VIII
The Bishop at Home
Angela and her husband breakfasted late next morning. Leyland came in as they were finishing, his manner full of excitement. “Mrs. Davis,” he explained, “has been talking to me.”
“Don’t be led on too much by that,” said Angela. “It has happened to others.”
“No, but I mean, Mrs. Davis has been saying something.”
“That is far more unusual,” assented Bredon. “Let’s hear all about it. Angela—”
“Mrs. Bredon,” said Angela firmly, “has been associated with me in many of my cases, and you may speak freely in her presence. Cough it up, Mr. Leyland; nothing is going to separate me from this piece of toast.”
“Oh, there’s nothing private about it particularly. But I thought perhaps you might help. You see, Mrs. Davis says that Mottram was expecting a visitor to turn up in the morning and go out fishing with him.”
“A mysterious stranger?” suggested Angela. “Carrying a blunt instrument?”
“Well, no, as a matter of fact it was the Bishop of Pullford. Do you know Pullford at all?”
“Nothing is hidden from us, Mr. Leyland. They make drainpipes there, not perambulators, as some have supposed. The parish church is a fine specimen of early Perp. It has been the seat of a Roman Catholic Bishopric—oh! I suppose that’s the man?”
“So Mrs. Davis explained. A very genial man. Not one of your standoffish ones. He was expected, it seems, by the first train, which gets in about ten. Mottram left word that he was to be called early, because he wanted to get at the fishing, and the Bishop, when he arrived, was to be asked to join Mr. Mottram on the river; he would be at the Long Pool. He’d been down here before, apparently, as Mottram’s guest. Now, it’s obvious that we had better find out what the Bishop has to say about all this. I’d go myself only for one thing: I don’t quite like leaving Chilthorpe while my suspicions” (he dropped his voice) “are so undefined; and for another thing, I’ve telegraphed up to London for details about the will and I want to be certain that the answer comes straight to my own hands. And the inquest is at four this afternoon; I can’t risk being late for that. I was wondering whether you and Mrs. Bredon would care to run over there? It would take you less than an hour in the car, and if you went as representing the Indescribable it would make it all rather less—well, official. Then I thought perhaps at the end of the day we might swap information.”
“What about it, Angy?”
“I don’t think I shall come and see the Bishop. It doesn’t sound quite proper, somehow. But I’ll drive you into Pullford, and sit at the hotel for a bit and have luncheon there, and you can pick me up.”
“All right. I say, though,” he added piteously, “shall I have to go and change my suit?”
“Not for a moment. You can explain to the Bishop that your Sunday trousers are in pawn; if he’s really genial he’ll appreciate that. Besides, that tweed suit makes you look like a good-natured sort of ass; and that’s what you want, isn’t it? After all, if you do stay to lunch, it will only be a bachelor party.”
“Very well, then, we’ll go. Just when I was beginning to like Chilthorpe! Look here, Leyland, you aren’t expecting me to serve a summons on the Bishop or clap the darbies on him, or anything? Because if so you’d better go yourself.”
“Oh no, I don’t suspect the Bishop—not particularly, that is. I just want to know what he can tell us about Mottram’s movements immediately before his death, and what sort of man he was generally. He may even know something about the will; but there’s no need to drag that topic in, because my telegram ought to produce full information about that. Thanks awfully. And we’ll pool the day’s information, eh?”
“Done. I say, though, I think I’d better just wire to the Bishop, to make sure that he’s at home, and ready to receive a stray spy. Then we can start at elevenish.”
As Bredon returned from sending the telegram, he was waylaid, to his surprise, by Mr. Pulteney, who was fooling about with rods and reels and things in the front hall. “I wonder if I might make a suggestion to you, Mr. Bredon,” he said. “I despise myself for the weakness, but you know how it is. Every man thinks in his heart that he would have made a good detective. I ought to know better at my age, but the foul fiend keeps urging me to point something out to you.”
Bredon smiled at the elaborate address. “I should like to hear it awfully,” he said. “After all, detection is only a mixture of common sense and special knowledge, so why shouldn’t we all put something into the pot?”
“It is special knowledge that is in question here; otherwise I would not have ventured to approach you. You see that rod? It is, as you doubtless know, Mottram’s; it is the one which he intended to take out with him on that fatal morning. You see those flies on it?”
They looked to Bredon very much like any other flies, and he said so.
“Exactly. That is where special knowledge comes in. I don’t know this river very well; but I do know that it would be ridiculous to try to fish this river with those particular flies, especially at this time of the year and after the weather we’ve been having. And I do know that a man like Mottram, who had been fishing this river year after year, couldn’t possibly have imagined that it was any use taking those flies down to the Long Pool. I only mention it because it makes me rather wonder whether Mottram really came down here to fish. Well, I must be starting for the river. Still nursing the unconquerable hope. Good morning.” And, with one of his sudden gestures, the old gentleman was gone.
A telegram came in admirably good time, assuring Bredon that the Bishop would be delighted to see him. It was little after eleven when the car took the road again; this time their way brought them closer to the Busk and gave them a better view of its curious formation. A narrow gorge opened beneath them, and they looked down into deep pools overhung by smooth rocks that the water had eaten away at their base. There was no actual waterfall, but the stream always hurried downward, chuckling to itself under and around the boulders which interrupted its course. “I think Pulteney overestimates the danger of having his river dragged,” observed Bredon. “You couldn’t drag that part of it; and, with all those shelves of rock, a corpse might lie for days undiscovered, and no one the wiser. I’m glad that it’s a death by gas, not by drowning.”
Their road now climbed onto the moors, and they began to draw closer to a desolate kind of civilization. Little factory towns which had sprung up when direct waterpower was in demand, and continued a precarious existence perched on those barren slopes now that waterpower had been displaced by steam, were the milestones of their route. They were jolted on a pavement of villainous sets; the air grew dim with a smoky haze and the moorland blackened with their approach to the haunts of men. At last tramlines met them, announcing the outskirts of Pullford. “I’m getting the needle rather about this interview,” confessed Bredon. “What does one do by way of making one’s self popular with a Catholic Bishop?” he demanded of Angela, who was convent-bred.
“Well, the right thing is to go down on one knee and kiss his ring. I don’t think you’d make much of a show at it; we ought to have practised it before we left Chilthorpe. But I don’t suppose he’ll eat you.”
Bredon tried to rearrange his ideas about Bishops. He remembered the ceremony of being confirmed at school; a long, tiresome service, with an interminable address in which he and fifty of his compeers were adjured to play for their side. He remembered another Bishop, met in a friend’s rooms at Oxford, a hand laid on his shoulder and an intolerably earnest voice asking whether he had ever thought of taking holy orders. Was that the sort of thing? Or was he rather to expect some silken-tongued courtier, in purple and fine linen, pledging him in rich liqueurs (as in the advertisements) and lying to him smoothly (as in the storybooks)? Was he to be embarrassed by pietism or to be hoodwinked by a practised intriguer? Anyhow, he would know the worst before long now. They drew up at the centre of the town before a vast, smoke-grimed hotel which promised every sort of discomfort; and Bredon, after asking his way to the Catholic Cathedral, and steadying himself with a vermuth, went out to face the interview.
The Cathedral house proved to be a good specimen of that curious municipal Gothic which is the curse of all institutions founded in 1850. The kind of house which is characterized by the guidebooks as fine, by its inmates as beastly. The large room into which Bredon was shown was at least equally cheerless. It was half-panelled in atrocious pitch-pine, and it had heavy, ecclesiastical-looking chairs which discouraged all attempts at repose. There was a gas-stove in the fireplace. Previous occupants of the See of Pullford lined the walls, in the worst possible style of portraiture. A plaster Madonna of the kind that is successively exiled from the church to the sacristy and from the sacristy to the presbytery at once caught and repelled the eye. In point of fact, the room is never used except by the canons of Pullford when they vest for the chapter mass and by the strange visitor who looks a little too important to be left in a waiting-room downstairs.
A door opened at the end of the room, and through it came a tall man dressed in black with a dash of red whose welcome made you forget at once all the chill of the reception room. The face was strong and determined, yet unaffectedly benevolent; the eyes met you squarely, and did not languish at you; the manner was one of embarrassed dignity, with no suggestion of personal greatness. You did not feel that there was the slightest danger of being asked whether you meant to take orders. You did not catch the smallest hint of policy or of priestcraft. Bredon made a gesture as if to carry out Angela’s uncomfortable prescription; but the hand that had caught his was at once withdrawn in obvious deprecation. He had come there as a spy, expecting to be spied upon; he found himself mysteriously fitting into this strange household as an old friend.
“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Brendan.” (The Chilthorpe post-office is not at its best with proper names.) “Come inside, please. So you’ve come to have a word about poor old Mottram? He was an old friend of ours here, you know, and a close neighbour. You had a splendid morning for motoring. Come in, please.” And Bredon found himself in a much smaller room, the obvious sanctum of a bachelor. There were pipes about, and pipe-cleaners; there was a pleasant litter of documents on the table; there was a piano standing open, as pianos do when people are accustomed to strum on them for mere pleasure; there was a quite unashamed loudspeaker in one corner. The chair into which the visitor was shepherded was voluminous and comfortable; you could not sit nervously on the edge of it if you tried. Instinctively, in such a room your hand felt for your tobacco-pouch. Would Mr. “Brendan” take anything before dinner? Dinner was due in three quarters of an hour. Yes, it was a very sad business about poor Mottram. There was a feeling of genuine regret in the town.
“I don’t really know whether I’d any right to trespass on My Lordship’s—on Your Lordship’s time at all,” began Bredon, fighting down a growing sense of familiarity. “It was only that the landlady told us this morning you were expected to join Mottram at Chilthorpe just on the morning when he died. So we naturally thought you might have known something about his movements and his plans. When I say ‘we,’ I mean that I’m more or less working in with the police, because the Inspector down there happens to be a man I know.” (Dash it all, why was he putting all his cards on the table like this?)
“Oh, of course, I should be only too glad if I can be of any use. The newspapers have just mentioned the death as if it were an accident, but one of my priests was telling me there is a rumour in the town that the poor fellow took his own life. Well, of course, I don’t think that very probable.”
“He was quite cheerful, you mean, when you last saw him?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say cheerful, exactly; but, you see, he was always a bit of a dismal Jimmy. But he was in here one evening not a week ago; very glad to be going off for his holiday, and full of fishing plans. It was then he asked me to come down and join him just for the day. Well, there was a tempting hole in my engagement book, and there’s a useful train in the morning to Chilthorpe, so I promised I would. Then the Vicar General rang me up the last thing at night and told me about an important interview with some education person which he’d arranged behind my back. So I gave it up—one has to do what one’s told—and was meaning to telegraph to Mottram in the morning. And then this sad news came along before I had time to telegraph after all.”
“Oh, the news got here as early as that?”
“Yes, that secretary of his wired to me, Brinkman. It was kind of him to think of me, for I know the man very little. I forget the exact words he used, ‘Regret to say Mr. Mottram died last night, useless your coming,’ something of that sort.”
“Do you know if he meant to make any long stay at Chilthorpe?”
“Brinkman would be able to tell you better than I could; but I fancy they generally spent about a fortnight there every year. Mottram himself, I daresay you know, came from those parts. So far as I knew, this was to be the regular yearly visit. Honestly, I can’t think why he should have been at pains to ask me down there if there had been any idea of suicide in his mind. Of course if there was definite insanity that’s a different thing. But there was nothing about him to suggest it.”
“Do I understand that Mottram belonged to your—that Mottram was a Catholic?”
“Oh, dear no! I don’t think he was a churchgoer at all. I think he believed in Almighty God, you know; he was quite an intelligent man, though he had not had much schooling when he was young. But his friendship with us was just a matter of chance—that and the fact that his house is so close to us. He was always very kindly disposed toward us—a peculiar man, Mr. ‘Brendan,’ and a very obstinate man in some ways. He liked being in the right, and proving himself in the right; but he was broad-minded in religious matters, very.”
“You don’t think that he would have shrunk from the idea of suicide—on any moral grounds, I mean?”
“He did defend suicide in a chat we had the other day. Of course my own feeling is that by the time a man has got to the state of nerves in which suicide seems the only way out he has generally got beyond the stage at which he can really sit down and argue whether it is right or wrong. At least one hopes so. I don’t think that a person who defends suicide in the abstract is any more the likely to commit suicide for that or vice versa. Apart from grace, of course. But it’s the absence of motive, Mr. ‘Brendan.’ Why should Mottram have wanted to take his own life?”
“Well, My Lord, I’m afraid I see these things from an uncharitable angle. You see, my business is all connected with insurance; and Mottram was insured with us, and insured heavily.”
“Well, there you are, you see; you have the experience and I haven’t. But doesn’t it seem to you strange that a man in good health, who digests his meals, and has no worries, should take his own life in the hope of benefiting his heirs, whoever they may prove to be? He had no family, you must remember.”
“In good health? Then—then he didn’t mention anything to you about his life prospects?”
“I can’t say that he did; but he always seemed to me to enjoy good health. Why, was there anything wrong?”
“My Lord, I think this ought to be confidential, if you don’t mind. But since you knew him so well I think it’s only fair to mention to you that Mottram had misgivings about his health.” And he narrated the story of Mottram’s singular interview at the Indescribable offices. The Bishop looked grave when he had finished.
“Dear, dear, I’d no notion of that; no notion at all. And it’s not clear even now what was wrong with him? Well, of course that alters things. It must be a grave temptation for people who are suffering from a malignant disease, especially if it’s a painful one; pain clouds the reason so, doesn’t it? I wish I’d realized that he was in trouble, though it’s very little one can do. But that’s just like him; he was always a bit of a stoic; fine, in a rugged sort of way. ‘It never did any good meeting troubles halfway,’ he used to say to me. Well, money can’t do everything for us.”
“He was enormously rich, I suppose?”
“Hardly that. He was very comfortably off, though. There will be a windfall, I suppose, coming to somebody.”
“He never mentioned to you, I suppose, what he meant to do with his money?”
“Well, of course, he used to say half-jokingly that he was going to provide for us; but I don’t think he meant us to take that seriously. He had a kind of hankering after religion, you see, but he didn’t get on well with religious people as a general thing. The Anglicans, he said, were all at sixes and sevens, and he couldn’t bear a church which didn’t know its own mind. The nonconformists, he said, did no sort of good in the town; all those fine chapels, and only thirty or forty people in each of them on a Sunday morning. He was a little unjust, I think, to the nonconformists; they do a great deal of good, some of them. And about the Salvation Army he was extraordinarily bitter. So he used to say he’d sooner his money went to us than to any of the others. But I think that was only an ironic way he had with him; people who have made a lot of money are often fond of talking about what they’re going to do with it. Of course it would have made a lot of difference to us; but I don’t think he meant to be taken seriously.”
“Well, I’m very much obliged to Your Lordship; I think, perhaps, I ought to be—”
“What, going away, and dinner on the table? No, no, Mr. ‘Brendan,’ that isn’t how we treat our guests at Pullford. Just you come along, now, and be introduced to some of the reverend clergy. I know the Load of Mischief, and those chops! Come on, and we’ll send you off in better trim than you came.” It was evident that there was no help for it; Angela must wait.