“Shut up, Tassar,” he muttered harshly, “you’ll start him again.”
“What do you mean?” cried Sorio. “Go on! Go on and tell us what you mean.”
“Wait one moment,” intervened Dr. Raughty, “talk of something else for one moment. I must cool my head.”
He put down his pipe by the side of his saucer of cherries, arranging it with exquisite care so that its stem was higher than its bowl. Lifting his chair, he placed it at a precise angle to the table, returning twice to add further little touches to it before he was half-way to the door. Finally, laying down his tobacco pouch, lightly as a feather upon the seat of the chair, he rushed out of the room and up the stairs.
“When the Doctor gets into the bathroom,” remarked Brand, “we may as well put him out of our minds. The last time he dined with me at Oakguard he nearly flooded the house.”
Mr. Traherne pressed his rat to his cheek and grinned like a satyr.
“None of you people understand Fingal,” he burst out, “it’s his way of praying. Yes, I mean it! It’s his way of saying his prayers. He does it just as Ricoletto does. It’s ritual with him. I understand it perfectly.”
The conversation at this point seemed to have a peculiarly irritating effect upon Sorio. He fidgeted and looked about him uneasily. Presently he made an extraordinary gesture with one of his hands, opening it, extending the fingers stiffly back and then closing it again. Baltazar, watching him closely, remarked at last,
“What’s on your mind now, Adriano? Any new obsession?”
They all looked at the Italian. His heavy “Roman-Emperor” face quivered through all its muscles.
“It’s not ritual,” he muttered gloomily, “you’d better not ask me what it is for I know!”
Brand Renshaw smiled a cruel smile.
“He means that it’s madness,” he remarked carelessly, “and I dare say he’s quite right.”
“Fingal Raughty’s not mad,” protested Mr. Traherne, “I tell you he bathes himself just as my rat does — to praise God and purge his sins!”
“I wasn’t thinking about the Doctor,” said Brand quietly, the same cruel gleam in his eyes. “Mr. Sorio knows what I meant.”
The Italian made a movement as if he were about to leap upon him and strike him, but the reappearance of Fingal, his cheeks shining and his face softly irradiated, distracted the general attention.
“You’d begun to tell us, Stork,” said the Doctor, “what your escape is from the sting of sensuality. You wipe out, altogether, you say, God and Eternity?”
Baltazar’s feminine features hardened as if under a thin mask of enamel. Brand shot a malignant glance at him.
“I can answer that,” he said, with venomous bitterness. “Tassar thinks himself an artist, you know. He despises the whole lot of us as numbskulls and Philistines. He’ll tell you that art’s the great thing and that critics of art know much more about it than the damned fools who do it, all there is to be known, in fact.”
Baltazar’s expression as he listened to his half-brother’s speech was a palimpsest of conflicting emotions. The look that predominated, however, was the look of a woman under the lash, waiting her hour. He smiled lightly enough and gesticulated with his delicate hand.
“We all have our secret,” he declared gaily. “Brand thinks he knows mine but he’s as far from knowing it as that new moon over there is from knowing the secret of the tide.”
His words caused them to glance at the window. The clouds had vanished and the thin ghostly crescent peered at them from between the curtains.
“The tide obeys it,” he added significantly, “but it keeps its own counsel.”
“And it has,” put in Sorio fiercely, “depths below depths which it were better for no corpse-world to interfere with!”
Dr. Raughty, who had cleared his throat uneasily several times during the last few moments, now called the attention of the company to a scorched moth which, hurt by one of the candles, lay shuddering upon the edge of the table.
“Hasn’t it exquisite markings?” he said, touching the creature with the tip of his forefinger, and bending forward over it like a lover. “It’s a puss-moth! I wish I had my killing-bottle here. I’d keep it for Horace Pod.”
Sorio suddenly leapt from his seat and made a snatch at the moth.
“Shame!” he cried, addressing indiscriminately the Doctor, Horace Pod and the universe. “Poor little thing!” he added, seizing it in his fist and carrying it to the window. When, with some difficulty and many muttered imprecations he had flung it out, “it tickled me,” he remarked gravely. “Moths flutter so in your hand.”
“Most things flutter,” remarked Brand, “when you try to get rid of them. Some of them,” he added in a significant tone, “don’t confine themselves to fluttering.”
The incident of the moth seemed to break up, more than any of the preceding interruptions, the harmony of the evening. Dr. Raughty, looking nervously at Sorio and replacing his pipe in his pocket, announced that he intended to depart. Brand Renshaw rose too and with him, Mr. Traherne.
“May I walk with you a little way?” said the priest.
The master of Oakguard stared at him blankly.
“Of course, of course,” he replied, “but I’m afraid it’ll take you out of your road.”
It was some time before they got clear of the house as Baltazar with a thousand delicate attentions to each of them and all manner of lively speeches, did his best, in the stir of their separation, to smooth over and obliterate from their minds the various little shocks that had ruffled his entertainment. They got away, however, at last and Brand and the priest, bidding the rest good night, took the road to the park. The sky as they entered the park gates was clear and starry and the dark trees of the avenue up which they walked, rose beside them in immovable stillness.
Mr. Traherne, putting his hand into the pocket of his ulster to derive courage from contact with his pet, plunged without preamble into the heart of the perilous subject.
“You may not know, Renshaw,” he said, “that Miss Herrick and her sister are leaving Dyke House and are going to live in the village. Nance has got work at Miss Pontifex’ and Linda is going to play the organ regularly for me. I believe there’s been something — lately”—he hesitated and his voice shook a little but, recovering himself with a tremendous effort, “something,” he went on, “between Linda and yourself. Now, of course, in any other case I should be very reluctant to say anything. Interference in these things is usually both impertinent and useless. But this case is quite different. The girl is a young girl. She has no parents. Her sister is herself quite young and they are both, in a sense, dependent on me as the priest of this place for all the protection I can give. I feel responsible for these girls, Renshaw, responsible for them, and no feelings of a personal kind with regard to any one,” here he squeezed Ricoletto so tightly that the rat emitted a frightened little squeal, “shall interfere with what I feel is my duty. No, hear me out, hear me out, Renshaw!” he continued hurriedly, as his companion began to speak. “The matter is one about which we need not mind being quite open. I want you, in fact, to promise me — to promise me on your word of honour — that you’ll leave this child alone. I don’t know how far things have gone between you. I can’t imagine, it would be shameful to imagine, that it has gone beyond a flirtation. But whatever it has been, it must stop now. It’s only your word of honour I want, nothing but your word of honour, and I can’t believe you’ll hesitate, as a gentleman, to give me that. You’ll give me that, won’t you, Renshaw? Just say yes and the matter’s closed.”
He removed his hand from his pocket and laid it on his companion’s wrist. Brand was sufficiently cool at that moment to remark as an interesting fact that the priest was trembling. Not only was he trembling but as he removed his hat to give further solemnity to his appeal, large drops of perspiration, known only to himself, for darkness dimmed his face, trickled down into his eyes. Brand quietly freed himself and moved back a step.