CHAPTER XXIV
REX BASIRE’S HUMOUR
A rough-paved village square; green-shuttered houses, sweltering in the afternoon sun; a pair of openwork spires, delicate as lace, dazzlingly white as Caen stone could make them, silhouetted against the burning sky; tattered children with mercenary hands full of wild flowers; a knot of British pilgrims, irreverently loquacious outside the church’s western door; gruesome beggars making exhibition of wounds; honest peasant people; dishonest relic sellers—such were the salient features of La Delivrande at the moment when Marjorie and Dinah descended into its closer air out of the field-smelling, wind-blown road that brought them hither from the coast.
‘We will ask Mrs. Arbuthnot’s opinion, and abide by it,’ cried Lord Rex, coming forward a few paces to meet them. ‘She will be far better versed in this kind of thing than the rest of us. Ought we to carry candles in our hands, Mrs. Arbuthnot, when we seek our cure? There is a candle-stall conveniently opposite, and Miss Verschoyle and I will head the procession as penitents-in-chief.’
‘Please help to keep Lord Rex in order, Mrs. Arbuthnot. He is really doing and saying the absurdest things!’ Rosie Verschoyle must have been, surely, at the zenith of good temper when she thus addressed that poor Mrs. Arbuthnot! ‘Now, Lord Rex, I command you to drop this talk about candles instantly. Of course the whole business is a ridiculous piece of Popish superstition, still,’ observed Rosie, with a certain largeness, ‘one has one’s ideas. A church is a church. Positively, I will not speak another word to you to-day unless you behave yourself with decorum when we are inside.’
The awfulness of the threat appeared, for the moment, to check Lord Rex Basire’s playful spirits. He made no purchase of candles. Save that he affected a sudden and very marked lameness of gait, he behaved no worse than his companions on entering the church. Guided by ragged Jean Jacques, the English people walked up to a fretted stone screen dividing the choir from the nave. In a small side altar on the left was a doll, clothed in woven gold, unlovely of face, with eyes ‘dreadfully staring,’ with a crown of paper lilies, with a score of rushlights burning before her in a row—La Delivrande.
Who that has travelled in primitive French districts can fail of knowing these little miracle chapels, their atmosphere, their votive offerings, their sincerity, their tinsel, their pathos? At least a hundred graven memorials on the wall beside the Virgin told the story of simple human hearts that had suffered, believed, of anguished human hopes that had here found fulfilment. Dinah Arbuthnot’s cheeks paled as Marjorie, in a whisper, translated the meaning of the inscriptions. Here a mother recorded her gratitude for her child, a wife for her husband, a daughter for her parent. Here the names were graven in full, here in initials. Occasionally there was one word only, ‘Reconnaissance,’ and a date. Dinah’s cheeks paled, her eyes filled. If she were alone, Dinah felt—puritan, heretic, though she were—she would gladly kneel and make her confession, lay bare her sorrow, on the spot where so many stricken and weary human souls had cast away the sad garment of repression before her!
Lord Rex Basire’s view of the place and situation continued irresistibly comic. And the faces of his companions, the rose-pink face of Miss Verschoyle not excepted, failed to condemn him for his levity.
A heap of pious gifts, testimonials, in kind, from the cured, lay, incongruously, as they had been offered, before the altar of the Virgin. There were crutches, big and small, a child’s reclining carriage, models of ships innumerable, a wooden leg—the stoutest faith might long for an explanation of that wooden leg! Well, reader, with the fair church solemn and hushed, five or six black-clad women telling their beads before the different altars, its only Catholic inmates, Lord Rex, it must be concluded, found the temptation towards practical jocularity too strong for him. Hobbling up to the altar, this humorous little lord stood, with bowed head, with contrite manner, in front of the lily-crowned figure for some minutes’ space. Slowly ascending a step, he next deposited his crutch, a silver and ebony toy, upon the heap of worn and dusty peasant offerings; then walked away with tripping, resonant step, with head joyfully erect, down the western aisle, as who should say, ‘Behold me—a believer, cured.’
Ragged Jean Jacques held his mouth between two sun-blackened hands, showily pantomiming his appreciation of the Englishman’s costly waggishness. The subalterns of the Maltshire Royals tittered aloud. Alas! in a marching regiment, as elsewhere, has not human nature its weaker side? Is not a duke’s son, with two inches of brain, and wit in proportion, a duke’s son, even when he jests? The young ladies with one exception looked about as frigid as Italian snow looks under the kisses of an April sun. The exception was Marjorie Bartrand.
Away out of the church flew Marjorie, brushing against Rex Basire’s elbow in her exit. She waited in the porch outside, eager beggars pressing forward with their wounds, children with their half-dead wild-flowers, relic-mongers with their chaplets and rosaries—blest, ay, to the last bead, blest, ‘tout bonnement,’ by his Holiness, away in Rome. By and by, when the last of the loud-talking, merry-spirited knot of idlers had issued forth from the church, Marjorie fastened upon the offender-in-chief. With luminous eyes, with drawn breath, with hands tightly clenched in her hot indignation, she scathed him, thus:
‘You have played a delicate bit of comedy, have you not, Lord Rex? It was the finest stroke of humour to scandalise a few poor peasant women, saying prayers for their dead?... For me,’ looking one by one round the group, ‘I felt ashamed—more ashamed than ever I was in my life before—of belonging to the same nation as you all! I read once,’ said Marjorie, ‘in a wise book: “Where we are ignorant, let us show reverence.” The ignorance only has been shown to-day.’
Dinah Arbuthnot and Geoffrey, who had lingered behind the others in the church, arrived on the scene just in time to hear the last accents of this denunciation. Then, ere the culprits could utter a word in self-defence, away shot Marjorie’s arrowy figure along a shadowed by-street, away, neither stopping nor hesitating, along the old chaussée that leads from La Delivrande Paris-wards, in an exactly opposite direction to the Langrune road.
‘By Jupiter! I was never so frightened in my life.’ Rex Basire’s limbs collapsed under him in well-dramatised alarm. ‘Have all Girton girls got dynamite in their eyes? Does their speech invariably bristle with torpedoes? Is Marjorie Bartrand Protestant, or Catholic, or what?’
‘Ah, what!’ repeated Rosie Verschoyle, ever ready with a little amiable platitude. ‘A hundred years ago the Bartrands were Papists, remember. It is a moot question among the people who know them best what the Tintajeux religion is at the present day.’
‘I know one thing,’ cried Geoffrey’s friend, Ada de Carteret. ‘All through Tintajeux parish the Seigneur is looked upon as more learned than canny. When the country folk come near old Andros after dark, declaiming Greek, and with a couple of black dogs at his heels, they will run a mile round sooner than meet him.’
‘The Seigneur’s term of endearment for Marjorie is witch, when they happen to be on speaking terms at all,’ said another voice. ‘Poor girl! In spite of her temper one cannot help liking her extremely. Who was it said of Marjorie that she had such an olive-like flavour?’
‘You always feel there must be a fund of goodness in the dear child—somewhere.’ This finishing note was given in Miss Verschoyle’s thin voice. ‘As to the lecture you came in for, Lord Rex, you deserved it richly. It is quite too—in saying this, I mean it—quite! to laugh at other people’s beliefs, even when they are most ridiculous.’
And then they all sauntered off to the stalls, where Lord Rex, we may be sure, found ample scope for his veiled yet poignant irony among the crosses, medals, rosaries, and relics that had been blest, ‘tout bonnement,’ away in Rome, by his Holiness!
Marjorie, meanwhile, pursued her way through shadow and sunshine, unconscious in which direction the fiery haste of her steps was bearing her. When her temper had burnt out—in the space, say, of two minutes and a half—she perceived that she was once more in open country, alone among colza stacks and fields of ripening barley, but on a less frequented road, amidst a landscape with wider horizons than the road and landscape she and Dinah had traversed in coming to Langrune from the sea.
How good it was to breathe this wild, well-oxygenised air! With what glad senses Marjorie gazed about her across the plains, rippling, as the sun lowered, in lucent amber waves, and shaded deliciously at intervals by rows of pearly, smoke-coloured poplar! A family of peasant farmers drove by in one of their old-world Norman harvest waggons—coeval, perhaps, with Andros Bartrand’s sickle! Friendly nods, gleaming smiles from sunburnt faces, were bestowed on the little girl as the homely cartload jolted on. She watched with wistful eyes until the waggon lessened, was lost to sight in the long perspective of white road. Seating herself beside a ditch, under shadow of a solitary pollard willow, a sudden vision of vines and olives and Spanish sierras arose, with all the strength of inherited nostalgia, in Marjorie’s breast. If the harvesters would only have carried her a league or two onward with them! She had nothing of value in her possession but a watch. How many francs could one raise upon a watch, Marjorie Bartrand wondered, in some primitive, unsuspecting Norman town? Enough, surely, living among peasant people, and eking means out by an occasional day’s work at onion-weeding or colza stacking, to carry one down to the frontier, the cherished land of dreams. A letter could be sent to relieve the Seigneur’s mind, and.…
And then, glancing back along the chaussée, Marjorie saw a man’s figure advancing towards her with steady quickness; a figure she knew over-well, darkly outlined against the chrome yellow of the sky. So Ada de Carteret was forsaken. Her heart went pit-a-pat. She would have given a fortune to fly, yet stirred not! One minute later and her nostalgia was cured. Longings for vine and olive and Spanish sierra had vanished, all, before the unromantic English presence of Geoffrey Arbuthnot.