The Rosemary Tree Read online

  She smiled at him. “I did not need that reassurance,” she said.

  Chapter 6

  1

  At the door of the lodge John lifted his hand to knock and then dropped it again. Bob wouldn’t want him. What could he say to the old man that would be of the least use? What could he say to any of his parishioners to which they would ever pay the slightest attention? Other priests, coming unknown to their parishes, could wear anonymity as a cloak of office that was not without impressiveness if they did not stay too long, but he could not do that. The older among his parishioners had known him in his weak and miserable childhood, his ineffectual boyhood and manhood. They knew all about the Wentworths and had told what they knew to their children. No one would ever listen to him here. But then, being what he was, he would never be listened to anywhere, and here he was at least in his own place, and he had proved himself to be one of those whose physical life decays if uprooted from familiar soil. Here he could at least keep some sort of hold upon the very poor health which was all he had ever attained to, and not fall sick as he did whenever he went to strange places. He was at least less of a nuisance here than anywhere else, and here he could pray better than in other places.

  He looked up and round at the familiar wood, with its great aspiring beech trees. “For whom do we pray?” he asked them. The great titles of the old love poem so bound up with the story of this place came to him. Saint. Sovereign. Goddess. For him, no woman, in spite of his love for Daphne, but the soul. For the soul both he and this place aspired. Any soul. Every soul. All souls. The soul of the man encountered on the road this morning. The soul of that woman who tormented his child in that abominable school. The soul of old Bob in there. Yes, old Bob. In there was a soul, his lady, his love. By knocking at the door, going in, making a fool of himself and coming out again, he prayed for that soul. As he knocked his heart was beating faster than usual, but not so much with the habitual dread of making a fool of himself as with amazement and wonder at God’s use of fools.

  From inside came a low growl. John opened the door cautiously and stuck his foot inside, but there was no need for the precaution. Old Bob was obviously not well enough even to shut the door in a visitor’s face and his diffidence vanished in concern. He forgot himself and entered almost precipitately. The stuffy little room inside was very dark. The lodge was extremely picturesque outside but the creepers hanging over the small diamond-paned windows kept out most of the light. Air was kept out by the fact that old Bob never opened the windows, such as they were, from year’s end to year’s end. He would have died of asphyxia had it not been that he always kept a fire burning to combat the damp of the rotting boards and mildewed walls of his abode. The one living room was the shape of a half circle and behind it was the half circle of the kitchen. Above were two bedrooms. There was a well in the garden behind but no running water and no drains.

  In this little house Bob had been born and lived for seventy-five years. His father, who had been coachman at the manor, had lived here for thirty years, his three children had been born here, and his wife and two of the children had died here. Bob, the youngest, had been only twenty-five when his father died and he had taken his place as coachman. He had married, but his wife had died in childbirth, and the child soon after, and he had not married again. He had been coachman until horses went out and cars came in, but his surly temper had never taken kindly to any form of change and he could not stomach cars. And so the family had driven their own car and he had become butler at the manor; a rather uncouth butler, but the Wentworths had always had a keener eye for character than for veneer, and unconventional themselves, outward conformity had meant little to them. Then the family fortunes had declined and he had become butler-cum-gardener. They had declined still further and he had taken over the pigs and the poultry. And now, help from the village hardly counting, he alone gave to Maria Went­worth the loyalty of a long line of devoted servants to a long line of devoted masters and mistresses.

  Their attitude to each other was peculiar, and difficult of comprehension to those who were not of their generation. With far too much to do and far too little pay for the doing of it Bob was prepared to serve Miss Wentworth until he dropped. It never occurred to him to do anything else. Now that his health had failed and he was old he could have retired to an old people’s home, but when John had once suggested this course old Bob had only been able to master his fury by remembering that the poor daft vicar was when all was said and done a Wentworth, lord of the manor by rights though not in the direct line. He would have died for a Went­worth as a matter of course and as casually as he cleaned out the pigsties. Yet he had no conscious appreciation of Miss Wentworth as a woman and he was abominably rude to her at times. Though she was to him his saint, sovereign, goddess, he did not know it. All he knew was that she was a Wentworth of Belmaray Manor and he was a Hewitt of the lodge.

  Miss Wentworth on her side would never have thought of dismissing old Bob no matter how rude or incompetent he might be. Had he taken to drink or stealing it would have made no difference. He had been a little boy at the lodge when she had been a girl at the manor and she had never known life without him. Had it been necessary she would have given her life for him as casually as he would have given his for her, yet it never occurred to her that her pigs were better housed than the man who looked after them, and that she ought to do something about the unhealthy little lodge in which he lived, and suffered the tortures of acute rheumatism. It never occurred to her that a few of the premature deaths in that lodge might have been caused by unhealthy living conditions, and that Bob himself might move with less pain if he lived in a modern lodge nearer the road where the sun would have reached him, or alternatively in one of the many unused rooms at the manor. She had the softest of hearts but to her Bob and the lodge were unseparable, and the lodge and the beech wood inseparable. Everything had its allotted place in Belmaray, like jewels in a crown, and to move anything from where it had always been would have seemed to her an act of sacrilege, had she thought of it.

  John, however, did think of it, but Bob’s language when he once suggested removal to the manor had been such that from then on he had kept his thoughts to himself. Old Bob in his lodge was like a snail in its shell. Dug out of it he would probably now be more ill than he was in it, as was John himself when separated from Belmaray.

  “You there, Bob?” he asked unnecessarily, feeling his way past the circular table with its plush table cover, and the family photograph album and Bible upon it, to the bamboo stand with the aspidistra that stood near the window and further assisted the geraniums on the window sill and the creepers outside to make the room nearly as dark as night. He knew the pitfalls now, as a ship sailing familiar seas knows the submerged reefs, but he was so clumsy in his embarrassment that he caught his foot in the bamboo stand and nearly fell headlong, and in saving himself he knocked against the horsehair armchair where the old man sat, jarring him badly.

  “Careful now, Vicar, you clumsy—!” Bob Hewitt bit off the word without speaking it. He had always been able to do that, even in the years before John became a parson. For the poor dolt was a Wentworth. Now, as then, he expressed his feelings in a low growl like distant thunder, and jerked with his pipe towards the armchair opposite.

  “I’m sorry, Bob,” said John apologetically. “It’s dark in here, coming from outside.” He lowered himself carefully to the slippery armchair. It was the most uncomfortable chair in the world and he could not imagine how Bob, in the grip of the screws, could endure to sit in a similar one hour upon hour. Yet he had been sitting there all day, perfectly still, while the pain waxed and waned, and would continue to sit there until a cousin came up from the village to help him to his bed. “So I can sit here too,” thought John. “I can at least do that.” And he stretched out his long legs before him, laid his arms along the arms of the chair, sat back as far as he could, and held on firmly. He was feeling as always madly restless an
d fidgety, and sharp needles of horsehair pierced through his trousers to his legs, and into his protruding wrists, and tormented him, but he managed to make no movement. In the shadowed room each man sat as though immovable in his dark clothes, in his dark chair, and looked as though carved out of rock. They sat silently for a few moments and each to the other seemed to gather stature, to become a focus of power and dignity, but while John’s mind speculated upon the reason with that same conscious strain with which he was imposing stillness upon his body, old Bob accepted the phenomenon as unquestioningly as his body accepted the tyranny of pain. Bob’s mind and body were still with that primeval stillness which the countryman shares with patient tethered beasts, with water gripped by frost and flowers heavy and sodden with rain. Circumstance held him still, and he merely sat and awaited his release.

  “Is it the screws?” asked John at last.

  “Screws and me stomach,” said Bob. And removing his pipe he embarked upon the history of his illness from the first moment of its onset a couple of days ago, when it took him in the back like a pronged fork while he was mixing the pig wash, until this very moment when it was as though someone were twisting his knees round and round in their sockets. His narrative was clear, detailed, almost dramatic in parts, spoken with none of the growling discourtesy of his reception of his visitor but carefully and almost sweetly and without a trace of self pity. When it was finished he replaced his pipe and had no more to say, inviting neither pity nor comment, withdrawn once more into the silent dignity of his inviolable rock. This was typical of old Bob. When his privacy was invaded he was like a snarling animal surprised in its lair, but once adjusted to the interruption the instinct of the animal gave way to the splendid natural instinct of the countryman who realized its rightness and its right. It is the difference between beasts and men that the first desert each other in pain and the second go in to each other and bear each other company. Bob’s instinct knew this, and so he put the facts of the case before the one who had come in to him, that he might bear him company with understanding. But that was all he did. He made no appeal. Patience was the basic fact in his pain. His narrative was like a flower sprung up out of that rock but soon withered, while the rock remained.

  John thought how through all the ages the patience of the poor had been the foundation stone of all life; no food without it, no fire on the hearth, no roads to travel, no houses to live in. Art might spring from other suffering, from the suffering of such men as had been in his family, such as he might have been himself had not the vein of gold died out in the dying breed, but that lay lightly like the soil upon the rock and took its value from the deep primeval pain. It was significant that the attitude of men like Bob to men such as he might have been was protective rather than reverential, while his to them was compounded of reverence. He wished he was the man he might have been had he lived a few centuries earlier, he wished he were the Rupert Wentworth who had painted the self portrait of the young man in armor, and of his queen Henrietta Maria, so that he could have left a portrait of old Bob upon the walls of the manor. Such light as there was fell full upon the old man’s face and he could see it clearly, his eyes being accustomed now to the dimness of the room. It was an entirely medieval face and should have been framed in steel, or in a bowman’s cap. It was a flat face, of a yellowish stone color, and deeply furrowed. The eyes were small and deeply sunk under a penthouse of bushy grey eyebrows. When Bob was well they were extremely sharp, shrewd and observant, but now they were dull and bewildered, for it was in his eyes that Bob showed he suffered. The great trap of a mouth was set grimly and the jaw was alarming in its square-cut strength, but there was no sullenness in the face and in the lines round the eyes there was humor. Bob had not shaved for a couple of days and the grey stubble of his beard was like lichen on the stone of his face. To those who did not know him it was a matter for astonishment when he smiled, showing great square teeth with gaps between them, for the smile was as full of charm and innocence as that of a child. Bob was innocent. He had been born of good stock and had had neither time nor inclination for vice, and his work had kept him in close contact with ways of life where the standards of excellence had been high.

  The Wentworths had for generations been austere, gentle and sensitive. There had been artists among them, and a few saints, but no gross sinners, no bullies and no cheats. When called upon they had fought with gallantry and dash, champions of lost causes but not really the stuff of which soldiers are made, and always thankful to come home again. They had always been an intensely clannish family, clinging to what was familiar, shrinking from strange places and strange faces, and with inbreeding physical and nervous weakness had grown upon them, so that now their power and endurance had weakened. No earlier Wentworth would have drunk himself to death when he lost his wife as John’s father had done, or allowed such a small affair as the South African War to shadow the rest of his life as John’s great-uncle had done, or had his nerves shattered and almost the last remnants of his self confidence destroyed as had been the case with John himself in the last of the world wars. Yet even in their decadence these men had retained to the full the Wentworth chivalry, gentleness and austerity, and with this family old Bob had spent his life; with them and the things they loved, their gardens and orchards, dogs and horses. He had never even wanted to do a gross or ignoble thing, and his childish innocence, like light on the rock, had the charm of a new spring, something entirely fresh and individual garlanding what had remained immovable through countless winters. If I could only paint him, thought John, or immortalize him in a poem, or serve him in some way. But he won’t be served. I can’t even remove the screws, only keep him company when he would probably rather be by himself. Would he? Does he recognize I’m keeping him company in the first sort of prayer men ever learned? What does he feel about it?

  Old Bob felt nothing about it, he was merely glad the vicar was there and noted that he seemed to be a larger and more powerful man sitting down than standing up. Sitting with his back to the window as John was doing Bob could not see his face, but he could see the fine shape of the head and the width of the shoulders, and when John turned his head for a moment he could see his dark profile with the beak of a nose and the receding chin, and thought oddly of an eagle; and anything less like an eagle than the vicar he could not imagine.

  “They shall mount up with wings as eagles,” he remarked unexpectedly. “Is that a text, Vicar?”

  “Yes,” said John. “The eagle is a symbol of strength, the sort of strength we shall have when the ending of the days has come.”

  The ending of the days. What a futile thing to say, he thought, for what could the phrase mean to Bob? Tough old countrymen such as Bob accepted death when it came as they accepted the vagaries of the weather, with resignation and as a matter of course, but they did not long for it as weaklings like himself did. Nor had they any realization of the process of purgation leading through the long days, the aeons of the days, to eventual freedom, a falling away of the weakness and the sin, the pain and the inhibition and the whole appalling bondage of sinful mortality. If they thought sometimes of another world the thought touched them lightly and was gone again, it did not ravish and madden them together as they struggled to see the coasts of it through their tears and longed for it through the walls of a breaking heart that would not break and let them go. Bob and his like were wise in their generation, and much braver than he and his like whose perpetual straining forward had in it an element of escapism of which he was ashamed.

  Bob sighed and the sigh caused him to belch slightly. “Pardon,” he said with a grave and sad dignity. It was a matter for regret that he should belch in front of a Wentworth, but a belch is one of the inflictions of infirmity which are not always under a man’s control, and so he felt more of resignation than shame in the matter.

  “What a fool I am!” ejaculated John. “I’m entirely forgetting what I came for,” and he dived into his pocket and produced
Harriet’s little flask of brandy, putting it on the table beside Bob. “Nothing like it for indigestion, Bob, and you won’t be able to get down to the Wheatsheaf for your usual tot.”

  A spark of their usual shrewd brightness came into the old man’s eyes. “That’ll set me up fine,” he said. “Thankee Master John—sir—Vicar.” He was so touched that the various titles by which he had addressed John through the years fell from him in some confusion. “Vicar,” he added finally, remembering that was the way things were now. This was an ecclesiastical gift and he took it with a deep respect. He felt there was something to be said for religion and had seldom felt more attracted by it. John felt the moment to be auspicious and knelt down and repeated the collect he always said with ailing parishioners before he left them, the prayer composed by that sick and crippled Pope who was carried everywhere in a litter.

  “O God, who knowest us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright; Grant to us such strength and protection, as may support us in all dangers, and carry us through all temptations; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

  “Amen,” said old Bob with absence of mind but unusual enthusiasm, and his gnarled old hand closed more tightly round the flask.

  2

  John got himself clumsily out of the room, catching his foot in the rag rug this time, and out of the dark little house into the cool spring evening.