, and give him the chance of snubbing her in his turn; so she said, “We had no idea when you stayed with us last autumn that you were thinking of being ordained ... but perhaps you weren’t thinking of it then?”
He did not answer at once, but seemed to be meditating: “It’s never quite a matter of thinking,” he said finally, “it’s just a drifting ... drawn on and on by the perfumes of the Church. What is it the Vulgate says again? In odore unguentorum tuorum curremus ...” he broke off, and then after a few seconds, as if summing up, slightly humorously, the situation, he added ruminatively, the monosyllable “úhu!” And the queer Scots ejaculation seemed to give a friendly, homely turn to his statement.
“You were lucky being born in the Church,” he went on; “my father was an Established Church minister up in Inverness-shire, and I was taught to look upon the Church as the Scarlet Woman. I remember once at the Laird’s I ... well, I came near to bringing up my tea because Lady Stewart happened to say that her cook was a Catholic. And sometimes still,” and he lowered his voice and looked at her with half frightened eyes, “sometimes still I feel a wee bit sick at mass.”
It was indeed strange that he too should feel the ambivalence of the Holy Mother.
“I know what you mean,” she said; “I never exactly feel sick—but I know what you mean.”
“Do you?” he cried eagerly, “and you brought up in it too!”
He got up, took a few restless paces up and down the room, and then stood still before a sketch in water-colours of Seville Cathedral, staring at it with unseeing eyes. Suddenly, he seemed to relax, and he returned to his chair.
“Well,” he said, “when one comes to think of it, you know, it would be hard to find a greater sin than ... feeling like that at mass.” Then a slow smile crept over his face: “I remember my father telling me that his father met a wee lad somewhere in the Highlands, and asked him what he’d had to his breakfast, and he said, “brose,”—and then what he’d had to his dinner, and he said “brose,” and then what he’d had to his tea, and it was brose again; so my grandfather said, “D’you not get tired of nothing but brose?” and the wee lad turned on him, quite indignant, and said, “Wud ye hae me weary o’ ma meat?” ... It’s not just exactly the same, I’ll admit—but it was a fine spirit the wee lad showed.”
A little wind blew in through one of the open windows, very balmy, fresh from its initiation into the secret of its clan,—a secret not unlike that of the Venetian glass-blowers, and whispered from wind to wind down the ages—the secret of blowing the earth into the colours and shapes of violets and daffodils. It made the summer cretonne curtains creak and the Hispano-Mauresque plates knock against the wall on which they were fastened and give out tiny ghostly chimes; as did also the pendent balls on the Venetian glass. Teresa suddenly thought of the late Pope listening to the chimes of St. Mark’s on a gramophone. All at once she became very conscious of the furniture—it was a whiff of that strange experience she had had in her Chelsea lodgings. Far away in the view a cock crowed. She suddenly wondered if the piano-tuner were coming that morning.
“The Presbyterians, you know,” he was saying, “they’re not like the Episcopalians; they feel things more ... well, more concretely ... for instance, they picture themselves taking their Sabbath walk some day down the golden streets ... they seem to ... well, it’s different.” He paused, and then went on, “My people were very poor, you know; it was just a wee parish and a very poor one, and it was just as much as my mother could do to make both ends meet. But one day she came into my father’s study—I remember, he was giving me my Latin lesson—and in her hand she held one of these savings boxes for deep-sea fishermen, and she said, “Donald”—that was my father’s name—“Donald, every cleric should go to the Holy Land; there’s a hundred pound in here I’ve saved out of the house-keeping money, so away with you as soon as you can get off.” How she’d managed it goodness only knows, and she’d never let us feel the pinch anywhere. You’d not find an Episcopal minister’s wife doing that!” and he looked at her defiantly.
“No; perhaps not ... that was very fine. Did your father like the Holy Land when he got there?”
There was something at once pathetic and grotesque in the sudden vision she had of the Presbyterian pilgrim, with a baggy umbrella for staff, and a voluminous and shabby portmanteau for script, meticulously placing his elastic-sided boots in his Master’s footprints.
“Oh yes, he liked it—he said it was a fine mountainous country with a rare light atmosphere—though Jerusalem was not as ‘golden’ as he had been led to understand! and he met some Russian pilgrims there, and he would often talk of their wonderful child-like faith ... but I think he thought it a pity, all the same, that Our Lord wasn’t born in Scotland,” and he smiled.
Her fancy played for a few seconds round the life, the mind, of that dead minister:
“... But to his lack-lustre eyes there appeared within the pages of the ponderous, unwieldy, neglected tomes, the sacred name of JEHOVAH in Hebrew capitals: pressed down by the weight of the style, worn to the last fading thinness of the understanding, there were glimpses, glimmering notions of the patriarchal wanderings, with palm trees hovering in the horizon, and processions of camels at the distance of three thousand years; there was Moses with the Burning Bush, the number of the Twelve Tribes, types, shadows, glosses on the law and the prophets ... the great lapses of time, the strange mutations of the globe were unfolded with the voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and though the soul might slumber with an hieroglyphic veil of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet it was a slumber ill exchanged for all the sharpened realities of sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father’s life was comparatively a dream; but it was a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the resurrection, and a judgment to come!”
It was not that this passage word for word stalked through her head; it was just a sudden whiff of memory of this passage. And on its wings it wafted the perfume of all the melancholy eloquence of Hazlitt—the smell, the vision, of noble autumn woods between Salisbury and Andover. If ever a man had not walked dry-shod that man was Hazlitt; all his life he had waded up to the waist in Time and Change and Birth and Death, and they had been to him what he held green, blue, red, and yellow to have been to Titian: “the pabulum to his sense, the precious darlings of his eye,” which “sunk into his mind, and nourished and enriched it with the sense of beauty,” so that his pages glow with green, blue, red, and yellow.
Time, Change, Birth, Death—she, too, was floating on their multi-coloured waters.
“Do you think your father is in hell?” she asked suddenly.
He winced.
“I don’t think so,” he answered, after a pause: “It isn’t as if he’d seen the light and turned away from it. I think he’ll be in Purgatory,” and he looked at her questioningly.
She was touched—this young seminarist was still quite free from the dogmatism and harshness of the priest.
“You know the legend, don’t you,” she said gently, “that the prayers of St. Gregory the Great got the soul of the Emperor Trajan into Paradise?”
“Is that so?” he cried eagerly.
“Yes; he was the just pagan par excellence, and the prayers of St. Gregory saved his soul.”
The door opened and Parker came in: “Excuse me, miss, but have you seen Miss Concha? It’s about that old lace ... Madame wishes to see if it can be draped without being cut.”
“No, Parker, I have not seen her.”
And Parker withdrew.
“I thought about that ... I mean my parents’ souls,” he went on, “when I first felt a vocation. I thought, maybe, me being a priest might help them—not that they weren’t a hundred times better than me—it’s all very mysterious ...” he paused, and once again punctuated his sentence with the ruminative “úhu.”
“My mother is terribly unhappy because my eldest sister died an atheist ... and now Concha’s having ratted ...” she found herself saying; herself surprised at this abandoning of her wonted reserve.
“Poor lady!” he said very sympathetically; “yes, it’s a bad business for a mother ... my aunt Jeannie, she was an elderly lady, a good bit older than my mother. I lived with her in Inverness when I was going to the Academy. Well, my mother told me she had several good offers when she was young, but she would never marry, because she felt she just couldn’t face the responsibility of maybe bringing a damned soul into the world ... yes, the Scotch think an awful lot about the ‘last things.’ ... And I suppose your mother can’t do anything to stop her?”
“Have you ever heard of a mother being able to stop a child going its own way?”
“Maybe not,” and he smiled: “I should think you must have been most awfully wilful when you were wee,” and he looked at her quizzically.
The moment when the conversation between a man and a woman changes from the general to the personal is always a pungent one; Teresa gave him a cool smile and said, “How do you know?”
“Well, weren’t you?”
“Perhaps ... in a very quiet way.”
“Oh, that’s always the worst.”
Then, almost as if it were a tedious duty, he harked back to Concha’s perversion: “Yes, it’s a bad business for you all about Miss Concha.”
“Life absorbs everything—in time,” said Teresa, half to herself.
“What do you mean exactly by that, Miss Lane?”
“Heresy, probably,” and she smiled.
“Well, what do you mean?”
“It’s difficult to explain ... but I feel a sort of transubstantiation always going on ... sin and mistakes and sorrows and joy slowly, inevitably, turned into the bread that is life, and it’s no use worrying and struggling and trying to prevent everything but fine flour from going in ... all’s grist that comes to the mill.”
He looked at her intently for a few seconds: “Don’t you believe in the teaching of the Church, Miss Lane?”
“Does it ... does it matter about believing?”
“Yes, it matters.”
“Well ... I haven’t quite made up my mind.”
Suddenly from the garden came Concha’s voice singing:
I’m so jolly glad to meet you!
I’m so jolly glad you’re glad!
Then one of the French-windows burst open, and in she came, all blown by March winds, a bunch of early daffodils in her hand, and, behind her, ’Snice, his paws caked with mud.
She made Teresa think of the exquisite conceit in which Herrick describes a wind-blown maiden:
She lookt as she’d been got with child
By young Favonius.
“Hallo! When did you arrive? It was such a divine morning I had to go for a walk. You poor creature—you do look thin. Oh dear, I must have a cigarette.”
Her unnecessary heartiness probably concealed a little embarrassment; as to him—he was perfectly calm, grave, and friendly.
Then Dick came in: “Hallo! How are you, Munroe? So sorry I wasn’t about when you arrived—had to go down to the village to see the parson. We’ll have to fatten you up while you’re here—shan’t we, Concha? I don’t know whether we can rise to haggis, but we’ll do our best.”
Teresa felt a strange sensation of relief; here it was back again—old, foolish, meaningless, Merry England. She realised that, during the last half hour, she had been in another world—it was not exactly life; and she remembered that sense of almost frightening incongruity when she had first heard of David’s vocation.