Last Post by Ford Ford Madox 1873-1939

Author:Ford, Ford Madox, 1873-1939
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
Publisher: The University of Adelaide Library

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http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/ford/ford_madox/last-post/part1.5.html

Last updated Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 15:12

Last Post, by Ford Madox Ford

Chapter 6

THAT would have been three weeks before the eleventh of November. His mind boggled a little at computing what the actual date in October must have been. With his then pneumonia his mind had not much registered the dates of that period; days had gone by in fever and boredom. Still, a man ought to remember the date of his wedding. Say it had been the twentieth of October, 1918. The twentieth of October had been his father’s birthday. When he came to think of it he could remember remembering hazily that it was queer that he should be going out of life on the date his father had entered it. It made a sort of full stop. And it made a full stop that, practically on that day, Papists entered into their own in Groby. He had, that is to say, made up his mind to the fact that Christopher’s son would have Groby as a home even if Christopher didn’t. And the boy was by now a full-fledged Papist, pickled and oiled and wafered and all. Sylvia had rubbed the fact in about a week ago by sending him a card for his nephew’s provisional baptism and first communion about a week before. It had astonished him that he had not felt more bitter.

He had not any doubt that the fact had reconciled him to his marriage with Marie Léonie. He had told his brother a year or so before that he would never marry her because she was a Papist, but he was aware that then he was only chipping at Spelden, the fellow that wrote “Spelden on Sacrilege,” a book that predicted all sorts of disaster for fellows who owned former Papist Church lands or who had displaced Papists. When he had told Christopher that he would never marry Charlotte—he had called her Charlotte for reasons of camouflage before the marriage—he had been quite aware that he was chipping at Spelden’s ghost—for Spelden must have been dead a hundred years or so. As it were, he had been saying grimly if pleasantly to that bogy:

“Eh, old un. You see. You may prophesy disaster to Groby because a Tietjens was given it over the head of one of your fellows in Dutch William’s time. But you can’t frighten me into making an honest woman—let alone a Lady of Groby —out of a Papist.”

And he hadn’t. He would swear that no idea of disaster to Groby had entered his head at the date of the marriage. Now, he would not say; but of what he felt then he was certain. He remembered thinking whilst the ceremony was going on of the words of Fraser of Lovat before they executed him in the Forty–Five. They had told him on the scaffold that if he would make some sort of sub-mission to George II they would spare his body from being exhibited in quarters 011 the spikes of the buildings in Edinburgh.

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