Chapter III

(i)

MAPLE, my lady," announced Masterman.

The priest came forward into the great hall, where the light of the setting sun lay splendid on the stamped leather and the banners and the lower edges of the gilded portrait frames, a slender, unimpressive little figure; and Lady Beatrice rose to meet him.

" My son Valentine," she said. " I think you've met before, though."

A tallish, pale boy, looking younger than his years, bowed slightly from the shadow behind her without moving, and almost immediately the General came in.

" And we hope you've brought some music," added his hostess, smiling.

It appeared that he had. It was in the porch with his hat and stick.

It was a curiously constrained dinner, thought the priest, who was observing, according to request, with all his power. Val never spoke at all unless he was spoken to, and then quite shortly, though adequately, hardly lifting his eyes; and the General seemed to talk with an effort every time. It was the father somehow, even more than the son, for whom the priest felt sorry. It was as if a kind of vicarious humility or shame had fallen upon him: his solemn, genial assurance was absent, and he spoke as a man might speak who was under a cloud and was never unconscious of it for an instant. Just once or twice a gleam of interest shone under his hairy eyebrows — a pin-point of light — as, for example, when he talked politics; but it died again, and he applied himself gravely to his plate once more. The other two were scarcely better; for it was, the priest reflected, Val's first evening at home since his ignominious departure for Cambridge nearly two months before. Lady Beatrice, under all her self-possession, was ill at ease; she tried to draw Val into the conversation far too pointedly, and he answered more and more shortly each time; and May was spasmodic and nervous. (Miss Deverell, I forgot to say, was also present, with her usual air of discreet severity. )

. It was a relief to everyone when dinner came to an end. The General asked the priest and Val whether they would take any more wine in such a manner that it was practically impossible to say yes, and suggested going after the ladies immediately with an air of undisguised satisfaction.

" We can have our cigarettes in the hall," he said.

As they went out under the gallery the priest turned to Val.

"Just back from Cambridge, aren't you?" he said.

" Yes," said the boy.

" I'm a Trinity man myself," said the priest. "Letter M, Great Court."

The boy nodded and smiled with a deliberateness that was almost insolent.

And then, five minutes later, Lady Beatrice asked Father Maple to play.

He went to the piano in a very serious frame of mind. For he could see the stress under \vhich the whole family lay, and he could not see the issue. It was his business, as it is of every priest, to be an expert in human nature, and he understood perfectly that there were elements here that might lead to a really grave catastrophe. By heredity, by instinct, by training, this group of persons was infinitely sensitive to certain things, among which honour and ' courage, and their opposites, lay supreme. And it was exactly in those points that their sentiments had been outraged by one of themselves. To live wildly, to be dissipated, to gamble, to idle, even to be overbearing and oppressive — all those sins could be condoned; they passed and left no irremediable stain behind. Some of these Medd worthies looking down from the walls had set startling examples in those aristocratic vices. The young man in the dining-room who had fought at Naseby looked no better than he should; and here in the hall was the portrait of the notorious Mrs. Anthony Medd, who had occupied a more than doubtful position in the Court of Charles II. Yet their portraits hung there, and their histories were told without any very overwhelming shame. But this was quite another matter. If Val had been ruined at cards, or had run away with somebody else's wife, it would have been sad, but not tragic. But to have shirked a duel, however foolish or indiscreet the fighting of it would have been, was in a completely different category. And, as a crowning touch and as a final complication, the boy himself, it was obvious, had all the sensitiveness to his crime which his father had. If he had been callous or ill-bred, if he had been just selfishly calculating or prudent, the priest would not have feared so much.

It was with the consciousness of this that he went to the piano, and, as is the result always with certain natures, his nerves were strung up, rather than enfeebled, by the fact. The instant he touched the piano, with those few preliminary chords with which a perfectly competent player begins, he was aware of it; and in that moment came to him a determination to use it, and to find a way to this boy's confidence by that which is, perhaps, the most subtle road of all. He laid his music-sheets aside and settled down to play to Val....

(n)

He had been playing about ten minutes when he saw the boy move.

Up to that moment he had been aware of a tense atmosphere such as he seldom won even with such a tiny audience as this. He did not look up from the piano, but he perceived in the semi-darkness of the hall that the four figures within his range — the husband, the wife, the daughter, and the shadowy companion — remained entirely motionless, each in its place — the old man on this side of the hearth and the three women on the other. He had not seen where Val sat down; but he noticed now the figure of the boy pass from the window-seat at the further end to that which was nearer the piano; and thenceforward saw the blot of his head against the darkening sky outside. There were no lights here; the sun had not long gone down, and, as he was extemporising, he had himself blown out the two candles on the piano.

Up to the moment when Val moved, the player had been doubtful, wooing, so to speak, enquiring, asking, wondering whether the language in which he pleaded would be understood. 'But now all doubt left him; he knew, by that strange intuition that lives only on the plane of art, and which is as certain in that realm as are the senses of sight or hearing in the physical order, that he had established communications. Whether or not those would lead to anything was another matter; whether, when his artistic oratory was done, any answer would come he did not know; but this at any rate he determined — that he would finish what he had to say. It might very well be that the soul of this boy, harrowed by eight weeks of miserable isolation, and now wrenched and torn again by his return home, and the countless associations he met there, and the reality of his disgrace — it might very well be that the answer would come, and that the boy would understand that here at least was one who understood.

So he gathered up his strength.

Up to now he had played plaintively and caressingly, with infinite pathos, seeking to draw tears and soft sounds; it was sentimental, he knew, but sentimentality in disguise, for it was by this alone that he had thought he could find his way to the strange mixture of commonplaceness and distilled refinement which he perceived to be the fabric on which these souls were built. But now he threw aside sentiment and sought strength.... The great chords crashed on.... He was amazed at his own fire: that soft tingling began in nerves and sinews, that electric pulsation ran up every fibre, connecting heart and brain and fingers, by which the artist knows that he is transfigured; his contractions and limitations passed away; and he felt himself pouring out from wires and keyboard and feet and hands, out into the solemn gloom of the hall, and into those beating hearts, that tremendous passion of which the artist and the orator alone know the secret, and the priest the source.

So he played, and ended. And Miss Deverell sniffed, distinctly, in the silence, after a decent pause.

It was a full minute before any moved or spoke. He heard a sigh and a rustle; and then he himself spoke, with a deliberate offhandedness.

" And now I'll play the gavotte you liked the other day, Lady Beatrice."

(m)

He came and sat down when he had done, and drank his coffee, which had grown cold. He had not an idea as to what would happen next; and he had determined not to risk anything by intrusion. Meanwhile he answered questions.

" Yes," he said, " I studied at Leipsic and Dresden for ten years.... Liszt? Oh, yes; I knew Liszt very well. In fact I very nearly "

He stopped.

Yes?" asked May breathlessly. (She had moved her seat to be near him.)

" I nearly took up music as a profession.",

"Why didn't you?"

" I became a Catholic, and then a priest," he said simply. " I wasn't ordained till I was forty, you know."

" And you gave up your music? " cried May.

" I gave it up as a profession," he said. " But I still get a good deal of enjoyment out of it. I am afraid I still play for two or three hours a day."

" But." And she stopped again, amazed-.

Val had showed no sign; he still remained in the window-seat, silent. Yet all the while that the priest was talking he was more aware of the boy's presence than of the three with whom he talked. The two women were voluble; even the General pulled his long chair a foot or two nearer to listen to the musician's account of his Leipsic days; but the boy's silence talked more loudly than them all. It seemed to the priest as if he knew exactly what was passing behind the heavy curtain — the world of misery and shame that trampled so ruthlessly on hope; the voice that cried, Rise and begin again, and the louder voice that proclaimed that it was too late, and that the thing was done, and that an end held more hope than a new beginning. For he had watched the boy's face at dinner, and had seen how every delicate fibre had withdrawn itself inwards, only to find that the worm that dies not is more agonising than the fire which is not quenched; he had seen that the torment within had been substituted for the disgrace without. He had said that a boy in such a position might go to the bad, or, what was worse, to despair; and he had learned that it was to the worse of those that the move was being made.

" And you have never regretted it? " asked May presently.

He smiled.

" Priests dare not, anyhow, regret their priesthood. And even if that were possible, it's foolish to regret things that are passed. There is always a best to be got out of them."

(It was a sententious remark, and he knew it. But he made it deliberately.)

May sat back and was silent; he understood why. And then Lady Beatrice began.

It was when he got up at last to go that he had his first opportunity of speaking to Val. He looked at his hostess carefully as he shook hands, and that lady was quick enough to understand.

" Val," she said, " see Father Maple to the door. I don't want your father to go out. He's got a touch of cold. (No, my dear, I insist.) "

The boy came forward quickly and silently from the window-seat — he had not spoken one word since the priest had sat down to the piano — and the two went out together to the porch.

" What a heavenly night! " said the priest.

He stood breathing in the heavy, fragrant night-smells of summer. It was a clear night overhead, but the dew-laden grass suffused the atmosphere with vapour, and the stars shone dim and soft. The great trees at the head of the slope opposite stood motionless blots against them. Somewhere in the gardens behind a nightingale began to sing.

' You won't walk with me as far as the garden gate, I suppose? " said the priest.

" Why, yes," said Val.

All the way down through the gardens the priest talked on indifferent matters, with pauses, trying to put the boy at his ease and to give him an opportunity of speaking if he wished. But Val answered in monosyllables, and only just enough for courtesy.

Once or twice the priest thought that the other's silence was trembling on the edge of speech; but nothing happened.

At the garden gate he said good-bye.

" Look in any time you like," said the priest. " I'm nearly always at home."

" Thanks very much," said Val, with a complete dispassionateness that told nothing.

As the priest went on he listened for footsteps going back to the house, but there were none. Val was either still standing looking at the night, or had turned off across the wet grass for a lonely stroll.

When Father Maple reached home he wrote a little note to Lady Beatrice, and set it out on his table to be taken up in the morning.

" DEAR LADY BEATRICE,

" I must thank you very much for a charming evening.

' Your son walked with me a little way homewards; but he was quite loyal to the conditions that have been laid on him. I still hold (since you are kind enough to allow me to say so) that these are very severe; and I should strongly advise your giving him to understand that he will not be transgressing them if he talks the matter over confidentially with someone whom he trusts, and who is not intimately concerned with the story itself — the Vicar, for example. It is always dangerous to hammer down the safety-valve, I think. " Yours sincerely,

" ARTHUR MAPLE.

" P.S. — Please don't dream of sending an answer to this. It needs none/'

He wrote this rather slowly, in his pointed small handwriting, hesitating now and again for a word, but with a kind of even decisiveness. He then read it through and sealed it and put it ready.

Then he took up his office-book and sat down in his deep chair by the lamp.