He suffered then the deepest agony that perhaps in all his life he had ever known. There was no one there to see. He sank down upon the wooden coping that protruded from the old wall and hid his face in his hands as though he were too deeply ashamed to encounter even the dim faces of the old wooden figures.
There was a stir in the room; the little door opened and closed; the bird, with a flutter of wings, flew back to its corner. Brandon looked up and saw a faint shadow of a man. He rose and took some steps towards the door, then he stopped because be saw that the man was Davray the painter.
He had never spoken to this man, but be had hated everything that he had ever heard about him. In the first place, to be an artist was, in the Archdeacon's mind, synonymous with being a loose liver and an atheist. Then this fellow was, as all the town knew, a drunkard, an idler, a dissolute waster who had brought nothing upon Polchester but disgrace. Had Brandon had his way he would, long ago, have had him publicly expelled and forbidden ever to return. The thought that this man should be in the Cathedral at all was shocking to him and, in his present mood, quite intolerable. He saw, dim though the light was, that the man was drunk now.
Davray lurched forward a step, then said huskily:
"Well, so your fine son's run away with Hogg's pretty daughter."
The sense that he had had already that his son's action, had suddenly bound him into company with all the powers of evil and destruction rose to its full height at the sound of the man's voice; but with it rose, too, his self-command. The very disgust with which Davray filled him contributed to his own control and dignity.
"You should feel ashamed, sir," he said quietly, standing still where be was, "to be in that condition in this building. Or are you too drunk to know where you are?"
"That's all right, Archdeacon," Davray said, laughing. "Of course I'm drunk. I generally am--and that's my affair. But I'm not so drunk as not to know where I am and not to know who you are and what's happened to you. I know all those things, I'm glad to say. Perhaps I am a little ahead of yourself in that. Perhaps you don't know yet what your young hopeful has been doing."
Brandon was as still as one of the old wooden saints.
"Then if you are sober enough to know where you are, leave this place and do not return to it until you are in a fit state."