‘Alas for your expectations,’ Errington said. ‘You can’t expectate if you don’t felicitate. But to return to Mundford, the sight of whom makes me expectorate—he must be hard on eighty; and yet he doesn’t look it, does
he?’
‘So perhaps the rumours are right. He always wins; he does not grow old….’
‘He is looking this way. In that embalmed brain the memory of seventy pounds is stirring! I’ll wish you good night, gentlemen, fellow gamblers and scoundrels all.’
But it was at Richard that the coal-chip eyes were looking; and as the group around the table hastily broke up, Mundford approached and held out the letter.
‘Thank you for allowing me to read it, sir. Most interesting. You do realise, don’t you, that if what your local
cleric suspects is true, you have there a property of incalculable value.’
Value … a hole in the ground? Ah, but there was something else–-
‘Oh, all those marble figures, eh?’ asked Richard, remembering.
‘They doubtless would have some value, antique relics, works of art,’ said Mundford smoothly. ‘It was of the site itself I was thinking. If it is indeed a Mithraic temple— as sounds possible—I myself would give you two thousand pounds for the use of it… for one evening.’
Momentarily speechless, Richard gaped at him.
‘For the use of it; a little secrecy and possibly some small collaboration on your part. And believe me, Sir Richard, the sum mentioned was not just an attempt to strike a bargain; it was a surety of my sincere interest.’
‘Well, if you’re interested to that extent you’d better come with me tomorrow and take a look at it.’
‘How very kind of you, I am most infinitely obliged to you. There is nothing in the world that I would rather do.’
His voice was calm, but something so avid shone on his face that Richard gave voice to words of unusual sincerity.
‘I wish to God,’ he said, ‘that there was anything in the world that I really wanted to do.’
As he spoke the limitless boredom moved in him like a sickness; the boredom that had driven him from one excess to another, which had set in early and grown great as his interests narrowed and his emotions cooled and one diversion after another failed him.
Mundford said, almost as though speaking to himself, ‘There are always new worlds to explore,’ and passed on to ask about their place of meeting, their mode of travel on the morrow.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Linda was surprised at the interest which Richard evinced in the underground place; he had shown none at all in the ruins of a temple reputed to be two thousand years old, nor in a deserted city said to be even older than that, nor in an aqueduct which had last served its purpose in Akbar’s time, all of which had been the object of visits from other white people in India. She, of course, had joined the expeditions and stood and stared and exercised her sense of wonder to the full.
His attitude towards this antiquity she attributed to Mr Mundford and reflected that there was novelty also in Richard’s relationship with this man. Never before had she known him to be on such terms with anyone. Acquaintances he had in plenty, but no friends, and she had often hated herself for taking advantage of her knowledge that one way to amuse Richard was to decry or make mock of his acquaintances. This Mr Mundford was different; no word of criticism must be used concerning him, as she quickly learned. Towards him Richard had something of the reverence which a young schoolboy has for one older, stronger and more popular.
It was all very strange and perhaps a little comic, but although she disliked Mr Mundford and found him physically repellent she could not regret Richard’s friendship with him. It seemed to have eased something which had always been provoking Richard to be unpleasant, to take pleasure in being unpleasant. One might think it strange that friendship with such an ugly, dull-seeming little man should oil the rasping wheels of their marriage,
but it seemed to do so; Richard was much kinder to her than he had been for longer than she could remember and actually said that she had behaved sensibly over the find. ‘Many women would have thought only of getting the house refronted and would have had the hole filled in at once.’
And that made her think of Hadstock, who, on the evening after their visit to the place, had abandoned reserve and formality long enough to say that if he had his way he would have the opening closed over at once. And she had said, ‘I feel the same.’ Their relationship, at that moment advanced a step.
For two days after their arrival Richard and Mr Mundford went up and down the marble stairs and into and out of the house. They said little about the find in Linda’s presence, but sat up late, talking. On the third day, much to Farrow’s relief and joy, Richard gave orders that the hole was to be closed. At that point the foundations were to be deepened and strengthened for safety’s sake; then the building would go on as usual and no one would ever guess what lay just by the long sash window— one of three—in the new dining-room.
No one questioned Richard’s action. ‘A queer old place, full of statchers, all of ‘em naked and some of ‘em nasty,’ as Farrow described it, had been found on a gentleman’s private property; the gentleman had come from London to look at the find and had sensibly decided not to let it interfere with his building plans. The days of publicity lay far ahead in the future and every one of the few people most nearly concerned would have laughed to be told that if, one hundred and fifty years later, one fragment of one of the statues should come to light it would receive nation-wide attention. Mr Avery, the rector, was heard mildly to lament that a friend of his at Cambridge had not been able to view the find; but even he realised that nothing must stand in the way of Sir Richard’s new dining-room. To the workmen Job’s sudden disappearance into the earth and his lucky escape were far more matter for wonder and talk than the discovery to which the fall had led.
Richard and his new friend went back to London and in a few days it was all forgotten.
Hadstock resumed his evening visits. During the first of these Linda asked the question which had lain in her mind since their inspection of the temple.
‘You were the first person to identify that place,’ she said suddenly, ‘How did you know?’
‘I guessed.’
‘Anyone could have guessed. I could have guessed— but I shouldn’t have been right. You were. You must have had something to go upon.’
‘I read a little, my lady.’
Although, in its wording the sentence might have been an opening towards conversation, its tone had a finality and Linda asked no more questions. She began, however, to entertain a curiosity about Hadstock, who lived alone, who held himself apart from everyone, and who ‘read a little’ and was informed upon matters about which one would have expected a farm bailiff to be ignorant.
Once, in a short November afternoon, the last of the month, she walked along Berry Lane and stood and stared at the cottage as though it could afford some clue. It shared its occupant’s secretiveness; its two small windows—one up, one down—were curtained with some ugly drab material, and the tiny garden was untilled, thickly buried under the leaf-fall of a solitary, age-twisted apple tree. When she had passed and could see, looking back, the space behind the cottage, she had a view of a linen line slung between two posts. Limp in the windless air hung two of Hadstock’s shirts—his working blue, and the white one into which he changed in the evening— three handkerchiefs, and two pairs of socks. Did he do everything for himself, she wondered, or did a village woman work for him? The idea of Hadstock washing, perhaps even ironing, his clothes was amusing, and yet pathetic.
She might never have known any more about the man
than she did on that November afternoon had it not been for the accident which took place during the second week in December.
During his brief visit Richard had ordered, or had told Hadstock to order, a new bull. The two men who had delivered it, each holding a pole hooked into the ring through its nose, had warned Hadstock of its savage disposition. A stout leather collar had been slipped over its head and attached by a chain to one of the solid posts by the side of the manger, but even thus shackled it had, in a few days, managed to intimidate anyone who attempted to feed it. Hadstock had undertaken the job himself ‘… until the creature has settled’. The stockman, in his first entrances, had always gone armed with a pitchfork; Hadstock, believing this to be provocative, had relied upon the bull-pole, slipping the hook through the ring as the great head turned upon his entry and, by pressing on the pole, warding the creature off while he emptied the food into the manger within reach.