The Dweller on the Threshold. Robert Hichens
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Those of the congregation who had not remained for the celebration were quickly dispersing, but Malling now noticed that the lady with the white lock was, like himself, waiting for some one. She stood not far from him. She was holding a parasol, and looking down; she moved its point to and fro on the ground. Several people greeted her. Almost as if startled she glanced up quickly, smiled, replied. Then, as they went on, she again looked down. There was a pucker in her brow. Her lips twitched now and then.
Suddenly she lifted her head, turned and forced her quivering mouth to smile. Mr. Harding had come into sight round the corner of the church.
"Ah, Mr. Malling," he said, "so you have stayed. Very good of you.
Sophia, let me introduce Mr. Malling to you—my wife, Lady Sophia."
The lady with the white lock held out her hand.
"You have heard Professor Stepton speak of Mr. Malling, haven't you?" added the rector to his wife.
"Indeed I have," she answered.
She smiled again kindly, and as if resolved to throw off her depression began to talk with some animation as they all walked together toward the street. Directly they reached it the rector said:
"Are you engaged to lunch to-day, Mr. Malling?"
"No," answered Malling.
Lady Sophia turned to him and said:
"Then I shall be informal and beg you to lunch with us, if you don't mind our being alone. We lunch early, at one, as my husband is tired after his morning's work and eats virtually nothing at breakfast."
"I shall be delighted," said Malling. "It's very kind of you."
"We always walk home," said the rector.
He sighed. It was obvious that he was in low spirits after the failure of the morning, but he tried to conceal the fact, and his wife tactfully helped him. Malling praised the music warmly, and remarked on the huge congregation.
"I scarcely thought I should find a seat," he added.
"It is always full to the doors in the morning," said Lady Sophia, with a cheerfulness that was slightly forced.
She glanced at her husband, and suddenly added, not without a decided touch of feminine spite:
"Unless Mr. Chichester, the senior curate, is preaching."
"My dear Sophy!" exclaimed Mr. Harding.
"Well, it is so!" she said, with a sort of petulance.
"Perhaps Mr. Chichester is not gifted as a preacher," said Malling.
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," said the rector.
"My husband never criticizes his—swans," said Lady Sophia, with delicate malice, and a glance full of meaning at Malling. "But I'm a woman, and my principles are not so high as his."
"You do yourself an injustice," said the rector. "Here we are."
He drew out his latch-key.
Before lunch Malling was left alone for a few minutes in the drawing-room with Lady Sophia. The rector had to see a parishioner who had called and was waiting for him in his study. Directly her husband had left the room Lady Sophia turned to Malling and said:
"Had you ever heard my husband preach till this morning?"
"No, never," Mailing answered. "I'm afraid I'm not a very regular church-goer. I must congratulate you again on the music at St. Joseph's. It is exceptional. Even at St. Anne's Soho—"
Almost brusquely she interrupted him. She was obviously in a highly nervous condition; and scarcely able to control herself.
"Yes, yes, our music is always good, of course. So glad you liked it. But what I want to say is that you haven't heard my husband preach this morning."
Malling looked at her with curiosity, but without astonishment. He might have acted a part with her as he had the previous day with her husband. But, as he looked, he came to a rapid decision, to be more frank with the woman than he had been with the man.
"You mean, of course, that your husband was not in his best vein," he said. "I won't pretend that I didn't realize that."
"You didn't hear him at all. He wasn't himself—simply."
She sat down on a sofa and clasped her hands together.
"I cannot tell you what I was feeling," she added. "And he used to be so full of self-confidence. It was his great gift. His self-confidence carried him through everything. Nothing could have kept him back if—"
Suddenly she checked herself and looked, with a sort of covert inquiry, at Malling.
"You must think me quite mad to talk like this," she said, with a return to her manner when he first met her.
"Shall I tell you what I really think?" he asked, leaning forward in the chair he had taken.
"Yes, do, do!"
"I think you are very ambitious for your husband and that your ambition for him has received a perhaps mysterious—check."
Before she could reply the door opened and Mr. Harding reappeared.
At lunch he carefully avoided any reference to church matters, and they talked on general subjects. Lady Sophia showed herself a nervously intelligent and ardent woman. It seemed to Malling obvious that she was devoted to her husband, "wrapped up in" him—to use an expressive phrase. Any failure on his part upset her even more than it did him. Secretly she must still be quivering from the public distresses of the morning. But she now strove to aid the rector's admirable effort to be serene, and proved herself a clever talker, and well informed on the events of the day. Of her Malling got a fairly clear impression.
But his impression of her husband was confused and almost nebulous.
"Do you smoke?" asked Mr. Harding, when lunch was over.
Malling said that he did.
"Then come and have a cigar in my study."
"Yes, do go," said Lady Sophia. "A quiet talk with you will rest my husband."
And she went away, leaving the two men together.
Mr. Harding's study looked out at the back of the house upon a tiny strip of garden. It was very comfortably, though not luxuriously, furnished, and the walls were lined with bookcases. While his host went to a drawer to get the cigar-box, Malling idly cast his eyes over the books in the shelves nearest to him. He always liked to see what a man had to read. The first book his eyes rested upon was Myers's "Human Personality." Then came a series of works by Hudson, including "Psychic Phenomena," then Oliver Lodge's "Survival of Man," "Man and the Universe," and "Life and Matter." Farther along were works by Lowes Dickinson and Professor William James, Bowden's "The Imitation of Buddha" and Inge's "Christian Mysticism." At the end of the shelf, bound in white vellum, was Don Lorenzo Scupoli's "The Spiritual Combat."
A drawer shut, and Mailing turned about to take the cigar which Mr.
Harding offered him.
"The light is rather strong, don't you think?" Mr. Harding said, when the two men had lit up. "I'll lower the blind."
He did so, and they sat down in a sort of agreeable twilight, aware of the blaze of an almost un-English sun without.
Malling settled down to his cigar with a very definite intention to clear up his impressions of the rector. The essence of the man baffled him. He had known more about Lady Sophia in five minutes than he knew about Mr. Harding now, although he had talked with him, walked with him, heard him preach, and watched him intently while he was doing so. His confusion and distress of the morning were comprehended by Malling. They were undoubtedly caused by the preacher's painful consciousness of the presence and criticism of one whom, apparently, he feared, or of whose adverse opinion at any rate he was in peculiar