Brother Copas | Page 7

gave him a dressing-down at tea-time for dragging Ibbetson into the
row. Threatened to have her nails in his beard--I heard her. That
woman's a terror. . . . All the same, one can't help sympathising with
her. 'You can stick to your stinking Protestantism,' she told him, 'if it
amuses you to fight the Chaplain. You're a widower, with nobody
dependent. But don't you teach my husband to quarrel with his vittles.'"
"All the same, when a man has convictions--"
"Convictions are well enough when you can afford 'em," Brother
Clerihew grunted again. "But up against Colt--what's the use? And
where's his backing? Ibbetson, with a wife hanging on to his coat-tails;
and old Bonaday, that wouldn't hurt a fly; and Copas, standing off and
sneering."
"A man might have all the pains of Golgotha upon him before ever you
turned a hair," grumbled Brother Dasent, a few yards away.
He writhed in his chair, for the rheumatism was really troublesome; but
he over-acted his suffering somewhat, having learnt in forty-five years
of married life that his spouse was not over-ready with sympathy.
"T'cht!" answered she. "I ought to know what they're like by this time,
and I wonder, for my part, you don't try to get accustomed to 'em.
Dying one can understand: but to be worrited with a man's ailments,
noon and night, it gets on the nerves. . . ."
"You're sure?" resumed Mrs. Royle eagerly, but sinking her voice-- for
she could hardly wait until the Master had passed out of earshot.
"Did you ever know me spread tales?" asked the comfortable-looking

Nurse. "Only, mind you, I mentioned it in the strictest secrecy. This is
such a scandalous hole, one can't be too careful. . . . But down by the
river they were, consorting and God knows what else."
"At his age, too! Disgusting, I call it."
"Oh, she's not particular! My comfort is I always suspected that woman
from the first moment I set eyes on her. Instinct, I s'pose. 'Well, my
lady,' says I, 'if you're any better than you should be, then I've lived all
these years for nothing.'"
"And him--that looked such a broken-down old innocent!"
"They get taken that way sometimes, late in life."
Nurse Turner sank her voice and said something salacious, which
caused Mrs. Royle to draw a long breath and exclaim that she could
never have credited such things--not in a Christian land. Her old
husband, too, overheard it, and took snuff with a senile chuckle.
"Gad, that's spicy!" he crooned.
The Master, at the gateway leading to the home-park, turned for a look
back on the quadrangle and the seated figures. Yes, they made an
exquisite picture. Here--
"Here where the world is quiet"--
Here, indeed, his ancestor had built a haven of rest.
"From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank
with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for
ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds
somewhere safe to sea."
As the lines floated across his memory, the Master had a mind to
employ them in his peroration (giving them a Christian trend, of course)
in place of the sonnet he had meant to quote. This would involve
reconstructing a longish paragraph; but they had touched his mood, and

he spent some time pacing to and fro under the trees before his taste
rejected them as facile and even cheap in comparison with
Wordsworth's--
"Men unto whom sufficient for the day, And minds not stinted or
untill'd are given, --Sound healthy children of the God of heaven-- Are
cheerful as the rising sun in May."
"Yes, yes," murmured the Master, "Wordsworth's is the better. But
what a gift, to be able to express a thought just so--with that freshness,
that noble simplicity! And even with Wordsworth it was fugitive, lost
after four or five marvellous years. No one not being a Greek has ever
possessed it in permanence. . . ."
Here he paused at the sound of a footfall on the turf close behind him,
and turned about with a slight frown; which readily yielded, however,
and became a smile of courtesy.
"Ah, my dear Colt! Good evening!"
"Good evening, Master."
Mr. Colt came up deferentially, yet firmly, much as a nurse in a good
family might collect a straying infant. He was a tall, noticeably
well-grown man, a trifle above thirty, clean shaven, with a square and
obstinate chin. He wore no hat, and his close black hair showed a
straight middle parting above his low and somewhat protuberant
forehead. The parting widened at the occiput to a well-kept tonsure. At
the back the head wanted balance; and this lent a suggestion of
brutality--of "thrust"--to his abounding appearance