Boarding schools -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Medical students -- Fiction
“St. Mary Redcliffe,” said Mr. Ingleby. “I always thought it was a fine
church, but I don’t think I ever saw it lit up like this before.” He
paused, and they gazed at the church for a little while in silence.
“It’s a funny thing,” he said at last, “that a great master can sign a
picture and the name of a poet be remembered by his writings, while the
greatest artists of the Middle Ages, people who planned and built
wonderful things like this . . . and I suppose it is more beautiful
to-day than when it was first finished . . . should be quite forgotten.
A funny thing. . . . I should think the man who made this church must
have devoted his life to it.”
Edwin glowed. It came as a delightful surprise to him that his father
should think of a thing like this. He was ashamed to confess that he
hadn’t believed him capable of it. It was the sort of thing that he
would only have expected of his mother. “What a rotten little snob I
am,” he thought. And though he happened to know, quite by accident, from
the Rowley Poems of Chatterton, that the builder of Redcliffe was William
Cannynge, round whose shadowy reputation the work of the wondrous boy had
grown, he could not for the life of him reveal this piece of learning,
since it would have spoiled the originality of his father’s reflection.
He only said, “Yes,” but the train of thought was so strong in him that
he couldn’t resist asking Mr. Ingleby if he knew which was the muniment
room.
“The muniment room. Why?”
“Because it was in the muniment room that Chatterton pretended that he
found the Rowley manuscripts.”
“Chatterton? Ah, yes. . . . Thomas Chatterton, the poet.”
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. I never read any of his poems, but I believe
he starved in London and committed suicide with Arsenious Oxide.”
This gleam of professional interest tickled Edwin. Keats: Beatings.
Chatterton: Arsenious Oxide.
“They found Arsenic on his lips. He made no mistake about it. The
lethal dose is a very small one. A grain or so would have done it. Why,
it’s beginning to rain again. We’d better go. I hope it will clear up
by to-morrow.”
They walked back to their lodging in a fine drizzle. On the way Edwin’s
father took his arm. The action gave Edwin a curious sensation. It
suggested to him that his father was lonely; that the natural instinct of
love in the man was making him eager for some sort of sympathy. It was
pitiable; for, in reality, they were strangers . . . there was no getting
away from the fact that they were strangers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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