CHAPTER VI

*

The sun had slipped away through Dixon's stackgarth and twilight was subsiding slowly in soft rose amber, like the sands of an hour-glass, as the Spawer wheeled round Hesketh's corner. Against a tremulant pink sky the lich-gate stood out in black profile, edged with luminous copper; the church tower was dipped in dull red gold as far as the luffer of the belfry; and the six Vicarage windows gleamed bloodshot from behind their iron bars when he came upon them for the first time. A group of happy children, playing at calling names and slapping each other down the roadway, stopped their pastime on a sudden and ran up to take awed stock of this presumptuous stranger, who dismounted before his reverence the Vicar's as though he actually meant to open the gate.

At the first contact of bicycle with the railings, the gathered gloom about the Vicarage door seemed suddenly to be sucked inwards, and the eddying dusk reshaped itself over the priestly dimensions of Father Mostyn.

"Ha!" The word rang out in greeting like a genial note of prelude blown on Gabriel's trumpet. "There you are. Capital! capital! I made sure we should find you not so far away." He waltzed down the narrow path to open the gate, balancing both hands as though they held an invisible baby for baptism, and its name was "Welcome." One of these--a plump, soft, balmy, persuasive, clerical right hand,--he gave to the Spawer by the gate; threw it, rather, as Noah might have thrown his dove across the face of the waters, with such a beautiful gesture of benediction that in settling down upon the Spawer's fingers it seemed to confer the silent virtue of a blessing.

"The bicycle too," he said, wagging humorous temporal greeting towards it with his left. "Capital! capital! I thought we should n't be walking to-night. There 's no evening post, you see, in Ullbrig." He flung the gate backward on its hinges as far as it would go. "Come in; come in. Bring your bicycle along with you. Not that anybody would dare to violate its sanctuary by the Vicarage palings, but the saddle would absorb the dew and--let me help you."

All the time, from the gate to the doorway, his hands were hovering busily about the bicycle without once touching it; yet with such a consummate suggestion of assistance that the Spawer with very little prompting could have sworn before Justices that his Reverence had carried the machine into the hall unaided.

It was a big, bare hall--square, flagged in stone, and ringing to their footsteps with the sonority of a crypt. From the ceiling depended a swing-lamp of brass at the end of a triple chain. On the left-hand side stood a hard ecclesiastical bench of black oak, primarily provided, no doubt, for the accommodation of those visitors to whom the privilege of a front room audience would be denied. On the right side filed a long line of austere wooden pegs in monastic procession. A canonical beaver obliterated the first of them; two more held up the dread square mortar-board against the wall between them, diamond-wise, each supporting a corner. For the rest, some sticks and umbrellas--with the ebony divining rod of far-reaching reputation conspicuous among them--completed the movables of the hall. The bicycle followed the mesmeric indication of Father Mostyn's hands into place along the wall under the hat rack, and the priest saw that it was good.

By a magnificent act of courtesy he relieved the Spawer of his cap, and swept his own black mortar-board down the rack to make place of honor for it--though there were half a dozen unoccupied places to either side. Then, taking up a matchbox from the oak bench, which he shook cautiously against his ear for assurance of its store, he invited the Spawer to follow him, and threw open the inner door.

"The Vicar, you see," he explained, as his shoulders dipped into the dusk over the threshold, "is his own servant in addition to being everybody else's. He acts as a chastening object-lesson to our Ullbrig pride. We don't go out to service in Ullbrig. We scrub floors, we scour front-door steps, we wash clothes, we clean sinks, we empty slops, we peel potatoes--but, thank God, we are not servants. Only his reverence is a servant. When anything goes wrong with our nonconformist inwards--run, Mary, and pull his reverence's bell. That 's what his reverence is for. Don't trouble the doctor first of all. Let 's see what his reverence says. The doctor will go back and enter the visit in a book, and charge you for it. If anything goes worse--run, Mary, again. Never mind your apron--he won't notice. Pull the bell harder this time, and let 's have a prayer out of his reverence to make sure--with a little Latin in it. The pain 's spreading. For we 're all of us reverences in chapel, each more reverend than his neighbor; but in sick-beds we 're very humble sinners indeed, who only want to get better so that we may be ready and willing to go when the Lord sees fit to take us. Or if it 's a little legal advice you 're in need of--why pay six and eightpence to an articled solicitor? Go and knock up his reverence. He 's the man for you--and send him a turnip for his next harvest festival."

Genially discoursing on the Ullbrig habit as they proceeded, with an occasionally guiding line thrown over his shoulder in bolder type for the Spawer's assistance: "... A little crockery to your left here. Ha! ... mind the table-corner. You see the chair?" he led the way into the right-hand room--a room larger than you would have dared to imagine from the roadway--lighted dimly by one tall, smouldering amber window of many panes; heavy with the smell of tobacco, and heaped up in shapeless shadow-masses of disorder. Two great bales of carpet stood together in one corner like the stern roots of trees that had been cut down. On the grained side-cupboard to the left hand of the fireplace were glasses--regiments of glasses--of all sorts and shapes and sizes and qualities. A cumbersome early-century round table, rising like a giant toad-stool from a massive octagonal stalk, apparently constituted the larder, to the very verge of whose circumference were cocoa-tins, marmalade jars, tea-cups, tea-pots, saucers; sugar-bags red and blue; some cross-marked eggs in a pie-dish; a brown bread loaf, about three parts through, and some cold ham.

And yet, despite the room's disorder, entering in the wake of those benignant shoulders; treading in the constricted pathways delineated by those sacerdotal shoes (virtually and spiritually sandals); wrapped about with the atmosphere of genial indulgence thrown forth this side and that from those priestly fingers, as though they swung an invisible censer--one lacked all power to question. A swing to the left, the fault of the chair was forgiven; a swing to the right, what fear of treading on crockery; a swing to the front, were he swinging a lanthorn now the way could hardly be better lighted.

Such was the power of Father Mostyn.

So, swinging and censing, and asperging and exhorting, and absolving and exorcising till all the ninety-nine devils of disorder were cast out, the priest passed through to the window.

"Ha!" said he, with the keen voice for a conviction realised, when he came there. "I knew we should catch sight of Mrs. Gatheredge somewhere about. By Fussitter's steps for choice. She suffers dreadfully, poor woman, from a chronic enlargement"--he paused to slip his fingers into the rings of the shutters--"of the curiosity. I believe the disease is incurable. It will kill her in the end, I 'm afraid, as it did Lot's wife. Nothing can be done for her, except to protect her as much as possible from harmful excitement. If you don't mind the dark for a moment"--the first shutter creaked upward--"we 'll fasten ourselves in before making use of the matches. The strain of looking into his reverence's room when he lights the lamp and has a guest inside might prove too much for her--bring about a fatal congestion of the _glans curiosus_. His reverence, you see, has got to think for others as well as himself. Ha! that's better." The second shutter closed upon the first like the great jaw of a megalosaurus, swallowing up the dwindling remains of daylight at a gulp. "Now we can light up in all good Christian faith and charity."

He struck a match, and so far as the Spawer could observe--since the Vicar's back was turned--appeared to be setting fire to the stack of papers on his writing-table. After a moment, however, when the flame had steadied, he drew it forth transferred to the wick of a composite candle, which he held genially horizontal while he beckoned the Spawer forward by virtue of the signet finger.

"That 's it," he said, wagging appreciative grease-drops from the candle. "Come along! come along! Let's see if we can't manage to find some sort of a seat for you. We ought to do--I was sitting down in one myself not so long ago." Still wagging the candle and performing an amiable bear-dance on both feet in a revolving twelve-inch circle as he considered the question on all sides of him, presently he made a pounce into the central obscurity and dragged out a big leather-backed chair by the arm, like a reluctant school-boy. "Here we are," says he, rejoicing in the capture. "The very thing I had in my mind. Try that. You 'll want to beg it of me when you 've known its beauties a time or two. That 's the chair of chairs, _cathedra cathedrarum_. There 's comfort for you!"

Negligently wiping the leather-work with a corner of his cassock, he declared the chair open for the Spawer's accommodation.

From the fender, bristling with the handles of saucepans, all thrust outward like the quills of a porcupine, he commanded a block tin kettle--and a small spirit-lamp. Other journeyings to and fro provided him with water in a glorious old John Bull mug, with a lemon, with a basin of lump sugar, with two spoons, with whiskey, with a nutmeg and grater, with cigars, contained in a massive case of embossed silver, with cigarettes, of which the Spawer was constrained to acceptance, having previously disappointed Father Mostyn by a refusal of his choice Havanas; with tobacco in a fat, eighteenth-century jar, lavishly pictured and proverbed; and with a colored, clay churchwarden as long as a fiddlestick, that looked as if it would snap brittly in two of its own weight at the first attempt to lift it. Lastly, all these things being accumulated one by one, and laid out temptingly on the little round table, with the blue flame established at the bottom of the kettle, and tapering downwards to its junction with the wick like a sea-anemone, Father Mostyn permitted himself to sink back hugely upon the chair, lifting both feet from the ground as he did so, in supreme testimony to the full ripe fruits of ease.

"Well," said he, setting his fingers to work in the depths of the tobacco jar, "and what about the music?" His tongue appeared reflectively in his cheek for a moment, and his keen eye fixed the far wall on a nice point of remembrance. "Let 's see.... A symphonium?"

The Spawer adjusted the balance gently: "A concerto."

"Ha! a concerto." Enlightenment swept over the Vicar's face like a tide of sunlight, and his shoulders shook as with the laughter of gladsome things. "Beautiful! beautiful! To think of our stubborn Ullbrig soil's being made to yield a concerto. Had it been a turnip now. But a concerto! Ullbrig knows nothing of concertos. It would know still less if you were to explain. Explanations only confuse us--besides being an unwarrantable violation of our precious rights of ignorance. Tell friend Jevons you 're at work upon a concerto, and see what he says. He 'll tell you, yes, his son 's got one." Father Mostyn cast the forefinger of conviction at him. "Depend upon it, that 's what he 'll tell you. His son 's got one. A beauty with bells that he gave eighteenpence for. Meaning one of those nickel-silver mouth-organs such as we can't go to Hunmouth Fair without bringing back with us--unless we plunge for a concertina. It 's got to be one or the other, or people might n't think we 'd been to Hunmouth Fair at all, and that 's a light too glorious to be hid under a bushel. But it 's all one in name to us whatever we get. We call it a 'music.' Whether it 's a piano, or a fiddle, or a song, or a symphonium, or a sonata, or a Jew's harp, or a concertina, or a sackbut--the definition does n't alter. We call it a 'music.' 'So-and-So 's gotten a grand music.' 'It 's a grand music, yon.' That 's our way."

The little black cat of a kettle, after purring complacently for a while over the blue flame, suddenly arched its lidded back and spat out across the table.

"Ha!" Father Mostyn turned gladsomely at the sound. "There 's music for you. Come; you 're a whiskey man? Say when and fear not."

"If you don't mind, I 'll say it now," said the Spawer, with laughing apology.

"No?" His Reverence held out the uncorked bottle by the neck, persuasively tilted. "Think twice, my son, before committing yourself to hasty judgments." Then seeing the Spawer was not to be moved: "A glass of sherry, then? Benedictine? Capital! You won't beat Benedictine for a standard liqueur. Apart from its pleasant effect upon the palate, it has a valuable corroborant action on the gastric juices, and tends to the promotion of chyme."

All in speaking he produced the familiar flagon from the sideboard, poured out a cut-glass thumbful of amber. This act of hospitality fulfilled, he turned, with no diminished zeal, to the serving of his own requirements. He sipped warily from an edge of his smoking glass to verify his expectations of the flavor, nipped his lips for a moment in judicial degree, and subsided slowly upon the chair in a long breath of rapture, extending the tumbler towards the Spawer for wassail--"here 's success to our concerto, and may your days be long in the land with us. We 're a stiff-necked and obstinate generation, who worship gods of our own making, and have more than a shrewd idea that the devil 's in music (we know for certain he 's in the Church); but we bake good pies for all that, and our nonconformist poultry can't be beaten."

The Spawer laughed. "And our postman?" he asked.

*