Gentian Hill Page 20

  What they were mentioning now, as they stood in the entrance hall, were the affairs of the day. They were gloomy enough. Napoleon had been crowned Emperor in Notre Dame, Austria had been ruinously defeated, and amongst all the nations of Europe, it seemed that only England really stood firm against the enemy; and even she had her halfhearted politicians, her bungling administrators who sickened the hearts of the willing and the brave. Thanks to the vigilance of Nelson and Cornwallis, the threatened invasion of England had not yet been attempted, but the fleets of France and Spain still remained intact, and the danger was not over. Nelson had been on the long chase to the West Indies and back, but he had not caught them. Now he was eating his heart out in the Mediterranean, but he could not lining them to battle. As the war dragged on and on, hardships were increasing. At times there was something almost like famine in the towns, with riots among the hungry people. The activities of the press gangs even became more brutal, and intermingled with patriotism there was a good deal of bitterness and discontent. There seemed no end to it all, and hearts were heavy. Though just at the moment, among this group of men and women, there was the rekindling of hope that comes when an aesthetic experience of great power and beauty has just laid its spell of peace upon the mind. Not hope of anything in particular. Just hope!

  The Sunday mass at Torre Abbey was in these days always memorable. The Abbé de Colbert, the chaplain of Torre Abbey and the spiritual director of all who worshipped there, made of it always a poignant and deep experience for those to whom he ministered. Each of the familiar prayers, spoken in his extraordinarily beautiful voice, soared up like music and fell again as light; there was a new quietness in their minds and new faith in their souls, and the intensity of his own devotion lit theirs. When the Abbé celebrated, it seemed as though dullness and dryness had never been, which some of them thought odd, for the Abbé, when not engaged in his priestly duties, seemed to them a dry old stick-so austere as to be scarcely human-not a likeable man at all. But the more discerning were not surprised. To them there was always something stimulating about the Abbé even at his most uncompromising, a suggestion of banked fires that kept them always on the watch for the glint of gold.

  But whether they liked or disliked the Abbé, they always paid him the tribute of intense awareness which is given only to quality of a high order. Engrossed in conversation though they were, as they gathered in the hall, they heard his light footfall behind them; conversation died to a murmur and they turned instinctively towards him. He smiled frostily as he came among them, bowed to Sir George, and bent to kiss the hand of Lady Carey as he courteously but firmly refused her invitation to dinner. His manners were those of the Versailles of twenty years ago, highly stylized and encased in ice, and somewhat shattering. He was, as always, immaculately and simply dressed in black, but in frock coat and white stock, not in the soutane and white bands of the priest.

  He said that he thought such a costume would attract too much attention in a Protestant country, and if there was one thing which he disliked more than another, it was to be the focus of attention. In a sudden moment of expansion he had once said bitterly to Sir George that he wished he were a hermit in a cell. Only so would he enjoy that complete seclusion from the human race which was the goal of his ambition. To this remark, Sir George had replied frigidly (for he disliked those who disliked the human race, being somewhat partial to it himself) that the Abbé surely had the next best thing to it. His nearby lodgings, a small bedroom and study in a cottage looking out upon a village green, were surely as quiet a retreat as any man could wish for. The Abbé had replied that a village green was not as quiet as it sounded. It could be at times an uncommonly noisy place, especially when a wrestling match was in progress-not always an ideal spot for a man engaged in literary pursuits.

  His history was known to his fellow émigrés in bare outline, but no more, for he never spoke of his past life. He had been the third son of the Comte de Colbert, and his childhood in his parents’ chateau must have been happy enough, and presumably his young manhood too, for he had been sent into a crack regiment, had held the rank of Colonel at the age of twenty-five, and had spent much time in attendance at the gayest court in the world. He had been gay himself, gifted with every grace of mind and person, but his gaiety had been a thing of excess; there had been no young men at the court so wildly extravagant in all they did as the young Colonel. He had not always been in France, for he had seen foreign service with his regiment, and had distinguished himself in it, but wherever he was, his abounding vitality had made him immensely popular. He had been a flame at which others warmed themselves. And in the day of retribution, his courage had still been as a flame. He had not joined any of the first waves of émigrés who, led by the Comte d’Artois, had escaped from France after the fall of the Bastille. He had served the King while this was possible, then he had gone home to do what he could to protect his parents. It was said of him that when the mob came to burn the chateau and murder its occupants, he had fought like a tiger until he had been wounded. The village Curé, it was said, had rescued him and hidden him. When he came back to life again, it was to find himself Comte de Colbert, for he was the only one of his family left alive. Then he became a fugitive, and it was at this time that he was joined in his wanderings by a woman whom he loved. Who she was and whether he was married to her, the Torre Abbey community did not know. Somehow they had escaped together and reached England, a child had been born to them, and they had been happy. Then the woman and the child had died, and the Comte had gone to Ireland. Nothing was known of the years he had spent in Ireland, except that while there he had become a priest. Two years ago he had come to Torquay, the cold, hard, yet immensely impressive man known to the Catholic community as the Abbé de Colbert.

  That was all any of them had been able to discover about him, and none of this information had been supplied by himself but had been pieced together for the most part by an energetic émigré, one of those busy ladies who can know no happiness until clairvoyant research into the lives of their friends has left those friends with scarcely a cranny in which to hide. Though it was felt by all that in the case of the Abbé, she had not been so successful as usual. There were some big gaps in the narrative, and no doubt these gaps contained occurrences which had played their part in transforming the gay young soldier of Versailles into this enigmatic and prematurely aged priest. For the busy lady had calculated that the Abbé could not possibly be as old as he looked. He was, she declared, only in his late forties.

  He looked sixty as he moved about the hall, paying his devoirs to first one group and then another, almost with the impartiality of royalty, saying not more than a few words to any of them, excepting only to Mrs. Loraine, a very old lady whose beauty and dignity had always attracted him. She was a widow whose two sons had both died lighting in India. She lived alone in a little house near Torre Church, and he liked her because she never spoke of her sorrows, nor of her rheumatism nor her straightened means, which caused her to come to mass in all weather not in a carriage, but very slowly and painfully upon her feet, leaning upon an ebony stick. He had actually been to call upon her once and she had asked him to come again, but he had not gone. Understanding him, she had not resented this. She smiled at him with affection now, as he bent over her hand, but was careful to say nothing to detain him. A moment or two later he managed to escape. His vanishing tricks were well known to his flock. He could disappear with the ease of a shadow when the sun goes in.

  2

  He strode away through the park with the swiftness and ease of a young man, and the relief of the solitary who has recaptured his solitude again. Though he was fasting, he scarcely felt tired. During the last fifteen years or so he had passed through one of those furnaces of suffering and hardship that break the body of a man of weak constitution, but temper the body of a strong one to whipcord and steel. The Abbé’s constitution had always been remarkable, and he was now whipcord and steel. He regretted it. He was thinking this
morning that if he were to live to ninety like his grandfather, then he was still only halfway through. And since Therese had died, the time had seemed long. That was the way of it in loneliness. When they had been together, the years had flown, and even the bad things they had endured had not seemed to last so long because they had been together. And now one solitary and uneventful week seemed a century. He supposed he ought to try and be more companionable, but he had lost the trick of it, and that after being one of the most gregarious young men in all France. Because the things that he had seen men do to each other had made him shrink from the human race, and because over there in Ireland, after she had died, the time of solitude in the monastery by the mere had restored his reason, he had come to think that only celled was he safe. The world was a madhouse, he had thought, and as most of the men and women in it were what you would expect in such a place, it was best to have as little contact with them as possible. But during the last year, as in quietness his mental balance had slowly steadied, he had felt ashamed of his shrinking it was a sin in a priest and just lately, at rare intervals, he had felt what was almost a longing to go out from himself once more and search among the criminals and fools for the few who were neither.

  They existed here and there, the wise and gentle, the brave and gay, and the incurious. Among the little community he had just left were many excellent men and women, he knew, but their curiosity, searching his wounds like .a surgeon’s probe, was a thing that he could not yet endure.

  King Lear and his child had been incurious, they had neither asked him his name nor told him theirs, they had just come and gone like the visitants of a dream, leaving him with the memory of the old man’s wisdom and scholarship and the look of astonished gratitude that had flooded the boy’s sensitive face in response to his act of common courtesy. That evocation and response had touched him more than he had realized at the time. He was not sure that it was not the boy’s look which had awakened in him this strange new wish for companionship. Several times lately he had wished not that those two had been curious but that he had--he had been a fool not to ask their names. »

  He looked and saw St. Michael’s Chapel, with its gray walls almost silver in the frosty sunshine. He had not been able to stay as long as he had wished in the Abbey Chapel after mass. Courtesy had demanded that he go to the hall and speak to the dispersing congregation; he decided he would climb up to St. Michael’s Chapel and continue his thanksgiving there. It was the place that he loved above all others in this district. It was, for him, steeped in the sense of sanctuary-peace after storm, thanksgiving for danger past, prayer for those still out in the wind and the weather – and he could always be certain of solitude there. The English Protestants looked upon it as a Popish relic and let it alone, and the few Catholics in the neighborhood were mostly too well stricken in years to attempt the steep climb up the rocks. Apart from the Catholic crews of visiting foreign ships, who came but seldom, he could only once recollect having seen anyone praying there, and that was the king’s son.

  He climbed up quickly and easily, and entering the Chapel looked eagerly about him. Absurd, he thought, to love the place so much that he had to look each time to see if all was well with it. It varied only with the weather, with the color of the shadows and the quality of the light; blue today, bright and brittle as spun glass. He knelt near the piscina, facing the place where once the altar had been, and through the unglazed east window the sun streamed in on him, so that he scarcely felt the cold.

  Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes: Zaudate eum omnes populi. Quoniam confirmata est super nos misericordia ejus: et veritas Domini manet in aeternum.

  Words! They were so small, so light, they waited so humbly about a man, ready for his use, yet they could deliver him from mortal weariness more swiftly than any other form of music. Music! The wings of Perseus that for mortality had no existence apart from the body yet were not of it. Wings upon aching feet. Prayer upon the lips. Heaven and earth. Eternal life in the bread and wine. Words had already lifted him into the silence, and he worshipped there for he did not know how long. Then coming back again, without knowing it, he spoke aloud. Sit nomen Domini benedictum: ex hoc nunc, et usuque in saecnlum.

  3

  Some sound disturbed him, a small rustle like that of a mouse. He looked around, expecting a mouse, and saw a small girl in a green cloak and bonnet sitting sedately on

  a hummock of rock, her hands folded inside a round brown muff, regarding him very seriously out of a pair of starry gray eyes. Meeting his glance, she smiled with the utmost friendliness, and the smile went through him with a stab of pain. He got up almost shakily, one hand against the wall, and stared bleakly at her with a face grown so suddenly haggard that any other child would have been scared stiff. But not Stella. Apart from her natural fearlessness there had never been anyone yet who had been unkind to her. Having met with and given nothing but love all her life, love was what she expected to receive and give.

  "Don’t your knees ache?" she asked sympathetically.

  "Slightly," said the Abbé stiffly. He had recovered himself, but he still stood where he was, one hand against the wall. He had not the slightest idea how to talk to children. He knew nothing about them. His own child had been so small a creature when death had come. He felt dizzy again for a moment. Would he never get over it?

  He perceived that the child had moved slightly. One small mittened hand came out of the muff and was laid upon the rock in invitation. She smiled and cocked her head on one side like a robin. Women! They knew how to beguile a man almost before they were out of the cradle. But no, upon a second glance he saw that there was no coquetry about her-merely motherliness. He crossed the chapel and sat down beside her on the low rock with some difficulty, his long legs stretched out ridiculously before him. So they sat, side by side, wrapped in their cloaks, looking at each other, the winter sunlight falling on their faces.

  “Do you suffer from lumbago?" asked Stella, "Sir," she added suddenly as an afterthought. She had been trained to say "Sir" and "Madam" to her elders, but she often forgot, not out of disrespect, but because the deep interest she took in everybody gave her a sense of nearness to them that was inimitable to formality. For the same reason she often forgot her curtsey too.

  "I thank you, no," said the Abbé. "I just found it difficult to sit down because I am so much taller than you are." Stella smiled, glad that he did not have lumbago. "Father

  Sprigg has it," she said. “It’s most painful. Mother Sprigg warms salt in the oven and applies it to where the pain is, and then he feels better."

  "Are Father and Mother Sprigg your parents?" asked the Abbé. He had quite forgotten that he did not know how to talk to children. This lovely child had done more than entirely put him at ease, though her smile had given him the wild stab of pain, and though he ached with it still, yet the fact of her was to him a gift of joy and wonder. It was so many years since he had had this sense of reverent acceptance of a treasure, that he had forgotten the feel of it. But now he could remember other times. The day when, as a small boy, he had first gone to midnight mass and the Cure had given him a lighted candle. The day when he had looked up and seen Therese coming towards him, her hands cupped about the gift she brought. The sight of the white swan flying over the mere in Ireland. The day when the old Cure, looking back at him from the tumbril, had smiled. All little things, yet gifts that had had power to save. And she was a little thing, this child, an elfin creature. While he questioned gently, and she answered quietly and politely, he saw her small, brown, heart-shaped face, the determined upper lip and straight little nose, the laughter in the curves of the lips, as a man sees who will never forget. Even so had he seen the candle flame, the cupped hands of Therese, the reflection of the swan’s wings in the mere, the gladness in the smile of his friend, and known that he had reached a milestone in his life.

  "Father and Mother Sprigg are my father and mother," Stella answered. This statement did not seem to her a lie. They had saved her. Th
ey loved her. To say that they were not her father and mother would have seemed to her, as the doctor had guessed, disloyalty.

  "You live in Torquay, child?"

  "No, Sir. I live at Weekaborough Farm near Gentian Hill."

  “You are here alone?"

  "Dr. Crane brought me to the bottom of the hill. He’s gone to see a patient and then he’ll come back and fetch me. Those were lovely words you were saying when I came in. Like Zachary used to say sometimes."

  "You like words?"

  She nodded.

  “So do I," he said. "They are like wings, are they not?"

  "They fly up," she said, "and then they fall down again like light."

  “Yes, I know. And this Zachary whose words you liked, is he your brother?"

  He saw how the laughter left her lips and her eyes darkened. "No. He’s gone away to sea, and I come here to remember that he will come back. Like Rosalind."

  The Abbé knew something of the legend of the place. "Once a year, like Rosalind?" he asked.

  "Yes. This is the first time I’ve come. Zachary went away on November 27th, so I really ought to have waited till November again, but I have come earlier because..." she stopped and looked a little troubled.

  "Could you tell me why?" asked the Abbé gently. Yes, she could tell him. She never found it hard to tell people things, if she could find the words. She had only hesitated because Mother Sprigg had said strangers did not always want to be bothered with all one’s affairs. But this man seemed to want to be bothered.