CHAPTER IV
MARY PREACHES AND THE COLONEL PREVAILS
A fortnight had gone by, and during this time Morris was a frequent
visitor at Seaview. Also his Cousin Mary had come over twice or thrice
to lunch, with her father or without him. Once, indeed, she had
stopped all the afternoon, spending most of it in the workshop with
Morris. This workshop, it may be remembered, was the old chapel of the
Abbey, a very beautiful and still perfect building, finished in early
Tudor times, in which, by good fortune, the rich stained glass of the
east window still remained. It made a noble and spacious laboratory,
with its wide nave and lovely roof of chestnut wood, whereof the
corbels were seraphs, white-robed and golden-winged.
"Are you not afraid to desecrate such a place with your horrid vices--
I mean the iron things--and furnace and litter?" asked Mary. She had
sunk down upon an anvil, on which lay a newspaper, the first seat that
she could find, and thence surveyed the strange, incongruous scene.
"Well, if you ask, I don't like it," answered Morris. "But there is no
other place that I can have, for my father is afraid of the forge in
the house, and I can't afford to build a workshop outside."
"It ought to be restored," said Mary, "with a beautiful organ in a
carved case and a lovely alabaster altar and one of those perpetual
lamps of silver--the French call them 'veilleuses', don't they?--and
the Stations of the Cross in carved oak, and all the rest of it."
Mary, it may be explained, had a tendency to admire the outward
adornments of ritualism if not its doctrines.
"Quite so," answered Morris, smiling. "When I have from five to seven
thousand to spare I will set about the job, and hire a high-church
chaplain with a fine voice to come and say Mass for your benefit. By
the way, would you like a confessional also? You omitted it from the
list."
"I think not. Besides, what on earth should I confess, except being
always late for prayers through oversleeping myself in the morning,
and general uselessness?"
"Oh, I daresay you might find something if you tried," suggested
Morris.
"Speak for yourself, please, Morris. To begin with your own account,
there is the crime of sacrilege in using a chapel as a workshop. Look,
those are all tombstones of abbots and other holy people, and under
each tombstone one of them is asleep. Yet there you are, using strong
language and whistling and making a horrible noise with hammers just
above their heads. I wonder they don't haunt you; I would if I were
they."
"Perhaps they do," said Morris, "only I don't see them."
"Then they can't be there."
"Why not? Because things are invisible and intangible it does not
follow that they don't exist, as I ought to know as much as anyone."
"Of course; but I am sure that if there were anything of that sort
about you would soon be in touch with it. With me it is different; I
could sleep sweetly with ghosts sitting on my bed in rows."
"Why do you say that--about me, I mean?" asked Morris, in a more
earnest voice.
"Oh, I don't know. Go and look at your own eyes in the glass--but I
daresay you do often enough. Look here, Morris, you think me very
silly--almost foolish--don't you?"
"I never thought anything of the sort. As a matter of fact, if you
want to know, I think you a young woman rather more idle than most,
and with a perfect passion for burying your talent in very white
napkins."
"Well, it all comes to the same thing, for there isn't much difference
between fool-born and fool-manufactured. Sometimes I wake up, however,
and have moments of wisdom--as when I made you hear that thing, you
know, thereby proving that it is all right, only useless--haven't I?"
"I daresay; but come to the point."
"Don't be in a hurry. It is rather hard to express myself. What I mean
is that you had better give up staring."
"Staring? I never stared at you or anyone else, in my life!"
"Stupid Morris! By staring I mean star-gazing, and by star-gazing I
mean trying to get away from the earth--in your mind, you know."
Morris ran his fingers through his untidy hair and opened his lips to
answer.
"Don't contradict me," she interrupted in a full steady voice. "That's
what you are thinking of half the day, and dreaming about all the
night."
"What's that?" he ejaculated.
"I don't know," she answered, with a sudden access of indifference.
"Do you know yourself?"
"I am waiting for instruction," said Morris, sarcastically.
"All right, then, I'll try. I mean that you are not satisfied with
this world and those of us who live here. You keep trying to fashion
another--oh! yes, you have been at it from a boy, you see I have got a
good memory, I remember all your 'vision stories'--and then you try to
imagine its inhabitants."
"Well," said Morris, with the sullen air of a convicted criminal,
"without admitting one word of this nonsense, what if I do?"
"Only that you had better look out that you don't /find/ whatever it
is you seek. It's a horrible mistake to be so spiritual, at least in
that kind of way. You should eat and drink, and sleep ten hours as I
do, and not go craving for vision till you can see, and praying for
power until you can create."
"See! Create! Who? What?"
"The inhabitant, or inhabitants. Just think, you may have been
building her up all this time, imagination by imagination, and thought
by thought. Then her day might come, and all that you have put out
piecemeal will return at once. Yes, she may appear, and take you, and
possess you, and lead you----"
"She? Why she? and where?"
"To the devil, I imagine," answered Mary composedly, "and as you are a
man one can guess the guide's sex. It's getting dark, let us go out.
This is such a creepy place in the dark that it actually makes me
understand what people mean by nerves. And, Morris, of course you
understand that I have only been talking rubbish. I always liked
inventing fairy tales; you taught me; only this one is too grown up--
disagreeable. What I really mean is that I do think it might be a good
thing if you wouldn't live quite so much alone, and would go out a bit
more. You are getting quite an odd look on your face; you are indeed,
not like other men at all. I believe that it comes from your worrying
about this wretched invention until you are half crazy over the thing.
Any change there?"
He shook his head. "No, I can't find the right alloy--not one that can
be relied upon. I begin to doubt whether it exists."
"Why don't you give it up--for a while at any rate?"
"I have. I made a novel kind of electrical hand-saw this spring, and
sold the patent for 100 pounds and a royalty. There's commercial
success for you, and now I am at work on a new lamp of which I have
the idea."
"I am uncommonly glad to hear it," said Mary with energy. "And, I say,
Morris, you are not offended at my silly parables, are you? You know
what I mean."
"Not a bit. I think it is very kind of you to worry your head about an
impossible fellow like me. And look here, Mary, I have done some
dreaming in my time, it is true, for so far the world has been a place
of tribulation to me, and it is sick hearts that dream. But I mean to
give it up, for I know as well as you do that there is only one end to
all these systems of mysticism." Mary looked up.
"I mean," he went on, correcting himself, "to the mad attempt unduly
and prematurely to cultivate our spiritual natures that we may live to
and for them, and not to and for our natural bodies."
"Exactly my argument, put into long words," said Mary. "There will be
plenty of time for that when we get down among those old gentlemen
yonder--a year or two hence, you know. Meanwhile, let us take the
world as we find it. It isn't a bad place, after all, at times, and
there are several things worth doing for those who are not too lazy.
"Good-bye, I must be off; my bicycle is there against the railings.
Oh, how I hate that machine! Now, listen, Morris; do you want to do
something really useful, and earn the blessings of an affectionate
relative? Then invent a really reliable electrical bike, that would
look nice and do all the work, so that I could sit on it comfortably
and get to a place without my legs aching as though I had broken them,
and a red face, and no breath left in my body."
"I will think about it," he said; "indeed, I have thought of it
already but the accumulators are the trouble."
"Then go on thinking, there's an angel; think hard and continually
until you evolve that blessed instrument of progression. I say, I
haven't a lamp."
"I'll lend you mine," suggested Morris.
"No; other people's lamps always go out with me, and so do my own, for
that matter. I'll risk it; I know the policeman, and if we meet I will
argue with him. Good-bye; don't forget we are coming to dinner
to-morrow night. It's a party, isn't it?"
"I believe so."
"What a bore, I must unpack my London dresses. Well, good-bye again."
"Good-bye, dear," answered Morris, and she was gone.
"'Dear,'" thought Mary to herself; "he hasn't called me that since I
was sixteen. I wonder why he does it now? Because I have been scolding
him, I suppose; that generally makes men affectionate."
For a while she glided forward through the grey twilight, and then
began to think again, muttering to herself:
"You idiot, Mary, why should you be pleased because he called you
'dear'? He doesn't really care two-pence about you; his blood goes no
quicker when you pass by and no slower when you stay away. Why do you
bother about him? and what made you talk all that stuff this
afternoon? Because you think he is in a queer way, and that if he goes
on giving himself up to his fancies he will become mad--yes, mad--
because--Oh! what's the use of making excuses--because you are fond of
him, and always have been fond of him from a child, and can't help it.
What a fate! To be fond of a man who hasn't the heart to care for you
or for any other woman. Perhaps, however, that's only because he
hasn't found the right one, as he might do at any time, and then----"
"Where are you going to, and where's your light?" shouted a hoarse
voice from the pathway on which she was unlawfully riding.
"My good man, I wish I knew," answered Mary, blandly.
Morris, for whom the day never seemed long enough, was a person who
breakfasted punctually at half-past eight, whereas Colonel Monk, to
whom--at any rate at Monksland--the day was often too long, generally
breakfasted at ten. To his astonishment, however, on entering the
dining-room upon the morrow of his interview in the workshop with
Mary, he found his father seated at the head of the table.
"This means a 'few words' with me about something disagreeable,"
thought Morris to himself as he dabbed viciously at an evasive
sausage. He was not fond of these domestic conversations. Nor was he
in the least reassured by his father's airy and informed comments upon
the contents of the "Globe," which always arrived by post, and the
marvel of its daily "turnover" article, whereof the perpetual variety
throughout the decades constituted, the Colonel was wont to say, the
eighth wonder of the world. Instinct, instructed by experience,
assured him that these were but the first moves in the game.
Towards the end of the meal he attempted retreat, pretending that he
wanted to fetch something, but the Colonel, who was watching him over
the top of the pink page of the "Globe," intervened promptly.
"If you have a few minutes to spare, my dear boy, I should like to
have a chat with you," he said.
"Certainly, father," answered the dutiful Morris; "I am at your
service."
"Very good; then I will light my cigar, and we might take a stroll on
the beach, that is, after I have seen the cook about the dinner
to-night. Perhaps I shall find you presently by the steps."
"I will wait for you there," answered Morris. And wait he did, for a
considerable while, for the interview with the cook proved lengthy.
Moreover, the Colonel was not a punctual person, or one who set an
undue value upon his own or other people's time. At length, just as
Morris was growing weary of the pristine but enticing occupation of
making ducks and drakes with flat pebbles, his father appeared. After
"salutations," as they say in the East, he wasted ten more minutes in
abusing the cook, ending up with a direct appeal for his son's
estimate of her capacities.
"She might be better and she might be worse," answered Morris,
judicially.
"Quite so," replied the Colonel, drily; "the remark is sound and
applies to most things. At present, however, I think that she is
worse; also I hate the sight of her fat red face. But bother the cook,
why do you think so much about her; I have something else to say."
"I don't think," said Morris. "She doesn't excite me one way or the
other, except when she is late with my breakfast."
Then, as he expected, after the cook came the crisis.
"You will remember, my dear boy," began the Colonel, affectionately,
"a little talk we had a while ago."
"Which one, father?"
"The last of any importance, I believe. I refer to the occasion when
you stopped out all night contemplating the sea; an incident which
impressed it upon my memory."
Morris looked at him. Why was the old gentleman so inconveniently
observant?
"And doubtless you remember the subject?"
"There were a good many subjects, father; they ranged from mortgages
to matrimony."
"Quite so, to matrimony. Well, have you thought any more about it?"
"Not particularly, father. Why should I?"
"Confound it, Morris," exclaimed the Colonel, losing patience; "don't
chop logic like a petty sessions lawyer. Let's come to the point."
"That is my desire," answered Morris; and quite clearly there rose up
before him an inconsequent picture of his mother teaching him the
Catechism many, many years ago. Thereat, as was customary with his
mind when any memory of her touched it, his temper softened like iron
beneath the influence of fire.
"Very good, then what do you think of Mary as a wife?"
"How should I know under the circumstances?"
The Colonel fumed, and Morris added, "I beg your pardon, I understand
what you mean."
Then his father came to the charge.
"To be brief, will you marry her?"
"Will she marry me?" asked Morris. "Isn't she too sensible?"
His father's eye twinkled, but he restrained himself. This, he felt,
was not an occasion upon which to indulge his powers of sarcasm.
"Upon my word, if you want my opinion, I believe she will; but you
have to ask her first. Look here, my boy, be advised by me, and do it
as soon as possible. The notion is rather new to me, I admit; but,
taking her all round, where would you find a better woman? You and I
don't always agree about things; we are of a different generation, and
look at the world from different standpoints. But I think that at the
bottom we respect each other, and I am sure," he added with a touch of
restrained dignity, "that we are naturally and properly attached to
each other. Under these circumstances, and taking everything else into
consideration, I am convinced also that you will give weight to my
advice. I assure you that I do not offer it lightly. It is that you
should marry your cousin Mary."
"There is her side of the case to be considered," suggested Morris.
"Doubtless, and she is a very shrewd and sensible young woman under
all her 'dolce far niente' air, who is quite capable of
consideration."
"I am not worthy of her," his son broke in passionately.
"That is for her to decide. I ask you to give her an opportunity of
expressing an opinion."
Morris looked at the sea and sky, then he looked at his father
standing before him in an attitude that was almost suppliant, with
head bowed, hands clasped, and on his clear-cut face an air of real
sincerity. What right had he to resist this appeal? He was heart-
whole, without any kind of complication, and for his cousin Mary he
had true affection and respect. Moreover, they had been brought up
together. She understood him, and in the midst of so much that was
uncertain and bewildering she seemed something genuine and solid,
something to which a man could cling. It may not have been a right
spirit in which to approach this question of marriage, but in the case
of a young man like Morris, who was driven forward by no passion, by
no scheme even of personal advancement, this substitution of reason
for impulse and instinct was perhaps natural.
"Very well, I will," he answered; "but if she is wise, she won't."
His father turned his head away and sighed softly, and that sigh
seemed to lift a ton's weight off his heart.
"I am glad to hear it," he answered simply, "the rest must settle
itself. By the way, if you are going up to the house, tell the cook
that I have changed my mind, we will have the soles fried with lemon;
she always makes a mess of them 'au maitre d'hotel.'"
