VII Father Jenks’ Tale

I have not yet had occasion to describe Father Jenks, the Ontario priest; partly, I think, because he had not previously distinguished himself by anything but silence, and partly because he was so true to his type that I had scarcely noticed even that.

It was not until the following evening, when he was seated in the central chair of the group, that I really observed him sufficiently to take in his characteristics with any definiteness and to see how wholly he was American. He was clean-shaven, with a heavy mouth, square jaw, and an air of something that I must call dulness, relieved only by a spark of alertness in each of his eyes, as he leaned back and began his story. He spoke deliberately, in an even voice, and as he spoke looked steadily a little above the fire; his hands lay together on his right knee, which was crossed over his left, and I noticed a large, elastic-sided boot cocked toward the warmth. I knew that he had passed a great part of his early life in England, and I was not surprised to observe that he spoke with hardly a trace of American accent or phraseology.

“I, too, am a man of one story,” he said, “and I dare say you may think it not worth the telling. But it impressed me.”

He looked round with heavy, amused eyes as if to apologize.

“It was when I was in England, in the eighties. I was in the Cotswolds. You know them, perhaps?”

Again he looked round. Monsignor Maxwell jerked the ash off his cigarette impatiently. This American’s air of leisure was a little tiresome.

“I lived in a cottage,” went on the other, “at the edge of Minchester, not two hundred yards from the old church. My own schism shop, as the parson called it once or twice in the local paper, was a tin building behind my house; it was not beautiful. It was a kind of outlandish stranger beside the church, and the parson made the most of that. I never was able to understand.”

He broke off again and pressed his lips in a reminiscent smile.

“Now, all that part of the Cotswolds is like a table; it is flat at the top, with steep sides sloping down into the valleys. The great houses stand mostly half way down these slopes. It is too windy on the top for their trees and gardens. The Dominicans have a house a few miles from Minchester up one of the opposite hills; and I would go over there to my confession on Saturdays and stay an hour or two over tea, talking to one of them. It was there that I heard the tale of the house I am going to speak about.

“This was a house that stood not two miles from my own village—a great place, built half way down one of the slopes. It had been a Benedictine house once, though there was little enough of that part left; most of it was red brick with twisted chimneys; but on the lawn that sloped down toward the wood and the stream at the bottom of the valley there was the west arch of the nave still standing, with the doorway beneath and a couple of chapels on either side. Mrs.—er—Arbuthnot we will call her, if you please—had laid it out with a rockery beneath; and once I saw her from the hill behind drinking tea with her friends in one of the chapels.

“Then the dining-room, I heard from the Dominicans, had been the abbot’s chapel. This, too, was what they told me. The house had been shut up for forty years and had a bad name. It had once been a farm, but things had happened there—the sons had died, a famous horse bred there had broken its neck somehow on the lawn. Then another family had taken it from the owner, and the only son of the lot, too, had died; and then folks began to talk about a curse; and the oldest inhabitant was trotted out as usual to make mischief and gossip; and the end was, the house was shut up.

“Then the owner had built on to it. He pulled down a bit more of the ruins, meaning to live in it himself, and then his son went up.”

The Canadian smiled with one corner of his mouth.

“This is what I heard from the Dominicans, you know.”

Father Brent looked up swiftly.

“They are right, though,” he said. “I know the house and others like it.”

“Yes, Father,” said the other priest; “your island has its points.”

He recrossed his legs and drew out his pipe and pouch.

“Well, as this priest says, there are other houses like it. Otherwise I could scarcely tell this tale. It’s too ancient and feudal to happen in my country.”

He paused so long to fill his pipe that Father Maxwell sighed aloud.

“Yes, Monsignor,” said the priest without looking up, “I am going on immediately.”

He put his pipe into the corner of his mouth, took out his matches and went on.

“Well, Mrs. Arbuthnot had taken the house a year before I came to Minchester. She was what the Dominicans called a frivolous woman; but I called her real solid before the end. What they meant was that she had parties down there, and tea in the chapel, and a dresser with blue plates where the altar used to stand in the abbot’s place, and a vestment for her fire-screen, and all that; and a couple of chestnuts that she used to drive about the country with, and a groom in boots, and a couple of fellows with powdered hair to help her in and out.

“Well, I saw all that at a garden-party she gave, and I must say we got on very well. I had seen her before once or twice out of my window on Sunday morning going along with a morocco prayer-book with a cross on it, and a bonnet on the back of her head. Then I showed her round the old church one day with some visitors of hers, and she left a card on me next day.

“On the day of the garden-party I saw the house, and the blue china and the rest, and she asked me what I thought of it all, and I said it was very nice; and she asked me whether I thought it wrong, with a sort of cackle; and I told her she had better follow her own religious principles and let me follow mine, and not have any exchanges. She told me then I was a sensible man, and called up her son to introduce us. He was a fellow of twenty or so, a bright lad, up at Oxford. He was just engaged to be married, too—that was why they had the party—and when I saw his girl, too, I thought things looked pretty unwholesome for the old curse, and I think I said so to the lady. She thought me more sensible than ever after that, and I heard her telling another old body what I had said.”

The Canadian paused again to strike a match, and I saw the corners of his mouth twitching either with the effort to draw or with amusement; I scarcely knew which. When the pipe was well alight he went on.

“It was on the last Sunday of September that year that I heard the young man was ill, and that the marriage was put off. I remember it well, partly because they were having a high time at the church, decorating it all for Michaelmas, which was next day, with the parson pretending it was for Harvest Festival, as they always do. I had seen the pumpkins go in the day before, and wondered where they put them all. I went up to the churchyard after mass to have a look, and was nearly knocked down by the parson. I began to say something or other, but he ran past me, through from the vicarage, with his coat-tails flying and his man after him. But I stopped the man, and got out of him that Archie was ill, and that the parson was sent for.

“Well, then I went back home and sat down.”

The priest drew upon his pipe in silence a moment or two.

I felt rather impressed. His airy manner of talking was shot now with a kind of seriousness, and I wondered what was coming next.

He went on almost immediately.

“I heard a bit more as the day wore on. One of my people stayed after Catechism to tell me that the young man was worse, that a doctor had come from Stroud, and another wired for from London.

“Well, I waited. I thought I knew what would happen. I thought I had seen a bit more in the old lady than the Dominicans had seen, but what I was going to say to her I knew no more than the dead.

“Then that night as I was going to bed—I had just said Matins and Lauds for Michaelmas day—the message came.

“I was half way upstairs when I heard a knocking at the door, and I went down again and opened it. There stood one of the fellows I had seen on the box of the carriage, and he was out of breath with running. He had a lantern in his hand, because there was a thick mist that night up from the valley.

“He gave me the lady’s compliments, and would I step down? Master Archie was ill. That was all.”

“Well, in a minute we were off into the thick of the mist. I took nothing with me but my stole, for it was not a proper sick call. We said little or nothing to each other. He just told me that Master Archie had been taken ill about ten o’clock, quite suddenly. He didn’t know what it was.”

The priest paused again for a moment.

Then he went on almost apologetically.

“You know how it is, gentlemen, when something runs in your head. It may be a tune or a sentence. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed how strong it is sometimes when you have something on your mind.

“Well, what ran in my head was a bit of the office I had just said. It was this. I have never forgotten it since:

“Stetit Angelus juxta oram templi habens thuribulum aureum in manu sua.”

He said it again, and then added:

“It comes frequently in the office, you remember. It was very natural to remember it.

“Well, in half an hour we were at the top of the hill above the house. I think there must have been a moon, because we could see the mist round us like smoke, but nothing of the house, not even the lights in the top floors below us. It was all white and misty.

“Then we started down through the iron gate and the plantation. I could have lost my way again and again but for the fellow with me, and still we saw nothing of the house till we were close to it on one side; and then I looked up and saw a window like a great yellow door overhead.

“We came round to the front of the house, and there was a carriage there drawn up, with the lamps smoking in the mist, and as we came up I saw that the horses were steaming and blowing. The driver had just brought the London doctor from Stroud and was waiting for orders, I suppose.”

The Canadian paused again.

I was more interested than ever. His descriptions had become queerly particular, and I wondered why. I did not understand yet. The rest, too, were very quiet.

“We went in through the hall past the stuffed bear that held the calling cards and all that, you know, and then turned in to the left to the big dining-room that had been the Abbot’s chapel. Some fool had left the window open. I suppose they were too flurried to think of it. At any rate, the mist had got in, and made the gas-jets overhead look high up like great stars.

“There was a door open upstairs somewhere, and I could hear whispering.

“Well, we went up the staircase that opened on one side below the gallery, that they had put up above the eastern end. The footpace was still there, you know, below the gallery, and the sideboard stood there.

“We came out on to the gallery presently, and my man stopped.

“Then some one came out with Mrs. Arbuthnot and the door closed. She saw me standing there, and I thought she was going to scream; but the fellow with her in the fur coat—he was the London doctor I heard afterward—took her by the arm.

“Well, she was quiet enough then, but as white as death. She had her bonnet on still, just as she must have put it on to go to church with in the morning, when the young man was taken ill. She beckoned me along, and I went.

“As I was going past the doctor he first shook his head at me, and then whispered as I went on to keep her quiet. I knew there was no hope then for Archie, and I was sorry, very sorry, gentlemen.”

The priest shook his own head meditatively once or twice, leaned forward and spat accurately into the heart of the fire.

“Well, it was a big room that I went into, and to tell the truth, I left the door open this time, because I was startled by the screen at the bed and all that.

“The screen stood in the corner by the window to keep off the draught; and the bed to one side of it. I could just catch a glimpse of the lad’s face on the pillow and the local doctor close by him. There was a woman or two there as well.

“But the worst was that the lad was talking and moaning out loud, but I didn’t attend to him then, and besides, Mrs. Arbuthnot had gone through by another door, and I went after her.

“It was a kind of dressing-room—Archie’s perhaps. There was a tall glass and silver things on the table by the window, and a candle or two burning. She turned round there and faced me, and she looked so deadly that I forgot all about the lad for the present. I just looked out to catch her when she fell. I had seen a woman like that once or twice before.

“Well, she said all that I expected—all about the curse and that, and the sins of the fathers; and it was all her fault for taking the beastly place, and how she would swear to clear out—I couldn’t get a word in—and at last she said she’d become a Catholic if the boy lived.

“I did get a word in then, and told her not to talk nonsense. The Church didn’t want people like that. They must believe first and so on, and all the while I was looking out to catch her.

“Well, she didn’t hear a word I said, but she sat down all on a sudden, and I sat down, too, opposite her, and all the while the boy’s voice grew louder and louder from the next room.

“Then she started again, but she hadn’t been under way a minute before I had given over attending to her. I was listening to the lad.”

The priest stopped again abruptly. His pipe had gone out, but he sucked at it hard and seemed not to notice it. His eyes were oddly alert.

“As I listened I looked toward the door into the next room. Both that and the one with the gallery over the hall were open, and I saw the mist coming in like smoke.

“I couldn’t catch every word the lad said. He was talking in a high, droning voice, but I caught enough. It was about a face looking at him through smoke.

“‘His eyes are like flames,’ he said, ‘smoky flames—yellow hair—are you a priest?... What is that red dress?’... Things like that. Well, it seemed pretty tolerable nonsense, and then I——”

Monsignor Maxwell sat up suddenly.

“Good Lord!” he said.

“Yes,” drawled the Canadian, “Stetit Angelus habens thuribulum aureum.”

He spoke so placidly that I was almost shocked. It seemed astonishing that a man—Then he went on again.

“Well, I stood up when I heard that, and I faced the old lady.

“‘What’s the dedication of the chapel?’ I said; ‘what’s the saint? Tell me, woman, tell me!’ There! I said it like that.

“Well, she didn’t know what I meant, of course, but I got it out of her at last. Of course, it was St. Michael’s.

“I sat down then and let her chatter on. I suppose I must have looked a fool, because she took me by the shoulder directly.

“‘You aren’t listening, Father Jenks,’ she said.

“I attended to her then. It seemed as if she wanted me to do something to save him, but I don’t think she knew what it was herself, and I’m sure I didn’t, not at first, at least.

“Then she began again, and all the while the boy was crying out. She wanted to know if her becoming a Catholic would do any good, and to tell the truth I wasn’t so sure then myself as I had been before. Then she said she’d give up the house to Catholics, and then at last she said this:

“‘Will you take it off, Father? I know you can. Priests can do anything.’

“Well, I stiffened myself up at that. I was sensible enough not to make a fool of myself, and I said something like this.”

He stopped again; sucked vigorously at his cold pipe.

“I said something like this: ‘Mind you keep your promise,’ I said, ‘but as far as I am concerned, I’d let him off.’”

A curious rustle passed round the room, and the priest caught the sound.

“Yes, gentlemen, I said that. I did, indeed, and I guess most of you gentlemen would have done the same in my circumstances.

“And this is what happened.

“First the lad’s voice stopped, then there was a whispering, then a footstep in the other room, and the next moment Mrs. Arbuthnot was on her feet, with her mouth opened to scream. I had her down again though in time, and when I turned a woman was at the door, and I could see she had closed the outer door through which the mist came.

“Well, her face told us. The lad had taken the right turn. It was something on the brain, I think, that had dispersed or broken or something—I forget now—but it seemed to come in pat enough, didn’t it, gentlemen?”

The Canadian stopped and leaned back. Was that the end then?

Father Brent put my question into words:

“And what happened?”

“Well,” added the other, drawling more than ever, “Mrs. Arbuthnot did not keep her promise. She’s there still, for all I know, and attends the Harvest Festivals as regularly as ever. That spoils the story, doesn’t it?”

“And the son?” put in the English priest swiftly.

“Well, the son was a bit better. That marriage did not take place. The girl broke it off.”

“Well?”

“And Archie’s at the English College at this moment studying for the priesthood. I had tea with him at Aragno’s yesterday.”