“This is rather serious. Do you know of anybody who had a grudge against you as well as against your husband?”
“Honestly, I can’t think of anybody; you see, our lives have lain so far apart lately. No, I think it’s probably just a coincidence; I was only going to suggest that, if I saw this man again, perhaps I might telephone to you?”
“Please do. Just send me word that you’ve seen him again and I’ll come over straight in my car. Then perhaps we shall be able to have a better look at him.”
Reeves drove away very thoughtful. Was it possible that the same enemy who had murdered her husband was on the widow’s track too? Or was she psychic, and did echoes of the dead man’s personality follow her? Certainly one might have expected Brotherhood to rest unquietly in his grave. His grave—would some fresh inspiration come to Reeves, perhaps, if he paid a visit to the grave in Paston Oatvile churchyard? He was half ashamed of the thought, and yet . . . it could do no harm. The evening was a fine one; there was no need to be back early at the dormy-house. Instead of taking the London road, which was the shortest way home, he struck out along the winding country lane that connected the two Pastons. In a few minutes he had drawn up at the lych-gate, and was finding his way among the grave-stones.
The sudden gasp of a harmonium surprised him—of course, they were at evening service. What was that tune? “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” wasn’t it? He went up to the porch; it is an almost irresistible temptation to listen when sound comes out from a building into the open. . . . Yes, that was the hymn, most rustically sung by a congregation that sounded chiefly female, but with the one inevitable male voice dominating all, very loud and tuneless. Here in the porch you got a sort of quintessential effect of Sunday evening service in a country church: the smell of oil lamps, a glimpse of ugly deal pews, Sunday clothes, tablets on the wall in memory of dead virtues and hypocrisies. Yes, it was finishing now:
So with my waking thoughts
Bright with Thy praise,
Out of my stony griefs
Beth-hel I’ll rai-haise.
So by my woes to be
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nea-rer-er to Thee——
and then the penetrating Amen for which the best efforts of the singers seemed to have been reserved. There was a rustle and a shuffling as the erect forms became sedentary, and then, with sudden clearness, Marryatt’s voice giving out the text.
There was no doubt what Marryatt was at—it seemed a very embarrassing theme he had chosen. He was working up his congregation to derive a lesson from the tragic suddenness of Brotherhood’s end; in the midst of life, he reminded his hearers, they were in death; thence he would proceed to refute Brotherhood’s own arguments of less than a fortnight ago as to the survival of human personality. It was a thoughtful sermon, but on sufficiently obvious lines. “We see around us a great deal of carelessness, a great deal of indifference, a great deal of positive unbelief, and we ask ourselves, do we not? whether after all the lessons we learned at our mother’s knee were not just old wives’ fables, good for us when we were children, but something that manhood would outgrow. We ask ourselves, do we not? whether after all the story of our life will be continued elsewhere, whether after all there is a crown to be gained. And we persuade ourselves, perhaps, or think we have persuaded ourselves, that there is nothing beyond, nothing eternal that we can strive for. Death will be a quiet sleep, to just and to unjust alike, nothing but a sleep. And then the old questioning comes back to us:
To sleep—perchance to dream; aye, there’s the rub!
For, in that sleep of death, what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause
And so we see that our difficulties are not so easily disposed of; that it is not so easy for us, after all, to get the better of our alarms. . . .”