Fludd: A Novel

THREE

Soon after, the school term ended. The mills closed for Wakes Week, and those of the populace who could afford it went to spend a week in boarding houses at Blackpool.

It was a poor summer on the whole, with many lives lost. The thunderstorms and gales of 27 July returned two days later; trees were felled and roofs blown away. On 5 August there were more thunderstorms, and the rivers rose. On 15 August two trains collided in Blackburn Station, injuring fifty people. On 26 August there were further fatalities after violent electrical storms.

In early September the children went back to school; a new intake of infants cowered under the mossy wall, and sought refuge in its shade from Mother Perpetua’s crow-like arm.

It was after nine o’clock on a particularly wet evening late in that month that Miss Dempsey heard a knock at the front door of the presbytery. She took this ill, because it was usual for the parishioners, if in need of a priest, to come to the kitchen door at the side; the nuns, similarly, knew their place. She had not yet fed Father Angwin his evening meal, for it was the night of the Children of Mary’s meeting, and Father had been obliged to give them an improving address.

The meeting had gone much as always. There had been prayers, and Father Angwin’s discourse, more rambling than usual, she thought; then a hymn to St. Agnes, Protectress of the Society. There were several such hymns, all of them absurdly flattering to the saint; and Miss Dempsey, on account of her Christian name, was forced to endure both pointed disregard and scornful stares while the verses lurched on. The other Children could not bear to hear her so lauded.

We’ll sing a hymn to Agnes,

The Martyr-Child of Rome;

The Virgin Spouse of Jesus,

More pure than ocean foam.

Miss Dempsey tried, during the weekly meetings—indeed she hoped she always did try—to look humble and inconspicuous; not to flaunt her status in the parish. But she felt, from the gimlet glances she received, that she was failing.

Oh aid us, holy Agnes,

A joyous song to raise;

To trumpet forth thy glory,

To sound afar thy praise.

Father Angwin said that he liked this particular hymn, did he not? He said he liked the thought of the Children of Mary blowing trumpets. But a small sigh escaped him, just the same.

After the concluding prayers the other Children were at liberty to go to the school hall to conduct the social part of their business: strong tea, parlour games, and character assassination. She herself, knowing her duty, had taken off her cloak at the back of the church, handed it to the president of the Sodality, taken off her ribbon and her medal, and hurried through the sacristy and back into her kitchen. She was aware that this proceeding gave the Children every opportunity to shred her reputation, but that could not be helped; on a bad night like this, Father was not to be left with a sandwich.

So who can this possibly be at the door, she wondered. She took off her pinny and hung it up. Perhaps someone is near death, and their sorrowing relatives are here to ask Father to come and give Extreme Unction. Perhaps, even, one of the Children of Mary has met with an accident; a fatal scalding with the tea urn was always a possibility. Or perhaps, she thought, it is some poor sinner, with blood on his hands, ridden over the wild moors to ask for absolution. But glancing up at the clock she knew this could not be so, for the last bus from Glossop had passed through twenty minutes earlier.

Miss Dempsey opened the door a crack. There was a bluish wild darkness outside, and rain rattled past her into the hall. Before her was a tall, dim shape, a man wrapped in a dark cloak, holes for mouth and eyes, a hat pulled over the brow; then, as her eyes became accustomed to the exterior murk, she distinguished the figure of a young man, holding in his left hand what appeared to be. a doctor’s black bag.

“Flood,” said the apparition.

“Indeed it is. A flood and a half.”

“No,” he said. “F-L-U-D-D.”

A gust of wind ripped at the trees behind him; their branches, fitfully lit by the storm flickering over Netherhoughton, stretched across his tilted cheek, in a tracery like fingers or lace. “Is this the time for a spelling bee?” Miss Dempsey flung back the door. “Do you really consider it is?”

The young man stepped inside. Rivulets of water cascaded from his clothes and pooled on the floor of the hall. He fixed her with his gaze, and peeled off his outer layers to reveal a black suit and clerical collar. “My name,” he said. “F-L-U-D-D. My name is Fludd.”

So you are the curate, she thought. She felt a sudden urge to say, M-U-D-D; mine, Father, is Mudd. Then his eyes fastened upon her face.

The urge reached her lips, and died. The night chill crept into her, from the open door, and, as she went to close it, she began to tremble, and she clamped her jaws, to stop her teeth from chattering audibly; too much shivering was a vulgar thing, she felt, and would give a bad impression. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll draw the bolts. It’s time. Quite late. You’ll not be wanting to go out again tonight.”

She did it. She felt the young man’s eyes on her back when she turned the key in the lock. “No,” he said, “I won’t want to go out again. I’ve come to stay.” Deep within her, behind her cardigan and her blouse and her petticoat trimmed with scratchy nylon lace, behind her interlock vest and freckled skin, Miss Dempsey sensed a slow movement, a tiny spiral shift of matter, as if, at the very moment the curate spoke, a change had occurred: a change so minute as to baffle description, but rippling out, in its effect, to infinity. In later years, when she talked about it she would always say, Did you ever see a pile of pennies pushed over? Did you ever see a house of cards fall down? And whomever she spoke to would look at her, comprehension strained; she could not find the words for that sliding, slipping, tripping sensation that she felt through her entire body. Miss Dempsey felt her mortality; but, in the same instant, she felt her immortality too.

At that instant, also, Father Angwin put his head around the sitting-room door. There could be no mistake about the newcomer, for he had already assumed a proprietorial air, taking off his sodden hat and setting it down on the hall-stand, and extracting himself from his cloak. A look of alarm and distaste crossed Father Angwin’s face: then stronger emotions. As Miss Dempsey was to tell a parishioner, next day: “I really thought for a moment he might fly out against him.” She saw the priest stand poised on the threshold of the room, his frail person quivering, a dangerous golden light in his eyes. A tune began to run through her head: not of a hymn. Despite herself, she began to hum, and a moment later was appalled to hear herself break into song: John Peel’s view hulloo would awaken the dead/ Or the fox from his lair in the morning.

“This is Miss Dempsey, my housekeeper,” Father Angwin said. “She is deranged.”

Before she could make any apology, she saw Father Fludd reach into the inside pocket of his black suit. She waited, her fingers nervously pressed to her lips, for the newcomer to produce some papers, a scroll perhaps, embossed with the Papal seal: some document excommunicating Father Angwin for drunkenness and peculiar behaviour, and installing this young man in his stead. But the curate’s hand emerged with a small flat tin. He held it out to Father Angwin and inquired, “Have a cheroot?”

For the rest of that evening Miss Dempsey went up and down stairs, providing as best she could for the curate’s comfort. He said he would take a bath, which was not at all a usual thing on a week-night. The bathroom, one of the few in Fetherhoughton at that time, was as cold as a morgue, and the hot water a rusty unreliable trickle. Miss Dempsey penetrated the frigid upper storey of the house, a threadbare towel over her arm, and then walked again with bedlinen, Irish linen sheets that were thin and starched and icy to her touch.

She looked out a hot-water bottle, and went into the curate’s room to draw the curtains, and to pass a duster over the small bedside stand, and to turn the mattress. There are those, it is said, who have entertained angels unawares; but Miss Dempsey would have liked notice. Every week she cleaned this room, but naturally the bed was not aired. There was no homely touch that she could provide, unless she had brought up a bucket of coal and laid a fire; but she could never remember seeing a fire in a bedroom, and it was better not to encourage any notions that the curate might have. She had somehow formed the idea, just by those first few moments of conversation, and by his elaborate unconcern about her singing, that besides being a priest he was a gentleman. It was an impression only, given by his manners and not his appearance, for the light in the hall was too dim for her to get much idea of what he looked like.

The walls of the upper storey, like the walls of the kitchen and the downstairs hall, were painted a deep institutional green; the panelled doors were varnished with a yellowish stain. There was no lampshade in the curate’s room, just a clear bulb, and the hard-edged shadows it cast. The floorboards creaked in the corridor, and Miss Dempsey stopped, rocking a little on her feet, detecting the point of the greatest noise. Downstairs the floors were made of stone. In every room a crucifix hung, the dying God in each case exhibiting some distinction of anguish, some greater or lesser contortion of his naked body, a musculature more or less racked. The house was a prison for these dying Christs, a mausoleum.

But when Miss Dempsey thought of the bishop’s house, she imagined table-lamps with silk shades, and dining tables on pedestals, and an effulgence of hot electric air. When she thought of the sycophants, she imagined them lolling on cushions, eating Brazil nuts. She imagined that they got food in sauces, and port wine on quite ordinary days, and rinsed their fingers in holy water in little marble basins; that in the grounds of the bishop’s house, where the sycophants walked together plotting in Latin, there were fountains and statuary and a dovecote. Crossing the hall, she paused outside the sitting-room door. She heard conversation in full spate. She could tell that Father Angwin had been drinking whisky. The curate spoke in his light, dry voice: “In considering the life of Christ, there is something that has often made me wonder; did the man who owned the Gadarene swine get compensation?”

Miss Dempsey tiptoed away.

The curate moved his hand over the tablecloth, in a skimming motion, sweeping the topic aside. His fingers—bloodless, pointed fingers—floated over the linen like swans on a lake of milk.

“I thought you might be one of those modern fellows,” Father Angwin said. “I thought you might have no scholarship. I was sick to think about it.”

Father Fludd looked down, with an inward modest smile, as if disclaiming any pretensions. He had been drinking too, but he was certainly not drunk; despite the hour—and it was now eleven o’clock—he was as pleasant, mild, and breezy as if it were teatime. Whenever Father Angwin looked up at him, it seemed that his whisky glass was raised to his lips, but the level of what was in it did not seem to go down; and yet from time to time the young man reached out for the bottle, and topped himself up. It had been the same with their late dinner; there were three sausages (from the Co-op butcher) on Father Fludd’s plate, and he was always cutting into one or other, and spearing a bit on his fork; he was always chewing in an unobtrusive, polite way, with his mouth shut tight. And yet there were always three sausages on his plate, until at last, quite suddenly, there were none. Father Angwin’s first thought was that Fludd had a small dog concealed about his person, in the way that starlets conceal their pooches from the customs men; he had seen this in the newspaper. But Fludd, unlike the starlets, had not got his neck sunk into a fur; and then again, Father Angwin thought, would a dog drink so much whisky?

From time to time, also, the curate leant forward and busied himself building up the fire. He was a handy type with the tongs, Father Angwin could tell. His efforts were keeping the room remarkably warm; and yet when Agnes came in, lugging a bucket of coal, she checked herself in surprise and said, “You don’t need this.”

Presently Father Angwin got up, and opened the window a crack. “It makes a change, for this house,” he said, “but it’s as hot as Hell.”

“Though far better ventilated,” said Fludd, sipping his whisky.

It’s time they had cocoa, Miss Dempsey thought. They’ll be tumbling under the table. The bishop will have chosen this toper, to lead poor Angwin on; he had a good head for drink, that was for sure, and no doubt when Angwin had passed out he would be tiptoeing into the hall and lifting the receiver on his special telephone line to His Corpulence.

And yet Miss Dempsey was not sure what to think. That look he had given her, in the hall; was it not, for all its chilling nature, a look of deep compassion? Could it be that Fludd was not a sycophant, but some innocent that the bishop wished to ruin? She felt that look still: as if her flesh had become glass.

I’ll sing again, she thought, to impress on him that if I’m given to singing it’s usually something pious. I’ll just hum as I take in this tray. She spread on the tray a white cloth with a scalloped edge, embroidered with satin-stitch pansies, which she had purchased in June at the parish Sale of Work; it looked, she thought, more pure than ocean foam. She placed the cups of cocoa upon it, and then two plates, and on each plate three Rich Tea biscuits. To Christ thy heart was given,/ The world pursued in vain …

She knocked; no reply of course, they were talking again. Its promises ne’er moved thee … She shoved open the door with her foot, and manoeuvred herself in. The heat took her aback; the fire was roaring up the chimney. She lost the thread of her verse. The curate looked up at her and smiled as she put the tray on the table, and she looked back, full into his face; this time, she thought, I must be sure and form some notion of what he looks like. She held his gaze for what length of time she could, without appearing to stare, and then bent over the hearth, touching the tiles up quite needlessly with the little gilt brush from the fireside set. She surprised herself; she usually brought in a filthy, bristly kitchen-type of brush for this job, and at the thought of anyone violating the fireside set, she would have spat.

She waited for Father Angwin to say, as he usually did, these are boring biscuits, I like Fig, I like Custard Creams; but he was entirely caught up in his conversation with the curate, his hands knotting and unknotting on the table, a flurry of agitation in his voice. “I try to tell myself that whatever evil is done is done permettio dei, with God’s sanction—”

“I understand,” said the curate gravely.

“—and certainly Augustine argues most persuasively in The City of God that though good can exist without evil, evil cannot exist without good. And yet the feeling has taken hold of me that the devil has got his independence in this world. It is he who has got the reins in his hands, I feel.”

Father Fludd stirred his cocoa judiciously. His eyes were downcast.

“I’ll come in for the tray,” Agnes said. “I like to get washed up before bedtime, Father. If there’s one thing I cannot abide it’s to see dirty pots first thing in the morning. I think it’s a habit low in the extreme.”

“I don’t know where God is,” Father Angwin said. “I don’t know that he is.”

“Drink it while it’s hot,” Agnes said to him, “and don’t get yourself worked up before bedtime.”

But Father Angwin was not listening to her. He looked through her as if he were not seeing her, and for a moment she felt an uprush of fear, like cold water on the back of her neck; what if she were really not visible, what if Father Fludd had disappeared her in some way? The next moment, her good sense reasserted itself. She went out into the hall, humming: All vain the wooer’s pleading/ All vain the judge’s ire: / One love alone thy bosom/ Inflamed with chastest fire. Was not “bosom” a rude word? But you were always getting it in hymns. Miss Dempsey had no terms at all for some sections of her anatomy; she never paid them attention. As men go to a banquet … She tried to remember what Father Fludd looked like, but the pattern of his features had been cleanly erased from her mind.

“So one morning,” Father Angwin went on, “I woke up. This was twenty years ago. It had gone in the night.”

“I see,” said Father Fludd.

“How can you explain that? I had it at night, and in the morning it had gone. I felt for the first quarter of an hour that it might come to light, in the way, you know, you might kick your slippers under the bed, or be absent-minded with your toothbrush.”

Father Fludd leant forward; they had transferred themselves now to the two armchairs, and sat at either side of the fire. “Did you apply to St. Anthony? You know he is the nonpareil for finding what is lost.”

“But how could I?” Father Angwin threw out his hands, in a large and liberal gesture of despair. “How could I, considering the nature of my loss, apply to Anthony or any other saint?”

“I suppose not,” Fludd said. “There are some losses—virginity, for instance—that St. Anthony could do nothing about; but you would not be debarred from asking him, if you were an optimist. Your situation, it seems to me, was more grave than the loss of virginity. What did you do next?”

“I looked in the wardrobe, I think. I got up—it was five o’clock, still dark—and I went and looked in the sacristy. I opened the press up and felt among the vestments. I knew there was no chance, but you can imagine how it was. I was half out of my mind with fear of the future.”

“And then?”

“I looked on the altar. It wasn’t there. It had vanished while I slept, and I had to accept the fact.” Father Angwin’s head drooped. “I had lost my faith. I no longer believed in God at all.”

“You relive the moment,” Fludd said, “as if it were yesterday. May I ask what you did next?”

Father Angwin placed his hands together, fingertip to fingertip. He considered. “It seemed to me that what I had urgent need of was some kind of survival plan, some kind of strategy. I wondered, is there a diocesan House of Detention for priests in my case? Somewhere they are put to be kept from view? After all, you cannot stop being a priest, can you? No matter how faithless or scandalous a man is, once he is a priest he is a priest for all eternity. I couldn’t abscond, could I, I couldn’t do a moonlight flit?”

“I should say your way was plain,” Fludd said. “A man may preserve the outward form, if he lacks the inward grace.”

“Yes. So I thought, well, I have no faith, I must just pretend I have.”

“And may I venture a guess? You had a parish. It must be served. And yet you would feel—what? On shaky ground. Suppose you made a slip, gave yourself away?”

“I was a charlatan,” Father Angwin said. “A pretender. A fake. Do you know what worried me? That I would stop thinking like a priest. Stop talking like a priest. That one day some parishioner would come at me with some question—is this or that a sin, should I do that or the other—and I’d say, well, what do you think, what do you feel like doing, what does your common sense tell you?”

“Common sense has nothing to do with religion,” Father Fludd said reprovingly. “And personal opinion has little to do with sin.”

“Exactly. Just my point. I was afraid I’d forget myself, respond as any person might—appeal, as it were, to the human and not the divine. I had to safeguard myself. Against this grievous peril.”

“So did you then become scrupulous? Did you become exacting?” Fludd leant forward in his chair, his eyes alight. “Did you make a point of it to become known in the district for the strictness of your opinions, for your old-fashioned stances, for the rigidity of your views? You would not hear of any innovation, deviation: of any slight departure from the rules of Lenten fasting, say? You would not remit a jot or a tittle?”

“That is about the size of it.” Father Angwin looked morose; he slumped a little. “Any more in that bottle?”

Fludd had secreted it by his chair, it seemed. He reached down, and poured his senior a generous measure. “Wonderful,” Father Angwin murmured. “Go on now, Father Fludd. You seem to be on my trail.”

“Shall we say, for instance, that in the confessional you gave no leeway? Supposing, for instance, some woman with six children came along. What did you recommend?”

“Oh, you know, I said they must abstain.”

“What did they say to that?”

“They said, thank you, Father.”

“They were relieved?”

“The word does not convey the measure of their jubilation. The men of Fetherhoughton are not noted for romance.”

“And if they said to you, Father, I cannot abstain, for the brute insists on his pleasures?”

“I said, then there is no help for it, my dear, you must have six more.”

“I understand,” Fludd said. “Suppose as a good Catholic you meet some very particular hardship, some tiny absurdity, which, as you imagine, is making life very hard for some poor son or daughter of the Church. You think, well now, what can this matter? What can it signify, in the eternal scheme of things? I will just, in this little instance, separate my judgement from the traditions of the Church. But faith, Father Angwin, is like a wall, a big, blank, brick wall. One day, some fool comes with a hairpin and chooses some inch of it, and begins to scrape away at the mortar. When the first dust flies up, the wall falls down.”

Father Angwin took a draught of his whisky. What Fludd said was comprehensible entirely; and he imagined the bishop, producing some dusty, purloined hairpin from the hot depth of his pocket. “I thought to myself,” he said, “a priest must believe in God, or at least pretend to; and who knows, if I pretend for thirty years, for forty years, perhaps the belief will grow back in again, the mask will grow into the flesh. And if you can accept the preposterous notion of a living creator who gives a bugger about every sparrow that falls, why jib at the rest of it? Why jib at rosaries and relics and fasting and abstinence? Why swallow a camel and strain at a gnat? And with that as my philosophy, it somehow seemed possible to go on, enclosed in ritual, safe as houses, as they say. Oh, the central premise was missing, but do you know, it didn’t seem to matter all that much? You wouldn’t think it, would you? You’d think if you lost your faith you couldn’t continue in this life. But I can assure you—this is the one life you can continue in.”

“You made an accommodation,” Fludd said. “It is natural. Suppose a woman marries a man after some great love affair. Then one morning she wakes up beside the chap, and sees that he is a mere nothing, despicable, a blot on her landscape. Does she rise up from her bed and go about the streets proclaiming her error? No, she does not. She gets back under the bedclothes. For the rest of the day she is even more civil to him than she has been before.”

“I dare say you are right,” Father Angwin said. “I dare say the parallel can be drawn. But I have not given much thought to the married state. I put it to myself differently. I thought, suppose your heart were taken out? But you could still walk and talk, and have your breakfast. Well, you wouldn’t miss it, would you?”

“So,” said Father Fludd, “you walked about the district without your heart, and you continued to hear confessions and say early Mass, you did all that was required of you and more; you travelled your necessary way, fettered as you were to this stale bridegroom, the Church. You didn’t shout from the pulpit that you no longer believed in God.”

“Why should I? If the heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone, why should not the Fetherhoughtonians do the same? Oh, I’d be willing, as the bishop says I ought, to deliver them from their ignorance: but what would I deliver them to?”

“It is a question,” Fludd said. “But now, what is this problem you have with the devil? How can it be that your belief in him remains?”

“Well, I saw him,” Father Angwin said, rather curtly. “He hangs about the parish.” He was silent for a moment, recovering his manners. “My dear boy, could I prevail upon you to drink that cocoa? I see you have stirred it up, and then taken no further interest in it. I wouldn’t wish you to provoke Agnes on your first night. She believes cocoa is good for priests.”

Fludd picked up his cup. “What did he look like?”

“The devil? He was a little man in a checked cap. He had one of those round faces, apple-cheeked, you’d say.”

“And you had never seen him before?”

“Oh, I’d seen him many a time. He comes from Netherhoughton. He keeps a shop. A tobacconist, he is. But don’t you understand, Father, how you can look and look at a thing, perhaps all the days of your life, without knowing its true nature at all? Until one day light dawns?”

“I would not say in this instance that it was light. I would say it was darkness.”

“That afternoon,” Father Angwin picked up his own cup and inspected its contents, “that afternoon, I say, I was walking about the church grounds, making my circuit around the convent and the school, just having a think to myself. And there the fellow appeared to me, just bobbed up from nowhere, and raised his cap. He smiled at me—and by God, I knew him.”

“How did you know him?”

“It was his smile … his horrible jauntiness … the little tune he whistled.”

“Anything else?”

“Perhaps the smell of sulphur. It stank out the afternoon.”

“Sulphur,” said Fludd, “may be taken as definitive.”

Agnes put her head around the door. She cleared her throat. “Are you finished with the tray?” The rest of her appeared. “It’s bedtime,” she said. “We keep decent hours, Father Fludd.”

“Agnes,” Father Angwin said, “Father Fludd is not obliged to go to bed just because you are going.”

“It’s not a matter of obligation,” Agnes said. “It’s a matter of seemliness. I’ve already locked up, hours ago.”

“Good,” Father Angwin said. “If there is anything we want, we shall get it ourselves. Father Fludd, I daresay, knows how to boil a kettle.”

Miss Dempsey went out and double-checked the big bolts on the front door, rattling them as she did so; not in protest at being sent about her business, but as a counter to the deep calm that had fallen on the house. The storm was over. When she looked through the kitchen window, she could see that the trees still swayed, but only a little, like polite dancers on a crowded floor. And any noise they made was lost to her, shut out by thick stone walls and the evening’s events. She touched her lip, fingering the small flat protuberance there. She turned off the light and went up to bed, leaving the dirty cocoa cups in the sink; departing from the habit of a lifetime, feeling that her life was somehow altered. It was true that the curate had not spoken to her, apart from an exchange of pleasantries, a few words when she brought in the sausages. But there was a whisper at the back of her mind, and only he could have put it there: I have come to transform you, transformation is my business.

The two men sat on, talking through the night. Soon it came, the peevish dawn. The fire fell to ash. Father Angwin felt his way upstairs in the dark, his hand against the wall. He had an hour or two before he must be up to say Mass. He lay down, removing only his shoes, and fell at once into a deep sleep.

When he woke up, he did not know what time it was. His mouth felt dry, there was unaccustomed sun outside the window. He lay thinking, not caring about anything very much. It seemed possible—probable, even—that he had dreamt Father Fludd. The details of their conversation were remarkably clear, but he found that he could not call the young man’s face to mind. Bits of it he could get: an eye, the nose. He could not somehow fit it together. It seemed possible that Fludd was some composite figure he had got out of his imagination; perhaps he had fallen asleep before the fire.

He sat up, rubbed his palms over his face, put the heel of his hands into his eyes and rubbed them, stroked his chin and thought of shaving, conversed mentally with his empty stomach and promised it a digestible coddled egg. Then, in his stockinged feet, his shoes in his hand, he crept down the passage and pushed open the door of the curate’s room.

It was not empty. Fludd was in bed and asleep. He lay on his back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, and his reserved, almost severe expression forbade Father Angwin’s close inspection. The room smelled of incense. Father Fludd wore some kind of old-fashioned nightshirt, starched and with a ruffled collar; it was a pattern that Father Angwin had never seen before, and immediately it excited his envy.

He turned away and tiptoed from the room, closing the door softly behind him; though it did not seem to him, as he remarked later, that an earthquake would have disturbed the curate. He looked like a bishop upon his catafalque; immediately this image occurred to him, Father Angwin thought bishop, bishop, we had no discussion of the bishop last night. His name was not even mentioned. If Fludd is a spy, I am ruined; but would any spy sleep so soundly? Then he thought, I am ruined anyway.

And there was the housekeeper, downstairs, about her morning round, and singing once more—Miss Dempsey, he thought, had conceit of her voice—to impress that oblivious, motionless, waxen image in the room behind him. He wondered, for an instant, whether he should return and take the curate’s pulse. But no: if Father Fludd was in the habit of dying during the night, that was a matter for himself. A fragment came back to him from last night’s conversation; had not the curate quoted Voltaire? “It is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once.”

Father Angwin put out a hand, to steady himself. He was overwhelmed with hunger; he felt quite giddy and faint. I must persuade Agnes, he thought, to forgive me my trespasses and let me have two eggs. She was in the kitchen now, pursuing in her uncertain soprano the theme of the martyrdom of St. Agnes:

As men go to a banquet,

As bride to meet her groom;

So thou with joyous footsteps

Didst haste to meet thy doom.

The soldiers wept in pity,

The headsman blushed for shame;

One sigh alone escaped thee.

’Twas Jesus’ sweetest name.