The Nebuly Coat

He was ruffled by such want of attention, and when there came at last a knock at his door, was quite prepared to expostulate with his landlady on her remissness. As she entered the room, he began, without turning from his drawings:

“Never knock, please, when you answer the bell; but I do wish you—”

Here he broke off, for on looking up he found he was speaking, not to the elder Miss Joliffe, but to her niece Anastasia. The girl was graceful, as he had seen the evening before, and again he noticed the peculiar fineness of her waving brown hair. His annoyance had instantaneously vanished, and he experienced to the full the embarrassment natural to a sensitive mind on finding a servant’s rôle played by a lady, for that Anastasia Joliffe was a lady he had no doubt at all. Instead of blaming her, he seemed to be himself in fault for having somehow brought about an anomalous position.

She stood with downcast eyes, but his chiding tone had brought a slight flush to her cheeks, and this flush began a discomfiture for Westray, that was turned into a rout when she spoke.

“I am very sorry, I am afraid I have kept you waiting. I did not hear your bell at first, because I was busy in another part of the house, and then I thought my aunt had answered it. I did not know she was out.”

It was a low, sweet voice, with more of weariness in it than of humility. If he chose to blame her, she was ready to take the blame; but it was Westray who now stammered some incoherent apologies. Would she kindly tell Miss Joliffe that he would be in for dinner at one o’clock, and that he was quite indifferent as to what was provided for him. The girl showed some relief at his blundering courtesy, and it was not till she had left the room that Westray recollected that he had heard that Cullerne was celebrated for its red mullet; he had meant to order red mullet for dinner. Now that he was mortifying the flesh by drinking only water, he was proportionately particular to please his appetite in eating. Yet he was not sorry that he had forgotten the fish; it would surely have been a bathos to discuss the properties and application of red mullet with a young lady who found herself in so tragically lowly a position.

After Westray had set out for the church, Anastasia Joliffe went back to Mr Sharnall’s room, for it was she who had been playing the violin. The organist sat at the piano, drumming chords in an impatient and irritated way.

“Well,” he said, without looking at her as she came in—“well, what does my lord want with my lady? What has he made you run up to the top of the house for now? I wish I could wring his neck for him. Here we are out of breath, as usual, and our hands shaking; we shan’t be able to play even as well as we did before, and that isn’t saying much. Why,” he cried, as he looked at her, “you’re as red as a turkey-cock. I believe he’s been making love to you.”

“Mr Sharnall,” she retorted quickly, “if you say those things I will never come to your room again. I hate you when you speak like that, and fancy you are not yourself.”

She took her violin, and putting it under her arm, plucked arpeggi sharply.

“There,” he said, “don’t take all I say so seriously; it is only because I am out of health and out of temper. Forgive me, child; I know well enough that there’ll be no lovemaking with you till the right man comes, and I hope he never will come, Anastasia—I hope he never will.”

She did not accept or refuse his excuses, but tuned a string that had gone down.

“Good heavens!” he said, as she walked to the music-stand to play; “can’t you hear the A’s as flat as a pancake?”

She tightened the string again without speaking, and began the movement in which they had been interrupted. But her thoughts were not with the music, and mistake followed mistake.

“What are you doing?” said the organist. “You’re worse than you were when we began five years ago. It’s mere waste of time for you to go on, and for me, too.”

Then he saw that she was crying in the bitterness of vexation, and swung round on his music-stool without getting up.

“Anstice, I didn’t mean it, dear. I didn’t mean to be such a brute. You are getting on well—well; and as for wasting my time, why, I haven’t got anything to do, nor anyone to teach except you, and you know I would slave all day and all night, too, if I could give you any pleasure by it. Don’t cry. Why are you crying?”

She laid the violin on the table, and sitting down in that rush-bottomed chair in which Westray had sat the night before, put her head between her hands and burst into tears.

“Oh,” she said between her sobs in a strange and uncontrolled voice—“oh, I am so miserable—everything is so miserable. There are father’s debts not paid, not even the undertaker’s bill paid for his funeral, and no money for anything, and poor Aunt Euphemia working herself to death. And now she says she will have to sell the little things we have in the house, and then when there is a chance of a decent lodger, a quiet, gentlemanly man, you go and abuse him, and say these rude things to me, because he rings the bell. How does he know aunt is out? how does he know she won’t let me answer the bell when she’s in? Of course, he thinks we have a servant, and then you make me so sad. I couldn’t sleep last night, because I knew you were drinking. I heard you when we went to bed playing trashy things that you hate except when you are not yourself. It makes me ill to think that you have been with us all these years, and been so kind to me, and now are come to this. Oh, do not do it! Surely we all are wretched enough, without your adding this to our wretchedness.”

He got up from the stool and took her hand.

“Don’t, Anstice—don’t! I broke myself of it before, and I will break myself again. It was a woman drove me to it then, and sent me down the hill, and now I didn’t know there was a living soul would care whether old Sharnall drank himself to death or not. If I could only think there was someone who cared; if I could only think you cared.”

“Of course I care”—and as she felt his hand tighten she drew her own lightly away—“of course we care—poor aunt and I—or she would care, if she knew, only she is so good she doesn’t guess. I hate to see those horrid glasses taken in after your supper. It used to be so different, and I loved to hear the ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Les Adieux’ going when the house was still.”

It is sad when man’s unhappiness veils from him the smiling face of nature. The promise of the early morning was maintained. The sky was of a translucent blue, broken with islands and continents of clouds, dazzling white like cotton-wool. A soft, warm breeze blew from the west, the birds sang merrily in every garden bush, and Cullerne was a town of gardens, where men could sit each under his own vine and fig-tree. The bees issued forth from their hives, and hummed with cheery droning chorus in the ivy-berries that covered the wall-tops with deep purple. The old vanes on the corner pinnacles of Saint Sepulchre’s tower shone as if they had been regilt. Great flocks of plovers flew wheeling over Cullerne marsh, and flashed with a blinking silver gleam as they changed their course suddenly. Even through the open window of the organist’s room fell a shaft of golden sunlight that lit up the peonies of the faded, threadbare carpet.

But inside beat two poor human hearts, one unhappy and one hopeless, and saw nothing of the gold vanes, or the purple ivy-berries, or the plovers, or the sunlight, and heard nothing of the birds or the bees.

“Yes, I will give it up,” said the organist, though not quite so enthusiastically as before; and as he moved closer to Anastasia Joliffe, she got up and left the room, laughing as she went out.

“I must get the potatoes peeled, or you will have none for dinner.”

Mr Westray, being afflicted neither with poverty nor age, but having a good digestion and entire confidence both in himself and in his prospects, could fully enjoy the beauty of the day. He walked this morning as a child of the light, forsaking the devious back-ways through which the organist had led him on the previous night, and choosing the main streets on his road to the church. He received this time a different impression of the town. The heavy rain had washed the pavements and roadway, and as he entered the Market Square he was struck with the cheerfulness of the prospect, and with the air of quiet prosperity which pervaded the place.

On two sides of the square the houses overhung the pavement, and formed an arcade supported on squat pillars of wood. Here were situated some of the best “establishments,” as their owners delighted to call them. Custance, the grocer; Rose and Storey, the drapers, who occupied the fronts of no less than three houses, and had besides a “department” round the corner “exclusively devoted to tailoring”; Lucy, the bookseller, who printed the Cullerne Examiner, and had published several of Canon Parkyn’s sermons, as well as a tractate by Dr Ennefer on the means adopted in Cullerne for the suppression of cholera during the recent outbreak; Calvin, the saddler; Miss Adcutt, of the toy-shop; and Prior, the chemist, who was also postmaster. In the middle of the third side stood the Blandamer Arms, with a long front of buff, low green blinds, and window-sashes grained to imitate oak. At the edge of the pavement before the inn were some stone mounting steps, and by them stood a tall white pole, on which swung the green and silver of the nebuly coat itself. On either side of the Blandamer Arms clustered a few more modern shops, which, possessing no arcade, had to be content with awnings of brown stuff with red stripes. One of these places of business was occupied by Mr Joliffe, the pork-butcher. He greeted Westray through the open window.

“Good-morning. About your work betimes, I see,” pointing to the roll of drawings which the architect carried under his arm. “It is a great privilege, this restoration to which you are called,” and here he shifted a chop into a more attractive position on the show-board—“and I trust blessing will attend your efforts. I often manage to snatch a few minutes from the whirl of business about mid-day myself, and seek a little quiet meditation in the church. If you are there then, I shall be glad to give you any help in my power. Meanwhile, we must both be busy with our own duties.”

He began to turn the handle of a sausage-machine, and Westray was glad to be quit of his pious words, and still more of his insufferable patronage.

Chapter Four

The north side of Cullerne Church, which faced the square, was still in shadow, but, as Westray stepped inside, he found the sunshine pouring through the south windows, and the whole building bathed in a flood of most mellow light. There are in England many churches larger than that of Saint Sepulchre, and fault has been found with its proportions, because the roof is lower than in some other conventual buildings of its size. Yet, for all this, it is doubtful whether architecture has ever produced a composition more truly dignified and imposing.

The nave was begun by Walter Le Bec in 1135, and has on either side an arcade of low, round-headed arches. These arches are divided from one another by cylindrical pillars, which have no incised ornamentation, as at Durham or Waltham or Lindisfarne, nor are masked with Perpendicular work, as in the nave of Winchester or in the choir of Gloucester, but rely for effect on severe plainness and great diameter. Above them is seen the dark and cavernous depth of the triforium, and higher yet the clerestory with minute and infrequent openings. Over all broods a stone vault, divided across and diagonally by the chevron-mouldings of heavy vaulting-ribs.

Westray sat down near the door, and was so engrossed in the study of the building and in the strange play of the shafts of sunlight across the massive stonework, that half an hour passed before he rose to walk up the church.

A solid stone screen separates the choir from the nave, making, as it were, two churches out of one; but as Westray opened the doors between them, he heard four voices calling to him, and, looking up, saw above his head the four tower arches. “The arch never sleeps,” cried one. “They have bound on us a burden too heavy to be borne,” answered another. “We never sleep,” said the third; and the fourth returned to the old refrain, “The arch never sleeps, never sleeps.”

As he considered them in the daylight, he wondered still more at their breadth and slenderness, and was still more surprised that his Chief had made so light of the settlement and of the ominous crack in the south wall.

The choir is a hundred and forty years later than the nave, ornate Early English, with a multiplication of lancet-windows which rich hood-mouldings group into twos and threes, and at the east end into seven. Here are innumerable shafts of dark-grey purbeck marble, elaborate capitals, deeply undercut foliage, and broad-winged angels bearing up the vaulting shafts on which rests the sharply-pointed roof.

The spiritual needs of Cullerne were amply served by this portion of the church alone, and, except at confirmations or on Militia Sunday, the congregation never overflowed into the nave. All who came to the minster found there full accommodation, and could indeed worship in much comfort; for in front of the canopied stalls erected by Abbot Vinnicomb in 1530 were ranged long rows of pews, in which green baize and brass nails, cushions and hassocks, and Prayer-Book boxes ministered to the devotion of the occupants. Anybody who aspired to social status in Cullerne rented one of these pews, but for as many as could not afford such luxury in their religion there were provided other seats of deal, which had, indeed, no baize or hassocks, nor any numbers on the doors, but were, for all that, exceedingly appropriate and commodious.

The clerk was dusting the stalls as the architect entered the choir, and made for him at once as the hawk swoops on its quarry. Westray did not attempt to escape his fate, and hoped, indeed, that from the old man’s garrulity he might glean some facts of interest about the building, which was to be the scene of his work for many months to come. But the clerk preferred to talk of people rather than of things, and the conversation drifted by easy stages to the family with whom Westray had taken up his abode.

The doubt as to the Joliffe ancestry, in the discussion of which Mr Sharnall had shown such commendable reticence, was not so sacred to the clerk. He rushed in where the organist had feared to tread, nor did Westray feel constrained to check him, but rather led the talk to Martin Joliffe and his imaginary claims.

“Lor’ bless you!” said the clerk, “I was a little boy myself when Martin’s mother runned away with the soldier, yet mind well how it was in everybody’s mouth. But folks in Cullerne like novelties; it’s all old-world talk now, and there ain’t one perhaps, beside me and Rector, could tell you that tale. Sophia Flannery her name was when Farmer Joliffe married her, and where he found her no one knew. He lived up at Wydcombe Farm, did Michael Joliffe, where his father lived afore him, and a gay one he was, and dressed in yellow breeches and a blue waistcoat all his time. Well, one day he gave out he was to be married, and came into Cullerne, and there was Sophia waiting for him at the Blandamer Arms, and they were married in this very church. She had a three-year-old boy with her then, and put about she was a widow, though there were many who thought she couldn’t show her marriage lines if she’d been asked for them. But p’raps Farmer Joliffe never asked to see ’em, or p’raps he knew all about it. A fine upstanding woman she was, with a word and a laugh for everyone, as my father told me many a time; and she had a bit of money beside. Every quarter, up she’d go to London town to collect her rents, so she said, and every time she’d come back with terrible grand new clothes. She dressed that fine, and had such a way with her, the people called her Queen of Wydcombe. Wherever she come from, she had a boarding-school education, and could play and sing beautiful. Many a time of a summer evening we lads would walk up to Wydcombe, and sit on the fence near the farm, to hear Sophy a-singing through the open window. She’d a pianoforty, too, and would sing powerful long songs about captains and moustachers and broken hearts, till people was nearly fit to cry over it. And when she wasn’t singing she was painting. My old missis had a picture of flowers what she painted, and there was a lot more sold when they had to give up the farm. But Miss Joliffe wouldn’t part with the biggest of ’em, though there was many would ha’ liked to buy it. No, she kep’ that one, and has it by her to this day—a picture so big as a signboard, all covered with flowers most beautiful.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that,” Westray put in; “it’s in my room at Miss Joliffe’s.”

He said nothing about its ugliness, or that he meant to banish it, not wishing to wound the narrator’s artistic susceptibilities, or to interrupt a story which began to interest him in spite of himself.

“Well, to be sure!” said the clerk, “it used to hang in the best parlour at Wydcombe over the sideboard; I seed’n there when I was a boy, and my mother was helping spring-clean up at the farm. ‘Look, Tom,’ my mother said to me, ‘did ’ee ever see such flowers? and such a pritty caterpillar a-going to eat them!’ You mind, a green caterpillar down in the corner.”

Westray nodded, and the clerk went on:

“‘Well, Mrs Joliffe,’ says my mother to Sophia, ‘I never want for to see a more beautiful picture than that.’ And Sophia laughed, and said my mother know’d a good picture when she saw one. Some folks ’ud stand her out, she said, that ’tweren’t worth much, but she knew she could get fifty or a hundred pound or more for’t any day she liked to sell, if she took it to the right people. Then she’d soon have the laugh of those that said it were only a daub; and with that she laughed herself, for she were always laughing and always jolly.

“Michael were well pleased with his strapping wife, and used to like to see the people stare when he drove her into Cullerne Market in the high cart, and hear her crack jokes with the farmers what they passed on the way. Very proud he was of her, and prouder still when one Saturday he stood all comers glasses round at the Blandamer, and bid ’em drink to a pritty little lass what his wife had given him. Now he’d got a brace of ’em, he said; for he’d kep’ that other little boy what Sophia brought when she married him, and treated the child for all the world as if he was his very son.

“So ’twas for a year or two, till the practice-camp was put up on Wydcombe Down. I mind that summer well, for ’twere a fearful hot one, and Joey Garland and me taught ourselves to swim in the sheep-wash down in Mayo’s Meads. And there was the white tents all up the hillside, and the brass band a-playing in the evenings before the officers’ dinner-tent. And sometimes they would play Sunday afternoons too; and Parson were terrible put about, and wrote to the Colonel to say as how the music took the folk away from church, and likened it to the worship of the golden calf, when ‘the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up again to play.’ But Colonel never took no notice of it, and when ’twas a fine evening there was a mort of people trapesing over the Downs, and some poor lasses wished afterwards they’d never heard no music sweeter than the clar’net and bassoon up in the gallery of Wydcombe Church.

“Sophia was there, too, a good few times, walking round first on her husband’s arm, and afterwards on other people’s; and some of the boys said they had seen her sitting with a redcoat up among the juniper-bushes. ’Twas Michaelmas Eve before they moved the camp, and ’twas a sorry goose was eat that Michaelmas Day at Wydcombe Farm; for when the soldiers went, Sophia went too, and left Michael and the farm and the children, and never said good-bye to anyone, not even to the baby in the cot. ’Twas said she ran off with a sergeant, but no one rightly knew; and if Farmer Joliffe made any search and found out, he never told a soul; and she never come back to Wydcombe.

“She never come back to Wydcombe,” he said under his breath, with something that sounded like a sigh. Perhaps the long-forgotten break-up of Farmer Joliffe’s home had touched him, but perhaps he was only thinking of his own loss, for he went on: “Ay, many’s the time she would give a poor fellow an ounce of baccy, and many’s the pound of tea she sent to a labourer’s cottage. If she bought herself fine clothes, she’d give away the old ones; my missis has a fur tippet yet that her mother got from Sophy Joliffe. She was free with her money, whatever else she mid have been. There wasn’t a labourer on the farm but what had a good word for her; there wasn’t one was glad to see her back turned.