The Drunkard Part 25

"Delighted. It will be so jolly to have you in the village. I'm not there as much as I could wish, of course. My other work keeps me so much in London. But Medley, my colleague, is an excellent fellow. He'll look after you in every way."

"Who lives round about?"

"Well, as far as Society is concerned, we are a little distance from anywhere. Lord Fakenham's is the nearest house----"

"Not in that way, O'Donnell. I mean interesting people. Lord Fakenham is a bore--a twelve-bore one might say. I hate the big shooting houses in East England."

The Rector was rather at a loss. "Well," he said, reluctantly, "I don't know about what you'd probably call _interesting_ people. Sir Ambrose McKee, the big Scotch distiller--Ambrosia whiskey, you know--has the shooting and comes down to the Manor House in September. Oh, and Gilbert Lothian, the poet, has a cottage in the place. I've met him twice, but I can't say that I know much about him. Medley swears by his wife, though. She does everything in the village I'm told. She was a Fielding, the younger branch."

The doctor's face became strangely interested. It was alert and watchful in a moment.

"Gilbert Lothian! He lives there does he! Now you tempt me. I've heard a good deal about Gilbert Lothian."

The Rector was genuinely surprised. "Well, most people have," he answered. "But I should hardly have thought that a modern poet was much in your line."

Morton Sims smiled, rather oddly. "Perhaps not," he said, "but I'm interested all the same. I have my own reasons. Put me into communication with the house agents, will you, O'Donnell?"

The affair had been quickly arranged. The house proved satisfactory, and Dr. Morton Sims had taken it.

On the morning when Mary Lothian had heard from Gilbert that he was returning that evening, Mr. Medley, reminded of his duty by a postcard from the Rector at Cowes, set out to pay a call and offer his services to the distinguished newcomer.

The "Haven" was a pleasant gabled house standing in grounds of about three acres, not far from the Church and Rectory. The late Admiral Custance had kept it in beautiful order. The green, pneumatic lawns suggested those of a college quadrangle, the privet hedges were clipped with care, the whole place was taut and trim.

Mr. Medley found Dr. Morton Sims smoking a morning pipe in the library, dressed in a suit of grey flannel and with a holiday air about him.

The two men liked each other at once. There was no doubt about that in the minds of either of them.

There was a certain dryness and mellow humour in Mr. Medley--a ripe flavour about him, as of an old English fruit crushed upon the palate.

"Here is a rare bird," the doctor thought.

And Morton Sims interested the clerygman no less. The doctor's great achievements and the fact that he was a definite feature in English life were quite familiar. When, on fugitive occasions any one of this sort strayed into the placid domains of his interest Medley was capable of welcoming him with eagerness. He did so now, and warmed himself in the steady glow from the celebrated man with whom he was sitting.

That they were both Oxford men, more or less of the same period, was an additional link between them.

... "Two or three times a year I go up," Medley said, "and dine in Hall at Merton. I'm a little out of it, of course. The old, remembered faces become fewer and fewer each year. But there are friends left still, and though I can't quite get at their point of view, the younger fellows are very kind to me. Directly I turn into Oriel Street; I breathe the old atmosphere, and I confess that my heart beats a little quicker, as Merton tower comes into view."

"I know," the doctor said. "I was at Balliol you know--a little different, even in our day. But when I go up I'm always dreadfully busy, at the Museum or in the Medical School. It's the younger folk, the scientific dons and undergraduates who are reading science that I have to do with. I have not much time for the sentiments and caresses of the past. Life is so short and I have so much yet that I hope to do in it, that I simply refuse my mind the pleasures of retrospection.

You'll call me a Philistine, but when I go to lecture at Cambridge--as I sometimes do--it stimulates me far more than Oxford."

"Detestable place!" said Mr. Medley, with a smile. "A nephew of mine is a tutor there, Peterhouse. He has quite a name in his way, they tell me. He writes little leprous books in which he conducts the Christian Faith to the frontier of modern thought with a consolatory cheque for its professional services in the past. And, besides, the river at Cambridge is a ditch."

The doctor's eyes leapt up at this.

"Yes, isn't it marvellous that they can row as they do!" he said with the eagerness of a boy.

"You rowed then?"

"Oh, yes. I was in the crew of--74--our year it was."

"Really! really!--I had no idea, Dr. Morton Sims! I was in the Trials of--71, when Merton was head of the river, but we were the losing boat and I never got into the Eight. How different it all was then!"

Both men were silent for a minute. The priest's words had struck an unaccustomed chord of memory in the doctor's mind.

"Those times will never come again," Morton Sims said, and puffed rather more quickly than usual at his pipe. He had spoken truly enough when he had said that he had not time in his strenuous life for memories of his youth, that he shut his eyes to the immemorial appeal of Oxford when he went there. But he responded now, instinctively, for there is a Freemasonry, greater than all the ritual of King Solomon, among those who have rowed upon the Isis, in the happy, thrice-happy days of Youth!

To weary clergymen absorbed in the _va_ and _vient_ of sordid parishes, to grave Justices upon the Bench, the strenuous cynics of the Bar, plodding masters of schools, the suave solicitor, the banker, the painter, or the poet, these vivid memories of the Loving Mother, must always come now and again in life.

The Bells of Youth ring once more. The faint echo of the shouts from river or from playing field, make themselves heard with ghostly voices.

In the Chapels of Wayneflete, or of Laud, some soprano choir is singing yet. In the tower of the Cardinal, Big Tom tolls out of the past, bidding the College porters close their doors.

White and fretted spires shoot upwards into skies that will never be so blue again. Again the snap-dragon blooms over the grey walls of Trinity, the crimson creeper stains the porch of Cranmer, and Autumn leaves of bronze, purple and yellow carpet all the Magdalen Walks.

These things can never be quite forgotten by those who have loved them and been of them.

The duration of a reverie is purely accidental. There is no time in thought. The pictures of a lifetime may glow in the brain, while a second pa.s.ses by the clock, a single episode may inform the retrospection of an hour.

These two grey-headed men, upon this delightful summer morning, were not long lost in thought.

"And now," said the clergyman, "have you seen anything of the village yet?"

"Not yet. For the three days that I have been here I have been arranging my books and instruments, and turning that big room over the barn into a laboratory."

"Oh, yes. Where the Admiral used to keep his Trafalgar models. An excellent room! Now what do you say, Dr. Morton Sims, to a little progress through the village with me? I'm quite certain that every one is agog to see you, and to sum you up. Natural village curiosity! You might as well make your appearance under my wing."

"Teucro auspice, auspice Teucro?"

"Precisely," said Medley, with a smile of pleasure at the quotation from his beloved poet, and the two men left the house together in high glee, laughing like boys.

They visited the Church, in which Morton Sims took a polite interest, and then the clergyman took his guest over the Rectory.

It was a fine house, standing in the midst of fair lawns upon which great beech trees grew here and there, giving the extensive grounds something of the aspect of a park. The rooms were large and lofty, with fine ceilings of the Adams' school, florid braveries of stucco that were quite at home in a house like this. There were portraits everywhere, chiefly members of the O'Donnell family, and the faces in their fresh Irish comeliness were gay and ingenuous, as of privileged young people who could never grow old.

"Really, this is a delightful house," the Doctor said as he stood in the library. "I wonder O'Donnell doesn't spend more time in Mortland Royal. Few parsons are housed like this."

"It's not his _metier_, Doctor. He hasn't the faculty of really understanding peasants, and I think he is quite right in what he is doing. And, of course, from a selfish point of view, I am glad. I have refused two college livings to stay on here. In all probability I shall stay here till I die. O'Donnell does a great work for Temperance all over England--though doubtless you know more about that than I do."

"Er, yes," Morton Sims replied, though without any marked enthusiasm.

"O'Donnell is very eloquent, and no doubt does good. My dear old friend, Bishop Moultrie, in Norfolk here is most enthusiastic about his work. I like O'Donnell, he's sincere. But I belong to the scientific party, and while I welcome anything that really tends to stem inebriety, I believe that O'Donnell and Moultrie and all of them are on the wrong tack entirely."

"I know very little about the modern temperance movement in any direction," said Mr. Medley with a certain dryness. "Blue Ribbons and Bands of Hope are all very well, I suppose, but there is such a tendency nowadays among Non-conformists and the extreme evangelical party to exalt abstinence from alcohol into the one thing necessary to salvation, that I keep out of it all as much as I can. I like my gla.s.s of port, and I don't mean to give it up!"

Morton Sims laughed. "It doesn't do you the least good really," he said, laughing. "I could prove to you in five minutes, and with entire certainty, that your single gla.s.s of port is bad, even for you! But I quite agree with your att.i.tude towards all the religious emotionalism that is worked up. The drunkard who turns to religion simply manifests the cla.s.s of ideas, which is one of the features of the epileptic temperament. It is a confession of inept.i.tude, and a recourse to a means of salvation from a condition which is too hard for him to bear.

That is to say, Fear is at the bottom of his new convictions!"

Certainly Medley was not particularly sympathetic to the modern Temperance movement among religious people. Perhaps Mr. O'Donnell's somewhat vociferous enthusiasm had something to do with it. But on the other hand, he was very far from accepting such a cold scientific doctrine as this. He knew that the Holy Spirit does not always work through fear. But like the wise and quiet-minded man that he was, he forbore argument and listened with intellectual pleasure to the views of his new friend.

"I know," he said, with a courtly hint of deference in his voice, that became him very well, "of your position in the ranks of those who are fighting Intemperance. But, and you must pardon the ignorance of a country priest who is quite out of all 'movements,' I don't know anything of your standpoint. What is your remedy, Dr. Morton Sims?"