Unclay

by T. F. Powys

  He felt for those who had never known the loving-kindness of the Church of Christ, and he shook his head compassionately over those who had not read Mansfield Park.

  From the Church, Mr. Hayhoe garnered and stowed away enough humility to last any man a lifetime; from Jane, he learned that it is better to listen than to look. The Church graciously permitted him to love God as much as he wished—which was with his whole heart—and Jane Austen allowed him to see into, and approve—though not all of them—the ways and habits of many a pleasant young lady, and more than one sober or frolicsome young gentleman.

  Though a meek man, at certain times Mr. Hayhoe could do a brave thing. He was a protestant, and he once sent a sermon to the Pope. In this sermon, he pointed out—addressing the Italian gentleman as “Holy Father”—the many errors of Rome.

  Every day Mr. Hayhoe expected to receive a reply, couched in the most courtly language, informing him that—led by His Holiness himself—every priest in the world would be permitted, and all in a hurry, to marry a “poor Miss Taylor.”

  Courage breeds courage. Soon after writing to the Pope, Mr. Hayhoe visited Daisy Huddy to read the Bible to her.…

  Joy comes easily to the good; ’tis ever in their path; they have not to hunt or to look for it. Joy comes to them. Though Mr. Hayhoe had been astonished and troubled by the monstrous curses of Lord Bullman, yet no sooner had the man ridden off, than he forgot all about them.

  Mr. Hayhoe sat down upon the grassy bank, wishing to rest a little—though first he picked up the daisy-chain that the young ladies had let fall in their eagerness to follow the chase, and he bound the gate with the daisies instead of the barbed wire, which he threw into the ditch.

  He decorated the gate happily with this new bond, hoping that soon every piece of spiked iron might be removed out of man’s way, together with those deep and adamantine chains that bind human souls to greed, cruelty and to all evil.

  Mr. Hayhoe sighed and leant back upon the soft grass.

  When he left his lodgings, he had put a book into his pocket—as he was used to do—wishing to think over a sermon when he went out, and a book may often be a useful help to encourage thought, as well as to quote from when the book is the Bible. The book that Mr. Hayhoe took from his pocket he supposed would do nearly as well; it was Northanger Abbey.

  He read for a little and then, allowing the book to slip into the grass beside him, he began to watch the birds.

  The birds were happy because the mild airs of spring made them so: Mr. Hayhoe was pleased too, because he had succeeded so easily in his mission that morning. He had certainly left his lodgings with a doubtful heart, little expecting any good to come of the attempted visit to West Dodder Hall, though he hoped that at least he would be replied to civilly, should he be bold enough to ask Lord Bullman for the gift of the Dodder living.

  In order to make himself look more respectable, Mr. Hayhoe had put on his best coat, leaving his wife, Priscilla, who remained at Shelton, to darn the old one, that was very much in need of a lady’s care.

  Before he left, he had preached a little homily to her, observing that it was God’s wish that a woman should rather sew than sorrow, “and though we may not be permitted,” he said, tenderly, “to see yet, for a little while, our child in Paradise, we may be allowed to live all our lives near to his grave in Dodder churchyard.”

  Mr. Hayhoe then strode out, more hopeful than he had been since their sorrow, leaving his wife busy about the threadbare coat.

  He had always known, he told himself—sitting contentedly upon the bank, that God’s ways are most curious. For, had Lord Bullman never sworn at the gate, he, Francis Hayhoe, might never have had the offer of Dodder. Did some good come to some one whenever Lord Bullman swore? If that were so, it would be lawful to pray that Lord Bullman might swear the oftener.

  Mr. Hayhoe smiled.

  As a matter of fact, benefits had rarely come to him as easily as the living of Dodder, though of course, even now, there was a chance that his lordship might change his mind about the gift.

  To ease his soul of this new fear, Mr. Hayhoe found his book again and began to read.

  III

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  * * *

  Mr. Hayhoe Hears Footsteps

  Mr. Hayhoe closed Northanger Abbey and lit his pipe, for he would sometimes smoke a little, as well as read, when he was out by himself.

  He watched for a while the smoke of his pipe rise in little rings, that grew larger until they vanished altogether, and then, as he looked down into the lane, his attention was caught by the queer behaviour of a little mouse. This small creature, Mr. Hayhoe saw, was most dreadfully frightened, but why this was so he did not know. The mouse trembled with fear, and seemed so utterly overcome with a strange dread that it could not even run into the grass for safety.

  Mr. Hayhoe watched the mouse. Perhaps the little creature had gone mad. He did not think so. What it appeared to suffer from was terror. Mr. Hayhoe wondered what ailed the thing. No cat was after it; evidently its nest was just under the bank; what was there to frighten it?

  The mouse ran to Mr. Hayhoe, looking up at him piteously—as though he were a god who could save. Mr. Hayhoe took the mouse in his hand. It was plump and well. Why was it trembling?

  Mr. Hayhoe gently put the mouse down upon the bank near to its hole. Its body twitched for a moment. It turned over, and was dead. Mr. Hayhoe shivered. He looked up into the sky.

  The day was become very still; not a breath of wind stirred the new elder leaves in the lane. Like the mouse, all nature seemed too frightened to move. Though there was no sound, an invisible fear moved and crept in the lane. What was it? The trees listened and waited.

  Mr. Hayhoe put his book into his pocket. In doing so, he noticed that his hand shook. He looked upward, wondering where the cloud had come from that so suddenly had dimmed the sun. Only a few moments before the sky had been quite clear, and now all had darkened as if a pall had fallen upon the land.

  Mr. Hayhoe took out his watch. His hand shook so that he could hardly hold it—the watch was stopped.

  A hare came up the lane, looking as frightened as the mouse. She paid no heed to Mr. Hayhoe and stopped within a yard of him, pricked up her ears, and listened. She stood upon her hind legs, with her fore-paws bent under her. She waited for a sound to come. She heard something, scattered the dust of the lane in her hurry to get away, and fled.

  What had happened to the creatures, wondered Mr. Hayhoe. Some unseen fear had killed the mouse and made the hare scamper off. What was it that frightened them?

  Mr. Hayhoe heard the sound of soft wings. Near to him, upon an elm-tree bough, sat a large owl. The owl blinked its eyes, and peered in the direction of Dodder. It cast out from its stomach a little ball of fur—the undigested portion of a rat—and blinked again.

  Mr. Hayhoe shivered. He supposed that a spring thunderstorm must be coming up, and yet he heard no thunder.

  As a good husband should do, whenever he is surprised at what goes on about him, Mr. Hayhoe thought of his wife. He remembered, with pleasure, that she had promised, when the coat was done, to meet him in the Dodder churchyard, so that they might eat their lunch together, near to the child’s grave. But now there would be no need to do that. They could get the key of the Vicarage from old Huddy, the caretaker, for that was their own house now, and lunch in the empty dining-room, sitting on a window-sill. Then they could walk as proudly as they liked over their new house, and choose a bedroom for themselves—the bedroom that overlooked the churchyard.

  Though thinking about his wife pleased him, as it always did, Mr. Hayhoe still noticed that he trembled. He felt his forehead; it was covered with cold sweat. Surely he was not going to die, like the mouse! He hoped not. But why did he feel so cold? There was nothing in the weather to account for that. Even though the sun was dimmed, the air was warm. Perhaps, he
thought, he had better soon leave that bank and go home. He liked a grassy place, but his wife had told him that a bank is not always safe—ants or snakes might be hiding, to sting a good man. He knew he was rather too fond of staying about in country lanes.

  Mr. Hayhoe was upon the point of rising, when he distinctly heard the sounds of footsteps approaching from the direction of Dodder.

  Near to where he was resting, the lane turned a corner, so that whoever was coming would have to arrive very near before being seen.

  The sound of a human footfall, though it may be approaching, is not likely to be much heeded until it comes very near. Though Mr. Hayhoe heard the sound, he did not regard it, except so far as it made him remain where he was for a little longer, wishing to give the footsteps a chance to go into some field or other and disappear.

  He wished to think, too—before he closed the gate, that deserved his gratitude for its boldness in checking Lord Bullman, and its kindness in allowing him to open it—of the pleasure that his tidings would give to his wife, Priscilla. Since her child had died, Priscilla had wished, more, he knew, than she liked to say, to live near to where her little boy had been laid to rest.

  Priscilla had grieved very deeply at his death, and had only kept her interest in living because of a strange hope that, somehow or other, had got into her head. This was nothing less than the wish to meet Death himself.

  She would often—and Mr. Hayhoe, knowing how shrewdly her sorrow pinched her heart, listened to her wild talk—tell her husband how she expected Death to look, if she did meet him.

  “If I search carefully,” she said, “and gaze closely upon every stranger that I meet, I shall be sure to know him when he comes to Dodder.”

  “He will come to Dodder,” said Mr. Hayhoe sadly, “one time or another.”

  “And perhaps you may be the first to welcome him,” said Priscilla.

  “Then,” said Mr. Hayhoe, with a smile, “I shall be the first to see our little Tommy.”

  IV

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  * * *

  Mr. Hayhoe Makes a New Friend

  Again Mr. Hayhoe heard the same footsteps; they were coming nearer. He thought he knew the sound of the steps, and tried to recollect when he had heard them.

  He soon remembered, for the hour during which he had last listened to them was not one that he was likely to forget. Not many weeks had passed since that unhappy time.

  Dr. Jacob had shaken his head over Tommy, and had spoken rudely to every one. Whenever a child died, Dr. Jacob believed the mother was to blame—or else the father, and he always told them so. He liked children, but hated fathers and mothers, all of whom he believed to be murderers.

  Dr. Jacob had just left, after informing Mr. Hayhoe that he had only himself to blame for allowing Tommy to catch measles, and Priscilla was gone to lie down for a few moments, for—worn out with constant nursing—she had hardly closed her eyes for five nights and days.

  Mr. Hayhoe waited beside the child’s cot. The moments passed slowly. He thought the child slept.

  Soon he saw a change come over the boy’s face. It was become expressionless; a pallor was there instead of a flush. The breathing was hardly noticeable. Mr. Hayhoe took up his hand. The eyes saw nothing. Tommy’s week of sickness was nearly at an end.

  When a man dies, Nature rages in anger: when a child’s life ends, she broods silently. Perhaps she is afraid of Dr. Jacob. Anyhow, the night when Tommy died was an unusually mild and quiet night for February. The window of the little room in Shelton was wide open, and the air came in, sweet and kindly.

  All the other village children were recovered of the complaint, and at that time of the night were all sound asleep. It was hard for Mr. Hayhoe to believe that his alone was the one to be taken. Was it all his fault? Dr. Jacob had told him that it was, and, anyhow, he would have to bear the loss.

  In the morning, just before nine, he would hear all the noise and clatter of the children going to school. His child would remain in bed, lying very still.

  “Every parent who lets a child die should be hanged,” Dr. Jacob had observed. But who was it who had sent this trouble so suddenly upon them? What had they done to be so punished?

  Mr. Hayhoe bent down over the hand that he held, and kissed it.

  The hand was cold.

  He heard steps in the lane. Not hurried steps, nor the gay going of a midnight reveller, nor were they the heavy slumbering steps of a labourer, returning late home. These steps were not like that: they were the sure and certain steps of one who has something important to do.

  The footsteps came up the village street; they neither paused nor loitered, they came on. When they arrived at the cottage where the Hayhoes lodged, they stopped. Some one opened the garden gate and came to the door.

  Mr. Hayhoe looked at the child. He gave a low groan, a gasp. He was dead.…

  The footfalls that Mr. Hayhoe heard in the lane were the same as the ones he had heard when his son died.

  It was not an ordinary field-labourer who had visited that Shelton cottage, “but perhaps,” thought Mr. Hayhoe, “it might have been a gentleman’s gardener, who had called with a gift of seed potatoes for his landlord, Mr. Thomas.”

  Whoever it was, Mr. Hayhoe could not be mistaken in the footsteps, that were now coming very near.

  Mr. Hayhoe leant back in the hedge: the stranger turned the corner of the lane, and came into sight. He walked very slowly, keeping his eyes upon the ground, as though searching for something that he had lost.

  The man was so busy searching that he did not notice Mr. Hayhoe. He stopped in the lane, and stood for a while considering deeply. Evidently he was trying to recollect whether it was really in that place, or elsewhere, that he had lost what he now sought. The stranger seemed to Mr. Hayhoe to be no one in particular—just an ordinary man.

  Perhaps a tradesman? His clothes, though they did not fit him very well, were quite new, and the man’s general appearance was tidy and respectable. He was certainly no idler; he had a busy look that indicated that, only a little while ago, he had had work to do.

  The new-comer now turned and looked down the lane, the way he had come. He rubbed his forehead slowly with three fingers, and remained thoughtful.

  Mr. Hayhoe never met a man but he looked well at him—and that for a reason—because in every human creature that he beheld he saw two goings—a falling to Hell or a rising to Salvation. Whenever he saw a new face, the thought always came to him, “’Tis a soul to be saved or damned.”

  And a human soul, Mr. Hayhoe would remind himself, should be kindly led to Heaven.

  Mr. Hayhoe hoped that the new-comer, if he mentioned religion to him, would take his words in a friendly way—some of them didn’t. Once or twice, when he had spoken of damnation to a farmer—Mr. Mere—he had been recommended to go to Hell himself. Upon another occasion, Mr. Hayhoe had happened to name the Holy Ghost—a person of the Trinity that is hardly noticed now-a-days—to John Card of Dodder, and received as a reply that his wife “had never yet tried to make a cake out of that self-riser.” Mr. Hayhoe hoped to do good to all whom he met. He watched the man, who was beginning to pry about in the hedge on the other side of the way, and to peer under the brambles.

  “He may have lost his tobacco pouch,” thought Mr. Hayhoe, who remembered having once walked ten miles to regain his pipe, having left it, one summer day, upon the seashore.

  Mr. Hayhoe examined the appearance of the stranger, who had not yet noticed him.

  The man was of medium height; he wore a small beard and moustache, already turned grey. Mr. Hayhoe could not be sure of the colour of his eyes, though when they looked his way, they shone and sparkled, then turned to darkness. He supposed them to be blue.

  Although his eyes were interesting, there was nothing otherwise strange about him; he was a mere common appearance—a man neither old no
r young, and certainly not one who would attract any attention from others.

  It is always a pleasant diversion of an idle moment, to wonder what a person, whom one meets out a-walking in the country, does. Sometimes the profession of a man can be known at once by his gait. There is no mistaking the squire. His lordly manner of walking is a proof of the fine quality of his blood. Others are not so easy to know, and, though a country labourer is likely to show what he is, yet there are other traders, about whose business there may well be a doubt. Mr. Weston, the wine merchant, has been taken for a colporteur, and Jove for a swan.

  Mr. Hayhoe considered the stranger. He might, he fancied, have come thereabouts to sell something, or else to measure a piece of land, or discover in a church register the date of a funeral. Was he a journeyman stone-mason, or an insurance agent, or was he collecting orders for a new patent medicine, a certain cure for all the ills of mankind?

  The man had by no means the look of a person who travels for pleasure. Evidently he had some duty to perform, some occupation that brought him into close contact with his fellow men.

  He appeared to have, too, besides other qualities—as far as Mr. Hayhoe could judge—a social side to his character. He looked as though he would not be ill at ease in any company, and as if he might enter the palace of a king without being ashamed.

  The two were alone in the lane: the hunt was gone far away. The hounds had followed the first fox, never expecting that much good would come of that journey into an earth under a great rock, and then had been called off, and all the following was gone to Madder Hill, where they hoped to find again.