“He was enormously rich, I suppose?”
“Hardly that. He was very comfortably off, though. There will be a windfall, I suppose, coming to somebody.”
“He never mentioned to you, I suppose, what he meant to do with his money?”
“Well, of course, he used to say half-jokingly that he was going to provide for us; but I don’t think he meant us to take that seriously. He had a kind of hankering after religion, you see, but he didn’t get on well with religious people as a general thing. The Anglicans, he said, were all at sixes and sevens, and he couldn’t bear a church which didn’t know its own mind. The nonconformists, he said, did no sort of good in the town; all those fine chapels, and only thirty or forty people in each of them on a Sunday morning. He was a little unjust, I think, to the nonconformists; they do a great deal of good, some of them. And about the Salvation Army he was extraordinarily bitter. So he used to say he’d sooner his money went to us than to any of the others. But I think that was only an ironic way he had with him; people who have made a lot of money are often fond of talking about what they’re going to do with it. Of course it would have made a lot of difference to us; but I don’t think he meant to be taken seriously.”
“Well, I’m very much obliged to Your Lordship; I think, perhaps, I ought to be—”
“What, going away, and dinner on the table? No, no, Mr. ‘Brendan,’ that isn’t how we treat our guests at Pullford. Just you come along, now, and be introduced to some of the reverend clergy. I know the Load of Mischief, and those chops! Come on, and we’ll send you off in better trim than you came.” It was evident that there was no help for it; Angela must wait.
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 showed the guest that he was never forgotten. The topic of conversation which Bredon (who in the meantime 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 milestones 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
