Chapter IX.
The Late Rector of Hipley
The dinner-table left a blurred impression on Bredon, for all his habit of observing his fellow men and analysing his feelings about them. The setting-out of the meal had faults that Angela would have condemned, and would have put right in no time; you were conscious at once that the household belonged to bachelors. Yet the meal itself and the cooking of it were of excellent quality; and it was thrown at you with a clamorous, insistent hospitality that made you feel like a guest of honour. The room seemed to be full of priests—there were five, perhaps, in reality, besides the Bishop—and every detail of their behaviour proved that they were free from any sense of formality or restraint; yet constant little attentions shewed the guest that he was never forgotten. The topic of conversation which Bredon (who in the mean time had informed the Bishop of the post-office mistake) could recall most distinctly afterward was a learned and almost technical discussion between the Bishop and the youngest priest present on the prospects of the local soccer team for next year. Nothing fitted in, somehow, with his scheme of probabilities; there was a Father O’Shaughnessy, who had been born and bred in Pullford and never seemed to have been outside it; there was a Father Edwards who talked with a violent Irish brogue. A teetotaller opposite kept plying him with Barsac.
It was perhaps a delicate attention that Bredon’s neighbour, on the side away from the Bishop, was the only other layman present. He was introduced as the Bishop’s secretary; and he was the only man in the room who looked like a clergyman. He seemed some fifty years old; he was silent by habit, and spoke with a dry humour that seemed to amuse everybody except himself. Bredon could not help wondering how such a man came to occupy such a position at his time of life, for his voice betrayed university education and he was plainly competent, yet he obviously thought of himself as a supernumerary in the household. The riddle was solved when Bredon, in answer to some question about his journey down to Chilthorpe, explained that he did not come from London itself, but from a village in Surrey, a place called Burrington. “What!” exclaimed Mr. Eames, the secretary, “not Burrington near Hipley?” And, when Bredon asked if he knew Hipley, “Know it? I ought to. I was rector there for ten years.”
The picture of the rectory at Hipley stood out before Bredon’s mind; you see it from the main road. There is an old-fashioned tennis-lawn in front of it; roses cluster round it endearingly; there is a cool dignity about the Queen Anne house, the terraces of which are spotlessly mowed. Yes, you could put this man in clerical clothes, and he would fit beautifully into that spacious garden; you saw him, with surplice fluttering in the breeze, going up the churchyard path to ring the bell for evening service; that was his atmosphere. And here, unfrocked by his own conscience, he was living as a hired servant, almost a pensioner, in this gaunt house, these cheerless rooms. . . . You wondered less at his silent habit, and his melancholy airs of speech.
Nothing creates intimacy like a common background discovered among strangers. They belonged, it seemed, to the same university, the same college; their periods were widely different, but dons and scouts, the mile-stones of short-lived undergraduate memory, were recalled, and their mannerisms discussed; and when at the end of the meal the Bishop rose, profuse in his apologies, to attend a meeting, Eames volunteered to walk Bredon back to his hotel. “I thought there’d be no harm, My Lord, if we just took a look in at poor Mottram’s house; I daresay it would interest Mr. Bredon to see it. The housekeeper,” he explained to Bredon, “is one of our people.”
The Bishop approved the suggestion; and with a chorus of farewells they left the Cathedral house together. “Well,” said Bredon to his companion, “you’ve got a wonderful Bishop here.”
“Yes,” said Eames, “the mind dwells with pleasure on the thought of him. There are few of us for whom more can be said than that.”
“I can’t fit Mottram, from what I’ve heard of him, into that household.”
“Because you’re not a provincial. Our common roots are in Oxford and in London. But in a place like this people know one another because they are neighbours.”
“Even the clergy?”