The Cathedral Part 33

"Then it doesn't matter to you whether I come with you or not?"

Her reply was soft. She suddenly put out her hand and took his.

"Of course it matters. We're friends. The best friend I'm likely to find, I reckon. What would I be meeting you for all these months if I didn't care for you? Just to be admiring the scenery?--shouldn't like."

She laughed softly.

She went on: "I'm ready to go with you or without you. If we go together I'm independent, just as though I went without you. I'm independent of every one--father and you and all. I'll marry you if you want me, or I'll live with you without marrying, or I'll live without you and never see you again. I won't say that leaving you wouldn't hurt. It would, after being with you all these weeks; but I'd rather be hurt than be dependent."

He held her hand tightly between his two.

"Folks 'ud say," she went on, "that I had no right to be talkin' of going away with you--that I'd be ruining your future and making people look down on you, and all that. Well, that's for you to say. If you think it harms your prospects being with me you needn't see me. I've my own prospects to think of. I'm not going to have any man ashamed of me."

"You're right to speak of it, and we're right to think of it," said Falk.

"It isn't my prospects that I've got to think about, but it's my father I wouldn't like to hurt. If we go away together there'll be a great deal of talk here, and it will all fall on my father."

"Well, then," she said, tossing her head and taking her hand away from his, "don't come. _I'm_ not asking you. As for your father, he's that proud----" She stopped suddenly. "No. I'm saying nothing about that. You care for him, and you're right to. As far as that goes, we needn't go together; you can come up later and join me."

When she said that, he knew that he couldn't bear the thought of her going alone, and that he had all along been determined in his thought that she should not go alone.

"If you'd say you loved me," he said, suddenly bending towards her, "I'd never let you out of my sight again."

"Oh, yes, you would," she said; "you don't know whether you _do_ love me. Many's the time you think you don't. And I don't know whether I love you. Sometimes I think I do. What's love, anyway? I dunno. I think sometimes I'm not made to feel that way towards any one. But what I really meant to say to-night is, that I'm dead sick of this hanging-on. I'm going up to a cousin I've got Blackheath way a week from to-night. If you're coming, I'm glad. If you're not--well, I reckon I'll get over it."

"A week from to-day--" He looked out over the water.

"Aye. That's settled."

Then, unexpected, as she so often was, she put her arms round his neck and drew his head down to her bosom and let her hand rest on his hair.

"I like to feel you there," she said. "It's more a mother I feel to you than a lover."

She would not let him kiss her, but suddenly moved away from him, into the dark, leaving him where he stood.

When he was half-way home the storm that had been slowly, during the last hour and a half, climbing up above the town, broke. As he was crossing the market-place the rain came down in torrents, dancing upon the uneven cobbles with a kind of excited frenzy, and thickening the air with a curtain of mist. He climbed the High Street, his head down, feeling a physical satisfaction in the fierce soaking that the storm was giving him.

The town was s.h.i.+ning and deserted. Not a soul about. No sound except the hissing, sneering, chattering whisper of the deluge. He went up to his room and changed, putting on a dinner jacket, and came down to his father's study. It was too late for dinner, but he was not hungry; he did not know how long it was since he had felt hungry last.

He knocked and went in. He felt a desperate urgency that he must somehow reconcile the interests and happiness of the two people who were then filling all his thoughts--his father and Annie. There must _be_ a way. He could feel still the touch of Annie's hand upon his head; he was more deeply bound to her by that evening's conversation than he had ever been before, but he longed to be able to rea.s.sure himself by some contact with his father that he was not going to hurt the old man, that he would be able to prove to him that his loyalty was true and his affection deep.

Small causes produce lasting results, and the lives of many people would have been changed had Falk caught his father that night in another mood.

The Archdeacon did not look up at the sound of the closing door. He was sitting at his big table writing letters, the expression of his face being that of a boy who has been kept in on a fine afternoon to write out the first fifty lines of the _Iliad_. His curly hair was ruffled, his mouth was twisted with disgust, and he pushed his big body about in his chair, kicked out his legs and drew them in as though beneath his concentration on his letters he was longing to spring up, catch his enemy by the throat, roll him over on to the ground and kick him.

"Hullo, governor!" Falk said, and settled down into one of the big leather arm-chairs, produced a pipe from his pocket and slowly filled it.

The Archdeacon went on writing, muttering to himself, biting the end of his quill pen. He had not apparently been aware of his son's entrance, but suddenly he sprang up, pushed back his chair until it nearly fell over, and began to stride up and down the room. He was a fine figure then, throwing up his head, flinging out his arms, apostrophising the world.

"Grat.i.tude! They don't know what it means. Do you think I'll go on working for them, wearing myself to a shadow, staying up all night--getting up at seven in the morning, and then to have this sort of return? I'll leave the place. I'll let them make their own mistakes and see how they like that.

I'll teach them grat.i.tude. Here am I; for ten years I've done nothing but slave for the town and the Cathedral. Who's worked for them as I have?"

"What's the matter, father?" Falk asked, watching him from the chair.

Every one knows the irritation of coming to some one with matters so urgent that they occupy the whole of your mind, and then discovering that your audience has its own determined preoccupation. "Always thinking of himself," Falk continued. "Fusses about nothing."

"The matter?" His father turned round upon him. "Everything's the matter.

Everything! Here's this Jubilee business coming on and everything going to ruin. Here am I, who know more about the Cathedral and what's been done in the Cathedral for the last ten years than any one, and they are letting Ryle have a free hand over all the Jubilee Week services without another word to anybody."

"Well, Ryle is the Precentor, isn't he?" said Falk.

"Of course he is," the Archdeacon answered angrily. "And what a Precentor!

Every one knows he isn't capable of settling anything by himself. That's been proved again and again. But that's only one thing. It's the same all the way round. Opposition everywhere. It'll soon come to it that I'll have to ask permission from the Chapter to walk down the High Street."

"All the same, father," Falk said, "you can't be expected to have the whole of the Jubilee on your shoulders. It's more than any one man can possibly do."

"I know that. Of course I know that. Ryle's case is only one small instance of the way the wind's blowing. Every one's got to do their share, of course. But in the last three months the place is changed--the Chapter's disorganised, there's rebellion in the Choir, among the Vergers, everywhere. The Cathedral is in pieces. And why? Who's changed everything?

Why is nothing as it was three months ago?"

"Oh, Lord! what a bore the old man is!" thought Falk. He was in the last possible mood to enter into any of his father's complaints. They seemed now, as he looked across at him, to be miles apart. He felt, suddenly, as though he did not care what happened to his father, nor whether his feelings were hurt or no----

"Well, tell me!" said the Archdeacon, spreading his legs out, putting his hands behind his back and standing over his son. "Who's responsible for the change?"

"Oh, I don't know!" said Falk impatiently.

"You don't know? No, of course you don't know, because you've taken no interest in the Cathedral nor in anything to do with it. All the same, I should have thought it impossible for any one to be in this town half an hour and _not_ know who's responsible. There's only one man, and that man is Ronder."

Unfortunately Falk liked Ronder. "I think Ronder's rather a good sort," he said. "A clever fellow, too."

The Archdeacon stared at him.

"You like him?"

"Yes, father, I do."

"And of course it matters nothing to you that he should be your father's persistent enemy and do his best to hinder him in everything and every way possible."

Falk smiled, one of those confident, superior smiles that are so justly irritating to any parent.

"Oh, come, father," he said. "Aren't you rather exaggerating?"

"Exaggerating? Yes, of course you would take the other side. And what do you know about it? There you are, lolling about in your chair, idling week after week, until all the town talks about it----"

Falk sprang up.

"And whose fault is it if I do idle? What have I been wanting except to go off and make a decent living? Whose fault----?"

"Oh, mine, of course!" the Archdeacon shouted. "Put it all down to me! Say that I begged you to leave Oxford, that I want you to laze the rest of your life away. Why shouldn't you, when you have a mother and sister to support you?"

"Stop that, father." Falk also was shouting. "You'd better look out what you're saying, or I'll take you at your word and leave you altogether."