Chapter 23

There are old and forgotten churches in overgrown corners of London
whose neglected remoteness suggests the possibility of any
ecclesiastical ceremony being performed quite unobserved except by the
parties concerned in it. If entries and departures were discreetly
arranged, a baptismal or a marriage ceremony might take place almost as
in a tomb. A dark wet day in which few pass by and such as pass are
absorbed in their own discomforts beneath their umbrellas, offers a
curiously entire aloofness of seclusion. In the neglected graveyards
about them there is no longer any room to bury any one in the damp black
earth where the ancient tombs are dark with mossy growth and mould,
heavy broken slabs slant sidewise perilously, sad and thin cats prowl,
and from a soot-blackened tree or so the rain drops with hollow,
plashing sounds.

The rain was so plashing and streaming in rivulets among the mounds and
stones of the burial ground of one of the most ancient and forgotten
looking of such churches, when on a certain afternoon there came to the
narrow soot-darkened Vicarage attached to it a tall, elderly man who
wished to see and talk to the Vicar.

The Vicar in question was an old clergyman who had spent nearly fifty
years in the silent, ecclesiastical-atmosphered small house. He was an
unmarried man whose few relatives living in the far North of England
were too poor and unenterprising to travel to London. His days were
spent in unsatisfactory work among crowded and poverty-stricken human
creatures before whom he felt helpless because he was an unpractical old
Oxford bookworm. He read such services as he held in his dim church, to
empty pews and echoing hollowness. He was nevertheless a deeply thinking
man who was a gentleman of a scarcely remembered school; he was a
peculiarly silent man and of dignified understanding. Through the long
years he had existed in detached seclusion in his corner of his world
around which great London roared and swept almost unheard by him in his
remoteness.

When the visitor's card was brought to him where he sat in his dingy,
book-packed study, he stood--after he had told his servant to announce
the caller--gazing dreamily at the name upon the white surface. It was a
stately name and brought back vague memories. Long ago--very long ago,
he seemed to recall that he had slightly known the then bearer of it. He
himself had been young then--quite young. The man he had known was dead
and this one, his successor, must by this time have left youth behind
him. What had led him to come?

Then the visitor was shown into the study. The Vicar felt that he was a
man of singular suggestions. His straight build, his height, his
carriage arrested the attention and the clear cut of