IX
The Late Rector of Hipley
The dinner-table left a blurred impression on Bredon, for all his habit of observing his fellow men and analysing his feelings about them. The setting-out of the meal had faults that Angela would have condemned, and would have put right in no time; you were conscious at once that the household belonged to bachelors. Yet the meal itself and the cooking of it were of excellent quality; and it was thrown at you with a clamorous, insistent hospitality that made you feel like a guest of honour. The room seemed to be full of priests—there were five, perhaps, in reality, besides the Bishop—and every detail of their behaviour proved that they were free from any sense of formality or restraint; yet constant little attentions showed the guest that he was never forgotten. The topic of conversation which Bredon (who in the meantime had informed the Bishop of the post-office mistake) could recall most distinctly afterward was a learned and almost technical discussion between the Bishop and the youngest priest present on the prospects of the local soccer team for next year. Nothing fitted in, somehow, with his scheme of probabilities; there was a Father O’Shaughnessy, who had been born and bred in Pullford and never seemed to have been outside it; there was a Father Edwards who talked with a violent Irish brogue. A teetotaller opposite kept plying him with Barsac.
It was perhaps a delicate attention that Bredon’s neighbour, on the side away from the Bishop, was the only other layman present. He was introduced as the Bishop’s secretary; and he was the only man in the room who looked like a clergyman. He seemed some fifty years old; he was silent by habit, and spoke with a dry humour that seemed to amuse everybody except himself. Bredon could not help wondering how such a man came to occupy such a position at his time of life, for his voice betrayed university education and he was plainly competent, yet he obviously thought of himself as a supernumerary in the household. The riddle was solved when Bredon, in answer to some question about his journey down to Chilthorpe, explained that he did not come from London itself, but from a village in Surrey, a place called Burrington. “What!” exclaimed Mr. Eames, the secretary, “not Burrington near Hipley?” And, when Bredon asked if he knew Hipley, “Know it? I ought to. I was rector there for ten years.”
The picture of the rectory at Hipley stood out before Bredon’s mind; you see it from the main road. There is an old-fashioned tennis-lawn in front of it; roses cluster round it endearingly; there is a cool dignity about the Queen Anne house, the terraces of which are spotlessly mowed. Yes, you could put this man in clerical clothes, and he would fit beautifully into that spacious garden; you saw him, with surplice fluttering in the breeze, going up the churchyard path to ring the bell for evening service; that was his atmosphere. And here, unfrocked by his own conscience, he was living as a hired servant, almost a pensioner, in this gaunt house, these cheerless rooms. … You wondered less at his silent habit, and his melancholy airs of speech.
Nothing creates intimacy like a common background discovered among strangers. They belonged, it seemed, to the same university, the same college; their periods were widely different, but dons and scouts, the milestones of short-lived undergraduate memory, were recalled, and their mannerisms discussed; and when at the end of the meal the Bishop rose, profuse in his apologies, to attend a meeting, Eames volunteered to walk Bredon back to his hotel. “I thought there’d be no harm, My Lord, if we just took a look in at poor Mottram’s house; I daresay it would interest Mr. Bredon to see it. The housekeeper,” he explained to Bredon, “is one of our people.”
The Bishop approved the suggestion; and with a chorus of farewells they left the Cathedral house together. “Well,” said Bredon to his companion, “you’ve got a wonderful Bishop here.”
“Yes,” said Eames, “the mind dwells with pleasure on the thought of him. There are few of us for whom more can be said than that.”
“I can’t fit Mottram, from what I’ve heard of him, into that household.”
“Because you’re not a provincial. Our common roots are in Oxford and in London. But in a place like this people know one another because they are neighbours.”
“Even the clergy?”
“The Catholic clergy, anyhow. You see, our priests don’t swap about from one diocese to another; they are tied to the soil. Consequently they are local men, most of them, and a local man feels at home with them.”
“Still, for a man who had no religion particularly, isn’t it rather a challenge to be up against your faith like that? I should have thought a man was bound to react one way or the other.”
“Not necessarily. It’s astonishing what a lot of theoretical interest a man can take in the faith and yet be miles away from it practically. Why, Mottram himself, about three weeks ago, was pestering us all about the old question of ‘the end justifying the means.’ Being a Protestant, of course he meant by that doing evil in order that good may come. He worried the life out of the Bishop, urging the most plausible reasons for maintaining that it was perfectly right. He simply couldn’t see why the Bishop insisted you weren’t ever allowed to do what’s wrong, whatever comes of it. And the odd thing was, he really seemed to think he was being more Catholic over it than we were. However, all that bores you.”
“No, indeed. I want to know everything about Mottram; and it’s silly to pretend that a man’s religion doesn’t matter. Was he thinking at all, do you suppose, of becoming a Catholic?”
Eames shrugged his shoulders. “How can I tell? I don’t think he really showed any dispositions. But of course he was a religious man in a way, he wasn’t one of your nogoddites, like Brinkman. You’ve met Brinkman?”
“Yes, I’m staying in the same hotel, you see. And I confess I’m interested in him too. What do you make of him? Who is he, or where did Mottram pick him up?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like the little man. I don’t even know what his nationality is; he’s spent a long time in Paris, and I’m pretty sure he’s not British. And mind you, he hated us. I think he had corresponded for some paper out in Paris; anyhow, he knew all the seedy anti-clericals; and I rather think he was asked to leave. Mottram seems to have taken him on on the recommendation of a friend; he had some idea, I think, of doing a history of the town; and of course Brinkman can write. But Brinkman very seldom came in here, and when he did he was like a dog among snakes. I daresay he thought the house was full of oubliettes. He’d got all that Continental anti-clericalism, you see. Here’s the house.”
They turned up a short drive which led them through a heavily walled park to the front door of a painfully mid-Victorian mansion. A mansion it must be called; it did not look like a house. Strange reminiscences of various styles, Gothic, Byzantine, Oriental, seemed to have been laid on by some external process to a redbrick abomination of the early seventies. Cream-coloured and slate-coloured tiles wove irrelevant patterns across the bare spaces of wall, Conservatories masked a good half of the lowest storey. It was exactly suited to be what it afterward became, a kind of municipal museum, in which the historic antiquities of Pullford, such as they were, could be visited by the public on dreary Sunday afternoons.
“Now,” said Eames, “does that give you Mottram’s atmosphere?”
“God forbid!” replied Bredon.
“See then the penalty of too great riches. Only one man in a thousand can express his personality in his surroundings if he has a million of money to do it with. It wasn’t Mottram, of course, who did this; but he would have built the same sort of horror if he hadn’t taken it over from a predecessor like himself. And the rooms are as bad as the house.”
Eames was fully justified in this last criticism. The house was full of expensive bad taste; the crude work of local artists hung on the walls; bulging goddesses supported unnecessary capitals; velvet and tarnished gilding and multicoloured slabs of marble completed the resemblance to a large station restaurant. Mottram had possessed no private household gods, had preserved no cherished knickknacks. The house was the fruit of his money, not of his personality. He had given the architect a free hand, and in the midst of all that barbaric splendour he had lived a homeless exile.
The housekeeper had little to add to what Bredon already knew. Her master usually went away for a holiday about that time in the year, and Mr. Brinkman always went with him. He had expected to be away for a fortnight, or perhaps three weeks. He had not shown, to the servants at any rate, any signs of depression or anxiety; he had not left any parting messages to suggest a long absence. His letters were to be redirected, as usual, to the Load of Mischief. There had been none, as a matter of fact, except a few bills and circulars. She didn’t think that Mr. Mottram went to any of the Pullford doctors, regularly at least; and she had had no knowledge of his seeing the specialist in London. She did not remember Mr. Mottram being ill, except for an occasional cold, though he did now and again take a sleeping draught.
“It’s quite true,” said Eames as they left the house, “that we never noticed any signs of depression or anxiety in Mottram. But I do remember, only a short time ago, his seeming rather excited one evening when he was round with us. Or am I imagining it? Memory and imagination are such close neighbours. But I do think that when he asked the Bishop to go and stay down at Chilthorpe he seemed unnaturally insistent about it. He was fond of the Bishop, of course, but I shouldn’t have thought he was as fond of him as all that. To hear him talk, you would think that it was going to make all the difference to him whether the Bishop shared his holiday or not.”
“Yes, I wonder what that points to?”
“Anything or nothing. It’s possible, of course, that he was feeling depressed, as he well might be; and thought that he wanted more than Brinkman’s company to help him over a bad time. Or—I don’t know. He was always secretive. He gave the Bishop a car, you know; and took endless pains to find out beforehand what sort of car would be useful to him, without ever giving away what he was doing till the last moment. And the other evening—well, I feel now as if I’d felt then that he had something up his sleeve. But did I really feel it then? I don’t know.”
“On the whole, though, you incline to the suicide theory?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s possible, isn’t it, that a man who had some premonition of a violent end might want company when he went to a lonely place like Chilthorpe?”
“Had he any enemies, do you think, in Pullford?”
“Who hasn’t? But not that sort of enemies. He used, I fancy, to be something of a martinet with his work-people, in the old manner. In America, a disgruntled employee sometimes satisfies his vendetta with a shotgun. But in England we have no murdering classes. Even the burglars, I am told, make a principle of going unarmed, for fear they might be tempted to shoot. You would probably find two or three hundred men in Pullford who would grouse at Mottram’s success and call him a bloodsucker, but not one who would up with a piece of lead piping if he met him in a lonely lane.”
“I say, it’s been very kind of you looking after me like this. I wish, if you’ve any time to spare in the next day or two, you would drop down to Chilthorpe and help me to make the case out. Or is that asking too much?”
“Not the least. The Bishop goes off to a confirmation tomorrow and I shall probably have time on my hands. If you think I could be of any use, I’ll certainly look in. I like Chilthorpe; every prospect pleases and only the chops are vile. No, I won’t come in, thanks; I ought to be getting back now.”
Angela was a little inclined to be satirical at her husband’s prolonged absence; but she seemed to have killed the time with some success. She had not even been reduced to going round the early Perp. church. They made short work of the way back to Chilthorpe, and found Leyland eagerly awaiting them at the door of the hotel.
“Well,” he asked, “have you found out anything about Mottram?”
“Not much, and that’s a fact. Except that a man who strikes me as a competent observer thought he had noticed a certain amount of excitement in Mottram’s manner last week, as if he had been more than ordinarily anxious to get the Bishop to stay with him. That, and the impression made on the same observer that he was keeping dark about something—had something up his sleeve. I have seen the house; it is a beastly place; and it has electric light laid on, of course. I have seen the housekeeper, an entirely harmless woman, partly Irish by extraction, who has nothing to add to what we know, and does not believe that Mottram habitually employed any of the Pullford doctors.”
“Well, and what about the Bishop?”
“Exactly, what about him? I find his atmosphere very difficult to convey. He was very nice to me and very hospitable; he has not the overpowering manners of a great man, and yet his dignities seem to sit on him quite easily. He is entirely natural, and I am prepared to go bail for his being an honest man.”
“That,” said Leyland, “is just as well.”
“How do you mean? Have you had the answer to your telegram?”
“I have, and a very full answer it is. The solicitors gave all the facts without a murmur. About fifteen years ago Mottram made a will which was chiefly in favour of his nephew. A few years later he cancelled that will absolutely and made another will in which he devised his property to certain public purposes—stinkingly useless ones, as is the way of these very rich men. I can’t remember it all; but he wants his house to be turned into a silly sort of museum, and he provides for the erection of a municipal art gallery—that sort of thing. But this is the important point: His Euthanasia policy was not mentioned at all in the later will. Three weeks ago he put in a codicil directing how the money he expects from the Indescribable is to be disposed of.”
“Namely how?”
“The entire half-million goes to the Bishop of Pullford to be administered by him for the benefit of his diocese as he and his successors shall think fit!”