Yet though outwardly bedecked and serene she was inwardly troubled. “I can’t get used to the idea,” she said to Mr. Entwistle. “I can’t get used to it at all. It’s some comfort that you know the man.”
“At school together,” said Mr. Entwistle. “Up at Cambridge together, and kept in touch ever since. Not bad, eh?”
“You’re the last man in the world I can imagine being friends with an Abbot,” said Miss Wentworth.
“Bob wasn’t an Abbot at school,” said Mr. Entwistle.
“For one thing, you never go to church,” said Miss Wentworth.
“At Cambridge, nor did Bob,” said Mr. Entwistle, and grinned reminiscently.
“I don’t hold with it,” said Miss Wentworth.
“Going to church?” asked Mr. Entwistle.
“Don’t try to keep my spirits up by being flippant,” said Miss Wentworth. “And anyway, they’re not down. What must be done, must be done, and what’s the good of moping. I mean I don’t hold with men and women shutting themselves up in monasteries and convents. I don’t at all like the idea of Belmaray becoming a monastery.”
“Nothing is settled,” said Mr. Entwistle. “You’re just going to have a talk with Bob, that’s all, and let him have a look at the house. He may not think it suitable. And if he does, and his order makes an offer, you may refuse the offer. It’s all as unsettled as the weather.”
“Which is very settled at present,” said Miss Wentworth.
“Have it your own way, dear lady,” said Mr. Entwistle. “It’s settled, then. Here’s Bob.”
An ancient car had driven up to the front door, a young monk at the wheel and an old monk beside him. Mr. Entwistle went out to welcome them and Miss Wentworth stayed where she was. She looked round her drawing room and knew a moment of sudden and absolute misery. Until this moment she had not fully realized what it was she was doing. Her mind had known that she must leave Belmaray, her will had been resolved to it, but while she made her decision, and while she set the necessary machinery at work to carry it out, her home had been holding her close as it had always done. In every sorrow of her life Belmaray had held her, and until now she had not fully realized that in this sorrow Belmaray would hold her no longer. Now full realization smote at her heart. She got to her feet as the door opened and came forward but for the first time in her life she was a tongue-tied hostess.
Only one man had come in and she heard him say that Tom Entwistle was showing Brother Martin the garden. She supposed they had shaken hands. She found they were sitting down.
“Old Tom was always a steady sort of chap,” she heard a harsh voice croaking out beside her. “Kept me out of any amount of trouble when we were younger. Always gave me good advice. Always knew where I’d find what I wanted, boots or brandy or a top hat. ‘Try so-and-so in the West End,’ he’d say. Never surprised at what I wanted. Never turned a hair when I said I wanted God but said, ‘Try the East End.’ He was right. It was in Limehouse that I found God. So when I wanted an abbey I asked old Tom.”
“You too,” said Miss Wentworth, “are trying to raise my spirits by flippancy.”
“I think I was trying to raise my own,” said the Abbot. “I understand you have lived here all your life.”
For the first time Miss Wentworth looked at him. He was bent like some old tree and his habit was the color of the bark of an old tree. His hands were swollen with rheumatism. She had not known a face could be at once so ugly, so attractive, so humorous and so relentlessly austere. He had a bright dark fierce eye, but she was aware of great kindness in him.
“The climate should suit your rheumatism,” she said. “It’s mild, and the house is high enough above the river to avoid the damp.”
“What I have to discover,” he said with a touch of sharpness, “is not the suitability of the climate to rheumatism, but to the life of prayer. Does one fall asleep here?”
“Certainly not,” said Miss Wentworth indignantly. “The liars who tell you that you fall asleep in the west country are only equalled by the liars who tell you it never stops raining. Both those statements are contrary to fact. I do not at all know that I want this house to become an abbey.”
“I understand,” said the Abbot mildly, “that in the last resort the decision does not rest with you?”
“It rests with my great-nephew,” acknowledged Miss Wentworth. “But it was for my sake only that we have struggled along here for so long. Had it not been for me he would have sold Belmaray long ago. To save him distress I am conducting these preliminaries without his knowledge.”
“When you have conducted them is there any likelihood that he may refuse his consent?” asked the Abbot. “I am not very happy, Ma’am, at going so far in this matter without your great-nephew’s knowledge.”
“John is accustomed to having practical matters arranged behind his back by his womenfolk,” said Miss Wentworth. “He is also accustomed to doing what they tell him. He is that type of man and his wife and I are that type of womenfolk. His daughters are still children.”
“No sons?” asked the Abbot sympathetically.
“He has no son,” said Miss Wentworth. “The line dies with him.”
“I had imagined the young man a son of the house,” said the Abbot. “He seemed so entirely happy here.”
“What young man?” asked Miss Wentworth.
“I must confess to you that I have been here before,” said the Abbot. “I came here prospecting after Entwistle had told me about it. I strolled about one evening in that field with the thorn tree in it. There was a young man writing in the small library and I spoke a few words to him through the window.”
“That was Michael,” said Miss Wentworth. “He is staying with me. But though he is not related to us he has become, as you say, very much at home here.”
“I liked the man and I am sorry to disinherit him,” said the Abbot.
“You seem very certain Belmaray is to become your property,” said Miss Wentworth with a touch of tartness.
“Not mine, Ma’am,” said the Abbot with almost an air of panic. “Monks have no property. The property of my order. The property of God. But I am aware, of course, that your great-nephew may share your dislike of placing this property in the hands of God.”
“I don’t think so,” said Miss Wentworth slowly. “He has placed much in the hands of God. And so, I think, have I.”
“This one thing more,” said the Abbot.
“If I could see it in that light,” said Miss Wentworth.
“You will,” he said.
She got up. “I’ll show you the house. From what you have seen you think it suitable?”
“The peace seems unassailable,” he said. “We are obliged to move from our old home for they have built an aerodrome at our front gate. Jet planes scream up over the chapel roof all day long. It had been a matter of shame to us all, especially to myself who am the eldest of us, to find ourselves so little possessed of the grace of detachment for which we have striven so long.”
“There is no aerodrome within miles of Belmaray,” said Miss Wentworth. “The hills protect us.” They had passed into the dining room, the Abbot’s dark fierce eyes appraising it as they talked. “I have seen many aeroplanes, of course, but I do not think I have experienced a jet.”
“The noise, Ma’am, when you have the thing more or less scraping a tonsured head, is quite diabolical.”
She liked the archaic manner of his address and the special quality of his courtesy. He did not belong to this century any more than she did. She warmed to the thought of him established in the peace of Belmaray.
“I do not know how to address you,” she said as they walked down the flagged passage. “I have never talked to a monk before. I don’t approve of them. Do I say Father Abbot?”
He did not at once answer her. He had stopped abruptly in front of the portrait of Ru
pert Wentworth in his bright armor. “Who is this young knight?” he asked.
“My ancestor, Rupert,” said Miss Wentworth. “He fought for King Charles.”
“I like that face,” said the Abbot. “I like it as I liked the face of the man you call Michael. A most vulnerable face. If they can survive they go furthest. You asked me how you should address me. Would beadsman do?”
She smiled at him in quick delight. “It will do very well,” she said. “I see you know the old poem. One verse of it is inscribed round the sundial in the garden in honor of the first Queen Elizabeth. Francis Wentworth, who built Belmaray in his old age, was much attached to her.”
“You must be much attached to the poem,” said the Abbot, as they went up the wide beautiful staircase.
“I am,” said Miss Wentworth.
“And yet you don’t approve of a man who serves on his knees?”
“At your age, yes,” said Miss Wentworth. “But not at the age of that young man whom I saw beside you in the car. I like activity in young men.”
“Ma’am, prayer is the greatest activity there is,” said the Abbot. “It is directed not only to the praise of God but to the redemption of the soul of man. But I won’t talk of that just now, though I should like to another day. Now I’ll just tell you for your comfort, that we are not inactive in your sense of the word. We take retreats and missions. We do much manual labor to support ourselves. The young lay-brother whom you saw in the car just now is an expert gardener and bee-man. When I was a lay-brother I was the swineherd. Ma’am, those pigs were the pride of my life.”
Miss Wentworth stopped on the stairs and turned round. “Pigs?” she said. “You appreciate pigs? No wonder I liked you on sight. What breed did you keep?”
“Tamworths,” said the Abbot. “Not the most beautiful breed but I think it was their ugliness that endeared them to me. I’ve never been a good-looking man. I had a fellow feeling.”
“We’ll look at the upstairs rooms later,” said Miss Wentworth. “Now we’ll go straight down to the orchard and look at my Welsh Whites. What to do with my pigs has been one of my problems. You’ll keep pigs again, of course?”
“Not personally,” said the Abbot, following her down the stairs. “But I will seriously consider the advisability of Brother Martin combining pigs with bees, if that would set your mind at rest.”
“You could take over old Bob Hewitt, my pig-man. There’s not a better man with pigs in the whole of the west country. You’ll do that?”
She hurried him out of the garden door. She had shed ten years of her age.
“It will all need consideration,” said the Abbot. “But I will meet your wishes in every way possible.” He smiled at her. “Pigs, and bees in the helmet. I think you will come to feel at last that this is ordained. . . This garden, with the old mulberry trees, will be a great temptation to me. I shall want to spend far too many hours in this garden.”
They walked slowly through the kitchen garden and reached the orchard, where four absorbed backs were presented to their view. Four men were standing in front of the pigsties, wrapped in admiration of the ladies within. “I hope Brother Martin and Mr. Entwistle are being discreet,” said Miss Wentworth. “Michael and Bob know nothing of all this.”
“I can vouch for their discretion,” said the Abbot. “Ma’am, what beauties! Ma’am, what wonders of Welsh Whites! Not even my Tamworths in my swineherding days were equal to these.” And with two strides he had reached the pigsties and propped himself on the half-door beside Bob and Michael.
Miss Wentworth sat down on a fallen apple tree near them and listened for a few minutes, with a half-smile on her face, to the scraps of conversation that drifted to her. She liked to hear men talk of the technicalities of a craft. It was astonishing how much Michael had learned about pigs in a short while, and Tom Entwistle could always keep his end up. She kept aloof from them. A woman, however knowledgeable, was always a slight intrusion upon masculine talk. It was warm in the sun but her sudden pleasure in the Abbot’s admiration for pigs was draining away, leaving her cold. What had he said? “This one thing more.” She remembered the night of Michael’s coming and how she had lain in bed through the storm thinking how things fell away from you in old age, but that she still had Belmaray. Now she had lost it. The misery she had felt in the drawing room overwhelmed her again. In the pride of life you stood with your hands full of roses, but in old age the petals turned to dust; and then even the dust fell away through your fingers, leaving you with nothing but your empty hands, stained with dirt. . . Just your sin, that was all you seemed to have at the end. . . She should have loved Charles. That not loving Charles had been one of those deliberate sins of which Michael had spoken, because she had meant to keep Charles outside. What harm that had done. . . And now she had nothing but her empty dirty hands. . . She sat bemusedly looking at them and slowly her misery turned to a faint glow of inward joy as she began to wonder if perhaps they had more value than all she had possessed. Empty, they could be cleansed. She was humble now, she had nothing and could be cleansed. It might be true that the loss of Belmaray was the one thing needful.
She looked up and saw the Abbot standing beside her. It seemed to her a very long time since he had last been beside her, but again she could not speak to him. Her powers had deserted her. The Abbot waited beside her for a few moments and then helped her to get up. His bony rheumatic hand under her elbow, his fierce old face when she looked at him, had a strength that startled her, and she wondered what connection the thoughts of the last few moments had had with the power that was in him. Probably none, for he had seemed absorbed in the pigs.
They walked slowly back through the garden. A stormcock was singing at the top of one of the mulberry trees and there was a lark high up in the golden evening sky. It was as though two spirits sang. The eagle beside her was silent but a verse from the book of Wisdom came suddenly into her mind. “The praise of courage is in his actions.” Perhaps she had not understood the heights to which prayer must rise before it becomes pure praise, the fortitude that is demanded before it can share in the redemption of man’s soul. The man of prayer beside her had said it was action, the greatest activity there is. She began to believe him. She began to be content that Belmaray itself, that aged knightly man, should now turn beadsman.
5
Michael weeded the garden and kept one eye on the front door. He understood it now; the withdrawal that he had felt lately in Miss Wentworth, the old man’s visit late in the evening to “get the feel of the place,” his own dream of him as the last of the knights of Belmaray. Well, it had to happen. The maintenance of this place was obviously getting beyond Miss Wentworth. And if it had to happen, this that was happening seemed to him fitting. Yet he felt an almost savage anger and resentment. Someone should have left Miss Wentworth a fortune so that she could have finished her life here in peace. Someone should have done something. Though she had known about it some while he doubted if realization had come to her until this evening. When he had half-turned round from the pigs and seen her sitting on the fallen tree he had known that realization had come to her. He had longed to go to her but he had been afraid to blunder. It had been a relief to him to see the Abbot go.
And now he was hanging about in the hope of speaking to the old man. They were all four inside now, Miss Wentworth, the two monks and Mr. Entwistle, but they couldn’t be much longer. He didn’t know what he wanted to say to the Abbot. It was presumptuous of him to want to say anything at all. But he might never see him again and he wanted to say—something. You could not see someone in a dream, and then see them in the flesh, and not feel you were in some way vitally connected with them.
The door opened and the three men came out. Mr. Entwistle had come by bus today, but was being taken back to Silverbridge in the Abbot’s car. There was some difficulty in starting it. The self-starter was not functioning and girding up his habit Brother Martin
was settling down happily to a long spell of mighty cranking. Michael stepped out of the flowered bed into the court by the sundial and the Abbot strolled down to join him.
“I am glad to meet you again, Sir,” said the Abbot. “Is this the sundial of which Miss Wentworth was telling me?”
Michael nodded. Now that the chance of speech had been given to him he stood beside the monk quite speechless. The Abbot bent down to look at the worn lettering.
“Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen;
Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green,”
he murmured, and walked round to the other side.
“Goddess, allow this aged man his right,
To be your beadsman now, that was your knight.”
He came back to Michael. “I understand that the sundial was put up in honor of Queen Elizabeth the First,” he said.
Michael swallowed and managed to articulate. “And the rosemary bush was planted in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria.” He looked at the Abbot bleakly for a moment and then looked away again.
“It seems that queens have always been honored here,” said the Abbot. “The tradition will be maintained. Monks are kings’ men but in our chapel we have a statue of Mary, whom some men call the Queen of Heaven, and we honor her. And there is another lady whom we honor, and for whom we pray ceaselessly; the soul. We pray for bodies too, the bodies of the sick and poor, the exiles, the prisoners and the persecuted, but pre-eminently for the soul. The soul, you know, like a ship, is always ‘she.’ That fact turns any man of prayer who battles for her into a knight. You possibly think I am talking a lot of nonsense and your thoughts are with Miss Wentworth.”