§3

Early the next year Mr. Pratt faded out. He could not be said to have done anything so dramatic as to die, though the green marsh-turf of Brodnyx churchyard was broken to make him a bed, and the little bell rocked in the bosom of the drunken Victorian widow who was Brodnyx church steeple, sending a forlorn note out over the Marsh. Various aunts in various stages of resigned poverty bore off his family to separate destinations, and the great Rectory house which had for so long mocked his two hundred a year, stood empty, waiting to swallow up its next victim.

Only in Joanna Godden's breast did any stir remain. For her at least the fading out of Mr. Pratt had been drama, the final scene of her importance; for it was now her task to appoint his successor in the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge. Ever since she had found out that she could not get rid of Mr. Pratt she had been in terror lest this crowning triumph might be denied her, and the largeness of her funeral wreath and the lavishness of her mourning—extinguishing all the relations in their dyed blacks—had testified to the warmth of her gratitude to the late rector for so considerately dying.

She felt exceedingly important, and the feeling was increased by the applications she received for the living. Clergymen wrote from different parts of the country; they told her that they were orthodox—as if she had imagined a clergyman could be otherwise—that they were acceptable preachers, that they were good with Boy Scouts. One or two she interviewed and disliked, because they had bad teeth or large families—one or two turned the tables on her and refused to have anything to do with a living encumbered by so large a rectory and so small an endowment. Joanna felt insulted, though she was not responsible for either. She resolved not to consider any applicants, but to make her own choice outside their ranks. This was a difficult matter, for her sphere was hardly clerical, and she knew no clergy except those on the Marsh. None of these she liked, because they were for the most part elderly and went about on bicycles—also she wanted to dazzle her society with a new importation.

The Archdeacon wrote to her, suggesting that she might be glad of some counsel in filling the vacancy, and giving her the names of two men whom he thought suitable. Joanna was furious—she would brook no interference from Archdeacons, and wrote the gentleman a letter which must have been unique in his archidiaconal experience. All the same she began to feel worried—she was beginning to doubt if she had the same qualifications for choosing a clergyman as she had for choosing a looker or a dairy-girl. She knew the sort of man she liked as a man, and more vaguely the sort of man she liked as a parson, she also was patriotically anxious to find somebody adequate to the honours and obligations of the living. Nobody she saw or heard of seemed to come up to her double standard of man and minister, and she was beginning to wonder to what extent she could compromise her pride by writing—not to the Archdeacon, but over his head to the Bishop—when she saw in the local paper that Father Lawrence, of the Society of Sacred Pity, was preaching a course of sermons in Marlingate.

Immediately memories came back to her, so far and pale that they were more like the memories of dreams than of anything which had actually happened. She saw a small dark figure standing with its back to the awakening light and bidding godspeed to all that was vital and beautiful and more-than-herself in her life ... "Go, Christian soul"—while she in the depths of her broken heart had cried "Stay, stay!" But he had obeyed the priest rather than the lover, he had gone and not stayed ... and afterwards the priest had tried to hold him for her in futurity—"think of Martin, pray for Martin," but the lover had let him slip, because she could not think and dared not pray, and he had fallen back from her into his silent home in the past.

The old wound could still hurt, for a moment it seemed as if her whole body was pain because of it. Successful, important, thriving Joanna Godden could still suffer because eight years ago she had not been allowed to make the sacrifice of all that she now held so triumphantly. This mere name of Martin's brother had pricked her heart, and she suddenly wanted to get closer to the past than she could get with her memorial-card and photograph and tombstone. Even Sir Harry Trevor, ironic link with faithful love, was gone now—there was only Lawrence. She would like to see him—not to talk to him of Martin, she couldn't bear that, and there would be something vaguely improper about it—but he was a clergyman, for all he disguised the fact by calling himself a priest, and she would offer him the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge and let the neighbourhood sit up as much as it liked.