Mr.Cole spoke of a God just and terrible,but a God Who apparently for the merest fancy put His faithful servant to terrible anguish and distress,and then for another fancy,as light as the first,spared him his sorrow.Mr.Cole emphasised the necessity for obedience,the need for a willing surrender of anything that may be dear to us,"because the love of God must be greater than anything that holds us here on earth."But Jeremy did not listen to these remarks;his mind was filled with this picture of a vast shadowy figure,seated in the sky,his white beard flowing beneath eyes that frowned from dark rocky eyebrows out upon people like Jeremy who,although doing their best,were nevertheless at the mercy of any whim that He might have.This terrible figure was the author of the hot day,author of the silent house and the shimmering darkened church,author of the decision to take his mother away from all that she loved and put her somewhere where she would be alone and cold and silent--"simply because He wishes.""From this beautiful passage,"concluded Mr.Cole,"we learn that God is just and merciful,but that He demands our obedience.We must be ready at any instant to give up what we love most and best."Afterwards they all trooped out into the splendid sunshine.
IV
There was a horrible Sunday dinner when--the silence and the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding,and the dining-room quivering with heat,emphasised every minute of the solemn ticking clock--Mary suddenly burst into tears,choked over a glass of water,and was led from the room.Jeremy ate his beef and rice pudding in silence,except that once or twice in a low,hoarse voice whispered:"Pass the mustard,please,"or "Pass the salt,please."Miss Jones,watching his white face and the tremble of his upper lip,longed to say something to comfort him,but wisely held her peace.
After dinner Jeremy collected Hamlet and went to the conservatory.
This,like so many other English conservatories,was a desolate and desperate little place,where boxes of sand,dry corded-looking bulbs,and an unhappy plant or two languished,forgotten and forlorn.It had been inherited with the house many years ago,and,at first,the Coles had had the ambition to make it blaze with colour,to grow there the most marvellous grapes,the richest tomatoes,and even--although it was a little out of place in the house of a clergyman of the Church of England--the most sinister of orchids.Very quickly the little conservatory had been abandoned;the heating apparatus had failed,the plants had refused to grow,the tomatoes never appeared,the bulbs would not burst into colour.
For Jeremy the place had had always an indescribable fascination.
When he was very young there had been absolute trust that things would grow;that every kind of wonder might spring before one's eyes at any moment of the day.Then,when no wonder came,there had been the thrill of the empty boxes of earth;the probing with one's fingers to see what the funny-looking bulbs would be,and watching the fronds of the pale vine.Afterwards,there was another fascination--the fascination of some strange and sinister atmosphere that he was much too young to define.The place,he knew,was different from the rest of the house.It projected,conventionally enough,from the drawing-room;but the heavy door with thick windows of red glass shut it off from the whole world.Its rather dirty and obscure windows looked over the same country that Jeremy's bedroom window commanded.It also caught all the sun,so that in the summer it was terribly hot.But Jeremy loved the heat.He was discovered once by the scandalised Jampot quite naked dancing on the wooden boards,his face and hands black with grime.No one could ever understand "what he saw in the dirty place,"and at one time he had been forbidden to go there.Then he had cried and stamped and shouted,so that he had been allowed to return.Amongst the things that he saw there were the reflections that the outside world made upon the glass;it would be stained,sometimes,with a strange,green reflection of the fields beyond the wall;sometimes it would catch the blue of the sky,or the red and gold of the setting sun;sometimes it would be grey with waving shadows across its surface,as though one were under water.Through the dirty windows the country,on fine days,shone like distant tapestry,and in the glass that covered the farther side of the place strange reflections were caught:of cows,horses,walls,and trees--as though in a kind of magic mirror.
Another thing that Jeremy felt there,was that he was in a glass cage swinging over the whole world.If one shut one's eyes one could easily fancy that one was swinging out--swinging--swinging,and that,suddenly perhaps,the cage would be detached from the house and go sailing,like a magic carpet,to Arabia and Persia,and anywhere you pleased to command.
To-day the glass burnt like fire,and the green fields came floating up to bo transfigured there like running water.The house was utterly still;the red glass door shut off the world.Jeremy sat,his arms tightly round Hamlet's neck,on the dirty floor,a strange mixture of misery,weariness,fright,and anger.There was already in him a strain of impatience,so that he could not bear simply to sit down and bewail something as,for instance,both his sisters were doing at this moment.He must act.They could not bo happy without their mother;he himself wanted her so badly that even now,there in the flaming conservatory,if he had allowed himself to do such a thing,he would have sat and cried and cried and cried.But he was not going to cry.Mary and Helen could cry--they were girls;he was going to do something.