A Bachelor's Comedy

Then Dick Stamford came towards them with his mother, and Elizabeth slipped her arm through that of the elder woman with her little air of reposeful tenderness which sat almost oddly on a young girl. She had that sort of kindness in her ways which most girls only learn from their first baby, and her voice held deep notes which caught the heart every now and then, breaking her light chatter like a stone in a narrow stream.

“You’ll stay tea, Elizabeth, and then Dick shall take you home,” said Mrs. Stamford.

“I’m awfully sorry, but I must have the cart round in half an hour. Mamma’s back – ” apologised Elizabeth.

So mamma’s back was not only a convenience to herself, personally.

Then Andy said good-bye, and Mrs. Stamford, leaving Dick and Elizabeth alone, strolled down the drive with her other guest.

“You will find Gaythorpe very quiet,” said Mrs. Stamford at the gate, obviously thinking of something else, and yet lingering.

Andy glanced back at it all, and a sudden vivid picture of the tumult of things warring beyond this quiet place struck across his mind.

“This seems – ” He sought a way to say it, but none came. “This does seem quiet.” He tried again. “Seems as if it had been lived in easily for ages.”

“Um. Well, people have no leisure to live now; they’ve only time to make a living,” said Mrs. Stamford absently. Then she said what she had been meaning to say all down the drive. “My son is a great deal alone here in the evenings. More alone than is good for him. I shall be grateful if you will come in when you can and have a game of billiards. You play, don’t you?”

“Oh yes – we had a couple of tables at the Men’s Institute in my last parish. I shall be very pleased to come,” said Andy.

So he went away down the road, feeling that pleasant as the world had been that morning early, it was immensely more delightful now.

Two urchins watched him go up the road, then squashed disreputable hats down on their brows and began to imitate his professional stride which he had unconsciously copied on first arrival in London from the senior curate.

“Parson Andy walks like this! Parson Andy walks like this!” they chanted together under their breath, stepping down the road behind him.

For by this abbreviation was the Reverend Andrew Deane already known to his parishioners. It was inevitable, of course, but as yet he remained in blissful ignorance of the fact, and only the night before had secretly burned a satin tie-case on which a tactless cousin had embroidered ‘Andy.’

As he went across the churchyard, taking the short-cut home, he glanced once more at the gravestone of Gulielmus; and having glanced, he stood a moment, thinking.

It was most probable that this dead brother of his had been entertained by a Stamford of Gaythorpe Manor, just as he had been. Will Ford – who was now Gulielmus – had no doubt walked back by the very path beside which his body now lay sleeping.

What had he felt? Why had he never married? How had life gone with him?

Andy was standing very still in the warm quiet of the spring afternoon when suddenly a sense of jolly-good-fellowship and kindness seemed to fill his spirit – as if some comrade had passed that way and shouted a merry greeting. There was nothing strange or abnormal about it, either then or in the ineffaceable after-remembrance of it.

Only – Andy had felt on his first journey to Gaythorpe as if, across the centuries, he greeted a brother; now he felt as if, across the centuries, a brother greeted him.

CHAPTER V

Andy sat in his study, endeavouring to prepare a Sunday-morning sermon that should justify the high opinion of his preaching which had led Mr. Stamford to present him to the living of Gaythorpe.

A light rain fell outside and a scent of the honeysuckle – it being now June – came through the open window; but Andy was not yet aware that every wayside flower preaches the finest sermon man can preach to man, and says, more convincingly than any parson ever could, ‘God so loved the world.’

The new Vicar, therefore, had taken in turn such topics as the Origin of Evil and the Reason for Free Will, handling them with a courage perfectly remarkable when you consider how the saints of all ages have hesitated afraid before them. This morning, however, having settled these questions, he cast about him for something else which should be at once striking and profound, and it was some time before he noticed a gradually increasing noise in the other part of the house.

Even when he did become aware of it he brushed it aside from his mind and went peacefully on, reconciling the doctrine of evolution with the second chapter of Genesis. At last, however, the study door was burst open in a manner that even a poet could not ignore, and Mrs. Jebb paused, inarticulate with some unknown emotion, upon the threshold.

“Not the boiler burst again?” exclaimed Andy, who had already learned some of the trials of a housekeeper.

Mrs. Jebb swallowed, blinked, and demanded —

“Did you give that – female – permission to clean my furniture?”

It was a long way from the dawn of the world to Mrs. Simpson’s sideboard, and for the moment Andy felt nonplussed; then he remembered.

“Oh, she’s turned up to polish it, poor woman, has she?” he said, with an air of relief. “I told her she could. It’s all right.”

Mrs. Jebb fluttered forward, wavering a little like a butterfly that has imbibed too much nectar, and she alighted with one trembling hand upon the writing-table edge.

“It is not all right,” she said. “It is all very, very wrong, Mr. Deane. Poor, I am, reduced to domestic service, I may be – but I will retire to the workhouse before I will allow a female from outside to polish furniture in this house while I remain your lady-cook-housekeeper.”

“Really, Mrs. Jebb – I’m sure I never – ” began Andy.

“What will the parish say?” went on Mrs. Jebb, growing still more agitated as she saw Andy’s concerned face. “What will the world say? Naturally that I’m not fit to be your housekeeper, if Mrs. Simpson has to come with dusters and furniture polish and an – an infant, to clean the Vicar’s dining-room sideboard.”

A dragging sound as of something being pulled reluctantly along, a bump, a yell, and Mrs. Simpson’s voice in the rear, shrill with motherly indignation.

“How dare you call this dear child names?” she cried, replying to the limitless opprobrium which lay behind the word ‘infant’ rather than to the term itself.

“Come, come,” said Andy, rising. “He is an infant all right, aren’t you, Jimmy? Not twenty-one yet, ha-ha! There is nothing unpleasant in the word ‘infant.’ ”

He smiled ingratiatingly from one angry face to the other, trying to carry it off easily, but in truth as frightened as a decent young man always is when he stands between two quarrelling women.

“There’s a way,” replied Mrs. Simpson slowly, glaring with her prominent light-blue eyes at Mrs. Jebb – “there’s a way of saying ‘woman’ that implies things I wouldn’t sully my lips by uttering. And yet ‘woman’ isn’t a bad word.”

“It all comes to this,” panted Mrs. Jebb. “Is Mrs. Simpson to walk in without a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave and start polishing your sideboard, or is she not?”

“It’s her sideboard,” said Andy weakly. “But I’m sure you’ll look after it all right, if Mrs. Simpson doesn’t mind.”

“Why should she mind? And if it’s hers, why doesn’t she take it away? Dozens of times I’ve said that the hideous thing completely ruins your dining-room, and I’m sure – ”

“Now,” interposed Mrs. Simpson, who grew, quiet as her opponent grew noisy, “now I shall say what I’d meant to keep to myself, because Mrs. Jebb has her living to earn, poor thing, and I wouldn’t do her an injury. That sideboard in its present state, Mr. Deane, is a disgrace. So is your beautiful table. So is all the furniture.”

“It only wants dusting. We’ve not had time this morning,” quavered Mrs. Jebb, retreating before this onslaught.

“It wants what you’ll never give it,” said Mrs. Simpson, hauling Jimmy away, and looking back for a last shot. “It wants elbow-grease.”

“Look here,” said Andy, pulling himself together. “I – er – really – discord in a clergyman’s house is what I greatly dislike. Mrs. Jebb, I told Mrs. Simpson she could come and clean her sideboard. Mrs. Simpson, you must put yourself in Mrs. Jebb’s place and consider if your feelings might not have been hurt under similar circumstances. This really won’t do.”

He threw his head back, settled his chin in his collar, and looked as nearly like the senior curate before a refractory Bible Class as nature permitted.

Mrs. Simpson paused.

“I came peacefully enough,” she said, “and I was going to tell Mrs. Jebb, only she went off at such a tangent, that I did ring five times. But I couldn’t make any one hear, so I walked into the hall. Then I saw the dining-room door open, and nobody there, so I went in there and started polishing. I’ll own it may have looked funny, but she shouldn’t have spoken as she did.”

“There! That makes all the difference. Doesn’t it, Mrs. Jebb?” said Andy eagerly, forgetting to be dignified. “I say, shake hands and make it up. Jimmy, shake hands with Mrs. Jebb to start with.”

“Won’t. Hate her. She’s got yeller teef like old Towzer.”