第37章 THE SIXTH - EXEGETICAL(6)

Lady Ella met him with affection and solicitude.

"I was tired and mentally fagged," he said."A day or so in London had an effect of change."She agreed that he looked much better, and remained for a moment or so scrutinizing him with the faint anxiety of one resolved to be completely helpful.

He regarded her with a renewed sense of her grace and dignity and kindliness.She was wearing a grey dress of soft silky material, touched with blue and covered with what seemed to him very rich and beautiful lace; her hair flowed back very graciously from her broad brow, and about her wrist and neck were delicate lines of gold.She seemed tremendously at home and right just where she was, in that big hospitable room, cultured but Anglican, without pretensions or novelties, with a glow of bound books, with the grand piano that Miriam, his third daughter, was beginning to play so well, with the tea equipage of shining silver and fine porcelain.

He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.

It wasn't a setting that one would rashly destroy....

And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex of finely adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still more in the mind of the bishop.At dinner he had all his domesticities about him.It was the family time, from eight until ten, at which latter hour he would usually go back from the drawing-room to his study.He surveyed the table.Eleanor was at home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright but very keen and happy.She had taken a first in the first part of the Moral Science Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two.

Clementina was to go back to Newnham with her next September.She aspired to history.Miriam's bent was musical.She and Phoebe and Daphne and Clementina were under the care of skilful Mademoiselle Lafarge, most tactful of Protestant French-women, Protestant and yet not too Protestant, one of those rare French Protestants in whom a touch of Bergson and the Pasteur Monod "scarce suspected, animates the whole."And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of education, from Mr.Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in orders, who sat now next to Lady Ella.Mr.Whippham, the chaplain, was at the bishop's right hand, ready for any chance of making arrangements to clear off the small arrears of duty the little holiday in London had accumulated.The bishop surveyed all these bright young people between himself and the calm beauty of his wife.He spoke first to one and then another upon the things that interested them.It rejoiced his heart to be able to give them education and opportunity, it pleased him to see them in clothes that he knew were none the less expensive because of their complete simplicity.Miriam and Mr.Blent wrangled pleasantly about Debussy, and old Dunk waited as though in orders of some rare and special sort that qualified him for this service.

All these people, the bishop reflected, counted upon him that this would go on....

Eleanor was answering some question of her mother's.They were so oddly alike and so curiously different, and both in their several ways so fine.Eleanor was dark like his own mother.

Perhaps she did a little lack Lady Ella's fine reserves; she could express more, she could feel more acutely, she might easily be very unhappy or very happy....

All these people counted on him.It was indeed acutely true, as Likeman had said, that any sudden breach with his position would be a breach of faith--so far as they were concerned.

And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and beautiful piece of silver, that graced the dinner-table.It had been given him, together with an episcopal ring, by his curates and choristers at the Church of the Holy Innocents, when he became bishop of Pinner.When they gave it him, had any one of them dreamt that some day he might be moved to strike an ungracious blow at the mother church that had reared them all?

It was his custom to join the family in the drawing-room after dinner.To-night he was a little delayed by Whippham, with some trivialities about next month's confirmations in Pringle and Princhester.When he came in he found Miriam playing, and playing very beautifully one of those later sonatas of Beethoven, he could never remember whether it was Of.109 or Of.111, but he knew that he liked it very much; it was solemn and sombre with phases of indescribable sweetness--while Clementina, Daphne and Mademoiselle Lafarge went on with their war knitting and Phoebe and Mr.Blent bent their brows over chess.Eleanor was reading the evening paper.Lady Ella sat on a high chair by the coffee things, and he stood in the doorway surveying the peaceful scene for a moment or so, before he went across the room and sat down on the couch close to her.

"You look tired," she whispered softly.

"Worries."

"That Chasters case?"

"Things developing out of that.I must tell you later." It would be, he felt, a good way of breaking the matter to her.

"Is the Chasters case coming on again, Daddy?" asked Eleanor.

He nodded.

"It's a pity," she said.

"What ?

"That he can't be left alone."

"It's Sir Reginald Phipps.The Church would be much more tolerant if it wasn't for the House of Laymen.But they--they feel they must do something."He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from the subject."Miriam dear," he asked, raising his voice; "is that 109 or 111? I can never tell.""That is always 111, Daddy," said Miriam."It's the other one is 109." And then evidently feeling that she had been pert:

"Would you like me to play you 109, Daddy?""I should love it, my dear." And he leant back and prepared to listen in such a thorough way that Eleanor would have no chance of discussing the Chasters' heresies.But this was interrupted by the consummation of the coffee, and Mr.Blent, breaking a long silence with "Mate in three, if I'm not mistaken," leapt to his feet to be of service.Eleanor, with the rough seriousness of youth, would not leave the Chasters case alone.