§4

Father Lawrence came to see her one April day when the young lambs were bleating on the sheltered innings and making bright clean spots of white beside the ewes' fog-soiled fleeces, when the tegs had come down from their winter keep inland, and the sunset fell in long golden slats across the first water-green grass of spring. The years had aged him more than they had aged Joanna—the marks on her face were chiefly weather marks, tokens of her exposure to marsh suns and winds, and of her own ruthless applications of yellow soap. Behind them was a little of the hardness which comes when a woman has to fight many battles and has won her victories largely through the sacrifice of her resources. The lines on his face were mostly those of his own humour and other people's sorrows, he had exposed himself perhaps not enough to the weather and too much to the world, so that where she had fine lines and a fundamental hardness, he had heavy lines like the furrows of a ploughshare, and a softness beneath them like the fruitful soil that the share turns up.

Joanna received him in state, with Arthur Alce's teapot and her best pink silk blouse with the lace insertion. Ellen, for fairly obvious reasons, preferred not to be present. Joanna was terrified lest he should begin to talk of Martin, so after she had conformed to local etiquette by inquiring after his health and abusing the weather, she offered him the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge and a slice of cake almost in the same breath.

She was surprised and a little hurt when he refused the former. As a member of a religious community he could not hold preferment, and he had no vocation to settled Christianity.

"I shouldn't be at all good as a country clergyman. Besides, Jo"—he had at once slipped into the brotherliness of their old relations—"I know you; you wouldn't like my ways. You'd always be up at me, teaching me better, and then I should be up at you, and possibly we shouldn't stay quite such good friends as we are now."

"I shouldn't mind your ways. Reckon it might do the folks round here a proper lot of good to be prayed over same as you—I mean I'd like to see a few of 'em prayed over when they were dying and couldn't help themselves. Serve them right, I say, for not praying when they're alive, and some who won't put their noses in church except for a harvest thanksgiving. No, if you'll only come here, Lawrence, you may do what you like in the way of prayers and such. I shan't interfere as long as you don't trouble us with the Pope, whom I never could abide after all I've heard of him, wanting to blow up the Established Church in London, and making people kiss his toe, which I'd never do, not if he was to burn me alive."

"Well, if that's the only limit to your toleration I think I could help you, even though I can't come myself. I know one or two excellent priests who would do endless good in a place like this."

Joanna suddenly felt her imagination gloat and kindle at the thought of Brodnyx and Pedlinge compelled to holiness—all those wicked old men who wouldn't go to church, but expected their Christmas puddings just the same, those hobbledehoys who loafed against gate-posts the whole of Sunday, those vain hussies who giggled behind their handkerchiefs all the service through—it would be fine to see them hustled about and taught their manners ... it would be valiant sport to see them made to behave, as Mr. Pratt had never been able to make them. She with her half-crown in the plate and her quarterly communion need have no qualms, and she would enjoy seeing the fear of God put into other folk.

So Lawrence's visit was fruitful after all—a friend of his had been ordered to give up his hard work in a slum parish and find a country vocation. He promised that this friend should write to Joanna.

"But I must see him, too," she said.

They were standing at the open door, and the religious in his black habit was like a cut paper silhouette against the long streaks of fading purple cloud.

"I remember," he said, "that you always were particular about a man's looks. How Martin's must have delighted you!"

His tongue did not falter over the loved, forbidden name—he spoke it quite naturally and conversationally, as if glad that he could introduce it at last into their business.

Joanna's body stiffened, but he did not see it, for he was gazing at the young creeper's budding trail over the door.

"I hope you have a good photograph of him," he continued—"I know that a very good photograph was taken of him a year before he died—much better than any of the earlier ones. I hope you have one of those."

"Yes, I have," said Joanna gruffly. From shock she had passed into a thrilling anger. How calmly he had spoken the dear name, how unblushingly he had said the outrageous word "died!" How brazen, thoughtless, cruel he was about it all!—tearing the veil from her sorrow, talking as if her dead lived ... she felt exposed, indecent, and she hated him, all the more because mixed with her hatred was a kind of disapproving envy, a resentment that he should be free to remember where she was bound to forget....

He saw her hand clench slowly at her side, and for the first time became aware of her state of mind.

"Good-bye, Jo," he said kindly—"I'll tell Father Palmer to write to you."

"Thanks, but I don't promise to take him," was her ungracious fling.

"No—why should you? And of course he may have already made his plans. Good-bye, and thank you for your great kindness in offering the living to me—it was very noble of you, considering what your family has suffered from mine."

He had carefully avoided all reference to his father, but he now realized that he had kept the wrong silence. It was the man who had brought her happiness, not the man who had brought her shame, that she was unable to speak of.

"Oh, don't you think of that—it wasn't your doing"—she melted towards him now she had a genuine cause for indignation—"and we've come through it better than we hoped, and some of us deserved."

Lawrence gave her an odd smile, which made his face with its innumerable lines and pouches look rather like a gargoyle's. Then he walked off bare-headed into the twilight.