I’m not going to repeat all the things she told me about his queer ways at home, because I don’t think people who let lodgings ought to be encouraged to pry into the private life of their lodgers and reveal it, or to tell about their ways and habits in the room for which they pay rent, and where they ought to be as private as in their own home.
Before we got the ‘Stretford Arms,’ Harry and I were in lodgings for a short time, and some day I will tell you something about that.
But the story about the Reverend Tommy that his landlady told me I can repeat, because it was about his past life; and it seems he used to talk about it himself sometimes, but always among the gentry. I mean, it was a subject—kind and unassuming as he was—that he never spoke of to his inferiors. I can quite understand the feeling. I could tell the ladies and gentlemen who stay at our place about Harry, and my having been a servant; but I should not care to talk in the same way to our barmaid, or our potman, or our cook.
This was the story—not as the landlady told it; for if I told it her way, I should have to wander off into something else every five minutes. If there is one thing I dislike it is people who can’t stick to the point when they are telling a story.
The Reverend Tommy, years and years ago, it seems, and long before he came to be our clergyman, was the curate at a place just beyond Beachy Head, an old-fashioned village that was on the Downs, hidden in among them, in fact—a place full of very old houses and very old people, quite shut away from the world; for you could see nothing of anything except the trees and the tops of the hills, the village lying down in a deep, deep hollow.
At least, that is the sort of village I gathered it was from the landlady, who said Mr. Lloyd had described it to her and showed her photographs of it.
He was quite a young man then, and, though the place was dull, it suited him, because of the cliffs and hills and places round about, where no end of wonderful old bones and fossils and things were to be found.
All the time that he could spare he was climbing the cliffs and hammering away at them to find the treasures that he thought such a lot of. They were only fisher folk who lived near the cliffs, and they soon got used to the young clergyman, who climbed like a goat, and would be let down by ropes, and do things that would have made Mr. Blondin feel nervous, and all to hammer away at the cliffs and the rocks.
Mr. Lloyd’s favourite place was a cliff just beyond Beachy Head—it was a very dangerous one, and many years ago a man had been killed there—a young fellow who used to do just what Mr. Lloyd did. People told him about it, but it didn’t frighten him. He said, “Oh, he must have been careless, or gone giddy. I’m all right.” But it was a very nasty place, being a straight fall from top to bottom, with only horrid jagged bits of cliff sticking out.
I can quite understand what it was like, because on our honeymoon we went for a day or two to the seaside, and Harry showed me a cliff that he had gone over when he was a boy after a seagull’s nest, and it made me go hot and cold all over to look at it, and when we stood at the edge I clutched hold of Harry’s coat and felt as if we must go over, it looked so awful. I hate looking over high places; it gives me a dreadful feeling that I must jump over if somebody doesn’t catch hold of me and keep me back. That’s a very horrid feeling to have, but I have it, and nobody ever got me up on the Monument. I can’t even bear to look down a well-staircase. I always see myself lying all of a heap, smashed on the floor at the bottom; and even when once in London I used to have to go over Westminster Bridge, I always walked in the middle of the road among the cabs and carts and omnibuses, even in the muddiest weather.