A telegram came in admirably good time, assuring Bredon that the Bishop would be delighted to see him. It was little after eleven when the car took the road again; this time their way brought them closer to the Busk and gave them a better view of its curious formation. A narrow gorge opened beneath them, and they looked down into deep pools overhung by smooth rocks that the water had eaten away at their base. There was no actual waterfall, but the stream always hurried downward, chuckling to itself under and around the boulders which interrupted its course. “I think Pulteney overestimates the danger of having his river dragged,” observed Bredon. “You couldn’t drag that part of it; and, with all those shelves of rock, a corpse might lie for days undiscovered, and no one the wiser. I’m glad that it’s a death by gas, not by drowning.”
Their road now climbed onto the moors, and they began to draw closer to a desolate kind of civilization. Little factory towns which had sprung up when direct waterpower was in demand, and continued a precarious existence perched on those barren slopes now that waterpower had been displaced by steam, were the milestones of their route. They were jolted on a pavement of villainous sets; the air grew dim with a smoky haze and the moorland blackened with their approach to the haunts of men. At last tramlines met them, announcing the outskirts of Pullford. “I’m getting the needle rather about this interview,” confessed Bredon. “What does one do by way of making one’s self popular with a Catholic Bishop?” he demanded of Angela, who was convent-bred.
“Well, the right thing is to go down on one knee and kiss his ring. I don’t think you’d make much of a show at it; we ought to have practised it before we left Chilthorpe. But I don’t suppose he’ll eat you.”
Bredon tried to rearrange his ideas about Bishops. He remembered the ceremony of being confirmed at school; a long, tiresome service, with an interminable address in which he and fifty of his compeers were adjured to play for their side. He remembered another Bishop, met in a friend’s rooms at Oxford, a hand laid on his shoulder and an intolerably earnest voice asking whether he had ever thought of taking holy orders. Was that the sort of thing? Or was he rather to expect some silken-tongued courtier, in purple and fine linen, pledging him in rich liqueurs (as in the advertisements) and lying to him smoothly (as in the storybooks)? Was he to be embarrassed by pietism or to be hoodwinked by a practised intriguer? Anyhow, he would know the worst before long now. They drew up at the centre of the town before a vast, smoke-grimed hotel which promised every sort of discomfort; and Bredon, after asking his way to the Catholic Cathedral, and steadying himself with a vermuth, went out to face the interview.
The Cathedral house proved to be a good specimen of that curious municipal Gothic which is the curse of all institutions founded in 1850. The kind of house which is characterized by the guidebooks as fine, by its inmates as beastly. The large room into which Bredon was shown was at least equally cheerless. It was half-panelled in atrocious pitch-pine, and it had heavy, ecclesiastical-looking chairs which discouraged all attempts at repose. There was a gas-stove in the fireplace. Previous occupants of the See of Pullford lined the walls, in the worst possible style of portraiture. A plaster Madonna of the kind that is successively exiled from the church to the sacristy and from the sacristy to the presbytery at once caught and repelled the eye. In point of fact, the room is never used except by the canons of Pullford when they vest for the chapter mass and by the strange visitor who looks a little too important to be left in a waiting-room downstairs.
A door opened at the end of the room, and through it came a tall man dressed in black with a dash of red whose welcome made you forget at once all the chill of the reception room. The face was strong and determined, yet unaffectedly benevolent; the eyes met you squarely, and did not languish at you; the manner was one of embarrassed dignity, with no suggestion of personal greatness. You did not feel that there was the slightest danger of being asked whether you meant to take orders. You did not catch the smallest hint of policy or of priestcraft. Bredon made a gesture as if to carry out Angela’s uncomfortable prescription; but the hand that had caught his was at once withdrawn in obvious deprecation. He had come there as a spy, expecting to be spied upon; he found himself mysteriously fitting into this strange household as an old friend.
“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Brendan.” (The Chilthorpe post-office is not at its best with proper names.) “Come inside, please. So you’ve come to have a word about poor old Mottram? He was an old friend of ours here, you know, and a close neighbour. You had a splendid morning for motoring. Come in, please.” And Bredon found himself in a much smaller room, the obvious sanctum of a bachelor. There were pipes about, and pipe-cleaners; there was a pleasant litter of documents on the table; there was a piano standing open, as pianos do when people are accustomed to strum on them for mere pleasure; there was a quite unashamed loudspeaker in one corner. The chair into which the visitor was shepherded was voluminous and comfortable; you could not sit nervously on the edge
