A Mediterranean mystery

by Fred E. Wynne

The aspect of my study in my Sussex vicarage was extraordinarily peaceful to me. When I looked over the top of my book, as I often did, I looked into the bright friendly eyes of a fire of mingled coal and drift-wood. When I turned my face half round to the left, as I also often did, I looked across the familiar, discreet harmonies of my room, to a long French window which framed a view of my lawn whose grass was now smoothing and renewing itself after the winter ruffling, of the red footpath and the border already gilt with crocuses; of stately trees beyond my frontier, their bare branches showing the faint pubescence of early spring. Among these trees were the red tiled roofs of the village, and beyond it the Channel, eye-grey to-day under the silver sky, and covered with rushing “white horses” whipped up by the steady East wind.

There was one long banner of smoke on the horizon, and a few miles from shore the brown sails of a couple of trawlers going close-hauled to windward with the flood-tide under them.

All this peacefulness and beauty was, I say, particularly grateful to me. It was like a gentle accompaniment to the book which I was reading with no less attention on account of this consciousness of my surroundings.

I had attended a clerical meeting in the morning and had, I suppose unwisely, said what I really thought about some of the topics under discussion.

Now I was re-reading with especial interest the chapter on “Persecution” in Lecky’s Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe. Only a few hours before I had seen among my colleagues the faces of the persecutor and the heresy-hunter, and I was undoubtedly heretical. It was difficult to reflect that if all this had happened but a short time ago, say in the time of my own great-great-grandfather, these same men would have rejoiced to see my live body roasted; that even now, given the power and the custom, the spirit of Calvin and Torquemada was not dead, that it still lit the eyes of living men who could believe in “Exclusive Salvation.”

After the fret, the prejudice, and the spluttering of modern theological controversy there was healing for my soul in the calm intellectual austerity of Lecky.

Such were my preoccupations then. The academic interests of a scholarly, well-to-do, bachelor parson of forty-five with a hobby for homing pigeons.

I had just looked at the clock and realised with another glow of satisfaction that my afternoon tea was almost due, when my man Bates came in with this disturbing telegram.

This Edmund who was about to burst again into the quiet routine of my life was my only brother, now practically my only relative, and some fifteen years younger than myself. At the time of his first appearance in the world I was old enough to regard the news of his arrival as an indiscretion on the part of my parents. My father was a younger son of our old and once-distinguished Irish family. He was one of those soldiers who are always doing the hard rough work of the Empire and seeing the other men in the comfortable positions getting the “Honours and Rewards.” I was born in India, and thanks to my mother’s moderate fortune had been sent home in childhood to receive an expensive and perfectly respectable education.

At the time of Edmund’s birth my father was at home, railing at the Indian Government and the War Office, earning, I fear, the reputation of a bore with a grievance in the Service Clubs, and certainly blasting any prospects of a further career he might have had, by his frank and perfectly just criticism of important persons.