Only candle-light in the cottage, in the silvered sconces on the jade-blue walls. Casket he had made for Picus, hung with brilliant xviiith century paintings of birds. That woman had done it, the slender, cousinly bitch. Once he had thought of dropping the handkerchief at her, and few he’d ever done it to had said no. His extreme vanity had never surmounted the transition from his boy’s beauty, which Ross had taken as a matter of course.
‘Introvert, introvert’ said his mind, full of fashionable fads. Then his torture came on him again as the huge night swept on, and even his fear of it was forgotten in the grinding and tearing of his frustration and desolation and rage against Scylla, until for all human purposes he was mad. In other surroundings it would have been a bad break-down, needing work, praise, new loves, above all admiration. Here, a pebble-throw from a gulf of air, it was ruin for one who in camps and cities and a classic personal relation had been heroic.
The story of the cup, now become a horror, came in. That his reason was not overset was because he took the hollow greek ship with “A present for Scylla” on it, and broke it to splinters.
Next morning he had not slept and sat staring when Lydia’s letter came. A horrible fit of laughing frightened the shepherd’s wife. She ran home like a half-plucked hen, while Clarence with affected deliberation for some unknown frightful audience took pen and paper and wrote in his exquisite hand.
He told Lydia that it was not so, and in a few lines conveyed such a loathing of Scylla that Lydia half saw the truth, and nearly went to find her. But Philip found the letter amusing, and she did not go.
The levelling afternoon sun that came in through the cottage door found Clarence drawing Scylla, on huge sheets of paper pinned to the walls. In charcoal, obscenely and savagely contorted, and with little darts made of fine nibs and empty cartridge-cases he pierced the bodies of his paper martyrs. Then he tore them down, finding no content in it, so that ragged strips of paper covered the floor, the silver divan, and the cushions bright as fresh blood.
Perhaps he was the man who had suffered most from the disbelief and disuse of all forms of religion. Bred a Catholic, he had left the church and the question superciliously, uneasily. Incapable of Ross’s and Scylla’s faith that there was a faith, with all its pains and invisibility, unquestioned as air. A religion externalised by a powerful discipline might have upheld him, but all that he had then was a suspicion that this was the punishment of a neglected set of gods.
The hour came when the light began to shew up the earth in relief, with a distinctiveness almost monstrous, like a drug reverie. A little freshness blew in off the water, a cloud or so travelled, teaspoonfuls of fire-dipped cream. Spent with pain, his fear of the night returned.
MR. TRACY
Carston spent the next morning thinking about old Mr. Tracy, or, more exactly, how he would hate to walk up his drive. In his country he would have faced a dozen of them, but he had been out early to scout and had seen the house up a much-too-long-yellow avenue between high clipped shrubs. Unsympathetic. Like a long neck into a trap.
At half-past twelve he had an idea. At two o’clock precisely he had passed the lodge. At two minutes past he saw old Mr. Tracy leave his front door and halt, turning as he walked, to speak to someone within. Two seconds later he saw a neat painted gate in the laurel wall, the entrance of a tunnel. One second later he was mastering the latch, and had disappeared from sight.
We will follow him, as earlier writers say so prettily, as he commences trespasser, in hiding from the approaching master of the house.
He followed the tunnel about ten yards, where it led him on to a wood-path parallel with the drive, whose principal feature was a pavement of enormous roots. He listened to the crisp sound of Mr. Tracy’s boots, waited till he had passed, tripped over the roots, slipped down the tunnel again, and reached the house as though nothing had happened. He was ashamed until he noticed that it was a sound instinct that had made him avoid the old man in open.
Half an hour later he was in the library. He heard: “So you want to buy that mischief-making cup for an antiquarian friend in the States? And you want its pedigree? I can write you out the particulars, of course. My name counts for something, but I imagine that I was sufficiently precise last time we met.”
“No, sir,” said Carston, “you were not. I have its photograph in the book that wasn’t burned as thoroughly as you might have wished. There it’s described as a mass-vessel, early english, from your collection. Now, I don’t give a damn which it is, but it can’t be that and a poison-cup. And before I write out a cheque I want to know which.”
“But, in any case, Mr. Carston, while we are speaking of money, I imagine that any cheque should be made out to me.”
“No, sir. I and three other persons heard you confirm your son’s gift of it to Miss Taverner.” (His reputation as a collector’s at stake. It can’t be two things at once)— “As to a second opinion, I expect your British Museum could give us that.”
“I admit,” said Mr. Tracy, “that it is probably a mass-cup. In my horror of loose feeling I preferred to suggest any origin, however grim or far-fetched, than that my relatives should abandon themselves to superstition.”
This might have sounded noble, but Carston kept on. ‘Bit of bunk: what has he been up to? That’s what I’m not to find out.’ He said:
“It seems to me that you’ve exchanged a fine, mysterious, almost sacred fable for a sordid, even brutal, personal invention. Facts are what I’m here for.”
‘What I won’t get, not the ones that matter.’
“You can be satisfied that in all probability the photograph describes it correctly. An early Church vessel, its shape suggests a chalice, with the setting lost. If so, it might well have been part of a crusader’s loot. Incidentally, since its probable origin greatly enhances its value, you might do well to stick to my earlier suggestion, the last part of which is no more than simple fact—”
“Cool!” Carston gasped. Cucumbers and icebergs.
“—Or is to be part of the price for Scylla Taverner’s hypothetical virginity?” Carston thought:
‘If I start losing my temper, it is he who will find things out. He chose blind-man’s bluff. We must play until we needn’t.’ At the same time conviction came to him that they would find out nothing. His direct attack was obvious, useless, unfruitful.
“I have nothing to say, but that I buy nothing with my eyes shut. And what I’ve come to get is your reasons for supposing it a Church vessel—” Vain repetition. Not even taken the wind out of the old man’s sails. Sailing serenely on: through a weak position: through fraud.
“You shall have them, Mr. Carston, to-night. Signed on my authority. You are staying at the Star?”
IN AND OUT
On his way down the drive Carston knew what you did. In Trollope, in cases of spiritual difficulty, you consulted the vicar. Whether it turned out well depended on whether you found a good vicar or a bad. The landlord directed him. His way led through the churchyard. He noticed a staring white monument, and read on it the name of Picus’s mother.
“Old devil to bury her like that and keep it clean.” In the flagged hall, he walked up a ribbon of green matting, and saw at the end Picus playing with a blind cord.
“Tracy,” he said, “I’ve been trying to clear this up.”
“Any luck?”
“None. Have you a good vicar?”
“I left the churchyard at two in the morning, and said ‘It’s me,’ and I’ve been here since. Sick of night and mist walking. I’ve told him. Come in.”