PETER HAINING
2002
A MIDNIGHT SURPRISE
STEERING his course by a tapering spire notched in the eye of the sunset, a tramp slouched along the Heathton Road. From the western sky a flood of crimson light poured over the dusty white highway, which led straightly across the moor. To right and left, acres of sear coarse herbage rolled towards the distant hills, now black against the flaming horizon. In the quivering air gnats danced and flickered; the earth panted with the thirst of a lengthy drought, and the sky arched itself over the heat of a fiery furnace.
For many hours the tramp had held on steadily in the pitiless glare of the mid-June sun, and now that he saw ahead of him the spire and house-roofs and encircling trees of the village whither he was bound, a sigh of relief burst from him.
To ease his aching feet he sat down beside a mouldering millstone and wiped his beaded brow with a red bandana. He did not swear, which was singular in a tramp.
Apparently he had but recently joined the cadging profession, for about him there lingered an air of respectability and the marks of a prosperity not wholly decayed. He was stout, rubicund of countenance, and he wheezed like a sick grampus. Watery grey eyes and a strawberry nose revealed the seasoned toper; thick lips and a slack mouth the sensualist. As a begging friar of mediaeval times he would have been altogether admirable; as a modern tramp he was out of the picture.
Clothed in a broadcloth frock-coat considerably the worse for wear, he wore—oddly enough for a tramp—gaiters over his gouty-looking boots. His black gloves were darned at the finger-tips, and his battered silk hat had been ironed and brushed with sedulous care. This rook-like plumage was now plentifully sprinkled with the white dust of travel. His gait, in spite of his blistered feet, was dignified, and his manners were imposing.
The road was lonely, likewise the heath. There was no one in sight, not even a returning ploughman; but the recumbent wayfarer could hear, mellowed by distance, the bells of homing cows. Beasts as they were, he envied them. They at least had a place to sleep in for the night; he was without a home, without even the necessary money to procure shelter. Luckily it was summer-time, dry and warm. Also the tramp affected the philosopher.
‘This,’ he remarked, eyeing a sixpence extracted from the knotted corner of his handkerchief, ‘is a drink—two drinks if I take beer, which is gouty. But it is not a meal nor a bed. No! one drink, and a morsel of bread-and-cheese. But the bed! Ah!’ He stared at the coin with a sigh, as though he hoped it would swell into a shilling. It did not, and he sighed again. ‘Shall I have good luck in this place?’ cried he. ‘Heads I shall, tails I shan’t.’ The coin spun and fell heads. ‘Ha!’ said the tramp, getting on to his feet, ‘this must be seen to. I fly to good fortune on willing feet,’ and he resumed his trudging.
A quarter of an hour brought him to the encircling wood. He passed beyond pine and larch and elm into a cosy little village with one street. This was broken in the centre by an expanse of green turf surrounded by red-roofed houses, amongst them—as he saw from the swinging sign—a public-house, called, quaintly enough, the Good Samaritan.
‘Scriptural,’ said the stranger—‘possibly charitable. Let us see.’ He strode forward into the taproom.
In the oiliest of tones he inquired for the landlord. But in this case, it appeared, there was no landlord, for a vixenish little woman, lean as a cricket and as shrill, bounced out with the information that she, Mrs Timber, was the landlady. Her husband, she snapped out, was dead. To the tramp this hostess appeared less promising than the seductive sign, and he quailed somewhat at the sight of her. However, with a brazen assurance born of habit, he put a bold face on it, peremptorily demanding bread, cheese, and ale. The request for a bed he left in abeyance, for besides the vixenish Mrs Timber there hovered around a stalwart pot-boy, whose rolled-up sleeves revealed a biceps both admirable and formidable.
‘Bread, cheese, and ale,’ repeated the landlady, with a sharp glance at her guest’s clerical dress, ‘for this. And who may you be, sir?’ she asked, with a world of sarcasm expended on the ‘sir.’
‘My name is Cicero Gramp. I am a professor of elocution and eloquence.’
‘Ho! A play-actor?’ Mrs Timber became more disdainful than ever.
‘Not at all; I am not on the boards. I recite to the best families. The Bishop of Idlechester has complimented me on my—’
‘Here’s the bread-and-cheese,’ interrupted the landlady, ‘likewise the beer. Sixpence!’
Very reluctantly Mr Gramp produced his last remaining coin. She dropped it into a capacious pocket, and retired without vouchsafing him another word. Cicero, somewhat discouraged by this reception, congratulated himself that the night was fine for out-of-door slumber. He ensconced himself in a corner with his frugal supper, and listened to the chatter going on around him. It appeared to be concerned with the funeral of a local magnate. Despite the prophecy of the coin, now in Mrs Timber’s pocket, Cicero failed to see how he could extract good fortune out of his present position. However, he listened; some chance word might mean money.
‘Ah! ’tis a fine dry airy vault,’ said a lean man who proved to be a stonemason. ‘Never built a finer, I didn’t, nor my mates neither. An’ Muster Marlow’ll have it all to ’isself.’
‘Such a situation!’ croaked another. ‘Bang opposite the Lady Chapel! An’ the view from that there vault! I don’t know as any corp ’ud require a finer.’
‘Mr Marlow’ll be lonely by himself,’ sighed a buxom woman; ‘there’s room for twenty coffins, an’ only one in the vault. ’T’ain’t natural-like.’
‘Well,’ chimed in the village schoolmaster, ‘’twill soon fill. There’s Miss Marlow.’
‘Dratted nonsense!’ cried Mrs Timber, making a dash into the company with a tankard of beer in each hand. ‘Miss Sophy’ll marry Mr Thorold, won’t she? An’ he, as the Squire of Heathton, ’as a family vault, ain’t he? She’ll sleep beside him as his wife, lawfully begotten.’
‘The Thorolds’ vault is crowded,’ objected the stonemason. ‘Why, there’s three-hundred-year dead folk there! A very old gentry lot, the Thorolds.’
‘Older than your Marlows!’ snapped Mrs Timber. ‘Who was he afore he came to take the Moat House five year ago? Came from nowhere—a tree without a root.’
The schoolmaster contradicted.
‘Nay, he came from Africa, I know—from Mashonaland, which is said to be the Ophir of King Solomon. And Mr Marlow was a millionaire!’
‘Much good his money’ll do him now,’ groaned the buxom woman, who was a Dissenter. ‘Ah! Dives in torment.’
‘You’ve no call to say that, Mrs Berry. Mr Marlow wasn’t a bad man.’
‘He was charitable, I don’t deny, an’ went to church regular,’ assented Mrs Berry; ‘but he died awful sudden. Seems like a judgment for something he’d done.’
‘He died quietly,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘Dr Warrender told me all about it—a kind of fit at ten o’clock last Thursday, and on Friday night he passed away as a sleeping child. He was not even sufficiently conscious to say good-bye to Miss Sophy.’
‘Ah, poor girl! she’s gone to the seaside with Miss Parsh to nurse her sorrow.’
‘It will soon pass—soon pass,’ observed the schoolmaster, waving his pipe. ‘The young don’t think much of death. Miss Sophy’s