CHAPTER XXXIV

June is the month for the old world garden that holds mystery and fragrance within its red-brick walls. In Lombard Street you would suspect no wealth of flowers, and yet in the passing through of one of those solid, mellow, Georgian houses you might meet dreams from the bourn of a charmed sleep.

Aloofness is the note of such a garden. It is no piece of pompous mosaic-work spread before the front windows of a stock-broker’s villa, a conventional color scheme to impress the public. The true garden has no studied ostentation. It is a charm apart, a quiet corner of life smelling of lavender, built for old books, and memories that have the mystery of hills touched by the dawn. You will find the monk’s-hood growing in tall campaniles ringing a note of blue; columbines, fountains of gold and red; great tumbling rose-trees like the foam of the sea; stocks all a-bloom; pansies like antique enamel-work; clove-pinks breathing up incense to meet the wind-blown fragrance of elder-trees in flower. You may hear birds singing as though in the wild deeps of a haunted wood whose trees part the sunset into panels of living fire.

Mary of the plain face and the loyal heart had opened the green front door to a big man, whose broad shoulders seemed fit to bear the troubles of the whole town. He had asked for Catherine and her husband.

“They are in the garden, sir.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, only Master Jack.”

Canon Stensly bowed his iron-gray head under the Oriental curtain that screened the passage leading from the hall to the garden.

“Thanks; I know the way.”

The Rector of St. Antonia’s came out into the sunlight, and stood looking about him for an instant with the air of a man whose eyes were always open to what was admirable in life. A thrush had perched itself on the pinnacle of a yew, and was singing his vesper-song with the broad west for an altar of splendid gold. The chiming of the hour rang from St. Antonia’s steeple half hid by the green mist of its elms. A few trails of smoke rising from red-brick chimney-stacks alone betrayed the presence of a town.

To an old college-man such an evening brought back memories of sunny courts, cloisters, and sleek lawns, the ringing of bells towards sunset, the dark swirl of a river under the yawn of bridges that linked gardens to gardens beneath the benisons of mighty trees. Yet the light on Canon Stensly’s face was not wholly a placid light. It was as though he came as a messenger from the restless, bickering outer world, a friend whom friendship freighted with words not easy to be said.

A glimmer of white under an old cherry-tree showed where Catherine sat reading, with the boy Jack prone on the grass, the Swiss Family Robinson under his chin. Murchison was lying back in a deck-chair, watching the smoke from his pipe amid the foliage overhead.

Master Jack, rolling from elbow to elbow, as he thrilled over the passage of the “tub-boat” from the wreck, caught sight of the Canon crossing the lawn. Catherine was warned by a tug at her skirts, and a very audible stage-aside.

“Look out, here’s old Canon Stensly—”

“S-sh, Jack.”

“Should like to see him afloat in a tub-boat. Take a big—”

A tweak of the ear nipped the boy’s reflection in the bud. His father gave him a significant push in the direction of the fruit garden.

“See if there are any strawberries ripe.”

“I’ve looked twice, dad.”

“Oh, no doubt. Go and look again.”

Canon Stensly’s big fist had closed on Catherine’s fingers. He was not the conventional figure, the portly, smiling cleric, the man of the world with a benignant yet self-sufficient air. Like many big men, silent and peculiarly sensitive, his quiet manner suggested a diffidence anomalous in a man of six feet two. To correct the impression one had but to look at the steady blue of the eye, the firm yet sympathetic mouth, the stanchness of the chin. It is a fallacy that lives perennially, the belief that a confident face, an aggressive manner, and much facility of speech necessarily mark the man of power.

A courtly person would have remarked on the beauty of the evening, and discovered something in the garden to praise. Canon Stensly was not a man given to pleasant commonplaces. He said nothing, and sat down.

Murchison handed him his cigar-case.

“Thanks, not before dinner.”

His habit of silence, the silence of a man who spoke only when he had something definite to say, gave him, to strangers, an expression of reserve. Canon Stensly invariably made talkative men feel uncomfortable. It was otherwise with people who had learned to know the nature of his sincerity.

“Hallo, what literature have we here?”

He picked up Jack’s discarded book, and turned over the pages as though the illustrations brought back recollections of his own youth. As a boy he had been the most irrepressible young mischief-monger, a youngster whom Elisha would have bequeathed to the bear’s claws.

“Ever a member of the Robinson family, Mrs. Murchison?”

Catherine caught a suspicious side glint in his eye.

“I suppose all children read the book.”

“I wonder how much of the moralizing you remember?”

“Very little, I’m afraid.”

“Nor do I. Children demand life—not moralizing upon life,” and the Canon scrutinized a picture portraying the harpooning of a turtle, as though he had gloated over that picture many times as a boy.

Catherine had caught a glimpse of Mary’s white apron signalling for help in some domestic problem. She was glad of the excuse to leave the two men together. The sense of a woman is never more in evidence than when she surrenders her husband to a friend.

“Can you spare me half an hour for a talk?”

“I am not overburdened with work—yet.”

“Oh, it will come.”

He turned over the pages deliberately, glancing at each picture.

“Your wife looks well.”

“Yes, in spite of everything.”

“A matter of heart and pluck.”

“She has the courage of a Cordelia.”

Canon Stensly put the book down upon the grass. The two men were silent awhile; Murchison lying back in his chair, smoking; the churchman leaning forward a little with arms folded, his massive face set rather sternly in the repose of thought.

“There is something I want to talk to you about.”

Murchison turned his head, but did not move his body.

“Yes?”

“Don’t set me down as a busybody. I think I have a duty to you as a friend. It is a matter of justice.”

The Canon’s virtues were of the practical, workman-like order. He was not an eloquent man in the oratorical sense, having far too straightforward and sincere a personality to wax hysterical for the benefit of a church full of women. But he was a man who was listened to by men.

Murchison turned half-restlessly in his chair.

“With reference to the old scandal?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Something unpleasant, of course.”

“Things that are put about behind one’s back are generally unpleasant. It was my wife who discovered the report. Women hear more lies than we do, you know.”

“As a rule.”

“I decided that it was only fair that you should know, since slandered people are generally the last to hear of their own invented sins.”

“Thanks. I appreciate honesty.”

Canon Stensly sat motionless a moment, staring at the house. Then he rose up leisurely from his chair, reached for one of the branches of the cherry-tree, drew it down and examined the forming fruit.

“They say that you used to drink.”

Murchison remained like an Egyptian Memnon looking towards Thebes. The churchman talked on.

“I have heard the same thing said about one or two of my dearest friends. Vile exaggerations of some explainable incident. The report originated from a certain lady who resides over against my church. Her husband is a professional man.”

He pulled down a second bough, and brushed the young fruit with his fingers to see whether it was set or not. The silence had something of the tension of expense. Murchison knew that this old friend was waiting for a denial.

“That’s quite true; I drank—at one time.”

A man of less ballast and less unselfishness would have rounded on the speaker, perhaps with an affected incredulity that would have embittered the consciousness of the confession. Canon Stensly did nothing so insignificant. He let the branch of the cherry-tree slip slowly through his fingers, put his hands in his pockets, and walked aside three paces as though to examine the tree at another angle.

“Tell me about it.”

There was a pause of a few seconds.

“My father drank; poor old dad! I’m not trying to shelve the affair by putting it on his shoulders. My father and my grandfather both died of drink. My wife knows. She did not know when we were married. That was wrong. If ever a man owed anything to the love of a good woman, I am that man.”

Canon Stensly returned to his chair. His face bore the impress of deep thought. He had the air of a man ready to help in the bearing of a brother’s burden, not with any bombast and display, but as though it were as natural an action as holding out a hand.

“It can’t have been very serious,” he said.

Murchison set his teeth.

“A sort of hell while it lasted, a tempting of the devil; not often; perhaps the worse for that.”

“Ah, I can understand.”

“It was when I was overworked.”

“Jaded.”

“The wife was something better than a ministering angel, she was a brave woman. She fought for me. We should have won—without that scandal, but for a mad piece of folly I took to be heroism.”

The churchman extended a large hand.

“I’ll smoke after all,” he said.

“Do.”

Murchison opened his cigar-case. Canon Stensly was as deliberate as a man wholly at his ease. There was not a tremor as he held the lighted match.

“Do you know, Murchison, I appreciate this—deeply?”

He returned the match-box.

“It puts you in a new light to me, a finer light, with that rare wife of yours.”

Murchison was refilling his pipe, lines of thought crossing his forehead.

“When my child died—”

“Yes—”

“I seemed to lose part of myself. I had crushed the curse then. I don’t know how to explain the psychology of the affair, but when she died, the other thing died also.”

Canon Stensly nodded.

“It was what we call dipsomania. I never touched alcohol for years. I had been a fool as a student. At my worst, I only had the crave now and again.”

“And you are sure—”

“Sure that that curse killed my child, indirectly. Is it strange that her death should have killed the curse?”

“As I trust in God, no.”

The thrush was singing again on the yew-tree, another thrush answering it from a distant garden. Canon Stensly lay back in his chair and smiled.

“Stay here,” he said, quietly.

“In Roxton?”

“Yes. You have friends. Trust them. There is a greater sense of justice in this world than most cynics allow. I never knew man fight a good fight, a clean up-hill fight, and lose in the end.”

They were smoking peacefully under the cherry-tree when Catherine returned. She had no suspicion of what had passed, for no storm spirit had left its torn clouds in the summer air. Her husband’s face was peculiarly calm and placid.

“Where’s that boy of yours, Mrs. Murchison?”

“Jack?”

“Yes.”

“He was hunting the strawberry-beds half an hour ago.”

“Tell him,” and the Canon chuckled, “tell him I am not too big yet—for a tub.”

“Oh, Canon Stensly—”

“My dear Mrs. Murchison, I said many a truer thing when I was a boy. Children strike home. To have his vanity chastened, let a man listen to children.”

The big man with the massive head and the broad British chest had gone. Husband and wife were sitting alone under the cherry-tree.

“You told him—all?”

“All, Kate.”

“And it was Betty? That woman! May she never have to bear what we have borne!”

Murchison was sitting with his elbows on his knees, his chin upon his fists.

“Well—they know the worst—at last,” he said, grimly. “We can clear for action. That’s a grand man, Kate. I shall stay and fight—fight as he would were he in my place.”

She stretched out a hand and let it rest upon his shoulder.

“You are what I would have you be, brave. Our chance will come.”

“God grant it.”

“You shall show these people what manner of man you are.”