“Molly Musk! I thought nobody knew where she was? When did she turn up?”
“Tuesday night, and died the next.”
“But I say, Fuller, this is interesting!” Perhaps the average boy would have been no more shocked; he might not even have found it interesting. This one leant his bicycle against the wall, and his elbows on the bench within the open window. “Where’s she been all this time?” he queried, confidentially. “What did she die of? What’s it all mean?” And there was a knowing curl about the corners of his mouth.
“Mean?” said the saddler; “there’s more than you want to know that, Mr. Sidney, but want must be their master. That old Jasper, he know, so they say; but I’m not so sure. It was he fetched her home, poor old feller; got the letter Monday morning, had her home by Tuesday night. That’s a man I never liked, Mr. Sidney. I’ve said it to his face, and I’ll say it as long as I live; but, Gord love yer, I’m sorry for him now! That’s given him a rare doing and no mistake, and less wonder. A trim little thing like poor Molly Musk! Not that I’m so surprised as some; a man of my experience don’t make no mistake, and I never did care for the breed. But there, even my heart bleed when that don’t boil; as for the reverend here, he feel it as much as anybody else, and that I know. That young Jim Cubitt, he come by just now, and says he, ‘He’s taking the service as if it was a wedding.’ ‘You’ve been kicked out of the choir,’ I says; ‘that’s what’s the matter with you still, or you wouldn’t want a man to be a woman. Thank goodness there’s one live man in the parish,’ I says, ‘though I don’t fare to hold with him.’ And no more I do, Mr. Sidney; but, Gord love yer, that make no difference to men of our experience. I like the reverend’s Popery as little as the squire like it, and I tell him so, yet he go on bringing me the Standard every day when he’ve done with it. Is there another clergyman that’d do the like to a man that went against him in the parish? Would the Reverend Preston at Linkworth? Would the Reverend Scrope at Burton Mills? Or Canon Wilders, or any other man Jack of ‘em? No, sir, not one!”
“But if he doesn’t read them himself,” said the boy, “it doesn’t amount to so very much.” And he laid his hand on three more Standards, unopened, with the parson’s name in print upon the wrapper.
“What I was coming to,” cried the saddler; “only when I get on the reverend my tongue will wag. They say he don’t feel. I say he do, and I know: all this week I’ve had no Standard, so this morning I was so bold as to up and mention it, and there was all six unopened. ‘Reverend,’ I says, ‘you must be ill — with that there Egyptian Question to argue about’ — for we’re rare ‘uns to argue, the reverend and me— ‘and no trace yet o’ them Phœnix Park varmin!’ But he shake his head. ‘Not ill, Fuller,’ he says; ‘but there’s tragedy enough in this parish without going to the papers for more. And I haven’t the heart to argue even with you,’ he says. So that’s my answer to them as says our reverend don’t feel.”
The boy had been patiently pricking the bench with a saddler’s punch; now he raised his deliberate dark eyes and looked at the other point-blank.
“You talk about a tragedy,” he said, “but you won’t say where the tragedy comes in. What has killed the girl?”
“I hardly like to tell a young gentleman like you,” said the saddler; “though, to be sure, you’ll hear of nothing else in the village.”
“Perhaps,” said the boy, with a rather sinister smile, “I’m not quite so innocent as I ought to be. Come on, out with it!”
“Well, then, the poor young thing was brought home in trouble,” sighed the saddler. “And in her trouble she died next night.”
The boy looked at the man through narrow eyes with a knowing light in them, and the curves cut deep at the corners of his mouth.
“In trouble, eh? So that’s why she disappeared?” he said at length. “Molly — Musk!”
II
THE CHIEF MOURNER
Jasper Musk remained some minutes at the grave, alone, and more than ever a mark for curious eyes; his own were raised, and his lips moved with a significance difficult to mistake, but in him yet more difficult to accept. The infidelity of the man was notorious, and, indeed, the raised face was not the face of prayer. It was flint bathed in gall, too bitter for faith, too savage for sorrow; it was a frozen sea of wrinkles without a single ripple of agitation. Yet the lips moved, and were still moving when Jasper Musk passed through the crowd now assembled about the gate, erect though halt, a glitter in his eyes, but that was all.
As the folk had waited and made way for him in the church, so they waited and made way outside. Thus, as he limped down into the road, Musk had the village almost to himself. He turned to the right, and the west wind blew in his face, strong and warm, with cloud upon cloud of yellow dust; overhead the other clouds flew high and white and broken, a flotilla of small sail upon the blue. But Musk was done gazing at the sky, neither did he look right or left as he trudged in the middle of the road. So the saddler’s place, and then the woody opening of the road to Linkworth, with the white bridge gleaming through the trees, and the ripe leaves purling in the wind like summer surf, all fell behind on the left; as, on the right, did the rectory gate, terminating that same flint wall which had been the children’s grand stand. Rectory, church, and glebe stood all together, an indivisible trinity, with open uplands east and north. Westward began the cottages, buff-coloured, thatched; and it was cottages for half a mile, but healthy cottages, with plenty of space between, here a wheatfield, there a meadow; for every householder of Long Stow has also his holding of land, and there is no more independent parish in East Anglia. Of private houses that are not cottages, however, the village has only three: the rectory at one end, the hall near the other, and the Flint House between the two.
The Flint House now belonged to Jasper Musk. Report said that he had bought it outright for nine hundred pounds, with the meadow he was now passing on his left, and the wild garden reaching to the river. Originally part and parcel of the Long Stow estate, the place had been let for years, with a good slice of land, to London sportsmen who spent just two months of the twelve there. Musk had been the lessee’s bailiff, and had feathered his nest so well that when the whole estate changed hands, and the part went with the whole, the ex-bailiff was in a position to buy a house and grounds for which the new squire had no use. None knew how he could have come honestly by so much profit; yet he was a man of tried integrity, but a hard man, and the last to get fair treatment behind his back. A more genuine marvel was the way in which he had spent his money, on a house that could scarcely fail to be a white elephant to such a man, and a hideous house into the bargain. It abutted directly on the road, grim and rambling, with false windows like wall-eyes, and facets of flint so sharp that to brush against the wall was to rip a sleeve to ribbons. There were many rooms, musty and mice-ridden, and now only two old people to inhabit them. Musk had driven all his sons from home, thus doing his country an unwitting service, for there was the stuff that knits an empire in the blood. But only one daughter had been born to him, and now he had left her in the ground, and would wash his mind of her for ever.
The resolution was easier than its accomplishment: on his very threshold a shrill small cry assailed and insulted Jasper Musk. And in the parlour walked his wife, meek-spirited, flat-chested, leaden-eyed; too weary for much grief, as he was too bitter; in her thin arms an infant not four days old.
Musk put himself in her path.
“Stop walking!”
“That’ll set him off again,” sighed Mrs. Musk, though not before she had obeyed.
“I don’t care,” said Jasper. “That can cry till that die,” he added brutally, as the fit returned; “and the sooner the better. Hold it up a bit. There, now! I want to have a look at the brat. I want to see who that’s like!”
“It’s like poor Molly,” whimpered the grandmother, shedding tears that she could neither check nor hide.
Musk thumped his stick on the floor.
“Molly? M
olly? You let me hear that name again! Haven’t I told you once and for all never to lay your tongue to that name, in my hearing or behind my back, as long as you live? Then don’t you forget it; and none o’ your lies. That’s no more like her than that’s like you. But a look of somebody it have, though I can’t for the life of me think who. Wait a bit. Give me time. That’ll come — that’ll come!”
But the thin shrill screaming continued till the little red face grew livid and wrinkled almost beyond resemblance to its kind; then Musk relinquished his futile scrutiny, and signed to his wife to resume the walking, but himself remained in the room. And he leant on his stick as he had leant on it at the funeral; but here in his house he wore his hat; and from under its broad brim he followed them, backward and forward, to and fro, with smouldering eyes.
“Do you know what I’ve vowed?” he presently went on. “Do you know the oath I took, there at that open grave, when all the tomfoolery was over, and that Jesuit jerry-builder had taken his hook?”
“I’m sure I don’t,” sighed Mrs. Musk, as the child lay once more still against her withered bosom.
“I stood there,” said Jasper, “and I swore I’d find the man. And I swore I’d tear his heart out when I’ve found him. And I’ll do both!”
His voice rose so swiftly to so fierce a pitch that the woman started violently, and the infant wailed again. Instantly the room shook, and with one stride, paid for by a spasm of pain, the husband towered above the wife; and this time it was a heavy hand upon her shrunk and shrinking shoulder that put a stop to the walk.
“Do you know who it is?” he cried. “My God, I believe you do!”
“I don’t, indeed!”
“She never told you?”
“God knows she did not.”
“Or anybody else?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think — you think! I see it in your face. Who is it you think she may have told? I’ll soon find out from him or her; trust me to wring that out!”
For answer, the woman subsided in sobs upon the horsehair sofa, rocking herself and the baby in her grief and terror. “You’ll be that angry with me,” she moaned; “you’ll be right mad!”
“Oh, no, I sha’n’t,” said Musk, in a kindlier voice. “I’m not so bad as all that, though this do fare to make a man crazy. Tell away, old woman, and don’t you be afraid.”
“Oh, Jasper, it was when you were gone to Lakenhall for the doctor — that last time!”
“Well?”
“She knew the end was near. Poor thing! Poor thing!”
“What did she say?”
“That she’d die more happier if only she could speak — if only I would send — —”
“Not for Carlton?”
The wife could only nod in her fear and desperation.
“You sent for that man the moment my back was turned?”
“Oh, I knew that’d make you right wild — I knew — I knew!”
Musk controlled himself by an effort.
“That don’t. That sha’n’t. I’ll have it out of him, that’s all; he’s not the Church o’ Rome yet! Go on. Go on.”
“I went myself. No one knew. I left her alone time I was gone.”
“And you brought him back with you?”
“Well, he got here first. He ran all the way.”
“He knew better than to let me catch him. Jesuit! How long was he with her?”
“Not long, Jasper, not long indeed!”
“And you heard nothing?”
“Not a word. I stayed downstairs. I had to promise her that before I went. She had something to say to Mr. Carlton that nobody else must know.”
“But somebody else shall!” said Jasper grimly. “That was it, you may depend; you should have listened at the door. But that make no matter. Somebody else is going to know before he’s many minutes older!”
And an ugly smile broadened on the thick-set face; but the woman gasped. Quick as thought the child was on the sofa, the grandmother on her feet. Trembling and terrified, she stood in her husband’s path.
“Jasper! You’re never going up to the rectory?”
“I am, though — this minute!”
“Oh, Jasper!”
“Do you let me by.”
“But I promised you should never know! You’ve made me break my solemn word! He’ll know I’ve broken it!”
“Yes, I’m going to learn him a thing or two. Will you let me by?”
“She’ll know — too — wherever she has gone to!”
“You’d better not keep me no more.”
“Jasper! Jasper! On her death-bed I promised her — —”
“Out of my light!”
III
A CONFESSION
The rector’s study was on the ground floor, facing south. It was a long room, but narrow, and so low that the present incumbent, who stood six-feet-two, had contracted a stoop out of continual and instinctive dread of the ancient beams that scored his study ceiling, combined with a besetting habit of pacing the floor. There were two doors; one led into the garden, providing parishioners with immediate access to the rector when he was not to be found at the church; the other terminated an inner passage. Both were of immemorial oak, and, like the lattice casement over the writing table, both rattled in the least wind. Such was the room which the Reverend Robert Carlton haunted when driven or detained indoors: rickety, ill-lighted, and draughty when it was not close, it was still a habitable hole enough, and picturesque in spite of its occupant.
Optional surroundings afford a fair clue to the superficial man, but no real key to character; thus Mr. Carlton’s furniture suggested a soul devoid of the æsthetic sense. He had the sense in all its fineness, but it found expression in another place. Like many ritualists, Carlton was a religious æsthete; none more fastidious in the service of the sanctuary; on the other hand, after the fashion of his peers in two Churches, the trappings of his own life were severely simple. They had nearly all been purchased second-hand, those wire-covered shelves and the books they bore, that oak settle, and the huge arm-chair filled with miscellaneous lumber. Two baize-covered forms were there for the accommodation of various classes which the rector held; a prayer desk faced east in the one orderly corner of the room. Only three pictures hung on the walls; a Holy Family and Guido Reni’s St. Sebastian, ordinary silver prints in Oxford frames, mementoes of a pilgrimage to Rome; and an ancient cricket eleven, faded from age, and fly-blown for long want of a glass. There were also a couple of tin shields, bearing the heraldic devices of Robert Carlton’s public school and of his Oxford college, while a crucifix hung over the prayer desk. Among the books two volumes on Building Construction might have been remarked upon the settle, together with a tattered copy of Parker’s Introduction to Gothic Architecture; among the lumber, a mason’s trowel and a cold-chisel. Lastly, the study smelt, but did not reek, of common birdseye.
Jasper Musk, passing the open lattice, caught the parson hastily rising from his knees, not at the prayer desk, but beside his writing table, upon which a large book lay open. A newspaper lay on top of the book when Musk was admitted some moments after he had knocked.
He entered with his heavy, uneven steps, but took up a position barely within the threshold, and began by declining a seat with equal emphasis and stiffness.
“No, I thank you, Mr. Carlton. I’ve never been here before in your time, and I’m never likely to come again. I’m only here now to ask a question — and return a compliment!”
And the visitor’s eye gleamed as Mr. Carlton creased the forehead that was so white in comparison with his face: at the moment this contrast was not conspicuous.
“From what I hear,” explained Musk, “you’ve done me the kindness of coming to my house when my back was turned.”
“And you have only heard of it now?”
“Within the last ten minutes; and I come here right straight. You may think I wouldn’t come for nothing, me that’s never darkened your door before to-day.
I don’t hold with you, Mr. Carlton, and I’m not the only one. That’s true — I’m not a religious man, and never was; but, if I ever was to be, it wouldn’t be your religion. No, sir, when I fare to want Christmas-trees in church I’ll go to Rome and be done with it; and that’s where you ought to be, Mr. Carlton, before you get a parcel of women to confess their sins to you as though you was God Almighty!”
Mr. Carlton sat quite still under this uncalled-for criticism; he even looked relieved, and one sensitive finger brushed the brown moustache to either side of his mouth.
“I have never advocated auricular confession,” said he, “whatever I may think. I have merely said, to those in doubt, in difficulty, or in trouble, I will help them with God’s help if I can.”
“In trouble!” cried Musk scornfully. “I know one that never might have got herself into trouble if she’d never listened to you! And that’s what brings me here; I’ll beat about the bush no more. My wife said she fetched you the other night. I don’t blame you for going, I won’t go so far as that. What I want to know, and what I mean to know, is this: did my — that young woman lying there — confess to you or did she not?” It was a fist that he had flung in the direction of the churchyard.
“Confess what?”
And the parson’s voice was cold and constrained, as it had been beside the grave; but that white forehead glistened like a dead man’s.
“The name of the father of her child!”
Carlton took an ivory paper-knife from his desk, and the thin blade snapped in two between his fingers. A pause followed. Musk stood like granite, stick and hat in hand, frowning down on the clergyman seated at his writing table. At length the latter looked up.
“I might say that is a question you have no right to ask, Mr. Musk; what is certain, had there been any question of confession, I should have no right to answer you. There was none. Your daughter sent for me, to speak to me; and speak we did; but she did not tell me that — scoundrel’s — name.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 181
