It was never allowed to be forgotten at St. Agnes' that the Mission was the Silchester College Mission; and there were few days in the year on which it was possible to visit the Mission House without finding there some member of the College past or present. Every Sunday during term two or three prefects would sit down to dinner; masters turned up during the holidays; even the mighty Provost himself paid occasional visits, during which he put off most of his majesty and became as nearly human as a facetious judge. Nor did Father Rowley allow Silchester to forget that it had a Mission. He was not at all content with issuing a half yearly report of progress and expenses, and he had no intention of letting St. Agnes' exist as a subject for an occasional school sermon or a religious tax levied on parents. From the first moment he had put foot in Chatsea he had done everything he could to make St. Agnes' be what it was supposed to be—the Silchester College Mission. He was particularly anxious that the new church should be built and beautified with money from Silchester sources, even if he also accepted money for this purpose from outside. Soon after Mark had become recognized as Father Rowley's confidential secretary, he visited Silchester for the first time in his company.
It was the custom during the summer for the various guilds and clubs connected with the parish to be entertained in turn at the College. It had never happened that Mark had accompanied any of these outings, which in the early days of St. Agnes' had been regarded with dread by the College authorities, so many flowers were picked, so much fruit was stolen, but which now were as orderly and respectable excursions as you could wish to see. Mark's first visit to Silchester was on the occasion of Father Rowley's terminal sermon in the June after he was nineteen. He found the experience intimidating, because he was not yet old enough to have learnt self-confidence and he had never passed through the ordeal either of a first term at a public school or of a first term at the University. Boys are always critical, and at Silchester with the tradition of six hundred years to give them a corporate self-confidence, the judgment of outsiders is more severe than anywhere in the world, unless it might be in the New Hebrides. Added to their critical regard was a chilling politeness which would have made downright insolence appear cordial in comparison. Mark felt like Gulliver in the presence of the Houyhnms. These noble animals, so graceful, so clean, so condescending, appalled him. Yet he had found the Silchester men who came to visit the Mission easy enough to get on with. No doubt they, without their background were themselves a little shy, although their shyness never mastered them so far as to make them ill at ease. Here, however, they seemed as imperturbable and unbending as the stone saints, row upon row on the great West front of the Cathedral. Mark apprehended more clearly than ever the powerful personality of Father Rowley when he found that these noble young animals accorded to him the same quality of respect that they gave to a popular master or even to a popular athlete. The Missioner seemed able to understand their intimate and allusive conversation, so characteristic of a small and highly developed society; he seemed able to chaff them at the right moment; to take them seriously when they ought to be taken seriously; in a word to have grasped without being a Siltonian the secret of Silchester. He and Mark were staying at a house which possessed super-imposed upon the Silchester tradition a tradition of its own extending over the forty years during which the Reverend William Jex Monkton had been a house master. It was difficult for Mark, who had nothing but the traditions of Haverton House for a standard to understand how with perfect respect the boys could address their master by his second name without prejudice to discipline. Yet everybody in Jex's house called him Jex; and when you looked at that delightful old gentleman himself with his criss-cross white tie and curly white hair, you realized how impossible it was for him to be called anything else except Jex.
For the first time since Mark, brooding upon the moonlit quadrangle of St. Osmund's Hall, bade farewell to Oxford, he regretted for a while his surrender of the scholarship to Emmett. What was Emmett doing now? Had his stammer improved in the confidence that his success must surely have brought him? Mark made an excuse to forsake the company of the four or five men in whose charge he had been left. He was tired of being continually rescued from drowning in their conversation. Their intentional courtesy galled him. He felt like a negro chief being shown the sights of England by a tired equerry. It was a fine summer day, and he went down to the playing fields to watch the cricket match. He sat down in the shade of an oak tree on the unfrequented side, unable in the mood he was in to ask against whom the College was playing or which side was in. Players and spectators alike appeared unreal, a mirage of the sunlight; the very landscape ceased to be anything more substantial than a landscape perceived by dreamers in the clouds. The trees and towers of Silchester, the bald hills of Berkshire on the horizon, the cattle in the meadows, the birds in the air exasperated Mark with his inability to put himself in the picture. The grass beneath the oak was scattered with a treasury of small suns minted by the leaves above, trembling patens and silver disks that Mark set himself to count.
"Trying not to yearn and trying not to yawn," he muttered. "Forty-four, forty-five, forty-six."
"You're ten out," said a voice. "We want fifty-six to tie, fifty-seven to win."
Mark looked up and saw that a Silchester man whom he remembered seeing once at the Mission was preparing to sit down beside him. He was a tall youth, fair and freckled and clear cut, perfectly self-possessed, but lacking any hint of condescension in his manner.
"Didn't you come over with Rowley?" he inquired.
Mark was going to explain that he was working at the Mission when it struck him that a Silchester man might have the right to resent that, and he gave no more than a simple affirmative.
"I remember seeing you at the Mission," he went on. "My name's Hathorne. Oh, well hit, sir, well hit!"
Hathorne's approbation of the batsman made the match appear even more remote. It was like the comment of a passer-by upon a well-designed figure in a tapestry. It was an expression of his own æsthetic pleasure, and bore no relation to the player he applauded.