While the sisters were taking possession of their new abode and trying to eat—though neither had much appetite—the supper provided for them by Mrs. Raps, Hamish Traherne, his cassock protected from the threatening storm by a heavy ulster, was making his promised effort to “talk” with the master of Oakguard. Impelled by an instinct he could not resist, perhaps with a vague notion that the creature’s presence would sustain his courage, he carried, curled up in an inside pocket of his cloak, his darling Ricoletto. The rat’s appetite had been unusually good that evening and it now slept peacefully in its warm nest, oblivious of the beating heart of its master. Carrying his familiar oak stick in his hand and looking to all appearance quite as formidable as any highwayman the priest made his way through the sombre avenue of gnarled and weather-beaten trees that led to the Renshaw mansion. He rang the bell with an impetuous violence, the violence of a visitor whose internal trepidation mocks his exterior resolution. To his annoyance and surprise he learnt that Mr. Renshaw was spending the evening with Mr. Stork down in the village. He asked to be allowed to see Mrs. Renshaw, feeling in some obscure way suspicious of the servant’s statement and unwilling to give up his enterprise at the first rebuff. The lady came out at once into the hall.

“Come in, come in, Mr. Traherne,” she said, quite eagerly. “I suppose you’ve already dined but you can have dessert with us. Philippa always sits long over dessert. She likes eating fruit better than anything else. She’s eating gooseberries to-night.”

Mrs. Renshaw always had a way of detaching herself from her daughter and speaking of her as if she were a strange and somewhat menacing animal with whom destiny had compelled her to live. But the priest refused to remove his ulster. The interest of seeing Philippa eat gooseberries was not strong enough to interrupt his purpose.

“Your son won’t be home till late, I’m afraid?” he said. “I particularly—yes, particularly—wanted to see him to-night. I understand he’s at the cottage.”

“Wait a minute,” cried the lady in her hurried, low-voiced tone. “Sit down here, won’t you? I’ll just—I’ll just see Philippa.”

She returned to the dining-room and the priest sat down and waited. Presently she came hurrying back carrying in her hands a plate upon which was a bunch of grapes.

“These are for you,” she said. “Philippa won’t touch them. There! Let me choose you out some nice ones.”

The servant had followed her and now stood like a pompous and embarrassed policeman uncertain of his duty. It seemed to give Mrs. Renshaw some kind of inscrutable satisfaction to cause this embarrassment. She sat down beside the priest and handed him the grapes, one by one, as if he were a child.

“Brand orders these from London,” she remarked, “that’s why we get them now. I call it extravagance, but he will do it.” She sighed heavily. “Philippa,” she repeated, “prefers garden fruit so you mustn’t mind eating them. They’ll get bad if they’re not eaten.”

The servant hastened on tip-toe to the dining-room door, peered in, and returned to his post. He looked for all the world, thought Mr. Traherne, like a ruffled and disconsolate heron. “He’ll stand on one leg soon,” he said to himself.

“When do you expect your son home?” he enquired again. “Perhaps I might call at the cottage and walk back with him.”

“Yes, do!” Mrs. Renshaw cried with unexpected eagerness. “Do call at the cottage. It’ll be nice for you to join them. They’ll all be there—Mr. Sorio and the Doctor and Brand. Yes, do go in! It’ll be a relief to me to think of you with them. I’m sometimes afraid that cousin Tassar encourages dear Brand to drink too much of that stuff he likes to make. They will put spirits into it. I’m always telling them that lime juice would be just as nice. Yes, do go, Mr. Traherne, and insist on having lime juice!”

The priest looked at the lady, looked at the servant and looked at the hall door. He felt a faint scratching going on inside his cloak. Ricoletto was beginning to wake up.

“Well, I’ll go!” he exclaimed, rising to his feet.

At that moment the figure of Philippa, exquisitely dressed in a dark crimson gown, emerged from the dining-room. She advanced slowly towards them with more than her usual air of dramatic reserve. Mr. Traherne noticed that her lips were even redder than her dress. Her eyes looked dark and tired but they shone with a mischievous menace. She held out her hand sedately and as he took it, fumbling with his ulster, “I hope you enjoyed your grapes,” she said.

“You ought to apologize to Mr. Traherne for appearing before him at all in that wild costume,” remarked Mrs. Renshaw. “You wouldn’t think she’d been at the dentist’s all day, would you? She looks as if she were in a grand London house, doesn’t she, just waiting to go to a ball?”

“Yes, at the dentist’s,” Mrs. Renshaw went on, speaking quite loudly, “at the dentist’s in Mundham. She’s got an abscess under one of her teeth. It kept her awake in the night. I think your face is still a little swollen, dear, isn’t it? She oughtn’t to stand in this cold hall, ought she, Mr. Traherne? And with so much of her neck exposed. It was quite a large abscess. Let me look, dear.” She moved towards her daughter, who drew hastily back.

“She won’t let me look at it,” she added plaintively. “She never would, not even when she was a child.”

Hamish, fumbling with his fingers inside his ulster, made a grotesque grimace of sympathy and once more intimated his desire to say good-night. He discerned in the look the girl had now fixed upon her mother an expression which indicated how little sympathy there was between them. It was nearly half past nine when he reached Rodmoor and knocked at Baltazar’s door. There was some sort of village revel going on inside the tavern and the sound of this blended, in intermittent bursts of uproar, with the voices from Stork’s little sitting-room. Both wind and rain had subsided and the thunder-feeling in the air had grown less oppressive.

Traherne found himself, as he had been warned, in the presence of Raughty, Sorio and Brand. Ushered in by the urbane Baltazar he greeted them all with a humorous and benignant smile and took, willingly enough, a cup of the admirable wine which they were drinking. They all seemed, except their host himself, a little excited by what they had imbibed and the priest observed that several other bottles waited the moment of uncorking. Dr. Raughty alone appeared seriously troubled at the new-comer’s entrance. He coughed several times, as was his habit when disconcerted, and glanced anxiously at the others.

Sorio, it seemed, was in the midst of some sort of diatribe, and as soon as they had resumed their seats he made no scruple about continuing it.

“It’s all an illusion,” he exclaimed, looking at Mr. Traherne as if he defied him to contradict his words, “it’s all an absolute illusion that women are more subtle than men. The idea of their being so is simply due to the fact that they act on impulse instead of by reason. Any one who acts on impulse appears subtle if his impulses vary sufficiently! Women are extraordinarily simple. What gives them the appearance of subtlety is that they never know what particular impulse they’re going to have next. So they just lie back on themselves and wait till it comes. They’re eminently physiological, too, in their reactions. Am I not right there, Doctor? They’re more entirely material than we are,” he went on, draining his glass with a vicious gulp, “they’re simply soaked and drenched in matter. They’re not really completely or humanly conscious. Matter still holds them, still clings to them, still drowns them. That is why the poets represent Nature as a woman. The sentimental writers always speak of women as so responsive, so porous, to the power of Nature. They put it down to their superior sensitiveness. It isn’t their sensitiveness at all! It’s their element. Of course they’re porous to it. They’re part of it! They’ve never emerged from it. It flows round them like waves round seaweed. Take this question of drink—of this delicious wine we’re drinking! No woman who ever lived could understand the pleasure we’re enjoying now—a pleasure almost purely intellectual. They think, in their absurd little heads, that all we get out of it is the mere sensation of putting hot stuff or sweet stuff or intoxicating stuff into our mouths. They haven’t the remotest idea that, as we sit in this way together, we enter the company of all great and noble souls, philosophizing upon the nature of the gods and sharing their quintessential happiness! They think we’re simply sensual beasts—as they are themselves, the greedy little devils!—when they eat pastry and suck sugar-candy at the confectioner’s. No woman yet understood, or ever will, the sublime detachment from life, the victory over life, which an honest company of sensible and self-respecting friends enjoy when they drink, serenely and quietly, a wine as rare, as well chosen, as harmless as this! Women hate to think of the happiness we’re enjoying now. I know perfectly well that every one of the women who are connected with us at this moment—and that only applies,” he added with a smile, “to Mr. Renshaw and myself—would suffer real misery to see us at this moment. It’s an instinct and from their point of view they’re justified fully enough.

“Wine separates us from Nature. It frees us from sex. It sets us among the gods. It destroys—yes!—that’s what it does, it destroys our physiological fatality. With wine like this,” he raised his glass above his head, “we are no longer the slaves of our senses and consequently the slaves of matter. We have freed ourselves from matter. We have destroyed matter!”

“I’m not quite sure,” said Doctor Raughty, going carefully to the fireplace where, on the fender, he had deposited for later consumption, a saucer of brandied cherries, “I am not sure whether you’re right about wine obliterating sex. I’ve seen quite plain females, in my time, appear like so many Ninons and Thaises when one’s a bit shaky. Of course I know they may appear so,” he went on patiently and assiduously letting every drop of juice evaporate from the skin of the cherry he held between his fingers before placing it in his mouth, “appear desirable wenches, I mean, without our having any inclination to meddle with them but the impulse is the same. At least,” he added modestly, “their being there does not detract from the pleasure.”

He paused and, with his head bent down over his cherries, became absolutely oblivious to everything else in the world. What he was trying now was the delicate experiment of dipping the fruit, dried by being waved to and fro in the air, in the wine-glass at his side. As he achieved this end, his cheeks flushed and nervous spasmodic quiverings twitched his expressive nostrils.

“I am inclined to agree with the Doctor,” said Brand Renshaw. “It seems mere monkish nonsense to me to separate things that were so obviously meant to go together. I like drinking while girls dance for me. I like them to dance on and on, and on and on till they’re tired out and then—” He was interrupted by a sudden crash which made all the glasses ring and ting. Mr. Traherne had brought down his fist heavily upon the rosewood table.

“What you people are forgetting,” shouted the priest, “is that God is not dead. No! He’s not dead, even in Rodmoor. Nature, girls, wine, rats,—are all shadows in flickering water. Only one thing’s eternal and that is a pure and loving heart!”

There was a general and embarrassed hush after this and the priest looked round at the four men with a sort of wistful bewilderment. Then an expression of indescribable sweetness came into his face.

“Forgive me, children,” he muttered, pressing his hand to his forehead. “I didn’t mean to be violent. Baltazar, you must have filled my glass too quickly. No, no! I mustn’t touch a drop more.”

Stork leaned forward towards him.

“We understand,” he said. “We understand perfectly. You felt we were going a little too far. And so we were! These discourses about the mystery of wine and the secret of women always betray one into absurdity. Adrian ought to have known better than to begin such a thing.”

“It was my fault,” repeated Mr. Traherne humbly. “If you’ll excuse me I’ll get something out of my pocket.”

He rose and went into the passage. Brand Renshaw shrugged his shoulders and lifted his glass to his lips.

“I believe it’s his rat,” whispered Dr. Raughty softly. “He lives too much alone.”

The priest returned with Ricoletto in his hand and resuming his seat stroked the animal dreamily. Baltazar looked from one to another of his guests and his delicate features assumed a curious expression, an expression as though he isolated himself from them all and washed his hands of them all.

“Traherne refers to God,” he began in a flutelike tone, “and it’s no more than what he has a right to do. But I should be in a sorry position myself if my only escape from the nuisance of women was to drag in Eternity. Our dear Adrian, whose head is always full of some girl or another, fancies he can get out of it by drink. Brand here doesn’t want to get out of it. He wants to play the Sultan. Raughty—we know what an amorous fellow you are, Doctor!—has his own fantastic way of drifting in and out of the dangerous waters. I alone, of all of you, have the true key to escape. For, between ourselves, my dears, we know well enough that God and Eternity are just Hamish’s innocent illusion.”

The priest seemed quite deaf to this last remark but Brand turned his hatchet-shaped head towards the speaker.

“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.

“I’m not in the least surprised,” he said, “at your speaking to me like this, and strange as it may seem it does not annoy me. In fact it pleases me. I like it. It raises the value of the girl—of Linda, I mean—and it makes me respect you. But if you imagine, my good Mr. Traherne, that I’m going to make any such promise as you describe, you can have no more notion of what I’m like than you have of what Linda’s like. Talk to her, Hamish Traherne, talk to her, and see what she says!”

The priest clenched his fingers round the handle of his oak stick. He felt rising in him a tide of natural human anger. Mentally he prayed to his God that he might retain his self-control and not make matters worse by violence.

“If it interests you to know,” Brand continued, “I may tell you that it’s quite possible I shall marry Linda. She attracts me, I confess it freely, more than I could possibly explain to you or to any one. I presume you wouldn’t carry your responsibility so far as to make trouble about my marrying her, eh? But that’s nothing. That’s neither here nor there. Married or unmarried, I do what I please. Do I convey my meaning sufficiently clearly? I—do—what—I—please. Let that be your clue henceforth, Mr. Hamish Traherne, and the clue of everybody else in Rodmoor, in dealing with me. Listen to me, sir. I do you the honour of talking more openly to you to-night than I’m ever likely to talk again. Perhaps you have the idea that I’m a mere commonplace sensualist, snatching at every animal pleasure that comes my way? Perhaps you fancy I’ve a vicious—what do you call it?—‘penchant’—for the seduction of young girls? Let me tell you this, Mr. Hamish, a thing that may somewhat surprise you. I’ve walked these woods till I know every scent in them by night and day—do you catch that fungus-smell now? That’s one of the smells I love best of all!—and in these walks, absolutely alone,—I love being alone!—I’ve faced possibilities of evil—faced them and resisted them, mind you!—compared with which these mere normal sexual lapses we’re talking about are silly child’s play! Linda does me good. Do you hear? She does me good. She saves me from things that never in your wildest dreams you’d suppose any one capable of. Oh, you priests! You priests! You shut yourselves up among your crucifixes and your little books, and meanwhile—beyond your furthest imagination—the great tides of evil sweep backwards and forwards! Listen! I needn’t tell you what that sound is? Yes—you can hear it. In every part of this place you can hear it! I was born to that tune, Traherne, and I shall die to that tune. It’s better than rustling leaves, isn’t it? It’s deeper. It’s the kind of music a man might have in his head when doing something compared with which such little sins as you’re blaming me for are virtues! Did you see that bat? I’ve watched them under these trees from midnight to morning. A bat in the light of dawn is a curious thing to see. Do you like bats, Mr. Traherne, or do you confine yourself to rats?

“Bah! I’m talking like an idiot. But what I want you to understand is this. When you’re dealing with me, you are dealing with some one who’s lost the power of being frightened by words, some one who’s broken the world’s crust and peeped behind it, some one who’s seen the black pools—did you guess there were black pools in this world?—and has seen the red stains in them and who knows what caused those stains! Damn it all—Hamish Traherne—what did you take me for when you talked to me like that? A common, sensual pig? A vulgar seducer of children? A fellow to be frightened back into the fold by talk of honour and the manners of gentlemen? I tell you I’ve seen bats in the dawn—and seen them too, with images in my memory that only that sound—do you hear it still?—could equal for horror.

“It’s because Linda knows the horror of the sea that I love her. I love to lead her to it, to feel her draw back and not to let her draw back! And she loves me for the same reason! That’s a fact, Mr. Hamish, that may be hard for you to realize. Linda and I understand each other. Do you hear that, you lover of rats? We understand each other. She does me good. She distracts me. She keeps those black pools out of my mind. She keeps Philippa’s eyes from following me about. She takes the taste of funguses out of my mouth. She suits me, I tell you! She’s what I need. She’s what I need and must have!

“Bah! I’m chattering like an idiot. I must be drunk. I am drunk. But that’s nothing. That’s one of the vices that are my virtues. I’ll tell you another thing, while I’m about it, Hamish Traherne. You’ve wondered sometimes, I expect, why I’m so good to Baltazar. Quite Christian of me, you’ve thought it, eh? Quite noble and Christian—considering what he is and what I am? That just shows how little you know us, how little you know either of us! Tassar can no more get away from me than I can get away from him. We’re bound together for life, my boy, bound together by what those black pools mean and what that sound—you wouldn’t think you could hear it here, would you?—never stops meaning.

“Bah! I’m drunk as a pig to-night! I’ve not talked like this to any one, not for years. Listen, Traherne! You have an ugly face but you’re not a fool. Wasn’t it Saint Augustine who said once that evil was a mere rent in the cloak of goodness? The simple innocent! I tell you, evil goes down to the bottom of life and out beyond! I know that, for I’ve gone with it. I’ve seen the bats in the dawn.

“Yes, Tassar’s gone far, Hamish Traherne, farther than you guess. Sometimes I think he’s gone farther than I guess. He never talks, you know. You’ll never catch him drunk. Tassar could look the devil in the face, and worse, and keep his pretty head cool!—Oh, damn it all, Traherne, it’s not easy for a person never to open his mouth! But Tassar’s got the secret of that. He must get it from my father. There was a man for you! You wouldn’t have dared to talk to him like this.”

Several times during this long outburst, Mr. Traherne’s fingers had caused pain to Ricoletto. But now he flung out his long arms and clutched Brand fiercely by the shoulders.

“Pray—you poor lost soul,” he shouted, “pray the great God above us to have mercy upon you and have mercy upon us all!”

His arms trembled as he uttered these words and, hardly conscious of what he was doing, he shook the heavy frame of the man before him backwards and forwards as if he had been a child in his hands. There was dead silence for several seconds and, unheeded by either of them, a weasel ran furtively across the path and disappeared among the trees. The damp odours of moss and leaf-mould rose up around them and, between the motionless branches above, the stars shone like pin-pricks through black parchment. Suddenly Brand broke away with a harsh laugh.

“Enough of this!” he cried. “We’ve had enough melodramatic nonsense for one night. You’d better go back to bed, Traherne, or you’ll be oversleeping yourself to-morrow and my mother will miss her matins.”

He held out his hand.

“Good night!—and sleep soundly!” he added, in his accustomed dull, sarcastic tone.

The priest sighed heavily and groped about on the ground for the hat he had dropped. Just as he had secured it and was moving off, Brand called out to him laughingly,

“Don’t you believe a word of what I said just now. I’m not drunk at all. I was only fooling. I’m just a common ruffian who knows a pretty face when he sees it. Talk to Linda about me and see what she says!” He strode off up the avenue and the priest turned heavily on his heel.