“Now I’m here I must go and see Aunt Maria,” he thought. “If I don’t she might be hurt if she hears I was at the lodge. But I must hurry or I’ll be late for supper, and that will hurt Daphne.”
He toiled up the steep drive through the beeches as quickly as he could, but just opposite the archway with the escutcheon of his family he stopped, suddenly remembering that the man he had met on the road this morning had drunk most of the brandy. Fool! Ass! Bungling ass! Criminal fool! Shame seized him, abysmal bitterness and shame. He had little sense of proportion and all his failings ranked as crimes in his eyes. He turned and ran down the hill again, but before he reached old Bob’s door he stopped, halted miserably and uncertainly and then turned back up the hill once more. For what was the good? How could he explain what had happened? It was such a mixed up story. The fool that he was could never get it disentangled. If he tried he would probably only hurt the poor old chap still further, better let it be. What a bad priest he was. Priests needed wisdom and tact and he had neither. Such bungling as his could lose a soul. The unspeakably precious soul. He should never have been a priest. He pulled his hair shirt about him and toiled on wretchedly up the hill. He should never have been a priest. Only God knew how many souls were lost because he was one. Only God knew.
Inside the lodge Bob was enjoying the best laugh he had had in weeks. Proper tootlish the vicar was. Left it about careless like, and someone had taken a nip. Just like Master John. His mind slipped suddenly back into the past and a happy old memory came to him. He stopped laughing and smiled with infinite tenderness. Yes, just like that, just the same. He remembered it as though it were yesterday.
It had been Bob’s birthday and John, seven or eight years old at the time, had saved up his pocket money and bought him a packet of cigarettes. But on his way through the kitchen garden to the stableyard to present them he had remembered that he had forgotten to give his kitten her milk, and had put the cigarettes under the rhubarb while he ran back to Tibby. A half-witted garden boy had been weeding in the garden at the time, and when a couple of hours later he suddenly remembered the cigarettes, fetched the packet and presented it to Bob, all had been filched but two. Poor little chap, how he had cried! Tootlish even then. But Bob had laughed and tweaked his hair and vowed that what was left was—what had been his phrase?—“worth more to me from you, Master John, than a box of cigars at five quid a box from the King of England himself.” That had comforted the little chap but he had not been able to laugh about it. Too tender-hearted. Always had been. Always the same.
The memory passed and he drank off what was left of the brandy, laughing again. “Done me a power of good,” he chuckled, looking at the empty flask. “That’s Master John all over. He don’t change. Always the same.”
He became silent, thinking back over the years once more. “Always the same.” The countryman has no higher praise to bestow. “He’ll see me out, thank God,” thought old Bob, and comforting himself with that thought and the warmth of the brandy he presently fell asleep.
3
Coming in the dusk round to the front of the house John was surprised to see candlelight shining from the windows of the room Miss Wentworth still called “the dining parlor.” She usually had her supper very early and the dining parlor was not used as late as this unless she had visitors. John turned hastily away, for he hated visitors, either his own or other people’s. He was aware of inconsistency in loving souls and hating visitors, but the fact was that try as he might he found it hard to realize that the well-clothed body of a visitor was inhabited by an immortal soul. He just could not reconcile the two. His definition of a visitor was narrow. No one lacking this world’s goods was a visitor. No one sick, or in any trouble or perplexity, was a visitor, nor anyone below a certain social level. Nothing male was a visitor, nothing holy or humble or unattractive, nothing very old and nothing very young. In fact what it boiled down to was that he was terrified of all well-born, well-dressed, prosperous, good-looking, self assured females between the ages of twenty and seventy-five. Flying from such a lady, or unable to fly and standing desperately at bay, he made an act of faith that she had a soul and committed the same and his plight into the hands of his Maker, recalling (if calamity befell him in his own home) 1 Peter Chapter IV Verse 7. “Use hospitality one to another without grudging.” Though he did not really grudge hospitality to such ladies, it was just that he was not clever with a teacup and he never could think what to say to them. What did such females talk about? Whatever it was the subject seemed inexhaustible for they never stopped at all, except when he stood before them with his teacup rattling in its saucer, when after a few feeble trickles the fountain seemed to dry up at the source.
“And yet you’re a Wentworth,” Aunt Maria had said once, in his undergraduate days, when this particular inhibition had just made itself most distressingly apparent. “Our family have always had such easy manners. Your poor father could be charming even in his cups, indeed in the earlier days more charming in them than out, and your lovely mother had manners to match her pretty face. What’s the matter with you?”
“Sobriety and my face,” John had replied gloomily. And there had been truth in his reply. Soberness went right through to the marrow of him and the sparkle of easy enjoyment was something he had never known, and as the one blot on the beauty of a good-looking family his beak-nosed face had always confronted him from every mirror with a pained reproach.
“Now who’s there with Aunt Maria?” he wondered, escaping back again round the corner of the house. “Lady Robinson? Mrs. Anstruther? That frightful woman with the eyelashes?” Miss Wentworth did not often have visitors in these days of family decay but there were still those who had known her in her younger days, and those who came to see her out of motives of curiosity, or to cultivate a name that was still a “county” name. And whatever their motives in coming (and she always knew their motives) she received them as she had always received all who came, with that keen and gracious benevolence that put all she had and was at their disposal. Remembering her manners as a hostess John halted, and holding to the drainpipe that traversed the height of the house at this point fought out one of his ludicrous battles, harder than usual today because he had been so shaken by his failure with old Bob.
“It’s my house, whose honor she upholds. It would have fallen into ruin long ago but for her, and the way the world is going we shan’t have it much longer. Yet it’s still my house and she entertains in it for me. It’s my guest in there. ‘Use hospitality without grudging.’ The house has never grudged.” He was a figure of fun, holding to the drainpipe; but his mind was suddenly alight with the remembrance of the lavishness of this house through the centuries. From Belmaray blood and treasure had drained away for the king. The poor had always been fed here, fugitives sheltered, the sorrowful comforted and prisoners courteously entertained. Unconsciously he lifted his hand from the drainpipe, a modern accretion, and laid it against the old wall as a man might lay his hand against his horse’s flank. In this sort of house hospitality meant more than in some places. Hospitality, here, was as sacramental as his going to old Bob. Prayer, that he had always thought of as oblation, was also hospitality. You offered your being for another and you also took another into your being. And with a house like this one’s being was scarcely separable from the being of one’s house, and so he must go in and see who was there.
“And all this nonsense,” he thought, as he once more made his way towards the front door, “because I am so very much alarmed by that Mrs. Whats-her-name with the eyelashes. Daphne says she has them sewn on, but is such a thing possible? It must be most painful. It’s wonderful how courageous women are in the pursuit of beauty. One should admire them for it. I wish I could. The wind is getting up and I’m going to sneeze. Now what is that knot in my handkerchief for? Was it to order the coke? Well, I didn’t.”
A gust of wind buffeted him and its freshness put new life into him. As h
e walked along the terrace and in through the porch to the passage his step rang so firmly on the stone flags that Miss Wentworth, used to his shambling hesitating mode of progress, did not recognize it. For a moment she listened, startled, visited by the odd conviction that it was some sailor or soldier host of this house home from war; Francis, the builder of the house, who had chosen the device of helmet and broken sword as an act of homage to his queen Elizabeth, home from the Armada, Rupert Wentworth home from Naseby or her brother Richard back from South Africa. Then she heard John’s familiar explosive sneeze (his catarrh must be bad today) and smiled at herself. “I’m too much alone,” she thought. “I keep the dead too much with me in the wrong way, as they used to be and not as they are. I can no longer serve them as they used to be, only as they are.” She smiled at the young man opposite her. It was her belief that one could serve the dead as they are only in emulation of their essential greatness. That lived in another world and by God’s grace could still live in this if one willed it so, for one had the seed of it in oneself. Their life must be the richer if one could bring the seed to harvest. Richard had been if possible even more hospitable than she was herself. His guests had always been the objects of his reverence. She could see him now, his huge grey head bent, listening with absorbed attention to the vapid remarks of some very dull young man who was their guest. Michael’s remarks were not vapid but would she have accepted him in quite this headlong fashion if she had not seen him first standing by Francis Wentworth’s sundial that Richard had loved so much?
The door opened and John came in and her reaction to the fact of him was what it always was, mingled affection, pity and exasperation, exasperation predominating. He was a Wentworth, and a good man as nearly all the Wentworths had been, his childhood had been pitiable and she had not done all she might at the time to make it less so, and for that she reproached herself now, but it tried her sorely that such a poor weak creature should be the only man left to them, and should have no sons. . . Though for that she blamed Daphne, who had made only three efforts and then desisted for reasons of finance. Finance! In her young day a little thing like finance never deterred a woman from carrying out the duties of her state. . . Now she must stop thinking about Daphne, an irritating subject, and attend to the matter in hand.
“Michael, I think you’ve already met my great-nephew,” she said. “John, Mr. Stone is paying me a visit.”
Michael flushed and got to his feet. In old days he could have carried it off; now, in this house, he could not. “Mr. Wentworth,” he said, “when I talked to you this morning about wanting to come here it was only the joke you took it to be. Please believe me. Then, later, I thought I’d try it on. I don’t really quite know what happened, but anyway I’m staying here for a bit and I mean to make myself useful. If you’ve summed me up as no good you’re quite right, but while I am here I am to be trusted. Please believe that.”
All his natural ease had deserted him and he stammered over the spate of words in a ridiculous fashion. John, completely taken aback, merely stood and gaped, his mouth open. They looked like a couple of embarrassed schoolboys and Miss Wentworth had no patience with either of them. “Now sit down, both of you,” she said in annoyance, “and eat this broccoli gratin before it gets cold. John, take a plate for yourself and one for the dog off the dresser, and a knife and fork out of that drawer. Michael has fetched a bottle of white wine from the cellar for us to drink with our meal. I know you don’t like it but it is a very long time since I have entertained a guest in the house and I am enjoying the occasion. You can have some of that revolting orangeade. I opened it four months ago when the children came. Michael, where did you put Walsingham’s food?”
John came out of his bewilderment and was once more the man whose step had rung out so firmly in the flagged passage. He smiled at Michael and the smile transformed his woeful countenance almost into the roundness of delight which Michael remembered from a childhood’s picture of the moon.
Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such sport
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
How he had loved that moon, not itself enjoying the pleasure of motion but so delighted by the movement of others. John’s face had rounded out in just the same way and shone with his pleasure. Michael smiled back. He had not realized before how poignant can be the pleasure of a host.
“That unfortunate dog,” prompted Miss Wentworth. Walsingham thumped his tail appealingly and both men sprang to their allotted tasks. Michael severed an appropriate portion from the large glutinous mass of offal which he had brought from the larder on a Wedgwood dish, and John took down a couple of Crown Derby plates of crimson and gold from the dresser for himself and Walsingham. A priceless collection of plates was displayed on the old dresser of black oak and Walsingham was fed off a different one each day, to keep them all washed and clean. John remembered, as he took down his own plate, that Daphne suspected that Aunt Maria did not always remember to wash Walsingham’s plate, and that it was replaced on the dresser cleaned and polished merely by the moisture and friction of Walsingham’s tongue. But he felt no revulsion, for his love of the creatures was entirely Franciscan.
Walsingham fed, the three of them sat down together and Miss Wentworth, who for some reason or other had replaced her hat, helped the broccoli gratin out of a Staffordshire dish while John poured the wine from the cobwebbed old bottle into exquisite goblets of amber-colored glass. There were daffodils in a Spode mug. There was a large brown loaf on the table in a pewter dish, biscuits in a posset pot of Bristol Delft, apples in a bowl of white jade and a strong brew of black coffee in a Lowestoft jug.
In spite of the high tea at the Wheatsheaf Michael found he was hungry again. For a long time now he had not had enough food. Not that there had been a shortage of it but it had been so revolting that he had not been able to get it down. Those ghastly suppers of dark sticky cocoa, like sickly mud, and the great slabs of doughy bread and margarine on the tin plate; and then when they had given it to you the re-locking of the cell door, and the long night before you when you couldn’t read and the man in the next cell began to shout and curse. He lifted his glass to taste the wine but his hand was shaking so much that he put it down. He must not, his first meal here, spill anything. He waited a moment and tried again. His host and hostess were talking quietly to each other and were apparently oblivious of him, but he knew their lack of notice was in reality a most delicate courtesy. At exactly the right moment Miss Wentworth turned to him and began to tell him about Josephine’s last litter, and John refilled his glass, his gentle smile entirely masking his conviction that alcohol of any sort had the most nauseating smell of anything in the world except onions and silage. Should he have refilled Michael’s glass? The instinct of a host had been irrepressible.
“Anyone would think I was a piece of Bristol Delft myself,” thought Michael, “the way they and the house and the dog behave to me. They must be all mad together. But this is perfection, like one of those little worlds that I used to escape to. Was there ever before a room like this, or a meal like this, or a dog like that, or such an oddly assorted trio as we three? It’s all entirely crazy and entirely fitting and the best thing that ever happened to me.”
He was able to take it all in now; the low room, raftered and panelled, the windows, curtained in faded and torn red damask, closed against the rising storm, the fire of logs burning in the wide hearth. The table, like the dresser, was polished black oak, and the old silver candlesticks gleamed upon it. There was no electric light but the six blue-hearted, crocus-colored candle flames gave to the panelled walls a lustre no other light could have given them. The high-backed chairs had tapestry seats embroidered with hunting scenes in faded colors. The Persian rug on the floor had holes in it, and where there were hollows in the stone flags underneath they had been padded
with newspapers.
Walsingham, his meal finished, was digesting it before the hearth. He was a spaniel. He was an aristocrat and was still handsome, though his rusty back was so broad and flat that one might have used it for a table. His black head was domed and full of wisdom, his ears long and pendulous upon each side of the long grave face, which had a pencil of white running down from between the white eyebrows to the tip of the nose. His chest was covered with curly white fur that was yellowing with age. He lay with his long forepaws extended and his chin laid upon them. His eyes, fixed on John, were dark wells of sadness, but Michael thought it was a reflected sadness that mirrored unconsciously the mind of his master and the age of the house. Walsingham himself, replete and warm, was content.
When all things in a microcosm of a world are entirely fitting each holds within it some reflection of the rest. The light of the candles shone in the darkness of the panelling, the daffodils looked down at their own beauty mirrored below them on the polished table, the shadows of the flames on the hearth moved among the rafters and the tranquility that was now in Michael’s heart was not his own. He was aware of its source and lifted his glass to Miss Wentworth. He wished he could lift his glass to every lovely thing about him for each, he felt, was somehow in him at this moment, and he in them. This then was what one meant when one described any coming together as fitting. It meant the union of things and people in a harmony like that of music; take away one note and the symphony was no longer a perfect thing. In this particular place, at this particular moment, the removal of even the mustard pot would have seemed to him a disaster.
The meal progressed in contented peacefulness, spiced with laughter. There are many ways of being a good hostess and Miss Wentworth’s way was that of the enlargement of her orbit. She did not so much referee her guests as describe her own charmed circle round them and little could come within the radius of her circle without becoming what the French call en rapport. And few people could be so dull as not to sparkle with some reflection of her own delightful humor. Safe from mockery or misunderstanding within the circle one was surprised to find oneself possessed of so much wit. “She is a great woman,” thought Michael, “the greatest I have known.”
The Rosemary Tree Page 13