Chapter II

AN EXHIBITION OF DOCTOR MORTON SIMS AND MR. MEDLEY, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF HOW LOTHIAN RETURNED TO MORTLAND ROYAL

"Seest thou a man diligent in his business: He shall stand before
Kings. He shall not stand before mean men."

--_The Bible._

About eleven-thirty in the morning, Mr. Medley, the curate, came out of the rectory where he lived, and went into the village.

Mortland Royal was a rich living, worth, with the great and lesser tythe, some eight or nine hundred a year. The rector, the Hon. Leonard O'Donnell, was the son of an Irish peer who owned considerable property in Norfolk and in whose gift the living was. Mr. O'Donnell was a man of many activities, a bachelor, much in request in London, and very little inclined to waste his energies in a small country village. He was a courtly, polished little man who found his true _milieu_ among people of his own class, and neither understood, nor particularly cared to understand, a peasant community.

His work, as he said, lay elsewhere, and he did a great deal of good in his own way with considerable satisfaction to himself.

Possessed of some private means, Mortland Royal supplemented his income and provided him with a convenient _pied à terre_ where he could retire in odd moments to a fashionable county in which a number of great people came to shoot in the season. The rectory itself was a large old-fashioned house with some pretensions to be called a country mansion, and for convenience sake, Mr. Medley was housed there, and became de facto, if not de jure, the rector of the village. Mr. O'Donnell gave his colleague two hundred a year, house room, and an absolutely free hand. The two men liked one another, if they had not much in common, and the arrangement was mutually convenient.

Medley was a pious priest of the old-fashioned type. His flock claimed all the interest of his life. He had certain fixed and comely habits belonging to his type and generation. He read his Horace still and took a glass of port at dinner. Something of a scholar, he occasionally reviewed some new edition of a Latin classic for the _Spectator_, though he was without literary ambitions. He had a little money of his own, and three times a year he dined at the high table in Merton College Hall, where every one was very pleased to see him.

A vanishing type to-day, but admirably suited to his environment. The right man in the right place.

The real rector was regarded with awe and some pride in the village. His name was often in the newspapers. He was an eloquent speaker upon Temperance questions at important congresses. He went to garden parties at Windsor and theatricals at Sandringham. When he was in residence and preached in his own church, it was fuller than at other times. He was a draw. His distinguished face and high, well-bred voice were a pleasant variation of monotony. And the theology which had made him so welcome in Mayfair was not without a pleasing titillation for even the rustic mind. Mr. O'Donnel was convinced, and preached melodiously, the theory that the Divine Mercy extends to all human beings. He asserted that, in the event, all people would enter Paradise--unless, indeed, there was no Paradise, which in his heart of hearts he thought exceedingly likely.

But he did good work in the world, though probably less than he imagined. It was as an advocate of Temperance that Leonard O'Donnell was particularly known, and it was as that he was welcomed by Society.

He was a sort of spiritual Karlsbad and was nicknamed the Dean of Vichy.

The fact was one that had a direct bearing on Gilbert Lothian's life.

The Rector of Mortland Royal was a "managing" man. His forte was to be a sort of earthly Providence to all sorts of people within his sphere, and his motive was one of genuine good nature and a wish to help. As a woman he would have been an inveterate matchmaker.

Did old Marchioness, who liked to keep an eye upon her household affairs, bewail the quality of London milk--then she must have it from Mr. Samuel, the tenant of the Glebe Farm at Mortland Royal!

Did a brother clergyman ask to be recommended a school for his son, the Rector knew the very place and was quite prepared to take the boy down himself and commend him specially to the Headmaster. With equal eagerness, Mr. O'Donnell would urge a confessor or a pill, and the odd thing about it was, that he was nearly always right, and all sorts of people made use of the restless, kindly little man.

One day, Dr. Morton Sims, the bacteriologist and famous expert upon Inebriety, had walked from a meeting of the Royal Commissioners upon Alcoholism to the Junior Carlton with Mr. O'Donnell.

Both were members and they had dined there together.

"I am run down," said Morton Sims, during the meal. "I have been too much in London lately. I've got a lot of important research work to do. I'm going to take a house in the country for a few months, only I don't know where."

The mind of the man occupied with big things was impatient of detail; the mind of the man occupied with small ones responded instantly.

"I know of the very place, Sims. In my own village. How fortunate! The 'Haven.' Old Admiral Custance used to have it, but he's dead recently. There are six months of the lease still to run. Mrs. Custance has gone to live at Lugano. She wants to let the place furnished until the lease is up."

"It sounds as if it might do."

"But, my dear fellow, it's the very place you want! Exactly the thing! I can manage it for you in no time. Pashwhip and Moger--the house agents in our nearest town--have the letting. Do let me be of use!"

"It's very kind of you, O'Donnell."

"Delighted. It will be so jolly to have you in the village. I'm not there as much as I could wish, of course. My other work keeps me so much in London. But Medley, my colleague, is an excellent fellow. He'll look after you in every way."

"Who lives round about?"

"Well, as far as Society is concerned, we are a little distance from anywhere. Lord Fakenham's is the nearest house----"

"Not in that way, O'Donnell. I mean interesting people. Lord Fakenham is a bore--a twelve-bore one might say. I hate the big shooting houses in East England."

The Rector was rather at a loss. "Well," he said, reluctantly, "I don't know about what you'd probably call _interesting_ people. Sir Ambrose McKee, the big Scotch distiller--Ambrosia whiskey, you know--has the shooting and comes down to the Manor House in September. Oh, and Gilbert Lothian, the poet, has a cottage in the place. I've met him twice, but I can't say that I know much about him. Medley swears by his wife, though. She does everything in the village I'm told. She was a Fielding, the younger branch."

The doctor's face became strangely interested. It was alert and watchful in a moment.

"Gilbert Lothian! He lives there does he! Now you tempt me. I've heard a good deal about Gilbert Lothian."

The Rector was genuinely surprised. "Well, most people have," he answered. "But I should hardly have thought that a modern poet was much in your line."

Morton Sims smiled, rather oddly. "Perhaps not," he said, "but I'm interested all the same. I have my own reasons. Put me into communication with the house agents, will you, O'Donnell?"

The affair had been quickly arranged. The house proved satisfactory, and Dr. Morton Sims had taken it.

On the morning when Mary Lothian had heard from Gilbert that he was returning that evening, Mr. Medley, reminded of his duty by a postcard from the Rector at Cowes, set out to pay a call and offer his services to the distinguished newcomer.

The "Haven" was a pleasant gabled house standing in grounds of about three acres, not far from the Church and Rectory. The late Admiral Custance had kept it in beautiful order. The green, pneumatic lawns suggested those of a college quadrangle, the privet hedges were clipped with care, the whole place was taut and trim.

Mr. Medley found Dr. Morton Sims smoking a morning pipe in the library, dressed in a suit of grey flannel and with a holiday air about him.

The two men liked each other at once. There was no doubt about that in the minds of either of them.

There was a certain dryness and mellow humour in Mr. Medley--a ripe flavour about him, as of an old English fruit crushed upon the palate. "Here is a rare bird," the doctor thought.

And Morton Sims interested the clerygman no less. The doctor's great achievements and the fact that he was a definite feature in English life were quite familiar. When, on fugitive occasions any one of this sort strayed into the placid domains of his interest Medley was capable of welcoming him with eagerness. He did so now, and warmed himself in the steady glow from the celebrated man with whom he was sitting.

That they were both Oxford men, more or less of the same period, was an additional link between them.

. . . "Two or three times a year I go up," Medley said, "and dine in Hall at Merton. I'm a little out of it, of course. The old, remembered faces become fewer and fewer each year. But there are friends left still, and though I can't quite get at their point of view, the younger fellows are very kind to me. Directly I turn into Oriel Street; I breathe the old atmosphere, and I confess that my heart beats a little quicker, as Merton tower comes into view."

"I know," the doctor said. "I was at Balliol you know--a little different, even in our day. But when I go up I'm always dreadfully busy, at the Museum or in the Medical School. It's the younger folk, the scientific dons and undergraduates who are reading science that I have to do with. I have not much time for the sentiments and caresses of the past. Life is so short and I have so much yet that I hope to do in it, that I simply refuse my mind the pleasures of retrospection. You'll call me a Philistine, but when I go to lecture at Cambridge--as I sometimes do--it stimulates me far more than Oxford."

"Detestable place!" said Mr. Medley, with a smile. "A nephew of mine is a tutor there, Peterhouse. He has quite a name in his way, they tell me. He writes little leprous books in which he conducts the Christian Faith to the frontier of modern thought with a consolatory cheque for its professional services in the past. And, besides, the river at Cambridge is a ditch."

The doctor's eyes leapt up at this.

"Yes, isn't it marvellous that they can row as they do!" he said with the eagerness of a boy.

"You rowed then?"

"Oh, yes. I was in the crew of--74--our year it was."

"Really! really!--I had no idea, Dr. Morton Sims! I was in the Trials of--71, when Merton was head of the river, but we were the losing boat and I never got into the Eight. How different it all was then!"

Both men were silent for a minute. The priest's words had struck an unaccustomed chord of memory in the doctor's mind.

"Those times will never come again," Morton Sims said, and puffed rather more quickly than usual at his pipe. He had spoken truly enough when he had said that he had not time in his strenuous life for memories of his youth, that he shut his eyes to the immemorial appeal of Oxford when he went there. But he responded now, instinctively, for there is a Freemasonry, greater than all the ritual of King Solomon, among those who have rowed upon the Isis, in the happy, thrice-happy days of Youth!

To weary clergymen absorbed in the _va_ and _vient_ of sordid parishes, to grave Justices upon the Bench, the strenuous cynics of the Bar, plodding masters of schools, the suave solicitor, the banker, the painter, or the poet, these vivid memories of the Loving Mother, must always come now and again in life.

The Bells of Youth ring once more. The faint echo of the shouts from river or from playing field, make themselves heard with ghostly voices. In the Chapels of Wayneflete, or of Laud, some soprano choir is singing yet. In the tower of the Cardinal, Big Tom tolls out of the past, bidding the College porters close their doors.

White and fretted spires shoot upwards into skies that will never be so blue again. Again the snap-dragon blooms over the grey walls of Trinity, the crimson creeper stains the porch of Cranmer, and Autumn leaves of bronze, purple and yellow carpet all the Magdalen Walks.

These things can never be quite forgotten by those who have loved them and been of them.

The duration of a reverie is purely accidental. There is no time in thought. The pictures of a lifetime may glow in the brain, while a second passes by the clock, a single episode may inform the retrospection of an hour.

These two grey-headed men, upon this delightful summer morning, were not long lost in thought.

"And now," said the clergyman, "have you seen anything of the village yet?"

"Not yet. For the three days that I have been here I have been arranging my books and instruments, and turning that big room over the barn into a laboratory."

"Oh, yes. Where the Admiral used to keep his Trafalgar models. An excellent room! Now what do you say, Dr. Morton Sims, to a little progress through the village with me? I'm quite certain that every one is agog to see you, and to sum you up. Natural village curiosity! You might as well make your appearance under my wing."

"Teucro auspice, auspice Teucro?"

"Precisely," said Medley, with a smile of pleasure at the quotation from his beloved poet, and the two men left the house together in high glee, laughing like boys.

They visited the Church, in which Morton Sims took a polite interest, and then the clergyman took his guest over the Rectory.

It was a fine house, standing in the midst of fair lawns upon which great beech trees grew here and there, giving the extensive grounds something of the aspect of a park. The rooms were large and lofty, with fine ceilings of the Adams' school, florid braveries of stucco that were quite at home in a house like this. There were portraits everywhere, chiefly members of the O'Donnell family, and the faces in their fresh Irish comeliness were gay and ingenuous, as of privileged young people who could never grow old.

"Really, this is a delightful house," the Doctor said as he stood in the library. "I wonder O'Donnell doesn't spend more time in Mortland Royal. Few parsons are housed like this."

"It's not his _metier_, Doctor. He hasn't the faculty of really understanding peasants, and I think he is quite right in what he is doing. And, of course, from a selfish point of view, I am glad. I have refused two college livings to stay on here. In all probability I shall stay here till I die. O'Donnell does a great work for Temperance all over England--though doubtless you know more about that than I do."

"Er, yes," Morton Sims replied, though without any marked enthusiasm. "O'Donnell is very eloquent, and no doubt does good. My dear old friend, Bishop Moultrie, in Norfolk here is most enthusiastic about his work. I like O'Donnell, he's sincere. But I belong to the scientific party, and while I welcome anything that really tends to stem inebriety, I believe that O'Donnell and Moultrie and all of them are on the wrong tack entirely."

"I know very little about the modern temperance movement in any direction," said Mr. Medley with a certain dryness. "Blue Ribbons and Bands of Hope are all very well, I suppose, but there is such a tendency nowadays among Non-conformists and the extreme evangelical party to exalt abstinence from alcohol into the one thing necessary to salvation, that I keep out of it all as much as I can. I like my glass of port, and I don't mean to give it up!"

Morton Sims laughed. "It doesn't do you the least good really," he said, laughing. "I could prove to you in five minutes, and with entire certainty, that your single glass of port is bad, even for you! But I quite agree with your attitude towards all the religious emotionalism that is worked up. The drunkard who turns to religion simply manifests the class of ideas, which is one of the features of the epileptic temperament. It is a confession of ineptitude, and a recourse to a means of salvation from a condition which is too hard for him to bear. That is to say, Fear is at the bottom of his new convictions!"

Certainly Medley was not particularly sympathetic to the modern Temperance movement among religious people. Perhaps Mr. O'Donnell's somewhat vociferous enthusiasm had something to do with it. But on the other hand, he was very far from accepting such a cold scientific doctrine as this. He knew that the Holy Spirit does not always work through fear. But like the wise and quiet-minded man that he was, he forbore argument and listened with intellectual pleasure to the views of his new friend.

"I know," he said, with a courtly hint of deference in his voice, that became him very well, "of your position in the ranks of those who are fighting Intemperance. But, and you must pardon the ignorance of a country priest who is quite out of all 'movements,' I don't know anything of your standpoint. What is your remedy, Dr. Morton Sims?"

The great man smiled inwardly.

It did really seem extraordinary to him that a cultured professional man of this day should actually know nothing of his hopes, aims and propaganda. And then, ever on the watch for traces of egoism and vain-glory in himself, he accepted the fact with humility.

Who was he, who was any one in life, to imagine that his views were known to all the world?

"Well," he said, "what we believe is just this: It is quite impossible to abolish or to prohibit alcohol. It is necessary in a thousand industries. Prohibition is futile. It has been tried, and has failed, in the United States. While alcohol exists, the man predisposed to abuse it will get it. You, as a clergyman, know as well as I do, as a doctor, that it is impossible to make people moral by Act of Parliament."

This was entirely in accordance with Medley's own view. "Of course," he said, "the only thing that can make people moral is an act of God, cooperating with an act of their own."

"Possibly. I am not concerned to affirm or deny the power of an Act of the Supreme Being. Nor am I able to say anything about its operation. Science tells me nothing upon this point. About the act of the individual I have a good deal to say."

--"I am most interested" . . .

"Well then, what we want to do is to root out drunkenness by eliminating inebriates from society by a process of Artificial Selection. It is within the power of science to evolve a sober race. We must forbid inebriates to have children and make it penal for them to do so."

Medley started. "Forbid them to marry?" he asked.

"It would be futile. Drunkenness often develops after marriage. There is only one way--by preventing Drunkards from reproducing their like--by forbidding the procreation of children by them. If drunkards were taken before magistrates sitting in secret session, and, on conviction, were warned that the procreation of children would subject them to this or that penalty, then the birthrate of drunkards would certainly fall immensely."

"But innumerable drunkards would inevitably escape the meshes of the law."

"Yes. But that is an argument against all laws. And this law would be more perfect in its operation than any other, for if the drunken father evaded it in one generation, the drunken son would be taken in the next."

The Priest said nothing for a moment. The latent distrust and dislike of science which is an inherent part of the life and training of so many Priests, was blazing up in him with a fury of antagonism. What impious interference with the laws of God was this? It seemed a profanation, horrible!

Like all good Christians of his temper of mind, he was quite unable to realise that God might be choosing to work in this way, and by the human hands of men. He had not the slightest conception of the great truth that every new discovery of Science and each fresh extension of its operations is not in the least antagonistic to Christianity when surveyed by the clear, unbiassed mind.

Mr. Medley was a dog-lover. He was a member of the Kennel-Club, and sent dogs to shows. He knew that, in order to breed a long-tailed variety of dogs, it would be ridiculous to preserve carefully all the short-tailed individuals and pull vigorously at their tails. He exercised the privilege of Artificial Selection carefully enough in his own kennels, but the mere proposal that such a thing should be done in the case of human beings seemed impious to him.

Dr. Morton Sims was also incapable of realising that his scheme for the betterment of the race was perfectly in accordance with the Christian Philosophy.

But Morton Sims was not a professing Christian and was not concerned with the Christian aspect. Mr. Medley was, and although one of his favourite hymns began, "God Moves in a Mysterious Way," he was really chilled to the bone for a minute at the words of the Scientist. He remained silent for a moment or so.

"But that seems to me quite horrible," he said, at length. "It is opposed to the best instincts of human nature--as horrible as Malthusianism, as horrible and as impracticable."

His expression as he looked at his guest was wistful. "I don't want to be discourteous," it seemed to say, "but this is really my thought."

"Perhaps," the other answered with a half-sigh. He was well used to encounter just such a voice, just such a shocked countenance as that of his host--"But by '_best instincts_' people often mean strong prejudices. Our scheme is undoubtedly Malthusian. I am no believer in Malthusianism as a check to what is called 'over-population.' That _does_ seem to me immoral. Nature requires no help in that regard. But Inebriety is an evil the extent of which no one but an expert can possibly measure. _The ordinary man simply doesn't know!_ But supposing I admit what you say. Let us agree that my scheme is horrible, that in a sense it is immoral--or a-moral--that it is possibly impracticable.

"The alternative is more horrible and more immoral still. There is absolutely no choice between Temperance Reform, by the abolition of drink, and Temperance Reform by the abolition of the drunkard. An ill thing is not rendered worse by being bravely confronted. An unavoidable evil is not made more evil by being turned to good account. It rests with us to extract what good we can from the evil. Horrible? Immoral? Perhaps; but we are confronted by two horrors and two immoralities, and we are compelled to make a choice. Which is best; to live safe because strong, or to tremble behind fortifications; to be temperate by Nature or sober by Law?"

. . . They stood in the quiet sunlit library, with its placid books and pictures irradiated by the light of approaching noon.

The slim, bearded man in his grey suit, faced the dry, elderly clergyman. His voice rang with challenge, his whole personality was redolent of ardour, conviction, an aroma of the War he spent his life in waging far away from this quiet room of books.

For years, this had been Medley's home. Each night, with his Horace and his pipe, he spent the happy, sober hours between dinner and bedtime here. His sermons were written on the old oak table. Over the high carved marble of the mantel the engraving of Our Lord knocking at the weed-grown door of a human heart, had looked down upon all his familiar, quiet evenings. In summer the long windows were open and the moonlight washed the lawns with silver, and the shadows of the trees seemed like pieces of black velvet nailed to the grass.

In winter the piled logs glowed upon the hearth and the bitter winds from the Marshes, sang like a flight of arrows round the house.

What was this that had come into the library, what new disturbing, insistent element? The Rector brought no such atmosphere into the house when he arrived. He would sip his coffee and smoke his pipe and linger for a gracious moment with the Singer of Mantua, or dispute about the true birthplace of him who sent Odysseus sailing over wine-coloured and enchanted seas.

An insistent voice seemed to be calling to the clergyman--"Awake from your slumber--your long slumber! Hear the words of Truth!"

He said nothing. His whole face showed reluctance, bewilderment, misease.

The far keener intelligence of the other noted it at once. The mind of the Medico-Psychologist appreciated the episode at its exact value. He had troubled a still pool, and to no good purpose. Words of his--even if they carried an uneasy conviction--would never rouse this man to action. Let it be so! Why waste time? The clergyman was a delightful survival, a "rare Bird" still!

"Well, that is my theory, at any rate, since you asked for it," Morton Sims said, the urgency and excitement quite gone from his voice. "And now, some more of the village, please!"

Mr. Medley smiled cheerfully. He became suddenly conscious of the light and comfortable morning again. He felt his feet upon the carpet, he was in a place that he knew.

"We'll go through the wicket-gate in the south wall," he said, with alacrity. "It's our nearest way, and there is a good view of the Manor House to be got from there. It's a fine old place, empty for most of the year, but always full for the shooting. Sir Ambrose McKee has it."

"The whiskey man?"

"Yes. The great distiller," Medley answered nervously--most anxious to sheer off from any further controversial subjects.

They went out into the village.

The old red-brick manor house was surveyed from a distance, and Morton Sims remarked absently upon its picturesqueness. His mind was occupied with other and far alien thoughts.

Then they went down the white dusty road--the bordering hedges were all pilm-powdered for there had been no rain for many days--to the centre of the village.

Four roads met there, East, South, West and North, and it was known to the village as "The Cross." On one side of the little central green was the Post office and general shop. On the other was the Mortland Royal Arms, and on the South, to the right of the old stone bridge, which ran over the narrow river, were the roof and chimneys of Gilbert Lothian's house nestling among the trees and with a vista of the orchard which stretched down to the stream.

"That's a nice little place," the doctor said. "Whose is that?"

"It's the house of our village celebrity," Mr. Medley replied--with a rather hostile crackle in his voice, or at least the other thought so.

"Our local celebrity," Medley continued, "Mr. Gilbert Lothian, the poet."

Neither the face nor the voice of the doctor changed at all. But his mind came to attention. This was a moment he had been waiting for.

"Oh, I know," he said, with an assumed indifference which he was well aware would have its effect of provocation upon the simple mind of the Priest. "The name is quite familiar to me. Bishop Moultrie sent me a book of Lothian's poems last winter. And now that I come to think of it, O'Donnell told me that Mr. Lothian lived here. What sort of a man is he?"

Medley hesitated. "Well," he said at length, "the truth is that I don't like him much personally, and I don't understand him in any way. I speak with prejudice I'm afraid, and I do not wish that any words of mine should make you share it."

"Oh, we all have our likes and dislikes. Every one has his private Dr. Fell and it can't be helped. But tell me about Lothian. I will remember your very honest warning! Don't you like his work?"

"I confess I see very little in it, Doctor. But then, my taste is old-fashioned and not in accord with modern literary movements. My 'Christian Year' supplies all the religious verse I need."

"Keble wrote some fine verse," said the doctor tentatively.

"Exactly. Sound prosody and restrained style! There is fervour and feeling in Lothian's work. It is impossible to deny it. But it's too passionate and feverish. There is a savage, almost despairing, clutching at spiritual emotion which strikes me as thoroughly unhealthy. The Love of Jesus, the mysterious operations of the Holy Ghost--these seem to me no proper vehicles for words which are tortured into a wild and sensuous music. As I read the poems of Gilbert Lothian I am reminded of the wicked and yet beautiful verses of Swinburne, and of others who have turned their lyre to the praise of lust. The sentiment is different, but the method is the same. And I confess that it revolts me to see the verbal tricks and polished brilliance of modern Pagan writers adapted to a fugitive and delirious ecstasy of Christian Faith."

Morton Sims understood thoroughly. This was the obstinate and prejudiced voice of an older literary generation, suddenly become vindictively vocal.

"I know all that you mean," he said. "I don't agree with you in the least, but I appreciate your point of view. But let me keep myself out of the discussion for a moment. I am not what you would probably be prepared to call a professing Christian. But how about Moultrie? He sent me Lothian's poems first of all. I remember the actual evening last winter when they arrived. A contemporaneous circumstance has etched it into my memory with certainty. Moultrie is a deeply convinced Christian. He is a man of the widest culture also. Yet he savours his palate with every _nuance_, every elusive and delicate melody that the genius of Lothian gives us. How about Moultrie's attitude?--it is a very general one."

Mr. Medley laughed, half with apology, half with the grim humour which was personal to him.

"I quite admit all you say," he replied, "but, as I told you, I belong to another generation and I don't in the least mean to change or listen to the voice of the charmer! I am a prejudiced old fogey, in short! I am still so antiquated and foolish as to have a temperamental dislike for a French-man, for instance. I like a picture to tell a story, and I flatly refused to get into Moultrie's abominable automobile when he brought it to the Rectory the other day!"

Morton Sims was not in the least deceived by this half real, half mocking apologia. It was not merely a question of style that had roused this heat in the dry elderly man when he spoke of the things which he so greatly disliked in the poet's work. There was something behind this, and the doctor meant to find out what it was. He was in Mortland Royal, in the first instance, in order to follow up the problem of Gilbert Lothian. His choice of a country residence had been determined by the Poet's locality. Every instinct of the scientist and hunter was awake in him. He had dreadful reasons, reasons which he could never quite think of without a mental shudder, for finding out everything about the unknown and elusive genius who had given "Surgit Amari," to the world.

He looked his companion full in the face, and spoke in a compelling, searching voice that the other had not heard before.

"What's the real antagonism, Mr. Medley?" he said.

Then the clergyman spoke out.

"You press me," he said, "very well, I will tell you. I don't believe Lothian is a good man. It is a stern and terrible thing to say,--God grant I am mistaken!--but he appears to me to write of supreme things with insincerity. Not vulgarly, you'll understand. Not with his tongue in his cheek, but without the conviction that imposes conduct, and perhaps even with his heart in his mouth!"

"Conduct?"

". . . I fear I am saying too much."

"Hardly to me! Then Mr. Lothian--?"

"He drinks," the Priest said bluntly, "you're sure to hear of it in some indirect way since you are going to stay in the village for six months. But that's the truth of it!"

The face of Dr. Morton Sims suddenly became quite pale. His brown eyes glittered as if with an almost uncontrollable excitement.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, and there was something so curious in his voice that the clergyman was alarmed at what he had said. He knew, and could know, nothing of what was passing in the other's mind. A scrupulously fair and honest man within his lights, he feared that he had made too harsh a statement--particularly to a man who thought that even an after-dinner glass of port was an error in hygiene!

"I don't mean to say that he gets drunk," Medley continued hastily, "but he really does excite himself and whip himself up to work by means of spirits."

The clergyman hesitated. The doctor spurred him on.

"Most interesting to the scientific man--please go on."

"Well, I don't know that there is much to say--I do hope I am not doing the man an injustice, because I am getting on for twice his age and envy the modern brilliance of his brain! But about a fortnight ago I went to see Crutwell--a poor fellow who is dying of phthisis--and found Lothian there. He was holding Crutwell's hand and talking to him about Paradise in a monotonous musical voice. He had been drinking. I saw it at once. His eyes were quite wild."

"But the patient was made happier?"

"Yes. He was. Happier, I freely confess it, than my long ministrations have ever been able to make him. But that is certainly not the point. It is very distressing to a parish Priest to meet with these things in his visitations. Do you know," here Mr. Medley gave a rueful chuckle, "I followed this alcoholic missioner the other day into the house of an old bed-ridden woman whom he helps to support. Lothian is extremely generous by the way. He would literally take off his coat and give it away--which really means, of course, that he has no conception of what money means.

"At any rate, I went into old Sarah's cottage about half an hour after Lothian had been there. The old lady in question lived a jolly, wicked life until senile paralysis intervened. She is now quite a connoisseur in religion. I found her, on the occasion of which I speak, lying back upon her pillows with a perfectly rapturous expression on her wicked and wrinkled old face. 'Oh, Mr. Lothian's been, sir!' she said, 'Oh, 'twas beautiful! He gave me five shillings and then he knelt down and prayed. I never heard such praying--meaning no disrespect, sir, of course. But it was beautiful. The tears were rolling down Mr. Lothian's cheeks!' 'Mr. Lothian is very kind,' I said. 'He's wonnerful,' she replied, 'for he was really as drunk as a Lord the whole time, though he didn't see as I saw it. Fancy praying so beautiful and him like that. What a brain!'"

Morton Sims burst out laughing, he could not help it. "All the same," he said at length, "it's certainly rather scandalous."

Medley made a hurried deprecating movement of his hands. "No, no!" he said, "don't think that. I am over-emphasising things. Those two instances are quite isolated. In a general way Lothian is just like any one else. To speak quite frankly, Doctor, I'm not a safe guide when Gilbert Lothian is discussed."

"Yes?"

"For this reason. I admire and reverence Mrs. Lothian as I have never reverenced any other woman. Now and then I have met saint-like people, and the more saint-like they were--I hope I am not cynical--the less of comely humanity they seemed to have. Only once have I met a saint quietly walking this world with sane and happy footsteps. And that is Mary Lothian."

There was a catch and tremble in the voice of the elderly clergyman. Morton Sims, who had liked him from the first, now felt more drawn to him than at any other time during their morning talk and walk.

"Now you see why I am a little bitter about Gilbert Lothian! I don't think that he is worthy of such a perfect wife as he has got! I'll take you to tea with her this afternoon and you will see!"

"I should like to meet her very much. Lothian is not here then?"

"He has been away for a week or so, but he is returning to-night. Our old postman, who knows everything, told me so at least."

The two men continued their walk through the village until lunch time, when they separated.

At three o'clock a maid brought a note from the Rectory to the "Haven." In the letter Medley said that he had been summoned to Wordingham by telegram and could not take the doctor to call on Mrs. Lothian.

The doctor spent the afternoon reading in the garden. He took tea among the flowers there, and after dinner, as it was extremely hot, he once more sought his deck chair under the mulberry tree in front of the house. Not a breath of air stirred. Now and then a cockchafer boomed through the heavy dark, and at his feet some glowworms had lit their elfin lamps.

There was thunder in the air too, it was murmuring ten miles away over the Wash, and now and again the sky above the marshes was lit with flickering green and violet fires.

A definite depression settled down upon the doctor's spirits and something seemed to be like a load upon lungs and brain.

He always kept himself physically fit. In London, during his busy life, walking, which was the exercise he loved best, was not possible. So he fenced, and swam a good deal at the Bath Club, of which he was a member.

For three days now, he had taken no exercise whatever. He had been arranging his new household.

"Liver!" he thought to himself. "That is why I am melancholy and depressed to-night. And then the storm that is hanging about has its effect too. But hardly any one realises that the liver is the seat of the emotions! It should be said--more truly--that such a one died of a broken liver, not a broken heart!" . . .

He sighed. His imaginings did not amuse him to-night. His vitality was lowered. That sick ennui which lies behind the thunder was upon him. As the storm grew nearer through the vast spaces of the night, so his psychic organism responded to its approach. Some uneasy imp had got into the barracks of his brain and was beating furiously upon the cerebral drum.

The vast and level landscape, the wide night, were alike to be dramatised by the storm.

And so, also, in the sphere of his thought, upon that secret stage where, after all, everything really happens, there was drama and disturbance. The level-minded scientist in Dr. Morton Sims drooped its head and bowed to the imperious onslaught. The man of letters in him awoke. Strange and fantastic influences were abroad this night and would have their way even with this cool sane person.

He knew what was happening to him as the night grew hotter, the lightning more frequent. He, the Ego of him, was slipping away from the material plane and entering that psychic country which he knew of and dreaded for its strange allurements.

Imaginative by nature and temperament, with a something of the artist in him, it was his habit to starve and repress that side of him as much as he was able.

He knew the unfathomable gulf that separated the psychical from the physiological. It was in the sphere of physiology that his work lay, here he was great, there must be no divided allegiance.

There was a menacing stammer of thunder. A certain line of verse came into his mind, a line of Lothian's.

"_Oh dreadful trumpets sounding,
Pealing and resounding,
From the hid battlements of eternity!_"

"I will take a ten mile walk to-morrow," he said to himself, and resolutely wrenched his thoughts towards material things. There was, he remembered with a slight shudder, that appalling passage in a recent letter from Mrs. Daly--

. . . "Six weeks ago a tippler was put into an alms-house in this
State. Within a few days he had devised various expedients to
procure rum, but had failed. At length he hit on one that was
successful. He went into the wood yard of the establishment, placed
one hand upon the block, and with an axe in the other struck it off
at a single blow. With the stump raised and streaming he ran into
the house and cried, 'Get some rum. Get some rum. My hand is off.'
In the confusion and bustle of the occasion a bowl of rum was
brought, into which he plunged the bleeding member of his body,
then raising the bowl to his mouth, drank freely and exultantly
exclaimed, 'Now I am satisfied!'"

Horrible! Why was it possible that men might poison themselves so? Would all the efforts of himself and his friends ever make such monstrous happenings cease? Oh, that it might be so!

They were breaking up stubborn land. The churches were against them, but the Home Secretary of the day was their friend--in the future the disease might be eradicated from society.

Oh, that it might be so! for the good of the human race!

How absolutely horrible it was that transparent, coloured liquids in bottles of glass--liquids that could be bought everywhere for a few pence--should have the devilish power to transform men, not to beasts, but to monsters.

The man of whom Mrs. Daly had written--hideously alcoholised and insane! Hancock, the Hackney murderer, poisoned, insane!

The doctor had been present at the post-mortem, after the execution. It had all been so pitiably clear to the trained eye! The liver, the heart, told him their tale very plainly. Any General Practitioner would have known. Ordinary cirrhosis, the scar tissue perfectly plain; the lime-salts deposited in the wasting muscles of the heart. But Morton Sims had found far more than this in that poisoned shell which had held, also, a poisoned soul. He had marked the little swellings upon the long nerve processes that run from the normal cell of the healthy brain. Something that looked like a little string of beads under the microscope had told him all he wanted to know.

And that little string of beads, the lesions which interfered with the proper passage of nerve impulses, the scraps of tissue which the section-cutter had thinned and given to the lens, had meant torture and death to a good woman.

How dreadfully women suffered! Their husbands and lovers and brothers became brutes to them. The women who were merely struck or beaten now and then were fortunate. The women whose lives were made one long ingenious torture were legion.

Dr. Morton Sims was a bachelor. He was more. He was a man with a virgin mind. Devoted always to the line of work he had undertaken he had allowed nothing else to disturb his life. For him passion was explained by pathological and physiological occurrences. That is to say, passion in others. For himself, he had allowed nothing that was sensual to interfere with his progress, or to influence the wise order of his days.

Therefore, he reverenced women.

Hidden in his mind was that latent adoration that the Catholic feels about the Real Presence upon an altar.

A good Knight of Science, he was as pure and pellucid in thought upon these matters as any Knight who bore the descending Dove upon his shield and flung into the _mêlée_ calling upon the name of the Paraclete.

In his own fashion, and with his own vision of what it was, Morton Sims, also, was one of those seeking the Holy Grail.

He adored his sister, a sweet woman made for love and motherhood but who had chosen the virgin life of renunciation that she might help the world.

Women! Yes, it was women who suffered. There were tears in his mind as he thought of Women. Before a good woman he always wished to kneel.

How heavy the night was!

He identified it with the sorrowful weight and pressure of the Fiend Alcohol upon the world. And there was a woman, here near him, a woman with a sweet and fragrant nature--so the old clergyman had said.

On her, too, the weight must be lying. For Mary Lothian there must be horror in the days. . . .

"One thing I _will_ do," he said to the dark--and that he spoke aloud was sufficient indication of his state of mind--"I'll get hold of Gilbert Lothian while I am here. I'll save him at any rate, if I can. And it is quite obvious that he cannot be too far gone for salvation. I'll save him from an end no less frightful than that of his brother of whom he has probably never heard. The good woman he seems to have married shall be happy! The man's fine brain shan't be lost. This shall be my special experiment while I am down here. Coincidence, no less than good-will, makes that duty perfectly plain for me."

As he stood there, glad to have found some definite material thing with which to occupy his mind, a housemaid came through the French windows of the library. She hurried towards him, ghost-like in her white cap and apron.

"Are you there, sir?" she said, peering this way and that in the thick dark.

"Yes, here I am, Condon, what is it?"

"Please, sir, there's been an accident. A gentleman has been thrown out of a dog-cart. It's a Mr. Lothian. His man's here, and the gentleman's wife has heard you're in the village and there's no other doctor nearer than Wordingham."

"I'll come at once," Morton Sims said.

He hurried through the quiet library with its green-shaded reading lamp and went into the hall.

Tumpany was standing there, his cap held before him in two hands, naval-fashion. His round red face was streaming with perspiration, his eyes were frightened and he exhaled a strong smell of beer.

His hand went up mechanically and his left foot scraped upon the oilcloth of the hall as Morton Sims entered.

"Beg your pardon, sir," Tumpany began at once, "but I'm Mr. Gilbert Lothian's man. Master have had an accident. I was driving him home from the station when the horse stumbled just outside the village. Master was pitched out on his head. My mistress would be very grateful if you could come at once."

"Certainly, I will," Sims answered, looking at the man with a keen, experienced eye which made him shift uneasily upon his feet. "Wait here for a moment."

He hurried back into the library and put lint, cotton-wool and a pair of blunt-nosed scissors into a hand-bag. Then, calling for a candle and lighting it, he went out into the stable yard and up to the room above the big barn, emerging in a minute or two with a bottle of antiseptic lotion.

These were all the preparations he could make until he knew more. The thing might be serious or it might be little or nothing. Fortunately Lothian's house was not five minutes' walk from the "Haven." If instruments were required he could fetch them in a very short time.

As he left the house with Tumpany, he noticed that the man lurched upon the step. Quite obviously he was half intoxicated.

With a cunning born of long experience of inebriate men, the doctor affected a complete unconsciousness of what he had discovered. If he put the man upon his guard he would get nothing out of him, that was quite certain.

"He's made a direct statement so far," the doctor thought. "He's only on the border-land of intoxication. For as long as he thinks I have noticed nothing he will be coherent. Directly he realises that I have spotted his state he'll become confused and ashamed and he won't be able to tell me anything."

"This is very unfortunate," he said in a smooth and confidential voice. "I do hope it is nothing very serious. Of course I know your master very well by name."

"Yessir," Tumpany answered thickly, but with a perceptible note of pleasure in his voice. "Yessir, I should say Master is one of the best shots in Norfolk. You'd have heard of him, of course."

"But how did it happen?"

"This 'ere accident, sir?" said Tumpany rather vaguely, his mind obviously running upon his master's achievements among the wild geese of the marshes.

"Yes, the accident," the doctor answered in his smooth, kindly voice--though it would have given him great relief to have boxed the ears of his beery guide.

"I was driving master home, sir. It's not our trap. We don't keep one. We hires in the village, but the man as the trap belongs to couldn't go. So I drove, sir."

Movement had stirred up the fumes of alcohol in this barrel! Oh, the interminable repetitions, the horrid incapacity for getting to the point of men who were drunk! Lives of the utmost value had been lost by fools like this--great events in the history of the world had turned upon an extra pot of beer! But patience, patience!

"Yes, you drove, and the horse stumbled. Did the horse come right down?"

"I'm not much of a whip, sir, as you may say, though I know about ordinary driving. They say that a sailor-man is no good with a horse. But that isn't true."

Yet despite the irritation of his mind, the necessity for absolute self-control, the expert found time to make a note of this further instance of the intolerable egotism that alcohol induces in its slaves.

"But I expect you drove very well, indeed! Then the horse did _not_ come right down!"

Just at the right moment, carefully calculated to have its effect, the doctor's voice became sharper and had a ring of command in it.

There was an instant response.

"No, sir. The cob only stumbled. But master was sitting loose like. He fell out like a log, sir. He made a noise like a piece of luggage falling."

"Oh! Did he fall on his head?"

"Yessir. But he had a stiff felt hat on. I got help and as we carried him into the house he was bleeding awful."

"Curious that he should fall like that. Was he, well, was he quite himself should you think?"

It was a bow drawn at a venture, and it provoked a reply that instantly told Morton Sims what he wanted to know.

"Oh, yessir! By all means, sir! Most cert'nly! Master was as sober as a judge, sir!"

"Of _course_," Sims replied in a surprised tone of voice. "I thought that he might have been tired by the journey from London."

. . . So it was true then! Lothian was drunk. The thing was obvious. But this was a good and loyal fellow, not to give his master away.

Morton Sims liked that. He made a note that poor beery Tumpany should have half a sovereign on the morrow, when he was sober. Then the two men turned in through the gates of the Old House.

The front door was wide open to the night. The light which flowed out from the tall lamp upon an oak table in the hall cut into the black velvet of the drive with a sharply defined wedge of orange-yellow.

There was something ominous in this wide-set door of a frightened house.

The doctor walked straight into the hall, a small old-fashioned place panelled in white.

To the right another door stood open. In the doorway stood a maid-servant with a frightened face. Beyond her, through the archway of the door, showed the section of a singularly beautiful room.

The maid started. "Oh, you've come, sir!" she said--"in here please, sir."

The doctor followed the girl into the lit room.

This is what he saw:--

A room with the walls covered with canvas of a delicate oat-meal colour up to the height of seven feet. Above this a moulded beading of wood which had been painted vermilion--the veritable post-box red. Above this again a frieze of pure white paper. At set intervals upon the canvas were brilliant colour-prints in thin gold frames. The room was lit with many candles in tall holders of silver.

At one side of it was a table spread for supper, gleaming with delicate napery and cut glass, peaches in a bowl of red earthenware, ruby-coloured wine in a jug of German glass with a lid of pewter shaped like a snake's head.

At the other side of the room was a huge Chesterfield couch, upholstered in broad stripes of black and olive linen.

The still figure of a man in a tweed suit lay upon the couch. There was blood upon his face and clotted rust-like stains upon his loosened collar. A washing-bowl of stained water stood upon the green carpet.

Upon a chair, by the head of the couch a tall woman with shining yellow hair was sitting. She wore a low-cut evening dress of black, pearls were about the white column of her throat, a dragon fly of emeralds set in aluminium sparkled in her hair, and upon her wrists were heavy Moorish bracelets of oxydised silver studded with the bird's egg blue of the turquoise stone.

For an instant, not of the time but of thought, the doctor was startled.

Then, as the stately and beautiful woman rose to meet him, he understood.

She had decked herself, adorned her fair body with all the braveries she had so that she might be lovely and acceptable to her husband's eyes as he came home to her. Came home to her . . . like this!

Morton Sims had shaken the slim hand, murmured some words of condolence, and hastened to the motionless figure upon the couch.

His deft fingers were feeling, pressing, touching with a wonderful instinct, the skull beneath the tumbled masses of blood-clotted hair.

Nothing there, scalp wounds merely. Arms, legs--yes, these were uninjured too. The collar-bone was intact under the flesh that cushioned it. The skin of the left wrist was lacerated and bruised--Lothian, of course, had been sitting on the left side of the driver when he fell like a log from the gig--but the bones of the hand and arm were normal. There was not a single symptom of brain concussion. The deep gurgling breathing, the alarming snore-like sound that came from between the curiously pure and clear-cut lips, meant one thing only.

Morton Sims stood up.

Mary Lothian was waiting. There was an agony of expectation in her eyes.

"Not the least reason to be alarmed," said the doctor. "Some nasty cuts in the scalp, that is all."

She gave a deep sigh, a momentary shudder, and then her face became calm.

"It is so kind of you to come, Doctor," she said.--"Then that deep spasmodic breathing--he has not really hurt his head?"

"Not in the least as far as I can say, and I am fairly certain. We must get him up to bed. Then I can cut away the hair and bandage the wounds. I must take his temperature also. It's possible--just possible that the shock may have unpleasant results, though I really don't think it will. I will give him some bromide though, as soon as he wakes up."

"Ah!" she said. That was all, but it meant everything.

He knew that to this woman, at least, plain-speaking was best.

"Yes," he continued, "I am sorry to say that he is under the influence of alcohol. He has obviously been drinking heavily of late. I am a specialist in such matters and I can hardly be mistaken. There is just a possibility that this may bring on delirium tremens--only a possibility. He has never suffered from that?"

"Oh, never. Thank God never!" A sob came into her voice. Her face glowed with the love and tenderness within, the blue eyes seemed set in a soul rather than in a face, so beautiful had they become. "He's so good," she said with a wistful smile. "You can't think what a sweet boy he is when he doesn't drink any horrible things."

"Madam, I have read his poems. I know what an intellect and force lies drugged upon that sofa there. But we will soon have the flame burning clearly once more. It has been the work of my life to study these cases."

"Yes, I know, Doctor. I have heard so much of your work."

"Believe then that I am going to save this foolish young man, to give him back to you and to the world. A free man once more!"

"Free!" she whispered. "Oh, free from his vice!"

"_Vice_, Madam! I thought that all intelligent people understood by this time. For the last ten years I and my colleagues have been trying to make them understand! It is not a _vice_ from which your husband suffers. It is a _disease_!"

He saw that she was pleased that he had spoken to her thus--though he was in some doubt if she appreciated what he had actually said.

But already the shuttle of an incipient friendship was beginning to dart between them.

Two high clear souls had met and recognised each other.

"Well, suppose we get him to bed, Doctor," she said. "We can carry him up between us. There are two maids, and Tumpany is quite sober enough to help."

"Quite!" the doctor answered. "I rather like that man upon a first meeting."

Mary laughed--a low contralto laugh. "She has a sense of humour too!" the doctor thought.

"Yes," she said, "Tumpany is a good fellow at heart. And, like most people who drink, when he is himself he is a quite delightful person."

She went out into the hall, tall and beautiful, the jewels in her hair and on her hands sparkling in the candlelight.

Morton Sims took one of the candles from the table and went up to the couch.

A shadow flickered over the face of the man who was lying there.

It was but momentary, but in that instant the watcher became cold. The silver of the candle-stick stung the palm of a hand which was suddenly wet.

This tranquil, lovely room with its soft yellow light, dissolved and shifted like a scene in a dream. . . .

. . . It was a raw winter's morning. The walls were the whitewashed walls of a prison mortuary. There was a smell of chloride of lime. . . .

And lying upon a long zinc slab, with little grooves and depressions running down to the eye-hole of a drain, was a still figure whose face was a ghastly caricature of this face, hideously, revoltingly alike . . .

Mary Lothian, Tumpany, and two maid-servants came into the room, and with some difficulty the poet was carried upstairs.

He was hardly laid upon his bed when the rain came, falling in great sheets with a loud noise, cooling and purging the hot air.