XXV

CHURCH ARCHITECTURE

It was already eleven o'clock, the sun shining in a bright sky, under which the country round the Waveney lay broad to the hills of mist which seemed to encompa.s.s the valley; yet, when one came to them no hills were there, but were still beyond. When Hogarth came out from the wood upon a footbridge, to his right a hand-sower was sowing broadcast, with a two-handed rhythm, taking seed, as he strode, from his scrip; and to the left ran a path between fields to an eminence with a little church on it; straight northward some Thring houses visible, and north-east, near the river, Lagden Dip orchard. Only two stooping women in fields near Thring could Hogarth see; also, still further, a gig-and-horse whose remote motion was imperceptible; also the trudging two-handed process of the sower nourishing the furrows. But for these, England, supposed to be "overcrowded", seemed a land once inhabited, but abandoned.

To Hogarth the whole, so familiar, looked uplifted now, the sunlight of a more celestial essence. Westring he would buy--though one memorable night in Colmoor he had arrived at the knowledge that it was not just that Westring should be anyone's; but then what one bought with his own diamonds was surely his own--his name being Richard.

He had pa.s.sed the bridge, when, glancing to the left, he saw a fifth person in the landscape--a man under a sycamore near the church, gazing up, with hung jaw, at the apse window--dressed in a grey jacket, but a clerical hat, and he had a note-book, in which he wrote, or drew.

Hogarth, whose mind was in weatherc.o.c.k state, rolled the barrow to the hill, left it, went stealing fleetly up, and gripped the man's collar, to whisper: "In the King's name I arrest you".

The man's hand clapped his heart, as he turned a face of terror.

"There is--some mistake--My G.o.d! Are you--?"

"Yes".

"Hogarth?"

"Who else?"

"But you have killed me! My heart--"

"Serves you right. Why didn't you give your right name to Loveday? And what are you doing here?"

"I was just examining this lovely old church, with its two south aisles, and one north, like St. John's at Cirencester. When the church fell in England, architecture was abolished--But as to why I am in Norfolk at all, I am skulking: and here is as another place. Your friend packed me off to America; but for some reasons I should prefer Golmoor--old Colmoor, eh? I fear I am a voluptuary, my son, fond of comfort, and old things, and pretty things. And all that I shall have yet! Tut, O'Hara is not done with the world, nor it with him. As to Norfolk, I once knew--a person--in this neighbourhood--"

The priest paused, regarding Hogarth with a smile, the "person" meant being Hogarth's mother; and he said: "But you are quite the Jew in dress: do you know now, then, that you are of the Chosen Race?"

"Singular notion! This is a mere disguise".

"Ah. But you look quite radiant. You must have come into a fortune. When I heard of your escape, I said to myself--"

"How did you hear?"

"Why, from Harris".

"Harris is drowned".

"Harris is now under that little roof down there--there"--the prelate stabbed with his forefinger: "Harris is my shadow; Harris is my master. He was picked up naked by the ship which ran down your vessel, recognized me one day in Broadway, and threatened to give me in charge if I did not adopt him 'as my well-beloved son'. Well, from him I heard all, how you called fire from Heaven--it was gallant. But aren't you afraid of capture down here in your own country?"

"I cannot be captured".

Those stony eyeb.a.l.l.s of O'Hara, bulging from out circular trenches round their sockets, surveyed Hogarth, weighing, divining him, while his bottom lip, ma.s.sive as the mouth of Polynesian stone G.o.ds, trembled.

"How do you mean?"

"I can buy King on throne, Judge on bench, Governor and Warder, the whole machinery. Even O'Hara I could buy".

"I am for sale! Hogarth! I _smelled_ it about you, the myrrh of your garments! And didn't I prophesy it to you years ago? What a development!

That beast, Harris, will dance for joy! Oh, there is something very artistic to my fancy, Hogarth, in the metal gold--brittle, bright, orpimented--"

"And diamonds?"

"Hogarth, have you diamonds?"

"Yes", said Hogarth, smiling at the effect of ecstasy upon O'Hara.

"Prismic diamond!" cried the prelate: "but how--?"

"Do you want to enter my service?"

"Do I _want_?"

"Well, I want a tutor, O'Hara; and you shall be the man. Undertake, then, to teach me all you know in two years, and I'll give you--how much?--twenty thousand pounds a year".

"My son", whispered O'Hara, "what a development--!"

"Good-bye. In Thring Street there is a little paper-shop. Come there to-night at seven".

He ran down the hill: and as he went northward, pushing his barrow, O'Hara had a lens at his eyes, saw the meteorite, and wondered.

XXVI

FRANKL AND O'HARA

Mrs. Sturgess, of the paper-shop, a clean, washed-out old lady, held up both averting hands at her back door, as Hogarth threw back his kefie, finger on lips; but soon, her alarm warming into welcome, she took him to a room above, to listen to his story of escape.

"And to think", said she, "there is the very box your sister, poor thing, left with me to keep the day she went away, which never once have I seen her dear good face from that day to this. Anyway, _there's_ the box--" pointing to a trunk covered with grey goat's-hair, the trunk to which the old Hogarth had referred in telling Richard the secret of his birth, saying to deaf ears that it contained Richard's "papers"--a box double-bottomed, on its top the letters "P. O.", with a cross-of-Christ under them.

"But, sir", said Mrs. Sturgess, "you must be in great danger here. I hope"--with a t.i.tter--"I shan't be implicated--"

"Don't be afraid, Mrs. Sturgess, it will be all right, and, for yourself, don't trouble about the paper-shop any more, but buy a little villa near Florence, where it is warm for the cough--don't think me crazy if I tell you that I am a very rich man. Now give me a steak".

Mrs. Sturgess served him well that day with a pang of expectancy at her heart! Always, she remembered, Richard Hogarth had been strange--uplifted and apart--a man incalculable, winged, unknown, though walking the common ways. He _might_ be a "very rich man"...

His meal over, Hogarth threw himself upon a bed, to dream another trouble of bubbles and burden of purples; woke at four; and, with a procured cold-chisel, hammer, and a calico bag, went to the fowl-house where he had left the meteorite, shut himself in.

Sitting in the dust there, he set to chisel out the gems from the porous ore, and as the chisel won the luscious plums, held them up, glutting his gaze, scratched his name on a fragment of window-pane, and was enchanted that the adamant rim ripped the gla.s.s like rag: the whim, meanwhile, working in him to purchase Colmoor, to turn the moor into a paradise, the prison into a palace; where his old cell stood in Gallery No. III to be the bedroom of Rebekah.

To see _her_ that very night was a necessity! and when it was dark he set out.